Movie Nation

Round up a handful of top drawer character actors, cast them as veteran cops who gather to pass on the wisdom of their years to a single new recruit during weekly poker games, and have then new detective draw on their stories — “lessons” — during a harrowing showdown with a serial killer.
That’s the premise behind “Poker Night,” a solid and well-acted if overlong and overly tricky thriller from Greg Francis, a TV veteran with such shows as “A Haunting” among his credits.
Beau Mirchoff of TV’s “Awkward” is Stan Jeter, the hero/narrator of this grisly tale. We meet him, bloodied, collapsing on the ground at what we figure is the end of some ordeal, narrating about the differences between wisdom and hindsight.
“Here’s the problem with wisdom,” he says. “You only get it AFTER you need it.”
Det. Jeter works for the Warsaw (U.S.) P.D., which is trying to find a shortcut to wisdom. The force has all these grizzled cops from all over the country. Foul-mouthed, two-fisted and incorruptible, they’re played by the likes of Ron Perlman, Giancarlo Esposito and Ron Eldard. During their poker nights, each tells stories — flashbacks within flashbacks within flashbacks — of some telling case from their past, a lesson Jeter needs to learn to keep him alive on the job and help him solve his most difficult cases.
These lessons involve serial killers or simple murderers each has pursued, doggedly, for years, and the strategies employed in tripping up the bad guy and keeping him from killing whoever was chasing him as they did.
All manner of (movie) killer was faced down — a kid accused of murdering his parents is the case Esposito’s cop solved, the most interesting of the flashbacks.
But in the fictive present, Stan has left the game, gone on a call and seen a terrorized and underclothed young woman (Halston Sage) sprinting through the dark. Stan is tased, tied up and face to mask with a monster-masked kidnapper, a smooth-talking villain who tells his own story in flashbacks, the “normal” life with the “normal” wife and office job. The joke here is that his flashbacks show him in this leathery mask, which is the only way Stan knows him.
Stan must use what he’s learned on his own, and from the various lessons of his elders (Titus Welliver and Corey Large are the other poker players) to survive this ordeal, reason it out and find a way to turn the tables on his captor, who it turns out is a serial killer.
Writer-director Francis stages passable chases and shootouts, and spares us little of the gore of these gruesome killings by gruesome killers. A clever touch, transforming the aged cop telling the story into young Stan in the flashbacks, which are shot in washed-out colors, either over-exposed or underexposed and dark.
But Francis outsmarts himself, groping around for twists to toss our way, losing track of the clean lesson-to-its-application throughline of the plot. With so many flashbacks, even he seems to lose the thread, and he veers sharply in the end to try and defy our expectations one last time, utterly violating the logic of this “world.”
The players are good, with Mirchoff earnest and young as a nice contrast to the salty, rough-and-tumble elders, especially the iconic screen heavy, Perlman.
It’s just that when the last card is dealt on this “Poker Night,”  Francis isn’t content to let the best hand win.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, with graphic violence, profanity, sexual situations

Cast:  Beau Mirchoff, Ron Perlman, Giancarlo Esposito, Halston Sage, Ron Eldard, Titus Welliver, Michael Eklund

Credits: Written and directed by Greg Francis. An XLRator Media release.

Running time: 1:44

It started with tweets from The Alamo Drafthouse and the Plaza in Atlanta. Theaters, high and low, north and south, east and west, will be showing “The Interview” now that Sony has un-surrendered to North Korea.

Here’s The Verge’s list — I hear Enzian in Orlando and suspect many others will be added to this list shortly.

See you at the Terrace in Charleston on Jimmy Buffett’s Birthday!

