This “true story” caper comedy set on the rough side of the music business in Northern Ireland is sung and joked mostly in Gaelic, the Mother Tongue of Ireland.
Fassbender trying comedy again? This looks daft enough to play, and too esoteric to get theatrical distribution outside of Old Eire.
But we’ll see. Surely it’ll come to streaming.
I have little memory of watching the Italian “empty nest” comedy “The Price of Family.” I reviewed it, but it left little to no impression at all.
I dare say in a week or two I won’t remember much about the sequel “The Price of Nonna’s Inheritance,” a “Granny’s gonna marry a lout who’ll steal all her money” caper comedy, in which the “caper” is killing Nunzio, Nonna’s ne’er do well actor, mooch and possible “Merry Widow Murderer” fiance.
Yes, writer-director Giovanni Bognetti is borrowing from Hitchcock’s “Shadow of a Doubt” for this one. Just a little.
Anna (Angela Finocchiaro) is buttonholed by boorish Nunzio (Antonio Bruschetta, funny) at a class reunion. Nunzio goes on and on, an aged actor on the make remembering their time as lovers back in high school, that “loser” Anna wound up with, regaling her with exploits as a Gypsy thespian, touring the world, in and out of jails as he goes.
By the way, your mother, Giulana. “Is she still acting? Could I have her number?”
Next thing Anna knows, Nonna Giulana is in love, ready to marry Nunzio on Spanish Menorca in the Balaeric Islands. That six million Nonna inherited? It’s as good as gone.
Nunzio’s heading for his third wedding, both of the earlier outings were short South American marriages. His brides died…suddenly.
There’s nothing for it but to stop this wedding. But not just by warning the smitten Nonna.
“We must MURDER Nunzio,” Anna declares. Pushover husband Carlo (Christian de Sica) goes along. He, like 30something daughter Alessandra (Dharma Mangia Woods) and lives-with-his-parents Emilio (Claudio Colica) already has that six million spent.
They’ll do the deed on Menorca.
“We haven’t done anything together in so long,” Mama Anna enthuses. As Alessandra and Carlo scheme up plans and Emilio brings his cowardice and morality into the conversation, the boorish Nunzio keeps giving us more reasons to hope they “save” Nonna by “killing” Nunzio.
As if this dysfuctional quartet of quarelling, buck-passing slackers ever follows through on anything.
There is one clever visual bit of business in this comedy, which tries to wring laughs out of a blind Serbian wedding planner and best man, and the euphemism “moving the furniture” to describe Nunzio and Nonna’s noisy love-making.
The family figures they can make it look like Nunzio is depressed and suicidal as a cover for his coming death. So they con him into diving into the pool and holding his breath. It’ll look like a suicide attempt to the rental villa’s CCTV cameras, which they figure will record the incident and back them up.
The silent movie miming Ale, Emilio, Anna and Carlo engage in to make that CCTV footage convincing is straight out of “The Perils of Pauline.”
The rest of the movie? Barely a grin in it, much less an actual laugh. Considering the effectiveness of the one mimed comic scene, perhaps the insults, inept scheming etc. lose something in translation (in Italian, or dubbed into English).
Either way, Nonna’s “price” is marked down and the movie about it is as instantly forgettable as its predecessor.
Rating: TV-MA, attempted murder subject matter, sexual situations, profanity
Cast: Christian de Sica, Angela Finocchiaro, Dharm Mangia Woods, Fioretta Mari, Claudio Colica and
Antonino Bruschetta
Credits: Scripted and directed by Giovanni Bognetti. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:30
This week “Inside Out 2” set an all-time Juneteenth box office record, some $30 million, raced by “Dune 2” to become the biggest blockbuster of 2024 ($340 million+ by weekend’s end) and is on a pace to clear another $95 million+ this post-Juneteenth weekend, its second week of release.
It’s a global phenomenon, clearing some $724 million already.
Think there’ll be an”Inside Out 3?”
“Bad Boys: Ride or Die,” is still holding audience and will clear the $150 million mark by Tuesday or Wed. of next week, with $18-19 million coming in this weekend. Not exactly a masterpiece, but that’s all money in the bank for the studio and its 50something stars.
