Movie Nation

The full title of “Dance First” includes the phrase “A Life of Samuel Beckett.” They left out the word “abridged.”

Because while one simply could not do better than have the great Irish actor Gabriel Byrne playing Beckett as a reluctant Nobel laureate, wracked by guilt and having a film-long debate with an alter ego about what to do with “the prize money” from that unwanted honor, it was never going to be easy to fit all that Beckett was, with generous samples of his work, into a 100 minute movie.

The Irish playwright, novelist, poet and short story writer was one the most celebrated and influencial authors of the 20th century. Beckett spent most of his working life in Paris, and composed many of his most famous works first in French, which is how the world first encountered Vladimir and Estragon, Pozzo and the unlucky Lucky, standing around talking, “Waiting for Godot.”

In the film that British director James Marsh (“The Theory of Everything”) and Scottish TV writer Neil Forsyth conjure up, Beckett is basically reduced to that guilt as he considers the women in his life, and men, that he figures he let down over the years.

While that reductivism seems a valid, servicable approach and provides the frame to the black and white flashbacks of Beckett’s brooding past, it proves a bit of a slog as the script serves up few highs and lows, almost no “work in progress” scenes or “Eureka!” moments. It’s as sentimental as a “Maestro,” but lacks the spark, the thrills of more entertaining biopics.

I’d blame some of that on Beckett himself. When the BBC editor Barbara (Maxine Peake of “The Theory of Everything”) who falls for him gushes over “Waiting for Godot,” she calls it a masterpiece and then states the obvious.

“But nothing happens.”

“Nothing happens twice,” the wily absurdist Beckett corrects her.

Aside from the time a Paris pimp stabbed him in the chest, a brief interlude in which the not-yet-famous Irish expat joins the French Resistance during World War II and a few testy exchanges over the autobiographical nature of his work with the women in his life protesting their treatment in the fiction, that goes for the film as well. Not a lot happens. And what does happen is treated too matter-of-factly to be of great dramatic interest.

Beckett hears his name called out in Oslo at the December, 1969 Nobel Prize ceremony, and turns to his (secret) wife and longtime collaborator and “companion” Suzanne (Sandrine Bonnaire) and mutters “What a catastrophe” (in French). He stomps up on stage, snatches the award and then climbs the lighting rig in the wings, leaving the theater. He emerges in what looks like a decomissioned salt mine, the perfect empty space/wasteland for Samuel Beckett to debate himself (Byrne x 2) over what this means.

He and his alter ego decide that the only way to make amends for this “undeserved” glory is to consider what to do with the cash, and rehash all the people the imperious, brilliant Beckett wronged over the course of his life — starting with his demanding, hated mother (Lisa Dwyer Hoff, brittle, bitter and toxic) — and how he might somehow “honor” or “repay” them with the money.

With her and his more-doting dad (Barry O’Connor) raising him in the privilege of private school and kite-flying reveries, May Beckett simply cannot understand or countenance the portrait she sees of herself in his earliest fiction.

“You could only imagine it as you because the whole world is you,” young Beckett (Fionn O’Shea) hisses back, drawing blood.

After graduating from Trinity College in Dublin, Beckett moved to Paris and sought out James Joyce as a mentor. “Game of Thrones” and “Peaky Blinders” alumnus Aiden Gillen plays Joyce as a 1930s burnout, still famous for “Ulyssees,” but no longer “that James Joyce.”

The script gives Gillen an edge to play in his world wearinness, setting the tone for their connection when he dismisses the fanboy’s first approach.

“I’m deep in THOUGHT.”

Beckett eventually befriends Joyce, and we meet the second source of his lifelong guilt. Joyce and his wife (the great Bronagh Gallagher) allow him to stay for dinner, to hang around and rudely pick the great writer’s brain while ignoring the women of the house only so long as Beckett takes their mercurial, impulsive “mad” daughter Lucia (Gráinne Good, terrific) out dancing.

Beckett cannot let that go any further, and Joyce cannot commit his daughter because once they’ve done that, she can’t come back and “Where else can she go?”

