Movie Nation

Science fiction cinema doesn’t get much more beautifully strange than “The Signal.”
An alien-interaction thriller that borrows from generations of such films that preceded it, it has the visual tone, production design and especially sound design to rival the best recent films in the genre.
It features a compelling young cast and a wizened, inscrutable veteran of the genre as the chief antagonist.
And then the filmmakers trip over themselves with a too-conventional/too exposition-heavy “Let us explain this to you” finale that kind of unravels the strangeness that preceded it.
“Signal ” begins as “Catfish,” three college kids played Brenton Thwaites, Olivia Cooke, Beau Knapp are driving a battered Volvo cross-country. They’re M.I.T. students, and they’re being hounded by a hacker.
“Nomad” is “messing with us again,” Nick (Thwaites) warns Jonah (Knapp). They taunt the hacker, and the hacker taunts back — turning on the camera of a nearby computer in the hotel room they’ve just checked into, posting traffic camera shots of their trek, messing with their heads.
Nick, who suffers from a debilitating illness that has him on crutches, ignores his girlfriend’s first warning.
“You guys should just stop taunting him.”
Nick used to be a jock, a cross country star. Now, he’s looking at a less and less mobile future, he’s moving that girlfriend, Haley (Cooke) across country where she’ll attend Cal Tech. He’s irked, and he’s arrogant.
“It’s CRAZY not to go after this guy.”
He and Jonah trace Nomad to an address in the middle of the Nevada desert. “This doesn’t look right,” especially in the dark. And “Nick, you know this is stupid, right?” has no effect.
Next thing you know, screams, a supernatural event and Nick wakes up in what appears to be an underground research lab of the type we’ve seen in films from “The Andromeda Strain” to “The Stand,” where everybody wears elaborate haz-mat suits, including Dr. Damon (Laurence Fishburne), who quietly, calmly, asks questions. And gives one answer.
“You’ve made contact.”
Director William Eubank handles the script’s “How can I get out of this place?” sequence with skill. Nick’s methodical problem solving and reasoning, and his rising rage (he can see Haley is in a coma in another sealed room) bring out his arrogance.
“You’re dinosaurs with government grants,” he fumes. “You’re a relic protecting ruins.”
Is that him insulting Dr. Damon, or some higher intelligence infecting him?
Thwaites, the Aussie actor who is Prince Phillip in “Maleficent,” makes a great, empathetic presence at the center of this, and Knapp (“Super 8”) a credible foil, even if the hacker with thick glasses is a genre cliche.
But what makes “The Signal” work, up until it turns predictable, is the world they place these characters in. Meghan C. Rogers’ production design, David Lanzenberg’s cinematography (lovely flashbacks to Nick’s cross-country sprints in the woods in springtime), Nima Fakhrara’s eerie score and the overall sound design are top drawer.
So even though “Signal” isn’t great sci-fi, you’d never know it to look at it and listen to it.
　
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some thematic elements, violence and language
Cast: Brenton Thwaites, Olivia Cooke, Beau Knapp, Laurence Fishburne, Lin Shaye
Credits: Directed by William Eubank, written by Carlyle Eubank, William Eubank and David Frigerio . A Focus Features release.
Running time:

They should’ve killed him when they had the chance.

Twas ever thus in revenge thrillers. The “hero” is wronged, injured, left for dead.

Only he isn’t. And since he’s Guy “Memento” Pearce, we reckon there’ll be heck to pay.

“The Rover” is set in post Apocalyptic Australia, somewhere between the end of “Mad Max” and before “The Road Warrior,” judging from it. Not that it ties directly to the Mel Gibson/George Miller saga. Something about the arid wastelands of Australia’s interior suggest End Times.

An unnamed, sun-spotted, disheveled man pulls up to what amounts to a roadhouse. Guy Pearce doesn’t pretty up to play this guy — hair thinning, beard greying. He hasn’t even finished his drink when a trio of robbers (Scoot McNairy, David Field and Tawanda Manyimo), one of them bleeding, have run their SUV into the ditch. They steal the Man with No Name’s car.

