Movie Nation

Rosamund Pike is finding the best way for a beautiful actress to get Hollywood to take her seriously is to be bad — violently so.

Daniel Bruhl was born to play a Baader Meinhoff Gang-era German “revolutionary” and terrorist.

And Eddie Marsan? Finally, Britain’s greatest character actor gets to play a badass. The Israeli mastermind behind the daring raid to free hostages from a hijacked airliner in Idi Amin’s terrorist-friendly Uganda.

“Narcos” director Jose Padilha ensures that this will lack nothing for grit, quasi-sympathetic portraits of the ruthless (on all sides) and pulse-pounding action.

“7 Days in Entebbe” comes our way in March.

It takes a while to settle into the the rhythms, the language and languid, lurid Old South melodramatics of “Mudbound,” a Sundance darling turned Netflix “event.”

For the better part of an hour, it’s fair to scratch your head over the murky visuals, mumbled Mississippi Delta accents and, as the title promises, “mud.”

An introductory burial scene in a torrential downpour plays and is treated as a flashback, but is in fact the fictive present. It’s the rest of the story, most of it anyways, that is flashback.

Relationships between the parallel stories, two families literally bound by mud, are straight-acketed into the soap operatic tropes of the “racial tensions drama” of this film of the Hillary Jordan novel. It’s handsome enough, but no more cinematic than director Dee Rees’ very fine blues singer TV biopic “Bessie.”

But Rees makes us smell the mud, the blood, the sweat and poverty in this depiction of the Depression Era South. She lets the racism announce itself, rarely underlining the implied violence that forces the intolerable upon the powerless.

And a very fine cast, many of its members gifted not just with a performance but with Jordan’s poetic narration of memory, bring this world of a not-at-all-distant past to life

Foremost among those narrators is Laura (Carey Mulligan), a “31 year-old virgin” when she meets her future husband (Jason Clarke). “My world was small, and he was my rescue from a life on the margins,” she says.

Henry is a  man of ambition and business, forced back into cotton farming, but who carries himself with the confidence of that over-used phrase “white privilege.” Whatever he was in Memphis, where they met, he isn’t that when he takes wife and children back to a  200 acre farm in the rural county where he grew up. But he doesn’t hesitate to instinctively lord it over the poor tenants, the Jackson family. They’re “colored,” after all.

Florence (singer/actress Mary J. Blige) and Hap (Rob Morgan) struggle to feed their kids, keep their heads above water as tenants and rely on their faith (Hap is a preacher/farmer) to weather the racism that governs everything they do in their lives.

Hap is needed to help move the McAllans in? “Yessuh.” Florence is summoned when the McAllan girls get whooping cough? There is no saying no, though Henry has the manners to at least say he’ll pay. And when Laura wants Florence to continue helping around the house, that can’t be turned down either.

 

Henry’s younger brother, Jamie (Garrett Hedlund, quite good) isn’t yet lost to accepting his place in the Jim Crow order of things, even though their monstrously racist old man (Jonathan Banks, hateful as all get-out) does his best to instill that in him.

When Jamie and Florence and Hap’s son Ronsel (Jason Mitchell) go off to fight in World War II, it’s not just history that teaches us things will change when they get back. Generations of movies about young men tempered by fire, bonded by shared combat and forced to start the process of moving beyond racism dictate that.

And that’s where the ugliness turns serious and “Mudbound” rises above genre.

Rees, who co-wrote the script, struggles with a fluid timeline that does not match the novel, allows too many over-familiar scenes and situations onto the screen and inexplicably (Is this explained in the novel?) lets Blige wear sunglasses in most of her scenes.

The players have a hard time making an impression much beyond archetypes — the murderous racist, the saintly black farm family, the “liberal” and poetic younger brother, the shiftless white hired help (a distracting minor character in the film) and his suffering to the breaking-point family.

Rees avoids most “trouble on the farm” tropes that date back to Renoir’s “The Southerner,”the trials of getting a crop in (we never see ripe cotton), but not the shocking ugliness of Klan culture in the not-so-Old South. Oddly, the black director on set shortchanges the black half of the story, not giving those characters enough chances to make an impression beyond the most basic.

But there’s power even in the over-familiar, and the movie’s harrowing third act, with men home from war unwilling to accept the way things have always been, alternately sings and stings. Hedlund and Mitchell, playing men scarred by war (Ronsel was a tanker with Patton, Jamie a B-25 bomber pilot), share the best scenes in “Mudbound” — drunken, “you’re alright by me” confessions of their combat experience and the great wrongs still in place in the county they’ve returned to.

