An R-rated Red Band trailer for an anarchic, no-holds-barred sex-among-the-summer-camp-staff training session that turns into a freaking “Friday the 13th” slasher comedy.
Finn Wolfhard and Billy Bryk co-wrote it and star in “Hell of a Summer,” headlining a cast of fresh young faces (Pardis Seremi, Abby Quinn, Krista Nazaire, Julia LaLonde, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai).
Neon has this edgy/funny/bloody romp set for April 18.
Barbie Ferreira stars in this feel-film film festival darling about parenting’s lifelong commitment, the sort of guys who bail (French Stewart) and the sort of man (played by Leguizamo) who has it in his heart to step up.
Roadside Attractions has this slated for March 21. We’ll probably need a feel good movie by then.
I’ve watched the upcoming Hulu documentary about Sly Stone and the “Burden of Black Genius,” another dazzling Black Music History by Questlove, loved it and hope to get a review up in the next few days.
It premieres Feb. 13.
But I had forgotten this piece of history the film resurrects. Sly and his family band’s first appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” was something of a musically political earthquake.
Check this out.
“Into the Deep?” Well, “Jaws” it’s not. Entirely too shallow for “The Deep,” too.
But Richard Dreyfuss is in it, the “Jaws” alumnus who’s lived to play the sage of the sea role in this B-almost-C picture about gun smugglers, drug trade pirates, treasure hunting and sharks.
“Into the Deep” is a geographically inept thriller set on the waters around the French island of Réunion when we can plainly see the road and business signs and craggy peaks and cliffs of seaside Thailand, the drugs in question were just stolen from Indonesia and the extras are Southeast Asian when Réunion is a LOT closer to Madagasacar than Singapore.
Cassidy (Scout Taylor-Thompson) grew up as the granddaughter of a famed oceanographer (Dreyfuss). But she saw her father killed by a shark when she was a child (the opening scene), a trauma worsened by how close the beast came to getting her. It’s taken decades of granddad’s lectures about “You’re a visitor in THEIR kingdom,” “BE the predator” lectures to get her over that.
Now she and husband Gregg (Callum McGowan) have been lured back to “those same waters” where Dad died to dive on a wreck with historical significance and “treasure” aboard. Their pal “Benz” (Stuart Townsend) is aiming to salvage the treasure, perhaps in a way that the local government and nautical historians will approve. But maybe not.
Handily, Benz keeps a shark cage on board his barge. Naturally Cassidy is triggered by that.
And then, sure enough, a shark attacks them and another couple mid-dive. Perhaps that tricked-out motorized catamaran in the distance can be of some help? Fat chance, as we’ve already heard Jordan (Jon Seda) order his fellow mercenaries to “light’em up” when they encountered gun runners in another boat.
Jordan and his minions are here to haul up sunken drugs. It doesn’t take long for him and his roid raging, armed-to-the-teeth thugs to show their true colors.
We just know Cassidy will get pressed into service doing that deadly dive for them. Luckily, she remembers Grandpa Seamus’s (Dreyfuss) Rules of the Sea.
“When you breathe you give yourself power…Figure out, ‘What are the things that can kill me?'”
These waters just seem too warm for the cold water loving great whites that are menacing one and all. Grandpa knew better.
“A great white goes wherever it WANTS to go.”
Dreyfuss lends a little sparkle to what is otherwise a dully predicatable affair. Even the performances pitched to be appropriate reactions to shark terror, losing loved ones or friends, feel low energy.
Perhaps if the gun smugglers’ mates were hunting Jordan & Co. for revenge that would have added the ticking clock suspense this shallow dive thriller sorely needed. But probably not.
Rating: R, bloody violence — guns and sharks — and profanity
Cast: Scout Taylor-Thompson, Callum McGowan, Jon Seda, Stuart Townsend and Richard Dreyfuss.
Credits: Directed by Christan Sesma, scripted by Chad Law and Josh Ridgway. A Saban release.
