Tom Hardy plays a reporter “who found something…really bad.”
It’s “Deadpool” run monstrously amok, a villain’s villain — Jekyll and Hyde and Tom Hardy as the conflicted fellow fighting it out from within.
Oct. 5, we figure out how “We…are Venom” plays out.
It begins with a prayer, a Bosnian woman kissing a medal and asking for someone, “Ya Hafizu” (“the protector”) to “protect me from evil.”
Their Mitsubishi has given out in the woods. Her German boyfriend, Alex, insists their situation is “a piece of cake.”
Selma? She’s got a bad feeling about this.
“I told you the GPS was wrong…I’m not going into that forest. You think we are in some park in Berlin? MINES!”
Selma (Alma Terzic) left here long ago, and the trauma of her return — for a funeral, no less — has Selma experiencing horrific flashbacks. Meeting two rough-hewn locals (in the woods doesn’t help. The Bosnian War left its scars, made her paranoid.
Running into two rough-hewn locals (Aleksander Seksan, Sanin Milavic) just brings it all back. Are they here to help or is it “a trap?”
“The Maus” is a real world thriller with horrific undertones, a tale in which we’re slow to know which version of the narrative to trust. Is it what Alex (Augustine Wittgentstein) insists, this problem is just an inconvenience, these two nice gentlemen are merely helping us out of a literal minefield?
Or is it Selma’s waking nightmare come to pass, with these guys who Muslim-hating thugs like the ones that tormented her and her family in the late genocidal war?
Filmed in Asturias by Spanish filmmaker Yayo Herrero, “The Maus” lets us believe what we want to believe, even as Selma’s incantatory repetition of “Ya Hafizu” seems to summon up something in her beyond the mere will to survive — a literal demon in this literal minefield of a forest.
The dialogue — English, and Bosnian and German (with subtitles) — doesn’t clarify enough.
Herrero keeps the camera tight on his star, a Bosnian actress, capturing her rising paranoia and monstrous survival instincts. He stages the violence, much of it underground in a dimly lit cave/command post, in grim close-ups as well, personal age-old race hatred expressed with a knife or an AK-47.
But Herrero doesn’t play fair with showing which version of reality to grasp, which secrets to give up and which treat as delusions. Is this a survival story, or deranged revenge for what happened during The War?
How far will this story drift on past its climax?
We don’t need it all spelled out for us, but for such a seemingly straight-forward tale, the filmmaker, dabbling with horror, still has a lot of explaining to do.
The story he chose to tell is grimly dissatisfying, nothing more.
MPAA Rating: unrated, violence
Cast: Alma Terzic, August Wittgenstein, Aleksander Seksan, Sanin Milavic, Diana Fernández Pérez
Credits: Written and directed by Yayo Herrero. A FilmFactory/Netflix release.
Running time: 1:35
Nobody goes down quietly in “BuyBust.”
Cops and drug gangsters, enraged slum dwellers fighting to be freed of both, they take their beatings, absorb brass knuckles and bullets, machetes and Molotov cocktails, and refuse to die.
“Adrenalin” pulls them out of the canals where they’ve been held under water, desperation keeps them from giving up on living even as their punches lose their punch and their bodies reach their limit.
The over-long and slow-starting action picture is sort of a Filipino version of “The Raid: Redemption” where the setting is a vast slum and there is no damned redemption.
Set to the beat of the “chick chick chick” of knives jabbing into flesh, it’s a movie where you take the good — long tracking shots through multi-levels of almost non-stop video-game styled mayhem, brutal fights that are more realistic than cinematic — with the half-hearted.
Many a “stage punch” gives itself away, vast volleys of ammunition are expended, but the gunfire isn’t resonant or explosive. And in close quarters, firearms are fired at the ground (no sense injuring actors jammed together in the frame).
Writer-director Erik Matti has made a Duterte era epic of blood and cynicism, a picture that where we’re given heroes but told, scene after scene, not to trust them. And above all, don’t get too attached to anybody.
Manigan (Anne Curtis) is a P-DEA cop training to join a new squad. Her old one? Wiped out. It’s made her cynical, untrusting.