He rescues their SUV and chases them — a cat and mouse run through the wilderness. They’re armed, he’s not. But he’s kind of crazy.

“I want my car back.”

That’s when they have their chance. That’s when they don’t kill him. And that’s when the pursuit turns maniacal, dogged and something almost epic.

Robert Pattinson plays a Southern fried member of their gang left for dead at the heist. He’s bloodied and “Deliverance” simple but coherent enough to recognize the getaway car that our hero is chasing the bad men in. Pearce’s No Name takes the young guy hostage, hoping he’ll lead him back to the three — back to his car.

David “Animal Kingdom” Michod co-wrote and directed this thriller, neatly depicting a world in partial decay. Roadside motels cling to life, convenience stores are armored and their owners armed.

“American dollars only. Take it or leave it.”

There are soldiers, barely making an effort to maintain law and order, guarding trainloads of coal which seems to keep the power on, in some places. Mainly the Army is just protecting or avenging their own.

Every argument is short and bullet-riddled. It is everyone out for himself, and a person hoping for a glint of humanity in this future will be hard pressed to find much of it.

At the center of this is the irredeemable, silent hero, played by Pearce. Everybody asks him questions. What’s his name, why does he have to get this car back? He never answers, not in the first two acts of “The Rover.” He answers every question with a question, until finally the fidgety simpleton Rey (Pattinson, in a very mannered performance) wears him down.

“You should never stop thinking about a life you’ve taken. That’s the price you pay for taking it.”

“The Rover” — the title is another long-unanswered question — is as violent and primal as “Animal Kingdom,” but not as brisk. The film grinds to a halt in between confrontations. And those shoot-outs are simple, direct and bloody, not “staged” in the Hollywood sense.

But it’s a film that greatly benefits from an unfussy, nihilistic turn by Pearce, one so devoid of vanity that you kind of wish he’d landed the lead in next year’s “Mad Max” revival. He didn’t, but “The Rover” is very much in that spirit. Pearce, in “The Rover,” is the epitome of the Man Who Has Lost Everything, including, perhaps, his name.

MPAA Rating: R for language and some bloody violence

Cast: Guy Pearce, Robert Pattinson, Scoot McNairy

Credits: Written and directed by David Michod, based on a story by Joel Edgerton and David Michod. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:42

　
You’re pretty much going to have to see “22 Jump Street” twice — just to catch all the jokes the roars of laughter make you miss.
No kidding, when this buddy cop parody hits its sweet spots — bromance gags carried to hilarious extremes by Jonah Hill and Channing Tatum, too-dumb-to-be-a-cop riffs by Tatum and a couple of vintage, sneering rants by Ice Cube — “22,” the sequel to “21,” only “exactly the same” as the first film (a running gag) becomes a “see it again on Netflix when I can hear it all” experience.
This comedy produces the biggest, loudest laughs of any movie this summer.
Undercover cops Jenko and Schmidt are sent off to M.C. State University to track down a new designer drug that college kids are using to help them focus. It’s called “WhyPhy.”
“I’m the first person in my family to pretend to go to college!”
They try to blend in by doing slam poetry, by pledging a frat, attending classes that are out of their dimwitted depth, hitting parties and asking around about the drug and this coed who died because of something she knew about it.
But they’re not fooling anybody.
“He’s like a 30 year old eighth grader!”
“Tell us about the war…ANY of them.”
The filmmakers and the cast mock the idea of a sequel and get away with doing exactly what they’re mocking, even if “It’s always worse the second time around.”
Ice Cube, making the most of just few scenes, lands more laughs with a scowl or three than he has in his last five pictures
And Tatum and Hill take their characters’ relationship to the next level of bromance, toying with the idea of “an open…investigation,” learning from their human sexuality class how inappropriate each can be.
“Did you know I used homophobic slurs in high school?”
“Yes, aimed at me.”
Pretty funny line, coming from Jonah Hill, who just had to apologize for calling a paparazzo a homophobic slur. There are other coincidences — Maya Angelou and Tracy Morgan jokes — that give the comedy an eerie currency.
Hill scores with an epic girlfight and a blast of slam poetry. Tatum is comically convincing as a walk-on superstar tight end for the football team, and a parkour-loving jock who climbs walls, and finds a new BFF in an Owen Wilson-look-alike quarterback (Wyatt Russell).
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A pack of credited writers, and the co-directors of the first film, those “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs” guys Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, conjure up good, quick footed and foul-mouthed fun. It goes on way too long, peaks too early and sputters before rallying with a frothy finale and a closing credits gag that kills, but also goes on too long.
That doesn’t much matter. Hill and Tatum are the unlikeliest of big screen odd couples, a happy-goofy one that seems headed for a long and fruitful relationship — homoerotic or not. And you’re still going to need to see this one twice to get all the sight gags, punchlines and pratfalls that this “exactly the same” sequel serves up.
MPAA Rating: R for language throughout, sexual content, drug material, brief nudity and some violence
Cast: Channing Tatum, Jonah Hill, Ice Cube, Amber Stevens, Jillian Bell, The Lucas Brothers, Peter Stormare
Credits: Directed Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, scripted by Michael Bacall, Oren Uziel and
Rodney Rothman, based on the Fox TV show. A Sony/Columbia-MGM release.
Running time: 1:52

