“On the nose casting” means you need look no further when looking for an actor to play a community college biology teacher who likes pot and Jethro Tull (Overlapping interests?) than Matthew Broderick.
He’s gone to seed in a tweedy way, and that works in “To Dust.”
Géza Röhrig playd Shmuel, an Orthodox cantor obsessed with what happens to his wife’s body after death.
Feb. 8, this melancholy comedy about death and decay comes our way, and frankly I can hardly wait. No. Seriously.
Spain’s Oscar winning Pelicula Power Couple team up for this February thriller.
Penelope Cruz plays an expat who returns to Spain with her kids for a wedding, when one of them is grabbed. And the past catches up to them all.
The Iranian director of “A Separation” and “The Past” reaches toward the mainstream with this multi-national production. Will they use the Leonard Cohen song of the same time in it? Because I’m hearing it in my head. Feb. 8 we find out.
Dan Folger, left, and Eddie Redmayne in “Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald.” (Warner Bros.)
Deadline.com is reporting a $7 million Thursday night pre-opening opening for “Fanastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald.”
That’s about 20% below the nearly $9 million that first “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” debuted to a couple of years back. The film is opening worldwide at the same time and figures to do $250-275 this weekend, planet wide. In the U.S. and North America it won’t match the $74-75 the first film pulled in, if Thursday night is any indication.
Box Office Mojo is expecting a $65-69 million opening weekend for this latest spin in J.K. Rowling’s Wizarding World.
Reviews aren’t helping this one. Critics have been indifferent to the murky muddle that Rowling scripted and David Yates filmed in the dark. I think it’s the worst film of the Potter and Post Potter Picture Parade.
“Instant Family” is another pre-Thanksgiving “holiday hit” in the making. And for a Mark Wahlberg and his “Daddy’s Home” team comedy, PG-13 thanks to adult themes and loads of profanity and a bit of violence, it didn’t make out badly with critics. I think Rose Byrne makes it.
It should manage $18 million this weekend, says Box Office Mojo.
That will allow the comedy to edge the best reviewed film of the weekend, Steve McQueen’s TV show-inspired heist thriller “Widows.” It opens on a lot of screens and should clear $17 million.
Will “Grindelwald” suck away most of the second weekend business from “The Grinch?” Universal could get another $35-40 million out of the Mean One. Maybe less.
“Bohemian Rhapsody” should pull in another $18-20, and will close the gap on “A Star is Born” about as much as it ever will. $185-188 for “Star” by Sunday night, $130+ for “Bohemian.”
“Green Book” opens in limited release, “Boy Erased” and “A Private War” open wider but still on too few screens to crack the top ten, unless “Nobody’s Fool” collapses altogether.
“American Street Kid” is a bracing, revealing and almost co-dependent film about homeless teens living on the streets in what has to be the Homeless Teen Capital of North America — Los Angeles.
Filmmaker Michael Leoni got to know his subjects, swapped cell numbers and became a part of their lives — thus the “co-dependent” label. The kids grew to trust him, depend on him (“I tried to feed every kid we interviewed.”). He broke the cardinal rule about “Not getting too close” to his subjects. He’d spend evenings phone calling his way through bureaucracy to try and get this or that one in a shelter, a “transitional living” home or even hotel rooms or his own house, just to get them off the street.
Ordinarily, I grimace a little at filmmakers who make themselves too much a part of a story they’re trying to objectively tell. It’s self-serving, and with a subject this emotional, self-righteous.
But Leoni, at the time a Los Angeles stage director, experiences first-hand the difficulties that come AFTER a teenage boy or girl has given you their version of how they ended up on the street, when they last ate and how much money they have in their pockets.
Easy solutions don’t exist, and the hard ones are depressingly inefficient, inadequate or even simply inappropriate. Only somebody who has crossed the lines that Leoni does, frantically trying to track down a boy who “is using meth again,” a pregnant teen experiencing pains that may not be simple hunger pangs, responding to late night calls from kids running from someone assaulting them, could make this story this personal.
Leoni did a play about street kids and noticed two such kids in his audience, more than once. Seana and Raven showed up time and again and identified with the actors playing young people like them in “The Playground.” Leoni got to know them, even videotaped interviews with Seana.
“Every night she left the theater, I knew her life was in danger,” Leoni says in the film. “And I didn’t know how to help her.”
Shortly after that, they both died. Raven, a teen prostitute, was murdered.
