One of the most popular musicals of the last 25 years comes to the screen this Thanksgiving, a fairytale spun off of L. Fram Baum’s “The Wizard of Oz.”
Ariana and Cynthia Erivo and Michelle Yeoh and Bowen Yang with songs in their hearts for the holidays. Jeff Goldblum as “Oz, the Great and Terrible?”
Maybe you’ve seen a nature program that tells the story of the long migration of the Monarch butterfly, those beautiful, delicate orange and black lepidoptera that amazingly make their way over vast distances from all over North America, from as far north as Canada, to their winter hatchery in the sanctuaries of Mexico.
Maybe you’ve raised one from crysalis to flight in an elementary school class, or learned of the importance of milkweed to their existence.
But if you’ve ever heard of them referred to as “Brides of the Sun” carrying “the Souls of the Dead,” romantic nicknames for a creature whose vast egg-laying flocks cover the pine and oyamel trees of El Rosario and other forests of Michoacán, you’ve absorbed the life work of Homero Gómez González, their greatest champion in Mexico, “The Guardian of the Monarchs.”
That’s the title of a Mexican documentary about Homero Gómez, who suffered the fate of many an environmental activist, journalist or citizen who dares to cross the many gangs spread across the country. He was murdered in 2020, and as Emiliano Ruprah’s film makes clear, just getting the government and the police to admit that pretty obvious fact has proven difficult.
The corruption runs deep, and the well-intentioned don’t have a chance.
Ruprah’s film sounds the alarm about this now-endangered species, “a world heritage” as Gómez often noted in videos promoting tourism to see the magic conclave of butterflies gathering near his home. “Guardian” doesn’t just memorialize Gómez. It lays out the threats to the butterflies, the interests that want the lumber that the butterflies flock to in order to lay their eggs, the land armed, police-protected gangs illegally clear cut and plant avocado trees on, the politicians they prop up and the locals and cops they intimidate and kill when somebody crosses them.
The entire police department around Ocampo, and El Soldado, where Gómez’s body was found in a well, was put under investigation after his disappearance.
And yet the police official in charge of the investigation, Mario Gerardo Pinedo, has the gall to sit on camera and insist there was “no evidence” of foul play, despite coroners, reporters and others bringing up all the evidence to the contrary.
Others who seem connected to the disappearance and murder mysteriously turned up dead in the months that followed.
The viewer can be excused for barking at the screen every time Pinedo shows up, “How do you sleep at night?”
Politicians, including a now-former governor, Silvano Aureoles, are implicated. Some defend their actions on camera, others — like politician Karina Alvarado — filed petitions that somehow immunize them from investigation, a pretty damning step to take.
It’s frustrating to see any injustice committed in plain sight and not dealt with, and that’s the feeling this solid, well-intentioned film leaves you with.
Ruprah uses interviews, coverage of festivals, the history of butterfly tourism (falling off due to violence and monarch decline) and reenactments to tell this sad, touching and infuriating story.
But “The Guardian of the Monarchs” leaves one with only glimmers of hope that justice will ever be done — exposing those who don’t tell what they know — or that anything will ever get better. As long as the poverty, the corruption and lawlessness that accompanies it and the avocado-mania that finances forest destruction exist, the monarchs are threatened. If they’re not doomed altogether, it’s because of brave activists like Homero Gómez González and people who demand that his sacrifice be avenged and not be in vain.
Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity
Cast: Homero Gómez González, Silvano Aureoles, Rebeca Valencia González, Mario Gerardo Pineo, Homero Gómez González IV and Amado Gómez
Credits: Scripted and directed by Emiliano Ruprah. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:32
Savi Gabizon remakes his Israeli mystery drama of the same title with an international cast including Gere, Kruger and Jessica Clement.
A summer release? Feels more like a fall title.
Taylor Russell and Lara Flynn Boyle also in this Film Movement oddity, built around Ewan McGregor, Rhys Ifans and Lara Flynn Boyle dealing with Mother Ellen Burstyn’s furniture bound meltdown.
“Adagio” is a classic 100 minute thriller in a 126 minute package.
