Movie Nation

There’s nothing like a dive deep into dull to get you off your “Why aren’t great directors still getting the chance to direct?” soap box.

Coppola disappears, Scorsese delivers a dog or three, Woody Allen’s last few pictures add embarrassment to his #MeToo shame, and damned if Wim Wenders doesn’t go out and make everybody remember how long ago “Paris, Texas” and “Wings of Desire” were.

“Submergence” is a soapy, melodramatic romance in quiet greys and limp emotions. This adaptation of a connected-by-water romance by novelist J.M. Ledgard has petite Oscar winner Alicia Vikander attempting a coquettish scientist (She wears GLASSES! See? She’s smart!), and her Tom Cruise-sized physical match James McAvoy taking on one more hard-headed Scot, a spy trapped in Somalia remembering how they met and connected by the sea in Dieppe.

Wenders lets composer Fernando Velázquez (“The Impossible,” “The Orphanage”) drown us in strings as a cute courtship plays out between two mismatched but physically attracted strangers in an exclusive French resort. The Eric Dignam (“The Yellow Handkerchief,” “Denial”) script lets the comic banter drift toward oceanography and thoughts of death, and evasion.

“Are you a spy?”

“Oh, I get it. You want to pry.” 

What’s her favorite body of water?

“This, the Atlantic.” And his?

“The human body…well, it’s MOSTLY made of water.”

Bet he says that to all the scientists with glasses at whom he makes passes.

Dr. Dani has “waited years” for her shot at dipping down to the sea floor in Europe’s “Nautile” submersible. It’s just adorable and a comic that she feels the need to explain what that is.

“Is it yellow?” he interrupts, because he’s no dummy.

“Of COURSE it is!”

James More (McAvoy) is a water engineer, an expert for non-profits which want to bring water to the Sudan, say. Where, you know, terrorists, pirates and guys hell-bent on bombing the rest of the world back to their level hang out. Coincidence?

They recall their month-ago meeting in their parallel lives. She is readying for the dive, where if things go wrong, “I’d suffocate. I’d have a lot of time to think about things.” He has been taken prisoner by the terror cell he wanted to make contact with (Alexander Siddig is the doctor who forgot his Hippocratic Oath). Beatings and starvation ensue, with More improbably sticking to his cover story and its alleged “mission” past the point of absurdity.

“I realize I’ve never been lonely before,” she blurts out to colleague and confidant “Thumbs” ) Celyn Jones, a whimsical-wise Peter Falk from “Wings of Desire” figure.

He’s just resolving not to die in the desert, with his love at the bottom of the deep blue sea.

It’s all moody and quiet, moments of action or the threat of it interrupting the sheer tedium of a romance that never sparks. The two of them together just seem…logical.

Oh well. At least two heralded under-40 stars get to say, “I made a movie for Wim Wenders” once. Pity it’s a “Don’t Come Knocking/Everything Will Be Fine” Wenders pic, and not of the “Paris, Texas” era.

At least Mr. “Buena Vista Social Club” still makes attention-grabbing documentaries. Wenders’ “Pope Francis” picture is due out soon.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, sexual situations

Cast: Alicia Vikander, James McAvoy, Alexander Siddig, Celyn Jones

Credits:Directed by Wim Wenders, script by  Erin Dignam, based on the  J.M. Ledgard novel . A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:52

A pretty good cast consisting of two Oscar winners and two Oscar nominees withers on the vine, waiting for a first time director to get on with things in “Same Kind of Different as Me,” a faith-based drama of the “Every Homeless Person has a Story” variety.

Interminable? Pretty much. We’re given a prologue that sets up a story we figure out in advance. And we spend the rest of the movie waiting for the still-a-fine-actress Renee Zellweger’s character to die and for the raging homeless man (the noble Djimon Hounsou) to finish telling us the origins of his rage.

Spoiler alert? Not in the least. It’s teased in that “I’m writing a book” and “this house is broken” opening.

What’s also a given is that the heavy lifting here will be done by the always-on-the-edge-of-tears Greg Kinnear, perhaps well-suited for the faith based genre — he fakes sincere piety and concern well — but eternally, exhaustingly dull in this outing.

He plays a high-flying Dallas art dealer who cheats — on his wife, anyway. She (Zellweger) faces this news with spine and stoicism. I really liked her call-the-other-woman scene, novel in its approach, well-acted.

Her “fix” and “condition” for saving that marriage and bringing Ron back to the huge Texas house where they were raising their kids, is that Mr. Million Dollar Sales has to drive her in his vintage Mercedes to the soup kitchen where she volunteers.

