Movie Nation

One of film, literature and mythology’s greatest archetypes gets a spotless new wardrobe in “Lady Macbeth,” a British film about a Russian novel based on the femme fatale of Shakespeare’s Scottish Play.

Calculating, self-serving, willful and cunning, this throwback anti-heroine is a great one to make the case that there’s a little Lady Macbeth in every woman.

Florence Pugh of “The Falling” brings a poker-faced cruelty to Katherine, the title character.  But perhaps she wasn’t born that way. We meet her, pert and pretty, veiled and bathed in white, on her wedding day.

But the 19th century Scots family she’s married into is in the business of making monsters, we quickly see. Her husband, Alexander (Paul Hilton of “Wuthering Heights”) is rich, spoiled, cruel and controlling.

“You ought to keep to the house…”

“I like the fresh air.”

“Keep to the HOUSE.”

And as much as enjoys ordering her to remove her night gown — “Take it off!” is his pillow talk — he shows no interest in doing anything other than ordering her about. No consummation, in other words.

Then we meet his father (Christopher Fairbanks, The Broker in “Guardians of the Galaxy”). Boris is an entitled brutal gnome who treats everyone badly and cannot hide his contempt for his new daughter-in-law. He’s a mine owner, and when he sends his son to tidy up the latest disaster, he hisses for Katherine to “resume your duties with more rigor, madam,” when he returns.

A house without books, conversation or music and a life of corsets, cruelty and silence is only interrupted when Katherine barges in on the servants having a nude frolic. And the swarthy rake Sebastian (Cosmo Jarvis) catches her eye and cockily realizes he’s caught it.

Blame it on Victorian era literary tropes or Russian sexism — the Nikolai Leskov novel, which also inspired an opera,  was published in 1865 — but their “courtship” falls well within the bounds of sexual assault.

As was common in cross-class melodramas of that age, the assault dissolves into lusty love-making. The moral of such immoral tales? All she really needed was a good…servicing.

Katherine is all smiles, filling the big, empty mansion with kisses and gasps of sexual desire. Then the old man comes home, and her manipulations take on a murderous air.

Casting this “Lady” so young isn’t a great handicap, even though every actress isn’t as accomplished at playing a man-eater at 20 as say the Great Natalie Dormer was. There’s little Showtime-level heat to the sex scenes, and one does wonder what these two from different classes (and races) would talk about after the mating.

The father and son possess Dickensian cruelty, but the script, performances and William Oldroyd’s direction make plain that this isn’t about just desserts, it’s about obstacles that Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth might have solved, but with a lot more spilled blood.

As leads, Pugh and Jarvis are more competent than compelling. Oldroyd springs murders on us by surprise, save for one instance, which will haunt you long after the credits have rolled.

But the climax is deflating and lets down a fabulously grey woods, heather and moors production design and the wicked promise contained in the story’s premise — that there’s a little Lady Macbeth in every woman, at least as far as men are concerned.

MPAA Rating: R for some disturbing violence, strong sexuality/nudity, and language

Cast: Florence Pugh, Cosmo Jarvis, Paul Hilton, Naomi Ackie, Christopher Fairbank

Credits:Directed by William Oldroyd, script by Alice Birch, based on the Nikolai Leskov novel “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.” A Roadside Attractions release.

Running time: 1:29

A master filmmaker with all the state-of-the-art resources due a man who produces sci-fi and comic book blockbusters turns his attention to history with breathless, stunning results in “Dunkirk.”

Christopher Nolan transforms the legend of Britain’s “miracle” retreat from the Fall of France into a harrowing, immersive blast of Greatest British Generation fear and dread, a thrilling, pulse-pounding experience that is the best film of the summer and an early Best Picture favorite.

It’s ancient history to generations now, people who grew up with stars like Tom Hardy (as an RAF pilot) and pop singer-turned-actor Harry Styles (as a soldier trapped on the beach). But Nolan’s masterpiece brings real history — in brisk, visceral and fictionally-augmented strokes — to relatable, resonant life.

A fortuitous bit of timing puts this movie into theaters as Western values and civilization are under assault, from without and within, like no time in recent memory. That adds weight and relevance to what could have just been another sentimental if gripping and entertaining bit of “Their Finest Hour” nostalgia.