“People DIE following orders, too!” she tells her boss (in Filipino, with English subtitles).
This we figure is foreshadowing that will serve her well when her new squad follows a blunt detective (Lao Rodriguez) into the rabbit warrens of Gracia di Maria, in the brutally tough Tondo section of Manila.
They’ve got a “rabbit,” a drug dealer they’re using as bait to get to Mr. Big — “Biggie Chen.” Just another bust in the country’s ever-evolving, ever-lasting drug war.
But as they wade into the maze of shanties, shacks, food stands and funeral parlors — even a packing crate “club” — of the slum, they fall into a trap.
No cell service, no “back-up,” just a dozen or so officers scrambling to escape underboss Chongki’s (Levi Ignacio) minions, and the equally enraged locals, who just want to be “left alone.”
Matti drops his outgunned and overwhelmed cops into a world of clutter and cover, but no safety. Rickety walls made of cloth, no door that could stop a bullet or a mob pushing to get through it, no wall thick enough to provide protection and no help on the way.
There’s a “Judas” in their midst, and a limited supply of ammo. Fights start as shootouts and devolve into swarming brawls, sometimes with meth’d up and armed gangsters, sometimes with the skinny, over-matched but frenzied poor.
The plot is “Who gets it next?” and who will survive the night, standard action beats seen in Westerns, “Zulu,” “Assault on Precinct 13,” scads of films.
The dialogue (smartly subtitled in yellow) is generic, be the line in English, Filipino/Spanish or a patois blended from all three.
“I’m not LEAVING you!”
Matti packs his police squad with a cross-section of life — a married couple dealing with phone calls from annoying children, cowboys, jaded veterans — all of whom pray the rosary, aloud, on their way to the mission.
I kept looking for signs of fascist art influence on the picture — that glorification of the muscular body, The State, the military institutions, uniforms, common since “Triumph of the Will,” even evident in “300.” But this is a Filipino picture politically in marked contrast with The State.
It’s entirely too long, with pacing issues in the opening and popping up here and there as it progresses. And not every fight is convincing, the action choreography is constrained by the setting.
But “BuyBust” is brimming with life, furiously protected and furiously taken, a bracing introduction of Matti and Filipino cinema to the world.
MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence in never-ending supply, drug abuse
Cast: Anne Curtis, Lao Rodriguez, Levi Ignacio
Credits:Directed by Erik Matti, script by Erik Matti and Anton. C. Santamaria. A WellGo release.
Running time: 2:06
He’s fretted in the most public, often comic ways, about his Canadian ancestry, his duty to the Motherland.
So it’s only natural that Ryan Reynolds should make a movie with Atom Egoyan. Who’s more Canadian than that?
And it’s about a father who loses his daughter to a pedophile ring. What’s more Canadian than that?
But “The Captive” is a 2014 mystery in the Egoyan (“Where the Truth Lies,” “Adoration,” “Chloe”) style, cryptic beyond cryptic, not playing fair with clues, plot logic and timelines. Shockingly, nobody saw it.
Cassandra, “Cass,” was an aspiring figure skater. She was good, and landscaper dad (Reynolds) and hotel maid mom (Mirielle Enos) were bursting with pride.
One wintry day’s “pairs” practice skate with her partner goes as well as ever, and Dad stops with her on the way home to pick up a pie at the truck stop. Cass disappears.
Egoyan’s story skips back and forth in time, from the job interview of a hot dog detective (Scott Speedman) who wants to join the pedophile/cyber crime detection unit, to the day he interviews, with his boss (Rosario Dawson), the father (Reynolds) whose daughter disappeared. The cops’ questions accuse the father.
“They’ve taken my daughter, and I want to know what you’re doing to help!”
Dad’s enraged and panic-stricken, but his wife goes berserk when he breaks the news to her, a fury of blame and grief.j
Meanwhile, the captor (veteran heavy Kevin Durand) has video feeds of all sorts of CCTV cameras, even in the hotel rooms Cass’s mom cleans, taunting his hostage even as he’s re-assuring her by letting her see her mother, from time to time.
