Movie Review: “Venom: The Last Dance,” and Thank God for That

Posted on October 25, 2024 by Roger Moore

Well, that’s enough of THAT, thank-you very much.

Maybe now that the steadily deteriorating Marvel franchise “Venom” has stuck out its tooth-ringed tongue one last time, we can get our Tom Hardy back.

The actor who made his mark in Christopher Nolan epics (“Dunkirk,” “Inception”), high concept thrillers (“The Drop,” “Legend”) and stand-out indies (“Bronson,” “Locke”) has been so swallowed up by this crap/crappier/crappiest comic book series that he’s managed only recurring roles on “Peaky Blinders,” the summer bust “The Bikeriders” and the occasional…podcast?

That’s criminal.

So they needed to give us “Venom: The Last Dance,” a picture that would wrap-up the trilogy about the mild-mannered reporter “possessed” by a toothy, carnivorous, foul-mouthed alien beastie with “boundaries” issues. Hardy, playing Eddie and voicing that alien smartass Venom, gave writer-director Kelly Marcel (she scripted “Fifty Shades of Grey” before selling her soul to “Venom”) some thoughts and earned a story credits for coming up with this alien invasion action comedy.

But that’s about all he got out of this, other than paychecks and a working vacation in Spain.

Eddie Brock is on the lam with his inner-voice bestie in Mexico, drinking both of them into a stupor, sometimes shifting “universes” to stretch out the definition of “last call.”

Venom has thoughts about “that multiverse s—.” As do we all.

Back in the U.S., Eddie’s wanted for murder, Area 51 is about to close and commando commander Strickland (Chiwetel Ejiofor) is hellbent on finding Eddie and his alien “symbiote” first. His elite team of soldiers dangling from lines beneath a V-22 Osprey are no match for Venom, even if they can track Eddie down to Mexico, or follow “We ARE Venom” making “our” way to New York by way of Vegas.

A white-haired alien entity, Knull (CGI Andy Serkis), from Venom’s old stomping grounds is seeking to end life in the universe as we know it, and sends more monstrous symbiotes in search of a “codex” key to…unlocking something — whatever’s strong enough to keep Knull in lockdown. Venom has it.

Lightning-scarred researcher Dr. Payne (Juno Temple) works in the super secret lab and symbiote research facility BENEATH Area 51. She’s hoping these shape-shifting beasties will be our friends.

But before all these characters and agendas can collide, Eddie/Venom have to “possess” a horse and hitch a ride with a UFO cultist (Rhys Ifans), his hippie wife (Alanna Ubach) and their non-believer kids, leading to a Sing-along-to-“Space Oddity” in a VW Microbus.

Because none of this is remotely serious, even if Hardy was too “serious” to sing along.

Characters return from earlier films, a stop in Vegas goes rather like one would expect and there’s an epic CGI brawl involving one and all that drives the finale, where Eddie and Venom the “lethal protector” of Earth fight creatures just as lethal as them.

None of its the least bit interesting, with only an occasional laugh landing amidst the mayhem and PG-13 profanity. The pacing is slow, the Spanish scenery (meant to be Mexico, Area 51, et al) generic.

And while I appreciate the attempted light tone of these films, the jokes that “We ALL have a monster inside of us” and “No one PHONES HOME (like E.T.) from here” don’t pack much of a punch.

The fights are less of a blur than earlier “Transformers/Marvel” CGI throwdowns, but nothing that would keep any non-fan awake through to the end.

Hardy, perfecting the “meek” American shlub “type” he tackled in “The Drop” years ago, soldiers through this and has as much fun with the synthesized voice of Venom as he can.

But the best thing about that is even if this is a hit he won’t have to do it again. Ever. I can’t wait to see him in something else. Anything else. Even a “Peaky Blinders” movie would do nicely, thank you very much.

Rating: PG-13, violence, alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Tom Hardy, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Juno Temple, Stephen Graham, Peggy Lu, Alanna Ubach, Cristo Fernández and Rhys Ifans

Credits: Scripted and directed by Kelly Marcel. A Sony release.

