It’s a January release, so expectations are low.
The money in this trailer seems to have gone for music clearances and a digital mountain lion.
Bryce Dallas Howard voices Bella, the lost dog, with Ashley Judd, Wes Studi and Edward JAmes Olmos the only real “names” in the cast.
But the author of “A Dog’s Purpose” strikes again with “A Dog’s Way Home.”
To Nic Cage fans — and we know who we are even if we’re proud of it — every movie is worth a “Nic Cage is BACK” headline. You know, like 50 years of Rolling Stone/Dylan covers.
Like a lot of Cage C-movies these past few years, this one has him looking scruffy, burnt out and wearing cowboy boots and a drawl.
Franka Potente is the other pretty face you recognize in “Between Worlds,”
which played Fantastic Fest and doesn’t have a firm release date yet.
Melissa McCarthy unleashes her inner misanthrope in “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” and we may never look at her the same way again.
Sure, the sad, lonely and foul-mouthed persona she’s cultivated in a few too many films is a big part of her version of the forger, thief and writer Lee Israel. But anger at her world, the limits put on it by Israel’s disdain for the human race, career misdirection, alcohol consumption, limited talent and frumpy appearance carries McCarthy through this performance, justifiably earning her Oscar buzz.
Israel was a biographer-for-hire in the ’70s and 80s, a freelance writer who got a book on reporter and game show panelist Dorothy Kilgallen on the best seller lists, but whose Estee Lauder bio was abandoned by book sellers practically before publication.
In 1991, when we meet her, she’s drinking at work, copy-editing with kids half her age and cursing too freely to keep the job. Her cat is old and sick, she’s behind on the rent. Her agent (Jane Curtin, prim and perfect) rarely returns her calls and nobody but nobody is interested in her writing about the nearly-forgotten vaudevillian Fanny Brice, already the subject of “Funny Girl” and “Funny Lady” movies by Barbra Streisand.
She can’t make nice, flatter, kiss up or “play the author’s game” to reach success. All she can do is remind us all of how there is nothing more distressing than the impatient hum of an electric typewriter when you’re at your written wit’s end.
“I’m a 51 year-old woman who likes cats better than people,” she grouses. She’s living in near squalor in one of the most expensive cities on Earth with no ready means of support.
Meeting a fellow barfly (Richard E. Grant, the life of the party), a gay ne’er-do-well who has crossed paths with her at this or that publishing party, doesn’t help. Drunk or sober, she’s broke. She has to sell her personal letter from Katharine Hepburn (she profiled her for a magazine in the ’60s) just to get her cat cared for.
She knows letters from the rich and famous have value. Stumbling across a couple of Fanny Brice letters, typewritten and tucked into some Brice books she pores over in the New York Public Library, gives Israel the inspiration.
As we’ve seen her pilfer from her agent’s apartment at a party, the leap isn’t a great one. Lee Israel will turn her writing toward mimicking the letters of figures she can research, whose voices she can copy, selling witty, jokey and blushingly personal notes for hard cash.
Brice, Noel Coward or Dorothy Parker, no problem. And when she gets away with it once or twice, she invests in the process — tracing signatures, reproducing personalized stationery, buying every old typewriter she can find, matching each typewriter to the author she is impersonating.
You had to be clever like that in 1991, even if you didn’t yet have the Internet around to unmask your crimes.
Israel could be funny and biting, so she made bon mot queen Dorothy Parker (“What fresh hell is this?”) a specialty.
“I’m a better Dorothy Parker than Dorothy Parker!”
If there’s guilt, maybe it’s because she took advantage of book-seller/letter buyer who is also a fan (Dolly Wells) and kind of cute. Rooking Stephen Spinella and Ben Falcone, playing other dealers, is guilt-free.
There’s a touch of McCarthy’s Sean Spicer impersonation in Israel — perpetually irked at the world when really, she’s the one with the big problem. It’s an understated performance flatteringly framed in close-ups by director Marielle Heller. Co-writer Nicole Holofcener (“Friends With Money,” “Lovely and Amazing”) specializes in layered, empathetic roles for women, which had to help.
