A collection of (somewhat) more credible experts and officials than is usual for such docs — and Marco Rubio — tell us these “something is out there” phenomena are about to be proclaimed The Real Deal. Officially?
March 25, this one premieres at SxSW.
Will it deliver?
Saw this trailer in a theater last Thursday. Finally Universal/Blumhouse deigned to drop it onto YouTube.
Threatening “Let’s play a game” messages via a short distance “drop” into our heroine’s phone on a blind date.
Hell is cellular.
Meghann Fahy is the single mom. Brandon Sklenar is the date. Who is sending those messages?
April 11.
Jeff Fahey plays the heavy, Kaitlyn Kemp a damsel in distress in this Old West/Morality is a Firearm tale. That’s a pretty good cast for an indie outing, even if it comes a cropper.
“Guns of Redemption” streams March 7.
“Brave the Dark” is a earnest do-good/feel-good story of the “One Great Teacher Makes a Difference” genre. Released by Angel Studios, which brought us “Bonhoeffer,” “Sound of Freedom” and “Homestead,” where “earnest” is their brand, it’s a low-stakes, dramatically flat affair, a picture that never plucks the heartstrings it’s meant to.
“Dark” still makes a decent showcase for British actor Jared Harris (“Chernobyl,” “Mad Men,” and his acting brother Jamie Harris, if not for another brother — Damian Harris — who directed, had a hand in the script and never quite brings it to life.
They’re all sons of the late, great Hollywood hellion Richard Harris, if you didn’t know.
Nicholas Hamilton of “Captain Fantastic” and “It” is Nathan Williams, a high school hunk and track star at Pennsylvania’s Garden Spot High. He’s got a cute girlfriend (Sasha Bhasin), a ready running mate (Will Price), a leather jacket and a ’76 Camaro.
What more could a lad want in 1986 rural Pennsylvania?
It turns out that Nate’s keeping up appearances as the cleanest, best-laundered, best-groomed homeless kid in Lancaster County. He’s living in that Camaro. He runs track — in a fury — “just to use the showers.” He’s got no parents and no visible means of support. That’s a recipe for trouble, burglaries, just to get by.
The other teachers at Garden Spot might dismiss Nate as rude, impulsive, an indifferent student with a bad temper. But Mr. D, aka Stan Deen (Jared Harris), the English teacher, director of school plays and an adored figure on and off campus, notices Nate’s disappointment at not scoring anything from the vending machine. A Hershey bar is offered, and a slow-building mentorship and friendship begins.
In a school full of peers who shrug and say “Let the system take care of him,” after Nate is arrested for burglary, Mr. Deen decides to take matters into his own hands. He takes the kid in, questions and observes his actions and interests, and puts Nate’s photographic passion to work doing sets/backdrops for the school’s production of “Flowers for Algernon.”
Nate learns a few things about Mr. Deen — that he had dreams, that he came back to care for an infirm mother who recently died and that he’s not much of a housekeeper. And Mr. Deen slowly works his way towards understanding the kid his fellow teachers refer to as a “piece of trash,” the trauma of Nathan’s past.
“This too shall past,” he tells the boy, over and over, as Mr. Deen calls in favors in “the system” and takes his best shot at giving a child a chance, and maybe his own rewarding but disappointed life some purpose.
That phrase, “This too shall pass,” like the film’s generic cliche of a title, is banal in the extreme, another empty platitude in a movie full of them and a plot with little at stake and no edge.
And slapping another trademark Angel Studios, “Here’s the real guy this ‘true story’ is about to urge you to endorse this movie and ‘pay it forward’ by buying tickets for others” epilogue on “Brave the Dark” doesn’t change that.
The film glosses over how a teenager keeps a ’70s gas hog of a car going, much less feeds, grooms and clothes himself with no money as it avoids showing us how Nate navigates the difficult, energy and soul-sucking logistics of being homeless. There’s drama in that, and in keeping up the illusion that you’re not homeless to others.
The script never answers a question Nate asks on behalf of the viewer, “What’s your angle? Everybody’s got an angle, Stan.“
Harris plays Mr. Deen as an exhuberant “type,” that teacher who throws her or himself into their work and their students with such enthusiasm that he touches scores of lives each school year. Is it all a performance? Is he maintaining an illusion, just like Nate? What’s HIS story? Harris didn’t lobby for or reach for deeper insights into the character, and Deen’s big emotional moments just sort of arrive, they don’t build.
Jamie Harris plays the kid’s probation officer. The traditional Hollywood way of portraying such characters is to give a craggy, crusty-looking actor a leather jacket, which is all what we see here.
And young Hamilton has a hard time wringing any pathos out of this character the way he’s scripted. Nate is bland, even in his hot-tempered moments, which are rare, and his emotional epiphany, which is inexcusable.
While one appreciates any Angel Studios release that doesn’t lean on any particular agenda — it’s not overtly a “faith-based” film — “Brave the Dark” has too little else going on to ever make it much more than a way of passing the time.
