An Australian animated remembrance of a weird, snail-obsessed childhood.
Kodi Smit-McPhee, Jackie Weaver, Sarah Snook, Eric Bana and Nick Cave are among those providing voices to the latest film from the director of “Mary and Max.”
This IFC (limited) release makes it into theaters Oct. 25.
A British “bio pic” musical about Robbie Williams, or a fever dream musical spinning off Williams’ sense of self by the director of “The Greatest Showman,” this holiday release has one of the more arresting trailers parked in theaters at the moment.
Not sure how big of a deal Williams is or ever was on this side of the pond, but this looks “mental,” as the Limeys say. And maybe fun.
But who is handcuffing whom?
Sophie Thatcher and Rupert Friend star in “Companion,” whose teaser trailer gives off very strong “Strange Darling” vibes.
We all saw “Barbarian,” and most of us thoroughly enjoyed it. So this holds promise.
Jan. 10 may be the release date. Then again, maybe they’ll hold it. Because “Strange Darling” just came out last summer.
Few movies about getting sober are as brilliant at conveying the allure of drowning, wallowing in alcohol, the emotional and physical liberation it seems to offer, as “The Outrun.” And rare is the story told within this most personal of experiences that exults in its trials, the gut check of “one day at a time” and the exultant release from the trap of addiction.
Saoirse Ronan is mesmerizing in this film, based on journalist Amy Liprot’s memoir (she co-wrote the script), which in director Nora Fingscheidt’s hands becomes an Orkney Islands travelogue, a healing-through-isolation-in-nature drama and a tour de force for Ronan, a great actress who gives herself over to this part to a degree we’ve never seen before.
A film that immerses us in the out-of-control, drink-your-blues-at-bay blur of addiction, filmed in the staggering, extreme closeups of a series of Hackney, London benders, “Outrun” contrasts that with being alone in a harsh environment, cornered into a confrontation with who you are, shocked by the ice-cold North Sea, the bracing, omnipresent wind and wildlife that take you out of yourself, your problems and your head.
It’s a tone poem of recovery, a windswept ballet of “choosing life,” and one of the best pictures of the year.
The story’s simplicity is framed within that one simple question addicts on the mend ask one another.
“How long you been sober?”
The movie tracks the answer to that from “0” days through “63 days,” “the steepest bit,” and beyond via that question and onscreen graphics. Through flashbacks, we see what 29 year-old Rona’s illness and the accompanying impulse control has cost her — dignity, a love affair, focus and physical and psychological injuries.
Ronan narrates the story of Rona through poetic observations about the differences in the islands, local lore and myth, and of her life there. She grew up on a 150 acre farm, helping her parents with the sheep. They’ve split up now, with Mom (Saskia Reeves) retreating into religion and dad (Stephen Dillane) reduced to living in a battered trailer.
Her father, we learn, has medically untreated manic episodes which alcohol abuse exacerbates. It’s through understanding her own issues that Rona will come to see her father in the cold light of knowing.
We meet Rona after grad school, an unemployed biologist who needs further schooling to actually do anything with this direction she’s taken. Moving back and forth through her life, we see the constant close-down-the-clubs/pubs habit, the ugly drunk she becomes at the end of the night, emptying every abandoned glass and bottle in the place as the staff tries to get this staggering last “regular” out the door.
She is a violent drunk. But somehow, she found love, and the film shows us — for the umpteenth time — how an alcoholic hides her bottles, if not her drunken behavior, from an increasingly despairing partner, here named Daynin (Paapa Essiedu).
Mom’s prayers for her smart trainwreck of a daughter include a suggestion. A wildlife conservation group needs monitors on the islands to count the shrinking local population of Corn crakes, which she can only find by listening for them. And she might be good at talking to her fellow farm folk about improved practices that will aid the wildlife population.
We see Rona get the job, witness how she fits into her place on “Mainland” island, and how that’s uprooted as she travels by ferry and puddle-jumper airplane to one of the Papa islands for this new work.
“I have a life to get back to in London” fades as the days sober add up, Rona joins meetings large and on the smallest island, tiny — just four older, burly men and her.
Her headphones blast the techo beat of her club cruising/dancing past, but the music of the howling wind drags her to awareness.
“I study my personal geology,” is how the budding scientist puts it. She swims with the seals. And she faces up to her lowest of the low moments, and what it cost her.
