Movie Nation

It was “The Lavender Hill Mob” and “The Titfield Thunderbolt” that Monty Python’s John Cleese was remembering when he decided that well-past-70 Charles Critchon might be just the jolly sort to direct his screenplay for “A Fish Called Wanda.”

Those classic Ealing Comedies might date from another age, and the old rule about “old guys can’t do comedy” remains a hard prejudice to overcome. But Cleese, Jamie Lee, Palin, Kline & Co. turned out to be in the surest possible hands with 1988’s “Wanda,” one of the greatest screen comedies ever.

Yet the editor-turned-director was already making his mark in British cinema before comedies beckoned. World War II launched his directing career (“For Those in Peril”). And stumbling across “Against the Wind” on a streaming channel reveals this 1948 gem to be the “perfectionist” Critchon at his action-oriented best.

It’s a heist picture bent to fit the still-new commando thriller narrative, and as such it’s a jaunty, genre defining work.

A “team” is assembled, trained to fight, parachute and hit the enemy with gadgets from a military movie prototype for James Bond’s Q-Division. The mission goes wrong from the first — accidents, betrayals, characters’ Achille heels’ exposed.

But with that “Keep calm and carry on” doggedness, these men and a woman don’t give up. And if the viewer isn’t won over by the twists, narrow escapes and sacrifices of the early acts and Critchton’s brilliant shooting and cutting, the filmmaker tosses young actors John Slater and Gordon Jackson onto a moving train, imperiling one and all in some seriously jaw-dropping “They did their OWN STUNTS” action for the climax.

An Urtext thriller becomes downright dazzling, and Crichton takes a giant step to making his name in British cinema in the process.

A priest (Robert Beatty) with a gift for languages and experience on The Continent is recruited by Ackman (James Robertson Justice of course, later of “Guns of Navarone”) to an asymettrical warfare unit specializing in “sabotage” behind enemy lines.

Future Oscar winner and “Diabolique” icon Simone Signoret, still in her ’20s and making her first English language film, is Michèle, bridling at desk duty, longing to return to Nazi Occupied Europe for revenge against a turncoat lover. Bomb-gadget guru Duncan (Jackson) will have to hide his feelings for Michèle – — “Once you start mixing duty and affection, you start digging graves!” — and his Scots-accent and iffy French from the authorities if he’s ever sent on a mission. Show dancer turned radio operator Julie (Gisèle Préville) will have to get over her crush on Father Philip (Beatty). Hulking man without a country Cronk (Jack Warner) could come in handy. Emile (John Slater) will undergo plastic surgery so convincing his own wife won’t recognize him on this assignment.

And Picquart (Paul Dupuis of “Passport to Pimlico”) will have to have a fascist image makeover before making his way back to Brussels. Because that’s where they’re bound. Their former instructor, master saboteur Andrew (Peter Illing) may have masterminded the work records office fire that threw a wrench into Nazi foreign labor impressment. But he was caught, and By Jove, they’re going in to get him.

Everything that can go wrong does when you’re dealing with parachute jumps, espionage, explosives, agents of mixed allegiances and locals you may not wholly trust. But the mission endures, with “suicide pills” a final out for those captured.

The deaths here are dramatic, sometimes to the point of shocking, and each has meaning and consequences. Signoret is the standout in the cast, but Dupuis, Slater and Jackson have some great moments.

Jackson, later immortalized as the fusty, traditionalist butler in “Upstairs Downstairs,” an early hit for PBS in the US and the template for “Downtown Abbey,” is most impressive as the sexist Scot who swoons for the jaded, loveless Michèle, only to have to depend on her professionalism to save his life.

But watching him cling to rolling rail-stock in the film’s climactic rail chase (much of the movie was filmed on location in Belgium) we don’t see “performing” “as if my life depended on it.” The actor, and Slater as Emil, are white-knuckling onto couplings and other parts of rolling freight cars because one false move and they’re dead or at the very least badly injured.

Ealing Studios would make its true mark on film history via the comedies to come — “Whisky Galore,” “The Ladykillers,” “Kind Hearts and Coronets” — a couple of them directed by Crichton.

But with the sentimental, sad and sometimes thrilling “Against the Wind,” one and all proved that it wasn’t just twee, quaint and distinctly British charm and wit that made Ealing a revered institution. Definitive genre pictures about “Their Finest Hour” did Ealing and Crichton & Co. credit, too.