Focus Features’ gamble on an aimless, tame and dull biker thriller/bio-pic, “The Bikeriders,” isn’t paying off. A $9.5 million opening weekend isn’t terrible. As Tom Hardy, Jodie Comer and Austin Butler aren’t box office stars, and director Jeff Nichols (“Mud”) is closer to his indie roots than anybody you make bank with, it’s looking like this won’t earn back its $40 million budget. Inexplicably, it got good reviews in some quarters.
That damned dirty apes of “Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes” are setting a franchise mark for box office, marching on with another $3.5-$4 million this weekend, closing in on the $170-175 million mark before this spring hit finally surrenders its screens.
Tiny distributor Vertical tried to pull a fast one with Russell Crow’s “The Exorcism.” He’s not playing “The Pope’s Exorcist,” a cute, roly poly priest tootering around Europe on a Vespa in papal livery. This isn’t a sequel. Vertical opened it wide betting that people wouldn’t figure that out. Crowe plays an actor in it, and he might have guessed that he was soiling his “brand” by doing another exoricism movie that isn’t a sequel. But whatever.
He and his movie and Vertical Releasing are facing utter audience indifference, as “The Exorcism” won’t clear $2 million by much.
June Squib’s action debut “Thelma” cleared $2 million in limited release.
A fine finish and some good performances recommend “Fancy Dance,” a melodramatic mystery with coming-of-age touches set in and around the Seneca-Cayuga Reservation of Oklahoma.
It’s a solid star vehicle for Lily Gladstone, who has spun her “Killers of the Flower Moon” acclaim into status and some plum roles — TV’s “Under the Bridge” among them.
Gladstone plays Jax, a Seneca lesbian who has made theft and drug dealing her way of getting by, which becomes a problem when Indian Child Protective Services comes looking for her niece.
Roki (Isabel DeRoy Olson) is staying with her auntie and waiting for her mother’s return.
But mother Tawi isn’t just absent. Like scores of Native women every year, she’s disappeared.
She was a stripper. This is oil country, where “man camps” of riggers are every bit as fraught as as depicted in “Wind River.” Roki may still hope Mom shows up in time for the mother-daughter dance competition at the Tulsa Pow-Wow, but Jax has her grim doubts.
The Feds and the local tribal police, in the person of Jax and Tawi’s half-brother, J.J. (Ryan Begay) keep kicking “jurisdiction” of the case back and forth. The locals have mounted repeated searches and Jax hands out photo fliers in all the worst places. She’s not going to let it go.
But when Child Services show up and custody of Roki is switched to the girl’s granddad, Jax and Tawi’s remarried father (Shea Whigham), getting that kid to the pow-wow takes precedence.
Maybe by dipping back into her old life and grabbing the kid for a road trip, Jax can solve two problems at once. Or make things a whole lot worse.
Gladstone and Olson click as aunt and niece, Seneca women who switch to the Seneca langauge whenever they’re trying to get out of a jam with white people or white authority.
But the white folks here seem nothing if not reasonable. Robbing a hapless fisherman of his money and truck, stealing from women in the changing rooms at stores, shoplifting gas and whatever else the convenience store offers is no “example” to set for a child.
Gladstone takes this character deep into unlikeable, but makes her mark via the mask of stoic doggedness Jax wears. She is human, craves the company of her favorite stripper (Crystle Lightning) and knows every pilfering, squatting and cop-dodging trick in the book. But damned if she’s going to ler her sister’s disappearance go unexplained.
Whigham brings that gravitas-with-an-edge presence to the grandfather figure, making us wonder about his motives and maybe how his fatherly failings impacted two daughters who both wound up on the wrong side of the law and the rough side of their culture.
The melodramatic moments start to pile up on that “road trip” — TV coverage of the “kidnapping,” the arrival of “the gun,” etc.
But with good players leading us into a fascinating cultural milieu, “Fancy Dance” comes off. Director and co-writer Erica Tremblay (TV’s “Reservation Dogs”) even manages to deliver tears just as the closing credits roll even if we can guess exactly where that finale takes place and some of what might happen there.