Running time: 1:29
“The Damned” is a thriller built on one of the oldest formulas in fiction. First, there are many, as Dame Agatha taught us, “And Then There were None.”
Ah, but what a setting this 19th century fable has — the treeless, snowy wastes of Iceland.
Thodur Palsson’s debut feature is a horror parable with supernatural overtones set in one of the most forbidding, under-inhabited landscapes on Earth.
The unnamed “fishing station” is somewhere in the uninhabited “north” — Iceland, we decide. Or Spitsbergen. But Norway makes more sense.
There, a handful of men (Joe Cole, Turlough Convery, Mícheál Óg Lane, Lewis Gibben, Francis McGee, and Rory McCann) fish out of a rowing dory all day, and gather in their communal shack to eat, drink and sing all night.
But Eva, played by Odessa Young of “Assassination Nation” and TV’s most recent version of “The Stand”) can do the drying racks math. They haven’t got enough fish left to feed themselves, much less take “home” for cash. She inherited this “station” from her late husband and it’s all she can do to not offend the masculinity of helmsman Ragnar (McCann) and take charge of their situation.
Things are dire enough before the day when they spy a sailing barkentine foundering on the distant “teeth” (reef) off the coast. Ragnar’s too quick with “It’s none’a our concern” judgement, which doesn’t silence the others, who see fellow seamen in peril.
But Eva seconds Ragnar. They haven’t the food to feed themselves. Any “rescue” would put their lives in danger, and she is responsible for those lives. “We won’t fish today, out of respect,” is her version of “thoughts and prayers.”
Events still conspire to send the fishermen out to that wreck, hunting for salvage when they’re sure those who survived the sinking have perished. They haven’t.
And as bodies wash ashore and they make coffins and bury them, the superstitious cook, Helga (Siobhan Finneran) warns them. Tie their legs, drive nails through their feet or the dead will come back to haunt those who didn’t save them.
The “Draugr” will be among them, an avenging shape-shifter, we gather.
“There ain’t no life left in’em. Just hate.”
As things go wrong and their ranks are thinned by a string of sad and horrible deaths, Eva tries to rationally confront their dilemma and find a way to save them, while there are those left to save.
Because the Draugr is both a direct menace, and an indirect one. It’d love “to see us turn on each other.”
The landscape is really the star here, but Young, McCann, Cole (playing the fisherman Eva trusts, who is sweet on his late boss’s widow), Convery (as the jovial Hákon) make strong impressions, and everybody cast seems chillingly at home in this forbidding place doing that deadly, lonesome work.
Palsson uses inventive hallucinations and heartrending pathos about the grim calculus of survival weighed against doing the right thing — using the code of the sea and simple Christian charity rather than self-preservation to guide your actions — to break up the blasts of terror and violence.
The picture’s predictable formula encounters an ending that will turn off many, a sort of cop-out in “Let’s EXPLAIN all that came before” sense.
But there’s no ignoring that “The Damned” has a visual, visceral power that should stick in the memory long past the point of “And Then There Were None.”
Rating: R, bloody violence, suicide, alcohol abuse, profanity
Cast: Odessa Young, Joe Cole, Siobhan Finneran, Turlough Convery, Mícheál Óg Lane, Lewis Gibben, Francis McGee, and Rory McCann
Credits: Directed by Thodur Palsson, scripted by Jamie Hannigan. A Vertical release.
Running time: 1:29
A singular pop/funk presence on American radio of the ’60s and early ’70s, rock historians fan and wide have long declared the genius of Sly Stone and the tunes he and his musical “family” brought to the world.
Now Hulu’s got a new Questlove documentary that remembers him and fills the screen with fans, contemporaries and critiics who recognize who and what he’s been.
What a grand Valentine’s Day gift. “Sly Lives!” streams Feb. 13.
It’s just a haunted house story, just a movie with objects that move and things that go bump in the night. Well, mostly in broad daylight.