Grant is the cinema’s favorite gay British best friend, and he makes a wonderfully louche lush as Jack Hock, Israel’s only friend. But being a homeless, aged coke-dealing Lothario doesn’t bode well for how dependable he’s going to be when the going gets tough.
“Can You Ever Forgive Me?” is based on Israel’s memoir, one of those reminders that in New York publishing, a name’s a name and when you’re in you’re in. Whatever price she paid for her crimes wasn’t high, and there were plenty of suckers who believed her later book and never bothered to fact-check her earlier works.
Short cutting cheats are repeat offenders, and I’d take anything she signed her name to with a bunch of grains of salt.
But “Forgive Me” makes for a fun yarn, one undercut with tinge of sadness. Perhaps only a comic as funny and salty as McCarthy could have made Israel funny, cunning, crooked and dysfunctionally depressed, so likably unlikable in the process.
MPAA Rating: R for language including some sexual references, and brief drug use
Cast: Melissa McCarthy, Richard E. Grant, Jane Curtin, Stephen Spinella, Dolly Wells
Credits:Directed by Marielle Heller, script by Nicole Holofcener and Jeff Whitty. A Fox Searchlight release.
Running time: 1:46
“Hunter Killer” arrives in theaters as a Cold War revival submarine thriller about commandos and a US sub sent to rescue an embattled, coup-imprisoned Russian president.
Tell me you think that’s wonderful geopolitical timing. Take off your MAGA hat when you do, pal.
It was scripted a long time ago and filmed some time before Michael Nyvist (“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”) died, in June of 2017. But this disjointed actioner feels like the most unfortunate piece of pop art timing since Charles Lindbergh tried to get “Save the Next Dance for Me, Adolf” on the 1941 “Hit Parade.”
It’s a Gerard Butler combat pic, and while it isn’t on the level of his worst B-pics — Gary Oldman has won an Oscar since this was put in the can, and the effects are decent — it’s still a clumsy thriller weighed down by cliches, gigantic leaps of logic and ham-fisted “The Russians are Just Like Us” politics that only a tiny minority of Americans won’t find grating.
Butler is Captain Glass of the U.S.S. Arkansas. He’s on a rescue mission for a missing U.S. sub in the waters north of the Once and Future Soviet Empire. But once he’s on station, there’s “a shoot out under the ice.” His “Hunter Killer” (non ballistic missile) sub has to fight its way out of a jam. The Russians want World War III?
So it almost seems. Because their president (Alexander Diachenko, handsome and bland) has been taken hostage, labeled “weak” by his bellicose defense minister (Michael Gor).
The Navy brass (Common) and intelligence expert (Linda Cardellini) see what’s happening. They’ve got to prevent the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs (Oldman) from pressing Madame President (Talk about alternate reality.) from escalating things into a war.
And as they already have commandos on the ground and a sub within reach, why not rescue the Russian Not Named Putin?
“We’re goin’ in t’get four of our boys, and one Russian president,” Captain Glass growls.
Toby Stephens of Netflix’s “Lost in Space” is the tough-as-nails commando leader, Carter MacIntyre the sub’s highly-strung XO (executive officer), the one who shrieks at his commander every time Glass goes rogue, beyond orders, what have you.
And the late Nyqvist, who rarely had a Hollywood film worthy of his talent and stature in his native Sweden, is a Russian sub commander.
The digital sub-fights are quite good, with surface ships and some apparent Navy cooperation. The best moments in the movie are little slices of damage control response teams, stanching flooding, putting out fires, etc.
The commando scenes, which are like their own movie (with painfully under-developed characters, “types” really) are generic paint-by-number bits. Love the way they swim in fjords above the Arctic Circle as if it’s Fleet Week in Key West.
It’s entirely too dramatically thin and lacking in real suspense to stand among the great or even middling submarine movies. It’s “Red October Lite,” with lots of Tom Clancy gadgetry and Cold War politics that Clancy would recognize as well.
