Movie Nation

“Where Hope Grows” is a sometimes moving and generally watchable melodrama about a drunken ex-ballplayer who finds purpose and a friend back in his home town.
But unlike most faith-based films, it isn’t a church that saves him, a pastor or devout Christian who shows him the way. It’s a teen with Down Syndrome.
The kid’s nicknamed Produce, thanks to his job at the local supermarket. That’s where Calvin Campbell (Kristoffer Polaha) stumbles into him. Calvin’s a single-dad whose teen daughter (McKaley Miller) is making bad choices, but he’s typically too tipsy to notice. He’s adrift, bitter about his lost career, refusing to look for a new one.
And then he creates a “Cleanup on aisle three.”
“I just trampled on one of your vegetables, ” he tells the kid.
“A tomato is a fruit,” Produce corrects him.
Produce is in the habit of hugging people he’s just met. And Calvin is struck by Produce’s in-the-moment optimism.
“I’m doing good. Even when I’m doing bad, I’m doing good.”
Calvin lets himself befriend Produce, and even though he resists the kid’s invitations to church, his always positive attitude starts to rub off.
And some of Calvin’s edge rubs off with it.
“Where Hope Grows” is straight melodrama, with daughter Katie’s jerk boyfriend (Michael Grant) nagging her about sex, Calvin pondering whether to get into AA (twelve step meetings are the movies’ easiest lump in the throat moment) and Produce straining to show “how smart” he is, and his true worth.
It’s all fairly routine, even if there’s a moment of violence, a hint of profanity, a little drinking and an unfaithful wife (Danica McKellar of “The Wonder Years,” the biggest name in the cast). But it works, here and there, and Polaha is perfectly believable as an ex-jock and ex-jerk who lets a little child lead him out of the darkness.

MPAA Rating: Rated PG-13 for thematic issues involving drinking and teen sexuality, and for brief language and an accident scene

Cast: Kristoffer Polaha, David DeSanctis, McKaley Miller, Michael Grant, Danica McKellar
Credits: Written and directed by Chris Dowling. A Roadside Attractions release.

Running time: 1:35

In “Pound of Flesh,” Jean-Claude Van Damme can still do the splits, still pull off a nude scene and still feels the need to do one.
And his Belgian-accented threats still sting.
“You see thees Bible?” he purrs to the pretty Manila bartender who served him a Cosby-spiked drink the night before. “Eet weel leave BEEG bruises. And I WEEL beat you weeth eet.”
He brought his hotel room’s Bible with him “for inspiration.” Not really. He woke up in a Manila hotel in a bath of ice, with the water turning red. His bed is covered in blood. There’s no sign of the damsel he rescued and bedded the night before.
But there is a telltale scar. Somebody stole a kidney. So he is understandably insistent in questioning the barmaid.
His brother (John Ralston), who needs the kidney, blurts out that “I should have KNOWN something like this would happen.”
But that’s merely the second funniest line. After the Biblical threat.
“Pound of Flesh” is a solid if occasionally silly B-picture of the sort that JCVD used to make, before “JCVD” suggested there might be more to him than mere “Muscles from Brussels.”
He’s 54, his ex-special forces character wears glasses, and his fights in this fists-and-firearms hunt for a missing kidney are a tad gingerly fought. That’s mostly because the character is supposed to be in pain and down one kidney. But these brawls, mainly with the late Darren Shahlavi, a tough Brit-villain who died earlier this year, seem a little tentative. This sort of martial arts movie is a young leading man’s game.
Deacon, Van Damme’s character, and George (Ralston) and Deacon’s old underworld contact (Aki Aleong of “House of Sand and Fog”) have mere hours to find the Irish tart (Charlotte Peters) who hustled Deacon out of a kidney, before that kidney is sold to some rich person who needs one.
But there’s little urgency to the proceedings, little of that famous “D.O.A.” clock ticking down toward someone’s doom. Director Ernie Barbarash cannot manage a decent chase scene, and Van Damme, after a couple of brawls, settles into a first-person-shooter charge into a fortress mansion for the finale.
The moral components of the movie — George is a college professor and a devout Christian who doesn’t want others harmed in the hunt for this stolen kidney — are laughable.
And the plot, once it is laid out at about the 30 minute mark, is by-the-comic-book routine.
But you have to hand it to JCVD. He has found a fresh formula for a brawny action star’s dotage. Yes, they all turn to guns to settle scores their movies used to settle with their fists. He, at least, has found a character with a good excuse. He’s down one “Pound of Flesh.”