Director and co-writer Stefano Sollima takes his sweet time setting the scene — which he never identifies as greater Rome, Lazio — and takes even longer letting us know what we’re diving into, a tale of blackmail involving mobsters, dirty cops and a young pawn trapped in two worlds.
Sollima takes a longer while introducing the disparate characters, and longer still to identify them by name and association. This slow, “make the audience come to you” mystery becomes seriously tedious, after a while.
Although there are grace notes and riveting touches in the later acts, the finale proves to be an anti-climax as Sollima draws things out some more. He doesn’t even know when to drop the mike.
But it’s all there in the not-exactly-ironic title. As any classical music fan can tell you, “Adagio” means “slowly” in Italian.
We follow the young, headphone-wearing music fan (Gianmarco Francini) into one of those lurid, over-the-top, over-designed movie versions of a disco, where the team of cops tracking “the puppy” have their orders, which they’ve passed on to him. Get something that incriminates someone on one of the many surveillance cameras they’ve planted there.
The kid is in over his depth, surrounded by drag queens and drugs, which he is more than happy to sample. Realizing he’s incriminating himself, he bolts.
That draws out single-father-of-two detective Vasco (Adriano Giannini), in a fury and using his team’s tech expert and “cleaner” (Lorenzo Adorni) and muscle (Francsco Di Leva) as he hunts their “puppy” down.
Whatever their credentials, tech and surveillance expertise, these cops are up to no murderous good.
The kid, Manuel, lives with his aged, addled father (Toni Servillo) whose gangland name — “Daytona” — he drops as he scampers about, trying to find “help” to save his skin and get him out of this jam. He turns to the blind mobster (Valerio Mastandrea) nickamed Polniuman. And Polniuman (say it aloud) sends Manuel to bald, scowling “I can’t help you” badman “Romeo,” played with a largely internalized menace by Pierfrancesco Favino.
“You know a lot of things you shouldn’t know,” “the puppy” is told (in Italian with English subtitles). The viewer? We know little, but we start to find things out, bit by bit as this Byzantine scheme unfolds.
There are old grudges and ancient alliances in play here, old mobster codes and big money and Italian politics being manipulated by dirty cops out for a payday.
A couple of twists remind us of true pieces of American gangland lore — the pose mob boss Vincent Gigante affected for his own safety, etc. And the film’s climax has a brute elegance that makes us long for the more streamlined story that should have led to it.
The Rome depicted here is threatened by wildfires which lead to constant power outages, often at dramatically opportune moments. Sollima (“Gomorrah,” “Sicario 2”) likes telling tales with sweep and allegorical darkness. But even taking that into account, this picture is slow right to the edge of dullness.
Nepo baby Giannini — son of Giancarlo — has the film’s showiest role, a cop who has lost the plot and crosses from “Get that money” to “Clean this up” to “Kill that kid, no matter what.”
But it is the old men and their old ways that carry this slow-footed thriller, with Favino (“Angels & Demons,” “World War Z”) and Servillo (“Il Divo”) lending their “old men still capable of violence” gravitas to a story that would have been better served by quicker pacing.
Rating: TV-MA, bloody violence, drugs, sexual content, profanity
Cast: Pierfrancesco Favino, Toni Servillo, Gianmarco Francini, Adriano Giannini, Valerio Mastandrea, Lorenzo Adorni, Francesco Di Leva and Silvia Salvatori.
Credits: Directed by Stefano Sollima, scripted by Stefano Bises and Stefano Sollima. A Netflix release.
Running time: 2:06
You can’t say the dark Spanish comedy “The Coffee Table” isn’t dark enough. It involves the tragic, accidental and bloody death of an infant. But considering the subject matter, maybe the “comedy” could have gone a little further.
Director and co-writer Caye Casas presents us with a “couple in trouble,” a hideous piece of furniture, the pathological liar selling it to them and a wife and new mother so hateful, right down to the 17,000 cigarettes Spanish timbre of her voice, that finding someone or some outcome to root for here is a chore.
There are deadpan laughs in this “How will I ever tell her about the accident?” comedy, but they are few and far between, and strained.
