Movie Nation

“Ride” is a somber, tense Texas melodrama about a rodeo family faced with a sick daughter, a prodigal, substance-abusing son fresh out of prison and the bankrupting power of the American healthcare system.

Director and co-star Jake Allyn gave good roles to screen veterans C. Thomas Howell and Annabeth Gish, who immerse themselves in these parts and this world. And Allyn cast cowboying stuntman/actor Forrie J. Smith to give this story grandfatherly gravitas and Texas rodeo life authenticity.

When Forrie, as a former rodeo cowboy turned preacher and grandfather and the only family member to visit Pete (Allyn) in prison lectures the lad about to take his next bull ride, “Champions aren’t made ridin’. They’re made that first few seconds after they fall,” this intimate indie feels epic, real and lived-in.

Howell, whiskered, grizzled and mastering the lariat for this role, plays a retired cowboy whose little girl (Zia Carlock) is “facing another battle.” The cancer is back.

That struggle was a big reason his wife (Gish) moved out. She’s the local sheriff, but surprisingly passive when it comes to how they’re going to finance this Hail Mary treatment that their doctor signs them up for out of town. John’s got to unload “anything that’s sellable,” horses included, and beg for another mortgage and early payout of his FFA school teacher pension to come up with $160,000.

Cowboy John and Sheriff Monica are not communicating all that well over that when their 20something son Pete gets out of prison, with grandpa there to pick him up. Pete did something awful, and in a small town like Stephenville, Texas, people may be polite and they may even forgive. But they don’t forget.

Jake jumps right back on that bull and puts that oxy monkey right back on his back, promising his rodeo winnings to dealer and ex-con Tyler (Patrick Murney) in exchange for drugs.

He only sees his younger brother Noah (co-writer Josh Plasse), as the rest of his family have bigger problems and guilt over shutting him out. The sheriff has a pushy and flirty deputy (Scott Reeves) who might be angling for her job, or more. And John is simply overwhelmed.

Events conspire to throw them all back together as Pete impulsively tries to buy his way back into their lives by helping with the cancer costs via money that isn’t his. Rodeo is “in the blood,” which means somebody needs to “cowboy up” and set their world to right.

Jake Allyn is an actor (“No Man’s Land,” “Someone Like You”) and writer. For his directing debut, he does the rodeo scenes justice, in front of and behind the camera, and makes “unfussy” his style. His smartest move, after the casting, was letting the close-up be his friend.

Screen veterans Gish, Howell, Reeves and Smith invest in their characters and this grim rodeo world reality, and their buy-in makes us buy-in. Allyn holds his own in scenes with them and carries off his “problem son” part with a sullen grit.

The plot turns are largely predictable, and the casting kind of threw me in the early scenes, with Howell and Gish both old enough to be more convincing as “young” rural South 50something grandparents. The relationships are underexplained for most of the first act. Howell’s scenes with Smith’s patriarch/preacher need to make that assocation clearer. I never heard the word “Dad” and they’re close to the same age.

Talking veteran players into plum indie film roles has to include an appeal to their vanity. Maybe they didn’t want to play grandparents of a sick grandchild, or maybe Allyn was too shy to make that his pitch.

But those are quibbles about a beautifully-acted genre picture with a wonderful sense of place, and of the sorts of problems that visit every corner of America, especially Texas.

Rating: R, violence, drug abuse

Cast: C. Thomas Howell, Annabeth Gish, Jake Allyn, Josh Plasse, Patrick Murney, Scott Reeves, Zia Carlock and Forrie J. Smith.

Credits: Directed by Jake Allyn, scripted by Jake Allyn and Josh Plasse. A Well Go USA release.

Running time: 1:53

Well, isn’t just the most doggoned adorable kid-friendly adventure movie trailer we’ve seen in ages?

“Illusionist” dad returns for the first time in a decade, tween daughter sets out with him in search of an elusive panther.

