Movie Nation

That first sight of a grain elevator in a crime film signals to us that
no matter how dark and bloody things turn, the violence is going
to have a funny edge. It’s “The Fargo Effect,” and even if “Cut
Bank” lacks the “youbetchas,” it’s in full force here.
A Montana tale filmed in Canada with Australian stars, it might
have been inspired by the Hank Williams Jr. song warbled over the closing credits. It’s got conspiracy and murder, perversion and provincialism, all packed into 93 compact minutes, a well-cast and intricately plotted thriller that only comes undone at the out-of-kilter coda.
Dwayne (Liam Hemsworth) dreams of escaping the tiny townwith his pretty blond girlfriend Cassandra (Teresa Palmer). He’s videotaping her doing a promotional video about “where the Rockies meet the Plains” out in a canola field when, in the distance, the camera captures a murder. Somebody shot the postman (Bruce Dern).
The tape makes the mild-mannered sheriff (John Malkovich) throw up at “the most disappointing day of my life,” the “first murder” that town has ever had.
It makes the Postal Service send an inspector (Oliver Platt) from D.C. to reward Dwayne for his evidence.
It makes Cassandra’s daddy (Billy Bob Thornton) suspicious. And it makes the town recluse (Michael Stuhlbarg of “A Serious Man”) come out of hiding, peering behind coke-bottle lenses as he asks “Where’s my parcel?”, the one the postman was supposed to deliver.
The death, it quickly turns out, was faked. And the first seriously funny twist in this Matt “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” Shakman film is that the seemingly slow-witted recluse is both more motivated and more sure-handed at investigating the crime than the sheriff. Always underestimated, stammering as he ignores everyone’s “I thought you were dead” remarks, he will certainly get to the bottom of this, and quickly.
Shakman cast this well, so well he can afford to waste a good actor like Oliver Platt on a tiny role as a careless, Bluetooth-addicted Fed and Thornton on a couple of simple exposition scenes. Hemsworth and Palmer may center the film, but Malkovich, Stuhlbarg and Dern carry it with a wry ear for small town whimsy, wistfulness and eccentricity.
The ending is where Shakman loses his nerve and whole affair swings wide of the mark. But this dark “Fargo Lite” farce makes us sit up, take notice and smile, or at least smirk, right up until that “Hey, wait a minute” finale.

MPAA Rating: R for violence and language
Cast: Liam Hemsworth, Teresa Palmer, Bruce Dern, John

Malkovich, Billy Bob Thornton, Michael Stuhlbarg
Credits: Directed by Matt Shakman, written by Robert Patino. An

A24 release.

Running time: 1:33

She just turned 21. So perhaps the cruel truth can be at last be said about Dakota Fanning without fear of being called a child-abuser.
Whatever “it” is, that spark that film actresses and actors have that makes them interesting and empathetic and anything else on the screen, Fanning doesn’t have it. Dead-eyed and expressionless, the once-wondrous child actress hasn’t matured into anyone worth building a movie around.
You can see it in the pained smiles of Emma Thompson, her co-star in “Effie Gray,” in which Fanning plays an ill-used child bride in the art world of Victorian Britain. Thompson wrote this vehicle, which co-stars her husband Greg Wise, and she’s not so great an actress that we can’t read “This dull child is absolutely ruining my wonderful period piece” in her performance.
Euphemia ‘Effie’ Gray was the obsession of her much-older suitor, the artist, critic and “greatest (art) teacher of our time,” John Ruskin. She “loves” him and accepts his proposal and moves from Scotland to London with the great man. He was the first to recognize the genius of “Mr. Turner,” for those who caught that biopic of the famed pre-impressionist English landscape artist.
But Ruskin was schooled for nothing less. When Effie moves in with her husband and his parents, she sees his passion is only for the work his exacting father (David Suchet) and smothering martinet mother (Julie Waters) have groomed him for. Ruskin has no time or interest, in ANY way, in Effie. And she’s not allowed to protest her lonely lot.
“You forget where you are,” his mother hisses. “You forget WHO you are!”
Thompson plays the forward-thinking arts patron Lady Eastlake (James Fox plays her husband), a woman who recognizes neglect and fears for Effie’s health and future. Robbie Coltrane is a doctor, Derek Jacobi a lawyer. The supporting cast is impeccable.
The problem begins and ends with Fanning. Effie is meant to be a hothouse flower, a “great beauty” who “blossoms” when a young protege (Tom Sturridge is painter Everett Millais) pays attention to her. Fanning cannot manage it. Her Effie’s sufferings have been lacking, and Effie’s romantic desperation is a non-starter.
Fanning’s name still gets movies financed, after a fashion. But after this, the latest in a long series of film-killing performances, perhaps even producers will get a clue. If you can’t get Elle, no Fanning is better than any Fanning at all.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic and sexual content, and some nudity

Cast: Dakota Fanning, Emma Thompson, Greg Wise, David Suchet, James Fox, Julie Walters
Credits: Directed by Richard Laxton, written by Emma Thompson. An Adopt Films release.