Maria (Estefanía de los Santos) and Jesús (David Pareja) are a long-married 40ish couple who just had a baby. When you see and hear their interactions in the furniture store, you pick up pretty quick on why it took so long for them — or him, at least — to take that step.
Maria is a bit argumentative. Short-tempered. And she calls the salesman (Eduardo Antuña) out on every lie he attaches to this two “fake” gold nude nymphs balancing a glass top table her husband is determined to buy.
Whatever decisions they’ve made as a couple, this one she’s left to him. And she sure as hell isn’t interested in letting him make it. Judging from the item in question, we see her point.
“I don’t want this table in our home,” she growls, in Spanish with English subtitles. But Jesús is still listening to the “Swedish design” and “Chinese” price and “bulletproof glass” claims by the BS artist salesman who hears a lot more about their marriage than would seem necessary as they bicker in the store.
She decided it was now or never on having a child. She dubbed the baby Cayetano, naming him for someone her husband bristles is “a fascist bullfighter.” But at least he gets to pick the table, right?
Imagine his horror when, after assembling the glasstop, noting a “missing screw” and being left alone with the baby for the first time, he trips and the baby bullfighter is killed. Blood everywhere.
Any man who has ever been married will pick up what might be the worst consequence of this. Maria’s justifiable flip-out over this is sure to include the ultimate “I TOLD you so!”
He tries to clean up the blood — he’s injured, too. He tries to secure cleaning products from the neighbor’s 13 year-old monster teen, Ruth (Gala Flores), who INSISTS that he “tell your wife about us.” The little psycho has apparently invented an attraction and “relationship” in her mind, which Jesús cannot talk her out of.
As our incompetent table-shopper struggles with his first babysitting nightmare, he re-encounters the salesman, fends off his younger brother (Josep Maria Riera) and the brother’s pregnant and much younger girlfiend (Claudia Riera) and tries to figure out how to tell his ill-tempered wife this terrible news.
The performances pay off. But the story elements with the funniest possibilities — the salesman, the crazed 13 year-old — dangle out there without any payoff. The biting banter in the opening scene is almost funny, in a cringey way. The building suspense is more pained than amusing, but as such it gives the picture a pathos that the script sets out to upend.
And the horror of what has happened, described in gory detail late in the third act, never quite plays as “We know we shouldn’t laugh, but we must.” Because we — or at least I — didn’t.
Rating: unrated, profanity, dead baby subject matter
Cast: David Pareja, Estefanía de los Santos, Josep Maria Riera, Gala Flores, Claudia Riera and Eduardo Antuña
Credits: Directed by Caye Casas, scripted by Cristina Borobia and Caye Casas. A Cinephobia release.
Running time: 1:31
One long ago gave up any hope that Hollywood would give up any “hit” intellectual property without wringing the last drops of value out of it. But the news that there will be a third “Downton Abbey” movie, with Paul Giamatti reprising a character from the series and that Joely Richardson and Alessandro Nivola will join the cast for it, gives me an excuse to renew my plea that this worldwide phenomenon, running on setnimental fumes for its most recent big screen treatment, be given a graceful, apt and historically-defensible send-off.
“Gosford Park” screenwriter and series creator Julian Fellowes has been reluctant to take the Great House and its era towards a natural coda, which might be the lone gripe I have with this popular, populous and period-perfect highbrow soap opera.
It was never going to be “Brideshead Revisited,” because Fellowes, a terrific screenwriter, is no Evelyn Waugh. But “Brideshead” points the way for how to wrap this saga up with a fond farewell to the age of legions of lower-class Britons employed “in service” in a vast, unmanageable mansion whose inheritance, National Trust listing and tax breaks still would rarely be enough to keep it practically liveable.
“Brideshead Revisited,” based on the 1945 Waugh novel, has been filmed a few times, most famously as a 1981 TV series that became the “Downton” of its day. That story, told in flashback, used the World War II service that great house — Brideshead — as a training grounds/billeting for the British military as its framing device.
One could see the house as it once was and what it would become, nothing any one family facing progressive taxation could afford and keep up in the manner of such manors of the past, a mansion symbolic of Britain’s class-divided past and somewhat more equitable future.