Rating: TV-PG, combat violence

Cast: Robert Beatty, Simone Signoret, Gordon Jackson,
Gisèle Préville, John Slater, Paul Dupuis, Peter Illing and James Robertson Justice.

Credits: Directed by Charles Crichton, scripted by T.E.B. Clarke and Michael Pertwee, based on a short story by J. Elder Willis. An Ealing Studios/J.Arthur Rank release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:36

Ok, the concept/conceit here is kind of LOL.

Riley Dandy and Adam David Thompson, playing robber-siblings, hope we’re expecting great things in the thriller’s execution. Buzz is pretty good.

Oct. 4.

Yes, there’s a whiff — a tiny hint — of rival ex-child-star Selena Gomez’s TV hit “Only Murders in the Building” in this “Only Serial Killer on Our Floor, and he’s Rich” thriller.

Blood and cleavers and Dermot Mulroney and a big payday.

This drops Oct. 15, streaming.

Love the casting.

This looks fun, Jekyll/Hyde twins tossed into a vampire salad.

Oct. 4.

An academic physicist confronts the Big Existential question at life’s end in the deliberate, low-key sci-fi dramedy “Omni Loop,” a film that ponders “What was it all for?”

A career with great promise and a life of paths taken or not taken hangs over a kind of “Edge of Tomorrow” meets “Groundhog Day” tale of a scientist who tries everything to fend off the inevitable, perhaps missing the larger “point” of her life in the process.

Mary Louise Parker is Zoya Lowe, a woman about to die because somehow a black hole has opened in her chest. She’s got another physics text co-written with her husband (Carlos Jacott) at the printers, ready for a last edit, a daughter (Fern Katz) who needs her and a big fat regret hanging over her life at this terminal juncture.

But “terminal” goes into overtime every five days, as Zoya has some magical pills that pop her back a week, in time to get the worst news again, have a premature 55th birthday party arranged by her grieving family again, visit her aged mother in a nursing home one “last” time and deal with her will and her publishers all over again.

The life-extending “loop” might be “Hail Mary” way of giving her existence meaning, “making my mark.” Or is it a trap, a way of obsessing about the outcome, about scientific pursuits she didn’t complete which might have “solved” her problem? What’s she not getting?

“Omni Loop” — Bernardo Britto’s film takes its title from a line on Miami’s downtown “Metromover” commuter rail — is about Zoya’s long, last ditch effort to get answers and maybe get results. Meeting a community college science student with Zoya’s “An Introduction to Modern Physics” book, she breaks the pattern, tracks the kid down, and day after day, re-explains her dilemma and her “plan” to young Paula (Ayo Edebiri from TV’s “The Bear”).

Existence that has lost all meaning through the endless, soul-sucking grief of the repetition of the last week of Zoya’s life takes on purpose again as they take over an unused lab, pore over old research and brainstorm new approaches that will put Zoya back in contact with her youth, a disappointed mentor (Harris Yulin, terrific) and perhaps the “reason” she was gifted with these magic pills as a “promising” child.

Parker, of “RED” and TV’s “Weeds” and many other credits, has always done her best acting with her incredibly expressive eyes and emotionally open facial expressions. A simple side-eye from her is usually worth a laugh. Here she gives us glimpses of wide-eyed puzzlement at her dilemma, always washed-away by the resignation of despair.

Parker makes the “loop” of repetition eye-rollingly funny, forlorn and wistful, even hopeful in a “Maybe this time we’ll get it” way.

The narrative lets us see things from Adeberi’s Paula for a few scenes, in that “everybody’s going through something (not just Zoya)” aphorism. The younger actress matches Parker puzzlement for puzzlement, always in her case impulsively replaced by hope. The kid, remeeting and re-learning Zoya’s plight, time after time, almost instantly engages with the challenge, bringing a fresh set of eyes and a new appreciation for Florida’s community college system.

The picture drifts out of its loop in the latter acts, and the messaging of Britto’s debut feature can seem downright retrograde in an era of reviving feminism.

But “Omni Loop” gives us a less gonzo, more reflective and frankly sadder riff on themes explored in time travel tales and in the “alternate universes” of “Everything Everywhere All At Once.” Confronting Paula with her “gift” pills, Zoya has to learn “Do you really think you’re the only person who has a reason to go back” in time?

And even with that “gift” of a do-over, who among us knows what we would do with it, why, and if it will provide the “fix” we figure our lives need?