So Leoni set out to shoot a public service announcement about the plight of children just like them. But it took time to find homeless teens who would talk to him. And by the time he did, as he ingratiated himself with them, a two minute PSA morphed into his feature length documentary, “American Street Kid.
He introduces us to two 15 year-olds, Kiki and Akira, to Nick from Mississippi and the kid who likes weed so much he took the street name “Greenz.”
Crystal was named after meth by her meth-head dad and who was, at the time of filming, pregnant herself.
There’s Ryan from Arizona and singer/songwriter Ish, “the rock star of the street” from Kansas City.
They have stories of “bad parenting” or being “the son of a pimp and a prostitute” or of being “raped when I was nine.”
They gravitated to LA, the Dream Factory, for who knows what reasons. But here they are, and Leoni hits them with questions that are simple and to the point.
“What put you on the street? ” “How much money do you have in your pocket right now?” “If you could have anything in the world right now, what would it be?”
“A home and a family,” Ryan answers.
Leoni doesn’t just question them on video. He gets involved. He tries to make those dreams come true.
We see him struggling, over long periods of time in most cases, to get through to kids who are often stoned when he tracks them down. They’re articulate but young, without life skills or impulse control or the ability to reason their way past delusions. School, a shelter, “a program” seems too much for them to handle.
Leoni tries to show Crystal how her “I’m gonna give (her child) what I never got as a child” cannot happen without giving her baby up for adoption, lectures prospective dad Ryan that “You can’t take of a kid when you can’t take of yourself.”
Leoni gets reality checks from veterans of the child homelessness problem, chief among them outreach worker Stacia Fiore, who cautions him and as she puts to rest the notion that “kids choose to live like this.”
“You can’t make that decision at 9,” she says. You can’t know how awful what they’re on the run from can be, or the nature of the addictions they’ve developed that sent their lives into a tailspin.
And as we see and hear Leoni get deeper into these lives, filmed as he does it, we start to get it. Who wouldn’t be haunted, wouldn’t be tempted to intervene — directly — to take a child sleeping under a shrub into someplace safer, even your own home?
There is genuine drama to “American Street Kid” and little melodrama. The “kid robbed me blind after I brought him home” scenario never plays out. Maybe he was just lucky in who he picked as his subjects (a couple of boys he hires to run effects on a stage show), but these kids are more a danger to themselves than others, and none appear so far gone that they’d prey on anyone within reach.
Panhandle? Sure. But none are violent.
Yeah, he’s in his film too much for its own good and yes, maybe his ideas for solutions — informed as they seem — feel naive. The kids who flee halfway houses and the like miss “their family” on the street, so they say. Not drugs?
But perhaps getting this close was the only way to see the good in every child, to make portraits this intimate, to personalize a problem this widespread — 1.8 million kids are homeless in the US, and 13 of them die on the streets every day.
And maybe taking his best shot at “saving” all these kids is the best way to illustrate how difficult solutions are. Because his success rate, even with the best “the system” can offer as help, is more depressing than you’d hope for such an upbeat guy and film.
MPAA Rating: unrated, drug use, frank discussions of sexuality and crimes, profanity
Cast: Jesus Fonseca, Wolf Anderson, Kassandra Alvarado, Jesse Arkhipova, Lindsay Clayton, Lorenzo Burton, Stacia Fiore
Credits: Written and directed by Michael Leoni. An 11.11 Experience release.
Running time: 1:44
“Shoplifters” is an award-winning Japanese drama about a little seen corner of that country’s culture — the working poor. And by “working,” I mean day labor in construction, sex club performer or ironer at a dry cleaners.
But as the title suggests, this extended family, three generations living in the hovel that used to be a nicer house where grandma still lives, steal. That’s their side hustle. Food in the market, toys in the local convenience store, “Just wear it out” department store clothes, fishing gear, chips in a slot machine casino — if they don’t want to pay for it, the Shibatas don’t.
Just as we’re making up our mind about them, with the patriarch (veteran character actor Lily Franky) giving hand signals to beautiful but cagey tween Shota (Jyo Kairi) so that they can loot their local supermarket, something happens to alter that perception.
A little girl (Miyu Sasaki) is all alone, weeping in a house. No, she doesn’t know where her mommy or daddy are. Yes, she’s hungry.
“Send her home,” wife Nobuyo (Sakura Andô) gripes. “We’re not an orphanage…can’t get involved.”
