Movie Nation

We hold these critical truths to be self-evident, and we hold them close to the heart.

• That every Ben Foster performance has value, and by extension, every film he makes is worth chewing over.
• That Elle Fanning has few peers when it comes to generating empathy in a role, and if she sees something in tarting down to play a 19 year-old Louisiana (by way of Orange, Texas) hooker, she gets the benefit of the doubt.
• And that no on-the-lam road picture can be all bad.

So the bleak, violent and somewhat downbeat “Galveston” has that going for it, out of the gate. Directed by French actress-director Mélanie Laurent (“Inglourious Basterds,” “Beginners,” “Night Train to Lisbon”), it’s an aimless road thriller/crime melodrama that delivers a few body blows, but pulls more punches than it lands.

Foster plays Roy, a collector/enforcer for a local “importer” (Beau Bridges) in 1988 New Orleans. Roy keeps the job even though his woman (María Valverde) ditched him for the boss. He keeps secret what the doctor told him about his lungs as he stomped out of having his X-rays explained to him.

And he keeps his doubts to himself when he’s sent on a job by that boss, with the proviso “Nobody should get hurt bad…No guns.”

Before you can say “Set up,” Roy and his sidekick, –the muscle — are jumped. Blood is spilled, a lot of it.

And there was this woman — teenage girl dressed as a woman, anyway. Rocky (Fanning) is tied up in a chair in the house Roy’s broken into. Freeing her complicates his getaway. But Roy, a stone-cold-killer, has a soft spot. How’d she GET here?

“I knew this girl in Orange, Texas,” Rocky begins, dissolving into tears. “Perfect Choice Escorts — I didn’t know.”

He won’t leave her. She won’t give him any peace.

“You’re the one that kidnapped me.”

“I saved you. Be clear on that.”

As they motor West, she’s a little too friendly with the barflies at the honky tonks they hit along the way. She comes on to him, maybe as a way of getting back to “normal” after the shock of witnessing the New Orleans bloodbath, maybe because screenwriters are lazy, hasty and lascivious about such matters.

“You’re 40. I’m 19. Man, that’s nothing, right?”

He turns her down with extreme prejudice — “You’re disgusting.”

But a coughing fit keeps him from ditching her, and when she begs him to make a stop in Orange, Texas, he does. That’s where he hears a shot in a house she’s dashed into, a shot followed by Rocky dragging a three year-old girl out with her.

“She’s never been to the ocean,” Rocky says of Tiffany. And that’s how they wind up in “Galveston.”

Laurent serves up a heaping helping of “local color,” from the dumpy motel run by the no-nonsense Nance (CK McFarland), to the dives around it and the down-and-outs who stay there. Rocky’s sordid trade fits right in there. Violence, despair and poverty hang over this crowd.

That includes the obligatory nosy young guy (Robert Armayo), a kid who with “a job” and a sense of himself as “a professional,” and a proposition for Roy.

“Where’d you do your time, bra?”

Foster, vivid in a role where he barely said a word (“Leave No Trace”) is at his best in the (brief, rare) fight scenes, and in biting off tough guy dialogue and drawling it at the camera.

“Reckon you’re gonna have to hope my words’ a lil’better’n yours.”

But Laurent loses track of her villain (Bridges) and robs the film of its urgency as she does. The story’s turn toward the grim, the fatalistic and the noble is undercut by an epilogue that serves no dramatic function.

The actors are game, the action beats are handled with skill. But the story lacked shape. Laurent had the cachet to land a great cast, but not the skill to bend a tired, unsurprising journey and the script that relates it into something more interesting.

MPAA Rating: unrated

Cast: Elle Fanning, Ben Foster, Beau Bridges

Credits: Directed by Melanie Laurent, script by Nic Pizzolatto, based on his novel.  An RLJE release.

Running time:  1:31

A militia nut movie with an edge.

James Badge Dale, Brian Geraghty, Patrick Fischler, Chris Mulkey, Happy Anderson and Robert Aramayo star in “The Standoff at Sparrow Creek,” which is getting VOD release Jan. 19.