Rating: unrated

Cast: Mary Louise Parker, Ayo Adeberi, Carlos Jacott and Harris Yulin.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Bernardo Britto. A Magnolia release.

Running time: 2:09

“Shiva Baby,” “Bottoms” and “Bodies Bodies Bodies” have given Rachel Sennott acting baggage, typecasting her as a confident-to-the-point-of-brazen, comically-blunt and cocksure (sorry) young woman whose allure has a contract rider.

You don’t want to cross her, or anybody she plays.

That makes the downbeat dramedy “I Used to be Funny” an inspired choice on her part. She plays into type and against it as a promising Toronto stand-up comic who has suffered trauma, abandoned her dreams and all but refused to ever leave her friends’ apartment.

Sam Cowell used to swagger onto the stage, swatting the audience with good-natured man-bashing, pronoun-curious teasing, femininity and rough sex jokes.

“My big flirty move on a date is to make the guy pinkie promise not to kill me…We need a Volkswagen level recall of men in general…Who am I to judge Justin Bieber’s youth pastor? Because I wanted to f— the Biebs, too.”

But something happened a couple of years back. She hasn’t left gay besties Paige (Sabrina Jalees) and Philip’s (Caleb Hearon) house since.

Seeing that the kid she used to nanny on TV listed as “missing” triggers flashbacks, a need to act and a recognition that “I Used to be Funny” and that she has a prayer of being that way again. If only she can get some closure.

Writer-director Ally Pankiw, a veteran of music videos and some pretty good TV series (“The Great,” “Black Mirror”) and Sennott create a young woman of means and a hint of direction — she has a fine arts degree, was an au pair in the UK for a couple of years, and has been a stand up for more years — and a glib way of looking at every subject, even the most serious ones.

“Ok, I’m gonna open with a ‘rape’ joke tonight.”

That’s what comics do.

Interviewing with the humorless cop-dad (Jason Jones of TV’s “The Detour”) of a twelve year old (Olga Petsa) in need of a nanny goes better than it should. At least Sam doesn’t joke about the unseen terminally ill wife.

Brooke, the child, doesn’t want a nanny. But the sassy, mouthy, conspiratorial Sam wins her over.

“You’re not like other nannies, are you?”

“You’re not like other kids, are you?”

We can too-easily guess what went wrong with all this, long before the many flashbacks to the nature of their confidences and Sam’s sense of responsibility about Brooke are laid out.

Sam saw Brooke a day or two after she disappeared. It didn’t go well. The cops she speaks to “know” Sam.

Her ex-beau (Ennis Esmer) figures in the flashbacks. Might they have a future? And those stand-up sets sampled suggest that maybe she’ll move beyond simply visiting her old comedy haunts and take up the mike again. Or not.

That depends on whether Sam can find the missing Brooke, who “hates” her.

Pankiw does a decent enough job keeping this narrative moving despite a slow pace that seems to predict a stall-out.

The milieu may be familiar, and the third act revelations and actions are both predictable and somewhat clumsily handled. But Sennott wraps herself completely around this character, giving us vulnerability behind the cocky facade, worry and responsibility in a profession not known for producing the stable and well-adjusted.

She’s good enough in this to make fans pine for the next time she chooses to be funny and nothing but. Well, funny and mean.

Rating: TV-MA, sexual assault, substance abuse by minors, profanity

Cast: Rachel Sennott, Olga Petsa, Jason Jones, Caleb Hearon, Ennis Esmer and Sabrina Jalees.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ally Pankiw. A Utopia release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:41

Michelle Austin and Bryony Miller and star in the latest film from Britain’s most important social-observer/filmmaker, Mike Leigh.

Leigh did “Vera Drake” and “Secrets & Lies” and Happy-Go-Lucky” and “Mr. Turner” and “Naked” and “Peterloo” and “Life is Sweet” and “High Hopes” and “Topsy Turvy.” His films aren’t always sharply-observed dramas and dramedies about the working class. Sometimes they’re sharply-observed portraits of Gilbert and Sullivan or the painter J.M.W. Turner.

Leigh is the last of his generation of British filmmakers, directors who came up during the “kitchen sink realism” of the early ’60s and made films that were a progression from that

We face his and is characters’ “Hard Truths” on Oct. 5 in North America.

The making of a pathological liar, professional credit thief and perpetual failure, tutored by one of the most malignant figures in American political history to be become the MOST malignant figure in American political history.