“Presence” is a “A Ghost Story” filmed like a “Paranormal Activity” installment. And it’s by one of the American cinema’s true American Masters, Stephen Soderbergh.
The director of everything from “Contagion” to “Erin Brockovich” and one of the most accomplished and constantly-employed screenwrieers of our time, David Koepp (“Spider-Man,” later “Indiana Jones” movies, etc), an accomplished director himself, deconstruct “the ghost story” genre and reach back to their minimalist cinema pasts for this quiet, intimate drama with a supernatural edge.
“Presence” doles out its jolt and thrills sparingly, immersing us in its limited, claustrophobic milieu and connects us with its sharply drawn characters.
A family (Lucy Liu, Chris Sullivan, with Callina Liang and Eddy Maday) have moved into a new-to-them hundred year-old, two story wood frame house. Whatever the home’s history, it’s not truly “haunted” until they show up.
Call it the House of Bad Karma.
Rebekah (Liu) is mixed-up in something sketchy at work, and she’s plainly got a favorite child. Tall, handsome and athletic Tyler (newcomer Maday) is abrasive, indulged and mixing with a mean boys crowd. Husband Chris (Sullivan of “This is Us”) is tuned in to that, his wife’s coming crisis, and her lopsided parenting and looking for a way out.
And underclasswoman daughter Chloe (Liang, of TV’s “Tell Me Everything”) is the child who knew two female classmates who wound up dead in recent weeks, the consequences of drug abuse, so everyone says.
But when stuff starts moving around in her room, Chloe’s uneasiness about their new home takes on meaning.
“It’s Nadia,” one of the dead girls, she finally blurts. “I think she’s here. I feel her.”
Chloe has felt this “presence,” and whatever its unease or intent, it’s moved in. We’ve felt it with her, because this movie is filmed from the “presence’s” point of view.
The tone Koepp, the cast and director/cinematographer Soderbergh reach for and achieve here is the great triumph of this compact, moving genre picture. Soderbergh’s camera floats through the house, settling in on tight compositions as it reaches each room and follows each character in each “long take” scene.
We or rather the “presence” are eavesdropping, peeking through louvred closet doors, standing over a teen’s bed or a wife’s evasive tap-tap-tapping on her laptop, which she doesn’t want her husband to see.
We follow Chris onto the wrap-around porch/deck, getting phone advice from a lawyer for “a friend.”
Once the story settles in, we meet just a couple of outsiders, and one of them is the cliched amateur, concerned and sympathetic medium (Natalie Woolams-Torres). What can she tell them, warn them about? Who in that house will listen?
What the writer and director were going for here is a dissection of a family already in crisis before something supernatural shakes rooms, rattles things off shelves and focuses on Chloe.
Soulful, concerned Dad lectures his son about “the fine man” he might be, the one he’s waiting for his teen with a “mean streak” to finally reveal. Brittle, distracted wife Rebekah keeps her panicked phone chats furtive and her favoritism on her foul-mouthed and dismissive son, who sees mercurial, growing-up-too-fast Chloe as the queen of attention-grabbing acting-out.
And Chloe is the one who should listen when her father says “bad decisions are the kind that last forever.”
The performances are understated and considered.
The shooting strategy adds to our unease, as a lack of edits (all closeups are medium shots achieved by physically moving the wide-angle lens camera in tight) works on the mind as much as seeing school books or whatever move of their own volition.
One shouldn’t oversell “Presence.” At the end of the day, it’s just the simplest sort of ghost story, told from each character’s point of view in their scenes, always spied from the ghost’s-eye-view.
But if you love horror, this minimalist “Sex, Lies and the Supernatural” is on an astral plane all its own. Its blend of mystery, suspense, chills and pathos are perfectly pitched. “Presence” is simply sublime.
Rating: R, violence, sex, drug abuse, profanity
Cast: Lucy Liu, Callina Liang, Eddy Maday and Chris Sullivan.
