Movie Nation

In “Belle,” Gugu Mbatha-Raw played a daughter of a slave raised to be a woman in polite society in 18th century Britain. She had to carry herself like a lady, in modest clothing Jane Austen would have recognized.
But in “Beyond the Lights,” she plays a hip hop starlet in the Beyonce/Miley/J. Lo mold, oozing sexuality. Mbatha-Raw dons short-shorts and high boots, halter tops and in one dress, all that covers her bosom is a carefully arranged gold chain. Was she ever embarrassed?
“It’s for THE CHARACTER,” she giggles. “I don’t know that I would care to own any of those clothes, or wear them in public. EVER.”
In shooting music videos that might put her character, Noni, in competition with Nicki Minaj for hip hop’s most risque, Mbatha-Raw had to get flirty-down-and-dirty, seizing attention the way many singers since Madonna have managed it — with a bump and a grind and outfits that are barely there. All in a day’s work, right?
“Well, it was a closed set,” Mbatha-Raw says. “And I decided that the clothes were a sort of armor, creating this character Noni plays. I don’t know if pop stars feel that way, but it’s kind of liberating, to wear something that you know is not you.”
Writer-director Gina Prince-Bythewood says that her star, whom she cast long before “Belle” raised her profile, “knew exactly why” she was in those provocative costumes. “The less Noni wears, the less you see of her. That’s the idea here.”
Noni is a young British singer raised on the soul singing of Nina Simone. But the demands of the music business and her manager mother (Minnie Driver) are that she bump and grind and wear hair extensions and tons of makeup, fake fingernails and almost no clothes. Prince-Bythewood (“The Secret Life of Bees,” “Love & Basketball”) says Noni is not meant to feel comfortable in this world. “So I tried to make Gugu a little uncomfortable in the rehearsal process. We put together a list of songs she was allowed to dance to during dance rehearsals — the most ignorant, sexist, n-word shouting hip hop.”
Hip Hop guru The Dream would write and produce the music. Mbatha-Raw would work with choreographer Laurieann Gibson, who worked with Lady Gaga and Nicki Minaj and Katy Perry.
But none of this would have worked if their star, whose most prominent prior credit was a cute community college student role in “Larry Crown,” didn’t have some chops. The British Mbatha-Raw showed up with an American accent for her audition.
“I could see the finished movie, just in her audition,” Prince-Bythewood says. “I couldn’t take my eyes off her — so vulnerable.”
She’d let her be British in the part. But the whole fantasy would fall apart if the actress couldn’t sing.
“We had her sing Nina Simone’s ‘Blackbird,’ and I was just crossing my fingers, legs, everything, ‘PLEASE let her be able to hold a note.’ But she came from musical theater…
“We got her a vocal coach and changed that vibrato and that musical theater tone into R & B. She had to be edgier and rougher, so they beat the niceness out of her voice.”
The director, 45, didn’t know her star grew up on Nina Simone records, singing along with mom to “My Baby Just Cares for Me” since she was six. She’d done a dance piece at drama school set to Simone’s version of the classic anti-lynching ballad, “Strange Fruit.”
With Simone’s music playing a pivotal role in the film, this bit of casting was meant to be. Prince-Bythewood says she was inspired by Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe to create this “Bodyguard” romance between a rising pop star who attempts suicide and the cop (Nate Parker) who saves her. But it’s hard not to see more modern incarnations of female pop fame in the script — Beyonce (“OK, I LOVE her and have all of her albums.”) to Whitney, Britney, Rihanna and the late Aaliyah.
“There are cameras everywhere,” Prince-Bythewood says. “So once Noni is inside this pop star persona she’s pushing, a persona that isn’t authentic to her, she can NEVER turn it off…It’s got to be exhausting and that pushes some people over the edge.”
Mbatha-Raw is earning glowing reviews for her performance in “Beyond the Lights,” with Variety’s Andrew Barker echoing many in calling her “fierce…believably crafting a thoroughly modern, synthetic pop star without losing track of the organic human beneath.”
But the star is relieved that this is only a film. Having a good singing voice isn’t enough to send Mbatha-Raw in search of a record contract.
“That image — it takes so much WORK and so many people, a team to do hair and makeup and clothes and all that,” she says, laughing. “I had no idea. And everybody is always watching you waiting for some mistake. I think I’ll stick to acting, pursue all sorts of roles, and just try to stay out of the tabloids. This ‘pop celebrity’ thing. I don’t know. Not for me.”

