Movie Nation

Screen Gems celebrates Violence Against Women Awareness Week with “No Good Deed,” a brutal thriller about, you guessed it, a “malignant narcissist” committing all sorts of violence against women.

The team behind “Obsessed” serves up Idris Elba as an escaped convict savagely menacing Taraji P. Henson and assorted other females in assaults so savage you’d think they happened in a casino elevator.

Screen Gems canceled preview showings of this, protecting a “plot twist,” they said. No, they were hoping the violence here would not take people out of the movie and into the evening news and sports talk radio, much the way the NFL is hoping images and a news story just go away.

And unlike Disney, which postponed a comic thriller which featured a bomb on a plane as a plot element 13 years ago, they’re just trotting this blood-stained melodrama out there and hoping we don’t notice.

Would “No Good Deed” have anything worth talking about without the Ray Rice sucker punch tie-in? Barely.

Elba plays Colin, serving time for manslaughter in Tennessee where the parole board has the good sense to not let him go. He escapes, and after checking in with an old flame (Kate Del Castillo) stumbles to Terry’s door in a wealthy suburb of Atlanta.

It’s a rainy night, and his disarming charm takes a while to work on Terry (Hanson). She has two tiny kids, a husband out of town and a suspicious nature. But his baritone and sleepy eyes do their magic, his cover story (he really did have a wreck in the rain) seems logical.

But once he’s inside the house, it’s just a matter of time before mayhem ensues. Who knew an 84 minute movie could seem this much longer?

Leslie Bibb plays the absurdly flirtatious neighbor-pal, whose come ons are porn-video obvious. And every so often, something hilariously coincidental changes the subject of awkward conversations — a child cries, a tree crashes through the window.

Elba’s a good actor, letting us see Colin size Terry up, reason out her situation, his eyes revealing cunning in one instant, future-tense guilt in the next.

“I ain’t got nothing to lose,” he declares, until his British grammar kicks in. “You stand…to lose ALL!”

Henson does as well as can be expected, playing a fiercely protective mom whose temper apparently takes precedence over her fear, mouthing insults like she’s arguing with her husband, but at a huge, muscular stranger with a gun.

The erotic touches, Terry’s coy attention to appearance after the audience has seen Colin as a man of violence, are a joke. And the sexualized extreme close-ups just underline how tin-eared “No Good Deed” would be, even without that security camera footage of a jock belting a woman as context.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sequences of violence, menace, terror, and for language

Cast: Idris Elba, Taraji P. Henson, Leslie Bibb, Kate Del Castillo

Credits: Directed by Sam Miller, screenplay by Aimee Lagos. A Screen Gems release.

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There have been earlier and better movies about “The Memphis Sound,” with the documentary “Respect Yourself: The Stax Records Story” being among the best.

And there have been recent and better music documentaries built around the idea of giving music legends another recording session and a final moment in the sun — “Twenty Feet from Stardom” set the standard for those.

So “Take Me to the River,” a broader and shallower recreation of that magical era in rhythm & blues and soul, doesn’t cover new ground. The history isn’t extensively explored, which leaves us with the novelty of having a lot of rappers share studio time with the likes of Bobby Rush and William Bell, Mavis Staples and Bobby Blue Bland.

The rappers — from Lil P-Nut to Snoop Dogg — create new rap breaks for classic songs, which the legends sing and the rappers pitch in on — Snoop Dogg joining Bell for “I Forgot to Be Your Lover,” the late Bobby Blue Bland wheeled in to cover “Ain’t No Sunshine When She’s Gone” with the aid of rapper Yo Gotti.

It works, even when the film’s narrator, “Hustle & Flow” actor-who-once-played-a-singer Terrence Howard, who has real (guitar) musical chops, underwhelms with his singing voice on one number, and Bland plainly was twenty-five years past his prime.

Director and music producer Martin Shore stages these sessions in assorted historic Memphis studio spaces, or recreations of the places where Stax, America, Sun and Hi records were recorded in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, and the artists breaking out of there were Booker T. and the MGs’ (Booker plays on the first track), Isaac “Shaft” Hayes and others.

The musical smorgasbord includes white blues harmonica cat Charlie Musselwhite and Talking Heads R&B fan Jerry Harrison, sitting in, inventing, collaborating as they “make some noise and have fun while we’re doin’ it.”

The most valuable thing about the film, implied in the shared narration by Terrence Howard and director Martin Shore, is capturing these legends one more time before it’s too late. Bland has a lovely moment of teaching rapping savant Lil P-Nut how to properly sing a Ray Charles number, and guitarist Charlie “Skip” Pitts, who played on everything from “Duke of Earl” to Wilson Pickett records to the famous “wah wah” guitar of Hayes’ “Shaft, gets his due. Both died before the film was released.