Joyce still had “Finnegan’s Wake” in his future, but he pushes Beckett to either write the truth, challenge himself and the literary status quo, or settle for a lifetime of pondering “consideration”great works, rather than actually writing them. “Stay there, it’s safe there.” And when it comes to translating Joyce’s works, he and his wife have their revenge on Beckett when he undertakes that.

Paris is where Beckett met the smart and beautiful Suzanne (Léonie Lojkine), who could see greatness in the young man, if he has the right “companion.” They live in Occupied Paris, flee when their Resistance cell is blown, and survive.

“Dance First” spends little to no time in the creative fervor that drove Beckett’s writing after the war, suggesting guilt over a murdered comrade was the impulse to write “Godot,” “Krapp’s Last Tape” and “Endgame,” revolutionizing the theater, fitting a trio of novels and made-for-BBC radio dramas in between these landmark plays.

We glimpse only one show — “Play” (1962) — which features its three characters acting with their heads sticking out of gigantic urns.

The relationship dramas of his life, with the long-suffering Suzanne the only one canny enough to insist he keep composing his works in French so that they could be paid twice “for the translation,” and BBC Barbara (Bray) is both the classic “other woman” soap opera and key to his rising reputation because Bray was sleeping with him while also reviewing his works for various British media.

There is a lot more to Beckett than this melodramatic side of his life, and Marsh and Forsyth’s chief blunder is in showing us so little by way of introduction to why he’s still the exemplar of theatrical minimalism, a key figure in the Theatre of the Absurd, why her merits having bridge shaped like an Irish harp named for him in Dublin, and a whole class of Irish patrol boats (named for the first vessel in its class) as well.

Those with little acquaintance with his novels, poems, plays or film won’t have that “Why Beckett matters?” question answered. And those who do are sure to find this meditation frustrating in its lack of explanation and celebration.

Byrne is “right” and quite good at showing us the artist reluctant to accept the late-life accolades. O’Shea gets across the conflicted, emotionally stunted egoist consumed by his art and Gillen auditions for a Great Joyce biopic to come.

But Byrne will only get one crack at Beckett, and it isn’t great. With Joyce, as well as Beckett, we’re unlikely to ever get more than one film telling that life story. “Dance First” isn’t exactly bad. It’s just too narrow in focus, too incomplete, a biopic that leaves us “waiting” for an elusive, mythic “author” to truly make his entrance.

Rating: unrated, adult themes

Cast: Gabriel Byrne, Sandrine Bonnaire, Aiden Gillen, Bronagh Gallagher, Gráinne Good, Lisa Dwyer Hoff, Maxine Peak and Finn O’Shea.

Credits: Directed by James Marsh, scripted by Neil Forsyth, based on the . A Magnolia release.

Running time: 1:40

It’s not what you think. OK, maybe it is.

Awkward funeral? Check. Weird sister in law? Oh yeah.

Billie Lourd also stars in this, with Colin Hanks as the bloke who makes our heroine a “Corpse Bride.”

August 19? We’ll keep an eye out.

Scenes rarely play like “scenes” in the films of Robert Altman. They don’t so much begin, reach their point, and end. The dialogue is cluttered, non-stop, layered in around the leads. “Important” lines from the characters the story is about melt into the conversations going on all around them, some punchy and funny, some inane.

It’s like lives — a world — the viewer drops in on, eavesdropping or even invited into by the human comedy — sometimes tragic — unfolding in front of you.

Altman brought “Altmanesque” to the Western with “McCabe and Mrs. Miller,” a scruffy, gorgeous star driven drama about a gambler and entrepreneur (Warren Beatty) who meets a prostitute (Julie Christie) who introduces herself life this.

“I’m a whore, and I know a LOT about whorehouses.”

“McCabe and Mrs. Miller” was a big studio star vehicle with a stunning Pacific Northwest setting (Squamish, British Columbia was the filming location). Altman had spent a little of his “M*A*S*H” capital in Hollywood on the wildly eccentric “Brewster McCloud.” He tried to play Hollywood’s game with films like “McCabe,” the later Elliott Gould/Raymond Chandler mystery noir “The Long Goodbye” and the gambling buddy dramedy “California Split.”