“Nightcrawler” has Jake Gyllenhaal as an amoral thief and sociopath  (Aspergerger’s, maybe a little?) who takes up freelance TV news crime and crash videography, and makes his mark in it. Feels a little dated in terms of its media savvy, but Dan Gilroy’s film has a marvelously icky vibe and Jake G. gives maybe his best ever performance in it. Great reviews greet the arrival of “Nightcrawler.”

“Horns” has Daniel Radcliffe continuing to go his own way as a movie star, picking this quirky dark comedy about murder, guilt and redemption as he plays a boyfriend whose girlfriend’s death has been pinned on him. He starts to grow horns, because that’s the way his community treats him. Heavy handed and way too long to sustain that light comic intent, I liked this more than the consensus of critics. They panned it. Me, not so much.

“Before I Go to Sleep” has my review as an outlier as well. It’s a compact thriller about an amnesiac (Nicole Kidman) who cannot decide who is telling the truth about her past — her husband (Colin Firth) or some shady sneak who says he’s her doctor (Mark Strong). Not as tricky as it needed to be, but that cast ensures that this is a real actor’s showcase. Marvelous performances, chilling.

“ABCs of Death 2” is another compendium of horror shorts directed by 26 or so little proven filmmakers. Damned if it isn’t better than the first compilation — the jokes land, the surprises shock. I’m not the only one who says so, either.

“Hit by Lightning” is Jon Cryer playing another lovesick loser, this one being lured into killing some gorgeous Frenchwoman’s husband. Yeah, I know. Everybody hated it.

“Missionary” is a good looking and smartly conceived thriller about a Mormon missionary lured into a sexual relationship with an older woman he ministers to, a relationship that turns stalker and deadly. Bad reviews, mostly, for this limited release, including mine.  But apparently, the Village Voice reviewer, in the absence of door-to-door encounters with Mormons, is all on board with the film’s Mormon-bashing subtext.

Bloody, brutal and melodramatic, “Revenge of the Green Dragons” is a straight-up gang war thriller whose release is “presented” by Martin Scorsese. The master of Italian-American mob movies saw much to like, and much that is familiar in this story of the rise of Chinese gangs in 1980s Flushing, New York.
“Inspired by a true story” (stay through the credits), “Dragons” follows a child smuggled into America in the early ’80s, enslaved washing dishes in a Chinese restaurant and eventually caught and coerced into joining one of the Asian gangs fighting to control Queens.
Unlike past depictions of this violent underworld of guns, knives and Mahjong parlors, co-directors Andrew Lau and Andrew Loo tell it totally from an insider’s point of view. The cops and F.B.I.agents (Ray Liotta) are too racist to care much about the flood of Chinese illegals and the drugs and violence the gangs that were smuggling them brought in with them. This is Chinese-on-Chinese violence, gruesome eye-for-an-eye stuff. Their rules for a clean kill? “Never shoot whites” is one of them.
Sonny avoids the gangs for a while. But when his “brother” Steven, the kid being raised in the same Chinese restaurant slave ring where he works, is kidnapped and tortured into joining, Sonny comes along. Can’t be any worse than the beatings that make up his dead-end world of dish washing.
Of course it can.
By 1989, Sonny (Justin Chon) and Steven (Kevin Wu) are the Chinese equivalent of “made men,” mobsters in good standing with the clean-cut leader of the Green Dragons, Paul (Harry Shum Jr.). The Tienanmen Square protests on TV mean nothing to them. Their simmering war with the White Tigers gang does.
Sonny falls for the willowy daughter (Shuya Chang) of a Hong Kong singer smuggled over and supported by the Green Dragons. But whatever soul Sonny has long ago vanished from Steven, who has become a cold-eyed killer.
Leonard Wu makes a vivid impression as the gang’s brutish second in command, Eugenia Yuan is a quietly furious Snakehead Mama, an inscrutable cliche of Chinese gang movies since the silent era.
“Behind every fortune is a crime,” she purrs, every line a fortune cookie quip.
Scorsese must have appreciated the myriad mob movie cliches that make up “Revenge.” The violence is vivid and in your face. There’s a continuum to the American immigrant experience, which Scorsese’s films depict and Ray Liotta, playing an F.B.I. agent spells out for his slow-witted boss. Irish, Jews and Italians went through their mobster eras. Now, it is the turn of the Chinese. That was corny and dated back when Mickey Rourke was saying it in the middle of these wars in “Year of the Dragon” (1985).
Colorful early scenes capture the terror of children hunted by gangsters, the awful beatings the kids endure before they’re initiated. Later scenes descend into the trite, gory and predictable conventions of such movies — betrayal, the deaths of those close to the hero, laughably arch speeches about this war.
“There’s a storm coming, detective. And I don’t know any umbrella that’s gonna keep this city dry!”
This would work better if you thought the writers and directors were in on the joke.