Even though Helsinki makes the idea of an American rescue of a Russian president more plausible than a say, having a woman in the White House, “Hunter Killer” isn’t remotely good enough to make you forget the America it’s being released in, which is the whole point of an action movie — escape.
MPAA Rating: R for violence and some language
Cast: Gerard Butler, Gary Oldman, Common, Linda Cardellini, Michael Nyqvist
Credits:Directed by Donovan Marsh, script by Arne Schmidt and Jamie Moss, based on a novel by Don Keith and George Wallace. A Summit release.
Running time: 2:02
There comes a moment in many a thriller when the villain, caught redheaded and/or redhanded, says the following.
“It’s not what you think. I can explain everything.”
In “Silencio,” both those statements are a lie. We’ve thought out and figured out the big surprise 45 minutes ago. And no amount of explaining would fix the obvious.
A sci-fi/ghost story mashup, it’s got nonsensical science, unemotional actors and direction that can’t be called that in any meaningful sense of the word. It’s head-slappingly stupid, a waste of time and scenery and an embarrassment to all concerned.
The “inspired by true events” story was inspired by an alleged radio/cell-phone dead zone in the central Mexican desert, a “zone of silence” corresponding with the landing place of the Allende meteorite (1969), “the most studied meteorite in history,” according to Wikipedia.
A U.S. missile accidentally crashed there, in the Mapimí Silent Zone in 1970, when our fictional story begins. The team investigating the crash is led by Dr. White (veteran Australian character actor John Noble of TV’s “Legends of Tomorrow” and “Elementary”).
The cobalt in the middle gets mixed up with the metal from the meteorite, and next think you know, the scientist and his associate are transported to another part of the desert, just in time to interfere in the car crash that killed Dr. White’s son, daughter in law and grandchildren.
His granddaughter Ana survives in this version of events, raised by Grandpa, who lives with her after she grows up to become a psychiatrist in something like modern day Mexico.
I say “something like,” because you and I can do the math. Melina Matthews of “Megan Leavey” plays adult Ana. She’d have to be in her mid-50s, and looks not a day over 40, with a little boy who could not be over four.
Grandpa has dementia, but by coincidence Ana is treating a clairvoyant who sees ghosts. His name is Daniel (Michel Chauvet), and he warns Ana, Whoopi Goldberg in “Ghost” style. “You’re in danger” girl. As we’ve seen that the only other person to have touched the contaminated stone from the crash site was a tiny boy named Daniel 48 years ago, we take him seriously.
Ana? She throws her education, child of science background out the window and swallows his tale whole. She’s to repeat numbers to her grandfather which will end his dementia, if only briefly. He has to track down the magical stone from way back when in a matter of hours.
Because other people are looking for it, too.
Rupert Graves, playing Dr. White’s former assistant now sentenced to a life of giving half-finished lectures on the “science” of the “zone of silence,” sums up the mystery and the movie he cashed a check for in a single sentence.
“We’ve never made sense of it.”
Writer-director Lorena Villareal hasn’t made a second film since her 2004 debut “Las Lloronas,” a version of a famous Mexican ghost story about “The Weeping Woman.” Coincidentally, there’s another movie about “La Llorona” coming out shortly.
As for this one, 14 years after Villareal’s first, you’d think she’d have mastered the art of creating suspense, pressed upon her actors the need to grieve when a character’s loved one dies, learned where to edit (the takes seem to start just before “action” and end just after “cut”).
It’s entirely too much to expect her to do the math (The movie could be set a few years ago, judging from some of the cars and the cell phone), or learn the difference between a tortoise and a turtle. She made her characters scientists and doctors, after all.
Yeah, it’s that incompetent.
MPAA Rating: R for some violence
Cast: Melina Matthews, John Noble, Rupert Graves
Credits: Written and directed by Lorena Villarreal. A Tulip Pictures release.