Rating: R, drugs, violence, sexual situations, profanity
Cast: Lily Gladstone, Isabael DeRoy Olson, Crystle Lightning, Ryan Begay and Shea Whigham.
Credits: Directed by Erica Tremblay, scripted by Erica Tremblay and Miciana Alise. An Apple TV+ release.
Running time: 1:32
A summer picture with old broads getting outta hand?
Gotta love the cast and the pitch. Gotta be better than “Summer Camp.”
A stylish bit of A-24 terror with Brandy Norwood squaring off against Kathryn Hunter, who played one of the witches in the Denzel/McDormand/Coen “Macbeth.”
Sept. 6.
“The Bikeriders” is hands-down the most pointless biker movie ever made.
With a narrative limping along on one training wheel, it mopes in an inane circle through the middle era of modern biker gangs, between the post-war “Wild One” birth of such “clubs” and ending just as the Hell’s Angels, The Outlaws, Bandidos and Mongols moved from traffic scofflaws and motorcycle theft into the drugs, extortion, prostitution and murder-for-hire of true organized crime outfits.
The best book about such gangs and this period was by Hunter S. Thompson, “Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga.” “Bikeriders” is based on Danny Lyon’s 1968 photos and interviews book of the same “Bikeroders” title.
Based solely on the movie, Lyons’ must be the inferior piece of journalism and character study. Based on writer-director Jeff Nichols’ casting of the interviewer “Danny” in the movie, played without wit, color or the suggestion of intellectual curiosity by Mike Faist, Nichols wasn’t all that impressed with it or him either.
As the viewer waits for a point to creep in, something beyond romanticizing or demythologizing the original “One Percenters” as louts, dolts and drop-outs, one wished somebody had paid more attention to “Sons of Anarchy” back when it was on the TeeVee. This isn’t just bad. It’s fatally uninteresting.
Austin Butler is Benny, a reckless, heedless Illinois punk who says “You’d have to KILL me to get this jacket,” his beloved Vandals’ “colors,” in a biker-unfriendly bar in Greater Chicagoland.
Benny is tough, able to take a beating, and a masochist, more than willing to take it.
He’s also so stupid he can’t figure the odds, evaluate his own fighting skills, and work out a better battle to pick.
We see how Benny met “riders club” founder Johnny (Tom Hardy) and how the two came to depend on one another. Kind of. As the story is told by Benny’s on-again/off-again biker moll Kathy, played by Jodie Comer, every bit of the history is sketched in by a long-winded woman with no gift for getting to the point, or having one.
Nichols makes this Comer and Kathy’s movie, as her endless anecdotes and dull history lessons begin with the fateful night a girlfriend lured her into a biker bar “meeting,” where leering, “You got a man?” come-ons start out aggressive and take on real menace.
Benny was her savior that night. And he sat on his parked Harley all night in front of her house and all the next day until her working Joe boyfriend stormed out on her.
Johnny? His “Don’t worry…about nothing,” implies that he and Benny can protect her from the other Vandals, and that the Vandals can protect her from outside threats.
Here’s the neat thing about this script. The “outside threats” are few and far between, generic biker tussles in the “fists or knives” mid-60s. The gang rides to intimidate unfriendlies of every stripe, little motorized Nuremberg rally visuals for the awed locals.
Is there a political parallel for today, that the thugs the culture fears are nothing but empty Levi’s jackets on bikes? Nah.
I’ve been a big fan of Nichols since his “Shotgun Stories” debut, through “Mud” and “Loving.” But “Bikeriders” is an artless parade of closeups, waiting for the actors to get to the nub of a line, the movie to impress on us the necessity of a scene and the narrative to come to some sort of point.
Comer’s monologues are banalities sprinkled with cliches, none of them amounting to a nugget of profundity or a big theme about alienation, nihilism and “guys who don’t belong nowhere else,” they just “belong together.”
Any messaging about “The Golden Age” of motorcycle gangs, before they turned even more criminal, is laughable.
Comer is believable in the part, but like even the “types” in the gang — save for Michael Shannon, playing the doltish, foreign-born “Zipco” — Kathy is painted in colorless strokes. We don’t see an interior life, the dullness she might be escaping, the dead-end her limited future offers, the danger she stupidly ignores until the obvious happens.