Seventy-seven springs ago the Nazi Blitzkrieg rolled through Dutch, Belgian, British and French forces and broke the back of Western Europe. The British Expeditionary Force, the only land army that could resist an invasion of the United Kingdom, was trapped, along with other Allied forces, in a tiny pocket along the French/Belgian coast. With little air cover to keep German bombers at bay and U-Boats and E-Boats from sinking their ships, no port big enough to handle a mass evacuation, all was lost.

Staring out across the English Channel, the Royal Navy commander in charge of the departure (Kenneth Branagh) mutters, “You can practically SEE it.”

“It” is “home.”

But there is only one “mole” (a breakwater-pier for loading deep-draft ships). The Germans are bombing and strafing it and shelling it. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers are exposed on a vast open beach. Waiting. What to do?

In pure “Keep calm and carry on” desperation, the Navy summons “the Small Boat Corps,” a fleet of “little ships,” requisitioned pleasure boats, fishing trawlers, motor-sailors and the like, that could come all the way up the shallow waters off the beach and fetch that army.

Nolan tells this emotional, nerve-racking story in its three theaters of action. “The Mole” recounts the desperate efforts, sometimes devolving into “every man for himself,” to stay alive on the beach and get a boat for home.

We see that largely through the eyes of three foot-soldiers (Fionn Whitehead, Aneurin Barnard and Harry Styles), with the story starting one week before this anti-D-Day reaches its climax.

“The Sea” follows the owner (Mark Rylance), his son (Tom Glynn-Carney) and his son’s pal George (Barry Keoghan) as they dodge Royal Navy supervision and sail their 43 foot yacht Moonstone “into war” on the last day of the evacuation.

And “The Air” details the limited Royal Air Force contingent spared for what was thought to be an exercise in mortal futility. Tom Hardy, Jack Lowden and a radio voice from 1968’s “The Battle of Britain” (and Nolan’s “Dark Knight” movies) are RAF pilots in the last, most desperate hour.

It’s a movie told without names, and with long stretches of no dialogue and near-silence — shell-shocked soldiers too nervous to speak, wind and the sea bashing the beach and breakwater into a dense, foamy meringue —  interrupted by the deafening scream of Stuka dive bombers (which had sirens designed to terrify those on the ground) and ear-splitting explosions.

Nolan parks the camera at sea level, letting the audience feel the unspoken sailor’s prayer that must have dominated the thoughts of skippers taking their little boats into harm’s way — “Lord, thy sea is so great and my boat is so small.” Moonstone and other tiny craft are dwarfed by departing warships, giving one and all a sense of the enormity of the undertaking and the doom they must surely face.

Cillian Murphy makes the strongest acting impression, a rattled survivor of a sinking plucked from the sea by the Moonstone. His maniacal determination to “not go BACK there” inspires the film’s most poetic line, summing up duty and facing down impossible tasks, delivered by Moonstone’s skipper (Rylance).

“There’s no running away from this, son.”

The air-to-air combat is some of the most realistic ever re-created. It’s no video game when the other pilot is hellbent on killing you, or avoiding you killing him. Every distraction or lapse in concentration could kill you, every calculation — about fuel, the odds, your “real” mission — means life-or-death.

Ships sink and we’re trapped below with panicked soldiers and sailors. Vast crowds of demoralized men helplessly duck, in perfect sync, at the strafing/bombing runs of the Germans.

Nolan’s camera has us trapped with them — on ships and planes that roll over and drop beneath the waves, in exposed positions where Germans can shoot everything and everyone to pieces, on a little wooden boat that has no business puttering into combat.

The characters are war movie archetypes, and the most archetypal scenes are the interplay between Branagh’s naval officer and an army Colonel (James D’Arcy), expositional conversations about the stakes for Western Civilization, the hopeless best-case scenario, “home” and the desperation of their situation. Archetypes or not, Branagh, D’Arcy and Rylance are understated and give the film its gravitas.

Younger actors, covered in oil and fear, generate the clock-ticking-down panic. Heroism here is limited. This is about simple survival.