But Grandma (Kirin Kiki) dotes on the five year old. “You’re covered in scars,” she notices. And when Mom and Dad try to return little Yuki to her house, the screaming brawl echoing through the windows melts even unsentimental Nobuyo’s heart.
“You don’t grow up to care for others” in this world, Nobuyo admits. But she does.
Writer-director Hirokazu Koreeda (“Our Little Sister”) cleverly uses Yuki as our access to this world, letting her observe the techniques father has passed to son, and the working lives of everyone here.
Dad gets hurt on his day-labor job, Mom faces layoffs at the dry cleaning plant — beginning with “work share” schemes.
“So everybody gets a little poorer.”
And then there’s Aki (Mayu Matsuoka), grandma’s favorite and Mom’s sexy sister. She’s bubbly fun and she brings money in by working as a “hostess” at those infamous Japanese sex clubs — putting on a schoolgirl’s uniform and putting on a show for lonely, damaged men sitting on the other side of a window, up-selling them on more personal contact for “chat.”
Dad makes it his business to instruct the kids on the family business. He grouses about the price of a window-cracking hammer to his boy — “Very expensive…if you pay for it.”
Someday, we’re going to see what he needs that hammer for. At some point, the new daughter’s “missing girl” status becomes a problem. Reluctant Dad is going to be pulled back into a sex life he’d lost interest in.
And that’s when Koreeda starts unraveling our first AND second impressions about this family, with relationships explained, motives upended as the walls of society — police, social services and others — close in around the Shibata clan.
Details stick with you — Shota teaching Yuri how to unplug the security detector at the door so he can pilfer fishing gear, Grandma revealing her own propensities as she nimbly lifts chips at a casino or grifts the children of her late husband’s later marriage. The elderly shop owner sees the older “brother” bringing baby sister into the game, and guilts him with free popsicles.
“Don’t make your sister do it,” he says (in Japanese, with English subtitles).
The cynicism of one and all is obvious long before Dad hobbles home after his injury. Workman’s comp? “It’d be better if you BROKE it, not just cracked (his ankle) it,” his wife complains.
“Shoplifters,” winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, is a film acted with great sensitivity, a rough story delicately told. Koreed discretely keeps injuries, arrests and other “big moments” just off camera, allowing the natural drama of the milieu and the characters inhabiting it to carry the film.
That allows “Shoplifters” to transcend its Grifting: How It’s Done genre conventions and make its larger statement with ease. Not all parents give birth, and even the sketchiest upbringing can get across the Big Life Lessons every child needs to learn.
MPAA Rating: R for some sexual content and nudity
Cast: Jyo Kairi, Kirin Kiki, Lily Franky, Mayu Matsuoka
Credits: Written and directed by Kore-eda Hirokazu. A Magnolia release.
Running time: 2:01
You’ve seen the best moment from “Ralph Breaks the Internet,” the sequel to Disney’s charming, “Wreck it Ralph,” an homage to vintage video games in a post-arcade world.
It’s the scene with all the anachronistic but ready-to-be-empowered Disney princesses and you probably caught it on, you know, the Internet.
Nothing else in “Ralph Breaks the Internet” comes close to the giddy joy that seeing the Mouse mess around with the ways it princess-spoiled generations of American girls via “Snow White,” “Cinderella,” “The Little Mermaid,” etc.
That’s the knock on this covers-much-the-same-ground sequel, an hour and 50 dullish but watchable minutes surrounding its best gag. It’s a movie that deprives us of the curiosity that Sugar Rush racer-girl Vanellope (Sarah Silverman) describes when she realizes her game in the aged Litvak Arcade is busted and may be unfixable, “that not knowing what comes next feeling.”
It’s a film whose best jokes are sight gags, but sight gags visualizing what eBay, Snapchat and Youtube look like from inside the web, mocking Internet Economics and the sorts of web content that lands “likes” and “shares.” These are plainly aimed at adults.
Kids, especially ones tested by the nostalgia and video game visualizations of “Wreck it Ralph,” are going to find this a chore.
Vanellope’s Sugar Rush game controller breaks at a point “just when my life was perfect,” Ralph (John C. Reilly) complains, thinking only of himself. Vanellope? She’s still glitchy, but she was getting kind of bored. Winning every race will do that.
With Old Man Litvak about to unplug the machine for good, the arcade’s odd couple access wifi and hit the Web — Ralph, to find and over-bid (on eBay) for that busted wheel, Vanellope to find new adventures, maybe even a new home.