It wasn’t just Roger Stone, Flynn, Manafort and Putin who made Trump. It was the venal, amoral Roy Cohn, McCarthy flunky to crypto-fascist “fixer” who tutored DJT to project his failings onto others, never accept blame, always lie and never admit failure, defeat or even being wrong.

Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong play Trump and Cohn.

And lest one dismiss this as some quick-and-dirty hit job, note that director Ali Abbasi did the terrific Iranian serial killer thriller “Holy Spider.” The Iranian/Danish filmmaker knows hot button issues and how to make potent, edgy entertainment out of them.

Oct. 11.

It’s got to be the most unusual of dilemmas, facing your twilight years as one of the most beloved figures in American pop culture.

James Earl Jones, a giant of the American theatre, Black theatre and screens big and small, carried that mantle with grace and pride for decades. The Grand Old Man of every medium he dabbled in died today at his home in Dutchess County, New York. Jones was 93.

“Star Wars” made him an icon, and even led to a hilarious turn or two sending up his “Darth Vader” voice and image on “The Simpsons” and “The Big Bang Theory” and the like.

But in a long career that collected nearly 200 screen credits — he made his film debut in Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove, or How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)” — Jones made it a point never to to act above the material, unless the material demanded it.

He played the first Black president (“The Man,” 1972) and embodied the bitter, racially discriminated-against boxing champion Jack Johnson in an Oscar-nominated turn in “The Great White Hope.”(1970)

His autobiography, “Voices and Silences,” is a read of rare frankness and vulnerability for a celebrity autobiography, something he generously attributed to his co-writer, Peggy Niven, when I interviewed him about the book some years back.

Jones was the first person I ever heard use the word “racialist” for someone a little too quick to play “the race card.” He used it about the great poet Maya Angelou when they worked on a play together — Jean Genet’s “The Blacks” — in about 1960 in his autobiography. And he tossed it out there again the first time I interviewed him, about “Field of Dreams” but talking up a particularly memorable role in a couple of episodes of “L.A Law.”

Jones was the son of African American theatre royalty, Robert Earl Jones. Dad leaving him with relatives may have contributed to his son’s lifelong stutter, something James Earl rarely let out on stage or the screen. But one reason James Earl had no patience for “racialists” was his awareness of his own struggle to conquer that stutter and father’s shadow to become one of the great performers and voices of his age — narrating everything under the sun, making Darth Vader his own even though he never came closer to the masked and caped villain than a recording booth.

I had the pleasure of interviewing several times over the years, with the first being memorable for how prickly he was. We were talking up his avuncular turn in “Field of Dreams,” but he was on set for “L.A. Law,” and staying in “racialist” character, he explained, laughing, years later. “The guy was a prick,” and that probably spilled over to that phone chat. It was rough going, in a “I don’t suffer fool journalists gladly” sense.

He was warmth-personified talking about “Sounds and Silences,” and the marvelous pairing with Robert Duvall titled “A Family Thing,” a simple dramedy that laid bare the absurdity of racism even in a pre Ancestry.com America. “We’re all EVERY different race,” he laughed in that sonorous roar of his.

Who wouldn’t want to be related to James Earl Jones?

His modesty, in spite of all he’d accomplished and experienced, was overwhelming. “Star Wars” or not, he was still “a thousand-aire” not a “millionaire,” he joked. He took on comedies (“Three Fugitives”) and authority figures (“The Hunt for Red October”) and classics of the American theater (including plays by August Wilson), a working actor first and last.

And as I noted, in recalling his glorious turn in 1987’s “Matewan,” he wasn’t above putting himself and his name on an indie film about the Mingo County War and early 1920s coal mining and getting that masterpiece made.

Race was a subtext of many of his most iconic performances, from “The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings” to “The Great White Hope.”

But he was a grand villain (“Conan the Barbarian”) and a fitting choice for a king (“Coming to America,” “The Lion King”). And he took every unexpected hit (“Sandlot,” “Star Wars”) with the same equanimity that he regarded his many prestige projects.

He was an Emmy, ACE and other award winner and collector of lifetime achievement awards.

He will be missed, and I dare say it won’t just be fans like me who mourn his passing. You got a taste of how beloved a presence he’s been back in 2011 when he deservedly collected an honorary Oscar, live from the London theater where he was co-starring with Vanessa Redgrave in “Driving Miss Daisy.”

Rest in peace, Mister Jones. Well done.

The dialogue has a metallic tang and the smell of a just-fired revolver about it in “Rebel Ridge,” an “In the Heat of the Night” style tale of Southern justice in the golden age of “cash forfeiture.”