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence including a sexual assault, pervasive language, some drug use and sexual content
Cast: Justin Chon, Kevin Wu,Shuya Chang, Ray Liotta, Harry Shum Jr.,Eugenia Yuan, Jin Auyeung
Credits: Directed by Andrew Lau and Andrew Loo, screenplay by Michael Di Jiacomo, Andrew Loo. An A24 release.
Running time: 1:34

Three of the best actors in the business put on a master class in mystery thriller in “Before I Go to Sleep,” a lean, twisty-turning tale in the “Memento” style.
Christine (Nicole Kidman) wakes up each day confused. Her eyes dart around the unfamiliar bed, the alien bedroom, the stranger’s hand draped across her.
Their bathroom is plastered in snapshots — of their wedding, their years together.
“I’m Ben, your husband,” the man (Colin Firth) says. “Christine, you’re 40…It was a bad accident.”
None of it rings a bell for her. Christine has lost 20 years and every night when she dozes off she loses that day’s memories as well.
A phone call promises help, a clue. Look in your closet, the voice of a man calling himself a doctor tells her. Look for the shoebox with the digital camera in it. Her video diary is there. Dr. Nash (Mark Strong) is the one who got her to start keeping one.
But something unsettles her, the bits of her past that the doctor, who insists she keep their relationship a secret, tells her. And she’s not sure what to make of the omissions her husband is leaving out of that story “to protect you.”
“So you edit my life?”
“Before I Go to Sleep” hangs on Kidman’s intimate performance. She whispers, girlishly, shocked at being told she had an affair, puzzled that the two men give her differing versions of how she lost her memory. At the beginning of each day, she is passive, naive and trusting. She gets into the car of the man who calls himself her doctor without question.
But as the days progress and the story advances, she adds to that diary and becomes assertive, questioning and suspicious. Some days, she suspects the husband of manipulating her. Some days, the doctor. Some evenings she’s drawn to the man who says he’s trying to heal her, and some she has sex with the man who insists he’s withholding details to save her pain and heartache.
Writer-director Rowan Joffe (he wrote the Clooney hitman thriller, “The American”), adapting an S.J. Watson novel, maintains the mystery at the heart of this puzzle picture and jolts us with the odd shock — a violent flashback, a loud horn blast from a passing truck that nearly hits someone.
But he wisely lets this be an actor’s picture. Strong, often cast as villains, is poker-faced here, close-ups capturing wheels turning that could be a doctor reasoning out a talking cure or someone with reason to keep Christine in the dark.
Firth, most often a romantic lead, wears a deflated look of loss that either masks the grief of a man whose great love has lost her sense of identity or something cagier.
And Kidman lets us feel Christine’s confusion, her desire to not stay in the dark even if every memory retrieved threatens more pain.
Whatever twists this puzzle tosses at us, the film reminds us that a great actor, in close-up, telling a story with just her or his eyes, is still the greatest special effect the movies have to offer. This cast telling this story ensures us that nobody will be dozing off “Before I Go to Sleep.”