“Mudbound” is not a great film, not polished enough to earn its “Oscar contender” hype. But it is a worthwhile one. It doesn’t touch us the way the sentimental “Places in the Heart” did, but doesn’t flinch (much) from showing the Bad Old Days at their very worst, which more sentimental films on this subject invariably sanitize.

And the fact that it’s on Netflix means you can absorb its two hours and 15 minutes at your leisure, rewinding it to unravel the plot’s lapses and the timeline’s clumsiness.

 

MPAA Rating: R for some disturbing violence, brief language and nudity

Cast: Carey Mulligan, Mary J. Blige, Jason Clarke, Rob Morgan, Jason Mitchell, Garret Hedlund,  Jonathan Banks

Credits: Directed by Dee Rees,  script by Virgil Williams and Dee Rees,  based on the Hillary Jordan novel. An Armory/Netflix release.

Running time: 2:14

 

We’re getting to that time of year when awards are piling up to make a sufficient guess at where the “critical” consensus is regarding the best pictures of 2017.

Critics don’t pick the Oscars, or the Golden Globes, for that matter. But they do tend to define the field, which pictures-performances have the best shot, which will require Oscar voters to think outside the box these earlier awards want to paint them in.

A couple of megalopolis movie critics groups — NY and LA Critics — tapped this year’s version of last year’s gay coming of age awards-bait ( “Moonlight”) as their best picture, “Call Me By My Name.” Groupthink settles in on such organizations, so we’ll see how much traction that idea gains (Back to back indie gay romances, this time with a teen and an older man element, sounds like the best way to write off the last vestiges of the Oscar TV audience. Heterosexual romances don’t typically win Oscars these days, either.)

The misnamed National Board of Review did its usual safe choice, going for Spielberg’s “The Post.”

But now we’ve got a more reliable Oscar predictor weighing in. The Broadcast Film Critics are all atwitter over Guillermo Del Toro’s smart, topical sci-fi with heart, “The Shape of Water.”

Per the BFCA’s oddly-organized press release — “The Shape of Water” leads all films this year with 14 nominations including Best Picture, Sally Hawkins for Best Actress, Richard Jenkins for Best Supporting Actor, Octavia Spencer for Best Supporting Actress, Guillermo del Toro for both Best Director and Best Original Screenplay alongside Vanessa Taylor, Dan Laustsen for Best Cinematography, Paul Denham Austerberry, Shane Vieau, and Jeff Melvin for Best Production Design, Sidney Wolinsky for Best Editing, Luis Sequeira for Best Costume Design, Best Hair and Makeup, Best Visual Effects, Best Sci-Fi or Horror Movie, and Alexandre Desplat for Best Score.

“Call Me By Your Name,” “Dunkirk,” “Lady Bird,” and “The Post” impressed with eight nominations each, and are all in the running for Best Picture and Best Director, among others.  “Blade Runner 2049” earned seven nominations, followed by “The Big Sick” and “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” each with six, and “Get Out” and “I, Tonya” with five.

Friends and I have been going back and forth over this year’s best bets for the as-many-as-ten Best Picture nominations for the Academy Awards (and five drama/five best musical or comedy Golden Globe nominations). I lean toward Films I Want to See Again as a tie-breaker, one of those qualities I take into account when I shrug off this or that Ten Best Contender.

“Dunkirk” has been a near-given Best Picture nominee since it classed up last summer’s screens with vivid, lived-in and immersive WWII history. I have yet to see a picture I thought was better. Working against it? Jealousy about Christopher Nolan’s genre-jumping success, and a lack of actual nominate-able performances. Tom Hardy? Mark Rylance? Maybe.

“Darkest Hour,” widely considered the companion piece to Nolan’s dazzling “Dunkirk,” is stealing some of its best picture attention by opening at the end of the year. Acting nominations will spin out of this one.

But “The Florida Project,” “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” “The Disaster Artist” and “Lady Bird” feel like contenders, even if “Lady Bird,””Florida Project” and “Call Me By My Name” have more of an Indie Spirit Award quality.  I’d put “The Big Sick” in there, too, though to me it and “Get Out” weren’t and aren’t Top Ten contenders.

“The Post,” with Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks and the story of the Pentagon Papers and the Washington Post, has felt like an Oscar nominee from the moment it was announced.

“The Shape of Water” and “Get Out” are fanboy genre pictures that might transcend genre enough to collect best picture nominations. “I, Tonya” feels a little narrow for best picture parameters.

