Tatum stars as a tech tycoon with his own private island, Naomie Ackie is a cocktail waitress with gold digging on the brain. Oscar winner Geena Davis, Kyle MacLachlan, Christian Slater and Haley Joel Osmebt also star.
This MGM/Amazon comic thriller is being tucked into the tail end of August, a traditional dumping ground for movies with limited prospects.
It’ll be on Amazon soon enough, because “Blink Twice” and it’ll be here (Aug. 29) and gone from theaters.
Looks cute. Ish.
Neon has this one, which means it opens May 31, closes June 1. Or maybe June 2.
July 26, as surefire a hit as any comic book movie to ever come down the pike hits theaters.
Shawn Levy directs our heroes teaming up to “fight a common enemy.” “Superfriends” eat your hearts out.
“We Grown Now,” the third feature of writer-director Minhal Baig, is a sentimental coming-of-age tale, a period piece nostalgic for Chicago’s stigmatized and long-gone Cabrini Green high-rise housing project.
That’s just the first way this lovely and intimate film upends expectations and challenges the viewer to see the world differently.
The two tweens who grow up in “the projects” — Malik (Blake Cameron James) and Eric (Gian Knight Ramirez) — are not overtly victims of their circumstances. Each lives in a single-parent household, but Malik’s mom (a radiant Jurnee Smollett) and grandmom (S. Epatha Merkerson, earthy and nurturing) and Eric’s dad (Lil Rel Howery, wholly serious for once) are wholly engaged in their lives and invested in their futures.
Mother Dolores may just be “trying to hold onto to the little we’ve got.” Dad Jason might be struggling to make ends meet with a pizza joint job and teach his Eric the math of home economics — how much it takes them to just get by.
But these kids are well-cared for, curious about the world to the point of being idealized “screenwriter” creations. Middle schoolers of any race and any locale aren’t known for skipping school to check out Walter Ellison paintings and a Georges Seurat exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago.
There’s little of the street argot and pervasive cultural rot often depicted in stories in such settings. When violence intrudes on their world, it may be a part of a trend that is politicized as it is presented on TV — drugs, guns and the random, murderous violence that connects them.
So Malik and Eric have room to dream, to pile old mattresses in the playground to “jump” and bounce into the sky with, DIY trampolines aimed at the heavens and a better future.
They swap jokes — “How do you make a tissue dance? You put a little ‘boogie’ into it.” They imagine the cosmos in a water-stained ceiling. They revel in a rare ride on The El. And they tell each other of their pasts, and a little about their hopes for the future.
Malik’s grandma reminds him he is one generation removed from Tupelo, Mississippi, and the racism his mother and grandparents fled. Eric’s dad passes on sage advice about grudges and the “life’s too short” reasons for letting go of them.
Baig — “Hala” was her break-out film — tests these lives and this friendship in a lot of conventional ways, a random shooting death, a police crackdown that upends ordinary, working class lives. The story’s turn towards a climax is yet another way it gives in to the tried-and-true of tales in this setting.
Everything’s a tad neat and scrubbed — including the child actors, their characters’ spotless Adidas and Chuck Taylors, and their dialogue. But the sweetness, the lived-in feeling of the characters and their world lift this gentle drama and recommend it.
It’s not a gritty recreation of a pretty grim place that was knocked-down for a reason. “We Grown Now” lets us see Cabrini Green and its people through the rose-colored glasses of memory, and reminds us of how universal that sentimentalizing process is. It wasn’t the buildings and the politics that created them and knocked them down that’s worth recalling. It’s the lives lived there, their hopes and dreams — realized or deferred — that matter.
Rating: PG, adult themes
Cast: Blake Cameron James, Jurnee Smollett, S. Epatha Merkerson, Gian Knight Ramirez and Lil Rel Howery
Credits: Scripted and directed by
Minhal Baig. A Sony Pictures Classics release.
Running time: 1:34
South African writer-director Brad Katzen puts extra effort into trying to make his stoner comedy “Soweto Blaze” look and sound new and “fresh.”
The setting is a post-Apartheid Soweto, more affluent and generally unrest-free, with nicer homes and just a scattering of ruins.