He’s part of “a whole new class of freaks,” the cops suggest. The monster leaves the girl’s mother clues, over the years — a hairbrush here, a baby tooth (in a jewel box) there — IN the hotel rooms she cleans daily.
In the present, eight years after the kidnapping, Cass (Alexia Fast) is resigned to her fate, reasoning with her captor, “protecting” she thinks, her parents by not trying everything she can think of to escape. She is just a beautiful blonde, playing the piano, wondering if he’s “lost interest” in her “now that I’m all grown up.”
The section chief (Dawson) and her detective are now in a relationship.
The kidnapper works for a big-shot developer (Bruce Greenwood) who also heads a charity that raises money for at-risk kids.
And the father of the victim has lost any faith in the police even though his increasingly frayed wife continues to visit Dawson’s unit boss. Dad has gone off the deep end, sure he’s lost his wife’s love, hellbent on “keeping my eyes open,” certain that he will find his daughter, discover clues on his landscaping treks over Canada’s highways and snow-covered back roads.
In a nutty, illogical and dream-interpretation driven thriller, that’s just the sort of thing that happens.
Dawson makes a convincing, level-headed crusader, testing her new hire’s reaction to child porn on the Internet.
Speedman’s cop is an under-developed “cowboy.”
“Me? I arrest people.”
Enos gives the mom a mania you appreciate, and Reynolds manages both the breakdown and man-taking-action moments he must play with his usual bite and aplomb.
But Egoyan, exercising his passion for melodramatic music in the score, snow in his settings and the ripple effects of a tragedy (Cass’s former partner cannot escape her kidnapping, either) in his stories, refuses to let us connect the dots that must somehow exist only in his mind.
Seriously, if you see the resolution to this coming based on the information the viewer is given by the storyteller, my hat’s off to you.
Only in Canada would an artist this fascinating, home-grown and maniacally uneven continue to draw the subsidies, attention and loyalty from his fellow Canadians, now big Hollywood stars, to get his increasingly unhinged thrillers made.
MPAA Rating: R for language and some violence
Cast: Ryan Reynolds, Rosario Dawson, Scott Speedman, Kevin Durand, Mirielle Enos, Bruce Greenwood
Credits:Directed by Atom Egoyan, script by Atom Egoyan and David Fisher. An eOne/Direct TV release.
Running time: 1:52
Shut the front door! A mermaid who doesn’t sing, who doesn’t necessarily want to be “part of your world?”
How did Disney allow this “Little Mermaid” to happen?
AMC theaters will open this period piece “Splash meets Fairy Tale: A True Story” in the Dog Days of Aug. (Aug. 17)
Emma Wilson (Kelli Berglund) is a cute, cocky, high school cheerleader and Air Force brat who has “already learned how to say ‘good-bye’ in six languages.”
That’s what military families face as a way of life — constantly moving, endless transfers to new bases. Dad (Terry Jones) is transferred from California to Australia, which Emma’s inner voice screams about.
“Tell him you have friends here, a life!”
Nothing for it, then, but to bite your lip and accept it. We also serve who cheer and “have a life.”
And there are worse places to land than Australia. I mean, they have cheerleaders Down Under, too.
“We’re just as INTO as you Yanks,” her new neighbor Hannah (Emily Morris) warns her.
We’ll soon see about that.
“Going for Gold” is one of those bland, generally benign teen comedies pop music montages, smiles and fresh-faced cheerleaders pumping fists and throwing down.
Ex-gymnast Emma hangs with Hannah and her shrinking gymnastics team, watching them show off how athletic, confident and competent they are.
“You guys want to see my routine?”
That leads to the girls joining in and experiencing the joys of tumbling, dancing in line, lifts and shaking your groove thing. And when events conspire — the arbitrary nature of gymnastics judging — to get the gymnastics team disqualified for the season, “Hey, I just got this really crazy idea.”
They haven’t even set up shop when Emma discovers the joys of “footie,” Australian Rules Football and they find their arch rivals — ACC — Adelaide Cheer Squad, aka Mean Girls Cheer.