MPAA Rating: R for violence, language and some sexuality

Cast: Jean-Claude Van Damme, Charlotte Peters, Darren Shahlavi, John Ralston, Aki Aleong
Credits: Directed by Ernie Barbarash, script by Joshua James. An eOne/Phase4 release.

Running time: 1:44

Take away the armies and artillery and a low-budget Civil War movie turns into a Western.
The makers of the upcoming “The Keeping Room,” with Brit Marling, Sam Worthington and Hailee Steinfeld, figured that out.
And the co-writer/director Kane Senes made the same discovery before tackling “Echoes of War,” a small-scale post-war tale of a blood feud that predated Fort Sumter and picks up after Appomattox.
James Badge Dale (“World War Z,” “The Lone Ranger”) is Wade, a soldier newly returned to Texas, checking in on his late sister’s family. Brother-in-law Seamus (an unrecognizable Ethan Embry) has kept Abigail (Maika Monroe) and her younger brother Sam (Owen Teague) alive and raised them on the Good Book.
But Wade senses, straight away, that Seamus has been turning the other cheek a little too freely. He’s letting the hateful plantation owner next door (William Forsythe) and his sons hunt on his land, raid his traps for food.
Old Man McCluskey lost a son in the war, and the two sons left behind are little comfort. His wife (Beth Broderick) is crazy, and he figures the Rileys owe him some unpaid debt.
“Pop says they’re just desperate, like all folks,” Wade’s young nephew Sam offers.
Wade, still armed and with the bravado of a man who has survived combat, is itching to start something.
And Sam wants to be just like his swaggering Uncle Wade. But Abigail is being secretly courted by Marcus McCluskey (Rhys Wakefield). So this feud is sure to have echoes of Shakespeare.
The players aren’t bad, but they have too little to play, even the young lovers. It’s hard to develop empathy for characters that are simple archetypes.
It’s also a generally artless film, with little in the cinematography to suggest the painterly touches such period pieces usually merit. A little random ugliness, a pointless and grisly sex scene involving the madwoman and her mad husband, sets the tone.
“Echoes of War” needs prettier visuals and bigger ideas, because the dialogue is too formulaic and the violence to come is entirely too predictable to hold our interest for 100 minutes.

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

Cast: James Badge Dale, William Forsythe, Ethan Embry, Maika Monroe, Rhys Wakefield, Beth Broderick, Owen Teague
Credits: Directed by Kane Senes, script by John Chriss, Kane Senes. An Arc Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:40

Not sure what Deadline Hollywood was expecting the sacrificial lamb comedy “Hot Pursuit” to manage on its opening weekend. It’ll do over $12, which seems a little low — not quite a flop. Reese’s big box office days are in the past.

Poor movie, middling showing. Seems like $16 or so would have been the high end of expectations.

“Avengers” has won another weekend ($76 million) and should pass “Furious 7” by Friday, next Saturday at the latest. The tally will be “7” $331 Sunday night, “Avengers 2” $311 or so.

“Maggie,” opening on limited screens didn’t set the world on fire, “The D Train” did no more for Jack Black than “Maggie” did for Schwarzenegger. “Far from the Madding Crowd” still isn’t on enough screens to crack the top ten. But “Ex Machina” is turning into a modest, smart hit, ($14 thus far) and “Woman in Gold” is counter-programming itself into the black.

But it won’t manage the money “The Age of Adaline” does, which will stand at over $31 million on Sunday night. That’s the one to take Mom to on Mother’s Day, by the way.

Every studio, large and small, just assumed those darned “Avengers” would swallow another weekend’s box office whole.

So nothing of any real note opens this second weekend of May.

“Hot Pursuit” took a beating from critics. Just brutal. Reese Witherspoon is earning “What was she thinking?” from a lot of us, but Stephen Whitty of the Newark Star Ledger and I were in agreement on the real culprit — director Anne Fletcher. The female Adam Shankman? It stands at a whopping 7% on the Tomatometer.