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Novelist R.L. Palacio’s attempt to turn out a sequel to her best-seller “Wonder,” which became a Julia Roberts weeper on the big screen, seems well-intentioned enough. But tying that story about a precocious child bullied simply because he looks :different” to The Holocaust might seem a stretch, and the film made from that literary sequel “White Bird” can’t escape being cloying and cliched.
Still, bullying is how fascism gets its start, and America and much of the world is coping with the consequences of that in ways the first film could only hint at. Skip past the “let’s cash in on a hit” ethos that hangs over all sequels and there’s a perhaps unintended timeliness to this tale.
The bully who needs to learn the error of his ways is Jewish, a New York child of privilege who doesn’t know his family’s history with that sort of behavior.
Helen Mirren plays the famous French painter and grandmother to prep school punk Dillon (Teagan Booth) who was expelled from his previous school for bullying little Auggie of “Wonder” a while back. Grand-mère conveniently shows up at the family townhouse after Dillon’s first day at his new school, where he’s witnessed rich boys he’d like to impress bullying the compassionate, human rights activists of the student body.
Dillon did nothing. As he figures the lesson from all that is to “mind my own business, don’t be mean, don’t be nice,” granny is here to state the obvious.
“Always be kind,” she preaches. Stick up for the bullied. And then she tells him the long story of her Holocaust childhood in Vichy France, a time “when it took courage to be kind” to Jews like her, and by extension, Dillon.
Young Sara (Ariella Glaser) was a fashion-conscious young teen just taking an interest in boys in 1942, when all of a sudden the French government’s Nazi overlords made anti-Semitism not just the law of the land, but fashionable among the French populace.
Sara was already a talented artist, but she doesn’t get how things are changing until the handsome Gaul she’s smitten with (Jem Matthews) takes note of her drawing and says it’s “not bad, for a Jew.”
Her mother (Olivia Ross) counsels that this spreading hatred “is like a bad storm. We just have to let it pass.” But Dad isn’t shy about scaring them all to death with what’s coming. He makes Sara promise to keep her overcoat with her and wear her winter boots at school all day. Naturally, she’d prefer to ditch the coat and don her ruby red shoes the moment she’s in class.That almost costs the child her life.
The Nazis show up, Jewish kids are grabbed and she escapes with her life. And who becomes her savior but the “crippled” boy the school bullies have all nicknamed “crab” because of the way he walks.
Julien, “my REAL name,” is a boy (Orlando Schwerdt) of resourcefulness and resolve. Mechanically-inclined enough to be the assistant projectionist at the town cinema, he spirits her away and hides Sara in his barn. Her parents were arrested, but Julien’s parents Vivienne (Gillian Anderson) and Jean-Paul (Jo Stone-Fewings) are all-in on saving her from certain death.
Julien must take daily risks of discovery, keeping the secrets of his projectionist/French Resistance fighter boss, his parents’ sympathies, the compassionate teachers and headmaster of the Catholic school and Sara’s survival from not just the Germans, but from French collaborators, including the school bullies.
Here, those teens are given black uniforms, berets and machine guns, with the freedom to harass and shoot neighbors/classmates they suspect of anti-German activity.
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A lot of myth and movie lore are attached to the cinema’s epic flops. The long-gestating, all-star-cast 1999 film of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s “Breakfast of Champions” carries its share of such baggage.
No, it didn’t end adapting screenwriter and director Alan Rudolph’s career. The miss-or-hit Altman-acolyte and cult filmmaker behind “Trouble in Mind,” “Afterglow,” “Songwriter” and “Choose Me” made four more films after “Champions,” with only “The Secret Lives of Dentists” being worth anybody’s trouble.
Rudolph was involved with this adaptation back when it was pitched as Altman’s follow-up to “Nashville” and “Buffalo Bill an the Indians,” but the latter flopped and we never got our ’70s “Altman” take on Vonnegut, set to star Peter Falk, Sterling Hayden, Ruth Gordon and Alice Cooper.
“Champions” came out the same year as “The Sixth Sense,” which lessened any impact it had on the early 2000s fall-off in Bruce Willis‘s screen career. He didn’t avoid “challenging” material after this, either. He’d star in Sam Shepard’s “True West” on TV a couple of years later, before settling into indifferent comedies, generic action pics, ensemble pieces and cameos as his star faded.
Co-star Nick Nolte‘s best years were already behind him, and his credits already included a pretty good version of Vonnegut’s “Mother Night.”