The fact that Nolan packs all this immersive action and national myth into a 106 minute movie should put every assembly-line technician/director conjuring up bloated two and a half hour wallows in digital spider men, apes, robots and raccoons to shame.

Great directors make great movies. And with “Dunkirk,” Christopher Nolan has made his second masterpiece, thrilling history retold, remembered and relished.

(BOX OFFICE: “Dunkirk” floats away with the weekend.)

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for intense war experience and some language

Cast: Tom Hardy, Mark Rylance, Kenneth Branagh, James D’Arcy, Fionn Whitehead, Harry Styles

Credits Written and Directed by Christopher Nolan. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 1:46

“The Gracefield Incident” is an attempted Canadian “Blair Witch Project,” and a veritable minefield of spoiler alerts waiting to happen.

It’s “Cabin in the Woods” meets “Signs,” a Bigfoot movie as imagined by M. Night Shyamalan.

And it’s, well, not terrible. The monster and lights in the sky effects are first rate. The shooting — little pools of self-sourced light in the dark gloom of a Quebec forest — and editing (characters yanked out of frame, willy nilly) is fundamentally sharp.

It’s just so silly, so very derivative, so predictable — despite over-explained moments, laughably illogical means of getting overhead GoPro camera shots of the setting.

But that’s what happens when you sentence yourself to first-person/shaky camera narratives. You waste screen time explaining the various angles and point-of-view shots you’re getting, when of course you’re going to have to break your own rules, at some point.

The video game editor Matt (writer-director Mathieu Ratthe) is so obsessed with cameras that he’s videotaping his pregnant wife (Kimberly Laferriere), while driving, with a helmet cam. And crashes and almost kills them in the opening scene.

They lose the baby, and amazingly, she doesn’t ditch him. Even though he’s replacing the eye he lost in the accident with a miniature eyeball cam-corder.

After recovery, they join two other couples for a weekend getaway at a chateau on the woods — hot tubs, drinking, French-Canadian accented banter. Oh, and by the way, the boss who loaned them the cabin is a Bigfoot cultist.

Events then conspire to make this motley, tipsy crew believers.

Dialogue writing is a dying art in North America’s film schools. Apparently. The inanities blurted through here include “Do you have to film EVERYthing?” to “Make sure you record EVERYthing because NO ONE will ever believe it!” to “OK, night vision’s on, now.”

When somebody says, “I’m gonna go check it out, you guys stay here,” bad things start to happen.

There is another camera among the sextet, and of course there are cell phones. But mysterious things make cell service die and bumps and claws in the dark of night make characters disappear. Attributing all the various shots to those two cameras — and CCTV in the chalet — still doesn’t add up.

The over-familiar is displaced by the “Seriously?” silly entire third act. This comes after a character has reached into a newly-formed meteorite crater to pluck a glowing rock — with his bare hands and empty head.

The acting isn’t terrible, though the script at times makes the players seem that way.

More work should be tossed at the effects team. But if writer-director-editor star Mathieu Ratthe is sentenced to another decade before being allowed to film another feature (“Lovefield,” 2008), don’t expect me to look surprised. Of all the hats he wears in this production, editor is the one that seems to give him a future.

MPAA Rating:PG-13 for sci-fi action/terror, accident images, language and some suggestive material

Cast:Mathieu Ratthe, Kimberly Laferriere, Alex C. Nachi, Juliette Gosselin, Victor Andres Turgeon-Trelles, Laurence Dauphinais
Credits:Written and directed by Mathieu Ratthe. A Momentum/eOne release.

Running time: 1:25

Martin Landau didn’t really get this “actor’s ACTOR” reputation until “Ed Wood.” And everybody working in criticism and film journalism back in ’94 had a ringside seat to the makeover.

He’d worked with Hitchcock, done a few TV series and a LOT of guest shots on the tube. Coppola brought him back for a career curtain call with “Tucker: The Man and his Dream.” And Woody Allen put an exclamation point on that with “Crimes & Misdemeanors.” Out of the shadows and into the limelight, an in-demand character actor with a couple of Oscar nominations to back that up.

But when Tim Burton called on him to deliver a daft and supremely touching turn as the typecast, drug-addled and dying Bela Lugosi working for the worst director in the history of movies, Landau was at the podium — and stood there for months.