“Maggie,” Arnold Schwarzenegger’s serious, somber and compassionate transformation in the middle of an indie zombie movie, is earning mixed reviews. Abigail Breslin is awesome in it, but Arnie holds his own.  Do yourself a favor and read the TIRADES in the comments of NPR’s interview with the ex-governor/Once and Future Terminator. Like Russell Crowe, like Mel Gibson and like Kevin Costner, he has transgressed in some way that have utterly turned a lot of people against him.

Not that the NPR audience figured to be filled with Arnold fans.

The best reviewed film of the weekend is the faith-based import “Noble,” about an Irish orphan who never lets the world beat her down and never loses her faith in the process. Not bad.

The Michael Fassbender Western “Slow West” has earned good notices and gone into wider release. Offbeat, dark and funny, and shot in New Zealand.

“Saint Laurent” is a botched, overlong French biopic of pioneering fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent.

Jack Black’s kind of over, so even the semi-daring “D Train” can’t put him back in the money. An offbeat bromantic comedy — a bromance that turns sexual — it feels like a PG-13 movie sexed and cursed up to an R.

Then there’s “Bravetown” — a high school dance team romance slapped on top of a mournful small town in denial over all the soldiers it’s sent off to war, “The Seven Five,” a decent but dated New York cop scandal documentary.

Morgan Freeman and Diane Keaton twinkle, but not enough, to rescue to sluggish New York real estate comedy “5 Flights Up.”

And Patrick Stewart classes up the Israeli dark caper comedy “Hunting Elephants,” taking a role that John Cleese was slated to play, at one point.

French fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent earns a “Gandhi” length, disjointed and arty film biography in “Saint Laurent,” a patience-testing period piece that skips through the designer’s glory years, catches up with him near the addled end and fails to deliver details of his greatest trauma.
In two and a half hours, director BeBertrand Bonello leaves out far more than he includes, avoids Laurent’s competitors, includes Andy Warhol — but only in narrated letters — and fixates on the driven, brilliant and yet somehow unfortunate fashion tycoon’s excesses and sex life.
But with Gaspard Ulliel in the title role, the film’s many abortive snippets and impressionionistic sketches come together in one iconic image. Playing Saint Laurent in his 1960s and ’70s heyday, Ulliel (“Hannibal Rising”) is as beautiful as the clothes his character wears, even the ugly ’70s suits. Tall, thin and angular, Ulliel is the personification of the Yves Saint Laurent line.
Fabrics that slink off shoulders and hug the hips and fall just-so, colors and textures blend in the “elegance and beauty” which were Saint Laurent’s self-declared lifelong pursuit.
Before his initials “YSL” were slapped on so many products as to lose their meaning, before his drug and booze fueled hard living got the best of him, before fashion itself passed him by, Yves Saint Laurent ruled couture and “Saint Laurent” reminds of us this — showing him expand his brand, his push from pricey runway wear to “ready-to-wear,” perfumes, selling out to American ownership. Saint Laurent, guided by his life partner/business partner Pierre Berge (Jérémie Renier), sold out early and often and got every bit as stinking rich as Coco Chanel.
We meet his “muses,” the willowy blonde model Betty Catroux (Aymeline Valade), whom he called his “twin,” the designer-muse LouLou de la Falaise (Léa Seydoux).
We spend a staggering amount of time not-quite-overhearing conversations in the discotheques of the day, drinking, popping pills and smoking-smoking-smoking. The Surgeon General ought to put a warning on “Saint Laurent.”
And we follow Saint Laurent cruising, and into the coke-and-pill-packed love affair with Karl Lagerfeld’s paramour, Jacques de Bascher (Louis Garrel).
The movie’s failings are teased at the beginning, when a strung-out Saint Laurent checks into a Paris hotel and spills his guts to a reporter. Or so we’re told. This “story” is never printed or related and we catch only a glimpse of his traumatic weeks as a young designer turned military conscript, subjected to hazing and drug and electro-shock treatments for the depression that followed.
We see nothing of his apprenticeship under Dior, and his fascination with the writer Marcel Proust is mentioned several times but never explained.
“Saint Laurent” plays like the most inside-baseball fashion film ever, too many random “highlights,” too few moments of inspiration.
And choosing simple white subtitles for a French film about a designer whose seamstresses, models and apartments were often bathed in white may be the biggest fashion blunder of all.