“The Human Race” is one of those “don’t get too attached to anybody” horror pictures, a lower-than-low budget variation of every race/chase/pick’em off, one-by-one horror tale since Edgar Allan Poe invented the genre and Agatha Christie perfected it.
But for a no-budget splatter film, it has ambition and wit, and writer-director Paul Hough shows promise.
We meet a broad assortment of people — the girl diagnosed with cancer (Brianna Lauren Jackson), the two combat vets from the Afghan War (Paul McCarthy-Boyington, Eddie McGee), the deaf couple (Trista Robinson, T. Arthur Cottam) — just random folks having sometimes random, sometimes exceptional days. Eddie (McGee), for instance, returned from the war with just one leg, and he crawls out of the bed of his latest sexual conquest at the behest of his Army buddy, Justin (McCarthy-Boyington). Justin Eddie as an inspirational speaker at the disabled kids’ school where Justin teaches.
Then a flash of light. Everybody — even the deaf folks, hears a voice.
“The House, the School and The Prison are ‘safe.’ Stay on the path, or you die. Follow the arrows, or you die… Race, or die.”
Next thing they all know, they’re gathered on a sidewalk that connects a house, a school and a prison. And they’re off, some sprinting, some elbowing others aside, some stumbling into the grass whereupon their heads promptly explode.
“The Human Race” follows this assembly of 80 or so people, all hearing a voice that calls out their shrinking ranks as some die a careless death and others are ruthlessly dispatched in this win-or-die footrace — “44, 43, 42…”
It’s not fair. Eddie has one leg, and crutches. An aged ex-Marine has a walker. One woman is pregnant, and two small children are caught up in the field, too. One runners figures to go all out to spring and lap the other competitors, killing them all. And there are murderous thugs and snickering sociopaths in their midst, who have the rest of the runners at a disadvantage.
So the priest (B. Anthony Cohen) who has an explanation for “What is HAPPENING to us?” only THINKS he has the answer.
“It’s Purgatory.” Since these deaths are undeserving and the righteous don’t have a prayer, that doesn’t wash, Padre. Take care that your own head doesn’t explode.
Deconstructing this, one would guess that Hough had access to some specific sets and a few actor friends with sign language skills or a single leg (McGee doesn’t have to fake that). Hough built a movie out of those ingredients.
There are nicely-staged one-legged-man fight scenes and sign language debates.
“The only thing I hear is DEATH!”
And there are effects that hint at this version of the “fight to the death” scenario’s origins. Think William Shatner, shirtless.
It’s not art. But “The Human Race” does manage to take a worn out formula and nonsense story and finds a few novel touches, a little humor and hints of pathos in between the exploding heads.
　
　
MPAA Rating: unrated, with bloody assaults, sexual violence, profanity
Cast: Paul McCarthy-Boyington, Eddie McGee, Trista Robinson, Brianna Lauren Jackson
Credits: Written and directed Paul Hough. An XLRator Media release.
Running time: 1:27