Running time: 1:38
The people in the artists’ collective known as Meow Wolf, and the filmmakers charged with making “Meow Wolf” Origin Story” and for that matter anyone writing about or reporting on them, run head-on into the same semantic dilemma. How do you describe the nearly indescribable?
They’re something like 200 in number — visual artists, video artists, conceptual artists, even performance artists, and the installations they mount are immersive, psychedelic, experiential, a riot of color, interactivity, movement, tactile (Touch me, please.) and sound.
It’s like Burning Man — the Permanent Fringe Festival Experience, as scripted by George R.R. Martin and installed in the most dazzling Children’s Museum you’ve ever visited.
These days, they have a permanent, profitable “high tech amusement park for people who don’t think Disney is nearly weird enough,” experience in Sante Fe, New Mexico, where they were founded. They have traveling exhibits and are franchising into other cities — the Cirque du Soleil of art.
But in the beginning, as any “origin story” promises, they were just young, idealistic somewhat anarchic Sante Fe artists “on the outside looking in” with unlimited imaginations, no backing, no reputation and little chance at cracking “the third largest art market in the United States.”
Emily Montoya, Benji Geary, Vince Kudlabek, Caity Kennedy, Matt King, Benji Geary and Sean Di Ianni were among those who found themselves struggling artists, trapped in a tourist town of 70,000, with almost as many art galleries (300, actually), none of which they could get their work into.
With no room for avante garde, experimental or genre-bending art, they commiserated and partied and made their own fun and noise. Then one day, Sante Fe native Vince Kudlabek, hoping to “agitate” and “shake up the culture I was born and raised in,” hot on the idea of a bunch of them renting a space, creating their own art and making a splash that day.
“We can’t wait for others to invite us to be part of THEIR world. It’s time for us to DO.”
What began with ten or so artists collecting garbage and turning it into this 900 square foot space of dazzling color, form, lights and noise grew, over the course of a decade, into an outfit that could sell out shows in huge warehouses, and eventually take over a closed bowling alley for a permanent exhibition that is the “theme park” Uproxx described above.
That the alley was purchased and rented back to them by Sante Fe’s “Game of Thrones” tycoon George R.R. Martin just made their big splash that much bigger.
We get a taste of the “herding cats” nature of mounting shows by the ever-growing group, an experiment in near anarchy where the organized and driven (principally Kudlabek, Montoya and Geary) forever butt heads with the vast majority, who are too “punk” to sell out. The art form? “Maximalism” is one way to describe it.
“Maximalism is way more stuff than you’d think would be comfortable” in a single space, in a single exhibit.
Their shows — GeoDecadent, The Due Return (a giant maze of a wooden ship, complete with pieces to read or play with, and bunks for naps mid-visit) and Omega Mart, a wholly self-contained “store” of colorful, conceptual weird objects — “Special today on Whale Song…” — culminate in the vast permanent bowling alley makeover.
There, you “open the door into another world, an interdimensional travel agency” via a Queen Anne home called “The House of Eternal Return,” which has passageways that take one to alternate dimensions, realities in time and space, fancifully realized with video, neon, plush this or collage that.
“Origin Story” lets us see them morph from artists or “ideas” people into Imagineers who don’t work for Disney, “creating a hyper event horizon.”
The writer Martin recalls the pitch for him to buy that bowling alley, with phrases like “interdimensional” and “different space and time pushing my buttons, being a sci-fi/fantasy guy.” Buttons pushed, he was all in.
The film tracks the group from “zygote” to full-blown success, from the days when “the cops thought we were a cult” to internal squabbles over who gets credit for what,” from throwing together stuff in the name of art to dealing with “being up to Code” and having to hire electrical contractors to keep them from burning their patrons to death with one flight of fancy too many.
Two big themes run through “Meow Wolf: Origin Story.” One is “inclusivity.” Even people who get into tiffs and storm off find themselves invited back in, “a lot more like a family than friends,” Caity Kennedy says. The other is uncompromising idealism.