The acting drops away from Bradley Cooper’s performance as “deadliest American sniper” Chris Kyle. Cooper bulked up, kept a pinch between his lower lip and his lower jaw and became a man of few drawled words, the perfect Clint Eastwood hero in Eastwood’s film “American Sniper.”
The director, who has seemed distracted if not downright bored with his recent films — “Jersey Boys” was sort of a post-orangutan low — returns to form with a clean kill of a movie, an unfussy combat film that only drifts in a third act. And that drift only sets in because the director decided to err on the side of trying to do justice to the real hero’s life.
Kyle grew up in rural Texas, absorbing his daddy’s simple, black and white values. The world, Daddy (Ben Reed) taught him, is full of sheep, wolves and sheep dogs. He wasn’t raising sheep, and wouldn’t stand for his boys becoming bullies or predators (wolves). Since there’s “evil in this world,” his boys need to be “sheep dogs.”
That explains the reaction Chris had when American embassies were bombed in 1998. His moral code has him abandon the cowboy lifestyle and enlist in the Navy. Because that’s where the SEALS are.
By the time 9/11 rolls around, he’s already a top sharp shooter. Eastwood’s film follows Kyle from his first kill, through multiple tours in Iraq, a guy his own troops call “The Legend,” a man with a high Iraqi insurgent bounty on his head.
“American Sniper” tells this story not just from Kyle’s point of view, but through it. He is not shooting insurgents — snipers, bomb makers and “savages,” as he calls the enemy. He is “protecting” Marines as they deploy on house-to-house searches, giving up his secure sniper’s perch to bust down doors and show the green troops how to stay safe and do the job on later tours.
First scene to last, Cooper keeps Kyle buttoned down, a man of such moral certitude that he’s prepared “to answer for each and every kill to the Almighty” when his time is up. The war turns personal when an opposing sniper starts picking off Americans. But Kyle tries to keep his cool and works hard to keep his bride (Sienna Miller) sheltered from the dangerous and deadly details of the job.
An excellent early scene – Kyle flirts with that future bride in a bar during SEAL training. Miller’s Taya is quick with a brush-off. The swaggering SEALS are “arrogant and self-centered.” Kyle keeps his cool, seems to accept the dismissal. But “self-centered” he will not take.
“I’d lay down my life for my country.”
Too much of “American Sniper” is standard-issue military service movie, from the abusive training sequences to the standard operating procedure of house searches, dusty firefights and bodies dropped like a rising score in a first-person-shooter video game. No characters outside of Cooper and Miller make much of an impression.
Eastwood allows for a few grace notes in between the war movie cliches — the brother (Keir O’Donnell) who also enlisted and is first to weary of America’s longest war, the hint that Kyle’s crack-shot counterpart (Sammy Sheik) lives a life parallel to Kyle’s, that of the lonely hunter/family man.
The director has a reverence for his subject that goes beyond covering the usual bases such as a SEAL funeral, suggesting the cost even a guy as sure of himself and what he is doing as Kyle pays an emotional toll for this bloody work.
And that reverence trips Eastwood up as he looks for his own exit strategy, a way of getting into and out of a third act that isn’t as simple or neat as a “clean kill.”
But Cooper, to his credit, rarely flinches, never chest-thumps and never loses his cool, even when Kyle is starting to lose his. It’s a masterful interpretation of a man with a lot more on his mind and blood on his hands than he was ever inclined to let on. And it’s a performance worthy of Eastwood himself — 50 years ago.

MPAA Rating: R for strong and disturbing war violence, and language throughout including some sexual references
Cast: Bradley Cooper, Sienna Miller
Credits: Directed by Clint Eastwood, screenplay by Jason Hall. A Warner Brothers release.
Running time: 2:12

Wes Bentley may be more than just another generic hunk, more than a “Hunger Games” and “Ghost Rider” alumnus, more than just the scientist with the “red shirt role” in “Interstellar.”
Not that “After the Fall” does much for his resume. Bentley is a mostly blank-faced hero of this less-than-thrilling thriller about an overextended home owner, husband and father who takes to a life of crime to keep up appearances.
Bill Scanlon is a meticulous guy, carefully going over the claims he works as an Albuquerque insurance claims adjuster. He’s upright, firmer with his kids than his wife (Vinessa Shaw), especially when his tweenage son is caught cheating.
“When we do something wrong, we own up to it. That’s what you do when you’re a man.”
His dad was a cop and we suspect that’s had a big impact on his character
But 15 minutes into the film, we learn that he’s not on the job. Not anymore. He was laid off.
“I need guys who can make it a little more…challenging for people” filing insurance claims, his less ethical boss confesses.
So Bill gets up, puts on a tie and heads out each day, badgering possible employers in the most polite, most pathetic way. His credit cards max out. Chasing the repo creeps who take his SUV in his pajamas is his wake-up call, even if his wife is still somehow without a clue. What’s worse, her rich, disapproving dad (Keith Carradine) is just waiting for him to fail.
That’s when Bill pulls out his dad’s old service revolver. That’s when he thinks about wandering into the subdivided desert where they live to shoot himself. And that’s when he stumbles into a life of crime.
Saar Klein’s film is a “Fun With Dick and Jane” without much of the fun. Bentley’s Bill is a good man going wrong, all poster-slogans about how his sons should try to live their lives.
“Intensity is doing something you hate…like you love it!”
But it’s all unraveling. The petty robberies — aimed at those who “deserve” it, a hooker and her john, the repo guys, a cruel convenience store manager — won’t cover their lifestyle. Bentley only lets Bill start to show emotion as all this gets to him.
Jason Isaacs is a hard-drinking cop who befriends Bill, takes him out target shooting and lectures him on the good life he has and the moral relativism of the world.
“There ain’t no sin. There ain’t no virtue. There’s just things people do.”
Bentley is pretty bland, start to finish, but let’s face it — the screenplay does him no favors. You introduce his career as catching people trying to commit insurance fraud, but you don’t use that expertise in the plot, in Bill’s crimes? That’s not tripping up our expectations. That’s looking a gift horse in the mouth.
The crimes start out polite and almost funny — almost. But this never rises to satire, never evolves into some bigger statement on morality and the world men live in.
And with unemployment below six percent, the “Fall” this is “After” seems instantly dated, robbing the film of whatever relevance and urgency it might have once had on the page.

MPAA Rating: R for language and some sexual content.
Cast: Wes Bentley, Jason Isaacs, Vinessa Shaw, Keith Carradine
Credits: Directed by Saar Klein, written by Saar Klein, Joe Conway. A Phase4 Films release.
Running time: 1:50

Mark Wahlberg takes on his most ambitious acting job ever in “The Gambler,” a gritty remake of a 1974 film that starred James Caan. And the new gambler doesn’t embarrass himself.
Playing a college professor addicted to losing, digging a deeper and deeper hole for himself with loan sharks, underworld gambling entrepreneurs and his family, Wahlberg never gives away the game — that long, erudite speeches about Shakespeare and Camus are not his forte.
But as Jim Bennett, one-time novelist turned arrogant assistant college professor with a gambling problem, Wahlberg also fails to let us taste the desperation. His fatalism — written into the character by William “The Departed” Monahan– locks the door on panic, and empathy. We see the clock ticking down on his debts, his repeated treks for cash to pay back what he owes, money that he then gambles away. We note his efforts to fight his attraction for the one promising student in his otherwise bored class (Brie Larson). And we never see him sweat. So it’s an impressive performance, not a moving one.
For Bennett, “Life’s a losing proposition. Might as well get it over with.”
That’s why he’s deep into debt with the shady Korean gambling mogul, Mr. Lee (Alvin Ing), willing to dive into dept with the even more dangerous Neville (Michael K. Williams, silky smooth) and hoping to get the massive, aged King of the Sharks, Frank (John Goodman) to lend him the cash that might cover his losses to the first two.
“Going on as I am is the only thing I’ve got,” he tells his mother, given a desperate fury by the great Jessica Lange. She can’t stop Jim any more than the threats made by the others.
“He wants to dance with the devil,” and that’s that.
Jim published a novel, “one of the best-reviewed first novels of 2007,” Neville cracks. But he realized his destiny with that book. And mediocrity was never going to be enough for a child of privilege, of intellectual advantage. “Victory or death” is his credo, which only partially explains why we see him, time and again, “double-or-nothing” his way out of a winning streak at blackjack or roulette.
Every character in this Rupert Wyatt (“Rise of the Planet of the Apes”) film is an articulate, quotable archetype-breaker — from the verbose and literary lowlifes who inhabit Jim’s secret world, to the students — even the jocks — who sit through his showboating, confessional, profane and semi-profound lectures.
The arrogant jerk cannot answer the challenge of a student athlete (Anthony Kelley) — “You’ve got a BMW M-1. How are you not happy?” He cannot learn the basic gambler’s lesson that Frank passes on between threats.
“You get up, you get out.” Jim never quits while he’s ahead.
But as meaty as this script sounds — every line another morsel — it never allows Wahlberg the chance to make us care what happens to Jim. Do we want him to get what’s coming to him, or are we rooting for him? Either way, Wyatt, Monahan and Wahlberg succeed only in frustrating our will, cashing out with a cop-out finale, making our two hour gamble on “The Gambler” something less than a sure thing.

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, and for some sexuality/nudity
Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Michael Kenneth Williams, Jessica Lange, John Goodman, Brie Larson, Anthony Kelley, George Kennedy
Credits: Directed by Rupert Wyatt, screenplay by William Monahan, based on the James Toback script for a 1974 film. A Paramount release.
Running time: 1:51