Running time: 1:44

There’s an extraneous word in the title of the thriller “The Girl is in Trouble.” The moment we meet the sexy, calculating Swede Signe (Alicja Bachleda), we know the girl IS trouble.
But co-writer/director Julius Onah’s clever genre film never lets us off the hook with a simple femme fatale moment. Because we’ve seen, in the film’s opening, what she saw — a man, covered in blood, strangling another man.
It’s a scene Signe had the presence of mind to record on her cell phone. And even that act suggests that this blunt blonde, on the run, ready to hide out in the bed of a casual pick-up if need be, is playing the angles, leaning on her assets — maybe to survive, maybe to escape justice, perhaps to profit.
August (Columbus Short) is the woman-weary DJ wannabe whom she draws into her problems. It’s his bed she ends up in and his voice that narrates the story.
“It’s the real to see death lying right in front of you,” he growls. August is involved because he recognizes the guys in the video, which he stumbles into by searching through Signe’s phone. And when the dead man’s brother, Angel, shows up asking questions, August lies. Bad move.
Wilmer Valderrama utterly reinvents himself here as Angel, a hard man trying to keep his abuela (grandmother, Miriam Colon) from knowing what he does for a living, trying to keep his kid brother out of the business and trying to find that kid brother. He won’t be happy when he learns out August knows Jesus is dead. Short is flinty and spare and Bachleda a blend of desperate, cunning and hard to read.
The narration gets to be a bit much, filling in backstory and such.
“She always thought fate would bring her to New York.”
But Onah uses his few NYC locations well, doles out the extreme violence sparingly and strings along a fairly suspenseful story that has the killer’s “fixer,” and Angel and Angel’s friends all looking for this woman, and August mystified as to why he’s helping her. She isn’t who she seems.
“The Girl is in Trouble,” that much is obvious. But so is the fact that the girl IS trouble. Why is the narrator always the last to know?

MPAA Rating: unrated, with graphic violence, explicit sex, drug content, profanity

Cast: Columbus Short, Alicja Bachleda, Wilmer Valderrama, Jesse Spencer
Credits: Directed by Julius Onah, script by Julius Onah, Mayuran Tiruchelvam. An eOne release.

Running time: 1:34

That late March animated window — spring break for elementary school kids, nothing else at the movies for them to see — opened wide for “Home,” a lesser Dreamworks offering that cleared $50 million, easily, a $54 million weekend for the Jim Parsons-voiced alien “invasion” comedy.

“Get Hard” did a very healthy $34 million on its opening weekend. Kevin Hart’s winning streak continues, Will Ferrell buys another year of box office relevance.

“Insurgent” fell off steeply, over 57%, to a $22 million weekend. It won’t hit $100 million until next weekend.

“It Follows,” the first decent horror movie of the year, opened pretty wide and didn’t exactly set the world on fire. Over 1,000 screens, over $4 million overall.

“Cinderella” is now over $150 million, and will pass Universal’s ghastly “Fifty Shades of Gray” next weekend as the year’s biggest hit. It’s doing great overseas, too.

“Do You Believe?”, from the folks who made “God’s Not Dead,” is still in the top ten — $7 million so far.

“Focus” will be a weaker Will Smith offering. It will finish up in the $60 million range, a little better than much older Kevin Costner’s latest, “McFarland, USA” is over $40 and will top out at $50, when all is said and done.