That’s the most impressive thing about Meow Wolf — all this money changing hands, all this work donated, created collectively, all these clashing agendas and egos, and they’re still sharing, still pitching in to help others realize their visions, looking to new cities and more “outsiders looking in” artists to replicate their own level of success.
Whatever rough edges were shaved off their group persona for the film (and we hear about conflict but never see it), whatever you think of the eye candy they’re creating, that’s inspiring to see.
MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity
Cast: George R.R. Martin, Emily Montoya, Benji Geary, Vince Kudlabek, Caity Kennedy
Credits: Directed by Morgan Capps, Jilann Spitzmiller . A Meow Wokf release.
Running time: 1:29
Ambition and dreams of soccer (football) glory crash into hormones and love in “Mario,” a brittle gay romance from Switzerland.
That’s where Mario Lüthi is an up-and-coming striker, playing for an Under 21 in a developmental league. He’s a striker that the big clubs have their eye on.
But as the YB club would love to jump to the upper division next year, they’ve brought in a hot talent from Hanover. Leon Saldo is also a striker, a bit of a ball hog. But the boys can make beautiful music together, the team realizes. So they make them roommates as well as teammates.
Then a hot night, video games in their underwear, horseplay. A smooch and an apology, and then No apologies NECESSARY, and the two young men — one tentative and inexperienced, the other Grindr-savvy — fall hard.
Can they play together and sleep together? Can they keep a secret, because as progressive and “politically correct” as the club wants to be, their teammates are teenage boys, after all — cruel by default.
“What a gay shot!” (in German, with English subtitles) is the go-to put-down when the ball doesn’t come your way. We know what’s coming if they find out.
Swiss director Marcel Gisler specializes in portrayals of gay life (the documentary “Electroboy” was his, and the feature “A Man, his Lover and His Mother”). Here, he patiently –almost too patiently — develops the footballers’ milieu — training routines, the dynamic of multi-cultural team, their music and group social life, as well as giving us a taste of Mario’s family.
Max Hubacher gives us a Mario who has had soccer drilled into him since he was very young by his frustrated baller dad (Jürg Plüss). Mario hasn’t been in charge of his own life, ever. Soccer is all he has — soccer and his BFF Jenny (Jessy Moravec)
Leon, played with a smoldering swagger by Aaron Altaras, is a shock to Mario’s system. As they connect as a couple, they have to fret over public displays of affection as they hire agents and plan for their football future. They’re young, but they have to know that coming out as a couple will blow up everything they’ve been working for their whole lives.
I like the fact that they’re portrayed as equals, none of this experience meets naive youth of “Personal Best,” still the most famous film on this subject.’
The film is sober and humorless to a fault. Knowing looks pass back and forth when Mario’s Dad says “They make the perfect couple on the field” is about it.
Much of what is here is soap opera predictable — the step by step first seduction, the signals each gives the other — “She’s not my girlfriend.”
It’s the “jig is up” second half of the film that offers a few surprises along with the overly familiar. Teammates suspect, rumors and taunting ensues, the agents and franchise try to “manage” the situations.
“To be clear, no one here or on the board has a problem with this issue…it’s the sponsors!
The soccer is solid, three-quarters-speed proficient, the locker room atmosphere convincing and the story’s resolution touching if somewhat pre-ordained. But the engaging leads, stumbling through a romance they’re too young to temper, finesse or control, give “Mario” the spark of life and make it another ground-breaking genre film that eventually Hollywood will get around to remaking.
MPAA Rating: unrated, explicit sexual content, profanity
Cast: Max Hubacher, Aaron Altaras, Jessy Moravec
Credits:Directed by Marcel Gisler, script by Thomas Hess, Marcel Gisler and Frederic Moriette. A Wolfe release.
Running time: 2:04
By Nov. 16, two films about the famous, daring and one-eyed war correspondent Marie Colvin will have opened.
The History Channel produced the documentary version — her real words, facts, real footage and real people talking about Colvin, who died covering one last civil war, in Syria. That’s called “Under the Wire.” Here’s the trailer.
