Movie Nation

He first gained notice in the U.S. in “The Wire,” as a detective on that seminal cops-and-drug-dealers show.

In his native U.K., he’s done lots of films and TV, with “The Hour,” a melodrama set in the world of early British TV journalism, stands out.

Then of course he was the vulpine villain Theron in “300,” where I first paid close attention to him.

Dominic West plays Jonathan, a jaded, cynical gay actor/activist who can be the life of the party in “Pride,” the new historical dramedy about gay activists who joined Welsh miners and created an historic political alliance that changed Britain.

Questions for Mr. West? Comment below.

Say this for Ryan Philippe’s “Catch Hell.” It may be a nasty, low budget exploitative genre thriller.But it’s as timely as the latest batch of stolen celebrity cell phone photos, as pointed as every Hollywood type’s nightmares about movie making in Louisiana, which has filmmaking incentives so generous it has water-logged the geography of movie making in America.
Philippe co-wrote directed and stars in “Catch,” so it’s easy to read a lot into this performance, a low-maintenance, low wattage but still recognizable movie star reduced to making a low-budget film in Shreveport.
“I am TOTALLY regretting taking this job,” Reagan Pearce (Philippe) gripes to his agent after enduring stares the moment he gets off the plane and idiotic backslapping from the rube producer who is behind his latest cinematic shot in the dark.
“What the hell happened to my CAREER, man?”
He can’t land the lead in James Cameron’s latest and is in desperate need of a “game changer,” the agent answers. That’s why he’s in Louisiana.
So he suffers the no wi-fi “finest hotel in town,” gets up early and clambers into the van that will take him to the set. Within minutes, he realizes this van isn’t going to the set, that guys (Ian Barford, Stephen Louis Grush) who are plainly homophobic, who freely use the N-word and who don’t know “P.A.” stands for “production assistant” are not from the film. And they have violence in mind.
“I’m Diane’s husband,” the older one (Barford) growls. As violins quiver on the soundtrack, the beatings begin. The shackles come out and Reagan is locked in a shack in the middle of the swamp, with only the in-bred Junior (Grush) and gators for company. Well, Junior AND his psychotically-enraged uncle who has access to compromising cell-phone photos and messages to his wife, some distant conquest Reagan may not even remember. He is going to pay for that.
“Catch Hell” has physical torture and sexually explicit mind games. It has a star who seems resigned to his fate and willing to give up and savage bumpkins straight out of “Deliverance” ready to take out their hatred of Hollywood and Hollywood values on him.
That description gives this simple, ferociously feral thriller more depth than it deserves.
Philippe the director handles the torture scenes and the set-up well enough. But he spoils suspense, shows his hand too early and never strays from a fairly conventional, if explicit, kidnap and torture narrative. The soul searching of “Buried” is missing from the performance, the sense of paying for one’s sins is mentioned, but never felt.
That makes “Catch Hell” nothing more than the sort of exploitation film that Reagan Pearce has signed onto, in desperation, one that he and we realize will be no game changer for the movie star on screen or the one behind the camera.

(Read Roger Moore’s INTERVIEW with Ryan Phillippe).
MPAA Rating: unrated, with graphic violence, sexual violence, profanity
Cast: Ryan Philippe, Stephen Louis Grush, Ian Barford
Credits: Directed by Ryan Philippe, written by Joe Gossett, Ryan Phillippe. A Phase 4 release.
Running time: 1:38