Nominations for Frances McDormand (“Three Billboards”), Streep (“The Post”), Sally Hawkins (“The Shape of Water”), Saoirse Ronan (“Lady Bird”) and the likes of Judi Dench (“Victoria & Abdul”), Laurie Metcalf (“Lady Bird”) and Margot Robbie (“I, Tonya”) seem likely, in lead or supporting roles. Jessica Chastain (“Molly’s Game”) is bubbling up, thanks to the Critic’s Choice nomination.

Best actor and supporting actor seem much more wide open, with Gray Oldman (“Darkest Hour”), Willem Dafoe (“The Florida Project”), Sam Rockwell and Woody Harrelson (“Three Billboards”) looking like front-runners, JPatrick Stewart and Hugh Jackman (“Logan”) Jake Gyllenhaal (“Stronger”) and Denzel (“Roman J. Israel, Esq.”) long shots.

The Golden Globes, with nominations coming Dec. 11, set the precedent for casting their net absurdly wide to ensure they don’t miss “picking the Oscar winner” before the Oscars, and BFCA does that in spades. Multiple “CYA” categories, finding a way to give Steve Carell (“Battle of the Sexes”) a shot at something, “best young actor” (Brooklyn Prince from “The Florida Project” ought to lock that up.) etc.

My favorite headline about that dubious “EVERYBODY gets a trophy” (or just a nomination) BFCA practice comes from D-Listed — “Everybody with a SAG Card Gets a Critics’ Choice Award Nomination.” L.O.L.

The full list of BFCA film nominees is below.

FILM NOMINATIONS FOR THE 23^rd ANNUAL CRITICS’ CHOICE AWARDS

BEST PICTURE

The Big Sick

Call Me by Your Name

Darkest Hour

Dunkirk

The Florida Project

Get Out

Lady Bird

The Post

The Shape of Water

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

 

BEST ACTOR

Timothée Chalamet – Call Me by Your Name

James Franco – The Disaster Artist

Jake Gyllenhaal – Stronger

Tom Hanks – The Post

Daniel Kaluuya – Get Out

Daniel Day-Lewis – Phantom Thread

Gary Oldman – Darkest Hour

 

BEST ACTRESS

Jessica Chastain – Molly’s Game

Sally Hawkins – The Shape of Water

Frances McDormand – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Margot Robbie – I, Tonya

Saoirse Ronan – Lady Bird

Meryl Streep – The Post

 

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Willem Dafoe – The Florida Project

Armie Hammer – Call Me By Your Name

Richard Jenkins – The Shape of Water

Sam Rockwell – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Patrick Stewart – Logan

Michael Stuhlbarg – Call Me by Your Name

 

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Mary J. Blige – Mudbound

Hong Chau – Downsizing

Tiffany Haddish – Girls Trip

Holly Hunter – The Big Sick

Allison Janney – I, Tonya

Laurie Metcalf – Lady Bird

Octavia Spencer – The Shape of Water

 

BEST YOUNG ACTOR/ACTRESS

Mckenna Grace – Gifted

Dafne Keen – Logan

Brooklynn Prince – The Florida Project

Millicent Simmonds – Wonderstruck

Jacob Tremblay – Wonder

 

BEST ACTING ENSEMBLE

Dunkirk

Lady Bird

Mudbound

The Post

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

 

BEST DIRECTOR

Guillermo del Toro – The Shape of Water

Greta Gerwig – Lady Bird

Martin McDonagh – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Christopher Nolan – Dunkirk

Luca Guadagnino – Call Me By Your Name

Jordan Peele – Get Out

Steven Spielberg – The Post

 

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Guillermo del Toro and Vanessa Taylor – The Shape of Water

Greta Gerwig – Lady Bird

Emily V. Gordon and Kumail Nanjiani – The Big Sick

Liz Hannah and Josh Singer – The Post

Martin McDonagh – Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

Jordan Peele – Get Out

 

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

James Ivory – Call Me by Your Name

Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber – The Disaster Artist

Dee Rees and Virgil Williams – Mudbound

Aaron Sorkin – Molly’s Game

Jack Thorne, Steve Conrad, Stephen Chbosky – Wonder

 

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY

Roger Deakins – Blade Runner 2049

Hoyte van Hoytema – Dunkirk

Dan Laustsen – The Shape of Water

Rachel Morrison – Mudbound

Sayombhu Mukdeeprom – Call Me By Your Name

 

BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN

Paul Denham Austerberry, Shane Vieau, Jeff Melvin – The Shape of Water

Jim Clay, Rebecca Alleway – Murder on the Orient Express

Nathan Crowley, Gary Fettis – Dunkirk

Dennis Gassner, Alessandra Querzola – Blade Runner 2049

Sarah Greenwood, Katie Spencer – Beauty and the Beast

Mark Tildesley, Véronique Melery – Phantom Thread

 