Credits: Directed by Stephen Soderbergh, scripted by David Koepp. A Neon release.
Running time: 1:25
There was never any doubt that, “canceled-“or-uncanceled, Mel Gibson has skills as a director.
He knows how to cast, block, shoot and edit a thriller, be it historic or generically modern.
But what we’ve allowed ourselves to question during his years in the cinematic wilderness is his judgement. The off-camera questions became public knowledge and turned him into a punchline. On-camera, we can accept the string of C-pictures he’s starred or co-starred in during his exile at face value. And now the director of “Hacksaw Ridge” is letting us know all the ways he can mess up a conventional action picture.
With “Flight Risk,” he “Air Americas” up a perfectly straightforward single set actioner. There’s paranoia and airborne suspense, tension and personal, in-your-face violence.
But it’s glib as all get out, dumb when it isn’t being glib and not nearly as much fun as Gibson seems to think he’s made it out to be.
Michelle Dockery doesn’t embarrass herself, playing a Federal marshal escorting a “flight risk” witness from BFE, Alaska back to New York for a mob trial. Mark Wahlberg shaves his head and dons an intentionally fake drawl as the fake bush pilot who is to get them from the middle of nowhere to Anchorage airport.
But Topher Grace? Grace plays Winston, the comical “reluctant” witness/mob accountant in this bloody-minded “Midnight Run” dawdle into danger. And any time we fret over what the stakes might be, what perils come next and how tense this can get, he’s here to deliver his share of the one-liners that derail Jason Rosenberg’s script.
This isn’t a single-engine cargo/passenger plane they’re boarding, it’s “a kite with seat belts.”
Dockery’s agent cracks about finding Winston in a “Motel Sux.” And then there’s Wahlberg’s psychotic hitman/pilot, the one “outed” and who revels in his criminal intent just over a half-hour into the film.
“You know the last thing to go through your mind in a crash landing? Your ASS!”
One character’s a “by-the-book” Fed with a troubled past. The other’s a stereotypical mob accountant, right down to hiding out in a snowbound “Motel Sux.” But Wahlberg’s playing a campy thrill-killer who’s about as believable as that accent he trots out for his bug-eyed zingers.
“I don’t know about you, but I made a Jackson Pollock in my pants!”
Whatever entertainment value there is in this icomes from the serious early acts, which encourage the viewer to buy into this timeworn “Who will fly the plane?” predicament. Gibson throws up his hands at the job of constructing a compact thriller tucked into a tiny airplane, and just goes for ridiculous, physics-defying Alaskan flying exploits, cliched mob corruption reaching into law enforcement, bloody-to-the-edge-of-killing violence, and laughs.
And there aren’t enough of those to constitute an “action comedy.”
Maybe Mel Gibson deserved his decades in the cinematic wilderness as an actor. Maybe he’s done his penance. But he’s not moving back to the A-list by botching a simple, potentially enjoyable B-picture from behind the camera.
Rating: R, graphic violence, profanity
Cast: Michelle Dockery, Topher Grace and Mark Wahlberg.
Credits: Directed by Mel Gibson, scripted byJared Rosenberg. A Lionsgate release.
Running time: 1:31
A screen legend gives better than a lackluster indie script deserves in “Loren & Rose,” a movie about a movie-maker befriending a once-famous actress he needs to get his new movie made.
Maybe there’s a bit of art-imitates-film-life in this Russell Brown film. His best known feature was “Search Engines” some years back. Casting Jacqueline Bisset as “Rose” made this middling-at-best drama worthy of financing. It became a darling of second tier film festivals (Ojai, Sarasota, Sedona, Hot Springs, etc.), more than one of which feted her with well-deserved “Lifetime Achievement” awards a coupld of years back.
Bisset is Rose Martin, something of a screen legend thanks to a few cult films that made her an icon to assorted subsets (the horror crowd, “the gays”) of the larger cinematic audience. But director Loren (actor and sometime director Kelly Blatz of “Prom Night”) needs this mercurial presence, infamous for “a series of disappearances” from the public eye and the screen, because she’s the “name” in his cast that will get his indie feature debut in production.