“Automata” is yet another “Blade Runner” knock-off, a sci-fi dystopia about robots getting too smart for humanity’s own good on an already sun-cooked Earth.
The novelty in this, which owes as much — cinematically — to “I Robot” as it does the rainy perpetual darkness of “Blade Runner,” is that the robots are actual gadgets instead of animated characters. The humans are interacting with, shooting and flirting with tactile, metal things with gears and servos that aren’t covered up with human skin.
Jacq (Antonio Banderas) is a claims adjuster/trouble shooter for a robotics corporation. It is 2044, and the human race has been reduced to a few million, planet Earth having been baked and irradiated by a misfiring sun. The robots, “Pilgrims,” were first needed to build all the shields to keep out the sunlight and radiation, to stop the deserts from spreading further. Humanity has retreated to cities and grown utterly dependent on them.
Fine, so long as robots obey their two protocols. They can harm no life. They cannot alter themselves or other robots. Simple, right?
People try to scam their warranties, looking for payouts. Jacq checks out the robots to ensure that they haven’t broken those two rules — one grabs a knife to keep Jacq from stabbing himself.
“Stop! Sir! You are putting a human life in danger!”
But he spies evidence that somebody or something is violating that second protocol. Jacq is “burnt out.” He is married with a baby on the way. But the boss (Robert Forster) wants to get to the bottom of these “altered” automata.
Dylan McDermott plays a seemingly psychotic cop who shoots any robot that gives a hint that it’s not quite right. Melanie Griffith — Mrs. Banderas, until recently — plays a “clock maker” (robot tinkerer) who builds sexual escort robots that look like Melanie Griffith.
The automata themselves have a familiar design. They have the functional, flat metal faces of the robot in the animated “Iron Giant.” Except for the ones who look like Melanie Griffith. None of them, alas, have enough humanity to them to make us care if some of them are acting more human.
“To die, you have to be alive first.”
The production design here is mostly deserts and a city with huge, anti-radiation balloons hanging over it, cheap clear-plastic raincoats and the scavenged/repaired cars and trucks of a world no longer designing new ones. Banderas gamely slogs through this story fully aware that it’s not really about the acting. McDermott is the only player who makes an impression.
Co-writer/director Gabe Ibáñez steals from good films, but doesn’t add much to their themes or content. The only viewers who aren’t 45 minutes or more ahead of this tedious affair are the ones skipped the 30-plus years of science fiction films that it is built from.
MPAA Rating: R for violence, language and some sexual content
Cast: Antonio Banderas, Dylan McDermott, Melanie Griffith, Birgitte Hjort Sørensen, Robert Forster
Credits: Directed by Gabe Ibáñez, screenplay by Gabe Ibanez, Igor Legarreta and Javier Sánchez Donate. A Millennium release.
Running time: 1:50

Hilary “Million Dollar Baby” Swank’s latest transformative performance has her taking on the doomed descent of someone suffering from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. ALS is probably best-known these days as the “Ice Bucket Challenge” disease.
If that’s a glib way of characterizing “Lou Gehrig’s Disease” it suits this “Disease of the Week” film treatment of it — glib.
Swank shows, in gestures and gasping, hoarsening voice, the progression of the illness from that first dropped glass to the moment Kate, her character, realizes that her career as a concert pianist is over.
That’s when she meets Bec (Emmy Rossum), a would-be songwriter, perpetual college student and hard-drinking caregiver prone to one-night stands and tactlessly blurting out whatever thought pops into her head.
Such as this plug for why she should become Kate’s helper-nurse.
“I can’t cook anything. Not even Pop Tarts.”
Even though Kate’s detail-oriented husband (Josh Duhamel) disapproves, this is who Kate wants managing her life and body as she loses control over both. And even Bec’s giggling, clumsy handling of that first time she helps the wheelchair-bound Kate use the bathroom doesn’t change the patient’s mind.
Rossum plays Bec as fiesty, but self-involved and not the sort of young woman who gets all weepy over her employer’s death sentence. The hardest things to believe here is Kate’s decision to hire her and any growing affection between them. They’re quite different, as their attempts at girltalk make plain. Bec is rude, a hard-swearing, unfiltered sort and inept at many of the things Kate needs.
The renowned stage director turn “chick picture” director George C. Wolfe (“Nights in Rodanthe”) has a nice touch with several scenes. We never see Kate’s doctor’s face. He is blunt, professional, distant and anonymous.
“This process only moves in one direction.”
Duhamel is decent at playing the noble heel of a husband, and Rossum is best at playing the gorgeous girl who dresses down, drinks and embodies Kate’s philosophy of misplaced love.
“Why is it that we want the ones who see us instead of the ones who do?”
But Bec keeps translating for Kate, whose inability to breathe is making her hard to understand. Only it isn’t. Swank is close-miked and perfectly understandable. Loretta Devine (“For Colored Girls”) is more vital and wholly believable as a fellow ALS sufferer in just a couple of upbeat but sad, gasping scenes (Ernie Hudson plays her husband).
ALS is a terrible disease, worthy as a cause and as the subject of a movie. But even though its parameters are vividly sketched out here, “You’re Not You” fails to bring us the fear or the tears that this story warrants. It sticks in the mind no longer than it takes you to change shirts after that ice bucket dunking.