MPAA Rating: R for graphic nudity/strong sexual situations, substance abuse throughout and some language

Cast: Gaspard Ulliel, Jérémie Renier, Louis Garrel, Léa Seydoux, Helmut Berger
Credits: Directed by Bertrand Bonello, script by Thomas Bidegain (screenplay), Bertrand Bonello. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 2:30

The unspoken grief of a small, patriotic rural town that refuses talk about its combat dead is a heavy burden to slap on a formulaic city-kid-turns-rural-dance-team-into-champs dramedy.
But that’s what the high-minded “Bravetown” attempts. An R-rated drama about drugs and remorse and death and kids questioning a town that’s “good for nothing but turning out future soldiers,” it’s somewhat undercut by the whole “Step Up’/Footloose/Glee” dance showcase that got it financed.
Lucas Till is Josh, a rising, drug-abusing DJ whose one drug-bust-too-many gets him shipped off by his onetime addict mom (Maria Bello) to live with the father he never knew.
Dad is played by Tom Everett Scott, with barely a line and not one decent scene to play. That’s because Dad is a combat vet, and in Paragon, guys don’t talk about the war they fought in and families don’t talk about the sons, brothers and friends they’ve lost.
Josh Duhamel is well-cast as the psychotherapist the troubled-teen Josh is forced to visit. He’s content to watch soccer matches and eat pizza during their sessions, until the kid starts to reach out, and the therapist is obliged to try and help. Not that the kid is having it.
“You learn that at shrink community college?”
The one thing the hip mixmaster might do to fit in is hip up the disastrous dance team, whose routines are as dated as their Avrile Lavigne-laced dance track.
Mary (Kherington Payne, very good) is their control-freak captain. Even she recognizes the city boy with his mad mixes would be just the ticket to turn around their fortunes.
Mary takes Josh to a tree adorned with the medals of the town’s fallen, a romantic concept (lit by kerosene lanterns) straight out of Nicholas Sparks. She suffered a loss, too. Her medicated, manic mother (Laura Dern, always sterling) is the only townsperson to talk about the dead. And she’s in depressed denial herself.
Till, one of the new X-Men, isn’t bad, although his character seems cut and pasted from assorted dance, music and troubled teen pictures. And there’s good support surrounding him.
But whatever its intent, “Bravetown” stumbles through a steady supply of contrivances designed to make the budget work and the storylines overlap. Relationships are abrupt, absurd legal expediencies push Josh into his dad’s town’s problems, Duhamel’s shrink is a vet with a secret, all the dance team’s contests are somehow staged on their home gym and the shattered town will be made whole at the foot of that tree of medals.
The result is an off-tone R-rated melodrama more suited to the unsophisticated PG-13 sentiments of a kids gotta dance picture, or a romance novel, Nicholas Sparks without a beach.

MPAA Rating: R for some language, drug use and brief sexuality

Cast: Lucas Till, Josh Duhamel, Kherington Payne, Maria Bello, Laura Dern, Jae Head, Tom Everett Scott
Credits: Directed by Daniel Duran, script by Oscar Orlando Torres. An eOne release.