He has to volunteer, too. And when she sees the “man in her dream,” a bat-armed crazy man named “Denver” (Hounsou), Ron’s job is to feed him, befriend him and heal him.

That means getting past the car window Denver smashes, the endless threats and always-scary eyes. That means hearing his story.

First-time writer, producer and director Michael Carney stages one static scene after another, plodding his way through this story built on the book Hall, Denver Moore and Lynn Vincent assembled from the odd intersection of the two men’s lives.

Its title — “Same Kind of Different As Me: A Modern-Day Slave, an International Art Dealer, and the Unlikely Woman Who Bound Them Together,” is more spoiler alert than any mere movie could be.

We are treated to the flashbacks of Denver’s awful childhood, the isolation of the share-cropping life in the Deep South, the source of the man’s rage against people in general, white people in particular.

Zellweger brings that lovely vulnerability that “Jerry Maguire” first introduced to the world. That she has altered her appearance in the years since doesn’t diminish the actress she is, even if this script is thin gruel for someone with her chops.

Hounsou makes Denver a vivid, flesh-and-blood person, but that again is no thanks to the script or the direction, which makes his flashbacks play agonizingly slow.

Jon Voight shows up as Ron’s racist drunk ultra-conservative daddy. The drunk part, at least, is a stretch for that ageing, wingnutty Oscar winner these days.

And Kinnear? He’s just what you’d expect, earnest, open-hearted. The thing is, it’s friction that makes drama, a journey that makes a story arc. Kinnear can’t seem to manage those these days. There’s no edge to this guy, who has to be a “Master of the Universe” hustler in his line of work in that part of the country. Even his “cheating” seems boring.

Getting a laugh out of Klan robes is easy, but Carney can’t quite land it. Earning tears from a terminal diagnosis on a cruel, hard life should take no effort at all.

Carney can’t manage that, either. A shorter, tighter picture would have subjected us to fewer flat scenes that only advance the plot in baby steps. Lose the opening and closing this is framed in and maybe the movie adds some urgency.

It begins and ends with the utterly enervated, drained and casting about for a book his character wants to write (he didn’t, it’s an “as told to” sort of tale) story frame. That makes the movie utterly reliant on sparks Kinnear doesn’t often provide in movies these days.

He can play bad. Watch “The Way Way Back” to see how well. As Hall had a handLetting the subject of the movie have a hand in the script is the best way I know how to rub all the failings, sharp edges and stuff of drama right off them. Jerks finding redemption make for interesting drama. It’s a pity Hall wouldn’t let himself be played that way.

This is just bland — as bland as only Greg Kinnear can make it.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic elements including some violence and language

Cast: Greg Kinnear Djimon Hounsou, Renee Zellweger, Jon Voight

Credits:Directed by Michael Carney, script by Michael Carney, Alexander Foard and Ron Hall, based on the Ron Hall/Denver Moore/Lynn Vincent book . A Pure Flix release.

Running time:

It’s not a great film, but I honestly don’t know how you can make a better movie about tennis than “Borg vs. McEnroe.” 

Here is the solitary combat, the stripped stage where glory or humiliation await, the mental toughness it takes to get up off the mat when the match and the crowd have turned against you. It’s the toughest solo sport out there that doesn’t involve a literal beatdown.

Yes, you could get a grand soap opera out of The Williams Sister Saga,” and who knows? Maybe there’s unspoken tragedy/backstage drama to assorted other great rivalries in the sport, past and present.

But Danish first-time feature director Janus Metz and unheralded screenwriter Ronnie Sandahl have done a fine job of getting into the skulls of two of the sport’s greatest head-cases and a storied rivalry born at Centre Court, Wimbledon.

It was 1980, when the rackets were made of wood and the players made of steel. And none was steelier than the icy blond rock star Bjorn Borg, played here by Sverrir Gudnason. On the court, he was the master baseliner, ripping passing shots by anyone who dared take the net against him, easily outlasting those who thought staying back and waiting for him to make a mistake was a better strategy. 

He was closing in on his fifth consecutive Wimbledon title. And all the brooding, ritualistic 24 year-old Swede could think about was losing. Nobody will remember that he won four in a row, he muses to his coach (Stellan Skarsgard plays Lennart Bergelin), “just that I lost the fifth one.”

John McEnroe (Shia LaBeouf) is the latest upstart to challenge him, a brash and rude American even more brash and rude than the dominant player Borg himself unseated, Jimmy Conners (Tom Datnow, relegated to the background). He’s assaulted a “gentleman’s sport” with cursing, tantrums and tirades that rattle line judges, throw opponents off their game and infuriate spectators. “Super Brat,” as the Brits nicknamed him, is just 21. 