BEST EDITING

Michael Kahn, Sarah Broshar – The Post

Paul Machliss, Jonathan Amos – Baby Driver

Lee Smith – Dunkirk

Joe Walker – Blade Runner 2049

Sidney Wolinsky – The Shape of Water

 

BEST COSTUME DESIGN

Renée April – Blade Runner 2049

Mark Bridges – Phantom Thread

Jacqueline Durran – Beauty and the Beast

Lindy Hemming – Wonder Woman

Luis Sequeira – The Shape of Water

 

BEST HAIR AND MAKEUP

Beauty and the Beast

Darkest Hour

I, Tonya

The Shape of Water

Wonder

 

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS

Blade Runner 2049

Dunkirk

The Shape of Water

Thor: Ragnarok

War for the Planet of the Apes

Wonder Woman

 

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE

The Breadwinner

Coco

Despicable Me 3

The LEGO Batman Movie

Loving Vincent

 

BEST ACTION MOVIE

Baby Driver

Logan

Thor: Ragnarok

War for the Planet of the Apes

Wonder Woman

 

BEST COMEDY

The Big Sick

The Disaster Artist

Girls Trip

I, Tonya

Lady Bird

 

BEST ACTOR IN A COMEDY

Steve Carell – Battle of the Sexes

James Franco – The Disaster Artist

Chris Hemsworth – Thor: Ragnarok

Kumail Nanjiani – The Big Sick

Adam Sandler – The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)

 

BEST ACTRESS IN A COMEDY

Tiffany Haddish – Girls Trip

Zoe Kazan – The Big Sick

Margot Robbie – I, Tonya

Saoirse Ronan – Lady Bird

Emma Stone – Battle of the Sexes

 

BEST SCI-FI OR HORROR MOVIE

Blade Runner 2049

Get Out

It

The Shape of Water

 

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM

BPM (Beats Per Minute)

A Fantastic Woman

First They Killed My Father

In the Fade

The Square

Thelma

 

BEST SONG

Evermore – Beauty and the Beast

Mystery of Love – Call Me By Your Name

Remember Me – Coco

Stand Up for Something – Marshall

This Is Me – The Greatest Showman

 

BEST SCORE

Alexandre Desplat – The Shape of Water

Jonny Greenwood – Phantom Thread

Dario Marianelli – Darkest Hour

Benjamin Wallfisch and Hans Zimmer – Blade Runner 2049

John Williams – The Post

Hans Zimmer – Dunkirk

 

 

 

 

David Huggins is a trained artist of the primitivist/impressionist school who has but one subject — himself…and his lifetime of encounters with aliens.

He’s particularly concerned with the conjugal visits, meetings that he insists were sexual in nature, and illustrates them in not-totally-unskilled detail in painting after painting. In an earlier age, we might have labeled the work “Alien Abduction Porn.”

To his credit, filmmaker Brad Abrahams never lets on that he’s making fun of this odd old Hoboken man’s obsession. He lets Huggins tell his story, in graphic detail, in “Love & Saucers,” an utterly credulous true believer’s coital “Communion” that has to be seen to be believed. Or disbelieved.

The one true outside expert put on camera here, Jeffrey Kripal, professor of Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University, finds Huggins “sincere” in his beliefs that he’s been meeting assorted aliens — “little hairy beings,” “Mantids” (preying mantis look-alikes) and the classic wide-eyed “greys” of 75 years of screen science fiction. So, Kripal takes it on faith that the guy believes this happened?

As we’re treated to recollections of one encounter after another, from childhood first contact to “I lost my virginity to an extraterrestrial” to the son he says he fathered with an alien, giving his human son an alien step-brother, the one person we’re desperate to hear from is a psychotherapist. If you’re going to put an expert out of his depth on camera, why not pursue one who doesn’t feed your subject’s delusions?

Because even though we can see this mania as a threat to Huggins’ marriage (his wife refused to appear) and the paintings are of sketchy quality and dubious value (Who’d want to live with this creepy, quasi-amateurish stuff on their walls?), suggesting there’s not really anything in this for him, the supernatural explanation he insists is the only one isn’t the only one.

His Hoboken townhouse is crammed with sci-fi books and films (all on VHS), and the fact that his alien descriptions fit not only with science fiction, but with those of others who have taken “Communion” in the Whitley Strieber sense don’t make his wild claims any more credible.