Lines like “Just because you was right that don’t make us wrong” leave a nasty aftertaste when delivered with a “Bama-ass” drawl.

The latest thriller fom writer-director Jeremy Saulnier is sharp, deliberate and lean, more “Blue Ruin” and “Green Room” than “Hold the Dark.” It takes its sweet, suspenseful time to get hold of us and give us a good shake.

“I wasn’t aware it was a pissin’ contest.” “It always is.”

By genre, this is another “You picked the wrong guy to mess around with” action pic, one smart enough to never have to use that cliched line. It’s “First Blood” and “Taken,” about a man with “particular skills” crossed by the wrong people — this time, small-town Southern law enforcement enjoying its decades of immunity from scrutiny, investigation and oversight.

Aaron Pierre (“Brother,” Malcolm X in TV’s “Genius”) plays Terry, a guy minding his own business, pedaling a bike through the Deep South (Louisiana, based on the use of the word “parish”) when he’s rammed by a small town cop who fails to take into account the cyclist is listening to music through his earbuds and can’t “stop” when ordered to, for no good reason.

Terry is harassed, threatened and cuffed. He is questioned and searched. “May I have your permission to look through your backpack?” “No, you may not.” He is misused and manhandled, but respectful and always in control of his emotions.

That cash? It’s to bail his cousin out of a “possession” arrest in Shelby Springs. He’s got to post it before that cousin is shipped off to the state pen for holding until trial. This is a matter of life and death.

Not that the cop (David Denham) and his backup (Emory Cohen) give two damns about that. This money is impounded, subject to forfeiture, all based on their “suspicion” and prejudice.

Terry may find a sympathetic ear in the courthouse, an assistant clerk and law student played by AnnaSophia Robb, in her best role since “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” “This can’t be legal” turns out to be legal. And in this corner of the BFE South, “this” is a whole system of arrests, charges and seizures that the police chief (Don Johnson) banks on and the judge (James Cromwell) signs off on.

Pushing back, trying to file a “robbery” report, only pisses off that chief, the one to whom everything is a “pissin’ contest.” Chasing down the bus prematurely transporting that cousin to prison doesn’t reassure the cousin, Terry or us that this is going to end well.

Because the cops may have all the cash and all the cards. But they’re going to find out they picked the wrong Black man to railroad and rob. All we have to do is wait for the shoe and the hammer to drop.

The genius of Saulnier and Pierre’s approach here it to keep that shoe from dropping, to play all this on simmer, to emphasize “less lethal” “special skills,” “de-escalation” and patience. Sooner or later, lines will be crossed and the ante will be upped in that “pissin’ contest.” Sooner or later, those small town police will figure out what all those Marine Corps acronyms attached to Terry Richmond’s name mean.

Pierre is stoic and stonefaced as Richmond, a man who may not remember “which amendment (to the Constitution)” guarantees “due process.” He is still someone of inner resources and inner reserve, willing to comply, to go along to get along, to make “a deal” because “a deal is a deal.” But corruption this ingrained, this officially sanctioned, makes “a deal” as worthless as the promise of a police chief.

Johnson never lets this “Chief Burnne” become a caricature. He is electric in the part, not inclined to lose his cool, willing to “mislead” rather than overplay or give away his hand, hellbent on having his way in all this. Because the police chief wants to be county sheriff,.

Saulnier’s film is at its best on familiar, factual ground. “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” was all over this “civil foreiture” sketchiness ten years ago. Some of the side issues — small town paranoia, job insecurity, all the people who have to look the other way for this corrupt cop hustle to operate — take on melodramatic touches.

But for all its flinty dialogue, there is no catch phrase, no glib “You picked the wrong” this, that or the other person “to mess around with.” Pierre makes us buy into the calculus Terry is working with, the training he’s absorbed. This is a potentially violent chess game, and Terry has to size-up his opponents, the cost-benefit and potential hazard of this move or that one. Pierre makes us reason this out with him.

I found the ending of “Rebel Ridge” a bit of a reach.

But Saulnier’s made a slow-burn thriller that surprises and keeps us guessing and waiting, mostly for that moment when somebody draws “First Blood,” and even then he trips up expectations, and deliciously so.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Aaron Pierre, AnnaSophia Robb, David Denman, Zsane Jhe, Steve Zissss and Don Johnson

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jeremy Saulnier. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:11