“If I beat Borg in the finals,” he cracks to reporters, “it’ll be very hard to boo me.”

But did you know that Borg started out just the same way, a racket-tossing tyro facing a ban, as a teen, from Swedish tennis, where guys like him didn’t fit into “a gentleman’s sport?”

That’s the back-story we see in this film, mostly seen from Borg’s point of view. Bjorn Borg’s own son Leo makes a compelling brat himself, playing his dad as a kid who lets his temper beat him when the other player can’t.

He used the range-reducing two-handed backhand because he was also a teen hockey player, and his family gave up trying to tame his on-court behavior earlier than you would have liked.

But onetime Swedish star Bergelin (the always estimable Skarsgard) sees the inner fire and figures he can direct the conflagration. His first lesson? A practice where every shot the punk takes gets called “out.” Yeah, he reacts just the way McEnroe did. But he’s got to get that under control.

McEnroe’s intensity is summed up in his British hotel room. He calls the front desk, gets some magic markers, and paints his walls with the Men’s Singles Draw, marking off who each of them has to get through to make their date with history, in the finals.

Borg broods, dials himself into his training rituals, contemplates “escape,” lies about his identity to strangers like a man who cannot handle the screaming groupies that come with fame and bristles at everyone who calls him “a machine.” No, he is “a volcano, keeping it all in.” McEnroe sees this.  His coach remembers it. His fiance (Tuva Novotny) frets that he’s bottled it up for too long.

Meanwhile, Johnny Mac is obsessing over pinball machines, partying with “Broadway” Vitas Gerulaitis (Robert Emms, funny) and cutting the throat of his best friend on the tour, Peter Fleming (Scott Arthur).

On the court? Borg struggles against low seeds and McEnroe, whose nerves are more out in the open, gripes about English pigeons, curses umpires with the F-bombs TV audiences rarely heard and the infamous, “ExCUSE me? You cannot be SERIOUS!” which we did.

The final, with its soul-crushing passing shots, scorching, arcing serves and naked net-charging aggression, is pretty much what you’d hope for in a movie about this signal event in the sport. It’s not quite full speed, even with digital enhancements.

Skarsgard is one of the greatest character actors of his era and brings stoic pathos to the “those who can’t, coach” role. But Gudnason is the star here, and shoulders that responsibility about as well as Borg did.

Which leaves the movie to LaBeouf, who energizes scenes with his antic energy, his darting eyes prattle, letting us see that desire to be “the youngest ever” men’s singles champ and the deflating defeatism that sets in, only to be beaten back by sheer will and ego — the fear of being humiliated.

God help the LaBeouf haters out there, but this is a great performance.

There is suspense, even if you remember how the match turned out, in the surprising layers of back story and the touching coda.

There’s no blood on the mat, no referee counting down from eight. But “Borg vs. McEnroe” is a vivid reminder of the personal nature of this genteel combat sport, of a great rivalry and of a time when America, Sweden and the world were their most passionate about it.

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, and some nudity

Cast: Sverrir Gudnason, Shia LaBeouf, Stellan Skarsgard, Tuva Novotny

Credits:Directed by Janus Metz, script by Ronnie Sandahl. A Neon release.

Running time: 1:47

John Krasinski knows where the horror is, and where the money is in “A Quiet Place,” and keeps the camera in tight on it.

It’s the faces registering the quaking fear, the shaken-to-their-marrow terror of his actors, who make this compact genre piece pay off. When you’re married to one of the great screen actresses of our time (Emily Blunt), have cast the wonderful Millicent Simmonds of “Wonderstuck” and aren’t bad on camera yourself, you build your thriller on close-ups, close-ups and silence.

Fingers rise to lips, eyes widen in alarm and the scream trying to leap out of your throat has to be suppressed at all cost when, as a tattered New York Post headline silently shouts, “It’s Sound!”

Here’s a horror movie that, like “Insidious,” recognizes the value in great acting, even in a sausage factory genre where that’s too often an afterthought. “A Quiet Place” is gripping, pulse-pounding and grimly satisfying “You are there” frights, jolts and pathos.

Eighty-nine days ago, something happened — the monsters came. And human civilization apparently ran out of time to adapt. The headlines Lee (Krasinski) posted on his market board are loaded with clues — headlines, “Stay Quiet — Stay Alive” — and questions.

“Weakness? “Armor?”

There’s no more back story than that. The Abbotts; Lee, Evelyn (Blunt) and their three kids (Simmonds, Noah Jupe, Cade Woodward) have become survivalists. Dad’s sanded every path they normally take, painted the spots on the wooden floors of their old farmhouse where the boards don’t creak.