Rating: PG-13, violence, teen drinking and drug abuse, some profanity
Cast: Jared Harris, Nicholas Hamilton, Sasha Bhasin, Will Price and Kimberly S. Fairbanks
Credits: Directed by Damian Harris, scripted by Lynn Robertson Hay and Dale G. Bradley, based on an original script by Nathaniel Deen and John P. Spencer. An Angel Studios release.
Running time: 1:52
Peter Stormare is in this “Fresh Faces of 2025” sinister swing into the supernatural.
Aged and reclusive pop icon comes out of seclusion for an”event” for the “select few.”
Have Kanye or Madonna thought of this?
The debut feature of Mark Anthony Green is built around a comedy central star, and John Malkovich.
March 14 from A24.
“Radical” politics — sexual, racial and otherwise — Vietnam, the first Earth Day, the sexual revolution, “female solidarity” and Kent State are the backdrop of “Three Birthdays,” a downbeat family melodrama about the day “The Sixties Died.”
Writer-director Jane Weinstock is old enough to know her subject, to be connected to an age of violent political division yet alive with the possibilities of change on many fronts of American culture. But this dissection of the “destructive honesty” of living lives locked into the dogma of your beliefs feels watered-down, tepid and weary almost from the start.
Josh Radnor and Annie Parisse (TV’s “Friends from College”) play professors at an unnamed but famously-progressive Ohio college. Nuala Cleary is Roberta, “Bobbie,” their daughter who celebrates her April, 1970 birthday as the film opens by writing a poem about “When I’m no longer a virgin.”
She’s 17, liberated and always wearing Mom’s “Female Solidarity” t-shirt. And today’s the day she’ll lose that virginity.
Parents Kate and Rob preach tolerance, protesting injustice and “sexual freedom” at home with the daughter they treat like an adult, and fold these messages not just their homelife but their classes. Kate’s published books on feminism, and Rob’s finishing up a book on J. Edgar Hoover and the Red Scare — The House Unamerican Activity Committee ’40s and ’50s.
But those cherished beliefs are tested by both generations as Bobbie finds out something about her parents’ fraying marriage, Rob realizes he won’t get tenure and Kate’s forced to confront the consequences of the marital liberties she’s demanded and the “experimenting” she’s carrying on.
“It’s a lot easier to be a purist when you don’t have a kid. Or a husband.”
Rob’s mocked for throwing a Black power salute at some Black students at this Oberlin-ish bastion, just the beginning of his maybe-my-liberalism-is-a-tad-tone-deaf awakening.
“If only you could be a Black woman, all your problems would be solved.”
And Bobbie’s “I’m a WOMAN now” arguments to the ticket-taker at the cinema where and her prematurely “mature” pal Joyce (Gus Birney) want to see “Women in Love” hit the cold hard reality of adult problems of the worst sort that come with thinking you’re more grown up than you are.
One problem with “Three Birthdays” is the unintentionally quaint way many of these issues — the revolutionary act of lighting up a joint, mentions of “Kent State,” which we know is lingering on the horizon, “the times, sexual revolution and all that” — play today.
Casting Ohioan Radnor, playing yet another “Liberal Arts” and “I Used to Go Here” variation of his “enlightened liberal romantic” character from TV’s “How I Met Your Mother,” just doubles down on that sense of a time studied and talked-about, but not actually lived by those involved.
With this subject and message, avoiding casting Radnor seems like the smarter play here, unless you’re connecting the politics of those fraught times with a history of cinematic Jewish parenting, which Weinstock is not.
For all the seriousness of the subtexts “Three Birthdays” feels shallow, lightweight and less serious than it should, with a cast “acting as” rather than inhabiting characters from that strangest setting of all — the distant-enough but not-terribly-distant past.
Rating: unrated, sex, profanity, marijuana use
Cast: Josh Radnor, Annie Parisse, Nuala Cleary, Jasmine Batchelor, Dolly Wells, Uly Schlesinger and Guy Burnet.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Jane Weinstock. A Good Deeds Entertainment release.
Running time: 1:31
Piero Vivarelli was an Italian B-movie filmmaker, a “genre” director who dabbled in several genres, most famous (at home) for his musicarello pop and rock movies of the 60s.
If you’ve never heard of Rita Pavone, Tony Renis, Mina and other early ’60s Italian pop icons, you might never have heard of the genre, and you’ve probably never heard of Vivarelli, who also served as a music consultant for others’ films and was one of the composers of the landmark Italian rock tune “24.000 baci.”
But in addition to his bubbly, corny pop musicals, he made the notorious “The Black Decameron,” “Satanik” and “Il dio serpente.” And he scripted a certain Franco Nero ’60s Western titled “Django.” So if the loopy pop and exploitation titles didn’t tip you off, there’s your “Why he matters.” Quentin Tarantino is a fan.
Co-writers/directors Fabrizio Laurenti and Niccolò Vivarelli (one of Vivarelli’s sons) make a half-decent case that Vivarelli is worth knowing about beyond the borders of his homeland. The energy of the pop music scenes from his earliest films, the lurid sensuality of his later works, his dabbling in fascism and communism — he befriended Castro — overseeing several mostly-forgotten international productions in Cuba and elsewhere, add to his cachet.