Gal Gadot voices Shank, a hellion driving stolen cars in a “Grand Theft Auto” knock-off, Taraji P. Henson voices Yesss, who can help Vanellope and Ralph figure out how to make money on the Internet (spam and pop-up “Wanna get rich playing video games?” come-ons get their due) to buy what they need to go home.
“Are you the Al Gore?”
“I’m the ALgorhythm!”
There’s a fun cheap shot at Pixar’s “Brave,” a dark dive into the room where “comments” on your content (web videos) dwell and a third act that outstays its welcome.
Not every movie that comes out needs to be shorter, but animated films for kids do and “Ralph” definitely does. More princesses, less Internet, I say.
“It’s so big,” Vanellope complains of the visually dazzling World Wide Web. “It just goes on forever and ever.”
As does their kids’ movie about it. I mean, I got the jokes and laughed at them. But I’m not 9, and even I was thinking “Enough already.”
MPAA Rating: PG for some action and rude humor
Cast: The voices of John C. Reilly, Sarah Silverman, Taraji P. Henson, Gal Gadot, Jane Lynch, Jack McBrayer, Mandy Moore
Credits:Directed by Phil Johnston, Rich Moore, script by Phil Johnson and Pamela Ribon. A Walt Disney release.
Running time: 1:52
Now that we’ve scratched Julianne Moore off that short list of “Best Actresses never to win an Oscar” (Glenn Close, Margo — are you next?) she can get back to the business of making terrific indie dramedies in between the supporting work in major motion pictures.
She’s over 50, and that’s what she plays in “Gloria Bell,” a 50something looking for another shot at love in LA’s dance club scene, which isn’t used to 50somethings who aren’t delusional “Real Housewives” making the scene.
“Gloria Bell” opens in March.
We will know later tonight if “12 Years a Slave” director Steve McQueen has a new hit on his hands with the heist thriller “Widows.”
But we do know he’s rolling in rapturous notices for a decent — not great — genre pic. Almost universal praise for the cast, the direction, etc. — lots of love for Viola Davis, as always. This swooning fool is lucky Daily Beast doesn’t allow comments. Oscars? Really?
McQueen, however, looks at these reviews and sees trouble — “inherent racism” in the way critics address or pay attention to the interracial marriage (Davis/Liam Neeson) at the heart of the story, or the widows of color who drive the plot.
I’ve glanced over my review and others and cannot see what he is talking about. As he gives no examples, it’s a bit of a head -scratcher until you consider the possibility he’s doing a lot of press, sees a lot of white press faces, and figures he’ll get away with a swipe that he doesn’t have to back up. Yeah, I’m saying he’s talking through his arse.
Specifics? Evidence?
I have no doubt that SOMEbody reviewing “Widows” MIGHT have thought it was “daring” or what have you to pair up Viola D. with Liam N. No idea who that might have been. It’s not daring. Not these days. So who is McQueen referring to?
McQueen could make a stronger case declaring that critics all-too-often throw extra love on a filmmaker’s LAST film when her or his next one comes out. Yeah, that happened here. Maybe critics bend over backwards to rave up the work of a talented BLACK director just to prove they’re not racist (in their minds). You could make that case, too. “Grading on the curve,” “benefit of the doubt,” etc.
Without pointing out examples of exactly what he’s talking about, he’s just blowing Fox News-style smoke. Steve McQueen is imagining a “War on ‘Widows'” that doesn’t exist.
But what about “inherent racism” in “Widows” itself? Anybody looking at that?
The one abusive relationship in the film has Jon Bernthal as the abuser. Making a point about Jews, there, Steve?
And how much of a racist Black Male (Brit) stereotype is it for you to make the sex kitten, bombshell character a vavavoom blonde (Elizabeth Debicki)? We all know what Cleavon Little said in “Blazing Saddles,” and the stereotype he was sending up.
This unwarranted attack –remember, overwhelmingly positive reviews were bestowed on “Widows” — and statement of the obvious (criticism is still mostly white and mostly male) brings to mind Mindy Kaling’s knee-jerk blast about reviews of “Ocean’s Eight.”
Some of us remember the various tirades Spike Lee has gone on over the years whenever one of his movies was widely panned, or even his accusations that theater chains and theater managers were intentionally under-reporting ticket sales to his epic, “Malcolm X.” These actions grabbed headlines and attention for his movies, even during his “Spike can’t make a good movie anymore” years. He, of course, had earned the right to complain. And no, your average 28 year old reviewer wouldn’t know that.