MPAA Rating: R for some sexual content, language and brief drug use
Cast: Hilary Swank, Emmy Rossum, Josh Duhamel, Loretta Devine, Ali Larter
Credits: Directed by George C. Wolfe , screenplay by Shana Feste and
Jordan Roberts . An eOne release.
Running time: 1:42

“Meet the Mormons” is a slick, upbeat Church of Latter Day Saints-backed documentary that aims to answer the image of the church and its members “shaped by the media and popular culture.”
A quick montage of pop culture ridicule of Mormons and Mormonism hits on that — “What are you, Mormon?” punchlines from films such as “Fletch,” “Burn After Reading” and “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” open mockery by the “The Simpsons” and “South Park.”
And the film’s narrator, Jenna Kim Jones, finds New York’s Times Square full of people with “misconceptions” about Latter Day Saints — “Lots of wives. “Lots of kids.” “Racists.”
But “Mormons,” the fresh-faced blue-eyed blond narrator informs us, “come in all shapes, sizes, shapes and colors.”
So the film shows us an African American Mormon bishop and his family in Atlanta. We meet Ken Niumatalolo, Mormon coach of the football team at the U.S. Naval Academy. We travel to Nepal where a native who has converted is helping build schools and water systems, to Costa Rica, where kickboxer Carolina Muñoz Marin trains, with her husband.
We meet a surviving hero of the Berlin airlift and a young man of mixed race, born out of wedlock, now old enough to go to South Africa to do his two years as a Mormon missionary.
Catholic and Baptist relatives in various countries proclaim their tolerance for the converted.
“I’m not pushing my religion on anybody,” Coach Niumatalolo assures the viewer as he notes that he decreed that his team will not do prep work on the Sabbath.
A Sunday school teacher asks a ten-year-old, “How can you dress modestly for the heavenly Father?”
Their wholesomeness is refreshing. Their optimism, and the film’s, is boundless.
But from the cherry-picked “stereotypes” to the sins of omission that follow, “Meet the Mormons” is nothing but propaganda. The film addresses the church’s reputation for “racism” without mentioning the long history in which that was true. The same gloss-it-over approach is used on the church’s sexist, patriarchal heritage.
And nobody brings up the homophobia that stormed out of the closet when Mormon money and organizers pushed California’s anti-gay Proposition 8 — “Proposition Hate,” it was nicknamed.
There have been Mormon-made movies that approach the religion, its history and reputation with a more open mind — Richard Dutcher’s “God’s Army” is the best of those.
But by being, in essence, a wholesome, sugar-coated recruiting film, “Meet the Mormons” — in 250 theaters this weekend — seems destined to preach only to the choir, the most famous of which is in that Salt Lake City Tabernacle.

MPAA Rating: PG for some thematic elements
Cast: Ted Niumatalolo, Col. Gail Halvorsen, Carolina Munez
Credits: Written and directed by Blair Treu. A Purdie release.
Running time: 1:19

(Read a review of “Missionary,” a new Mormon-bashing indie thriller)

Bill Murray’s annual aim for the Oscars? Melissa McCarthy’s redemption for “Tammy”?

Oh I hope so. Kid living with his mom, parents divorced, befriends the engaging layabout who lives next door. Naomi Watts also stars.

“St. Vincent” opens in limited release Friday, wider release in coming weeks.

Consider the phrase “Rockwell crackles.” It’s often turned up in reviews of Sam Rockwell’s film performances over the years, in Amber Wilkinson’s plug for his latest, “Laggies,” in London’s Daily Telegraph newspaper, for instance.

All that crackling comes by design — a raised eyebrow, a laid-back, Christopher Walken-esque way with a line, a deftly-delivered put down, all “part of the souffle” of a performance, Rockwell says. And once he’s worked out the ingredients he wants to use, his character’s entrance is where he shoves that dish into the oven.

“I love a great entrance,” he says. Craig, his divorced lawyer/single dad in “Laggies” has one. The film is about a woman (Keira Knightley) who hides from the adult life she’s not quite worked out by hanging out with high school kids — one kid in particular — for a week. Chloe Grace Moretz plays the kid, Rockwell’s Craig is her father.

“Craig comes on at just the right moment in the film,” Rockwell says. “Because it changes when Keira’s character has an adult to confront with what she’s doing. That’s why the entrance is a big deal. Like Kramer on ‘Seinfeld,’ right?