“Cheer battle!”
Truthfully, the cheering/tumbling in this little “Bring It On Lite” is half-speed lame.
So is the “recruit the squad” sequence, beginning with Liam, the footballer who can do backflips. Hip hop dancer, belly dancer?
“Are you guys good?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“Congratulations! You just got great!”
And then there’s fund-raising…
The banter is mild-mannered and cute, the frictions and interpersonal dynamics oh-so-PG. The obstacles? Emma’s reluctance to make new friends, what with her Dad always ready to grab that next promotion and transfer.
New team member Ethan would turn Emma into a “smitten little kitten,” if it wasn’t for that next move hanging over her head.
“Blandness” is what hangs over this mild-mannered Big Contest comedy, bland characters, blase villains, bland situations, friction-free at every turn.
When Coach (Ruth Natalie Fallon) says “The last thing we need is internal drama!” she’s dead wrong. The whitest teen comedy since “The Breakfast Club” could use a little — a LOT — of drama, internal or external.
The jokes — “Coach was on a famous gymnastics team, back in, World War II, was it?” She has the manners of an emu” and the like — wilt.
There’ve been a number of “Bring it On” imitations since that iconic hit came out in 2000, but it behooves the writer-director-choreographer and casting director to at least refer back to the Kirsten/Gabrielle cheer-off when making a copy.
The cheerleading’s got to be eye-popping, pushing the envelope. The conflict has to be grounded in reality — not necessarily the class-race schism that underlies “Bring it On,” but something with some edge.
Writer-director Clay Glen has a couple of teen gymnastics pics (“The 2nd Chance,” “Raising the Bar” under his belt, so there’s no excuse for not “raising the bar” on the cheer routines. A hint of belly dancing is about as sexy as things get here, and everything plays like a walk-through rehearsal.
The leads are cute but light on screen charisma, with zero chemistry with each other. The finale is a real eye-roller. Harmless enough, but engrossing? Nah.
It all adds up to “Netflixable? Not so much.”
MPAA Rating: G
Cast: Kelly Berglund, Emily Morris, Terry Rogers, Ruth Natalie Fallon, Daisy Anderson
Credits: Written and directed by Clay Glen. A Marvista/Netflix release.
Running time: 1:28
Many of my favorite documentaries over the years have been works of cultural historiography — films that literally “write the book” on some corner of pop culture that’s outside of my experience or general interest.
My first serious education in hip hop was “Rhyme & Reason.” “Paris is Burning” introduced us all to drag queen subculture’s embrace and impersonation of high fashion. “The King of Kong” packaged video gaming’s prehistory into a tale of hated champion vs. upstart challenger, and “Rize” set the table for how dance culture got from hip hop to krumping and clowning, to twerking.
“When the Beat Drops” peels back the layers of recent dance history, the line dancing “dance battles” first mainstreamed in “Stomp the Yard” and “Step Up” and “You Got Served,” and traces it to the ascendant Capital of African America — Atlanta — and the black gay subculture that created it.
Jamal Sims’ film breaks into chapters focusing on this or that figure in Atlanta line-dancing’s past and present.
It all began, the various practitioners of the back-arching, leg-kicking “buck” dancing say, with the majorette/dance squads of “HBCUs” — Historically Black Colleges and Universities — with Atlanta’s Clark, Spellman, Morehouse, Morris Brown and Spelman at their epicenter.
Football and basketball games brought in not just the athletes of Jackson State, from Jackson, Mississippi. It was the dance squad, the Prancing J-Settes that won the attention, admiration and imitation of young Anthony Davis and his friends.
A plus-size kid who had grown up with little interest in “doing what boys should do,” who knew he was different when he realized Lynda Carter’s “Wonder Woman” was his role model, Davis would watch the “graceful…sassy and sexy” J-Settes, and he and friends would try out what they saw that night, after the game, in Atlanta’s African American dance clubs like Club Traxx.
“Bucking…like a stallion,” was all the rage, and the dance floor and even the parking lot would be the scene of dance battles as young men would throw down, match each other’s moves and try to better them.