Pretty promising genre picture,  from J.C. Chandor and screenwriter (“Zero Dark Thirty”) Mark Boal.

They filmed “Triple Frontier” in Colombia, and spared no expense in who they hired for the job. This is a fictional variation on that long-planned Mark Boal/Kathryn Bigelow project about the no man’s land corner of South America where several borders meet, I dare say.

“Triple Frontier” arrives on your TV in March.

“He’s not like us.”

You don’t say.

The frights from the scary kid this rural couple “found” come our way Memorial Day, when “Brightburn” reaches theaters. 

Rarely has an actor’s “baggage” served him better in a role than Willem Dafoe’s has in bringing Vincent Van Gogh to the screen in “At Eternity’s Gate.”

Soulful and wounded, testy and potentially dangerous — those are the hallmarks of Dafoe’s lustrous and gritty character actor’s career. And those fit neatly into our picture of Van Gogh, a sensitive, mercurial and impulsive character whose painting and actions have invited over a century of second-guessing and post-mortem psychoanalysis.

Dafoe even looks like Van Gogh, the Van Gogh of his self-portraits — worn, lined, fretful. We forget, in an instant, the the Great Dafoe has already lived decades longer than Vincent, who died at 37.

Julian Schnabel’s intimate, psychological look at his fellow artist’s life is valuable not so much for its conjecture on how Van Gogh died or even on his mental struggles, perhaps exacerbated — as the film suggests — by persecution by the rural locals he spent his last years living with and painting. “At Eternity’s Gate” glories in Dafoe’s fragile, manic take on the painter’s mad rush with the brush, his way of seeing the world, which was only truly validated after his death.

Schnabel’s rushed, jerking hand-held camera and judicious use of extreme closeups may underline and mimic Van Gogh’s frantic-to-see, frantic-to-paint, frantic-to-live state. But it is Dafoe who makes us see Vincent’s exultant moments and his despairing ones, makes him sympathetic — flesh and blood and pain and genius all there in his eyes.

“The essence of nature is beauty,” Vincent declares. Though to be fair — Schnabel also shows us many of Van Gogh’s uglier works. He saw beauty in the tangled, brown roots of an uprooted tree, in stark seasons where his beloved sunflowers had withered and rotted, in the despair of an old man in the painting the film takes its title from.

This validates what the world has long thought of Van Gogh, what his friend and compatriot Paul Gauguin (Oscar Isaac, devil-may-care brilliant in the part) sees in Van Gogh, that “no one sees the world the same way” and nobody but nobody saw it like Van Gogh.

“People will be known because you painted them!”

Schnabel, who co-wrote the script, leans on what we already know about Van Gogh, the familiar parameters and geography of his circumscribed final years. “I hate the grey light” of Paris, he says. “Go South, Vincent,” Gauguin counsels. The more-successful Gauguin, meanwhile, keeps threatening to go “to Madagascar!” And not just for the light, but to get away from the competition, the struggle for acceptance, the money pressures. He never made it to Madagascar. And Martinique wasn’t enough of an escape for Gauguin, as he eventually found his way to Tahiti.

Van Gogh’s move to Arles and environs were well-covered by the glorious animated mystery, “Loving Vincent.” But Schnabel — like every other Van Gogh film biographer (Robert Altman’s “Vincent & Theo,” Vincente Minelli’s “Lust for Life”) — cannot resist showing us the real people Vincent knew and the human subjects for many of his paintings.

Children storm his easel and pelt him with stones when he shoos them away. A farm maid flips out when he impulsively asks her to pose, and then manhandles her into position for the most flattering light and animated posture.

“Paintings have to be done in full one gesture,” he exclaims. “The faster I paint, the better I feel!”

“Loving Vincent,” animated as if Van Gogh has done it with his own brush, is still the best appreciation of the artist and recounting of his troubled life. But Dafoe and Schnabel brilliantly give us the man — troubled but focused, misunderstood and scary, impulsive enough to remove the ear that let him hear distressing news, someone who saw the infinite in the muddy boots he took off and preserved on canvas in the yellow light of Arles.

