Movie Nation

Even a casual Marx Brothers fan knows that the siblings made their best films for their first Hollywood studio, Paramount Pictures.

Already vaudeville veterans pushing past 40, they made their satiric masterpiece, “Duck Soup”(1933) and the wacky stage adaptations “The Cocoanuts” and “Animal Crackers,” their popularity building until peaking with “Horse Feathers” (1932), which was a smash and landed them on the cover of Time Magazine, all for Paramount.

The act, settling into Groucho, Chico and Harpo, gave up all that, and Paramount’s improvisation-friendly productions for bigger MGM paydays in the mid ’30s, and “A Night at the Opera,” their first film for Metro, was the only one regarded as among their best.

Even in this send-up of pretension, class, opera and the very musicals that the brothers flirted with making, one can feel the “madcap” slipping away as the banter slows and structure and sticking-to-the-script/watch-the-clock MGM “efficiency” weigh on them from the start.

But this Sam Wood musical comedy still produced the most iconic Marx Brothers sight gag, “The Stateroom Scene.” It has an ambitious dance number (not involving the brothers), romantic ballads and the trappings of MGM prestige in many a scene.

It presents Chico’s and Harpo’s musical interludes in a logical (for the Marxes) context, and showcases them beautifully, with Chico’s piano pranks performed, up-close, with an audience of children and Harpo playing a cross-eyed tour de force on the harp.

“Opera” also starts the regrettable process of moving Groucho’s greatest foil, Margaret Dumont, into the background as the love interest — singing actors Kitty Carlisle and Allan Jones — and their intrigues with a nastier, more famous singer (Walter Woolf King) and New York Opera director (Sig Ruman) are far more prominent.

But it plays, with veteran screenwriters George S. Kaufman and Morrie Riskind and a circus of uncredited gag writers assisting, leaning into the Brothers’ long-polished comic personas.

The summer’s big blast of climate-changed disaster, “Twisters,” had a big Thursday afternoon and evening and a bigger Friday clearing $32 million by midnight last night.

That’s pointing to a two-studio (Universal/WB) release that will devour the weekend and let Universal claim back-to-back bragging rights, as this Glen Powell star vehicle is exceeding expectations, which had been headed over $70 million on its opening weekend.

Now, as reported by @TheNumbers, the tally is in. “Twisters” will have raked in $80 million by midnight Sunday.

As it cost a whopping $200 million, with almost all of that spent on effects, that has to come as a relief to financiers who cut corners with a younger, less acclaimed cast. There’ll be e no more of that “$50 million and it’ll be fine, $60 million it’s a hit” equivocating.

The soft PG-13 rating (it’s much closer to PG) seems like a smart play, now, as this picture is as family friendly as a Pixar project.

Powell has two topline blockbusters this year. If he’s not “The New Brad Pitt,” it’s not because the table isn’t set for him.

“Despicable Me 4” cleared nearly $24 million and will vault over the $260 million mark by next Tuesday. Not the best film in that franchise, but…

Pixar’s “Inside Out 2” is cruising to another $12.8 million, and should clear the $600 million mark before next weekend. I

The Neon horror offering “Longlegs” lost some steam, but is holding enough audience to add another $11.7 million to the coffers. Neon may have a $60 million level hit on its hands, when all is said and done (it’ll be under $40-44 million by midnight Sunday). Considering how thin the horror audience has been in 2024, that’s a feat.

And “A Quiet Place: Day One” is looking at a respectable $5-6 million, staying in the top five as its run and screen count wind down. It should finish its theatrical schedule short of $140 million in North American ticket sales.

Right now, Daisy Edgar-Jones‘ (of “Twisters”) and Anthony Ramos’ agents should be making hay and taking calls. They weren’t “box office” before, but at least one can make the claim that they are now.

The best Hallmark movie in years was snatched up by Netflix.

“Find Me Falling” is a Harry Connick Jr. star vehicle and showcases him as an aged rock star fleeing the downward spiral that comes for most rock stars after they turn 50. So his character runs off and buys a house on Cyprus.

That’s the place, it turns out, where he wrote his biggest hit — “Girl on a Beach.”

Guess who inspired the song? Guess who’s still living there? Guess how a young singer there ingratiates herself into Mr. Get-Away-from-All-That’s life?

And guess what goes on in front of that tiny house that sits on the most scenic cliff face on Cyprus?

The label “Hallmark movie” is shorthand for a screen romance that takes the most predictable turns at the most predictable moments. That’s “Find Me Falling.”

Even the subtext — that near has-been John Allmann has bought a house on a “suicide hotspot” famous all over Cyprus, that he had no idea, that he has to contend with the police chief (Tony Demetriou) and guilt when people jump, so he starts intervening — is just as cute and sweet as can be.

The “Girl on the Beach” we and he discover is now the only doctor (Agni Scott of
Bridget Jones’ Baby” and TV’s “Alexander: The Making of a God”) on that part of Cyprus.

On an island where everybody knows everybody and most are related, Dr. Sia kept her connection to the rocker secret. Among other secrets.

The flirty, sassy young taverna singer Melina (Ali Kumiko Whitney of “The Road Dance” and “Cabin Girl”) may have to get involved if these two former lovers are every going to get back together.

Of course it’s all as cloying and cute as it is predictable.

But Connick plays this rock-fish-out-of-water perfectly, giving most every scene a light air of perplexity and embarassment. Scott makes a good foil, with Whitney, Demetriou, Lea Maleni shining, and a just-colorful-enough cast of bit-players giving the rom-com that “local color” that all but guarantees a spike in Cypriot tourism.

