Hyped at Sundance, probably unreleasable (theatrically), weird and gory, at the far end of exotic and odd, “Mandy” folds a Nicolas Cage gonzo turn into a Panos Cosmotos fever dream.
“Mandy” also stars the Great Bill Duke, and Linus Roache and will get minimal theatrical release and VOD treatment on Sept. 18.
There’s a moment, early in the tense French divorce drama “Custody,” when you feel sorry for Antoine, the husband.
He’s sitting in mediation, a lawyer at his side, making his case, a judge hearing it, and his ex-wife and her attorney arguing against joint custody.
Everybody but Antoine is a woman. Is the deck stacked against this bearish father of two? Simple casting (the burly Denis Ménocet plays him) underscores our expectations. We hear a statement from his 11 year-old son. Julien has his mother, his older sister, his grandparents and “lots of friends” where he’s moved.
He doesn’t want to see “that man,” uses words like “harass,” when he talks about how Antoine treats the wife he’s separated from, and finishes with “He wants to hurt her.”
It sounds coached, and the judge says so. Perhaps that guides her hand as she makes a simple ruling ensuring the father’s rights. Perhaps she should have known better.
Perhaps the French should learn that well-worn American phrase, “restraining order.”
“Custody” is a thriller built upon on-the-nose casting. There is little in Antoine that suggests how shocked and enraged his lawyer seems over “the violent, threatening boor portrayed here (in French, with English subtitles).” We believe it. And not just because of his appearance.
We can see it in wife Miriam’s eyes, with actress Léa Drucker conveying, at every turn, the mortal fear of saying or doing something to set him. We see it in son Julien (Thomas Gloria), his eyes-averting terror and resignation getting in the car with Antoine after the joint custody begins.
We sense it even in the older daughter (Mathilde Auneveux), an eighteen year old music student who desperately craves and devours her boyfriend, anything with the promise of an escape from this hell. The fact that her father disapproves and has threatened them adds mortal danger to their affair. The passion may be there, but Antoine has destroyed the joy in their first love and left one and all broken, quivering in fear at his manipulations, stalking and bullying.
His own parents seem to value the grandchildren more than him and have no hope of correcting the volcanic temper we’ve seen flashes of from them.
Writer-director Xavier Legrand expands on is Oscar-nominated short “Just Before Losing Everything” (“Avant que de tout perdre”) for a quiet, grimly realistic thriller that begins with a lot of talk and civilized debate and descends into living with fear pointing to a moment when everybody’s nightmare comes true.
Ménochet manages the script’s odd passive aggressive moment chillingly. But he was cast for brute menace, and he conveys that in every scene. We fear for Miriam and especially Julien, who might just be any kid trapped in the middle of his parents’ divorce, save for Antoine’s blunt threats.
She’s secretly found a new apartment? She might be seeing somebody else? She’s letting their daughter continue to see her boyfriend? She won’t let him have her phone number? She lies every time he calls, about Julien’s “stomach ache” — any excuse the two of them can think up.
“She’ll pay for that, big time.”
Ménochet’s interrogations of his son don’t go as far as water-boarding, but they are torture to sit through. His silent brooding, driving and badgering the kid for an address, a phone number, build the movie’s menace, weekend by weekend.
If there’s an overbearing flaw to “Custody,” it is its lack of surprises. We sense what this guy is capable of. We’ve heard it described. The only question is when and where.
To Legrand’s credit, he conjures suspense out of the horrific reality of it all. Even if we think we’ve gotten ahead of this tale, muttering “foreshadowing” or “here it is” at every possible point our fears could be realized, Legrand teases and taunts us, right down to the ironic choice of song daughter Josephine sings at her birthday party.
We remember Tina Turner’s personal history. Does Josephine?
(See the trailer for the short film “Avant que de tout perdre” here)
MPAA Rating: unrated, adult themes
Cast: Léa Drucker, Denis Ménochet, Thomas Gloria
Credits: Written and directed by Xavier Legrand. A Kino Lorber release.
Running time: 1:33
C
A record breaking summer at the box office slacks off a tad this weekend with “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom” plunging over 60%, even though it might stake claim to another $59 million, Deadline.com claims. The Friday to Friday drop was 70%, so we’ll see.
“Incredibles 2” may hit $45+, with Saturday being the big day for families with kids to show up.
“Sicario: Day of the Soldado” did a good Thursday and a very healthy Friday to take the lead among new releases this weekend. Maybe as much as $19 million in the coffers by midnight Sunday.