The other film is an awards season bio-pic starring Rosamund Pike, Stanley Tucci, Jamie Dornan and Tom Hollander — “A Private War.”
Here’s the trailer to that one. It opens in select cities Nov. 2. It’ll be fascinating to weigh them against each other, even though the doc appears to have reenactors/voice-over people. And The History Channel is best know these days for being an “Ancient Alien Astronauts” conspiracy delivery system.
He has long been placed within the cinema’s pantheon, a revered, lionized filmmaker, his name dropped every time Woody Allen does an interview because Woody Allen, more than anything else, wants to be compared to Ingmar Bergman.
What filmmaker wouldn’t? Not Margarethe von Trotta. The German actress-turned-director (“The German Sisters”) works a little too hard at making that connection in “Searching for Ingmar Bergman,” a fine overview of the Swedish filmmaker built upon his movies, interviews with those who worked with him and filmmakers influenced by him.
The director von Trotta occasionally pulls Bergman so close to herself that she takes attention away from her ostensible subject.
She begins by visiting the beach where “The Seventh Seal” was shot, reciting details she remembers from the movie and analyzing those details as she strolls through the gravel and clips from the film play out.
She treasures a film festival program in which Bergman named her most famous film as one of 11 he regards as “important,” including her “German Sisters” with “Rashomon,” “La Strada” and “Sunset Boulevard” in his personal all-time “best list.” OK.
And when she interviews Bergman leading lady, muse and ex-wife Liv Ullmann, she burns screen time with pictures of when they first met — “You remember? This was back in ’81 in Venice when I got the Golden Lion!”
But get past von Trotta’s early egotism and “Searching” provides a solid overview of the Swedish master’s career, films, life and ambitions.
Bergman greatly appreciated having his films adapted for the stage, because “one thing he always wished was that they really regard him highly as a writer,” fellow filmmaker Stig Bjorkman remembers. He takes von Trotta around Bergman’s Stockholm and shows her an apartment Bergman took because the famed Swedish playwright August Stringberg once lived there.
“Theater is my life,” he said. “Film is my mistress.”
As a boy, he admired Hitler, and “strong, brutal men” turned up in many of his films over the years.
When he directed children, one of his actors notes, he didn’t treat them like his children but as a peer — a child himself. His own children? Neglected, ignored.
Another actress, Rita Russek, hints that he was coming on to her and remembers seeing him as “phobic…brooding…a poor sod.”
He fell in love with many a leading lady, married and/or impregnated several.
“He said to the ladies when they were pregnant, ‘Now I know you love me,” his son, filmmaker Daniel Bergman recalls. “And then he left them.”
We see archived TV interviews from the ’60s and ’70s, with Bergman confessing the heart of his technique and his main obsession as a director — “Film is a distributor of dreams.”
There’s behind the scenes footage of his working on “Fanny and Alexander,” and being rather jolly about it as he does. Then future producer Katinka Farago recalls the dread that faced her as she was assigned to work for him as a script girl. “Nobody wanted that job,” she says. “He threw script girls and assistant cameramen out the door every day. He had a method, ‘Never argue with an actor.’ So he took it out on other people on the set.”
“He never thought that he was good enough,” she adds.
He worshiped the Swedish silent era director Victor Sjöström — “Every summer, I see ‘The Phantom Carriage’ in my cinema,'” he told one actor. “He must have seen it 50 times.” He immortalized Sjöström by casting him in “The Wild Strawberries.”
But he was jealous of Bo Widerberg, the first Swedish New Wave director. And Swedish directors who came after him, like Ruben Östlund (“The Square,” “Force Majeure”) tried to ignore him.
“He had to die before we (his generation of Swedish filmmakers) started to watch his films.”
Screenwriter Jean-Claude Carriere (“The Unbearable Lightness of Being”) notes the man’s upbringing — he was the son of a Lutheran pastor — and sees Bergman’s films as “preoccupied with religious guilt.”