But the whole affair is more celebratory than organized — way too many scenes of people meeting and hugging — and comes off like a well-intentioned vanity project with a few too many vanities to serve.

MPAA Rating: PG for thematic material, language and smoking

Cast: Bobby Blue Bland, Mavis Staples, Snoop Dogg, Terrence Howard, Booker T. Jones, Jerry Harrison, Yo Gotti

Credits: Directed by Martin Shore. An Abramorama release.

Running time: 1:

You might have thought “Dolphin Tale,” the sleeper hit kids’ film of a few falls back, was a complete, compact and uplifting story that didn’t really need a second act.
And if so, you were on the money.
A fictionalized account of the true story of Winter, a badly-injured dolphin, rescued by the Clearwater (Florida) Aquarium, and how a prosthetic tail was fabricated for her allowing her to swim and survive and inspire veterans, cancer survivors and accident victims of all ages with her pluck, “Dolphin Tale” covered all the bases.
So “Dolphin Tale 2” feels, in its best moments, like little more than “Winter’s Greatest Hits.” The dolphin is in trouble again, the embattled aquarium faces the threat of losing custody of the dolphins it is rehabilitating, and Morgan Freeman shows up in the third act to complain about how tiny a baby dolphin they’re caring for is.
“I pulled anchovies off PIZZAS that were bigger than that!”
Actor-director Charles Martin Smith built his follow-up story around Winter losing her companion dolphin. Aquariums are required to pair up these very social animals as a provision of keeping them. Winter, losing her pal, seems depressed.
The Clearwater Aquarium, spruced up, well-financed and successful now that Winter has become a star attraction, has to find her a friend, a distressed dolphin that isn’t able to return to the wild. Sawyer, her human pal (Nathan Gamble), is so worried about this crisis that he may pass up the chance to attend a sea school where bright, aspiring marine biologists can get a taste of what the profession will be like.
Whatever else these films are, Smith, star of “Never Cry Wolf,” gets the righteous work of such aquariums right. Harry Connick Jr., the no-nonsense aquarium director and father of Sawyer’s gal-pal Hazel (Cozi Zuehlsdorff), refuses to bend the mission to save Winter.
“Rescue. Rehab. Release.”
The government guidelines may be inconvenient (Smith plays the inspector who lays down the law), but the adults don’t question their necessity.
And the rescue and release scenes go to great pains to show how this delicate work is handled, how labor intensive it is and how rewarding it can be to return a dolphin or injured sea turtle to the wild.
But the life around the aquarium, with its cranky pelican (friend to the injured turtle) strains to be amusing. Smith peoples the film with the same cast, including Kris Kristofferson as Hazel’s grandpa and Tom Nowicki as the aquarium’s benefactor. There just isn’t enough for them all to do. Freeman gets the few funny lines, which are all the same.
“I’ve got jars of peanut butter older’n you!”
Still, seeing what Winter can mean to a disabled child, the educational side of the story and the adorable animals make this every bit as child-friendly as the original. And if it’s more about “teachable moments” than fun ones, at least “Dolphin Tale 2” will hold the interest of its youngest viewers while it teaches, which is all any parent can hope for from a kids’ film.

MPAA Rating: PG for some mild thematic elements
Cast: Nathan Gamble, Ashley Judd, Harry Connick, Jr., Morgan Freeman, Cozi Zuehlsdorff, Kris Kristofferson, Charles Martin Smith
Credits: Written and directed by Charles Martin Smith. A Warner Brothers release.
Running time: 1:44