“So you work on it. Every little detail makes a difference in how you regard the character. He’s got to be a little guilty, being a single parent. Over-compensating, maybe. He’s trying too hard to be the cool dad. But he’s the lawyer dad.”

So Craig bursts in on daughter and daughter’s new grownup pal with an “A-HA!” Cool Dad, joking around with his kid. Forgetting to knock. He sees who she’s with and blurts out the first thing that comes to mind.

“Wow,” he says, looking Knightley up and down. ” High school students are looking rougher and ROUGHER these days.”

In just a line, Craig establishes himself as the cool dad, but the concerned and involved father. He’s raised an eyebrow at something inappropriate and insulted a beautiful woman. Because, who knows? She might be a drug dealer luring his kid to her doom.

“Hey, did you hear about the grown woman who started hanging out with a bunch of pubescent kids? No, I’ve never heard of that either.”

In “Laggies,” Rockwell, the king of quirky since way before “The Way, Way Back,” plays an adult.

“Yeah. A totally new thing for me, being the ‘adult.’ First time for everything, right?”

The novelty in that didn’t mean extra prep time, because “I’m kind of at that age now where I sort of AM this guy, you know? A little bit. He wasn’t that big of a reach. Aging yuppie? I can do that. Not far at all from who I am.”

Director Lynn Shelton, of “Your Sister’s Sister,” makes chatty, touchy-feely comedies like “Touchy Feely” and “Your Sister’s Sister.” She relies on actors who can analyze a script and bring more than what’s on the page to her films, part of that “mumblecore” genre of talkative, insightful romances.

“I like rom-coms that make you think,” Rockwell says. “This reminded me of ‘Desperately Seeking Susan,’ with Keira as a version of Susan. Or a John Cusack movie, where he’s gone off in ‘Grosse Point Blank’ to figure his stuff out. In our movie, it’s a chick. Keira’s doing that. And I get to be a sort of eyewitness to that. Kind of the Tom Hanks part, or the Paul Rudd role. You know, the straight man. The adult. I like being the adult.”

At 45, Rockwell is in his four-films-a-year prime. He likes jumping back and forth, from lead roles to supporting parts. He likes making a cool entrance. Watch for him doing that in an upcoming remake of “Poltergeist,” He turns everybody he plays, serious or comic, into someone a little off center. And he likes characters whose function in the film is pivotal, clearly defined, even if the role seems small. He only shows up in “Laggies” half way into the film, but Craig and Rockwell change it.

“I like to think she brings out the kid in him, and he makes her think adult thoughts. Oh yes.”

“Gone Girl” has the Oscar hype. “Annabelle” is a reliably scary horror picture.

“Gone Girl” had a good Friday. “Annabelle” had a HUGE Friday.

And now, as the Oscar contender pulled in its huge audience for the weekend on Saturday, and “Annabelle” didn’t tail off as expected, we’ve got a bonafide Box Office race to the finish.

By midnight Sunday, we could be looking at a $37 to $37 million tie.

Not bad. I saw “Annabelle” with an audience of folks young enough to not be jaded by its tired horror tropes and weak acting. They shrieked in all the right places. It works. Simple effects, simple frights, yeah we have our umpeenth haunted doll story (“The Simpsons” made fun of that chestnut on a “Halloween Treehouse of Horror” episode in the early ’90s).

But people are getting their shrieks out.

“Left Behind” isn’t drawing the Rapture crowd the way the people who can Nic Cage in the lead expected. That audience is staying home, watching church and Ebola Scares on Fox News.

“Boxtrolls” is having a big second weekend, “Equalizer” didn’t fall off as much as it should have. “Maze Runner” is still in the top five and turning into a franchise.

Yes, we know who he used to be married to.  But there’s considerably more to Ryan Phillippe than who his ex is.

He’s been in ensemble hits such as “Gosford Park” and “Crash,” “The Bang Bang Club,” “Stop Loss,” he was the villain of “The Lincoln Lawyer.” The guy works. A lot.

He makes his directing debut with a nasty little movie-biz-savvy kidnapping thriller, “Catch Hell,” which he also stars in.

He plays an actor, a bit on the downward side of the career arc, forced to take a job on an indie thriller to be shot in Louisiana. And just as he’s gritting his teeth to get through it, he’s taken hostage, dragged out into the bayou, chained up and tortured.

A comment on movie making in Jindaliana? On the fickle nature of fame? What it takes to get attention these days as an actor?

Questions for Ryan Phillippe? Comment below.