I was sure “Uncle Drew” would hit that family friendly sweetspot and at least manage Madea money, with the African American audience if no one else. Word or mouth might help it have a big Sat., but the crossover audience isn’t turning out (no white actors, save for Nick Kroll, the villain), so $16 is where things stand at the moment.
“Leave No Trace” is riding very good reviews to a strong but not remotely dazzling $18K per screen average in a couple of cities. Botched marketing, as usual, from that studio. Another good movie nobody will see.
A wide release of a Bollywood title, “Sanju,” has shoved “Won’t You Be My Neighbor” out of the top ten.
This trailer is as self-explanatory as any in theaters these days. “The King of Thieves” opens Sept. 18…in the U.K.
A London rom-com about a sad woman (Rose Byrne) in a dull relationship (With Chris O’Dowd? How is this possible?) who then meets, via a flaming review of her sig other’s FAVORITE indie rock icon (Ethan Hawke) said icon and falls for him.
Looks cute, and as rom-coms that work are as rare as moon rocks, we will keep an eye out for “Juliet Naked” Aug 18.
Julia is just a sex kitten pickpocket, working the lurid clubs and working “it” for a few shekels a night, before heading home to her industrial dump of a loft.
Then she’s abducted, trussed up like Hannibal Lecter at his scariest, another blonde bound for torture porn town, right?
Operating theater, classical quartets playing in the background, brain blasts that force memories out. In “Tau,” beware the creep with the cattle prod.
This minimalist, digital-effects-packed thriller hurles us and Julia into a “Saw” knockoff, where “Jigsaw” is a homicidal robotic house filled with drones, a security robot and oter things that won’t just keep her there, they — “he,” the computer system named “Tau” with the voice of newly-crowned Oscar winner Gary Oldman, or the combat robot Ares — could tear her apart.
Julia’s not the only one gagged and bound here, in this futuretech prison with expressionist lighting, electrified cages, some sort of implant thing on her neck. Who took her, for what reason and what purpose?
She’s tough and resourceful, and quick to come up with a plan. Improvise. Pilfer. And my personal favorite, set something — EVERYthing — on fire.
“Stay away from the gas line or we’ll all go up in flames.”
The thing about “mysterious” abduction tales is that they always work best when you cling to the mystery. Remember “Old Boy,” “10 Cloverfield Lane,” “Split,” the endless “Saw” films, track down Noomi Rapace in “Rupture.” Not knowing who or what has taken the heroine (usually) connects us with their plight, narrows our focus to what they can see, what their panicked priorities are.
Who gives a damn about the kidnapper? Even Jigsaw? A little information goes a long way, even in films in which the ticking clock of this or that chance of escape and thus show us James McAvoy and his alternate personalities chatting with a shrink as his prisoners scramble to get out.
But “Tau” shows us its bespectacled billionaire (Ed Skrein) holding people in his lair, far too early. And even gives us a pedestrian “The rich will kill us if it pays dividends for them” motivation.”
“Tests,” you say? Ones that don’t involve chainsaws?
“Tau” transforms into an over-designed cat-and-mouse game, war of wills. We’ve seen people die, the villain is supposedly super-smart. How can she leverage anything into a chance at escape, a negotiated release, or whatever? Will developing empathy with Tau save her?
Skrein has the right, emotionally-lacking chiseled villain look and air, but inspires zero fear.
Monroe, gripping in the higher-stakes, panic-stricken and sexually charged “It Follows,” is a bland heroine, physically engaged with the role but rarely more than a pretty presence at its center. She seems tougher in the beginning, and more emotionally disengaged from the sci-fi/AI cliches that pass for conservations with the machine.
“What is…a person? Am I…a person? I have more questions.”
Jokes — if you can call them that — disintegrate into the ether.
Tau, visualized s a gigantic, all-sensing/all-seeing talking triangle, gives daily updates for “Subject 3” and her tasks and the “project deadline,” and don’t add urgency.
Still, the production design — digital backdrops augmenting vast living rooms and a library, even — is impressive. It’s rare that production design ever rescues a movie from a script that’s gone down the rabbit hole of ridiculous that “Tau” does.
MPAA Rating: R for some violence and language
Cast: Maika Monroe, Ed Skrein, Gary Oldman
Credits:Directed by Federico D’Alessandro , script by Noga Landau. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:37
Mob mugs are the same the world over. Overdressing, standing around, eating Italian food, bickering about it.
Even in Israel.