He called it “my love letter to Bela,” and an encomium for the actor’s craft. Not everybody gets to labor in the spotlight. They also serve who get deep into character, support the lead and raise everybody else’s game around them. Landau, graciously and articulately, called attention to that.

He did versions of this “an actor’s craft” talk to everybody who interviewed him about “Ed Wood.” It got more polished along the way. And he was all set to repeat this moving, noble speech when he got the Oscar. Then, the band played him off.

He got overwhelmed, blurted out a long list of thank-yous, many of them borderline pointless. And blew his moment. It didn’t happen often, but Martin Landau, who died overnight at 89, after spending his last decades working — a LOT — thanks to that Oscar, got off script and blew his big take.

He had a half-century of stories, anecdotes, to fill a dozen “Inside the Actor’s Studio.” Hell, he’d have been a pretty good host. He’s in the character actor’s Hall of Fame — or would be if there was one — right up there with Walken and Wilford Brimley, Bob Balaban and Woody Strode, Austin Pendleton and Elizabeth Perkins and others.

He will be missed. He did the homework, found ways to add value to a character and enriched most every film he showed up in, even the B-movies and indie fare he spent much of the last decade doing.

And he’s a reminder, if you get that Oscar you’ve worked your whole career for, don’t waste your acceptance speech prattling off random names — I remember a radio host being one of them. Be ready. Give them something poetic. “Thank” those who really got you there in person, or with hand-written notes.

George A. Romero, the “Night of the Living Dead” inventor of the modern zombie movie, godfather of “The Living Dead” (which he wasn’t crazy about–“a soap opera” with zombies, bingo), loved those filmmaker photographer’s vests he was often photographed in, and didn’t mind his place in film history. To his credit, he never ever ran away from it.

He made a no-budget black and white chiller in Pittsburgh, and more than few movies of that genre as follow-ups. None were remotely as effective as that ground-breaking/genre-inventing classic.

A charming man, generous with his time, I got to interview him on a few occasions and remember wandering through a tour of Winter Park, Florida’s for-profit/pricey/well-equipped Full Sail University with him a few years back. He kept rubbing his chin and marveling at “the movies you could make with all this stuff.”

He lost his battle with lung cancer this weekend. George A. Romero was 77, and if he doesn’t turn up in homages in every zombie movie or TV show over the next year, those making their Romero knock-offs should be ashamed. Dead, but his legend lives on. RIP.

Reese Witherspoon, Chris Pine, Oprah, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Mindy Kaling, Michael Pena, Zach Galifianakis — all in service of a big screen rendition of Madeleine L’Engle’s novel. “Wrinkle” opens next May.

Very Harry Potter-ish from its look, in the way it has many many characters to service and a kind of Chris Pine gives a TED Talk opening.

“Lord, thy sea is so great and my boat is so small.”

It’s great to see Gerard Butler take a break from mind-numbing action franchises, lame sword and sorcery flicks and decades of failed comedies and try something new.

But it must be the luck of the Scots that when he does change speeds, it’s in a movie with a title so banal Nicolas Cage already owns it and a melodrama so bland it could be a Lifetime Original Movie.

In “A Family Man,” he plays an unscrupulous workaholic who barely notices when his oldest son gets sick, and is rarely there when the kid is hospitalized for the cancer battle of his life.

Will Dane Jensen, a St. Louis native (from the Scottish Quarter?) see the error of his ways, not lying, cheating, hustling and absentee-parenting in time to “be there” for his kid?

One of the failings of “Family Man” is that this is rarely in doubt, and another is that the script clumsily wants him to have his cake, and time with his sickly son, too.

It’s a “Boiler Room/Wolf of Wall Street” peek inside the high-pressure world of corporate head-hunting. The stakes seem penny-ante when compared to stock hustling, real-estate hustling, etc. Who knew?

Dane is a fast-talking creep who keeps “a desk drawer full of ‘burner phones'” so that he can sweet talk desperate job seekers on his office line, and sabotage their chances if they find a job on their own (no fees) using another number, another name and a mouthful of slander and innuendo to scare off potential employers.