His personal life — marriages and unending womanizing, a patriarchal fixation on Black women in particular, neglected kids — one who OD’d, another of whom of whom admits “My Dad wasn’t so much a Dad as a ‘character'” — gives the impression that Vivarelli was practically a parody of an Italian film director “of his time,” the ’60s and ’70s.
But Vivarelli is fondly remembered by critics and peers, filmmakers who followed in his wake and ex-wives for being very much an Italian man and movie maker of his “moment” — bubbly Teddy Boys and “rock chicks” in “Howler of the Dock,” “Rita, the American Girl,” zipping about on Vespas, stopping to sing and dance and shock their elders.
Film Movement or somebody selling them the rights to this cut seven minutes from the original release. I’m guessing it was mainly more nude scenes, or an actual interview with Tarantino, that were deleted.
Rating: unrated, nudity, profanity
Cast: Piero Vivarelli, Rita Pavone, Beryl Cunningham, Franco Nero, Emir Kusturica, Umberto Lenzi, Lars Bloch, Olivier Père and Quentin Tarantino
Credits: Scripted and directed by Fabrizio Laurenti and Niccolò Vivarelli. A Film Movement+ release.
Running time: 1:23
Two fisted, two-footed, machete-and-pistol-packing Brit Mama “Jade” never backs down from a fight.
Especially when she’s caught between rivals — a gangster and a businessman, one of them played by Mickey Rourke.
Shaina West is a stunt woman turned action heroine, reason enough to check out this Blaxploitation throwback.
Feb. 18.
An absurd script is navigated with brio and professionalism in the “Back in Action” comedy.
Jamie Foxx and Cameron Diaz summon up their old school cool and comical chemistry (“Annie”), Glenn Close trots out an accent and the quips and ass-kickings pile up like Audis in a CGI-assisted pileup at the end of any given chase.
Director and co-writer Seth Gordon is known for big budget, action-packed larks (“The Lost City”), and for not always making them come off (“Pixels)”). He lives up and down to both reputations in a movie with pizazz and pop that’s never so amusingly over-the-top that you forget what nonsense this all is.
But as you would hope and expect, Foxx is past his health emergency — hale and hearty and sometimes a hoot — swapping zingers with Ms. “Still Got It” Diaz as two spy-parents on the lam with offspring who don’t now how badass their elders are.
The American spies are sleeping together when we meet them, teaming up for an Alpine heist of this high-tech, world-dominating “key.” As the mission goes wrong and they survive a digitally unsurvivable plane crash, Emily lets out “I’m pregnant.” After viewing a “royal flush” of pregnancy test-sticks, Matt says, “My favorite person is about to create my new favorite person…I’m in.”
And they’re out — off the spy-grid about out of action as they raise two kids, Alice and Leo (McKenna Roberts and Rylan Jackson), in McMansion suburbia. A cliched viral video of them delivering ass-whippings in a club underage Alice has fake-ID’d her way into blows their cover.
But that key? They still have it, 15 years later. And bad guys aplenty want it. Still.
Forget the car and boat chases through Britain, on the A roads and on the Thames, the well-choreographed (and stunt-doubled) brawls and think about that. This 15 year old high-tech key…still works? Still is cutting edge tech? Still holds the possibility for upending the global power structure?
That’s like Chechen and Polish bad guys risking their necks to fetch an MP3 player.
None of this is at all serious, these “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” suburbanites, “Boomers” with a “Karen” included, coping with sassy, tech-savvy rebel kids, renewing old contacts (Kyle Chandler is their old control agent, Andrew Scott is Mr. MI-6) and visiting Emily’s rich, estranged “MI-6 girl boss legend” mother, played by Close.
Casting Foxx always means there’s a better joke on the set than in the script. That minivan Mom and Dad just trashed through armed villains in SUVs in order to fetch the 14 year-old and 12 year-old from school? “What happened to our car?”
“Long story short, don’t valet.”
Each star gets plenty of moments to show off their still-sharp skills in fight choreography, and their way with a one-liner.
“I need to feel like that bitch again!”
Michael Jackson jabs, “Can you beat up” so-and-so’s dad jokes, “full English breakfast” put-downs and a “Push It Real Good” sing-along are among the low-hanging-fruit gags turned up here.
Every fight is staged to vintage pop songs — from Rat Pack baubles and Nat King Cole ballads to Lauryn Hill and James Brown classics.
All in a tale where the kids are the last to figure out Mom and Dad aren’t who they seem. Are they crooks on the lam?
“They’re not CRIMINALS! They’re in a PICKLEBALL league! They watch HGTV!”
God help me, I laughed a few times. And God bless Foxx for luring Cameron Diaz back on screen, and for his recovery. They’re damned cute together, even if their movie isn’t all that in concept, writing and any scene that involves “inaction.”
Rating: PG-13, violence, some profanity
Cast: Jamie Foxx, Cameron Diaz, McKenna Roberts, Rylan Jackson, Andrew Scott, Jamie Demetriou, Kyle Chandler and Glenn Close.
Credits: Directed by Seth Gordon, scripted by Seth Gordon and Brendan O’Brien. A Neflix release.
Running time: 1:52
Movie Nation 