The set is almost as detailed, wooden and “lived-in” as “Popeye’s” Sweethaven, which came later. The wintry location shooting, with themes and images borrowed by such later films as “The Claim” and” The Hateful Eight,” would provide a backdrop for a tale a of man trying to live “up” to his reputation and a British prostitute trying to get her piece of the American Dream before she aged out of that chance.

But being an Altman film, the obvious isn’t “obvious” and the chiaroscuro of the crowded images and “world” we’re immersed in is what’s paramount in this Warner Brothers box office bomb.

Beatty’s McCabe rides into newborn village Presbyterian Church — named for the structure they’re building, a symbol of “civilization” — as a man with a bearskin coat, a bowler hat and a reputation.

The proprieter of the bare-bones-minumum saloon (Rene Auberjonois) thinks he knows the man’s name, and his reputation, that he killed a fellow a while back. McCabe does nothing to deny this, insists he only be called by his last name, and rolls out a tattered red duck table cloth to invite the locals to play poker.

An Altmaneseque touch — we don’t see McCabe win, clean out the locals and finance everything to follow via his skills at five card stud. He loses. A lot.

But next thing we know, he’s secured land, planned a saloon and brothel and traveled back down the trail to Bear Claw to procure prostitutes, the saddest and most ill-used hookers in the West.

It isn’t until Mrs. Miller rolls up on him, asks him to feed her and lays out her “hygiene” and long-term plan (to make enough money to buy a San Francisco boarding house for her declining years) that everything starts to pay off for McCabe.

Mrs. Miller makes him build a bathouse, makes patrons of their brothel — which he also builds — visit and pay to bathe before they’re allowed to be near the new “San Francisco” sex workers she brings in, and McCabe almost doesn’t care that his saloon and gambling parlor takes a back seat.

McCabe kind of, sort of, goes sweet on Mrs. Miller, who indulges that ardour — for a price. Mrs. Miller has a secret. So does McCabe, we figure.

When McCabe is challenged to sell out his property to a bloody-minded mining concern (Michael Murphy represents them), we start to wonder if he’s as tough as his bluff, foul-mouthed bravado makes out.

“If a frog had wings, he wouldn’t bump his ass so much, follow me?”

Maybe Jessica Belkin is a victim to be. Or maybe those coming for her crossed the wrong waitress.

Sept. 20.

Say this for the Mexican action comedy “Non-Negotiable.” They pack a lot of characters, plot and “twists” into 86 minutes.

An almost jaunty, populist action comedy about a presidential kidnapping, scandal, petty corruption with a whiff of police incompetence built around a hostage negotiator in a troubled marriage trying to free his therapist wife — also held hostage with El Presidente — director John Taratuto’s got his hands full just trying to make the four-writers-screenplay make sense.

Taratuto, who gave the world “I Married a Dumbass” a few years back, misses as often as he hits in that regard, even if he and his cast get the tone, the messaging and the subtext right.

Mauricio Ochmann, from the vast supporting cast of the long-running Mexican TV series “El Señor de los Cielos,” stars as Alan Bender, an adrenalin junky who loves coming in and saving the day as a police hostage negotiator.

He loves it so much he’s neglecting his psychiatrist wife (Tato Alexander) and undercutting her practice with his showboating.

Alan’s way of getting out of his promise to give up “field work” so that he can be more help to her and their daughter is to make a guy with a stutter (Itza Sodi) the protege he’s training to replace him. The joke there is Menendez will never work out in a job where your ability to talk fast and lie faster to plead criminals into giving up their hostages is paramount.

Alan even takes a call in the middle of couple’s counseling. But hell’s bells, it’s a “Code Pig” (in Spanish, subtitled, or dubbed into English).