The dialogue is mostly the local patois, some blend of Zulu and Sotho, some of it given the International Accent of Cannabis — “Rastafarian.”
Katzen uses split screens, simulated phone screens and jump cuts so often that when the film stops cold — freezes up — you wonder if that’s a stylistic choice, or a technical glitch via Netflix (the likely culprit).
And the closing credits are Indian cinema-inventive — still shots of the crowded set ID’ing every member of the crew and their job, as well as the mostly-unknown cast.
But all our intrepid filmmaker has done is revisit what one might assume are the American films of his 1990s childhood — “Friday,” the Urtext of modern stoner comedies, and the Alicia Silverstone kidnapping comedy “Excess Baggage.”
There are a couple of laughs in this one, mostly from the inept gunplay, the loopy situations, the characters and the stoner philosophy espoused by He who is the Most-stoned — “What if time is just an artificial construct?”
Yet the best praise one can summon for this South African stoner comedy is “Hope you do better next time.”
Mo (Matli Mohapeloa) is a low-rent pot dealer beloved for his wide and exotic selection of smokables — Dutch Treat, Skunk, etc.
Dill (Sydney Ndlovu) and his gal Pickle (Nyeleti Khoza) might be his most reliable customers. Aside from the local Rastafarian. But they never seem to pay.
That is an issue for the corrupt cop (Nhlanhla Mayisa) who has been shaking Mo down for years. The payoffs cut into Mo’s efforts to save up for his dream business, a mellow, maybe even cannabis-infused smoothie-dispensing food truck.
When he and Dill and Pickle lament their cash-poor status, and watch an interaction involving mobster Lebo the Lion (Sello Sebotsane), his albino henchwoman (Palesa Mosia) and his rebellious hottie of a daughter Thandi (Dimpho More), they joke about a ransom that could solve all their problems.
Next thing poor Mo knows, he comes home to find the two short-attention-span potheads have gone through with a kidnapping and stashed rash and furious Thandi in his house. As her daddy is a murderous thug, and as she’s stolen money from him in an effort to escape that life, Mo is in over his head, and we don’t have to ask “Deep what?” as to the substance he’s buried under.
Katzen tries to bedazzle this simple-enough set-up with interludes where Dill and Pickle put ads on TikTok that they’re looking for a short term rental (to stash Thandi), split screens that show us text messages but which never add up to an “LOL” and the point of view shifts as the dirty cop and the mobster’s apprentice hunt one and all down.
Dill & Pickle are the heart of the picture, but even together they don’t add up to one Chris Tucker, to use the “Friday” comparison.
The third act violence is (supposedly) non-lethal, and involves pistols and an AK 47 and “accidents.” Kind of funny.
I like the idea behind “Soweto Blaze,” and the attempts to give it all a little pizazz. And the setting and characters are novel. There just isn’t enough here that’s funny enough to carry this cannabis caper comedy across the finish line.
Rating: TV-MA, violence, drug abuse
Cast: Matli Mohapeloa, Dimpho More, Sydney Ndlovu, Nyeleti Khoza, Palesa Mosia, Nhlanhla Mayisa and Sello Sebotsane
Credits: Scripted and directed by Brad Katzen. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:35
Josh Hartnett, Alison Pill, Hayley Mills and some relative of M. Night’s star in this Aug. 9 release.
A big pop concert is used to capture a notorious serial killer, who apparently is a fan of the “Gaga-esque” singer, played by Saleka Shyamalan, oldest daughter of M. Night.
A big question to ponder, thanks to this weekend’s emerging box office figures. What happened to the horror movie audience? Where did they go?
For most of this millenium, this has been the most reliable corner of the movie-going public, with most titles opening in the $17-20 million range, and sequels to established franchises rolling in $25-27 million+ on their first weekend.
In recent months, we’ve had “Immaculate,” “The First Omen” and now “Abigail” open at $11 million or under.
There was a time if you put an actress in a nun’s habit and made her scary or had scary things happen to her, it was money in the bank. You’d reboot an “Exorcist,””Halloween,” “Scream” or now “Omen,” you’d automatically sell lots of tickets.