I like that this Indiewire piece (read the comments) summons up Brie Larson’s hilarious “white male critics” attack/defense for “A Wrinkle in Time.” Say what now? She was making a point about perspective, a “Venus and Mars” take on how “old white men” don’t get a movie girls embraced, the soft and squishy and dramatically-inept but politically-correct as-all-get-out “Wrinkle,” directed by Ava DuVernay, a veteran of a thousand jobs in Hollywood, none of which suggested she was a gifted film storyteller.
No Brie, an Academy Award for an indie thriller doesn’t earn you a pass when it comes to intellectually rigorous arguments any more than it immunizes you from taking the money for “Skull Island.”
And no, criticism is not diverse and never has been. Thanks to the collapse of most of the decent paying gigs with the disappearance of legacy media, that’s not going to change. Attempts by Rottentomatoes and others to anoint Major New Female/People of Color voices have failed for a variety of reasons, the ugliest being their anointed ones just don’t have it.
I reviewed “Widows” the way I pick critics I read — on merit. Race doesn’t figure into it on that scale. It’s a movie by movie, critic by critic “content/value/talent” thing that doesn’t pull back far enough to fret, “Well, why are so many critics this race or that gender?” or “Why are so many people in film Jewish 100 years after ‘An Empire of Their Own’?” or “Why is Michael Peña the only Hispanic male to land acting work?”
Because colorblindness has always been the goal. And pulling some random accusation out of your butt over a movie that’s, if anything, OVERpraised, is just stepping in it.
Murky to the point of sleep-inducing, “Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald” is a lot like watching an entire Wizarding World movie through Newt Scamander’s tumbling red forelock.
A parade of back stories involving familiar surnames (Lestrange, Dumbledore), endless exposition and the usual parade of magical critters and apocalyptic wizard fights, it suffers from unfortunate production design that presents most of its two hours and 15 minutes in gloom, fog and underlit murk.
Warner’s decision to sign over this franchise to British director David Yates may still look good on their bottom line. But this lumbering, forlorn cry for “Eye drops, get me EYE DROPS” shows he’s bored with it all and not growing new wit or storytelling skills as he cashes their checks.
Johnny Depp signing on as a murderous elitist and deadly demagogue pays off only in his look — mismatched eye-colors, a shock of whitish punk rock hair. “His message is very seductive” those worried about the escaped monster Grindelwald declare. No, it isn’t.
Eddie Redmayne returns as Newt, summoned to see Dumbledore (Jude Law) on the gargoyled rooftops of 1920s London, given the mission to go and find Credence Barebone (Ezra Miller), a confused youngish wizard looking for a lost “chosen one” sibling. Is he in foggy London, Lost Generation Paris or Jazz Age New York?
A veritable checklist of challengers/helpers connect along the way, from Newt’s government bureaucrat brother (Callum Turner) to circus sideshow changeling Nagini (Claudia Kim), Leta Lestrange (Zoë Kravitz) to the returning Queenie (Alison Sobol) and her goofy Muggle love, Jacob (Dan Fogler, always good for a laugh).
“You were supposed to be OBLIVIATED!”
Newt’s fondness for Fantastic Beasts (remember, he’s researching a book) pays off, repeatedly. And the more his brother and others (Katherine Waterston returns as Tina) insist, “You have to choose a side,” the more Newt digs in with “I don’t DO sides.”
J.K. Rowling tries to wrestle messages about “seductive” demagogues and their mesmerized followers in, and raises the stakes (as always) with the consequences of human/wizard weakness in the face of personal, moral and physical challenges.
But by the time that payoff arrives, Yates has all but put us to sleep with visual and plot clutter, darkness, critters and chat.
I’m not a huge fan of this series, but this has to be the worst of the lot, more agonizing to sit through than the page-by-page “true to the book” bores by Chris Columbus, duller than the weakest of the artless Yates pictures.
At times, you’d swear the guy was muddying up the images just to get out of this job-for-life.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some sequences of fantasy action
Cast: Eddie Redmayne, Johnny Depp, Zoë Kravitz, Alison Sudol, Ezra Miller, Katherine Waterston, Dan Fogler, Claudia Kim, Callum Turner and Jude Law
Credits: Directed by David Yates, script by J.K. Rowling. A Warner Brothers release.
Running time: 2:14
Movie Nation 