“Maktub” is a dark Israeli comedy about sadistic thugs with style, “Master Chef” fans, the foodies Steve and Chuma. They remember their Torah, they expect respect and prompt return on their “investments,” and they know what they like at their favorite Italian eatery. It is “their” restaurant, no matter what the new owner/chef says.
It takes a savage beating to get that point across. Which is where they draw the line.
“Kill him? What are we, animals?”
But “collecting” has suave Steve (Hanan Savyon) feeling unfulfilled. Chuma (Guy Amir), the muscle, is troubled. A fish has fallen from the sky, “a bad sign.”
Every stop it seems, entails a meal. And criticism of that meal. You do NOT want these two at your table. They’ve seen “Goodfellas.” They know ow to make that pause after telling a joke so chilling you might wet your pants.
But surviving a bomb blast as Chuma hellbent on going to the Wailing Wall to give thanks, and has them both feeling they’ve been spared for a reason. The boss (Abraham Celektar) may not understand. Because, you know, that money they were collecting? Maybe it blew up in the blast, maybe they kept it.
And maybe those prayers on signed notes tucked in the cracks of the Wailing Wall can be answered. By two mobsters.
“Don’t freak out. We’re here to help.”
Guy needs a raise to save his marriage? Make his boss an offer he can’t refuse, in Hebrew with English subtitles.
The sexes are separated at The Wailing Wall, so dressing in drag is de rigueur if you’re stealing women’s prayers.
“What? Even the pretty ones have troubles, too!”
Can’t afford a Bar Mitvah for your bullied musician son? Go to The Wailing Wall, leave a prayer. Fuggedaboutit. In Hebrew, with English subtitles.
So what we’re dealing with here is “Letters to God,” with punching and threatening and dangling people out high rise windows. “Letters to God” might’ve worked with this twist.
“Maktub” — the title means “letter” in Uzbek — has complications, characters considering fleeing to America, mob entanglements and romantic ones. It starts out plenty tough, goes utterly soft and then rediscovers the bloody for the third act.
And it would be too much for these devout Jews to do something about the militarized Apartheid state they live in where terrorist bombings are a protest of last resort. I suppose.
But I laughed more than once, and grinned at a couple of adorable surprise twists. Definitely Netflixable.
MPAA Rating: TV-MA
Cast: Guy Amir, Hanan Savyon, Gal Amatai
Credits:Directed by Odez Raz, script by Hanan Savyon, Guy Amir. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:45
“Sicario” was a movie that needed no sequel. It set up a quest, twisted and turned — with shocking moments of violence — until that quest was at an end. Like too few action pictures these days, it gave us closure, a sense of completion. It dared to leave us wanting more. Lionsgate had a modest hit on its hands, and more importantly, a good movie, one that’s as rewatchable as it was surprising.
Then Sony got its hands on the property, more money was involved and here we have a sequel. As I said in my review, I loved “Sicario,” “Sicario: Day of the Soldado” I liked — much more conventional. And then the third act took even that away. Early reviews entailed a lot of underwear changing over “Soldado.” Then the better critics weighed in and poof, there goes the “masterpiece” silliness, right out the door.
Kudos to “Uncle Drew” director Charles Stone III. Check out the performances he got out of Kyrie Irving, Shaq, Reggie Miller and especially Chris Webber in this comedy. Pepsi did the proof of concept, that NBA stars of today, done up in old age makeup, old school track suits, surprising and skunking “young bloods” on the playground, is funny. Stone’s film took that to a (slightly) new level. He needed a better non-baller lead, and the script, despite the delights of seeing these “old men” dazzling on the court and surprise on the dance floor, has too few funny ideas to pay off. Mixed reviews for this one, too.
Neither of these two films should challenge “Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom,” which will plummet on its second weekend, or “Incredibles 2,” which is sure to hold audience another weekend. Box Office Mojo figures these two newcomers, both being established “brands,” will manage $17 or so. That’s selling the family-friendly farce “Drew” short. I’d be surprised if it didn’t clear $25.
“Leave No Trace,” the wilderness, off-the-grid vet (Ben Foster) raising his daughter in the woods drama, has earned great reviews but is going into limited release.
“Dark River,” a superb British “battle my personal demons when I return to the family farm” drama starring the formidable Ruth Wilson, is terrific and worth checking out if it’s showing in your neck of the woods.
“World” should manage another $50, 60 million this weekend, and anything below $50 will suggest buyer’s remorse and audience finally coming to its senses. If “Incredibles 2” does close to $50, it just might be close.
“Won’t You Be My Neighbor” should stick around the top ten one more week. Go see it while you have the chance.