Critic-filmmaker Olivier Assayas (“Clouds of Sils Maria) sees Bergman as the forerunner of auteur cinema, a pioneer in “modern, free filmmaking” whose main work was “exploring the unconscious” as he “searches for the light” in his leading ladies.
Spanish director Carlos Saura (“Carmen”) speaks, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, of what “must have been a rigorous process” in selecting “actresses and lovers,” as beautiful and talented as they all were.
The most revealing interview is with Bergman’s filmmaking son Daniel, a man who confesses no real sentimental attachment to either of his parents, just as they showed none to him. He shows von Trotta around Bergman’s study, noting the autographed books from the pianist Käbi Laretei, who consulted on his “Autumn Sonata” and became his lover and then wife and Daniel’s mother.
“They were both narcissists and they were fond of their art history,” the son acridly observes. He later collaborated with his father on the autobiographical “Sunday’s Children.”
“You should never trust Ingmar’s stories,” Daniel says, and von Trotta comforts him by telling Daniel, “He was much closer to his own childhood than to his own children.”
We see photos of a vast brood of children Bergman cared little for, who didn’t know each other until later in life.
He’s sounding more like Woody Allen’s role model all the time, isn’t he?
von Trotta is most interested in Bergman’s furious tax exile in the mid to late 70s, police raiding his set, TV denunciations of his homeland and exile in America, followed by “banishment” in Munich, where his dark (even by Bergman standards) “The Serpent’s Egg” and “From the Life of Marionettes” were filmed.
If you didn’t know “Scenes from a Marriage” was inspired by TV’s “Dallas,” that he was no “film snob,” his grandson is here to recall hanging out with him on Farö, the island where he spent his last years, sitting in the screening room watching “Pearl Harbor” with a guy who was never really “a grandpa.”
Once she gets out of her own way, von Trotta provides a generally breezy overview, appreciation and dissection of one of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived.
“Searching for Ingmar Bergman,” with interviews in English, and German, French, Swedish and Spanish with English subtitles, touches on most of what was important about Bergman and why his films still matter to cineastes and aspiring filmmakers, even if the memory of these often self-consciously “arty” works has faded in a culture that is always most interested in the new and the now.
MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, nudity
Cast: Liv Ullmann, Ruben Östlund, Olivier Assayas, Stig Bjorkman, Margarethe von Trotta
Credits:Directed byFelix Moeller, Margarethe von Trotta, Bettina Böhler. An Oscilloscope Laboratories release.
Running time: 1:39
A big big second week falloff isn’t preventing “Halloween” from dominating the box office on Trick or Treating weekend. A 70% drop Friday to Friday and Deadline.com is still figuring it’ll hit $33 million by midnight Sunday.
A bit generous. I figure $30 is within reach and that Friday was telling us something. Word has gotten around, and repeat business for a repetitious thriller with few frights isn’t a factor.
The only wide opening offering any competition might have been “Hunter Killer,” a submarine thriller starring Gerard Butler as a commander with orders to save the Russian president. The fellow giving those orders probably has orange hair.
That’s not drawing any audience, maybe $6-7 million. Butler’s a draw in the right vehicle, but those are few and far between, and are mostly ensemble thrillers these days.
“A Star is Born” is managing another $13-14, “Venom” adds another $10 (It’s over $300 million, worldwide), “First Man” and “Hate U Give” are sticking around, waiting for those first award’s season honors to give them a boost. “First Man” may hit $50, all in, if that acclaim doesn’t lengthen its release. “Hate” won’t clear $30 without help.
Universal didn’t park “Johnny English Strikes Again” on a lot of screens. Rowan Atkinson is a much bigger deal in the REST of the former British Empire, and the rest of the world. It’s already over $100 million abroad, but on 652 screens here, it did not even crack the top 12 — 13th at about $1.5 million.
That’s less than the superior (still a bit of a slog) “Indivisible,” a faith-based drama with an Iraq War backdrop.
And A24’s “Mid90s” cracked the top ten in its first week of wide (ish) release.
Movie Nation 