And lacking an outside expert to go into what makes Huggins believe all these fantastical things happened to an artsy dreamer from rural Georgia, Abrahams, who artfully uses the paintings to flesh out Huggins’ narration,  needed to do more probing himself, with his questions. He doesn’t. The barest hints of a troubled childhood let the viewer wonder what wasn’t asked, and if there was molestation involved.

Huggins’ wacky consultations of the I Ching (tossing coins, etc.), his first gallery showing of his works and his endless, detailed and explicit descriptions of his inter-species sex life may play “cute,” but seems like an unhealthy, or at least unseemly filmmaker’s indulgence of an old man with unresolved issues, issues not helped by the act of legitimizing them with a documentary.

In a culture at war over “truth” and “facts” versus “sincere” beliefs, “Love & Saucers” aligns itself firmly with the cranks without even the courtesy of a wink to suggest it’s not in on the joke.

If they ever tell me where they’re from, I’ll let you know.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with graphic sexual content

Cast: David Huggins, Jeffrey Kripal

Credits:Directed by Brad Abrahams. An Orchard release.

Running time: 1:10

Pixar’s “Coco” gave the Disney division cause to celebrate again today, after a week of John Lasseter sexual harassment bad news.

Not only is it a big (not huge, just big) box office hit. But the stage has been set for the film collecting what used to be known as the Obligatory Annual Pixar Oscar — best animated feature film. “Coco” leads the Animated “Annie” nominations, which were announced today, collecting nine nods, including best picture.

I had thought, with this year’s crop of weak animated features (“The Boss Baby” and “Captain Underpants” were cute, the latest “Lego” movie a let-down, “Despicable 3” and “Cars 3” barely watchable at all) that there’d be room in this field for films off the beaten animated feature path.

“In this Corner of the World,” an anime period piece set in WWII Japan, and the gorgeous Van Gogh brushstroked “Loving Vincent” could have made that field, and may yet flesh out the Oscar nominations (if the effort is made). Here, both adventurous, lovely films are relegated to “indie” status and compete with each other, and not with Pixar, Dreamworks, Sony Animation et al.

“Kong,” “Valerian,” “Game of Thrones” “and, “Guardians of the Galaxy 2” and  “War for the Planet of the Apes” picture collected deserved recognition, too.

The half-hearted Xmas film, “The Star,” the “Lego Ninjago Movie” and “My Little Pony” piffle weren’t even acknowledged, upsetting Bronies the world over.

 

Our heroes figure the central fact of their lives out long after we, the audience, do. Their epiphany comes at the tail end of a 27 minute prologue, that part of the film that unfolds before the title “Sundowners” flashes on the screen.

“Here we are,” Justin declares.

“Did I ever have any potential?” Alex wonders.

“We’re not LOSERS,” Justin further declares.

“You’re right. We’re just not successful.”

“Sundowners” is a daft Canadian comedy about a catastrophe in the making, one we see coming long before those who are its instigators do.

And it’s a smart, poignant skewering of lives of diminishing returns, two grown men flailing at life and failing at life at 33.

All it takes is a trip to Mexico for that to become more or less clear to wedding photographer Alex (Phil Hanley of “Snow Buddies”) and his “phone jockey” (call service center) pal Justin (Luke Lalonde).

Alex’s manipulative dope of a boss (Tim Heidecker, hatefully hilarious) has sent him to a Mexican resort to film and photograph a Canadian wedding there. Alex has decided to bring his no-clue-about-cameras pal Justin along as his co-shooter. Because they could both use a break.

That long prologue revealed that Alex is a frustrated filmmaker, trapped working for a small business owner who lies, bluffs and obfuscates his way out of paying for his services. Justin only found out his ex-girlfriend had an abortion when she showed up to collect his “half” of the expense.

“We’re 33, and today was our first time on a plane,” Alex complains. “There was a BABY on the flight. And he’s already HAD a more interesting life than us.”

The wedding in a foreign land offers them a fresh start —  a chance to dip their toes in the sea, meet hot resort vacationers, drink the nights away and (supposedly) get paid for it. I’ll let you guess how many of those fantasy wishes come true.

The disasters awaiting the guys that writer-director Pavan Moondi cooks up include a groom having a semi-secret meltdown over the bankruptcy and impending criminal prosecution that he hasn’t told the bride (Cara Gee) about, a best man who lacks the courage to break up the wedding by confessing his love for the bride, a drunken gay father of the bride who can’t control his lust around Justin, soccer hooligan bullies, incompetent hotel staff and the generally inept Justin who brings Alex down to his level.

The disasters herein are well within the realm of the possible, and that makes each failed bar pick-up, each all-nighter-at-the-bar, each missed appointment — “Who wears a watch? What is this, 1996? Am I Chandler BING?” — makes us wince as we laugh at the cascading debacle surrounding these two.