I loved the borderlands hitman thriller “Sicario,” and I’m not alone. It has this meandering but compact narrative, brutal violence meted out by brutish men, the queasy unease it gives you about government sanctioned mayhem and a devilish simplicity underlying all that surface complexity, the thing that drives it.
Revenge.
But while there is still intense pleasure in watching the understated machismo of Benicio Del Toro in the title role (“hitman”) and Josh Brolin as Matt Graver, the off-the-books black-ops guy the government calls in when they need things to “get dirty,” while that tag-team quest narrative is somewhat reprised, I never got got beyond “like” with “Sicario 2,” “Day of the Soldado (Soldier).” And when the thriller’s third act collapses in on itself , breaking its own unsentimental rules and reminding us that this is the studio that reboots “Spider-Man” every three years, whether we ask for it or not, “like” becomes a stretch.
The setting is our still-porous border, where suicide bombers are now sneaking in via Mexico via the cartels that used to make their money bringing us the drugs America craves.
The Islamic terrorists are that “Reicshstag fire” or 9/11 redux so many of us fear — an excuse for a civil liberties/rule of law-flouting government to “get tough” and “go dirty.” That’s what the Secretary of Defense (Matthew Modine) wants out of Garver, a no-holds-barred assault on the cartels that control human smuggling. Start a war between them, don’t leave our fingerprints on it.
The play? Kill a second-in-command here, kidnap a daughter of a kingpin there. That’s how our “Sicario,” Alejandro (Del Toro) comes back on the payroll
That daughter-kidnapping, of an insolent 14 year-old savage, the world-wise Isabel (Isabel Moner), is what goes wrong. That puts our Sicario in the position of protecting her from all comers.
Meanwhile, on the American side of the border, Miguel (Elijah Rodriguez) is a teenager going wrong in McAllen, Texas. He’s signed on with a cousin to become a mule, smuggling Latinos over the Rio Grande. The money, the machismo, the guns and tattoos are too much to pass up.
As in the original “Sicario,” these two threads will intertwine, and not in ways that follow Hollywood conventions.
Two great things from the first film are missing here; the sense of completion and closure, and the pathos brought by having Emily Blunt as a straight-arrow government agent caught up in illegal ops that she, and we, know are sure to lead to blowback. Nobody here is morally conflicted. Nobody here has to have the shenanigans going on hidden from her or explained to her.
Everybody South of the Border is hopelessly corrupt, and the film offers just a glimpse of that sort of stink settling here in the country where we’re supposed to be about “rights” and “rules,” but where the looting and law-flouting is just now getting serious.
Only when things go sideways does the undersecretary in charge (Catherine Keener, great as always) show any sign of second-guessing, and that’s not over morals. She figures this could be cause (another cause) for “impeachment.”
The action beats are perfunctory and director Stefano Sollima never met a drone shot of a truck convoy, a wall of satellite videos from all angles or night vision shots from a chopper, that he didn’t like. SOMEbody read a little too much Tom Clancy, translated into Italian, for his own good. “Surgical strikes” only exist in action movies and Clancy novels.
All I’ll say about the film’s infamous third act is that the picture goes from engrossing to conventional in a flash, and then doubles down on the sort of bottom line “franchise” value that too many studios succumb to these days.
That’s the Marvel Universe we live in at the movies. No story is ever “over,” nothing ever feels complete and satisfying. Everything, even the movies you don’t have to stay all the way through the credits for, is scared to death to leave the viewer wanting “more.”
MPAA Rating: R for strong violence, bloody images, and language
Cast: Benicio Del Toro, Josh Brolin, Catherine Keener, Isabela Moner, Elijah Rodriguez
Credits:Directed by Stefano Sollima, script by Taylor Sheridan. A Sony/Columbia release.
Running time: 2:02
Remember “Goosebumps?” Yeah, Jack Black’s all about the kid-friendly horror genre. Got to start them off somewhere.
This time, he’s paired up with Oscar winner Cate Blanchett for a film based on Eric Kripke’s novel, “The House With a Clock in its Walls.”
He’s weird Uncle Jonathan, Cate B. is his testy/scary/saucy neighbor. Yeah, witches and warlocks.’
Kyle MacLachlan is He Who Must Be Resisted.
It’s like Eli Roth made a period piece Harry Potter picture. Because Eli Roth is the director.
You may recall Kripke created TV’s “Supernatural.”
All good clean (pumpkin in the face) fun, right?
This one opens Sept. 21.
Movie Nation 