Now, you’ve got a bloody-minded vampire comedy with a monstrous child and reliable, “name” talent in the supporting cast. And it may claw its way to a box office win. But maybe it won’t.
As of Sat. AM, the race is too close to call, based on previews and Friday’s take. “Abigail,” with good reviews and a being new film in a formerly reliable genre, still has the edge.
The jaunty “Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare” was thought to have a shot at $11 million. It too earned good reviews and is a fun night out for action fans. But Deadline is suggesting that Friday’s take means it’ll be lucky to clear $9.
And the more serious “Civil War,” even with a political edge that won’t appeal to all, is holding audience thanks to good reviews and decent word of mouth and may earn another $11 million after opening in the $26 million range last weekend.
Saturday’s numbers will be the tell here, with “Civil War” the most likely to steal first place from “Abigail” and those who would kill her.
With the fading appeal of comic book movies, one can see genre fatigue settling in. Filmmakers have run out of things to say and do in these films and their once-reliable audience is getting wise and — relatively speaking — moving on. They’re still making money, but they’re not guaranteed to make bank.
Horror fans haven’t all flocked to streaming. The big site Shudder has endured huge layoffs in recent years.
Is inflation chasing the horror crowd off? Movies are still a relative bargain, but did theater chains leap past a price point that makes younger viewers, teen couples and older fans of the genre wince?
There’s also the possibility that the audience is tired of these films, that at least part of that audience has outgrown the movies, and that big stinkers such as the latter “Halloweens” and endlessly recycled “Insidious” et al franchises have scared fans off.
I wonder. With studios setting up boutique nameplates such as Blumhouse, and reviving distributor brands just to service the horror side of the business, Hollywood has to be concerned, too.
“Godzilla x Kong” will pull in another $8.5 million and change, meaning that Dan Stevens stars in two thrillers (“Abigail”) in the top five this weekend.
A new anime release “Spy x Family Code: White” is drawing the anime faithful to the tune of $5 million or so. They’re showing this on a lot of IMAX screens, oddly enough.
The “Ghostbusters” and “Kung Fu Panda” sequels won’t crack the top five this weekend, and are finally fading away.
As always, I’ll update this post as other data comes in from Box Office Pro, deadline.come and others.
“The Roaring Twenties” is a summation of the classic “gangster movie” era, all rolled up into one swift, sprawling narrative.
Produced by THE gangster movie studio, Warner Brothers, released in that pinnacle cinematic year of 1939, we can look back at it now as heralding the end of one crime thriller era, with the more subtextual and highly-regarded film noir genre about to emerge.
It’s the final teaming of two of the great screen gangsters of the age, James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart. It has themes and threads that run through the cinema of that age and ages to come — social circumstances creating a criminal, a career and a “business” in the making, corruption and shifting values minimizing the nature of the crime and a powerful man trying to win a beautiful woman by making her a star.
Director Raoul Walsh would come to be seen as one of the masters of genre after this film, and the later “High Sierra” and “White Heat,” the latter Cagney’s greatest gangster picture, the former one of Bogart’s.
But compared to them, “The Roaring Twenties” can seem stodgy and dated — almost quaint. It has more in common with “Little Caesar” than the classics to come, a movie of newsreel/newspaper montage “history lessons” underscored by stentorian, lecturing voice-over narration.
“An era of amazing madness. Bootlegging has grown from small, individual effort to big business, embodying huge coalitions and combines.”
The sound-staginess of it all, with even World War I battlefields recreated indoors, and the sprint-through-the-era nature of the narrative seriously date the picture, dulling some of the impact of the tight performances and crackling dialogue.
But Cagney and Bogie, nearing equal stature and both behaving like it, pop off the screen, two movie tough guys going toe-to-toe one more time.
Eddie and George meet in a shell crater in France, one a working class New York guy “doing my bit,” the other a hardened mug, a cynic who may be figuring out he doesn’t mind this killing thing. “Harvard boy” Lloyd (Jeffrey Lynn) winds up in that hole with them, and all three characters are established with a few words and actions.
“Harvard” is rattled and gun-shy. George (Bogart) is harsh in his manhood/class-warfare judgments of him. Eddie (Cagney) isn’t having it.
“I don’t like heroes OR big mouths!”