That means the country’s cowboy-hat populist president Araiza (Enoc Leaño) has been grabbed. Turns out the populist has a congresslady on the side, and that’s how the tinkerer with a grudge, Vicente (Leonardo Ortizgris) trapped him and her and tied them up in bomb vests.

Alan is late to the scene, which all involved try to keep hush-hush. The competent SWAT commander in charage (Claudette Maille) figures she has the situation well in hand — squad deployed, cameras everywhere tapped into.

“Why can’t I see the drone video?” “Lt. Vasquez borrowed it to record his son’s birthday.”

Another twist to the hostage scenerio is that Victoria, Alan’s wife, and the personal trainer (Gonzalo Vega Jr.) she may be having an affair with are also being held, as the kidnapper has an agenda, a plan and a grudge — perhaps against Alan.

The script’s subtext is that “corruption” and fake “populist” rich dude politicians are the reason none of Mexico’s insoluable problems ever get solved. How far will the kidnapper go to get his revenge, and what political ramifications will that have?

Because the government cannot let this blackmail come off, cannot let this “get out” and has all these assetts in place to ensure that. Well, except for the drone.

As for the results, some sequences play, some are novel and some are tried and trite cliches. The picture’s opening pre-kidnapping scenes are hard to follow, and the story reaches a climax, an ending, and then struggles to go on. More obvious and contrived populist points must be scored. Apparently.

Still, it’s not a bad effort one and all and quite a bit more high-minded than “I Married a Dumbass.”

Rating: TV-14, violence, sexual discussions

Cast: Mauricio Ochmann, Tato Alexander, Leonardo Ortizgris, Enoc Leaño, Itza Sodi, and Claudette Maille.

Credits: Directed by Juan Taratuto, scripted by Julietta Steinberg, Joe Rendón, Daniel Cuparo and Marcelo Birmaj. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:26

This premieres at London’s Frightfest in August, and doesn’t appear to have distribution…yet.

But considering the filmmakers eager to appear on camera to sing his praises, that could happen.

He was apparently a deadly spy, a definitive Dracula, Bond villain and “Lord of the Rings” heavy, a multilingual actor for some 60 years, and occasional singer. Will this film get to it all, or just scratch the surface?

Edie Falco plays the hovering/mothering type in this comedy with Bradley Whitford, Michael Rapaport, Jeanie Berlin, Charlie Tahan, Kayli Carter, Michael Beach and ex-Congressman/ex-“Love Boater” Fred Grandy.

This just came off the film fest circuit, so look for it to sneak into release any minute now.

Years of experience teach you to set your sites low for some movies. An ambitious, combat-heavy WWII RAF bio-pic with no big names in the cast, no major distributor behind it, a modest-budget film that premieres and reaches much of the world on Tubi?

That’s “The Shamrock Spitfire,” the story of an Irish ace in the “British Oppressor’s” Royal Air Force during World War II. Tubi got it, and it’s a sturdy, sentimental period piece with decent performances, excellent production values and great special effects.

I don’t know how the Higgins brothers, Dominic and Ian, got their dazzling aerial combat sequences, which can be Heironymous Bosch freeze-frames of planes, clouds, tracer bullets, pilots, explosions and fire. Sampling, compositing and layering combat footage, repurposing clips from “The Battle of Britain,” whose collection of airborne Spitfires, German bombers and ME-109s have turned up in decades of RAF stories since?

But those scenes serve as foundation to a solid, if somewhat dramatically flat and generally unsurprising genre picture on the order of “Mission of Honor” (about Polish pilots in the RAF) and “Dark Blue World” (about Czech pilots in the RAF).

Brendan Finucane was a Dublin native, son of an Easter Uprising revolutionary and an English mother. After Irish independence, his father’s work took them to London, where Brendan (Shane O’Regan), long fascinated by flight, answered the call to join the Royal Air Force just before World War II.

His father (Eoin Lynch) may not approve, fretting over what the folks “back home” would say about an Irish patriot’s son serving in the “Royal” anything. But young Mister “head in the clouds” confers with his priest, whose advice about “the cost of not following your heart” sways him.