“Unsustainable” has become our watchword for a bubble about to burst, a system — financial, climatological or health care — on the brink of collapse.
The experts in “Ivory Tower” use it, with varying degrees of alarm, to describe the state of college education in America.
Andrew Rossi’s documentary is a bit scatter shot in its approach. It broadly laments the collapse of America’s contract with kids — to educate them, get them into a college and into a career or careers and a life that college helps prepare them for — and narrowly zeroes in on a myriad of causes for this.
It’s built around an interview with educational theorist Andrew Delbanco of Columbia University, who uses words like “apocalyptic” and “time bomb” to describe the threats that the very idea of higher learning faces. There’s student debt, a system with misplaced priorities, students unprepared for college, and growth-obsessed colleges dealing with kids as sources of income, commodities to be lured with amenities, “perks” and lifestyle upgrades.
The film drops in on Arizona State University and lays bare the costs of getting a reputation as a “party school.” Schools like ASU, experts suggest, depend on out of state students who are “less academically inclined,” paying a premium to attend a college with big time athletics teams, pool parties and a lively pub crawl nearby.
“Just give them beer and circuses,” one of the authors of a book about that, “Paying for the Party”, complains.
We meet dedicated kids who have made it into Harvard, or who attend classes at the rigorous, desert-set Deep Springs College and meet the activists at Cooper Union, a legendary “free” admissions New York college which has made financial and real estate blunders that forced it to start charging students tuition for the first time in 150 years.
The film also finds students buried under debt and suggests many push for degrees simply as a way of “putting off thinking about the future.”
The larger worry in play here is that colleges, battling their way to the bottom to maintain enrollment, have dumbed down their degrees, that a legacy of the Reagan Revolution may be that colleges, which used to be subsidized because the nation as a whole valued higher education, is returning to something only a rich elite can afford. Governor Jerry Brown talks about what happened to California’s iconic state college system was and how deep in the hole it is today.
And somehow, in it’s 90 brisk minutes, “Ivory Tower” finds the time to look at and, on occasion, shoot down solutions to the myriad problems suggested by overbuilt, over-enrolled degree factories with athletic teams. MOOC — Massive Open Online Courses? “Hacking” college through Uncollege.org? A return to what community colleges used to be charged with doing?
Those many subjects mean that most of what is addressed here is only touched on. “Ivory Tower” plays like a prospectus for a series of films, a “Cosmos” on higher education that could explain what we used to expect out of colleges, how that worked and how far society, government, the institutions and those chasing degrees in them have drifted from that. As it is, this film doesn’t dwell on any problem or solution long enough to get us outraged or inspired to insist on a change for the better.
　
　
MPAA Rating:PG-13 for some suggestive and partying images
Cast: Andrew Delbanco, Elizabeth A. Armstrong, Jerry Brown, Peter Schiff, Richard Arum, Drew Faust, David Boone
Credits: Written and directed by Andrew Rossi. A Samuel Goldwyn/CNN Films release.
Running time: 1:31

Rare is the end-of-life melodrama that doesn’t traffic in “Disease of the Week/Weeper of the Week” cliches. “Lullaby” certainly does.

But this terminal illness tale rises above the form, mainly thanks to a stellar cast and a refusal to drift into maudlin, a film that saves its big emotions for a wrenching finale that it earns.

Garrett Hedlund plays Jonathan, a young musician used to getting his by on his looks and charm. Sparkle those eyes a little and stewardesses won’t arrest him for smoking in the lavatory of the plane that is taking him to the side of his dying father.