New Zealand co-stars in this one.

The movie that sealed John Woo‘s reputation, and the genre with which he’d be most comfortable in the years to come, was 1986’s “A Better Tomorrow,” a gangland shoot-em-up that featured his longtime muse, tall, cool action icon Chow Yun-Fat.

But sitting on the shelf when that instant classic came out was a gonzo Vietnam War B-movie masquerading as a drug war thriller.

“Heroes Shed No Tears” was titled “The Sunset Warrior” when filming in Thailand had finished. Filmed and given a limited release in 1984, it can be deemed a part of the whole renewed interest in “Vietnam” as a subject, much of it stirred up by Sly Stallone’s first outing as Rambo, “First Blood” (1982).

It’s filled with gunplay, positively packed with ordnance, explosions and silly tropes of the trade. Heroes and villains exchange fire waving their machine guns about willy-nilly as they do. It’s amazing that any viewer would believe anybody involved hit anything, as few of these geared-up mercenaries, drug soldiers and Vietnamese troops actually took the time aim at what they were shooting at.

There’s a child in jeopardy, women imperiled, and a big novelty for a Woo film — before and since — a soapy full-body massage nude sex scene. Hey, when in Thailand…

But as daffy as it is, for a Woo completist, it’s an interesting look at how he first approached filming and editing combat. No doves fluttering into the church rafters, because there is a brothel but no church. But slow-motion shootings, brutal, long beat-down fights, bloody self-sacrifice and over the top explosions? Yup.

Eddy Ko plays a commando-turned-mercenary leading a small team into “The Golden Triangle” to kidnap a drug lord/general (Pang Yung-cheung), who looks to be holed up on the Laos/Vietnam border. About half a dozen Hong Kong mercs go in with grenade launchers, time bombs, machine guns and a flame thrower and nab General Samton over the dead bodies of scores of his Vietcong-“pajama” clad minions.

“You can’t get away once you’re in my territory,” the general sneers (in dubbed Cantonese with subtitles). “When I fight, I don’t hold back.”

With the general dropping charms off a Buddhist prayer bracelet for his army to track him, it’s pretty obvious this crew will be fighting its away across borders on its way to Thailand.

Merc leader Chang Chung (Ko) hadn’t counted on black-clad drug gangsters snatching his little boy (Ma Ying-chun) or Julie (Lee Hoi-suk), the kid’s caregiver and Chang’s too-patient girlfriend. And then there’s the Vietnamese Colonel (Yuet Sang-Chin) who loses his cool when his border crossing gets all shot up.

He and his men had just murdered a French journalist, and just started raping the journalist’s girlfriend (Cécile Le Bailly).

And when his army unit joins the drug gang in pursuit of Chang Chung’s Dirty Half-Dozen, the Col. brings in what we can take to be Hmong tribesman to “track” the elusive soldiers of fortune.

The payoff if they get this general to Thailand? Chang and his family will be able to move to America.

On this odyssey, they will fend off ambushes aplenty, loot bodies, gamble with locals and reload reload reload while building a body count the IDF would envy. Chang will cross paths with an old Vietnam War buddy, an American deserter (Philippe Loffredo) with a bordello filled with arms and wired with explosives.

It’s all rather nonsensical, as we can’t even pin down what borders they’re crossing or why this building gets blown up more than once.

As for performances, even the kid is pretty good, and Woo’s use of closeups and quick cutting showcases most of the players at the very best they can be, acting or in “action.” The fight choreography is passable and the drawn-out big finish isn’t a bust.

But the best that can be said for the script is “I’ve seen worse,” a phrase that anyone who ever saw a Chuck Norris movie can utter with confidence.

And everything notable about Woo’s technique, which was being refined as he entered his second decade as a Hong Kong action film director, is only glimpsed here and there in this last job-for-the-Golden Harvest production co. money before the artist Woo came into his own.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, sex, nudity, drug trade subject matter

Cast: Eddy Ko, Ching-Ying Lam, Yuet-Sang Chin,
Kam Kong Chow, Lee Hoi-Suk, Pang Yung-cheung, Ma Ying-chun, Cécile Le Bailly and Philippe Loffredo

Credits: Directed by John Woo, scripted by Peter Ho-Sun Chan, Leung-Chun Chiu and John Woo. A Golden Harvest production now on Film Movement+.

Running time 1:29

Whatever intrigues, insights and darkly comic charms writer-director Savi Gabizon gave audiences for his oddball Israeli dramedy “Longing” are mostly lost in translation in a Richard Gere remake he filmed in Canada.

A tale of a middle-aged man who learns he had a son, and that he just died, and who experiences grief, regret and a “Longing” to have known the 19 year old, longing that warps from awkward into something increasingly bizarre, it just doesn’t play among those indulgent and ever-so-polite Canadians.

Gere, for all the soulful brooding his career’s had him play, seems miscast and a little lost as a “father” who imposes on the good folks of Hamilton, Ontario (filmed in and around Hamilton, Cambridge and Kitchener), takes liberties and crosses lines with people who, sooner or later, are going to have to tell him “ENOUGH!”

Suzanne Clément of “Death of a Ladies Man” plays Rachel, an old lover who visits Daniel Bloch (Gere) in New York. Their meeting sets the tone for the film to follow. It’s awkward, with pointless bickering over the mere “45 minutes” he could “give her today” when he had much more time tomorrow.

Not that she even needs 45 minutes. They split up 20 years ago, and she returned to Canada. She didn’t tell him she was pregnant when she moved, because “I knew you didn’t want children.” They have a son, Allen, 19. He’s amazing. Well, actually, he’s dead. I’ve got to go.

It’s a decently-performed scene, but leaden — ironically and gratingly wordy. Awkwardness about this situation is the rule. As Gere’s Daniel somberly broods, when she ducks out of the dining room, calls his lawyer.

“Longing,” from this point on, proclaims its sadness, but reaches for this quirky undercurrent of dark comedy. As Daniel flies north for a funeral that, oddly, only he attends (not the ex, her husband, Allen’s friends or classmates), a mystery unfolds.

Was he into drugs? Someone calling himself Allen’s “best friend” comes asking for money for a deal that went sour with Allen’s “accident.”

The kid was obsessed with his French teacher, writing her poems, expelled from school for stalking her and painting a sexually explicit poem on the wall of their school. Daniel meets the teacher, who is played by Diane Kruger, so he gets and we “get it.” But did she lead the boy on?

Asking some stranger you’ve just met something like that just isn’t done. Not in Canada, or anywhere. Well, maybe Israel.

As Daniel meets this girl passing herself off as Allen’s “girlfriend” and that father still mourning a dead daughter in the cemetery, his visit is extended, his investment in this son (Tomaso Sanelli) he never knew grows and he dreams about conversations with a pianist teen who “kept to himself,” who hadn’t lived with his family in years to try to fill in the blanks.

This “true story” weeper is about a woman who chased her dream to London, only to get diagnosed with MS years later.

“I want to go home” where there just might be an old flame willing to “Take My Hand.”

Aug. 29 is when this drama drops.

An 18th century tale of the horrors of settling Terra Australis? Color me…intrigued.

Shudder has this one, which will enjoy a brief theatrical release June 21, and stream thereafter.

Robert Parrish was a child actor, then one of the best editors in Hollywood before he became a film director. And while he was no David Lean, still the most famous editor to cross over into calling all the shots on the set, Parrish was a skilled craftsman whose films were always competent and polished, even the ones that didn’t quite work.

In his later years, he wrote one of the best memoirs about “the business,” “Growing Up in Hollywood.”