Davis founded his own dance team, Phi Phi, which has ruled the roost in Atlanta, hosting and sponsoring competitions, demonstrations and the like, gay teams putting themselves out there in increasingly feminine attire in a conservative, church-based bastion of African American conservatism. “The city too busy to hate” would slowly come to accept its black gay subculture.
Made-up and dressed in matching halter-tops, leggings and boy shorts, groups like Team Mystique and Banji and 3D would dance-off in assorted styles of music — House and Hip Hop.
Official competitions, which Davis and Phi Phi often organize (as they moved away from competing) would feature a category called “Stands” — dance moves a college dance squad like the J-Settes could perform in the limited space, on steps, aisles or in between seats, in the stands of a football stadium or basketball arena.
“Dance in YOUR SPACE,” Anthony, aka “Big Tony,” bellows to his team as they practice choreography, barking out the count as they rehearse their steps.
Dancers talk about the grounding they need in modern dance, jazz dance and ballet and use the nomenclature of those disciplines, even if they never formally studied them.
As “bucking” came to be known as “J-Setting,” named for Jackson State’s dancers and their role in inventing and popularizing it, a new generation of dancers like Lavor and Napoleon (Team 3D) got involved and all of this moved even more out into the open.
As “Napoleon” (Lynel Goodwin) may declare, “When the beat drops, my mission is to take over the world.” When he’s not in dance mode, he’s a school band teacher and non-profit director (Band Room Nation), popularizing marching/dancing bands at high schools across America.
Those profiled talk about getting mugged, harassed and discriminated against, and debate how “out there” they should be when, for instance, they participate in a small town Christmas parade.
Sims has gone for an action-oriented (lots of dancing) and yet intimate, in-their-own-words story which hamstrings his film somewhat. That myopic approach means there’s no outside voice connecting this trend or fad to the larger dance world. It’s just gay black dancers in Atlanta chronicling dance inside their bubble, with no Voice of Cultural Authority saying, “It spread from here to the horizons” or “This will be as forgotten as krumping in a few year’s time.”
Still, “When the Beat Drops” makes for a fascinating dissection of “how these things get their start,” even as the jury’s still out on their larger impact.
fascinating I did not know that
MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity, sexuality
Cast: Anthony Davis, Lynell Goodwin, Johnny Waters III
Credits:Directed by Jamal Sims. A World of Wonder/LOGO release.
Running time: 1:27
Somebody figured out that what fans of witch and wizard stories revel in is the cornucopia of critters, gadgets, spells and talismans.
Somebody figured out that witches, warlocks and wizards learn their trade somewhere — probably an enchanted, inaccessible school.
And that somebody discovered this long before J.K. Rowling came along.
Mary Stewart’s “The Littlest Broom,” the basis for the Japanime “Mary and the Witch’s Flower,” was published in 1971. And watching this new-to-Netflix (it had a short Fathom Events theatrical release) film is like taking a peek into the many influences Rowling synthesized into her Potter world.
It’s a lovely looking anime outing — not from Studio Ghibli — that, like Potter, hurls exposition and fresh “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” at us, from opening scene to last.
The set-up, a girl “mistaken” for a witch, a never-ending string of introductions to the elements of this world, a rescue quest, is straight up “Hero’s Journey” of Joseph Campbell, and absurdly unsurprising. But for any Potter fan longing for a little taste of that sort of thing, it probably fills the bill.
A girl escapes from a mansion, fleeing by broom. But it’s a harried flight, her bag of magic beans spill out and…we cut to years later.
Young Mary (voiced by Ruby Barnhill) is staying with her great aunt in a great house in the English countryside. She’s a tween, a bit of a klutz and lonely. If only school would start!
“Nothing good ever seems to happen in my life!”
But a chance trek into the woods following some cats lets her find bright blue flowers. They are “Fly by Night”flowers, the gardener tells her. They bloom every seven years and the locals also call them “The Witch’s Flower.”