The first sign that baby blues won’t deliver, this time, is when a too-sassy nurse (Oscar winner Jennifer Hudson) berates the chain smoker for “bringing that into MY hospital.” She doesn’t care what crutches he needs to face his father’s death. Dad (Richard Jenkins) has accepted it.

“I’m done. My body is ruined.” All he wants is to “look at you all with clear eyes one last time,” but his son isn’t having it. And neither is Jonathan’s sister, Karen (Jessica Brown Findlay), a lawyer who isn’t keen on dad’s plan to turn off life support and end his life with some dignity, an effort his wife/their mother (Anne Archer) supports, with tears. So does his doctor (Terrence Howard), also with tears.

Did I mention Dad’s battle has been going on for over twenty years? Disease fatigue, the trauma of living under the cloud of death that has been hanging over the old man, may be in play. So might the realization that Dad, a pillar of the New York business community, may have a fortune to pass on. That isn’t why Karen has her legal briefs in a bunch, but it could be.

Enter the sick teenager in a different ward. Jessica Barden plays Meredith, 17, bald and doomed, bumming a cigarette off Jonathan and dumping a little wisdom on him the way such wise children do in such movies.

“If you think he wants to die, you’re wrong,” she counsels. “If he says he’s not in pain, he’s lying.”

Things come to a head as all must rally to organize one last Passover Seder for Dad (they’re Jewish). Distant relations and friends flood the hospital, further confusing the kids. Who ARE these people?

“They watched you get circumcised.”

Can Meredith take part?

“Are you Jewish? I’ll pour some Manischewitz…”

Writer-director Andrew Levitas put the burden of keeping the tone light but grim on Jenkins and Barden, and it pays off as both players manage a fine balance between amusing and pitiful. Hudson’s nurse may be using her “Oh no you DIDN’T” sass to cope with the death all around her. And Hedlund, using some of his “Country Strong” musical chops and his headstrong “Tron” youthful blundering, makes Jonathan a compelling surrogate for the audience, a man dealing, uncertainly, with death for the first time in his privileged life.

Thanks to them, “Lullaby” works. They don’t so much add new words to this familiar song as manage to not botch this interpretation of it.

MPAA Rating:R for language and brief drug use

Cast: Garrett Hedlund, Jessica Barden, Richard Jenkins, Jennifer Hudson, Jessica Brown Findlay, Anne Archer, Amy Adams, Terrence Howard

Credits: Written and directed by Andrew Levitas. An Arc Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:57

Something about the label “Hellion” implies a sense of impish fun and
mischief. But 13 year-old Jacob Wilson (Josh Wiggins) sets fires, trashes
vehicles in the parking lot while his fellow Texans enjoy a high school football
game and has so much rage in him that he’s already a familiar figure to the
cops.
Jacob is the unlikely anti-hero of “Hellion,” a messed-up kid taking out his
hurt and resentment on most of those around him, especially his dad (Aaron Paul
of “Need for Speed” and “Breaking Bad”), Hollis.
Something bad happened in this family. Hollis, a carpenter, crawls into a
beer can, even on those weekends when he’s hammering away at the family’s dream
house, a vacation getaway in nearby Galveston that represents a last link to the
absent mother in this household of males.
Jacob’s run-ins with the law are not solo, but he’s got a code — “I don’t
rat out my crew.”
And lectures from Hollis don’t carry any weight — “Take responsibility,
Jacob.” Dad doesn’t seem to be very good at that, either.
The real tragedy here is ten-year-old Wes (Deke Garner), who idolizes Jacob
and wants to run with his self-destructive/property-destroying “crew.” Jacob is
young enough and delusional enough that he means it when he tells the kid
brother, “I swear I won’t let anything happen to you.”
“Hellion” is an accident waiting to happen, a tragedy unfolding. Latchkey
kids, hyped up on sugary sodas, junk food and speed metal, bored when dad takes
Jacob’s motorbike away, are headed for trouble.
Juliette Lewis is the kindly aunt — sister of their dead mom — who figures
in the story when Jacob’s many run-ins with the law bring the cops and child
welfare down on the family.
I like the way writer-director Kat Candler, expanding a short film she made a
few years back, doesn’t give away the whole back-story — what killed the
mother, who might have been to blame. I don’t like the film’s contrived,
melodramatic climax, or this whole story thread where hotshot motocross rider
Jacob figures he can solve all their problems by winning “the Big Race.”
But “Hellion” is involving, sobering and very well-acted, with nice turns by
young Wiggins and especially by Aaron Paul — playing a broken man who has just
enough of a grasp of what he’s supposed to be doing to realize the life-scarring
mistakes he’s making with these boys.
As coming-of-age melodramas go, “Hellion” offers a rare and engrossing
glimpse into a working class nightmare, a lifestyle of indulged biker-kids,
guns, violence and beer that is every bit the trap we consider our inner cities
to be.