MPAA Rating: R for some brutal violence and language
Cast: Nicole Kidman, Colin Firth, Mark Strong
Credits: Written and directed by Rowan Joffe, based on an S.J. Watson novel. A
Clarius/Millennium release.
Running time: 1:32

A gaunt Jake Gyllenhaal rarely blinks in “Nightcrawler,” turning himself into a chilling human special effect. As a focused but directionless petty thief who does discovers the rewards of recording and selling video to “If it bleeds, it leads” local TV news in Los Angeles, he not only acts like a reptile, he looks the part.

“Nightcrawler” is an utterly fascinating plunge into the ethical cesspool of freelance video journalism in the TMZ age. Writer-director Dan Gilroy (“Michael Clayton”) delivers a blistering, funny and instantly-dated skewering of TV news and the selling of fear to the huddled masses, which market research here reveals only care when white people are the victims of crime.

Louis Bloom (Gyllenhaal) is a socially awkward sociopath, a self-educated loner sharp enough to realize his petty thefts of copper tubing and iron manhole covers is not a business with a future.

But stumbling onto an accident and meeting a swaggering but brusque freelance videographer (Bill Paxton) convinces him there’s a career with a future, a business model he can make work. He wrangles a cheap camera and figures out, within hours, ways to get a leg up on the others shooting footage to sell to the various Los Angeles TV stations. Focus on the blood, ignore the cops and crime scene protocols and develop a cinematographer’s eye.

“I’m a very fast learner,” he says, without a hint of modesty or guile. He’s like a malevolent Dr. Sheldon Cooper of “Big Bang Theory” — borderline Asperger’s, with no compunction about how he gets the amazing shots he does.

Rene Russo is spot-on as Nina, an aging TV news director who is the only person Bloom will sell his footage to. She will run it, gore and all, over colleagues’ objections. She gently eggs Bloom on, flatters him and teaches him.

“Think of our newscast as a screaming woman, running down the street with her throat cut.”

Bloom hires a homeless man (Rick Garcia) as his navigator and assistant. And in a whirlwind montage, we see them hustle their way to the top of the overnight news video trade — nursing home fires, bloody wrecks, car-jackings. When nobody is looking, Bloom stages his photos, re-arranging the scene for a more grabby image. The viewer’s jaw drops, because we can sense the slippery slope this earnest, smiling young snake is all-too-eager to hurl himself down.

Gyllenhaal gives one of his more transformative performances as Bloom, an Internet-smart creep whose calculating nature runs from how to truly shove aside the competition to making the only woman in his life, Nina, fulfill both his professional and sexual requirements.

Gilroy gives their scenes, in which Russo’s Nina rebuffs and brushes off Bloom’s blunt advances, but never so firmly that she scares off her video savior, a breathless crackle. We never have to see them in bed. The haggling over going rates for video scenes are seductive enough.

Gilroy cut some corners on the casting, not spending the money on charismatic name actors to play the cops who suspect Bloom’s dark side or the one reporter at the TV station to object to this deal with the video Devil. That makes the story less predictable and entirely about its amoral central figure, whom we figure out early on and thus aren’t really shocked at each new transgression.

More problematic is the world Gilroy sets this in. It’s today. It’s video. Bloom is Internet savvy in the extreme. And yet the web nature of much video reportage — the TMZs of the world clobber broadcast TV when it comes to paying for video — is ignored. And Gilroy limits the competition in the media capital of the world to just a couple of freelance video rivals.

But from that first moment, when smiling Louis Bloom charms and then jumps a security guard, to a breathless third act where his finds that final moral line to cross, Gyllenhaal’s “Nightcrawler” pulls us in, mesmerized by this viper’s wide, unblinking eyes until it’s too late.