Lalonde makes Justin vulnerable and amusingly clumsy at pretty much everything he attempts. But Hanley, who didn’t just ACT in “Snow Dogs,” he WROTE it, is a real stitch. He plays up a sort of passive Canadian haplessness that is just adorable, reciting long riffs about life, love, work and how he’s failing at all of them, totally unequipped to stand up to bullying, and lying to women in bars in ways that would impress no woman.

“That’s what my tantric yoga instructor tells me!”

Jackie Pirico, as a slightly demented, libidinous bridesmaid/sister to the bride — impresses. And David John Phillips is broadly hilarious as the father of the bride who makes you wonder how he ever stopped swishing long enough to father the bride.

Not every scene dazzles, or even tickles. But from one sun-up to the next, “Sundowners” manages to reel in the unreality of a “Bridesmaids” or “Hangover” and find the funny in the merely incompetent.

MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity, adult situations, alcohol abuse

Cast: Tim Heidecker, Cara Gee, Jackie Pirico, David John Phillips.

Credits: Written and directed by Pavan Moondi. An Orchard release.

Running time: 1:37

OK, so I’m a little late getting to this one. VERY late then, sure.

But I meant to see it when it had a short run at the regional art cinema. Just never got around to it. So that counts, right?

“Colossal” is a personal responsibility dramedy grafted onto a Korean monster picture — “Smashed” or “Rachel Getting Married” meets “The Host.” And seeing it in the cold light of day, after any hype around its oddness, its against-the-grain charms, it’s a somewhat threadbare affair, a little too on-the-nose in message and off in tone to quite come off.

Anne Hathaway is never for one second believable as a beautiful, big-haired drunk, wasting away in  sea of Pabst Blue Ribbon to the point her stiff of a boyfriend (Dan Stevens, thy name is “stiff”) kicks her out.

Gloria is supposed to be a party girl. But when she’s shown the door, the party’s over. Nobody takes her in. It’s back to small-town New England with her, no more New York dreams or delusions of “making it” there as a writer.

She sets up housekeeping in her parents’ empty, unrented house. And who’s the first guy she connects with when she rolls into town? That would be old school chum Oscar, who inherited the family business. And what business would be the very best place for Gloria to get her act together? Oscar’s bar.

But on the other side of the world, bigger things are afoot. A big thing with big feet, huge horns and a vast tail, to be exact. A monster is menacing Seoul, South Korea. Gloria, who suffers memory losses on a daily basis and blackouts during every night’s binge, is slack-jawed with shock. The rest of the world is, too, even as people keep going to work, checking into cable news all day as they do.

So even though Oscar announces “You know you’re watching something that’s going to change the course of history,” nothing much changes for him, his drinking buddies (Tim Blake Nelson, Austin Stowell) or Gloria.

But Gloria sobers up long enough to notice something about the monster, the quizzical looks on its face, the way it scratches its head as a nervous tic. It’s her. But it only appears when she crosses this playground in her hometown. And it only hurts the hapless citizens of Seoul through carelessness, clumsiness and narcissism.

Writer-director Nacho Vigolando skims over Gloria’s way of reasoning this situation out, skipping straight to the experiment she conducts to see if her theory is true. He’s more interested in her past — childhood flashbacks “explain” how this space-time warp with monsters came about. And he’s tickled at how she explains this to her new drinking buddies, and how they all accept this new reality as either a responsibility or as another way of expressing their drunken dismay at their limited world and their place in it.

The picture has basically one gimmick, one major point, and spends 109 minutes ambling towards it. Hathaway dresses down and offers us a more winded version of the lovelorn and lost screen persona she’s built around herself.

Sudeikis plays another “Jason Sudeikis” role — sweet-seeming only on the page, with the scary eyes and testiness barely in check. Merely casting him so reveals the character’s true nature that an attentive viewer is watching all his warm attentions for Gloria with a “When’re the gloves coming off?” dread.

The effects are indie-comedy cheap, and the tale’s overarching morality’s a bit murky.

That doesn’t utterly undercut “Colossal.” The personal responsibility allegory — Gloria has to accept how she hurts others, learn to control it and if possible atone for it — is sharp and I wish more sci-fi would point itself in similar directions. Insignificant lives can have enormous consequences.

But once you get that idea out there, the movie should be a sprint to its coda. And Vigalonda never, for one second, injects urgency into this story or properly sets the table for what’s at stake, personally, temporally or globally.

In the end, all that’s “Colossal” about it are its pretensions, and its length.