I can’t remember what he said in that book about “Fire Down Below,” one of the most lavish productions of 1957 — Rita Hayworth, lured out of a four year “retirement” to star as the on-the-lam redhead who comes between Robert Mitchum and Jack Lemmon, Technicolor and Cinemascope wide screen, filmed on location in Trinidad and Tobago.

But the evidence of what went right and what didn’t come off is right there on the screen, a lavish movie awash in “local color” that “limbos” out of the gate and gets up a fine head of steam before settling into torpid, inert melodrama that loses track of its leading lady for much of the third act.

The editor turned director had to recut what apparently was a story, told mostly in flashbacks (similar to Hayworth’s Welles classic, “The Lady from Shanghai”) to get his real “star” on the screen earlier.

That turns over the long, languid third act to a sailor trapped on a slowly-burning freighter, and the harbor master (Herbert Lom) and port doctor (Bernard Lee) who are among those trying to save him.

But the picturesque tale of two boat bums smuggling a gorgeous and often “kept” European refugee with “no papers” from port to port has a lot to recommend it until it goes wrong.

And producer Albert “Cubby” Broccoli was so enamoured of the experience that he and Harry Saltzman would buy the rights to Caribbean resident Ian Fleming’s James Bond and make “Dr. No” and other films in this exotic world that few, back then, had traveled to.

Mitchum’s the grizzled old salt Felix and Lemmon’s Tony a Korean War veteran who have met and bought the old wooden coaster “Ruby,” making ends meet by smuggling this or that form of contraband, with help from their Trinidadian crewman Jimmy Jean (Edric Connor, terrific) and a shady bartender middle-man (Anthony Newley, perfectly oily).

It takes a lot of negotiating to talk them into human trafficking. Irena (Hayworth) sits by as the latest man to “keep” her and the two friends haggle over the risk and the price.

“I’m coming from nowhere, illegally, and I’m on my way to nowhere, equally illegally” is all she’ll say.

Over the course of their journey from “San Juan” to “Santa Nada,” they will stop for Carnivale and a swim. Tony will fall for Irena and Felix will fail to sway him about her true nature, her sordid past and the ways she’s always been “kept” by men who fall under her spell.

Novelist, playwright and screenwriter Irwin Shaw (“The Young Lions,””Rich Man, Poor Man”) turned the Max Catto novel into a script filled with pungent dialogue.

“Forget it. Forget me. I always get by somehow.””Sometimes you wonder what God had in mind when he invented the male sex.” “I’m waiting for someone to touch me with kindness.”

Hayworth cuts loose with hair-flinging abandon in a street dance scene during Carnivale that shows us exactly why Columbia kept her under contract all those years. Mitchum was just settling into his world weary cynicism and Lemmon’s still in his eager beaver “Mister Roberts/The Apartment” youth.

Connor’s singing baritine Jimmy Jean is both a stereotype and a lot more, as we see in this film the slow pace of change in the cinema’s treatment of Black characters. An actor had to bring a lot of presence to expand the reach of a role in such performances, and Connor does. It’s a pity he didn’t come along 20 years later, or that Hollywood didn’t fully evolve after “Casablanca.”

Port doctor Lee would go on to play “M” in the Broccoli-produced Bond pictures, and Lom would become the object of Inspector Clouseau’s torment in those Peter Sellers comedies. Parrish, the director, would make two Sellers films of his own.

This movie? It’s got a lot to offer, even if it finished narrowly in the red when it came out and didn’t figure in anybody’s “best films” lists, then or now. Whatever its failings, “Fire Down Below” didn’t end anybody’s career.

Think of it as a multi-million dollar location scout for James Bond movies, one with Rita and Mitchum and Good Neighbor Jack along for the slow boat ride over the gin-clear waters of the Caribbean Sea.

Rating: TV-PG

Cast: Rita Hayworth, Robert Mitchum, Jack Lemmon, Edric Connor, Bernard Lee, Herbert Lom and Anthony Newley

Credits: Directed by Robert Parrish, scripted by Irwin Shaw, based on a novel by Max Catto. A Columbia release on Tubi, Amazon, et al.

Running time: 1:56

An engaging, accomplished cast and an insistently light tone recommend “Ezra,” another road trip bonding tale about autism and loved ones struggling to understand it.

The audience is always in on the “teachable moments” in movies from “Rain Man” and “The Last Right” to “Ezra.” We learn about autisim just as parents and strangers do in the movie.

The autistic character in such films invariably is a “Hollywood” version of “on the spectrum” — funny in just the right doses, contrived to be “manageable” when its convenient to the plot, with meltdowns just as predictable. But as loved ones and the medical community learn and pass on more about autism, screenwriters take that as license to lean hard on variations of “cute.”

Bobby Cannavale stars as Max, a former comedy writer who has aged into an edgy, confessional stand-up comic. His act has its funny bits, but it takes on other tones when he stops talking about his cranky ex-chef Dad (Robert DeNiro) and starts talking about “my son, Ezra.”

Ezra, played by William A. Fitzgerald, is a bespectacled autistic tween, growing up in Manhattan with his realtor Mom (Rose Byrne) and “making progress,” from “not talking” to “never shuts up.” He still can’t stand to be touched, still struggles with manic attention to movies and TV he’s exposed to — mostly when he’s visiting his Dad.

Quoting “Breaking Bad” doesn’t go over well in middle school. But maybe all that funny profanity eases the bullying.

“Fire in the hole, bitch!”

Max is on the cusp of a “big break,” as his agent (Whoopi Goldberg) has talked a talent scout for Jimmy Kimmel’s show into checking out his act. Being a father of a child with uncertain health and special needs, she’s figured Kimmel will dig this. Being a devoted dad, Max isn’t sure he can work this “break” in.

And meeting with reps from Ezra’s latest Hoboken school shows mother Jenna’s negotiating skills, and Max’s volcanic temper. She won’t say it, but Ezra’s picked up on the idea that she thinks his condition is inherited from Max, and that Max takes after his old man, the short-tempered union doorman, Stan (DeNiro).

That agent may not know that. But she knows something’s self-destructive about Max.

“I really want you to fly. But you’ve GOT to stop blowing up the runway!”

Ezra gets yanked from school and earns further attention from The State. So Max lashes out by grabbing the kid and taking him on a road trip.

“I’m saving my son’s LIFE!”

And nothing Jenna or her new man (Max won’t sign the divorce papers) Bruce (played by director Tony Goldwyn) can do will stop the reckoning that will come when they or the authorities catch up to them.

Cannavale as a frustrated stand-up comic works, even if the material is more believably-acted and filmed than amusing. Byrne is wonderfully under control as a mother who perhaps understands her child better, even if his indulgent Dad — who takes him, in costume, to Lebowski Fest — is the boy’s truest bond.

And Old Man DeNiro suggests a tempestuous hardcase who has mellowed, just a little, in this grandfather figure.

Goldwyn peppers his supporting cast with great players who find fun things to do around the edges. Goldberg’s agent has a habit of taking towering, over-40 Max into her lap. Rainn Wilson plays an amusing ex-comic and old pal who runs a kids camp in Michigan. Jacqueline Nwabueze plays an adorable Sengalese nun working at the camp.

And Vera Farmiga brings her brand of warmth to an old flame.

“Ezra’s” perfectly agreeable, pretty much start to finish. But boy, do the contrived elements of this plot — the ongoing pursuit of “Kimmel,” the underage kid’s mouthy “stepping on the punchline” habit when he’s in the comedy clubs as Dad does his act — grate.

The struggle between “cute” and “cloying” is real, and tends to blunt the emotional impact of the story.

But Goldwyn’s light touch ensures that the picture is never less than watchable, even if “Ezra” does have its share of “give me a break” moments.

Rating: R, profanity, fisticuffs, sexual situations

Cast: Bobby Cannavale, Rose Byrne, William A. Fitzgerald, Tony Goldwyn, Whoopi Goldberg, Rainn Wilson, Vera Farmiga and Robert De Niro

Credits: Directed by Tony Goldwyn, scripted by Tony Spiridakis. A Bleecker Street release.

Running time: 1:41

Never much of a fan of these films. A few laughs, but not much beyond that. Slim pickings, even for a comic book adaptation.

A few pronoun jokes, a little of the old ultra-violence, and then we get our Tom Hardy back.

October.

If you’re not old enough to remember the original, unadulterated opening credits crawl to “Star Wars,” I envy you your youth, and pity you not growing up in a cinematic era where the value inherent in the Latin phrase “In Media Res” was lost.

It’s the term we use for joining a “story” that’s already in progress.

In “Star Wars,” we’re told in that opening, that we’re joining a story already in progress, as in the old movie serials George Lucas was paying homage to, and that radio’s Firesign Theatre sent up with its contemporaneous audio cartoon, “Flash Bazbo, SPACE Explorer,” we’re picking things up “When we last left Flash…”

We’re hurled into action and ordered to make sense of it via dialogue with snippets of exposition, semiotics — villains clad in black, storm trooper minions in menacing sneering helmets, heroine and heroine dressed in white — and the instinct to root for the underdogs, those under attack.

The crawl tells us this is “Episode IV: A New Hope.” So we’ve missed three installments of this tale that would have gotten us to this point. And we were FINE with that.

George Lucas’s original script included lots of world-building and what became, in essence, backstories for Luke, the Skywalker clan, Ben Kenobi, Han Solo, Jabba and Gredo. Jump-starting the tale in the middle was one of the luckiest strokes of “We’ve gotta cut this” in the history of cinema.

A big lesson was learned with that blockbuster, one Spielberg and Lucas ran with for “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” We don’t need to see a child, wrapped in swaddling clothes, born on Krypton. Hurl us into the action, take our breath away, and put Indie on the run from Nazis, Natives and “Snakes. I HATE Snakes!”

Fangirl and fanboy mania for “origin stories” took over the movies in the ’90s and really hasn’t let go in the decades since. So we’ve been treated to “Young Indiana Jones Chronicles,” inane “Star Wars” prequels — “Rogue One” being the only one that works — and now a prequel that’s a sequel and a genuine box office bomb in the bargain, “Furiosa.”

We saw Mel Gibson become “Mad Max.” But only AFTER “The Road Warrior” blew up, a stand-alone thriller that didn’t need the no-budget origin story most of us missed in limited release, a tale of Mel’s highway patrolman losing his family and his civilization, but not his police pursuit vehicle, when The World Ended.

The dazzling “Fury Road” was set later in the saga, in this George Miller post “oil wars” “universe.” We didn’t need to see Charlize Theron’s character’s origin story, didn’t need to see how she lost her arm. “Unecessary” was a word that turned up in a lot of reviews, even the laudatory ones.

J.J. Abrams started his “Star Trek” saga with an origin story, and that’s been the rule for most of the big franchise pictures to come along since the ’90s. “Superman Returns” and the entire “Mission: Impossible” franchise were against the grain in starting their stories in media res.

Maybe “Furiosa” is a moment when one and all should remembering that Tolkien wrote a lot of backstory, back history and world building before starting “The Hobbit” in media res, that Lucas basically stumbled into the idea of joining that “galaxy far away,” and that Coppola got away with “Godfather Part 2,” and if you’re not Coppola, maybe asking yourself “Is this prequel really necessary?”should be your first order of business.

What “the studio suits” and accountants want isn’t always the easy money they think it will be. Let’s remember that prequels are “no brainers” just because fans say they want them, but that expecting fans to keep their word when you give them what the fickle dears claim they crave is not just a creative dead end. It can be a financial one, too.