Movie Nation

Director Susanne Bier follows her Oscar winning “In a Better World,” about bullying in Denmark having kinship to the misdeeds of warlords in Africa, with a romance. Talk about stepping clear of your comfort zone.
The generally dramatic Bier (“Things We Lost in Fire”) gives a dark edge to the melodramatic comedy “Love Is All You Need.” From the opening strains of “That’s Amore,” forlournly played on a mandolin, it’s obvious that this will not be “Mamma Mia! II” set in sunny Italy.
Ida (Trine Dyrholm of “A Royal Affair” and “In a Better World”) is just out of her last blast of chemotherapy. She’s lost a breast and her hair. But this Copenhagen hairdresser’s nearly-clean bill of health is spoiled when she catches her husband with a younger woman. And she can’t toss a fit about it, because her daughter (Molly Blixt Egelind) is getting married in a rustic villa in the south of Italy.
Wouldn’t you know it, that workaholic, widowed businessman Phillip (Pierce Brosnan) she collided with at the airport parking deck is the father of the groom (Sebastian Jessen). He’s irked most of the time and this really sets him off. Naturally, they’re thrown together on the flight, and when they reach Italy, where her soon-to-be-ex shows up with his floozie, and the frosty, “I have chosen to be alone” Phillip is stuck dealing with the Danish inlaws of his late wife.
Bier is so much more comfortable with the dramatic stuff that the film’s grabber moments are revelations — the damage cancer has done to Ida, the liberation (she skinny dips) she wants to feel but cannot.
Brosnan does a nice bit of weathered resignation here — playing a man wounded, bitter and wound too tight. Dyrholm brings a wide-eyed wonder to Ida’s reactions to Phillip’s brusqueness, as if she can’t stand the thought of the guy but cannot help but feel lucky that he’s showing her some attention. He’s out of her league.
Their chemistry is passable, and there’s a nice subtle metaphor about the lemon orchard this villa sits in (Phillip, a fruit and vegetable importer, owns it) and what Ida does when life hands her lemons. She makes lemon pudding.
The script is full of surprises that might have delivered a farce, in different hands. But Bier keeps the humiliations, heartbreak and fear all too real. Little is played for laughs. It’s almost jarring when we take a break from the threads of the plot to enjoy some Sorrento scenery and Sorrento sunsets.
It works, after a fashion — a romance that isn’t a romantic comedy. But Bier, a wonderful director, proves that “Love” isn’t all you need to make us swoon. You need a lighter touch.

MPAA Rating:R for brief sexuality, nudity and some language
Cast: Trine Dyrholm, Pierce Brosnan, Molly Blixt Egelind
Credits: Directed by Susanne Bier, written by Anders Thomas Jensen and Susanne Bier. A Sony Classics release.
Running time: 1:56

That’s the buzz from Variety. This hot Oscar-bait period piece script is about famed code-breaker/computer theorist Alan Turing, and his tragic, closeted life as a gay man at a time when “The love that dare not speak its name” was illegal in the UK.

A genius, perhaps on the level of a Newton or Einstein, and a war hero, he was persecuted and prosecuted and died far before his time.

As I said, “Oscar bait.”

A terrorist act on the most video-wired streets in the world — London. Ex-lover lawyers (Eric Bana and Rebecca Hall) are defending the man accused on carrying out the terrorism.
And Julia Stiles is a New York Times reporter covering them. And the trial.
This late late August movie feels like the first “fall” picture, in that “Constant Gardener” release slot. Let’s hope it’s as good as that one.

The Hollywood Reporter found a former Scientologist willing to sit through “After Earth” and focus on its Sci-Tol talking points, evidence of Will Smith’s conversion and efforts to promote the group through the film.

A few snippets of dialogue — about “fear” and “present moment” connect it to the Travolta/Cruise religion that L. Ron Hubbard built out of his “self-help” book, “Dianetics.” But a couple of the points made there seem like stretches. “Volcanoes?” Really.

This isn’t “Battlefield Earth,” though it shares its setting with that epic fiasco.

The movie is bad on its own terms (and it is certainly much better than “Battlefield Earth”) and Smith and Son’s efforts to promote it have failed partly because they come off as cocky, rich nitwits with little grasp of science fiction, real people’s daily reality and the like. And they’ve managed to dodge the whole Daddy Buying His Son Another Screen Credit angle.

Ethan Hawke’s had some good luck with horror, and “The Purge” has a hint of that. America, legalizing one day a year where there are no laws — and criminal impulses reign — a family barricaded against the mob, but some of that mob breaking in and terrorizing them.
“The Purge” looks iffy, but as parables go, it might work. It opens Friday.

However diminished his status among domestic movie audiences, Tom Cruise is still a very bankable box office star in much of the world. Especially, apparently, in Japan.

His latest, “Oblivion,” opened well enough but faded before reaching $100 million in the US. It’s earned over $275 million worldwide, and Japan will only add to that, according to THR.