Young Brendan is determined to succeed, even though he has trouble with the “landing” part of flying — lots of trouble. But his instructors see the “fight” in him.

And as he notes later in the film, once he’s won his wings, “‘Fighter’ always comes before ‘pilot,’ doesn’t it?”

The film follows Finucane’s tough-minded career, from training to glory as the pilot of the “Shamrock Spitfire,” which wore that green symbol on its fuselage once he became famous.

The Higgins are British filmmakers (Birmingham born) whose earlier feature films had faith-based themes (“The 13th Day,” “All That Remains”). They cover a parade of tropes and cliches in this script, from the “lass back home, waiting” (Bethany Billy), the taunting and bullying the pilot they nickname “Paddy” which his English comrades serve up — sometimes leading to fisticuffs, the twinkling Catholic priest and the “Battle of Britain” “finest hour” newspaper headline montages.

Only two Brits would try to soften the “Paddy” business by referring to this infamous, ancient ethnic slur as an “affectionate” nickname in an opening title. But Finucane could have taken it that way, one supposes — after a few fistfights over it.

What’s novel here is the attention to detail in the training sequences, the combat and the in-the-cockpit actions of a flyer frantically looking all around him for enemy planes, working the controls, trying to stay alive to fight another day, even when he’s been hit.

In that regard, “The Shamrock Spitfire” holds its own, and then some, with big-budget films such as Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk.”

The many obvious moments of foreshadowing, the first sight of the squadron dog, first words about “my lucky (cigarette) lighter,” the lager-fueled esprit de corps with his British comrades and later the Australian-piloted squadron “just call me ‘Paddy'” commands, are common currency in such films, so common that Monty Python mocked these cliches fifty years ago.

Still and all, “Shamrock Spitfire” more or less gets the job done, with or without surprises. O’Regan shows promise and the cast is competent, even without the sparks.

And when this one gets in the air, it’s a cinematic textbook on how to create suspenseful dogfights, how to fake, shoot and edit convincing aerial combat on a tighter-than-tight budget.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, mild profanity

Cast: Shane O’Regan, Bethany Billy, Chris Kaye, Eoin Lynch and Emily Outred

Credits: Scripted and directed by Dominic and Ian Higgins. A Tubi release.

Running time: 1:48

When Frederick Forsythe wrote “The Day of the Jackal” in the early ’70s, professional assassin tales were a relatively rare thing.

Likewise, when Fred Zinneman made his 1973 benchmark Euro-thriller film of the story of a killer rogue French right wingers hired to kill French President Charles De Gaulle in the early ’60s, the cinema hadn’t been exposed to scores of versions of this sort of stupidly-pricey lone gunman tale.

We’ve had every male star of recent decades — Jason to Bruce to Forest to Liam to Antonio to Cuba to Pierce to Benicio to everybody who played Bourne to Fassbender, and plenty of female ones, from Bridget Fonda to Taraj P. Henson, Saoirse (“Hannah”) to Saldana (“Colombiana”), and even comic tales that paired up Kevin Hart and Woody Harrelson and “Mr. and Mrs. Smith,” uniting the Pitt-Jolies.

So the novelty’s gone, even if the cat-and-mouse classic of the ’70s still stands above the rest.

Now, here’s a third “Jackal” — Edward Fox had the title role in the original, Bruce Willis starred in “The Jackal” remake of ’97 — with Oscar winner Eddie Redmayne pursued by a dogged, crafty cop (Lashana Lynch in the Michael Lonsdale role) in a mad dash to stop the worst from happening.

Eddie’s Jackal drives a later model Alfa Romeo roadster than Fox’s did. Otherwise, the beats look the same for a story set in the present, and it looks as if no expense was spared in the action sequences sampled in the trailer.

Will its rising suspense and compact thriller punch work as a drawn-out series? Nov. 7, we’ll find out if the Intellectual Property still clicks — on Peacock.

Crackling dialogue, bluff, brittle performances and a plot riddled with “coincidences” and saddled with clumsy, chatty villains characterize “Nightfall,” a fin de noir thriller from Jacques Tourneur.