 

MPAA Rating: R for language

Cast: Anne Hathaway, Jason Sudeikis, Dan Stevens, Tim Blake Nelson, Austin Stowell

Credits: Written and directed by Nacho Vigalondo. A Neon release.

Running time: 1:49

No great surprise that Pixar’s charming “Coco” is pulling in another $27 million on this weekend after Thanksgiving.

Or that “Justice League” and “Thor” continue to rake in the cash just behind it.

But A24’s Oscar contender, “The Disaster Artist,” a comedy about the making of “the best worst movie ever made,” is only on 19 screens. And damned if it didn’t almost crack the top ten, pulling in nearly $1 million, if Friday projections hold.

It would have joined other Oscar contenders “Lady Bird” and “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” if it had. An expanded release should deliver that, even if it is a James Franco picture, with Seth Rogen and assorted others in funny supporting roles.

Is “Wonder” an Oscar contender? I should think not, a sappy holiday feel-good picture about a square peg kid dealing with a bunch of round-hole classmates featuring a tearful Julia Roberts, it’s closing in on $100 million. So. Maybe.

It’s doing a helluva lot better than “Roman J. Israel, Esq.,” which Deadline.com and others are treating as if it’s got another Denzel Washington nomination in the offing. That one is fading faster than a pair of knock-off bluejeans. I don’t think this is one of Denzel’s better performances, and the movie’s a dog. So. No.

“Murder on the Orient Express” is rolling towards the $100 million mark and that should guarantee that Kenneth Branagh will get to make the sequel promised in that film’s coda, “Death on the Nile.” The film’s old fashioned setting, murder mystery, “all star cast” and sumptuous production values make it the perfect picture to take older parents or grandparents to when you’re visiting them over the holidays.

Bleecker St.’s “The Man Who Invented Christmas” could have given it a run for its money in that corner of the “older audience” marketplace, a generally smart and well-mounted period piece about Charles Dickens writing “A Christmas Carol.” But it was incompetently marketed and despite a wide release, will be gone from most screens long before Santa shows up.

“Call Me By Your Name” and “The Shape of Water” are doing great per-screen numbers in limited release, a platform release being part of their Oscar strategy.

Woody Allen is doing decent per-screen numbers in New York, where “Wonder Wheel” is set and they’ve been propping up the increasingly dotty old pedophile (allegedly) for years.

 

Everybody has a dog story in the heist-gone-wrong thriller, “Bullet Head.” Even the dog.

And these stories are told, mostly in smartly-handled, rhapsodic flashbacks, in Paul Solet’s tale of crooks trapped in a warehouse with a bloodied fighting pit bull out for revenge. It’s almost exactly what you want in a crime genre picture — good actors, great dialogue with a tasty, righteous twist to the proceedings.

Oscar winner Adrien Brody and ought-to-have-an-Oscar character actor John Malkovich are grizzled veterans of the safecracking trade. They joined “a soft in, soft out” job set up by a junkie (Rory Culkin) and it went wrong.

Their car shot up with the get-away driver dead, they’re waiting for “a pick-up” at this vast, abandoned warehouse in the outskirts of town. Recriminations? Yeah. The old guys should have known better than to trust “the kid.”

They should have known better than to take on “one last job.”

There are only three kinds of “last scores,” the elder statesman (Malkovich) grouses.

“The kind where you serve life. The kind where you’re served a bullet. The kind where you walk away.”

They didn’t “walk away,” and here they are.

“Here,” we’ve seen in a parallel plot, is an active crime scene itself. A mobster (Antonio Banderas) is running a high stakes dog fighting tournament here. Rottweilers, mastiffs and pit bulls named De Niro, Eastwood, Jackson, Bronson  and Freeman, fight, with the losers promptly dispatched by their heartless trainers.

Only one doesn’t die. His trainer does. I’ll let you imagine how. Now, the safe-crackers are trapped in the building, unarmed, with a killer dog.

Not that a gun would help.

“I’ve done plenty of bad,” Brody’s crook declares, “but I ain’t shootin’ no f——g dog!”

Writer-director Solet, whose “Mars” TV series was a hit for National Geographic, makes this ruined warehouse a labyrinth of breathless chases and near-death experiences, mazes of stacks storing who-knows-what, an abandoned gym, holes in floors, holes in walls and catwalks to escape onto.

But it’s the characters and the dialogue that make this cut-and-dried thriller work. Brody and Malkovich swap “cat person/dog person” put-downs. They make their animal encounters of the past compelling, charming and almost-funny.

Just guessing here, but those monologues are probably the reason this cast signed onto Solet’s picture. Culkin’s is the most heartbreaking. Banderas gets his across with just his Spanish growl, no filmed recreation necessary.