Running time: 1:44

Posted in Reviews, previews, profiles and movie news | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Movie Review: “Venom: The Last Dance,” and Thank God for That

Movie Review: Switzerland’s Oscar contender has a Peruvian flavor — “Reinas”

Posted on October 24, 2024 by Roger Moore

When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences changed its “Best Foreign Language Film” category at the Oscars to “Best International Feature,” it was designed to make the Academy Awards seem less Hollywood-centric, less like “English” was the official language of Oscar-worthy movies.

They’d invented “Best Foreign Language Film” in the late ’40s as an honor going to a film from a designated culture and country, with each far-from-Hollywood non-English-speaking nation submitting one film as their “best” in a given year. They removed “language” from the equation.

That leads us to “Reinas,” Switzerland’s official entry for this year’s Oscars, a period piece set in the turmoil of early ’90s Peru, a tale of all-Peruvian characters all speaking Spanish. Which is not commonly spoken in the country that produced it.

But when your writer-director is “Swiss-Peruvian” (Klaudia Reynicke-Candeloro), she could submit her entry from whichever country wants to claim credit for it or perhaps back an Oscar campaign for the film.

The film itself is smart, sharp and immersive, a festival award-winner that takes us into a country collapsing into hyper-inflation driven by a government that teetered back and forth between military dictatorships and civilian rule, between Soviet alignment or seeking aid from the U.S.

The Shining Path guerrilla movement was carrying out murders and bombings. Power went out, off and on in the cities. And people were fleeing.

That’s what Elena (Jimena Lindo) has planned. She’s got a job lined-up in Minnesota, passports at the ready with Visas arranged for her two daughters –teen Aurora (Luana Vega) and much younger Lucia (Abril Gjuinovic).

But their estranged father, Carlos (Gonzalo Molina) won’t sign their permission-to-leave documents, and he has rights. He’s not overtly fighting this move over Elena’s plans for his little queens, his “Reinas.” Yet he never can seem to make it to the notary with her to sign-off and allow his kids to grow up somewhere more stable, less communist and/or fascist.

Carlos is “still trying to get back on my feet” (in Spanish with English subtitles) driving a cab, describing himself as an “actor” to the paying customers. To his ex and his kids, he’s “been in the jungle,” “working in security,” “a secret agent” or some such.

“The Great Carlos” or “Crazy Carlos” seems to know everybody. The hyperinflation hammering the economy has him cagily moving to the barter system — a sack of hard-to-get sugar in his battered taxi’s trunk, a spare tire traded for swimsuits for the girls, and so on.

He’s sketchy enough for us to wonder just how “connected” he is, which side he might be on, what that police-issued “special” ID might convey.

Oldest daughter Aurora doesn’t care. Self-involved and 15, she’s fretting over leaving her friends and her first boyfriend. Whatever Mom’s got planned, impulsive, naive Aurora is sure to interfere. Little Lucia wants to stay with Mom, but Aurora thinks Dad’s life in Lima would be more to her liking.

As Dad lies and hustles with his every breath, that plan may not be a plan at all.

Director and co-writer Reynicke-Candeloro maintains the mystery as long as she can so that we’ll stay engaged in a personal story of realizing “When it’s time to leave” your country.

Police and soldiers all over the streets, prices skyrocketing, everybody racing to exchange their cash for yankee dollars via street-vendors and a president finishing his litany of bad news with “God help us” on TV — those are signs it’s probably already too late to escape.

Elena is a travel agent, which helps. She lives with her mother (Susi Sánchez) and they are “privileged,” Elena is the first to admit.

But her oldest child hasn’t got a clue. And as the picture shifts to her point of view in its second half, we start to wonder how much havoc one teen can wreak as Aurora sprints towards a cliff only her mom sees.

Molina does a great job of skating the line between “lying loser” and “maybe a guy we’re all underestimating.” That mystery gives the viewer something to latch onto in a film that saves most of its suspense and “action” for the third act.