It features linebacker-in-a-suit Aldo Ray as a commercial artist fleeing two murderous bank robbers, Brian Keith and Rudy Bond as the trigger-happy dopes who keep letting him get away and Anne Bancroft as a woman our hero figures is a femme fatale but who may have other reasons for cadging $5 from him at an LA bar.

Tourneur, whose best films were stamped with his painterly way with shadowy film noir monochrome (“Out of the Past,” “Cat People”) takes us into a bars and dimly-lit rooms, out to the LA oil patch and the Tetons of Wyoming in a thriller best remembered for having it’s snow-covered finale cribbed by “Fargo,” and for the script and dialogue by the prolific and piquant Stirling Silliphant (“In the Heat of the Night,” “Village of the Damned,” TV’s “Route 66”)

“Guys have probably been swarming around you since your second teeth came through.”

That’s how James Vanning (Ray) — Or his name Rayburn? Or something else? — talks no-nonsense to the beauty (Bancroft) who sits next to him at the bar, claiming she didn’t bring cash. She works in fashion.

“I should have figured your being a model. I mean, believe it or not, I’m an artist”

“Soup cans or sunsets?” she cracks.

As this was 1956, how’d she or the screenwriter know what Andy Warhol would become famous for painting…in 1962?

Vanning’s guarded with the model Marie, but sure to get her number so that she’ll “pose” for him. He’s not that forthcoming with the stranger James Gregory) who stops stalking him long enough to strike up a chat, where we learn “Vanning” is a vet who fought on Okinawa.

The stranger? He’s got a wife (Brando’s big sister, Jocelyn Brando) and a secret of his own. He’s an insurance investigator with an interest in Vanning.

Whatever the two mugs who seem to have bribed model Marie to distract Vanning are mixed-up in is sure to involve that insurance detective. The talker (Keith) has to go to some pains to rein in his Colt 45 packing mug of a partner, Red (Bond).

“Look, Red, tonight’s his night. Might be a short one. Might be a long one. But he’s gonna keep breathing until we get an answer out of him. You got that?”

They robbed a bank. Somehow, “Vanning” or Rayburn or whoever ended up with the cash. They want it back. Flashbacks tell us the story of how they crossed pathsjust before a blizzard rolled into the Wyoming Tetons.

The Burnett Guffrey cinematography is as crisp as the dialogue, and beautifully complements the flinty, unfussy performances. It’s a short, brisk thriller, which accounts for the lack of back-story most of the characters warrant, even at their chattiest.

Silliphant writes past a lot of lapses in logic. Not only do the bad guys think of every way under the sun or moon to let their quarry get away, but they talk a lot as they do.

 “Well, maybe we can get this thing straightened out, and everything will be fine.”

“And “dandy.” Don’t forget the ‘dandy.'”

The dialogue is so sharp that you almost don’t notice how EVERYbody talks too much. Vanning and Marie get into a taxi where he unloads a lot of “wanted for murder” exposition on her. As if the cabbie couldn’t hear. As if the viewer isn’t wondering why the cabbie hasn’t heard.

That goes for the finale, too, which invents another colorful, verbose argument that defies logic and stands-out as the most contrived moment in a fairly contrived plot.

But that post-war “noir” era of cynical anti-heroes randomly targeted by evil was winding down. Why not unload every thing you ever wanted a tough guy — and Ray was one of the toughest — to say to another tough guy in your script?

“Nightfall” still makes a fine late-career showcase for Tourneur’s visuals, a showcase for Ray, Bancroft and Keith, an early example of Sillphant’s ear and a reminder of just what we’d miss when color totally supplanted the symbolic shades of darkness that monochromatic film stock provided.

Rating: “approved,” violence

Cast: Aldo Ray, Anne Bancroft, Brian Keith, Jocelyn Brand, Rudy Bond and James Gregory.

Credits: Directed by Jacques Tourneur, scripted by Stirling Silliphant, based on a novel by David Goodis. A Columbia Pictures release on Tubi, Amazon, et al

Running time: 1:22