They meet at an equally “legendary” and out of the way Topanga Canyon Cafe Sun & Earth to talk about her starring role in a drama loosely based on the life of artist Georgia O’Keeffe.
“Loren & Rose” is a series of conversations that take place over the years as they collaborate, consider collaborating some more and become friends under the watchful care of ancient waiter Phil (Paul Sand of “The Hot Rock,” “Sweet Land” and TV’s “Palme Royale”).
Rose regales Loren and us with tales of flying into Bhutan to make a film, of “the heyday of hallucinogens,” or her one great love and of the highlights and pay-the-rent lowlights of her career.
“I felt like a port hooker on fleet week!”
She flatters the filmmaker who might engineer her comeback, even flirts a little as he goes on about breaking up with this same sex lover or that one and gushes about how “the gays” loved her career-defining role as a transgressive nun named “Lisa.”
Every so often, Loren drably voice-over narrates to catch the viewer up with what else has gone on in their lives, before and after they’ve met, and what’s happened between films.
As the story is framed within an estate sale of movie memorabilia and belongings, we gather that Rose has passed away and this narrative is a reminiscence.
The problem with this “My Dinner with Rose” is that the anecdotes are boilerplate dull. The drama inherent in “friction” between the two of them is flatly scripted and played. The stakes are low. So what if The Kid orders basically everything that provides the flavor left off of his “Restaurant Russian Roulette” meal orders?
Bisset, who worked with McQueen (“Bullitt”) and Truffaut (“Day for Night”), Huston (“Under the Volcano”) and Lumet (the 1970s “Murder on the Orient Express”), is still a radiant screen presence, a famous beauty who has aged with grace and whose talent for “lighting it up” on screen has never dimmed.
Blatz isn’t remotely on her level as acharismatic performer, but as Loren, he seems unintimidated. Perhaps if he had played the lad as a tad overawed, that would have given the conversations more edge.
But as Rose gently chides her director/suitor in the film, “If it ain’t on the page, it ain’t on the stage.” Brown’s script simply lacks the sizzle, pathos, friction or witty warmth to make “Loren & Rose” play.
Rating: unrated
Cast: Jacqueline Bisset, Kelly Blatz and Paul Sand.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Russell Brown. A Wise Lars production on Amazon.
Running time: 1:23
Netflix’s much-hyped “Emilia Perez” musical led the way with 13 nominations when the much-delayed contenders for the 97th Academy Awards were announced this morning.
“The Brutalist” and “Wicked” scored ten nominations each. A total of 10 films are up for Best Picture this past year, with Demi Moore’s daring turn in sci-fi’s satire of Hollywood’s treatment of older actresses “The Substance” earning recognition, the impressive Dylan bio pic “A Complete Uknown,” the dark and even comical Papal thriller “Conclave,” “Dune: Part 2,” “I’m Still Here,” “Anora” and “Nickel Boys” rounding out the field.
Karla Sofía Gascón made history as the first openly transgender performer to receive a nomination, with her turn in “Emilia Perez” recognized. She is competing for Best Actress against Demi Moore (“The Substance”), Cynthia Erivo (“Wicked”), Fernanda Torres (“I’m Still Here”) and Mikey Madison of “Anora.”
If one takes this Oscars as sending a political message to the new/old administration in Washington, Gascón‘s nomination is one slap at the virulently anti-trans Trump crowd. Honoring Sebastian Stan with a Best Actor nom for portraying Trump’s training in crime, fraud and avoiding accountability in “The Apprentice” is another sign of that. Stan is up against Oscar winner Adrien Brody (“The Brutalist”), Colman Domingo (“Sing Sing”), Timothée Chalamet (“A Complete Unknown”) and Oscar winner Ralph Fiennes for his Papal operator/archbishop in “Conclave.”