But “Champions” did scare Hollywood out of ever taking another shot at a feature length film based on Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s quirky, prescient and human-foibles-skewering science fiction. We got a film of his masterpiece “Slaughterhouse-Five”and “Happy Birthday, Wanda June” in the adventurous early ’70s, a disastrous “Slapstick” in the ’80s, “Mother Night” and “Breakfast of Champions” in the ’90s, and that was all she wrote.
“And so it goes,” and so it went, all because a funny book didn’t turn into a funny movie.
The multi-point-of-view story has Albert Finney play a reclusive “cult” writer invited to be feted in suburban Midland (not quite Texas, and the movie was shot in Twin Falls, Idaho). Whatever his literary rep and national profile, Kilgore Trout has a rich fan and is properly praised to the heavens by that fan’s mouthpiece and conference organizer (Buck Henry).
Our Vonnegut alter ego decides to keep the travel honorarium and hike or hitchhike his way West. He meets fans who know of his myth and never suspect they’re in the prescence of The Master.
Midland is also home to the greatest car salesman of them all, hype master Dwayne Hoover (Willis), the telegenic emperor of the Exit 11 Motor Village. Dwayne’s all smiles and this week’s hype — “HAWAIIAN week!” But when we meet him, he’s sticking a revolver in his mouth.
Married to the broken Celia (Barbara Hershey), cheating with the dizzy employee Francine (Glenne Headley), father of flaky lounge-singing son Bunny (Lukas Haas), it’s hard to pin down the source of Dwayne’s existential angst and mental health crisis.
His old Army buddy, salesman Harry Le Sabre (Nolte) is barely keeping it together himself, manic in his TV sales pitches, unwinding by dressing in women’s wear with his domineering wife (Vicki Lewis).
And a convict (Omar Epps) figures the fact that his name — Wayne Hoobler — “sounds like” Dwayne Hoover is reason enough to pursue employment at the Motor Village the minute he gets out of prison.
Continue readingA global crisis and a lot of international leaders, lost in the woods — literally — at a conference to tackle that crisis.
Looks intriguing. Three credited directors including Guy Maddin and “Green Fog” siblings Galen and Evan Johnson bring this to the screen Oct. 18.
This Apple TV psychological horror series co-stars Rosie Perez and Judith Light and premieres Oct. 25.
The “Fruitvale Station,” “Creed” and “Black Panther” director leaves franchises behind and gets back to more challenging work with this period piece about two brothers returning to their hometown to face “evil.”
Delroy Lindo, Lola Kirke, Hailee Steinfeld, Jayme Lawson and bluesman Buddy Guy star in this March 7 release.
How serious is it? Coogler shot it on FILM.
Box office expectations for “Joker: Folie à Deux” have been tumbling since the first reviews rolled out some weeks back.
Todd Phillips’ jukebox musical fantasy take on the “tragic” story of the making of a murderous monster may pair up Lady Gaga with Joaquin Phoenix for a song and even dance or three. But the tone is off, the story’s messy and the message is muddled.
“Joker” earned $96 million when it opened in a pre-COVID thrall of glowing reviews and fan frenzy to see this most serious of comic book adaptations.
It’s a darker world, now, with fascism on the loose and the law unwilling to rein it in. The lighthearted slaughter of “Deadpool & Wolverine” was a break from the steady trend of slumping interest in comic book fare. Thoughts of “Folie à Deux” matching “Joker’s” take vanished, and slipped with every passing week.
A $50 million weekend is still within reach, Deadline.com says. But $45 seems more likely, less than half the last film’s take.
The only other movies opening this weekend are “White Bird,” a surviving WWII tale starring Gillian Anderson, and “Monster Summer,” a witch hunt starring Mel Gibson as the witch hunter. Neither of those will clear $2 million.
That means it’s up to the charming and sweet “The Wild Robot” to take up the slack, and it could clear $20 million on its second weekend, with $18-19 million the track its on right now. It’ll hit $100 million — barely — between Arbor Day and All Hallow’s Eve.
“Beetlejuice Beetlejuice” is still making bank, raking in another $11 as it marches towards the $300 million domestic take mark. Let’s hope Tim Burton does something more interesting and more fun with this box office capital.
“Transformers One” is fading fast and won’t make the $60 million mark before it’s chased off screens — another $5 million and change this weekend.
And “Speak No Evil” is still in the top five, but the James McAvoy remake of a Danish thriller isn’t reviving the horror audience, which has flatlined many a release this year by not showing up. It’ll only take in another $3, and that barely gets it over $30 million since release.
I’ll update these figures and Sat. data starts coming in.
Movie Nation 