This is Vespa country, with Cypriot variations of classic Greek cuisine, Greco-Mediterranean beaches and tavernas where traditional music is played and getting everybody to sing along with Connick and Whitney is easier than getting them not to.

“Find Me Falling” was never going to pull a muscle from trying too hard. Whitney’s “local” singer sounds Santa Monica born and bred and her lack of accent isn’t credibly explained, for instance.

But writer-director Stelana Kliris had just enough can’t-miss elements, starting with under-filmed Cypress and throwing in crooner/actor Connick, Scott, Whitney and Demetriou as the cop/tour-guide/Cypriot cuisine expert.

“Find Me Falling” never reaches beyond the low hanging fruit. But that turns out to be pretty sweet, if not quite as filling or challenging as you might hope.

Rating: TV-14, smoking, adult situations

Cast: Harry Connick Jr., Agni Scott, Tony Demetriou, Lea Maleni, Clarence Smith and Ali Kumiko Whitney

Credits: Scripted and directed by Stelana Kliris. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:33

Fionn O’Shea plays the young Beckett, with Lisa Dwyer Hogg, Sandrine Bonnaire, Maxine Peake, Bronagh Gallagher and Caroline Boulton cast as some among the many women in his life.

Love the casting of the Irish icon Gabriel Byrne as this Nobel Prize winner in winter.

Aiden Gillen plays the other Irish literary lion, James Joyce, whom the young Beckett once sought a meeting with.

August 9, Magnolia releases this first “fall film,” “Dance First,” think later.

Carla Juri and Takashi Ueno star in this downbeat Bradley Rust romance, about a woman who travels to Tokyo to visit a friend after the death of her husband.

She finds that life goes on, experiencing different worlds within the culture. And maybe a first hint of new love pops up to complicate things.

Aug. 16, “I’ll Be Your Mirror” hits select theaters thank to Strand Releasing.

A Pope dies and the world’s cardinals gather, and “you know how rumors spread.”

About the death, the election and the candidates, one presumes?

The cast includes Sergio Castellitto, Lucian Msamati and Brian F. O’Byrne.

November, this latest film from Edward Burger, the director of the recent Oscar-winning “All Quiet on the Western Front” serves up an awards contender from Focus Features.

The prologue that opens “Twisters” introduces a bunch of characters and kills them off, somewhat dramatically but coldbloodedly.

It takes the film a whole hour to raise the stakes as high a second time, hurling characters into a rodeo and then destroying that rodeo, and much of Stillwater, Oklahoma in the process. But the anonymous victims are, in most scenes, mere effects, in this disaster movie.

Such effects, simulating the vast scope and menace of a tornado and the immersive terror of being trapped in one, have vastly-improved in the 28 years since “Twister,” this film’s inspiration if not its prequel. But as summer popcorn movies go, this one has a hard time finding its heart.

British actress Daisy Edgar-Jones (of TV’s “War of the Worlds”) is Kate, our perky weather sciences student whose notion that tornados can be “tamed” with chemicals is tested in a chase that goes terribly wrong and kills most of her undergrad “team.”

Glen Powell, in his third film of the year (“Anyone But You,” “Hit Man”) steps further into that “New Brad Pitt” spotlight with a grinning, hunky turn as a swaggering, cocky Tyler Owens, all teeth and stubble and hat and catch-phrases that can be summed up on a T-shirt on his Youtube-dramatized chase videos.

“If you feel it, CHASE it!”

Years after college Kate carries survivor’s guilt and works at the National Weather Service, where an old classmate, Javi (Anthony Ramos) tracks her down for a week of using her “instincts” to help his scientist-chasers find promising Oklahoma storms to 3D radar map.

Tyler and his motley Arkansas crew are more thrill-seekers, self-promoters and gut-followers. Spying Kate use a dandelion to test the breeze, Tyler drawls “Sometimes the old ways are better than the new.”

So the new version of tornado chasers vs. “Twisters” sets up a conflict between people of science and attention-grabbing/merchandise-selling Youtube yahoos, and then upends the expectations inherent in that dichotomy. In a deeply divided America where science is under attack by yahoos, with or without Youtube channels, there’s something to be said for forcing people to consider the character and motives of people not like themselves.

But not tying the film’s science “profit” angle to sinister efforts to “privatize” The National Weather Service suggests the picture’s agenda is dumber. And the script lacks the nerve or the depth to worry over that fundamental struggle, or see past “She’s cute and scientific, he’s cowboy cute and reckless.”

Kate’s “new ways” might make the steadily-shifting and climate-change-widening Tornado Alley a little safer for folks. Tyler, who has some meteorology in his background, is content to anchor his ancient Dodge truck in a twister’s path and shoot fireworks into it to make pretty pictures for the TeeVee.

It looks right. Good cast. Is Disney sweating bullets over HBO or Max or HBO Max stealing their “Star Wars” thunder?

No.

This explains that which doesn’t need explaining, but Tim Burton’s got a shot a serious September 6 hit, his first in ages, with this one.

Bringing back Winona and Michael Keaton, parking Jenna Ortega front and center. This looks, sounds and smells like a winner.

Willem Dafoe vs. Michael K? I’m there.

It’s based on a true story, that of Robert Peace, a Newark streets to Yale’s halls success story. Jay Will has the title role.

It’s an August 16 release.