His ruthless boss (Willem Dafoe) expects no less. And if he doesn’t scramble, his slightly-less unethical colleague (Allison Brie) will get the jump on him.

So yeah, the three kids and wife (Gretchen Mol) and Highland Park home life take a back seat.

Screenwriter Bill Dubuque — forget that name — illustrates Dane’s sense of responsibility and victimhood by scribbling the clunkiest, clumsiest, most tin-eared “sex” scene in the history of the big screen. If that online screenwriting course offers a refund, pal, GRAB it.

Alfred Molina is one of the aging, desperate mid-level managers/engineers and execs trying not to beg Dane to do his job and cut them a break.

Dane has no real time for him, and only notices that his son (Max Jenkins) has grown a pot belly, and can’t keep up when he demands they go job it off. The bruises? Only his wife spies those.

It’s a life-threatening disease, and Dane learns the hard way that he can’t bully the doctor (Anupam Kher) into a quick fix.

To be fair, there are some touching moments as Dad tries to connect with his loves-to-draw-buildings kid by wandering the great old edifices of Chicago, in between chemos. Young Jenkins has the soulful qualities the movies give sick children.

But nothing in this slog of a picture is developed enough to make “Think I’ll do this movie with Gerard Butler” pay off for the supporting cast. Dane’s occasional tantrum eats up screen time that could have made the wife and boss more than caricatures, the “good man” Dane is letting down (Molina, with Mimi Kuzyk playing the wife) shown at the end of his tether, or the cutthroat nature of the office.

I seriously question whether that business has this sort of pressure, or rewards, attached to it.

Still, Butler took a shot, gave it a try and unless it’s his fault that all his scenes stay in and unbalance the picture while everybody else’s got cut — or he wrote that ridiculous “negotiated” oral sex scene — deserves credit for not picking up a gun, a sword or Jennifer Aniston one more time.

MPAA Rating: R for language and some sexual content

Cast: Gerard Butler, Gretchen Mol, Willem Dafoe, Max Jenkins, Alfred Molina, Alison Brie, Anupam Kher

Credits:Directed by Mark Williams, script by Bill Dubuque. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:50

A big Thursday night and bigger Friday puts the last “Planet of the Apes” movie of this trilogy, “War for the Planet of the Apes,” into “King Kong” (“Skull Island”) territory — a $55 million opening weekend, based on the $24,000,000 it will have earned before the first showing Sat. AM.

That’s dead-center in the expectations for the dull, dark, glum and over-praised finale to this ambitious and surprising sci-fi franchise.

But there was always going to be a loser in this weekend’s “Spider-Man: Homecoming” second weekend vs. “Apes” showdown. And it’s Marvel’s webslinger.

Friday’s numbers for “Homecoming” point to a $40 (ouch) to $46 second weekend, a 61% to 65% plummet. Right in the kisser. A big drop is to be expected when a movie opens at over $117 million. But that’s steep enough to suggest little repeat business, middling word of mouth and an exit-by-August. If that holds up, next weekend could be under $20.

“Despicable Me 3” for instance, despite being merely a middling sequel in a summer riddled with them, is holding audience (in the absence of anything other than Pixar’s dreadful “Cars 3” to steal kiddie/family audience share. It is in the middle of adding another $21 million this weekend.

“The Big Sick,” a much-praised dramedy built around the life and comedy of Kamail Nanjiani, is doing quite well in its first weekend of wide release — over $8.5 million.

Conversely, the not-scary/kinda-funny “Wish Upon” horror film is flopping and will be lucky to pull in $4 million for Broad Green.

In “Dunkirk,” perhaps this year’s earliest Best Picture Contender, a flight of RAF pilots make a crossing to keep the Stukas from strafing “our lads” on the beaches, awaiting their fate. Tom Hardy is in a Spitfire, and Jack Lowden. And the voice, over the radio from the third plane, is the unmistakable Cockney crackle of Michael Caine, sometime Alfred the Butler and decades removed from his RAF days in 1968’s “Battle of Britain. We never see him, or his classic British roadster (Riley, Vincent, Jaguar, Morgan? Alvis!). But he’s there, thanks to Christopher Nolan. You can feel it. That’s texture. That’s a connection to “There’ll always be an England.” #80somethingace.