“Danny Collins” may be the closest Al Pacino ever gets to playing Pacino the legend on the big screen.
Perma-tanned under that vast black mane and Mephistophelian goatee, blinged in the Jersey Italian style, effortlessly larger than life and bowl-you-over charming, this is the post “Hoo-Hah” Pacino that he’s presented to the press and the public since “Scent of a Woman.” And he’s never been more engaging at being, well, himself.
Credit actor-turned-director Dan Fogelman for putting the real Pacino into this “kind of based on a true story…a little bit.” “Danny Collins” is about a rich and super-famous singer-songwriter sell-out in the Neil Diamond mold, a guy cruising for decades on hits that the sing-along audience basically performs for him. Then, like the real-life singer we see in the closing credits, he’s gifted with a letter John Lennon once wrote to him back at the beginning of his career, a little advice about “riches” and “fame” that might have served him well…forty years ago.
Danny quits his tour, ditches the “coked-up teenager who can’t keep her nipples covered” (his fiance, played by Katarina Cas) and heads to Jersey to meet the son he never knew.
That son, played by Bobby Cannavale with an exhausted, weary rage that long ago lost its heat, wants nothing to do with him. Nor does his slightly more sympathetic wife (Jennifer Garner, glorious). Their adorable ADHD daughter (Giselle Eisenberg) is another story.
Danny turns on the twinkle for the staff of the Hilton where he’s staying, especially the “age appropriate” manager (Annette Bening in a pasted-on grin that isn’t falling for anything). He sparkles for his “family.” And he drinks, even as he tries to stop sniffing the coke he keeps in the garish crucifix he wears beneath his constantly open shirt wrapped in an omnipresent scarf.
“Danny Collins” is entirely too on-the-nose to be much of a challenge, but it is about something, about taking stock, trying something hard and then wondering if the easy thing that’s gotten you by all these years is what you should go back to.
Bening and Pacino make their “banter” work.
“I’m an old man, with ten Scotches in him. What can I do?”
Fogelman laces the soundtrack with John Lennon songs, gets Christopher Plummer to play the saucy old manager/father confessor to Danny and Josh Peck to play a starstruck doorman. And in this F-bomb laced showbiz dramedy, he makes sure the only F-bombs that matter are from that crusty agent and the saintly “best daughter-in-law ever.”
It’s cute, with an R-rated edge that doesn’t insult the sensibilities of the AARP audience this should appeal to. And the gekko-eyed, leathery grin of Pacino holds it all together, whether it’s croaking Danny’s biggest hit on stage, dancing the “moves” that made the groupies swoon, back in the last century or hinting at the lonely vulnerability of a guy who gets — almost too late — the affirmation from his idol that could have changed his life.

MPAA Rating: R for language, drug use and some nudity
Cast: Al Pacino, Annette Bening, Christopher Plummer, Bobby Cannavale, Jennifer Garner
Credits: Written and directed by Dan Fogelman. A Bleecker Street Media release.

Running time: 1:46

Good acting and sharp editing make “The Barber” a most engrossing serial killer thriller. But too much talk, mostly in a lecturing over-explained finale, almost undoes all of that.
Scott Glenn has the title role, a Chicago man once a “person of interest” in 17 Chicago murders — young female victims were often buried alive — now an elderly, mild-mannered barber with a different name in a small Midwestern town.
Glenn, who has conveyed both menace and quiet kindness in a career that has had him playing convicts (“Urban Cowboy”) and FBI agents (“The Silence of the Lambs”) , is well-cast as a man who won’t stand for profanity, a friend to all, but with just a touch of menace.
Chris Coy of “The Walking Dead” is a young man who shows up in town, identifies the former Francis Visser, possible serial killer, and threatens him.
“I know that that itch doesn’t die,” the kid says. “Teach me how not to get caught.”
A clue about who he is. When the small town sheriff (Stephen Tobolowsky) arrests and roughs up the kid, the boy gives his name as “J.D. LaRue.” That’s a cop from TV’s “Hill Street Blues.” We’ve seen a cop, years before, kill himself over failing to build a case against Visser — a cop with a son.
Now, some stranger with serial killer leanings wants Visser to guide him.
“Class starts tomorrow,” the old man purrs.
The old man tells his protege to “Be clean, don’t rush…”Everywhere you go, you’re leaving puzzle pieces.”
And the kid learns — an oversexed waitress here, a rain-soaked hitchhiker there.
Meanwhile, back in Chicago, we meet a cliched garter belted hooker (Kristen Hager) who turns out to be a cop, and turns out to know the kid. She tracks him down to intervene.
Director Basel Owies deftly keeps parallel storylines marching forward, maintaining suspense despite the occasional lapse into situations that were worn out back when “Hill Street Blues” was on the air.
And as we head to the inevitable, predictable conclusion, the monologues lengthen and logic goes out the door. But in spite of its failings, chatty and otherwise, this “Barber” still delivers a pretty close shave.

MPAA Rating: R for violence, language and some sexual material

Cast: Scott Glenn, Chris Coy,Kristen Hager,Stephen Tobolowsky
Credits: Directed by Basel Owies, written by Max Enscoe. An ARC release.

Running time: 1:30