They can grow their own food, raid the abandoned pharmacy in the nearby town for medicine, home school their kids and make their own entertainment — Monopoly, with the dice silently rolled on a blanket. And they can all speak sign language because older sister Regan (Simmonds) is deaf.

Their days are spent on silent chores, pasting newspapers on the walls for soundproofing, lighting the nightly signal fire to let the world know they’re still there.

Because the gigantic, lightning-quick preying mantis monsters are never more than a dropped dish, sneeze or slammed door away, ready to slash and slaughter with motives no human understands.

Think about that set-up for a minute, because screenwriters Bryan Woods, Scott Beck and Krasinski have. How can you keep children safe? How can you keep them quiet long enough to reach adulthood? Kids are clumsy, noisy and make mistakes. Discipline here is absorbed and self-motivated. It has to be.

How can a child who can’t hear the noise she makes or the rumbling approach of menace manage?

Krasinski finds the grace notes almost smothered by the endless dread of threat — a tender, earbuds shared husband-and-wife dance to Neil Young’s plaintive “Harvest Moon,” extreme close-ups that capture the tenderness the kids feel for each other and their parents, the deaf teen doing what teens everywhere do — rebelling.

The director co-star is formidable and heart-tugging here, but Blunt, as you might guess, will tear your heart out when she isn’t making you fear for her next too-loud breath.

The plot bears no more scrutiny than the average vampire, zombie, “last family alive”  aliens invade thriller.

But the sound design is Oscar-worthy. And the film’s striking reliance on visuals was emphasized to me as I saw it in one of those 4D motion-activated-seats multiplexes (a nuisance) in the Dutch Antilles, with Spanish subtitles translating the sign language. Do the Abbotts really need ASL? Do we need the subtitles to know what is happening and where this is going?

No. Bravura movie-making doesn’t need back story, spoon-fed exposition or endless conversations. We can guess how the old World War II adage “Loose lips sink ships” doomed our chatterbox, digitally-connected civilization.

“A Quiet Place” makes for an entertaining, nerve-rattling essay on what might save us, the power of connection and the symphony our environment provides when we give it the silence it begs for and so seldom gets.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for terror and some bloody images

Cast: Emily Blunt, John Krasinski, Millicent Simmonds, Noah Jupe

Credits:Directed by John Krasinski, script by Bryan Woods, Scott Beck and John Krasinski. A Paramount release.

Running time: 1:31

This doesn’t have a lot of oomph to it, very “Lifetime Original Movie” looking. A “film festival” movie for the right film festival.

But the true story of homeowners facing down Pfizer, Big Development and its lapdogs in a state legislature seems timely. And Catherine Keener and Jeannie Tripplehorn are well-paired as antagonists.

“Little Pink House” is headed for limited release later in April.

Yes, there are plenty of Cinemas in Willemstad, Curacao. But this art deco delight screams out for restoration, conversion to an art cinema/performing arts venue. Gorgeous ruin. Maybe I should GoFundMe this.

He’s the designated “wise old car guy who always wins” winner in the American version of “Top Gear,” which if nothing else gives the veteran character actor name recognition.

Here, William Fichtner is the guy in a dead marriage who wonders about the young couple next door, the beautiful young woman he’s sure is being abused.

He is “The Neighbor.” The horror of it all…Early summer limited release?

A huge horror with a touch of sci Fi opening for “Quiet Place,” a genre pic built around top flight acting couple Emily Blunt and John Krasinski is headed for a $46 million opening thanks to a $19 million Friday, per Box Office Mojo.

“Blockers” is right around $21 million, pretty much where “Ready Player One” looks to end up its second weekend.

“Tyler Perry’s Acrimony” is dropping off @60 percent.

Endless flogging of the Kennedy scandal movie “Chappaquiddick” by conservative media is barely getting that one in the top ten. Maybe $5 million.

“A Miracle Season” didn’t even manage that. Not quite faith based enough to cash in on that “I Can Only Imagine” money.

Tipton, of “Warm Bodies” and “Warm Bodies” stars as the unwitting invited guest of a horrific cult in this 2016 thriller, about an erotic novelist who falls for the wrong European guy and goes with him to this “villa” that looks like a castle and is plainly full of freaks.

“Compulsion” is set for a late spring limited release in the US.

Yeah, this is Neil Gaiman. Based on his short story. John Cameron Mitchell of “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” directed it. And it’s got Nicole Kidman in it.

“Earth Girls are Easy” meets uh, “High Fidelity” and oh, “Under the Skin?”

“How to Talk to Girls at Parties” opens in May.