Lindo lets us see the wheels turning in a woman trying to charm her ex into saving her family, tamping down her fury at his procrastinating, his lies to the kids and the like.

And Vega testily gives us a taste of every headstrong teen about to “find out” we’ve ever been or known.

The payoffs to the various storylines are, to a one, something of a letdown. But “Reinas” is a Peruvian-Swiss filmmaker’s caution to the world about the risks of voting your way into political extremism, or helplessly watching as clueless others seal your country’s fate for you.

When authoritarianism hits the fan, cruel incompetence is the governing ethos. And not everybody’s a travel agent with an escape plan already lined-up, no matter what their ex or rebellious teen want.

Rating: unrated, threats of violence, teen drinking, adult themes

Cast: Luana Vega, Gonzalo Molina, Jimena Lindo, Abril Gjurinovic and Susi Sánchez

Credits: Directed by Klaudia Reynicke-Candeloro, scripted by Klaudia Reynicke-Candeloro & Diego Vega. An Outsider Pictures release.

Running time: 1:43

Posted in Reviews, previews, profiles and movie news | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Movie Review: Switzerland’s Oscar contender has a Peruvian flavor — “Reinas”

Movie Review: A Child’s turn as Robinson Crusoe in “Kensuke’s Kingdom”

Posted on October 24, 2024 by Roger Moore

“Kensuke’s Kingdom” is a simply but attractively animated film based on a Michael Morpurgo novel.

The novel, in turn, is based on the classic tale “Robinson Crusoe,” here modernized to place a shipwrecked boy and his dog in tropical paradise, an island all but deserted save for a Japanese WWII survivor.

In subject matter, look and feel it’s a lot like those “Famous Classic Tales” — condensed fiction animated for children and shown on American TV in the ’70s and ’80s and repeated for years beyond that.

But while this British/Welsh/Luxembourg co-production shares the same simplified-for-children story and under-animated look of TV animation of that era, it features the voices of an Oscar winner — Cillian Murphy — and two Oscar nominees, Sally Hawkins and Ken Watanabe — as the adults in the cast.

Michael (Aaron MacGregor) is a headstrong lad stuck on a 44 foot ketch with his parents (Hawkins, Murphy) and big sister (Raffrey Cassidy) as the grownups have lost their jobs and decided “a fresh start” means buying a sailboat for a world cruise.

Michael is too young for responsibilities, or to have a say in whether or not the family dog gets to come with them. But he’s smuggled Stella onboard, something nobody else figures out until weeks into the trip.

Right.

The boy’s hardheadedness includes his reluctance to wear his safety harness, which is how he almost falls overboard, and after all that foreshadowing a storm whips up in the South Seas, he finally does, with Stella tumbling after him.

They survive without life jackets and awake on an island, marooned on a beach he can’t seem to reason or explore their way off of. When food and water start appearing before them in the mornings, they eventually realize it’s from Kensuke, a tall, skinny old man who speaks no English and can’t understand why they insist on cooking his sushi.

The island features dense forest, steep waterfalls and a widely-varied eco-system of wildlife including great apes, whom Kensuke has befriended. He lives in the standard issue Robinson Crusoe kids’ fantasy tree house, elaborately engineered and plumbed in bamboo in a Japanese fashion.

A faded family photo tells us of Kensuke’s wife and child, and flashbacks give away his story. He survived the late WWII sinking of his destroyer, his family back in Nagasaki did not.

Now he broods and hides from the world, with the island itself his only real purpose.

The outside threat to their paradise comes from poachers who’d love exotic birds and a baby ape for their sellable menagerie. The headstrong boy must learn caution, responsibility and empathy if he’s to get along with this stranger hellbent on protecting his “kingdom.”

The “learning” is soft-pedaled here as the script’s ambition doesn’t extend much beyond hurling a child into a “Survivor” situation with only his dog and a magnifying glass compass to help them survive.

Well, and their Japanese Robinson Crusoe savior.