MPAA Rating: R for violence including graphic images, and for language

Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Rene Russo, Bill Paxton, Rick Garcia

Credits: Written and directed by Dan Gilroy. An Open Road release.

Running time: 1:57

Documentary filmmaking rewards the obsessive.
You have to be obsessed to dive into and put in the endless hours to finish your film, often in the thin hopes that PBS, a cable channel or Netflix will show it to the tiny audience that such films typically lure. And often, the most arresting subjects are obsessive themselves — obsessive Scrabble players (movie watchers (“Cinemania”), crackpot hermits who write long, psychotic unpublished (and unpublishable novels (“In the Realms of the Unreal”).
And then there are the quirkier, seemingly more normal obsessives who play with dolls and make art with them. “Marwencol” (2010) was about a brain-injured war vet who posed dolls in this vast, elaborate and fictional World War II town he created in his yard, then photographed as art.
“Magical Universe” is about an old man in Maine who does dioramas with Barbie dolls and then photographs them. Al Carbee had become something of a local celebrity/local character in Saco, Maine — stuffing a huge old house with art — dioramas and collages, photographs and sketches, paintings and the like.
He stuffed a huge barn, “the biggest in Maine,” with more of it. He pulled the barn down and moved it up against his house so he could create a vast, odd and self-absorbed gallery of his works. He dug a tunnel in his basement to create more space for this stuff.
Filmmaker Jeremy Workman was tipped off about him, made a short film and became a lifelong pen pal of Carbee’s. “Pen pal” means that Workman was subjected to hundreds of long, rambling stream-of-consciousness/narrate-the-minutia-of-my-day letters and self-absorbed videotapes.
And Workman maintained the connection, even if Carbee came off as “unsettling” and his letters as “the rants of some crazy person.”
Workman’s girlfriend Astrid also appears in the film, an exotic blond who becomes something of a fresh obsession for Carbee. She chastises the filmmaker for the way he characterizes Carbee, first in his short film and now (by extension) in this feature length treatment.
“You’re making a strong statement that he is weird.”
Well, yeah. “Magical Universe” feels like a visit to a hoarder masquerading as an artist. But wandering through the vast collage that was Carbee’s house, you can understand Workman’s mixed feelings. The film serves to validate the art, in an age where “art” can be anything with a good back story. But the viewer sits through these 80 minutes feeling like an armchair psychotherapist.
Carbee comes off as a narcissist who figured his every random thought was worth preserving on film, paper or painting.
He was a creator, sure. But Workman’s film feels exploitative, and the filmmaker cannot help but make Carbee look a little creepy and a bit pathetic. The only thing that eases your conscience watching “Magical Universe” is the difficulty in deciding, “Who was using whom here?”

MPAA Rating: unrated, adult themes
Cast: Al Carbee,Jeremy Workman and Astrid von Ussar
Credits: Written and directed by Jeremy Workman. A Sundance Selects release.
Running time: 1:20