Back home, Eddie finds an economy that isn’t adjusting in time to help returning doughboys. His female pen-pal (Priscilla Lane) turns out to be a high school girl who dresses older for roles in school plays.
His cabbie pal Danny (character player Frank McHugh) is the only one who might help with both his problems — a driving job, and a “maybe you can help her with her homework” crack about Miss Underage.
“Prohibition” is arriving, our narrator reminds us, without a hint of the moral and wartime logistical arguments that made banning liquor attractive in the late teens. Eddie, driving a cab, gets suckered into making an illegal booze drop-off. The club owner, Panama Smith (Gladys Smith, portraying a version of New York actress, “entrepreneur” and speak-easy owner Texas Guinan,) mixed up in the arrest gets off.
And that’s how Eddie gets a rap sheet and a foot in the door of the budding bootlegging business, which leads to an empire of “taxis” at his command, which leads to illicit hooch manufacturing, which puts him back in touch with hardened criminal George, who becomes a partner and rival, and not exactly in that order.
Eddie’s clout means he can seriously court the older but still young chorine Jean (Lane) and pay some people off to make her a star, even if the street-savvy and slightly older Panama might be more his speed. Panama thinks so.
“She seems like a nice kid,” a speak easy wag notices. “I hope she can out-talk him.”
“I hope she can outrun him,” Panama cracks with a sigh.
And that “Harvard” guy from the trenches of France? He’s a lawyer, a handy guy to know when you’re setting up a complex illegal business, not quite as handy when he crosses-over to the badly-corrupted law’s side, and starts making eyes at Eddie’s arm’s-length girlfriend.
A trio of writers took New York critic turned studio exec Mark Hellinger’s notion for a “Roaring” era gangster saga and peppered it with enough snappy dialogue to pass for a screwball comedy.
George complains about the partnership. “First, you used to ask me about things, then you began to tell me, now you ignore me. My feelin’s is gettin’ hurt.”
“Oh, my poor delicate little rose bud,” Eddie snarls.”Ain’t that a shame. Just as long as your bank roll ain’t hurtin’, you got nothing to squawk about.”
The best recommendation of this dated but very entertaining picture is the battle-among-equals nature of the Cagney/Bogart billing. Bogie was finally getting a foothold of stardom, and while Cagney was the energetic, charismatic dynamo of a lead, Bogart’s more internalized intensity draws attention to him in their scenes together.
The power imbalance of their earlier pairings, and much of Bogart’s supporting player career, is vanishing right before our eyes.
“The Roaring Twenties” was made just when this history was fresh, further removed from the Jazz Age than “Little Caesar,” arriving well into the Depression and end of Prohibition which unraveled some of the power of the booze-built gangs.
But Hellinger’s idea and Walsh’s riveting film based on it ensured that the narrator’s opening words would be the least prophetic ever uttered on screen.
The Twenties will never be “An era which will grow more and more incredible with each passing generation until someday people will say it never could have happened at all.”
Rating: approved, “TV-PG,” violence
Cast: James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Priscilla Lane, Gladys Smith, Paul Kelly, Jeffrey Lynn and Frank McHugh
Credits: Directed by Raoul Walsh, scripted by Jerry Wald, Richard Macaulay and Robert Rossen. A Warner Bros. release.
Running time: 1:46
The two most beaten-to-death tropes in thrillers? “Serial Killers” and “Hit Men.”
Here’s a Richard Linklater “true story” movie about a college prof (Powell of “Anyone But You,” “Top Gun: Maverick”) whom the police use as a play-acting fake “hit-man” for would-be criminals trying to hire somebody as their murderer-for-hire.
This could be really clever, playing with the MOVIE stereotype of what a hit-man is like — urbane or Eastern European and soulless, world traveler or low-rent sociopath.
The most “accurate” hit man movie is probably “The Iceman,” a true story that depicted a dull, cruel and soulless mob murderer and “family man” played by Michael Shannon.
But the dunces hiring “a hit man” only know the hit-men in the movies — the Pierce Brosnan, Liam, Jean Reno “cleaners” and killers. That’s where “Hit Man” sets up shop.
June 7, the suddenly hot Powell makes his mark on Netflix.