Butler? He’s about as convincing a dangerous biker as Elvis was.
As my attention drifted into how one might have gotten a more compelling, entertaining or enlightening movie about this culture (adapt a BETTER WRITTEN BOOK) and era, bits of miscasting, scenes that defy cinematic convention and merely frustrate when they could titillate, terrify or what-have-you, I burned-out that rear tire down to the threads of one ugly conclusion.
This is a two hour waste of a lot of fine vintage motorcycles.
Rating: R, violence, profanity
Cast: Tom Hardy, Austin Butler, Jodie Comer, Boyd Holbrook, Norman Reedus, Mike Faist and Michael Shannon.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Jeff Nichols, based on a book by Danny Lyons. A Focus Features release.
Running time: 1:56
“Ghostlight” is an intimate, moving indie drama about the transformative power of art and the mental health benefits of the theatre.
An “actors’ picture” in the purest sense of the phrase, its players take us on an emotional journey that covers limited ground, but manages to be an enriching, deeply rewarding experience nevertheless.
Keith Kupferer stars as Dan, a gruff highway construction worker sleep-walking through his days jack-hammering streets and sidewalks in his corner of Illinois.
Dan, we quickly learn, is getting it from all sides. He’s got an out-of-control teen (Katherine Mallen Kupferer) at home, a passive, sometimes-impulsive wife (Tara Mallen). And every pedestrian wanting a little peace and quiet and every rude, rushed driver feels the need to yell at the 50something laborer in the orange vest.
Something’s going on, driving all that domestic dysfunction. Daughter Daisy might get kicked out of school. There are “depositions” to prep with a lawyer, and counselors to drag Daisy to.
It’s enough to make Dan snap. But just as he does, this pushy little woman (Dolly De Leon) who has been complaining about the noise drags him into a storefront.
“I need your help with something.”
That “something” is a theater company she’s in. They need warm bodies, and Dan? He has the look of a Capulet. Wait, what is this?
“Your salvation,” Rita assures him. She looked Dan up and down, saw him mel tdown, and figured “you might like being somebody else, for a while.”
“Ghostlight” scampers past that unlikely turn of events and hurls this Blue Collar Joe into breathing exercises, limbering-up techniques and the “Provocative Questions” game, something actors play to measure, improve and acknowledge “emotional intelligence,” put themselves in another’s shoes and be “available” “in the moment.”
Dan, bottled-up and burdened by a sea of troubles, starts to connect to himself, his family and their problems by rehearsing “Romeo and Juliet.”
“Isn’t the language gorgeous,” a castmate enthuses? “I just wish I knew what it meant,” Dan admits.
Actress-turned-writer/director Kelly O’Sullivan and co-director Alex Thompson (“Saint Frances”) manage to make a generally unsurprising melodrama into a life-affirming delight.
So much of this is “on the nose” and predictably-sweet that “Ghostlight” flirts with becoming maudlin.
The novelty of casting a real-life couple, veteran stage actors, and their daughter, in the lead roles is cute enough to almost overwhelm the slight story and its “We all saw THAT coming” twists.
It turns out that the fiery Daisy knows Shakespeare, has the play memorized and was — until recently — a regular thespian in her high school. She too might be “transformed” by this amateur production.
But the players make the sale, and make this picture sing. The performances are mostly-understated, with barely glimpsed simmering fury in scenes where it isn’t evident. The youngest Kupferer takes things believably over-the-top as a mouthy, volatile teen in crisis.
The play within the picture is also “on the nose,” as far as subject matter. But as anybody who appreciates the Great Works of the Theatre knows, even the most shambolic “Romeo and Juliet” can come off, if the performances allow it.
De Leon’s Rita is every pie-eyed dreamer who fell in love with the stage, never came close to making it and yet never can let it go.
There are plenty of theatre nerd chuckles in the stumbling rehearsals, the unconventional casting and the “drama” behind the drama — demands for “an intimacy coordinator” on set — small-timers with big egos, older actors finding the soul of teen love and impulsiveness, or the perfect song to contemporize a 430 year-old play.