Schnabel’s always been most at home making movies about fellow artists, and he is on his game with the the film’s hand-held style, Van Gogh color palette and appreciation, at every turn, of the artist’s plight. He also rounds up a wondrous supporting cast — Mads Mikkelsen as a sympathetic priest with no eye for art, Emmanuelle Seigner as Madame Ginoux, the cafe-owner/”friend” Van Gogh painted, with Mathieu Amalric (of Schnabel’s “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”), the great French character actor Niels Arestrup as a fellow inmate in the asylum Van Gogh stayed in, Rupert Friend as the supportive brother/art dealer Theo Van Gogh and Vladmir Consigny as Dr. Felix, seen in a more sympathetic light here than in “Loving Vincent.

But it is Dafoe’s compact, internalized turn as the artist, letting us feel his pain rather than bellowing about it (see “Lust for Life” for that) that pulls us in and gets us as close to the artist as any film ever has. It’s glorious work, and a grand capstone to a fabulous career, with or without Oscar recognition.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some thematic content

Cast: Willem Dafoe, Rupert Friend, Emmanuelle Seigner, Oscar Isaac, Mads Mikkelsen, Niels Arestrup, Vladimir Consigny, Mathieu Amalric, Stella Schnabel

Credits: Directed by Julian Schnabel, screenplay by Louise Kugelberg, Louise Kugelberg and Julian Schnabel. A CBS Films release.

Running time: 1:50

Yes, that’s how it’s supposed to look. And no, Sony Animation should not have let “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” out its doors and onto big screens in this blurred, jerky, pixelated condition.

No kidding, six minutes into it, I go track down the studio’s representative at the screening, who had overseen other showings of the film in our market. No, that’s just how it looks, he assures me.

So did all those folks raving this up on Rottentomatoes watch it off screeners on their home systems? Because this plainly cut-rate or at least ill-advised enterprise, in which the dot matrix of characters’ CGI is plainly visible on an IMAX screen near you, the action as jerky as 1960s TV anime and action beats devolve into a “Transformers” blur, is ugly enough on the big screen to spoil a pretty good effort at redefining the comic book movie. They wanted to make it look like a comic book? They went too far.

As in, animate it. Make it look and feel like a comic, with thought balloons for narration, an embracing and a mocking of the entire on-page and onscreen history of the character. Throw in a cuter than usual Stan Lee cameo and the tone, at least, is spot on.

But choosing this “style” without realizing how problematic it would be? How’d that happen?

It is not, as one of the alternate universe Spider-Men (or woman or pig or teen girl), this one a black and white (“noir”) “Shadow” knockoff from the 1930s voiced by Nicolas Cage (perfect) growls, “pretty hard core for an origin story!”

A charter school kid of African American-Latino heritage (Shameik Moore) is bitten by a radioactive spider this time. But there’s already a Spider-Man who has the market cornered on all this crime-fighting and web slinging. It’s only on meeting Peter Parker (wiseacre Jake Johnson) that young Miles is pulled into the fight, against Kingpin (Liev Schreiber), who has a collider/particle accelerator that his minions (Kathryn Hahn is Doc Ock) will use to tear a hole in space-time and tap into alternate universes.

Kingpin? He has his reasons. But that means other Spider-Men break into Miles’ universe, and there are Spider-Man casualties.

Luckily for Miles, he’s got all these comic books to study on how the webslinger is supposed to behave, teach him Spidey’s ethos, all that. “Our family doesn’t run,” and “No matter how many times you get knocked down, it’s getting back up again that matters.”

Good stuff. If only the young teen was confident enough to live up to it. If only he was brave enough to take that first plunge off a big city high rise. That’s a clever touch, too.  Bit of a fraidy-cat, this Spider-Man-Miles.

The main story is just recycled variations on generic comic book themes, and nothing special. It’s the flippant tone, the awkward adjustment of the kid to “changes” in his body (sticky hands and feet, etc.), changes he attributes to “puberty,” that give “Spiderverse” a lift.

“I don’t think you know what puberty is,” a sassy new student who calls herself “Wanda” (Hailee Steinfeld) suggests.