It’s the phone call no one wants to answer. A relative has been hospitalized. He tried to kill himself.
Most inconveniently, when Maggie answers the phone she has to discard the fatal fistful of pills she was about to pop. She has to go deal with brother Milo.
That’s the curtain raiser on “The Skeleton Twins,” a brittle and bruised comedy that manages to find something funny in a damaged, estranged brother and sister who can’t see that if they stop leaning on one another, they’ll both fall down. Again.
Maggie (Kristen Wiig) hasn’t had much to do with Milo (Bill Hader) in years. But his “To whom it may concern, see you later!” note has the L.A. hospital insisting that she bring him home to Nyack. Plainly, she is put out. And just as plainly she’s in no shape to prop up somebody else thinking of ending it all.
This Craig Johnson film starts tripping us up, right from the first. Maggie answers the phone with a furious “I’m on the National ‘Do Not Call’ Registry!” Whatever gay cliche failed-actor Milo was playing out, his sister seems to have it together. She has a house. She’s married to an ever-upbeat, outdoorsy park service employee (Luke Wilson) in their corner of upstate New York. They’re trying to have a child.
Well, her husband is. That’s our first clue about her passion for pills. Then, there’s the mania for self-improvement classes — scuba is the latest. What she does in those classes — hooking up for heated sex with the younger instructor (Boyd Holbrook), with a sad, helpless fatalism — defines her. She’s unworthy, living a lie, trapped.
Milo uses his return to their hometown to confront or rekindle a part of his past, with Rich (Ty Burrell). Bringing their self-absorbed mom (Joanna Gleason, very good) in just completes the picture.
They used to be “the gruesome twosome,” “The Skeleton Twins.” They loved their dad, and each other, playing dress-up, watching bad ’80s romances and lip-syncing to Jefferson Starship.
Now, their fights draw blood and no one around them can predict their mood-swings. They seem to have avoided each other simply because they know each other too well.
“Some of us have our secrets, and some of us have our reasons.”
Former “Saturday Night Live” castmates Wiig and Hader tumble into siblingdom with comfortable ease, which gives their characters — variations on caricatures they’ve played elsewhere — weight. She’s the funny, mercurial “ugly duckling” overcompensating with promiscuity. He’s the (toned-down, here) flamboyantly gay man who isn’t quite managing a life out of the closet.
Wilson, Glee son and Burrell are also a bit on-the-nose, in terms of casting.
So the surprises in Johnson’s film come from the jarring shifts in tone, as abrupt as any manic depressive mood swing, from giddy nostalgia to brutally blunt confrontations over missteps and traumas.
“Skeleton Twins” may not be a wholly fleshed-out character study, and nobody here takes a flying leap out of his or her comfort zone. But the timing of this tale of depression, suicide and how vulnerable we all are to our past, our demons and our shortcomings, is enough to recommend this engagingly melancholy comedy.
　
MPAA Rating: R for language, some sexuality and drug use
Cast: Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader, Ty Burrell, Luke Wilson, Joanna Gleason, Boyd Holbrook
Credits: Directed by Craig Johnson, written by Mark Heyman and Craig Johnson. A Roadside Attractions release.
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Screen Gems, which tends to cower rather than preview most of its releases, is being unusually Screen Gems-ish about “No Good Deed,” a thriller with Idris Elba as the possible home invader and Taraji P. Henson as a woman he terrorizes.

Screen Gems would not show it well in advance. They only scheduled screenings of it on Wed. night, tonight.

This AM, I get notice that they have suddenly and abruptly canceled those. Nationwide, they claim.

“Plot twist protection” they give as their excuse. No studio EVER does that. Maybe an email to critics asking us not to give this or that away (“Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves” was one time that happened).

Damaged goods that won’t be helped by reviewers reporting that is far more likely. They never hide a movie they’re proud of. UPDATE: They have even canceled the Thursday night paid showings of this that Fandango was advertising Tuesday and Wed. Man.

This is a bush league move by Screen Gems. They’ve marked their film (again) as cursed before it even opens. Considering how rarely they preview their product, thus staining every film they release as crap before anybody’s seen it, you’d think they’d catch on.

Serenely melancholy but unfailingly melodramatic, “The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby” is a tone poem to love and loss that goes on too long and is more intent on creating a sad mood than with breaking your heart or bringing you to tears.
Writer-director Ned Benson shows us a happy couple in an opening moment, an attempted suicide in the next. And for the rest of the movie, we see these two — played by Jessica Chastain and James McAvoy — unhappily separated, broken and on edge. And we see a small circle of lovers, family and friends who struggle to make eye contact, to avoid “the big conversation” with a couple that has split up for reasons that only become clear well into the story.
Eleanor grew up named for the anti-heroine of the Beatles song “Eleanor Rigby.” She shrugs that off as a whim of her parents (Isabelle Huppert, William Hurt). But we can’t help but notice “all the lonely people” around her.
She survives her suicide attempt, but as far as husband Conor is concerned, she has disappeared. Her cell is shut off, her family won’t let him contact her. We figure they have their reasons.
Conor is a failing young restaurateur running “a bar with uninspired food” with his chef-pal, Stuart, played by Bill Hader. Conor has a temper, brawling with customers, tustling with Stuart in the kitchen. His depressed restaurateur-father (Ciaran Hinds) is full of cryptic, wise-sounding advice.
“You shouldn’t be interested in regretting things.”
Eleanor’s psychology-professor dad is even more lost.
“None of us knows how to help you.”
We see her French mother, wine glass always in hand, and we watch Conor’s stumbling efforts to move on or at least keep moving. Eleanor goes back to college where Viola Davis plays her world-weary “philosophy of identity” professor, who can’t offer decent advice because she doesn’t know Eleanor’s tortured history.
And in flashbacks, we start to piece together how they all got here, a low-heat love affair that doesn’t predict, at all, where this story might go.
“Disappearance” is an interesting stunt — three films that tell this circumscribed story from two points of view. Benson created “The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Him” and a “Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Her,” for festivals and such. The U.S. release combines those two for “Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Them,” an act of common sense and mercy.
Because this story manages to be sad without ever quite achieving “moving.” The performers are all aces, and McAvoy and Chastain are able anchors, with Chastain a bit flat here, enervated being the crippled state Eleanor is supposed to be in.
But Benson drifts along on mood, giving very good actors lovely things to say, but rarely surprising us with novel treatments of this sort of break up, rarely raising the stakes.
Barmaid throws herself at Conor? Dance club pick-up tries to bed Eleanor? Even the secret source of their grief is something of a cliché.
The thing that “Disappearance” does perfectly is, unfortunately, its most anti-cinematic trait. Grief and a romantic break-up have never been more deflatingly, depressingly captured. But that’s something more to be recognized and endured than relished in a movie.
　
MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity and sexual situations
Cast: Jessica Chastain, James McAvoy, Viola Davis, Isabelle Huppert, William Hurt, Ciaran Hinds, Bill Hader
Credits: Written and directed by Ned Benson. A Weinstein Co. release.
Running time

