This doc, narrated by Bogie’s son, comes close on the heels of a recent Bogie/Bacall biography I read and reviewed and promises an equally “intimate” portrait — using home movies, old interviews, etc.
Doesn’t appear all that deep and polished, kind of quick and dirty, but we’ll see.
Nov. 15 at a cinema near you.
Ernest Cole worked in South Africa, a little known photographer whose photos were seen the world over as blunt black and white documentation of Black life under Apartheid.
Maybe there’s a shot or two of Elon, Peter Thiel and other South African racists/fascists who fled when majority rule finally won the day there.
Maybe there’s a Palestinian Ernest Cole documenting what’s gone on in Israel pretty much since its founding, but especially in the Bibe epoch, in that Apartheid/Genocidal state.
Nov. 22, a documentary about Cole makes its way to cinemas.
Two things you can say for the Sam Raimi-produced thriller “Don’t Move” is that it sprints by — thrillers on the move have to — and that it’s part of a sub-genre that has proven a goldmine in decades past — a young woman imperiled and in the woods, chased by a psychotic.
But this isn’t “Rust Creek” or even “Alone,” and it wasn’t so much directed by two unknowns and scripted by two lesser-knowns. It was “produced,” a product, made to Netflix’s order and perhaps even Netflix’s specs. “Don’t Move” takes a while to make its first wrong moves, but when it does, it tumbles right off a cliff.
Which is how it begins — a morose young mother (former child star Kelsey Asbille of “One Tree Hill,” “Wind River” and TV’s “Yellowstone”) leaves her husband in bed and drives to the parkland cliff where her little boy fell to his death. Iris is ready to follow him into the abyss.
“The world takes what it wants. I wish it had taken me instead.”
But “Richard” (Finn Wittrock of “Unbroken” and TV’s “American Horror Story”) intervenes. He expresses sympathy, tells her about the Big Mistake in his life and talks her out of it. It’s only in the parking lot, where he’s parked entirely too close to her Prius for her to be able to get out, that she figures out she’s in mortal danger.
Waking up from being tased, she racks her brain for escape options. Hitting the emergency button on her smart watch doesn’t do it. And her driver, “Richard” (“Why do you keep calling me that?”) has all his bases covered.
“Please, go through the process. Everybody does.”
He’s sure she’s trapped. She remembers she never goes anywhere without a Swiss Army knife.
And we’re off — a petite, willowy woman with a lot of fight in her and a smirking, chiseled villain who appears to have all the advantages. That syringe he injected her with? It will immobilize her in a couple of minutes. It’ll last for an hour.
“I hope you find a good place to hide,” he bellows as she sprints off.
The problem-solving in this real-time T.J. Simfel/David White screenplay isn’t bad, just obvious. The foreshadowing is Screenwriting 101 level, the waypoints of this attempted escape pre-ordained, the finale over-the-top in ways that would never pass a medical board’s “fatal injury” review.
But Asbille is plucky and the pacing atones for some of the script’s sins.
What are they? You can contrive, but don’t give away your contrivances. Under-explain, don’t over-explain. Let the villain’s ploys be surprises, and don’t telegraph your victim’s counter-moves. Don’t introduce strangers into the mix just to kill them off, the way ALL these movies do. And keep the clock ticking in your “ticking clock” thriller.
“Don’t Move” avoids some pitfalls and tumbles into others, and whenever it does, it abandons suspense and just feels silly.
That’s how you end up with a thriller that doesn’t feel “real,” it just feels processed.
Rating: R, violence, profanity
Cast: Kelsey Asbille, Finn Wittrock and Moray Treadwell.
Credits: Directed by Brian Netto and Adam Schindler, scripted by T.J. Simfel and David White. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:32
Quan (“Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” “Goonies” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once”) co-stars with Ariana Dubose, Marshawn Lynch, Daniel Wu, Cam Gigandet, Sean Astin and Rhys Darby in this caper comedy set to open the week before Valentine’s Day.
We’ll see if former child star Quan, swept up as part of an Oscar-honored ensemble, can carry a picture in this scenario, with this sort of support.
A pope dies and over 100 of his archbishops gather to politic, poor-mouth, backbite and backstab their way towards electing another in “Conclave,” a deliciously dark, well-acted and beautifully-filmed inside-Vatican-intrigues thriller.
Director Edward Berger (“All Quiet on the Western Front”), with screenwriter Peter Straughan adapting a Robert Harris novel, serves up a sumptuous pageant of ritual and tradition as the red-robed archbishops — captured with their whiter-than-white umbrellas in the Vatican City rain at one point — meet and vote, scheme and investigate, form alliances and wrestle with issues of faith, “liberalism” and a “Universal Church” that is losing favor and losing ground around the world, if not on the “stacked” U.S. Supreme Court.
It’s a thinking filmgoer’s film, and a darkly comic one as it exposes the mere mortals who act all too human as members of the ultimate elite, a gathering of serene majesty and self-importance, one almost guaranteed to tumble into melodrama.
Ralph Fiennes is Archbishop Lawrence, Dean of the College of Cardinals and one of the innermost inner circle at his bedside when the pope dies. He had hoped to resign from this position and take up his ongoing struggle with “belief” in a monastery or some such. Or so he keeps saying. But he is “a manager,” the dead pope once told him. “Managers manage.”
That’s just what he is to do when the archbishops from near and far, some 108 of them, descend on Rome to pick a new pope, “sequestered” from the world, voting on paper ballots that are then burned after each round of voting until white smoke spills out of the chimney of the Sistine Chapel, telling the world that they’ve reached a decision.
It will take a two-thirds majority of archbishops to make that secret ballot selection, with all the ballots burned — evidence — letting the world believe something like a full consensus has been reached.
Lawrence is aligned with the liberals, like the just-passed-pope. They’re rallying around the American Aldo Bellini (Stanley Tucci). But the politicking Tremblay (John Lithgow) is playing the angles, out to grab the papal regalia and power for himself.
An archbishop from Africa (British TV star Lucian Msamati) is a popular choice among third world clerics.
And then there’s the conservative, chain-vaping Italian Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto of “Mostly Martha”) who’s of the Mel Gibson “Latin Mass,” take the church back to the pre-“Second Vatican Council” ultraconservative school, someone who “must be stopped,” the liberals all agree.
The dean must keep the peace and maintain the church’s image during this possibly fractious conclave. But right from the start, he’s tipped about the old pope discovering corruption in one of the candidates. The liberals’ agreed-upon champion Bellini insists he is “not fit” and has no interest in the papacy, even as he trots out the word “ambition” to decribe anyone who might stand in his way.
And a new “secret” archbishop has arrived and must be investigated, at least superficially, before he can be seated. Archbishop Benitez, played by screen newcomer Carlos Diehz, was appointed in secret and kept secret afterwords. Lawrence’s right-hand-man, bishop O’Malley (Brian F. O’Byrne) can’t find much about him. Maybe the pope kept this archibishop secret because of Benitez’s posting.
He is archbishop of Kabul, Afghanistan, right in the murderous heart of the most intolerant corner of Islam.
Isabella Rossellini plays the nun in charge of the army of churchwomen who work to keep this conclave fed, laundered and doing its duty. But scandal, scheming and petty mistrust writ large with the stakes so high threaten to upend it all.
“Although we sisters are supposed to be invisible, God has nevertheless given us eyes and ears.”
And outside, we hear, there are protests and bombings. Over what is never made clear.
The Oscar-winning Fiennes is in great form playing a conflicted man who must maintain decorum, and his temper, in the face of myriad challenges. He practically crumples his crucifix in fury at the end of each day’s test.
It is to the credit of the entire supporting cast that one and all hold his or her own with Fiennes and his magnificently internalized seething.
Tucci, Lithgow, O’Byrne and Rossellini each have their best roles in years and don’t disappoint. Casteillitto, Diehz and Msamati impress.
And Berger gives this all the kind of gravitas it deserves — a new church “direction” in a world turning away — even as he is letting in just enough air that the faithful and those critical of “The Church” can have a laugh at the arcane pageantry and human vindictiveness that all the pomp and circumstance in the world can’t paper over.
“The men who are dangerous are the ones who want it!”
I can’t stress enough how beautiful the images here are — crisp costumes in pristine settings embracing the ancient history, high art and timeworn rituals of this world and this process. The settings are striking and overwhelming, the shot selection, lighting and blocking are perfect.