MPAA Rating: unrated, with teen violence, smoking
Cast: Josh Wiggins, Aaron Paul, Juliette Lewis, Deke Garner
Credits: Written and directed by Kat Candler. An IFC release.
Running time: 1:39

Imagine a Pedro Almodovar horror comedy.
There’d be violence and cross-dressing, graphic discussion of exotic sexual practices and homo-eroticism. Gender politics would take center stage.
It would have witches, naturally. And Carmen Maura would play their queen.
“Witching and Bitching” is a madcap Spanish farce by Alex de la Iglesia. It’s the best Almodovar movie Almodovar never made, a riotous, gory farce that might be the funniest movie of the summer, and surely is the coolest.
It begins with a sell-your-gold shop robbery on Madrid’s popular square, the Puerto del Sol, with robbers dressed as street mimes staging a heist that goes comically, bloodily wrong.
Jose (Hugo Silva) is the leader, painted up as silver-coated Jesus, pulling a shotgun out of the cross he totes on his back. Tony (Mario Casas) is painted up like a plastic green toy soldier. Only his machine gun is real. There’s an Uzi-packing Sponge Bob, an Invisible Man.
But a little boy (Gabriel Delgado) is their lookout.
“You brought the boy?” Tony fumes.
“I get him Tuesdays and alternate weekends,” Jose, whom Tony keeps calling “Jesus,” explains.
That leads to a rant about alimony and custody and judges prejudiced against fathers and next thing you know, security guards and customers — all hostages in the store — are bickering, taking sides and generally wigging out.
That happens a lot in “Witching and Bitching,” that second half of the title.
There are heated debates in the taxi they hijack as a getaway car, with the cabbie, Manuel (Jaime Ordóñez) throwing in his lot with the surviving members of the gang. Their haul? A sack full of pawned wedding bands.
“Thousands of broken promises…broken dreams…lies..cheating…”
Symbolic? You bet.
Sergio is tickled at all the shooting and screeching tires, especially when Manual takes off through the woods.
“Again! AGAIN!”
And then they stumble into Zugarramurdi, an infamous village on the French border. Manuel’s heard of it, but the rest soon catch on to what it is. The freaks that surround them, the cauldron, the bizarre dishes on the menu at the diner — the troll that seems to live in the toilet. This is home to Spain’s witches. These guys want to gripe about how awful their womenfolk are, what “brujas” (witches) they can be? They’re confronted with the real thing, a matriarchal culture which might have use for what those wedding bands represent and have a taste for “pure” little boys.
De la Iglesia (“The Oxford Murders”) keeps the patter manic and testy and adds just enough lulls in the action to make his big special effects/action set pieces stand out. Carolina Bang plays a ravenous and sexy daughter witch with an eye for Jose. Maura, a veteran of many an Almodovar comedy, is her mother, the queen.
Silva, star of Almodovar’s “I’m So Excited!” is an agreeably scruffy, nonchalant leading man. He gives Jose a sexy, irresponsible, making-it-up-as-he-goes edge, traits that rear their head whenever Jose’s incompetent parenting skills are questioned.
“Do you have a kid? No? Then SHUT up!”
“Witching” is a trifle on the long side, but de la Iglesias builds the action to a fine climax, and then tops it with his epic finale, which seems to employ every extra in Spain and every special effects artist, too.
But whatever the film’s horror chops, cinematic battles of the sexes are rarely this much fun.
　
MPAA Rating: Unrated, with graphic violence, nudity and profanity
Cast: Hugo Silva, Mario Casas, Carolina Bang, Macarena Gómez, Carmen Maura
Credits: Directed by Álex de la Iglesia, written by Jorge Guerricaechevarría and Álex de la Iglesia. An IFC release.
Running time: 1:53