Running time: 1:53

Patrick Stewart preens, poses and gives us a little song and dance in “Hunting Elephants,” livening up a fairly dark and somewhat predictable Israeli caper comedy.
He plays Lord Michael Simpson, a not-quite-starving actor, a highly born ponce whose stage production “Hamlet: Revenge of the Sith,” has him barely a full step ahead of his creditors.
Then he learns his sister, who married an Israeli, is catatonic and dying in the same retirement home where her hotheaded ex-underground commando husband Eliyahu (Sasson Gabai) protects her from the staff.
“The only person with permission to kill my wife is me!” Eliyahu rages. And since he still wears a holster and sometimes brandishes his pistol, they take him seriously.
Lord Simpson flies to Jerusalem to reclaim the home that their foreign service family owned that his sister and her husband lived in for decades.
But the situation he stumbles into is what “Hunting Elephants” is actually about. Eliyahu, whose name Lord Simpson butchers in every hilarious way possible (“Elly Hoo Hoo”), is caring for his bullied, estranged grandson (Gil Blank). And like Lord Simpson, like grandson Yonathan, and like his ex-comrade in arms, also retired (Moni Moshonov), Eliyahoo is in desperate need of cash.
Why not rob the bank where Jonathan’s dad ran security until he was worked to an early death? Revenge for the son of the victim, and the victim’s father, Eliyahu — and ready cash for everybody else.
“I’ve never played a bank robber,” Lord Simpson coos. “Is it a big part?”
The set-up, built out of a longish prologue that shows Yonathan’s grief, guilt (he was unable to save his father) and bullying, is uncertain in tone and direction. But the moment Eliyahu and then Lord Simpson show up, Reshef Levi’s film, in English and Hebrew with English subtitles, figures out what it wants to be.
It’s an Israeli “Going in Style,” that American tragi-comedy about geezer bank robbers that the late George Burns, Art Carney and Lee Strasberg starred in decades ago.
But in taking his time to get to that plot, Levi gives Gabai a chance to work up a fine lather. There is no cranky old man like a self-righteous “freedom fighter” who still carries a gun. Stewart’s Lord Simpson is not-quite-anti-Semitic, comically dismissive of this nation of “terrorists,” ridiculing the violence, tribalism and bunker mentality of Israeli culture.
Levi packs a lot onto what boils down to a very simple plot, with simple characters with simple motivations. But the occasional surprise and the over-the-top performances make “Hunting Elephants” a somewhat worthy quarry.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with violence, profanity, innuendo

Cast: Sasson Gabai, Moni Moshonov, Patrick Stewart, Gil Blank, Yaël Abecassis
Credits: Directed by Reshef Levi, written by Reshef Levi and Regev Levy . An XLRater Media release.

Running time: 1:48

In a time of intense new scrutiny of police practices and tactics around the country, the documentary “The Seven Five” shows just how wrong these public servants in blue can go when the circumstances are right.
A new film about a notorious New York Police Department precinct and its “most corrupt cop ever,” “The Seven Five” takes us back to the ’80d crack cocaine epidemic at Ground Zero, where the drugs and money were easy temptations for weak links in “the thin blue line” that separates society from criminal anarchy.
And while it would be a mistake to conflate Tiller Russell’s film with the incidents that brought national attention to policing today, here’s a movie that does a very good job of explaining where many a misdeed by someone with a badge comes from, a vocation that has become a culture and law unto itself.
The very definition of “good cop” is the center of it all. Whatever it means to the public, to elected and judicial officials, to the NYPD of this post-Serpico era, it meant “never giving up another cop.”
Michael Dowd was the head of a corrupt ring of cops in Brooklyn’s embattled 75th Precinct, where poverty and despair, murder and addiction were already endemic. Dowd, discovering the easy money available, robbed, burgled, took payoffs from drug dealers and eventually run his own drug distribution operation with his partner, Kenny Eurell. They made a bad place much worse.
Russell’s film uses archival footage of Dowd testifying before a corruption commission, TV newscasts of the day and modern interviews with dirty cops, DEA agents sold out by those dirty cops and the Internal Affairs officers slow to get the goods on these guys.
The film allows these middle-aged men to swagger and brag, one last time, about their exploits, to rationalize their behavior way back then. Russell only sketches in the background of these men who apparently never absorbed basic tenets of right and wrong, either from the police academy or their parents. But their slippery slope was a simple one — overwhelmed by a tidal wave of drugs and crimes in the most violent precinct in New York, “you feel under-appreciated as well as overwhelmed.”
The cops are slangy, like over-eager reality show contestants auditioning for a bit part in a Scorsese movie. Those chasing them are more sober-minded about how difficult it is to catch a crooked cop, and just what it takes to convict them after they’re caught.
In a neighborhood “that would scare Clint Eastwood,” they found a way to not just get by, but to thrive — by stealing, by working for the people they were supposed to arrest and get off the streets.
Although well-told, it’s an over-familiar story, and a sad one. And being far enough removed from the issues that have police in the spotlight post-Ferguson, “The Seven Five” also feels a little dated. Remember when all we had to worry about was cops going on the take?

MPAA Rating: R for pervasive language, some grisly crime scene images, and drug content

Cast: Michael Dowd, Kenny Eurell, Adam Diaz, Baron Perez, Dori Eurell
Credits: Directed by Tiller Russell. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:42