The blood flows, “Swan Lake” plays on 78 rpm records and “tiny dancer” jokes abound in the revolting and funny “Abigail,” a “dead before dawn” thriller about a kid ballerina kidnap victim who turns out to be a vampire.
One and all mutter and even sometimes shout “WTF?” or the words that acronym stands for, and repeatedly, as that’s a natural human response to “What do we know about vampires?”
“That they aren’t real.”
Entirely too much of the tale is given away in the trailers, which causes this Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett film, scripted by Stephen Shields and Guy Busick, to lumber out of the gate and take a while to get going. And there’s a lot of momentum-killing “explaining” in the second and third acts that stops the gory fun in its pointe-shoes tracks.
But as little Alisha Weir jetes and pirouettes through a kidnappers’ hide-away mansion that has become “a trap,” a mansion supposed to be somewhere in New York state but which the six kidnappers (Melissa Barrera, Dan Stevens, Kathryn Newton, Kevin Durand, William Catlett and the late Angus Cloud) plainly race by the unique Samuel Beckett Bridge (in Dublin) in their getaway van to get to, one and all are reminded of the simple fact that there are few things on this Earth as terrifying as an entitled twelve year old girl.
And this one can’t be killed, or so it is said of the toothy undead.
We meet the kidnappers, “professionals” of varying degrees of professionalism, as they pull off the complicated kidnapping of a child, all alone in her mansion after she’s been deposited there by her chauffeur-driven Rolls after an evening of dancing “Swan Lake” in an empty and ornate opera house.
The man who hired them (Giancarlo Esposito) gives these “rats” “Reservoir Dogs” style nicknames — straight out of Sinatra’s “rat pack.”
There’s the “brains,” Frank (Stevens, just seen in the “Kong X Godzilla” movie), the blonde hacker Sammy (Newton, “Ant-Man’s” daughter, all grown up), the cluelessly hitting-on-the-women driver Dean (Cloud, of TV’s “Euphoria”), the dim-witted French Canadian muscle Peter (“Locke & Key” character actor Durand) and the sniper Rickles (Catlett of “Constellation”).
The only one with empathy has to be the ex-Army nurse, Joey (Melissa Barrera of the recent “Scream” reboot), in charge of sedating their quarry.
“It’s a 24 hour job,” Lambert (Esposito) reassures one and all. That $50 million ransom is as good as in the bag as “the hard part’s over.”
But we know it is. Oh yes we do. We’ve seen the trailers.
Referencing the Agatha Christie book originally titled “Ten Little Indians” is a cute inside joke, as all thrillers of this sort spin out of that killing-off-the-kidnapper/victims one by one, “And Then There Were None” formula.
The overarching joke is how this “tiny dancer” is such a monstrous, unstoppable killing machine. Kudos to Ms. Weir for getting across a personality in between the effects that give her oh-so-many teeth and cover her in gore. She’ll never be unemployed, from this day forward, so long as there are fan conventions where she can sign autographs and grin for selfies.
“I’m sorry about what’s about to happen to you.”
Stevens, the most oft-employed of the class of “Downton Abbey,” brings a snippy impatience to his “leader” role, with Durand grand at playing “dumb” muscle and the late Mr. Cloud rendering another version of an amusingly-dopey and tone-deaf stoner-villain.
Newton, Catlett and Esposito deliver what limited goods their characters are charged with carrying.
But Barrera, bringing back the ’70s shag haircut all by herself as “Joey” accidentally sets the horror in motion, and then tries to work-the-problem their way out of it, carries the picture. She is an arresting presence and a serious candidate for horror’s new “Scream Queen.”
Out of all the comical, panicked and despairingly serious “WTFs” delivered in this revolting romp, even after it stops romping, Barrera’s are the ones that make you go “indeed. What the eff can they do now?”
Rating: R, graphic violence, profanity
Cast: Kathryn Newton, Giancarlo Esposito, Alisha Weir, Kevin Durand, Melissa Barrera, Dan Stevens, Will Catlett, Matthew Goode and Angus Cloud.
Credits: Directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, scripted by Stephen Shields and Guy Busick. A Univeral release.
Running time: 1:49
Movie Nation 