“Kensuke’s Kingdom” is engaging enough for its target audience, and parents probably won’t mind explaining the “Famous Classic Tale” that Michael Morpurgo leaned on. Maybe plant a little bamboo in the backyard, because as Crusoe to Kensuke to Gilligan, there’s just no plante that’s more useful in a pinch.

Rating: PG

Cast: The voices of Sally Hawkins, Cillian Murphy, Aaron MacGregor, Raffrey Cassidy, and Ken Watanabe.

Credits: Directed by Neil Boyle and Kirk Hendry, scripted by Frank Cottrell Boyce, based on the children’s novel by Michael Morpurgo. A Blue Fox release.

Running time: 1:24

Posted in Reviews, previews, profiles and movie news | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Movie Review: A Child’s turn as Robinson Crusoe in “Kensuke’s Kingdom”

Movie Review: Glenn Close stars in a “Beach Read” that might cure insomnia — “The Summer Book”

Posted on October 23, 2024 by Roger Moore

“The Summer Book” is a picturesque period piece based on a novel Tove Jannson wrote, inspired by her own experiences living on an island in the Gulf of Finland. It aims for “lyrical” and “meditative” as it tells the story of a little girl and her father dealing with or avoiding the grief that came with the loss of the child’s mother.

But if the distributors of it were cheeky enough to make their own book “based on the film,” it’d be nothing but pretty pictures. It’s characterized by dry, scenic emptiness, a dash of melodrama and a Glenn Close performance of pointillistic perfection.

Nothing much happens, and not all that much is experienced in it, either.

Sophie, her illustrator father and wisened grandmother boat off to the deserted island where their family has summered for decades. The child (newcomer Emily Matthews) is six or so, and whatever happened to her mother is not something she can articulate or properly process. Dad (Anders Danielsen Lie) has memories of this place that probably haunt him, so he throws himself into his work and in coaxing back to life a poplar tree he planted — perhaps with his wife, or in her honor the year before.

Grandma (Close) twinkles and stumbles about with the infirmities of great age but the confidence of someone who knows every rock at the seaside, ever corner of the tiny forest there. She has a notion of what these two are going through, but doesn’t have much in the way of words of comfort or wisdom to offer.

The child can be a chatterbox, and granny has only so much patience for the incessant observations and questions such as “Are there ants in heaven?”

“Life is long, Sophia.”

They will spend the summer wandering, boating around the archipeligo and planning for the Midsomer bonfire, something they’ve always celebrated here.

Dad puts up a tent, another tradition, and grandma introduces Sophia to the wonders of nature and woodcarving as Dad practically disappears from the picture.

Thank heavens somebody brings Sophia a cat to adopt. Too bad it’s a cat.

“The more I love him, the less he loves me!”

But the child experiences this world and this life in what should turn out to be the formative memories of her future. Perhaps as an adult she’ll decide this was when she realized what loss was (not likely). But certainly she’ll figure out how inane she sounded saying this to her granny, who’s told her and us she helped found The Girl Scouts of Finland.

“I came to tell you what it’s like sleeping in a tent. I thought you would like to know.”

Too much of the movie is a read-between-the-lines/fill-its-holes-yourself experience — quiet idylls, grandma looking at the sea, the cove, the cabin and the trees as if this might be the last time, indulging Sophia as she’s really “getting” the place for the first time.

At one point, grandma runs naked through the trees, a scene not set up as “something we did as children.” That is merely implied. Or perhaps granny is going natural. Or a bit balmy.

The insights about the fragility of moss balance with the superstitions of grandma’s people.

“We’ll put seven leaves under your pillow and you’ll dream of the man you’ll marry.”

Sophia decides to test her newfound interest in the Almighty with a prayer — “Dear God, I’m bored as BEEF. Let SOMEthing happen.” Because “even a STORM” would be a break from the tedium.

Sure enough, that’s what happens, something served up in six thousand, two-hundred and seventy-two melodramas that preceded “The Summer Book.”

Whatever the meditative, “inspiring” merits of the novel, veteran British TV writer Robert Jones and “The One I Love” nepo baby director Charlie McDowell (son of Mary Steenbergen and Malcolm McDowell) don’t find its cinematic equivalents in this adaptation.

But Glenn Close, America’s Judi Dench (Give her an honorary Oscar, for the love of Mike.), makes the film watchable with another spot-on performance. Every gaze at the horizon, every movement, every gesture seems exactly right, calculated to seem as natural as taking that next deep breath.

Even if the script doesn’t move us through this character, Close almost manages that with just a look, a sigh or an old woman’s last wistful twirl of her Scandinavian pony tails.

Rating: unrated, nudity

Cast: Glenn Close, Anders Danielsen Lie and Emily Matthews

Credits: Directed by Charlie McDowell, scripted by Robert Jones, based on a novel by Tove Jansson. A Charades release.

Running time: 1:35

Posted in Reviews, previews, profiles and movie news | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments Off on Movie Review: Glenn Close stars in a “Beach Read” that might cure insomnia — “The Summer Book”

Classic Film Review: A Grifter Dramedy Urtext –“Elegant Beast” (1962)

Posted on October 23, 2024 by Roger Moore

Before “Parasite,” before “Shoplifters,” and even before “The Grifters,” there was the darkly comic Japanese morality play “Elegant Beast,” which makes the old W.C. Fields saying, “You can’t cheat an honest man” universal.

Yûzô Kawashima’s 1962 film, titled “Shitoyakana kedamono,” which is sometimes translated as “The Graceful Brute,” is a minor masterpiece in amoral, entangled thieving at its most personal. Confined to basically a single set — a modest but well-stocked Tokyo apartment — Kawashima’s film of a Kaneto Shindô screenplay is paranoid, callously amusing and cruelly cautionary.

There’s no such thing as a “victimless crime,” after all.

The apartment belongs to the Maedas. Or so we think. Their rush in hiding their TV, their Polaroid camera, the Renoir that sometimes hangs on the living room wall, their liquor collection and even members of the family tell us something’s up when three people come to their door.

Mr. Katori (Hideo Takamatsu), a talent agent hoping to book an “Evelyn Presley” tour of Japan, is furious. He’s brought along his accountant, Yuki (Ayako Wakao) and the ridiculous-looking but possibly tough jazz singer (Shôichi Ozawa) for backup.

There’s money missing from the office, and the Maeda’s son Minoru has taken it!

“There must be some mistake,” Mr. (Yûnosuke Itô) and Mrs. (Hisano Yamaoka) protest, in Japanese with English subtitles, the first of MANY such protests. “Our son would never do such a thing!”

A tirade of bellowing accusations filled with facts, details and precise amounts confronts a lot of very Japanese apologizing and bowing.

But it’s only afterward that Katori’s “I’ll go to the POLICE” threat is dissected. That’s when Minoru, played by Manamitsu Kawabata with an Alain Delon edge and swagger, comes out of hiding.

“He cheats on his taxes,” Minoru cackles as changes out of his sharkskin suit. No, Katori won’t be ratting them out to the cops.

When tarted-up daughter Tomoko (Yûko Hamada) sashays in, we start to get a picture of the scope of the crimes of this family that preys together. The novelist she’s been cleaning out has kicked her out. Something about Dad’s “pimping her out” to him as his mistress rubbed him the wrong way.

When novelist Yoshizawa (Kyû Sazanka) barges in to “break things off,” he makes himself at home and asks about his Renoir. That’s when we figure out he pays for this apartment. He apparently recommended Minoru for the booking agency job. Minoru didn’t just loot them, he apparently stole book residuals by passing off Yoshizawa’s business card to his publishing house.

“It might be rude of me to talk this way, but are you all in this together?”

Every knock at the door of this apartment further complicates this delicious plo and the relationships, and adds money to the tally and layers to all the grifting that’s going on.

“Elegant Beast” was one of the last films of Kawashima (“The Temple of Wild Geese”) and an early jewel on screenwriter (“The Naked Island,” “Hachi: A Dog’s Tale,” “Postcard”) and sometime director Shindô’s resume.

The early scenes set it up as a con artist family farce, with the “Evelyn Presley” references and jazz singer with the silliest spitcurls this side of “Alice in Wonderland.” But as sketchy women talk of using and letting themselves be used, sexually, for money and as corrupt men rage at being used in simular fashion, we start to taste the “cost” of all this conning, however one and all rationalize it.

Kawashima shows characters ascending or descending a shadowy symbolic white staircase, up towards their dream life, or down into debt, jail or hell.

Conversations are overheard as characters are glimpsed listening via a fan vent, a doorway, through an air duct or down a stairwell. The compositions by cinematographer Nobuo Munekawa are pristine and striking, and the editing (by Tatsuji Nakashizu) crisply underscores the combative — without fisticuffs — nature of the many harangues and bowing apologies that constitue the story’s conflicts.

The acting is blunt and brisk — sinister coming in all shapes and sizes here.

But best of all is the clockwork screenplay that complicates the characters and their interrelationships, allows them to miss seeing others just out of the frame and allows us to wonder not simply where the grifting ends, but who, in all this corruption, will come out clean and who will pay a price.

That makes “Elegant Beast” the mother of every dark grifter tale to follow. Because not every scam ends with a twinkle, a smirk and “The Sting.”

Rating: TV-14, but racy — nudity, profanity, innuendo

Cast: Ayako Wakao, Manamitsu Kawabata, Yûnosuke Itô,
Kyû Sazanka, Yûko Hamada, Hideo Takamatsu,
Hisano Yamaoka and Shôichi Ozawa

Credits: Directed byYûzô Kawashima, scripted by
Kaneto Shindô. A Daiei Release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:35

Posted in Reviews, previews, profiles and movie news | Comments Off on Classic Film Review: A Grifter Dramedy Urtext –“Elegant Beast” (1962)

Movie Preview: An Adrien Brody epic in Ayn Randian Tones — “The Brutalist”

Posted on October 22, 2024 by Roger Moore

Actor turned director and co-writer Brady Corbet (“Vox Lux”) named the hero of his immigrant saga Lazlo Toth, the name of the fellow who busted up a famous statue way back when.

Not the same fellow, but what’s really interesting to me about this festival-buzzed epic is the fellow in the lead role.

Adrien Brody has marched to his own drummer, pretty much from the start of his career. He’s been a hep cat with not-unjustified delusions of Brando, gave one of the most memorable Oscar speeches in recent memory and has played roles large and small in big pictures and indie ones.

Felicity Jones and Guy Pearce also star in this drama with an Ayn Rand vibe — a visionary architect and his wife (Jones) flee Europe after WWII for America and make their fame — with the aid of a mysterious wealthy patron (Pearce).

This one comes to theaters at the height of Awards Season — Dec.

Posted in Reviews, previews, profiles and movie news | Comments Off on Movie Preview: An Adrien Brody epic in Ayn Randian Tones — “The Brutalist”

Movie Review: Belgium’s hope for an Oscar nomination? “Julie Keeps Quiet”

Posted on October 22, 2024 by Roger Moore

She wants to become a professional tennis player, so Julie stays focused. She’s a teen, and if wants to continue to train Julie knows she has to keep her eye on the ball, on and off the court.

Julie has to work on her conditioning. Julie spends hours hitting, hours shadow-playing out points. She haunts the weight room and practices her footwork. She’s even taken up juggling to maintain that “eyes always on the ball” intensity.

Julie eschews most socializing. She won’t let her parents distract her. She’s so far into her head that walking her dachshund is the only pleasure she allows herself.

And when a teammate of Julie’s kills herself and the coach they shared is suspended from their club, Julie doesn’t lose that focus. Others have questions, but “Julie Keeps Quiet.”

Belgium’s submission for this year’s Best International Feature Oscar is a simmering, interior drama about the myopia required to become a professional athlete. Tessa Van den Broeck has the title role, the strokes and the game to make a convincing junior straining with every fiber of her being to make it to “junior pro” with the BTF, the Belgian Tennis Federation.

We never see her play a match. This Leonardo Van Dijl film (co-written with actress Ruth Becquart) lives in Julie’s head and makes us guess what’s going on in there.

Julie doesn’t talk. Even when she’s questioned by classmates, fellow players and the director of the club (Claire Bodson), she is close-lipped.

She has questions of her own, but her solution to every problem, every dilemma facing her in her life, has always been “practice, practice” and “more practice.” She throws herself into preperation, grudgingly accepts a new coach (Pierre Gervais) and carries on.

But something happened. Something was going on. Was it just the pressure of focusing one’s life this narrowly, the fear of not making it, that caused promising junior pro Aline to kill herself? That’s what that suspended coach (Laurent Caron) says.

Julie is young, naive and impressionable, all traits exaggerated by the juvenile nature of sports and making that your life focus. But she’s not stupid.

The script nimbly avoids directly addressing the matter at hand, which the viewer figures out almost from the start. But Van Dijl, making his feature debut, gives us clues in what Julie and the accused Jeremy talk about by phone as she stays in touch with the club pariah. And then Van Dijl delivers a quiet, child-questioning-an-adult scene about why everyone is “stressing out” that will knock your socks off.

“Jeremy, why did she do it?”

That conversation is not loud, explosive or accusatory. It’s as “quiet” as everything else in this film. At times, “mesmirizing” crosses over into tedium in this French and German (they’re studying it in high school) with English subtitles drama.

Who wants to watch an hour of tennis practice? Even players and former players might blanch at that.

But any hint that Julie’s journey to adulthood is stunted by her focus gradually washes away in this smart, tense and above all very “quiet” drama about a tragedy, a possible crime and how one tennis player handles it and what she herself can do about it.

Rating: unrated, adult subject matter

Cast: Tessa Van den Broeck, Pierre Gervais, Claire Bodson and Laurent Caron.

Credits: Directed by Leonardo Van Dijl, scripted by Ruth Becquart and Leonardo Van Dijl. A Cineuropa release.

Running time: 1:40

Posted in Reviews, previews, profiles and movie news | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Movie Review: Belgium’s hope for an Oscar nomination? “Julie Keeps Quiet”

Netflixable? Eric Bana and Sadie Sink are a father and daughter staring down a cult — “A Sacrifice”

Posted on October 22, 2024 by Roger Moore

“A Sacrifice” is a thriller about an American father who is the last to realize that his daughter’s being recruited by a German cult.

As Ben Monroe is an expert on “groupthink” and cult behavior, this is humbling. He’s the one who invited Mazzy (Sadie Sink of “Stranger Things”) to Germany — where he’s teaching — to “get her grades up,” which suggests flawed reasoning backed up by inattentive parenting.

Who figures bringing a sixteen year-old to cosmopolitan, hedonistic Berlin, where she doesn’t speak the language and where he is too distracted by his work, is going to help her “grades?”

Logic isn’t the strong suit this latest thriller from Ridley Scott’s writer-director daughter Jordan Scott (“Cracked”), a picture that broods and occasionally chills and takes its time entrapping the daughter right up to the abrupt twists of the finale. It’s short but not “brisk,” and not really developed enough or long enough to score its points.

Ben’s academic friend since his college days (Stephan Kampwirth) has police connections, which is how he gets Ben onto the scene of a mass suicide. The author of “The Science of Loneliness” is working on a new book on “Groupthink” and seeing all the bodies, ritualistically staged pre-death, and hearing the theories of the police profiler (Sylvia Hoeks of “Blade Runner 2049”) could help him with his research.

They banter about what people get from cults — “community, believing” in something greater than themselves, causing one to “give away your free will” in an effort to give “you life some meaning.”