That miss-or-hit collection of horror shorts, “The ABCs of Death” becomes more hit or miss with its sequel, “ABCs of Death 2.”
Not to be confused with the similar “VHS” horror omnibus, “ABCs” gives up-and-coming horror writer-directors — more than 26, as many work in teams — a letter of the alphabet which they then turn into a word and build a four to five minute tale of death.
So we get director Hajime Ohata’s “O is for Ochlocracy,” a word which means mob rule. In this case, it’s rule by zombies who bring a zombie killer to trial for…wait for it…killing zombies.
The length means the filmmakers have to find a clever concept, a couple of decent shocks, and a great punchline. And the good ones do.
“B is for Badger” has actor-director Julian Barratt (“The Mighty Boosh”) playing a bullying nature show host whose hapless crew watches helplessly as the badger, supposedly driven away by a nearby nuclear power plant, turns out to be still there, much stronger and even more irritable than the host.
A Japanese teenage girl’s psychotic fantasy of what to do about her awful parents, who neglect her and her dog, becomes ‘s Sôichi Umezawa deliciously dark “Y is for Youth.”
“N is for Nexus” (Larry Fessenden) cleverly sends a dating couple, in costume, kiddie trick-or-treaters and a distracted, crossword-puzzle addict cabbie into a busy intersection on Halloween.
A few of the shorts are weak but watchable with filmmakers who seem to have a juvenile attachment to female nudity. It’s why boys go to film school — many of them, anyway. And a couple of the “ABCs” are student film amateurish, though not E.L. Katz’s nicely conceived “A is for Amateur.” A would-be hitman fantasizes “a job” — taking out a drug dealer by crawling through the duct work of his nude-girls-filled lair. Then the hitman gets to work, and we see what the movies never show you — how duct work was never made to be crawled through, all jagged sheet metal, with pointy screws more of a menace than vermin.
As with all of these shorts collections, the idea is to make a statement film and get a directing deal. But we the viewers also find names to try and remember, filmmakers worth watching for. Because you never know who the next Joon-Ho Bong (“The Host”) or Juan Antonio Bayona (“The Orphanage”) will be. A couple of them might make the grade after learning their “ABCs.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, with graphic violence, gore, nudity, drug abuse
Cast: Scores of players, none of great note (yet)
Credits: Written and directed by over 26 different filmmakers. A Magnet release.
Running time: 2:03

The die was for Jon Cryer way back when “Pretty in Pink” launched him in the movies.
He’d always be the doormat, the witty loser who never gets the girl.
All he had to look forward to was getting older and balder, and better character names than the one John Hughes saddled him with — “Ducky.”
His niche has served him well as second banana all those years on “Two and a Half Men.” And here he is, still lovelorn and comically sad in “Hit by Lightning.”
As Ricky, the balding 40 year-old chain restaurant manager, he laments to his BFF Seth (Will Sasso) that they’re the last two guys from their high school class to marry.
And even though he knows the odds are long, even though he’s a nonbeliever who drinks and swears like Cryer never could on TV, he prays to God that he will “Find my soulmate…before I’m hit by lightning.”
The answer might be eHappily, an online dating service. That’s where his profile, in search of his “heartner,” lures Danita (Stephanie Szostak) into a date.
She’s beautiful, a “10,” and as Seth says, Ricky is just a “four” — even with that spray-on hair covering his bald spot. She’s nervous, a little on edge, but eager and into him. It’s only after the sex — MUCH later — that she blurts out that she’s married, that “My husband would KILL me” if she ever left, and that Ricky should help her kill him.
Whoa.
Ricky, in the film’s primary leap of illogic, doesn’t have to think twice before agreeing. Yeah, he’s that lonely.
It is up to the annoying lump Seth to set him straight. He shows him “Body Heat,” starring “Will Hurt, and Kathleen Turner, back when she still looked like a chick.” And “Wild Things.” This Danita is bad news, a regular “femme fatal.”
“That’s fa-TALE.”
Such is the nature of the humor in this comedy, written and directed by Ricky Blitt.
Sasso, who once starred in TV’s “$#*! My Dad Says,” tries the hardest, playing the loser who doesn’t know he’s a loser, dragging the pal he nicknamed “Hog” (better than Ducky, sort of) out of his shell, then shoving him back in it when Hog crosses the line.
Szostak (“Iron Man 3,” “The Sopranos”) is mainly just a nervous pretty French face for Ricky to obsess over. This part called for a lot more Sofia Vergara.
Cryer sort of shrugs and bears it, the way he does on TV only with less sex and more profanity, and the chance of violence hanging over the proceedings as Ricky/Hog meets the husband (Jed Rees). He starts to wonder if the man is the monster Danita portrays him as, or if she’s just leading them both to their doom.
Not that the script ever makes us care. Slow-witted and slowly paced, with characters kept at arm’s length, our biggest concern is not whether Ricky will indeed be “Hit by Lightning,” but whether anybody will find a spark of life in this corpse of a comedy.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with gun violence, sexual situations, profanity
Cast: Jon Cryer, Stephanie Szostak, Will Sasso, Jed Rees
Credits: Written and directed by Ricky Blitt. A Phase4 Films release.
Running time: 1:25