With each new alternate Spider-Man, the kid hears “You’re like ME,” which Miles is slow accepting.

“I don’t WANT to be.”

The long LONG animated film (which seems longer thanks to the poor aesthetic choice that gives it a direct-to-DVD animation feel) is front-loaded with a lot of laughs, which thin out just as the second hour is getting started. The visuals are even harder on the eyes than the junky looking (somewhat intentionally so) “Teen Titans Go!” movie of earlier this year.

These films were plainly put into production with “devices” other than movie theater projection in mind, as there is no Sony Animation, Pixar, Dreamworks or Blue Sky production that looks as unfinished as “Spider-verse.” I’ll bet it’s perfectly acceptable streaming or on home video where every flaw in motion, design and finish isn’t as obvious. As an aesthetic choice, it just doesn’t work. Was it MEANT to hurt the eyes and induce headaches? 

Fans of the current TV series and “Spider-Man” completists may find more to chew on here. I was amused that Miles is using his mom’s last name (Morales) because his dad’s last name is Davis. Who wants to go by Miles Davis? His Dad (voiced by Brian Tyree Henry) is named Jefferson Davis, so clearly he knew the joke he was ruining on his kid’s birth certificate.

But a lot of recognizable (Lily Tomlin is Aunt May) voices, and unrecognizable ones (Chris Pine and Oscar Isaac are also in the cast), a lot of comic book touches (interior monologues in thought-boxes and the like) and the general jokiness don’t justify this “Spider-verse” making the trek to the big screen.

Direct. To. Video.

And if I’m the only one to say that, so be it. I can’t review anything but the headache-inducing blown-up TV (under) animated miasma I see before me. This is sloppy.

MPAA Rating: PG for frenetic sequences of animated action violence, thematic elements, and mild language

Cast: The voices of  Shameik Moore, Jake Johnson, Hailee Steinfeld, Lily Tomlin, Nicolas Cage, Zoe Kravitz, Kimiko Glenn, Kathryn Hahn

Credits: Directed by Bob Persicheti, Peter Ramsey, Rodney Rothman, script by Phil Lord and Rodney Rothman. A Marvel/Sony Animation release.

Running time: 1:57

A few Awards contenders take bigger tentative steps into the box office wars on this ffrst weekend in Dec., traditionally a slow weekend dominated by the Big Thanksgiving hits.

“Ralph Breaks the Internet” has dominated the past few weekends, but has been falling off in the steep manner that verifies what some of us who have reviewed it said — not that kid-friendly, not as fun as “Wreck it Ralph.” 

Universal’s “The Grinch” has done a much better job of bringing in repeat customers and the word of mouth (it’s not that good, either, I thought) seems better. So it may pass “Ralph” when all is tallied by midnight Sunday. 

Both should come in around $15-16 million for the weekend, which is more good news for “Grinch” which has been making holiday hit money for a month, now. Somewhere around $225 million in the US, with “Ralph” fading as it clears the $140 million mark.

Deadline.com is calling it for “Ralph,” but let’s wait until tomorrow to figure that out.

“Schindler’s List” is back on screens, celebrating a great “movie we never need to see again” on the anniversary of its release. Over 1000 screens and it won’t crack the top ten or the $750,000 mark.

“A Star is Born” is winding down, also out of the top ten, while “Bohemian Rhapsody” hangs tough in the top five for another week.

“Mary Queen of Scots,” IGNORED by the Golden Globalists, and “Vox Lux” are underwhelming in limited release.

“Spider-Man” is, like all comic book characters, a natural for animation.

Here’s Sony spending some real big screen money on a “Spider-Man” cartoon that does what Sony NON-animation hasn’t done, as yet — cast an African-American actor as the web slinger, alternate storyline-hero-the works.

The maitre’d’s and beer wine distributors who call themselves The Hollywood Foreign Press Association picked it as one of the best animated films of 2019. Yay for them. WE will see.

A little stark. Tony Stark. One last time.

A bleak “Avengers” for bleak times.

And our only hope is Paul Rudd? April 26.