This is an “off the radar” cult, and will require all the profiler’s skill, with maybe some help from an author whose work she respects, to chase down.

That’s the perfect time for Mazzy to show up, forced to make her way from the airport on her own, unable to figure out the subway and its long, tortured Germanic station names. It’s a good thing helpful hunk Martin (Jonas Dassler) is there to show her the way.

Ben may be absorbed by the sort of thinking that leads to “groupthink,” and having someone to discuss that with. Mazzy checks out the profiler and wonders “Who’s the midlife-crisis bait?”

We can guess most of what’s to come just in that first act set-up. So Scott, adapting a novel by Nicholas Hogg, tries to throw us off the obvious by shifting the point of view to show us Martin’s life — living with his doting grandmother — and the cult he’s in, where everyone takes the reassurances of leader Hilma (Sophie Rois), that “you’ll never be lonely again” at face value even as she’s warning of global collapse, mass extinctions and — RED FLAG time — “chemtrails.”

The ticking clock here is watching Mazzy get lured into a cult while her father is distracted by researching a cult with the cute cop on the case.

Scott pretty much botches that, with the shifting points of view never building the necessary suspense to make this come off. She succeeds in serving up Jonestown chills at what gullible people, from the People’s Temple to Heaven’s Gate to MAGA Q-Anon devotees, can be talked into doing as they take the wrong advice on fighting loneliness.

Connecting that condition to totalitarianism is as close as “A Sacrifice” gets to sending a message.

The story is reasonably absorbing, and the leads compelling enough to make us invest in “A Sacrifice.” But the lapses in logic are thrown into sharp relief in a third act that pretty much collapses in on itself.

The Big Confrontation and Race to Save are utterly botched, which Scott doubles down on by then OVER-explaining what we’ve seen set up in the first two acts.

The reason one always points out “nepo babies” in showbiz is that “talent” isn’t heriditary, even if the urge to give your offspring a leg or two up in your profession is. Scott’s filmmaking isn’t anything that makes her stand out from legions of other filmmakers trying to get their movies made, and her competence is easily questioned in the execution here, no matter how much fatherly advice her producer-dad gave her, if any.

language, sometimes she does, mostly she can’t even pronounce the place names.

Rating: R, violence, disturbing images

Cast: Eric Bana, Sadie Sink, Jonas Dassler and Sylvia Hoeks

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jordan Scott, based on a novel by Nicholas Hogg. A Vertical release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:36

Posted in Reviews, previews, profiles and movie news | Tagged , , , , , | Comments Off on Netflixable? Eric Bana and Sadie Sink are a father and daughter staring down a cult — “A Sacrifice”

Movie Preview: “The Strangers” are back — “The Strangers: Chapter 2”

Posted on October 21, 2024 by Roger Moore

This teaser trailer promises a Fundamentalist variation on a theme — at least on the car radio — pursued unto death in the masked murderers tale “The Strangers.”

The IMDB page of this Renny Harlin “I’m BACK, baby!” sequel — part of a trilogy — doesn’t have a release date, nor does this teaser trailer.

It’s set up to be a trilogy. Perhaps that explains the insane running time (2:42) listed for this title on IMDB. The third film is due next year, with “Chapter 2” smuggled out in late 2024.

Posted in Reviews, previews, profiles and movie news | Comments Off on Movie Preview: “The Strangers” are back — “The Strangers: Chapter 2”

Movie Preview: “The Vanishing?” David Schwimmer’s BACK, and in “Goosebumps”

Posted on October 21, 2024 by Roger Moore

Schwimmer tells “Dad Jokes” before going all “Red ROSS” on kids and neighbors over something that happened in the city decades ago.

Looks fun, I have to say. Good to see Schwimmer kvetching and kvelling on screen again.

Jan. 10, this “Goosebumps” tale of terror comes to Hulu and Disney +.

Posted in Reviews, previews, profiles and movie news | Comments Off on Movie Preview: “The Vanishing?” David Schwimmer’s BACK, and in “Goosebumps”