How hard can it be to get “A Coffee in Berlin”? Damned near impossible, it turns out.
Niko (Tom Schilling) is a baby-faced lad of about 20, has no luck finding a
cup. And in this winning, dry and hip character comedy, he’s a bit lost.oiding
commitment to his cute girlfriend.
Thanks to multiple drunk driving incidents, he can’t drive, though that’s not
a huge problem. He lives in Berlin. Maybe that’s why the court-appointed
counselor gives him “the Idiot Test,” and insults his height, his sexuality and
assorted other physical attributes. It’s probably the only real punishment he’ll
face.

Yeah, interrogations like this ALWAYS sound rough in the original German
(with English subtitles).

Niko has no job, dropped out of law school, something he didn’t tell his
father, who supports him.
He gives his last change to a homeless guy, only to have the ATM eat his
card. No, there is no graceful way to get that change back.
“A Coffee in Berlin” follows Niko through a long day and night in the city,
catching up with his actor-too-cool-to-ever-take-a-role pal, visiting a friend of
on the set of a World War II drama. It’s not really a compliment, telling Phillip (“That suit looks good on
you,” when he’s dressed as a Nazi.
Niko stumbles into a girl who had a crush on him in high school.
“I even tried to kill myself,” Julika (Friederike Kempter) burbles. She was
fat, then, and he didn’t know she existed. So, out of guilt, he and Matze check out her performance art theater piece.
The first running gag in Jan Ole Gerster’s austere, black and white comedy is
that Niko cannot find a cup of coffee to save his life — the espresso machine
is broken at the cafe where he goes, the movie set coffee thermos has just emptied, the
bartender has “just cleaned the machine” for the night, his dad insists he have
a drink instead of coffee when Niko shows up, at the country club, to bum more
cash.

Another gag, Niko seemingly inspires arguments almost everywhere he goes. He
is a provocation — to his dad, his girlfriend, to the subway cops who accuse
him of riding without a ticket, to the performance art director, to the once-fat
“I don’t understand people” is his mantra, but he keeps making these
connections — however clumsy.
Aside from those running gags and themes, “A Coffee in Berlin” has a
wonderful romance about it. Blame the black and white photography, write it off
to the underside of a beautiful foreign city that the movie shows us, but this
2012 film, just now clearing the festival circuit and making into American
theaters, is an engaging take on a drifting character at an age when we’re all
adrift. Speaking German, photographed in black and white and wandering Berlin,
smoking and hunting for coffee, Niko is the very definition of hipster/slacker. And
Schilling, with Gerster tossing a wide
variety of characters in a sea of uncomfortable situations at him, just owns it.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, with adult
situations, smoking, drinking, profanity
Cast: Tom Schilling
Credits: Written and directed by Jan Ole Gerster. A Music Box release.
Running time: 1:25

Small, remote town pulls every trick in the book to land itself a much-needed town doctor. The locals are always colorful and quirky, the new doc, a Big Medicine cynic.

Maybe he’s a New Yorker, as he was on TV’s “Northern Exposure. Maybe he’s a would-be plastic surgeon, as he was in “Doc Hollywood.”