The miracle of “Ghostlight” is that cast and crew here take the punch-lines associated with actors and acting, the dreamy delusions its often overly-sensitive practitioners are famous for, and turn them into the greatest gifts acting gives to actors.
Emotional availability and “healing” might be just down the street with a bunch of cockeyed dreamers who just want to “put on a show,” with or without an intimacy coordinator.
Rating: R, fisticuffs, profanity, adult subject matter
Cast: Keith Kupferer, Katherine Mallen Kupferer, Dolly De Leon and Tara Mallen.
Credits: Directed by Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson, scripted by Kelly O’Sullivan. An IFC release.
Running time: 1:54
The Austrian thriller “The Devil’s Bath” is a patient, pitiless descent into madness, belief and the helplessness of a time and place where life was, as the philosopher put it, “nasty, brutish and short.”
Based on research of historical case studies of 18th century Austria, it’s about troubled women and the scanty support and comfort they’d receive from their families and their faith in a hardscrabble subsistence society from much more recent history than you’d think.
Filmmakers Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala take us to a place and time where lumbering, communal fishing and farming were practiced, where life was unspeakably hard and when society and sanity’s margin for error were at their thinnest.
A new bride is tested by what she can’t understand, what the Church can explain or comfort her out of and what faith will not forgive.
That’s the world Agnes (Anja Plashg) has married into. Burly, grinning Wolf (David Scheid) from a nearby village has taken her in, spent his savings and her dowry on a farm, and invited her into this life.
Their wedding day might be their last happy day. Agnes is struck by the beauty of nature, so much so that she’s given to wandering reveries, collecting insects and shells and such. It’s not a lifestyle that can indulge such idleness.
Her stern mother in law (Maria Hofstätter) seems supportive, but Agnes is slow to pitch in on the fishing, the livestock tending, the cooking and house-keeping, and slower to catch on.
“The Lord won’t like it if you don’t cook for your husband!”
Her wedding night is a disappointment and her fervent desire for babies seems thwarted. Does Wolf play for the other team?
She sees the decapitated, ritualistically dismembered corpse of a woman who tossed her baby over a waterfall, witnesses the tragedy of a suicide and hears the words of the Catholic priest, who lectures one and all on what “crimes” can be forgiven and absolved, and those that cannot.
With her family insisting she stick with the marriage and live in the village where she has no friends, what options does Agnes have in this harsh, myopic reality?
Writer-directors Franks and Fiala immerse us in these brutish lives, underscoring just how limited the reach of The Age of Reason really was. Their film evokes “Midsommar” and “The Witch” in its blunt depiction of superstition as tradition and “primitive” ways and thinking.
Earthly suffering was a given, with heaven as the main promise of relief. Agnes and everyone else must struggle to eat, stay warm, avoid accidental death or grievous injury and procreate.
Survival is nasty business, and animal slaughter and cruelty are hard-wired into this illiterate, isolated culture.
All Agnes can do is lean on her faith, fretting over where “the altar” will go in their new house, and the more primitive shrine she can piece together in the root cellar. Her immediate experience and that of those surrounding her is all she has to guide her life.
It’s not enough.
Plaschg registers confusion and pathos in her performance. She lets us see the “problems” and “quirks” in Agnes’ personality, and fear for how they might be her undoing. Hofstätter’s mother-in-law seems harsh but rational and not all that unreasonable, given their circumstances.
Fiala and Franz give us a couple of scenes of heartbreaking grimness and unblinking cruelty, and a dozen other reminders of how unforgiving this world was to those struggling through it. The rituals, from weddings to executions, have an awful callousness that rattles modern sensibilities.
The film’s pacing is a tad too deliberate for its own good, spacing its shocks out, giving away its message and the direction it is going in long before it takes us there. But “The Devil’s Bath” (” Des Teufels Bad,” in German with English subtitles) is a reminder that then and now, the horrors of the supernatural can’t hold a candle to the terrors of reality at its ugliest.
Rating: unrated, graphic violence, nudity, sex
Cast: Anja Plaschg, David Scheid and Maria Hofstätter
Credits: Scripted and directed by Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala. An IFC release.
Running time: 2:01
Peyton List and Brianna Middleton are among the embattled offspring.
“Coming soon?”
Movie Nation 