Best Supporting actor is an embarassment of riches with Jeremy Strong (a deadeyed dead ringer for Roy Cohn in “The Apprentice”), Guy Pearce (“The Brutalist”), Edward Norton’s uncanny Pete Seeger impersonation in “A Complete Unknown”), Kieran Culkin’s life-of-the-trip cousin in “A Real Pain” and Yura Borasov’s lovesick heavy in “Anora.”
Monica Barbaro (Joan Baez in “A Complete Uknown”), Ariana Grande (the best reason to see “Wicked”), Felicity Jones (“The Brutalist”), Isabella Rossellini (“Conclave”) and longtime fan favorite Zoe Saldaña (“Emilia Pérez) fill out a frankly dazzling field for best supporting actress.
“Nosferatu” the Robert Eggers remake of a silent film classic, earned expected nominations for cinematography (Jarin Blashke), costumes (Linda Muir), makeup (David White, Traci Loader and Suzanne Stokes-Munton) and production design (Craig Lathrop; Set Decoration: Beatrice Brentnerová.
The best news about those nominations is that it could push “Nosferatu” over $100 million at the box office by the end of next weekend.
The Munich Olympics incident as seen from the broadcast booth of ABC Sports “September 5” earned a lone Best Original Screenplay nomination for Moritz Binder, Tim Fehlbaum and co-writer Alex David. Jesse Eisenberg was nominated in that category for “A Real Pain,” along with Sean Baker (“Anora”), Coralie Fargeat (“The Substance”), and Brady Corbet, Mona Fastvold, who co-wrote “The Brutalist.”
The adapted screenplay nominations went to “A Complete Unknown,” “Conclave,” “Nickel Boys,” “Sing Sing” and “Emilia Pérez.” “Wicked” was left out of that category for good reason.
Best Animated feature nominees include a new “Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl” from Netflix, “Inside Out 2” and “The Wild Robot” from the biggest animation houses, Disney/Pixar and Dreamworks, “Memoir of a Snail” and Latvian director
Gints Zilbalodis’ “Flow.”
“Best directors direct best pictures,” the old adage goes. So “Anora” (Sean Baker), “A Complete Unknown” (James Mangold), “The Brutalist” (Brady Corbet ), and “The Substance” (Coralie Fargeat) might be the Best Picture favorites.
The complete Best Picture field is “Anora,” “The Brutalist,” “A Complete Unknown,”“Conclave,” “Dune: Part Two,” “I’m Still Here,” ““Emilia Pérez,” “Nickel Boys,” “The Substance” and “Wicked.”
Some figure Denzel Washington (“Gladiator II”), Daniel Craig (“Queer”), Kate Winslet (“Lee”), Nicole Kidman (“Babygirl”), Pamela Anderson (“The Last Showgirl”) and director Jon M. Chu (“Wicked”) were “snubbed. I’d add “Queer” as Best Picture, maybe Denis Villeneuve (“Dune: Part 2”) as Best Director, definitely Willem Dafoe (“Nosferatu,” Best Supporting actor) and Anjelina Jolie’s Best Actress nomination-worthy turn as “Maria” Callas as a geniune ommissions.
“Moana 2” and “Mufasa” didn’t make the Best Animated Feature field for obvious reasons. Last summer’s lavishly over-praised “Kinds of Kindness” crapped out with cause.
I think I’ll pull for “Nosferatu” in every category it’s up in, “The Wild Robot,” Demi Moore, Colman Domingo, Zoe Saldaña and Guy Pearce, Brady Corbet for Best Original Screenplay, Best Director and “Brutalist” for Best Picture. What we’re looking for this year is memorable, from the heart and of-the-moment acceptance speeches of the sort that Adrien Brody delivered when he won for “The Pianist.”
Will we get them?
The 97th Academy Awards will be handed out on March 2 at the Dolby Theatre at Ovation Hollywood, and telecast on ABC.
Movie Nation 