Mary has plucked one. The cats freak out, and fog and lightning and whatnot dust up in the woods. Before you know it, Mary’s discovered a kid-sized broom and the darned thing has whisked her to Steampunk U in the clouds.
Actually, it’s Endor College. Being a redhead, naturally they take her for a witch, a first-year kid. Characters like the Scots-accented broom-handler/wolfman Flanagan (Ewen Bremner), the heavyweight Headmistress Madame Mumblechoo (Kate Winslet) and bigheaded mad scientist Doctor Dee (Jim Broadbent) are sure she’s “a prodigy,” and give her the grand tour — a feast of classes, magical activities and weird things that make magical life easier. They also give her the run of the place.
Only Mary isn’t…a prodigy. It’s just that talismans — the flowers, the broom, a book of spells — keeping dropping her in lap.
When Madame M. finds out, there’ll be heck to pay. That means she’s going after the only boy Mary’s met in Redmanor village, Peter (Louis Ashbourne Serkis, you know who’s kid?). And Mary’s fate is sealed.
“All trespassers will be TRANSFORMED!” That’s the big thing at Endor, Dr. Dee’s transformation experiments. Mary and/or Peter could end up as some caged critter of the Mad Doc’s design.
I love the color palette of anime films, the impressionistic backgrounds, with characters, structures, trees etc. in the foreground drawn in sharp, realistic images. The animation is still, after the advent of computer assistant, jerky — almost by design these days.
“Mary and the Witch’s Flower” isn’t particularly Japanese (a real appeal of these films) and isn’t built out of the most engrossing or exciting script. Studio Ghibli’s “Kiki’s Delivery Service” and “Spirited Away” covered similar ground in a much more interesting way.
Director Hirosama Yonebayashi is best known for animating Western kid lit (His “Secret World of Arrietty” is adapted from “The Borrowers”). He doesn’t have the Hiyao Miyazaki (“Spirited Away”) touch. The screenplays he directs need juicing — more jokes, better sight gags.
But the creatures, settings and gadgets are real eye candy and hold our attention. It’s more for kids than adult anime fans, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Who knows what child watching today will be the next J.K. Rowling, inspired by all the witchery/wizardry jiggery pokery this world introduces?
MPAA Rating: PG for some action and thematic elements
Cast: The voices of Ruby Barnhill, Kate Winslet Jim Broadbent and Ewen Bremner
Credits:Directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi, script by Riko Sakaguchi and David and Lynda Freedman (English), based on the Mary Stewart novel “The Littlest Broomstick. A Studio Ponoc/GKids/Universal release.
Running time: 1:43
When you’re charging members $9.95 a month to see a movie a day (average price, $10 matinee, $14 and up in the evenings), the word “unsustainable” comes up.
Whatever data mining value there is in seeing what you buy tickets for, it’s not worth dollars per day, scores of dollars a month to any buyer of Movie Pass’s customer info.
Thursday night, “Mission: Impossible — Fallout” fans using MoviePass were screwed.
Out of money. Emergency loan got them back up…but tick tick tick.
Congrats on those who bought in and took them for a ride. But this was never going to work. The jig is up.
The theater chains aren’t going to eat that shortfall. The studios aren’t either. Failing that, how was this ever going to get in the black?
At least they proved that if you make the tickets cheap enough, people of a movie-going age or of a movie-loving disposition (tech/app savvy older film fans) will see EVERYthing out there.
What I’m holding out for is a Regal Beer Pass — your favorite pour at any Regal location (my favorite chain) for a fixed amount. Per month. Stella gets expensive when you see 30 movies a month.
An epic about the Irish Potato Famine of 1847, and the British role in causing it.
A cast that features Oscar winner Jim Broadbent, LOTR and “Matrix” legend Hugo Weaving, Barry Keoghan and Stephen Rea and Sarah Greene in what has the feel for one of those troubling movies that reminds us it wasn’t so much a religious civil war that tore at Ireland for centuries, it was a class war.
“Black 47” has an Irish opening date (Sept. 18), but somebody will surely pick it up for US distribution — Sony Classics, Samuel Goldwyn, Bleecker Street — one of’em.
Movie Nation 