Or maybe he’s French Canadian, as he was in 2003’s “Seducing Doctor Lewis,” and it’s new remake, “The Grand Seduction.” It’s a formula comedy in which the formula works as well as it ever has, thanks largely to a winning cast and a heightened sexual twist to its “We need a doc to survive as a town” message.

Tickle Cove used to be an island fishing town where men had work and provided for their families, where men felt like men, cutely illustrated by a town wide sex scene in an opening flashback.

“Life was a thing of beauty,” narrates Murray French (Brendan Gleeson).

But now, the cod have gone, as have most of the young — off to “town,” nearby St. John’s. The men left behind collect unemployment checks, and drink. There may be sex in the city, but not in Tickle Cove.

When the mayor skips town in the dark of night, Murray frets. When his wife takes a job in St. John’s, he is finally shaken from his lethargy. Insults from his pal, grizzled old Simon (Gordon Pinsent, sort of a Canadian Brendan Gleeson), are the final straw.

“You’ll become the new little Missus,” Simon teases. “Oh God, you’ll LOVE Yoga Ball!”

Murray takes the village by the horns to make one last ditch attempt to land a dubious “petrochemical byproduct reprocessing plant” (“What do they make? They make JOBS!”) that Big Oil needs to park somewhere — somewhere with enough people to work it, somewhere with a doctor.

Fortune smiles on them when fast-talking, newly-licensed plastic surgeon Dr. Lewis (Taylor Kitsch) passes through the airport in St. John’s fresh from a Caribbean cricket match — he’s an enthusiast — with a baggie of cocaine — “just this ONCE.” Security screening is what the old mayor of Tickle Cove is now doing for a living in St. John’s. A sneaky deal is struck — the doc will spend a month in Tickle Cove to avoid an arrest.

Ken Scott, who wrote “Seducing Doctor Lewis,” and “Starbuck” (remade as “Delivery Man,” with Vince Vaughn), co-wrote this remake with Michael Douse, and they flesh out the earlier French Canadian comedy with some edge — the whole sexual inadequacy of unemployment thing, and the cocaine gimmick.

But where they really lucked out was with this cast. Gleeson was born for mischief, and is a natural at leading a Cove-wide con job to trick the doctor into staying. They dress the town up — uprighting the toppled tombstones, fixing fences, painting. How do you explain hat dilapidated house at the village entrance? A “World Heritage Site” sign in front will do.

Pinsent, best known for the Alzheimer’s drama “Away From Her” and TV’s “Republic of Doyle,” is a goofy delight. And Kitsch, playing a gullible city slicker, has never been more charming.

The NSA has nothing on Tickle Cove, as they research the doctor, spy on him and listen in on his phone calls.

He loves cricket? They’ll fake a cricket match and pretend to be enthusiasts. He likes cocaine?

“We’re DOWN with it,” Murray brags. The townsfolk show off their scars from “the substitute” doctor to play on his guilt. And even though Lewis is engaged, Murray tries to enlist the pretty postmistress (Liane Balaban).

“Adopt a flirtatious attitude toward the doctor,” he cajoles. She’s not having it, or “him.”

It’s all more twee than madcap, kind of a Canadian “Waking Ned Devine.” Not that it’s as funny as that, or as brisk. Don McKellar (“Last Night”) has directed a 90 minute movie buried inside a nearly two-hour-long one.

So “The Grand Seduction” is, like Tickle Cove itself, a bit of an oversell. But Gleeson, Pinsent and Kitsch make this a diverting comic travelogue for anybody who misses “Northern Exposure” but has no intention of moving to Alaska, or in this case, Newfoundland.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some suggestive material and drug references

Cast: Brendan Gleeson, Taylor Kitsch, Liane Balaban, Gordon Pinsent

Credits: Directed by Don McKellar, written by Ken Scott and Michael Douse, based on the French Canadian comedy, “Seducing Dr. Lewis.” An eOne release

Running time: 1:53