A few films have taken us into the regal papacy under such conditions, with the 1968 epic “The Shoes of the Fisherman” being the first and most impressive that I recall. That film was a pre Pope John Paul appreciation of the Catholic Church’s position in the Cold War. In “Conclave,” it’s a reeling institution that can ill afford one more scandal after decades of bad press that is depicted, a church whose top tier officials ponder their faith and the buy-in that involves.
The finale turns dramatically melodramatic, suggesting the severest trial will produce the most radical changes and revealing who the most cunning manipulator of all might be. It’s enough of a jolt that you may laugh at the audacity of it, or the incredulity.
But “Conclave” is a deliciously immersive experience, a narrative that commands our attention and expects our speculation even if it maintains a distance that allows it all to seem out-of-step, surreal and even darkly humorous at its most extreme.
Rating: PG
Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, Isabella Rosselini, John Lithgow, Lucian Msamati, Sergio Castellitto, Carlos Diehz and Brian F. O’Byrne.
Credits: Directed by Edward Berger, scripted by Peter Straughan, based on a novel by Robert Harris. A Focus Features release.
Running time: 2:00
What manner of miscalculated meshuggagh mashup is this?
“Your Monster” is a “personal demons” rom-com take on “Beauty and the Beast,” one with the beast willing to offer to “eat” the creep who jilted fair Laura when she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer.
“It would literally take like, two seconds!”
It’s not romantic. The comedy is thin, the frights meant to be jokes (cough cough) and the “monster” disappears for much of the later second act and earlier third one.
But it does have “In the Heights” singer and “Scream” and “Scream IV” screamer Melissa Barrera, so let’s see if we can find something other than her in this “anti-romantic comedy” to endorse.
That’s the spin actress turned first-time feature writer-director Carolina Lindy has given her movie. But movie critics review the movie, not the “director’s statement..” Well, those of us who know we’re being “spun,” anyway.
Barrera plays a not-ready-for-Broadway baby who’s put in five years with her playwright/paramour Jacob (Edmund Donovan), helping him write, polish and workshop the musical that could be his big break, “House of Good Women.”
As he’s taken suggestions and based the heroine, Laurie, on Laura, Jacob does the right thing and promises her the lead. It’ll be her “big break,” too.
But her getting diagnosed with The Big C kind of cuts into his creative process and “me” time. He drops her like a rotten potato. She’s left to weep on the shoulder of the Amazon delivery guy who refreshes her supply of Kleenex, and take comfort from her dizzy actress “ride or die” Mazy (Kayle Foster).
It’s at this low ebb, with the show entering auditions and Laura not invited, that the beast who lived under her bed and in her closet growing-up re-appears.
“You don’t remember me? At all?”
Nope, thus the screaming.
The ill-tempered monster tries to get her out of the house she grew up in — “I don’t do roommates!” — and failing that, instead sticks around to buck our gal up since she’s feeling low.
She insists that “I was just very helpful in the development process” of the show, but her Monster isn’t hearing it. She makes excuses for her ex, but he’s quick to give Jacob a new nickname — “Limp d–k f-ck-face!”
That’s what makes Laura summon up the guts to audition, shock Jacob and win the role…of understudy. That way she gets a front-row seat for his lust for his new leading lady (Meghann Fahy) and what she’s doing to Laura’s role and her show.
Ask any comic and they’ll tell you shock-value profanity is the weakest crutch in comedy. That’s too much of what the monster has going for him, that and a decent “Beauty and the Beast” mask perhaps leftover from the first Broadway production of the Disney musical. Sitcom vet Dewey (“Casual,” “The Mindy Project,” “Now We’re Talking”) registers under the mask. But not much.
What little chemistry our leads develop is tossed aside for “rehearsing the show” and follow-up visits to her bloodwork nurse and oncologist in the later acts.
None of this is supposed to make much sense, and it doesn’t. The leads are OK, but the limp supporting cast is confined to generic roles — bitchy co-stars, dopey stage manager of the play, vapid “bestie,” cheerfully unconvincing doctor, grumpy nurse.
They aim for a sort of “anti-romantic” “cute” that never gets past cloying.
Movies connect with viewers in a lot of ways, but for me, that never happened as the disparate elements are dully executed by themselves and never really work together. The “musical” is clunky, the romance unromantic and neither the nostalgia (your childhood fear) nor the “Allow yourself to be angry” messaging landed.
I laughed three times, maybe four. And whatever “charms” it reached for vanish for the attempted over-the-top finale, which left me cold and didn’t come close to making the sale about the “Embrace your inner rage” spin this is allegedly about.
Rating: R, sex, implied violence, profanity
Cast: Melissa Barrera, Tommy Dewey, Edmund Donovan, Meghann Fahy and Kayla Foster
Credits: Scripted and directed by Caroline Lindy. A Vertical release.
Running time: 1:39
A box office hit, and a packed house suggests a lotta people are skipping Sunday Mass in Durham., NC.
The lady yelling “It’s NOT a comedy” at the people laughing at the wicked twists and backstabbing must be Leonard Leo’s cousin or some such.
A January working class “girls” comedy, this could find its niche and score in what is generally an Oscar holdover month with ONE horror/action or comedy hit breaking out amidst awards contenders.
Two Broke Girls trying to make the rent. One more time. Can Katt Williams help? Lil Rel? Janelle James?
Nepo Baby Maude Apatow might have some spare change. But nothing’s going to take away the nightmare of a plasma donation/sale gone wrong wrong wrong.
The child of about nine lives with his father in the forest, hidden from “the evil outside” world, off-the-grid, with hints that there might be no grid left.
They hunt and forage, set traps and makeshift alarms and hole-up in a Cold War era concrete bunker that’s seen better days. But where else would one ride out the Apocalypse?
Father (Sasko Kocev) has the glint of madness in his eyes as he teaches his son and limits his horizons. The boy (Matej Sivakov) reads from a battered picture book and imagines himself as “The Leaf Child,” “special.” He can don his headphones if the outside world gets to be too much.
But Dad’s biggest concern is that little Marko grows strong enough to chamber a round in the semi-automatic pistol he leaves the child with every day.
Dad listens to political Jeremaids (In Macodonian, with English subtitles) on a crackling shortwave radio. He drinks, and keeps handcuffs handy for when he does. The crazy eyes tell us he’s capable of violence and probably paranoid.
But I cannot overstate the disappointment that “Beyond the Wasteland,” titled “M” in its European release (after Marko’s hand tattoo) turns out to be just another “After the Zombie Apocalypse” thriller.
“‘M’ is for Marko, Mother,” and so on, the child recites. M is for “Macedonia,” too. Vardan Tozija’s survivalist thriller becomes an undead parable about humanity’s capacity for dehumanization and the dangers of anti-immigrant demagogues.
That doesn’t paper over the fact that it’s depressingly conventional in plot and genre. It’s just a Macedonian zombie movie, and no more ambitious than most of the other films that followed “Night of the Living Dead.”
Marko is already afraid of his father when he figures out that the world “outside” isn’t all evil. He stumbles across special needs child Miko (Aleksandar Nichovski) and his mother (Kamka Tocinovski).
The boys can sneak off and share toys (batteries last longer after the apocalypse than they do now). But Marko dare not reveal this to his Dad. We and he can guess how that will turn out.
Blood will be shed, children will flee and “the evil ones” will be confronted and (over) explained. The allegory is hammered home.
But even though it’s a good-looking film, and grim enough, even if there is some suspense despite story beats so cut-and-dried that they will surprise no one, even though the child star is impressive in this setting, “Beyond the Wasteland” never escapes its “Been there, seen that, got the allegory” burden.
Honestly, the cinema was almost zombied-out before “The Walking Dead,” and the symbolic, slow-walking horror isn’t any fresher now, after “Maggie” and “World War Z” and scores of other variations on families trying to survive zombies/children in Zombieland theme.
Rating: unrated, violence
Cast: Matej Sivakov, Sasko Kocev,
Aleksandar Nichovski and Kamka Tocinovski
Credits: Directed by Vardan Tozija, scripted by Darijan Pejovski and
Vardan Tozija. A Well Go USA release.
Running time: 1:39
Censored and edited to death and long thought “lost” in its original form, “The Body Snatcher” is a 1945 horror tale that retains its ability to chill you to the bone.
Produced by horror impressario Val Lewton (“Cat People”), directed by Robert Wise (“The Day the Earth Stood Still,” “The Sound of Music”) and co-starring horror icons Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, it was well worth restoring — with British censor snips recovered. And so it was.
Experienced today, Karloff’s ghoulish grin and cocky self-assurance in the title role is a wonder to behold. He towers over the picture and indeed over Lugosi, by this stage in his career reduced to smaller roles playing on his “name” value. Karloff was always the more formidable actor.
What stands out for its era is “Body Snatcher’s” pitilessness. The deaths staged off-camera retain their power to shock. And Karloff revels in it all, a cabman retained as “specimen” procurer in the name of medical science, with Cabman Gray all-too-willing to take shortcuts when the need arises.
It’s based on a Robert Louis Stevenson story, “The Body Snatcher” which was inspired by the true story of a couple of murderous medical corpse creators. The fact that something exactly like this really happened thanks to killers Burke and Hare, and Dr. Robert Knox, who bought the bodies for his Edinburgh anatomy classes, so rattled the wartime British censors that all reference to them in the film was cut out.
That’s been restored. But one of the film’s most sinister inventions was never lopped out. Producer Lewton, an uncredited co-screenwriter, insured that the true story/legend of Greyfriar’s Bobby (renamed here) was folded-in, with the faithful dog’s dead master another “fresh” corpse for Cabman Gray to acquire, by hook or by crook.
Set in a VERY convincing facsimile of “Old Edinburgh” on RKO backlots (the old “Hunchback of Notre Dame” sets) at RKO’s Encino Ranch, thanks to art directors Albert S. D’Agostino And Walter E. Keller, the story follows efforts by Dr. Wolfe MacFarlane (Henry Daniell of “The Great Dictator,” “The Philadelphia Story”) to acquire the necessory bodies for dissection to teach the next generation of doctors.
“Stupid and unjust laws” stand in the way of “medicine,” “science” and progress, he blusters. So he’s got a long-running arrangement with Cabman Gray to get what he needs, not just bodies of the indigent or of dead criminals, but of respectable folk.
The vexing case of a paralyzed child (Sharyn Moffett) tests Dr. MacFarlane, nagged into taking on the necessary surgery by his moral and innocent student Fettes (Russell Wade). Fettes doesn’t know how many corpses it will take to practice and study for this procedure. And he doesn’t want to know where they came from.
When he starts to question where the bodies come from, Dr. MacFarlane presents implausibly innocent scenarios, telling him “Believe it or not, you’d best ACT like you believe you do!”
Fettes has met and been assigned the task of paying Gray, who lives rather well for a cabman, kept in his cups by his after-hours body-snatching. Gray is cocky to the point of arrogance, taking Dr. MacFarlane down to size with the mere remembrance of his nickname, “Toddy.”
Gray has something on the doctor, and by extension his new assistant. But the doctor’s manservant Joseph (Lugosi) hears all, and skulking around, sees much. He’s got something on Gray, too.
As the bodies that Gray “could not have gotten fairly” add up, Fettes grows horrified at what’s going on and the threat implicit in his suspicions endangers him as well as the innocent victims procured by Gray.
Donna Lee plays a beautiful street pauper, singing a Scottish lament (“When Ye Gang Awa, Jamie”), who turns-up often enough that we fear the worst.
The gloom of of it all contributes to that. Lewton assured the Wise and Director of Photography Robert De Grasse bathed ancient Edinburgh in shadows, adding to the menace.
This is widely regarded as one of Karloff’s greatest performances, and he so turns on the charm in his malevolent locutions that we can hear the narrator of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” in his sweet-talk to the little paralyzed girl he introduces to his horse. Even in his dealings with the doctor, he seems almost sympathetic.
“Being poor I have had to do much that I did not want to do. But so long as the great Dr McFarlane comes to my whistle, that long am I a man. If I have not that then I have nothing. Then I am only a cabman and a grave robber. You’ll never get rid of me, Toddy.”
It was Karloff’s last teaming (of eight collaborations) with Lugosi.
“The Body Snatcher” is a veritable primer on Golden Age Hollywood horror, a reminder that Universal didn’t have the market cornered on epic frights, and that you don’t need anything supernatural to scare viewers’ socks off. A creepy setting, a proper, plummy-voiced villain and murders in the name of “progress” will get the dirty job done.
Rating: TV-14, violence
Cast: Boris Karloff, Henry Daniell, Edith Atwater, Russell Wade, Paula Corday, Donna Lee, Sharyn Moffett and Bela Lugosi
Credits: Directed by Robert Wise, scripted by Philip MacDonald and Val Lewton, based on a short story by Robert Louis Stevenson. An RKO release on Tubi, Youtube, etc.
Running time: 1:19
Movie Nation 