And yeah, we see a lot of “Bullet Head” from the dog’s point of view, not just the blurry, fish-eye lens chases. A dog has to have a hard life to get to where he is, and we see it.

The players give great value, one and all. We stop wondering “Why’d they sign onto this?” (a bit of a parlor game with any Adrien Brody movie) quickly. We empathize with most of the characters, even the killer beast out to get them.

It’s a clever trick for a movie with a predictable story arc and a marvelous fatalism about its characters. It’s the players and their points of view that let “Bullet Head” score something close to a bulls-eye, even if the shot is fired at easy, close range.

MPAA Rating: R for violence, bloody images, language, some drug use and nudity

Cast: Adrien Brody, John Malkovich, Rory Culkin, Antonio Banderas

Credits: Written and directed by Paul Solet A Saban Films/Millennium  release.

Running time: 1:33

If you’ve ever dial-hopped and stumbled across a poet reading her latest haiku, followed by an ancient cylinder recording of a singer from the very early 1900s, chased by an extended bebop jazz jam and rounded-off by by a live singing harpist, you’ve discovered a broadcast relic of the ’60s, “free form radio.”

It’s a non-corporate, non-network “listener supported” “community” station, as opposed to a member of the NPR network. It’s radio for “people who don’t quite fit in.” And it’s a rare thing.

You can find such typically low-power (limited reach) stations in big cities, in the mountains of Virginia, Tennessee and North Carolina, in college towns such as Madison, Wisconsin or Winter Park, Florida. And perhaps the most famous survivor of the species is WFMU-FM in Orange, New Jersey, just across the river from Manhattan.

“Sex and Broadcasting” is the title of a famous “how to” book by Lorenzo W. Milam about getting such a station licensed, staffed (volunteers) and on the air. It’s also the title of a lively and engaging documentary about WFMU’s history and struggles to stay solvent and relevant in the age of Internet Radio and a million other distractions for this station’s metro-New York audience.

Tim Smith’s movie follows station manager and guiding light Ken Freedman as he pulls his own on-air stunts, doing a “meet up with our listeners” live in the middle of a local lake (from a canoe), leads the camera through the cluttered archives, record and CD stacks and arcane music reproduction gear (the aforementioned Edison cylinder player) and tries to rally the independent thinkers there to fund raise to pay their bills and expand their signal reach into NYC.

WFMU, which started life as an Upsala College FM station (Upsala closed, the station lives on), is captured at a fun, desperate moment in its history. There were popular hosts, popular programs, including “JM, The Jewish Moment,” a daily dose of ethnicity and ardent Zionism, the beehive of studios and stacks filled with comics, musicians, hangers-on and ardent believers in this sort of radio, all there for one of the station’s near-death experiences — drowning in debt.

Considering the history of such stations, it’s hardly surprising that the volunteers are generally older, whiter, more Jewish (in this station’s case). They are aged hippies and assorted other eccentrics. Decades of donated labor hosting shows have made them polished presenters, people capable of genuine novelty on the air. Their personas and programming zaniness have made them frequent subjects of profiles in the other New York media.

The station had one host set the record for one person being continuously on the air, makes live performances of every manner of music (much of it unpolished) and has an internet presence that created a worldwide web audience for its weirdness, which makes fundraising easier.

“Community” stations aren’t just licensed to serve their community, they create their own community — of supporters, volunteers, listeners and call-in show guests. And WFMU, like such stations I’ve appeared on, volunteered for and just listened to — WORT, WUVT, WPRK, WDVX, etc. — excels at this, which Smith’s movie notices but doesn’t dig into.

While hosts and former hosts talk on camera, a bit broader picture of the station’s whole eco-system would have made a better movie (and a longer one, alas). The only fans who speak on camera are famous — Adam “Ad Roc” Horowitz of The Beastie Boys, comic Patton Oswalt, “Simpsons” creator Matt Groening.

And nothing Smith shows us here can convince the viewer that this brand of broadcasting might stage a comeback, any more than any other terrestrial broadcasting medium. Thus, it’s an exercise in nostalgia.

But “Sex and Broadcasting” is still a fascinating block of broadcasting trapped in amber, a little radio history about passionate people doing something they love, willing to beg for bucks on the air to continue doing it and finding enough kindred spirits, “people who don’t quite fit in” in a shrinking sea of radio listeners to cling to FM life a little longer.

MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Ken Freedman, Matt Groenig, Adam “Ad Roc” Horowitz, Tom Scharpling, Patton Oswalt

Credits:Directed by Tim K. Smith. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:18