Something like that was the subtext of the early run of the “Downton Abbey” TV series — World War I intruding on the stately pile and its generations of inhabitants, a property saved by the heir’s timely marriage to American money now full of people “doing our bit” for the Empire and the war effort.
World War II, its grim tests and a culture bracing for “the change” that would sweep over the British aristocracy and their estates in post-war Britain would be a great way to wrap this story up, giving the locale and its inhabitants purpose and the viewer a bit of “We’ll meet again” and “Keep Calm and Carry On” nostalgia.
Literally anything else — another story set in the ’30s, immune to the worldwide depression outside their grounds — would just be more of the same, cinematic running-in-place. And I would hope Fellowes wouldn’t want that, no matter how much Focus Features might.
Writer-director Sarah T. Schwab’s “A Stage of Twilight” is a somber melodrama about a couple facing an end-of-life decision with despair and as much grace as either can manage, under the circumstances.
It makes a fine showcase for its venerated, venerable leads — Karen Allen and William Sadler. But the plot only escapes from the tropes of this downbeat genre by shoehorning in tropes of another as we meet a young neighbor struggling to decide his own future while coping with family responsibilities and a romantic entanglement.
Schwab never overcomes the grim seriousness implicit in the subject matter, never allows a lighter moment and never quite brings us to tears, despite Allen’s best efforts.
Allen plays Cora, a small town librarian in rural New England (New Milford, Connecticut was the filming location), a woman whom we learn aspired to more than this in the opening scene, re-shelving books.
One was a novel Cora wrote years before, and she smiles when she notes that people have been checking it out and reading it.
Husband Barry (Sadler) shows up to surprise her with an anniversary dinner. Her laments of how “old and frumpy” she looks prompt a smirk and a twinkle. But his wasting cough tells us this won’t just be about love and devotion. He quickly learns his prognosis has changed. He has three months to live.
Barry runs through a range of reactions, “toe-tagging the pipes” of their aged farmhouse so that a future plumber will be able to make speedy repairs, buying a truckload of firewood. Barry’s got in mind to take care of Cora after he’s gone. But he decides “I don’t want your last memory of me to be of some old, sick man.” He’s got a plan for that, too.
As we pick up hints of their long-ago courtship and Cora’s distress at their differing approaches to this inevitable fate, their young neighbor Jimmy (Marlon Xavier) is starting to wonder if life on dad’s dairy farm is all there is. An ag-and-tech college might be in Jimmy’s future, if his stubborn father (Alfredo Narcisco) is willing to listen to reason and his smart kid’s ideas for improving their operation.
Jimmy’s local ties include the girlfriend (Emily Kratter) who has their entire future mapped out for them. Cora, perhaps wondering about her own path not taken, passes on suggestions that remind us of what fonts of helpful information librarians often are, even if one’s high school guidance counselor is no help.
The limited scope of the drama lapses into melodrama as Barry states his dogged intentions for “the end” and Jimmy visits college and promptly finds himself a potential girlfriend with wider horizons — not much wider, as every young woman he meets seems to appreciate his prospects for inheriting a big dairy farm.
The players are fine, but the mopey pace and somewhat generic “twists” to the plot make “A Stage of Twilight” — whose title promises a literariness the script never lives up to — something of a well-intentioned slog.
Rating: unrated, sex, fisticuffs
Cast: Karen Allen, William Sadler, Marlon Xavier, Emily Kratter, Alexander Flores and Alfredo Narcisco.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Sarah T. Schwab. A Cardinal Flix release on Amazon
Running time: 1:47
Vikander plays the last and perhaps toughest of the Six Wives of Henry XIII, Kateryn (Catherine) Parr, the one who tempted fate and stood up to the murderous monarch and lived to tell the tale.
This summer release is from the director of “Invisible Life” and “Mariner of the Mountains.”
Brian Van Holt also stars in this serial killer thriller. The serial killer might be a “cop?”
“The Bone Collector,” they call the man they’re hunting.
Gibson plays an FBI Agent/profiler, Curtis Jackson a police chief. This Lionsgate release drops July 5.
Movie Nation 