The US version of this romance is one film, not two, a love story told from two different points of view. But in festivals, in Europe, they got “Her” and “Him” versions of the tale. Jessica Chastain and James McAvoy pair up for this Ned Benson experiment in POV, perhaps a bit less indulgent in its 2 hour long U.S. form.

“The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby” opens in limited release this Friday.

It took Australian journalist/filmmaker Genevieve Bailey six years of travel to 15 different countries, from Thailand to the U.S., Sweden to Morocco, to film “I Am Eleven,” her documentary about the state of eleven-year-olds the world over.
She wasn’t wasting her time. But diving into a corner of film in which Michael Apted’s “Seven Up Series” has long been the gold standard, with the award winning French documentary “Babies” (2010) coming out long before she finished hers, had to be daunting. She doggedly went on, filming scores of kids, more than 20 of whom her movie mentions by name.
“Eleven” turns out to be an overreach, with too many voices to be anything but superficial, too few (she skipped sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America) to be thorough. It never touches the heart the way those earlier documentaries did, even if it is informative and picturesque, as good travelogues always are.
She says in the film’s introduction that she was trying to capture the most magical year of her youth. At 11, she says, a child is learning about the ever-widening world he or she is a part of, and yet still can feel it’s “at our feet.”
“Are they having as much fun as I did?”
Then she visits an orphanage in India where the little girls are doing chores and taking care of the younger children at the home. They smile, shyly, and talk about their lives. But they’re more grateful to have a home, friends and a decent diet than concerned with “having as much fun” as Bailey.
Sihan, a girl in Morocco, takes coaching from her mother, off-camera, about the hardships of their lives (women “not allowed to work” and the men often unemployed). A stylish, introspective French kid, Remi, loves “snakes and I don’t like racist people at all.” Politically correct, even at 11.
Billy, the plump working class Brit, needs subtitles, partly because of his thick accent, partly because we learn he had learning/socializing issues when he was younger.
An Asian American smart aleck declares, “I’m going to be a tree for Christmas. Because we’re like, messed-up financially.”
Rika, the Japanese child, demonstrates the customs of her country and the pressures. She’s 11 and attending “two cram classes a week,” in addition to school, to prep her for all-important, life-altering exams.
Several children are of mixed race. Others are transplants, part of this era’s ease of movement. There’s a Swedish/Iraqi rapper and an Aussie kid living and working with a Thai one in an elephant compound in Thailand.
German and Georgian, Jewish and Aboriginal, none of the kids have anything important to say about religion, love and their hopes for the future. Because they’re 11. But Bailey asks them anyway.
The whole enterprise is beautifully shot, but feels haphazard with bits of back story filled in here, ignored there. She revisited some of the kids a few years later and we see how Grace, the British poetess is turning out, and how Sahin, the Iraqi rapper who talks a thug’s game, is settled into Sweden.
None of which adds up to much of a thesis, just an interesting skip across the surface of the planet and kids living on it.
　
MPAA Rating: unrated, would have earned a G or at most a PG.
Cast: Riko, Goh, Billy, Remi, Siham and many other children, age 11, from all over the world.
Credits: Written and directed by Genevieve Bailey. A Proud Mother/International Film Circuit release.
Running time: