If the trailers are any indication, the sequel to the Jason Reitman reboot of his dad and Harold Ramis’s smash comedy franchise will have even more comics in the cast — and fewer laughs.
Big twitter (X) debate over the weekend over whether or not this was anything to get too worked up about. Maybe it’ll still be fun. Projections are for “Frozen Empire” to pull in $50 million on its opening weekend.
Let’s see.
Wes Anderson went a long ways towards “rescuing” the reputation of the dark and twisted fiction writer Roald Dahl from his “children’s author” image with his gloriously cast and production-designed-to-death short film version of “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar.”
The author of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” “Witches” and “James and the Giant Peach” had something to say to adults, too.
Now, celebrating that 40 minute “Henry Sugar” Academy Award win, Netflix releases that film folded into into a new package of FOUR Roald Dahl stories. It’s titled “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Three More.” And as “The Swan,” “The Rat Catcher” and “Poison,” the added stories make clear, Dahl’s sophisticated, sometimes sadistic fiction could pack on suspens, despair at the human condition and touch on themes with the cold, wet slap of cultural criticism layered-in.
“Henry Sugar,” the story of a greedy rich heel (Benedict Cumberbatch) who masters the transcendental Eastern art of seeing with one’s eyes closed and seeing through things to win at blackjack, only to reform after winning bores him, showcased Cumberbatch, Dev Patel, Richard Ayoade and Oscar winner Ben Kingsley. It was an acted/all-narrated story within a story within a story, with every actor named speaking in voice over or directly to the camera, often deferring to the author himself (Ralph Fiennes) as he sits and edits and speaks from a soundstage version of his writer’s “shack” behind Gipsy House, Dahl’s home in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire.
It’s classic Anderson “twee,” a fast-talking, candy-colored animated film sans animation, with actors telling the story, passing the narration back and forth, dryly reacting or under-reacting to the words, the actions and the stage hand who shows up to remove or add props and change stage backdrops and settings.
Every man has his moment — for this is an all-male enterprise, not wholly out of place for the sometimes-sexist Dahl — and many of those moments are underscored by a Max-the-Dog move from “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.” Each and every one turns and stares, befuddled or annoyed, at the viewer.
The precious effect is repeated throughout “Henry Sugar” and the three newer and darker stories added here. Only now, Rupert Friend joins the ensemble, all of whom play multiple roles in the stories.
In “The Swan,” we’re treated to a grim and horrific tale of a young birdwatcher being kidnapped and tortured by bird-murdering teens — tested by being lashed between the rails of railroad tracks, forced to watch crimes against nature and bird sanctuary laws. It is a sad, almost bleak dip into magical realism, here tinged by Dahl’s trademark sadistic edge.
“The Rat Catcher” features a feral Fiennes as a bloke who’s been summoned to deal with rats in a 1950s British village. By focusing the script on Dahl’s actual words via the constant narration, Anderson immerses us in the lovely, exacting descriptions of a cynic and a master craftsman.
The title character “was lean and leathery, with a sharp face and two long, sulfur-yellow teeth protruding from the upper jaw over the lower lip.”
Cumberbatch, Kingsley and Patel are featured in “Poison,” a tale from just-before-independence India in which a Brit (Cumberbatch) has had a poisonous krait snake crawl onto his chest and doze off. A colleague (Patel) summons a Bengali doctor (Kingsley) to try and protect the seemingly-doomed Englishman and neutralize the snake. But will his efforts dent the Brit’s inbred racism?
The way Anderson uses the actors, deadpan performances (mostly), narrating in a stacatto style, parked in front of clever settings in varying degrees of surreal “realism,” is almost animation, a reminder that “The Fantastic Mister Fox” and “Isle of Dogs” have been the pointilistic Anderson’s most wholly-realized triumphs — created in stop-motion animation.
His style can be grating, especially that self-aware mugging-to-the-camera that he insists on. But here we see its greatest application, deadpan turns played underneath screwball-comedy-speed dialogue, all of it, pretty much every juicy, biting word, written by a mercurial, sometimes mean-spirited wit who was always entirely too brilliant and too adult to be “just for children.”
The real Dahl was a real piece of work. But the work is timeless, and Anderson has rendered it in its most entertaining cinematic form with this short story collection feature film.
Rating: PG, closer to PG-13 thanks to human and animal cruelty, racism
Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Dev Patel, Ben Kingsley, Rupert Friend, Richard Ayoade and Benedict Cumberbatch.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Wes Anderson, based on four short stories by Roald Dahl. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:29
Russell Crowe plays a cop remembering things that might best remain forgotten in a more sturdy-than-inspiring thriller about a murder, a wrongly-accused death row inmate and more than one suspect who’d prefer to let “Sleeping Dogs” lie.
Based on a novel by E.O. Chirovici, it sets up as a twisty tale in the “Memento” style. A man whose memory is addled by early onset Alzheimer’s, forced to label everything in the house, from the “front door” down to his microwave meals with taped child-appropriate instructions, is called upon to save the life of a convict (Pacharo Mzembe) who claims he’s innocent, and that the former detective either knew that back when, or didn’t care enough to dig deep and clear him.
Wearing a stocking cap to hide his “experimental treatment” scar, Roy flashes back to visits to his doctor, who tells former detective Roy Freeman his years-long alcoholism is “a common trigger for Alzheimer’s,” but that the surgery, the implants and vigorously exercising his mind — puzzles, memory-jogging — could turn him around. Roy will meet up with his old partner, open case files and revisit a past that didn’t exactly cover him in glory.
He was fired, with cause. He was a “loyal” cop, which suggests that “We look out for our own” ethos that is the core of much police corruption. And there were plenty of motives and suspects floating around this womanizing, manipulative, credit-stealing college professor (Marton Csokas) who got himself beaten to death.
The desperation of the condemned man is tinged with rage. You’d be angry too, if your only hope was a disgraced cop whose memory is out to lunch, perhaps never to return.
Tommy Flanagan plays Jimmy, the old partner who admits “We all drank on the job, back then,” as if that’s some consolation to Roy. Sure, he’ll pitch in. Or will he?
Harry Greenwood is a writer whose true crime memoir recalls the murder, his college days working with that dead professor, and obsessing over the creep’s brilliant polymath research assistant, played by Karen Gillan.
Gillan’s Laura Baines is painted in femme fatale shades. Like others he meets, she remembers Roy even if Roy cannot remember her, or the case, very clearly.
He’s acting on “just a feeling,” he admits. “That’s all I’ve got to go on these days.”
The more he digs, the more he remembers and the more stones he turns back over, or figures out that he never turned-over in the first place.
Adam Cooper, graduating from screenwriter (“Assassin’s Creed,” “The Transporter Refueled”) to director and co-writer, barely maintains his directing debut’s forward motion, which mutes its impact. Too many shots of Crowe’s Roy pondering this or that, sometimes jarred by a flashback, make “Sleeping Dogs” a fairly sleepy affair.
I liked the way Roy relies on what he used to do by rote, methodically questioning, reading up and extrapolating clues, listening to his instincts about who may or may not be involved, tracking the threads of the plot in post-its notes and the like.
Memory loss or not, these are the muscles Roy used to exercise. Now, if he could just figure out which flashbacks are suppressed or lost memories and which are hallucinations, he’d be cooking.
The poor pacing and a platoon of peripheral characters weigh the picture down and cheat the viewer of the chance to get ahead of the plot.
But Crowe’s guarded, meditative presence more or less holds this cluttered, convoluted tale together.
Flanagan and Csokas show us flash.
And Gillan takes a good shot at showing us a woman with problems, a past and a hard-to-pin-down place in all this, perhaps out of guile, or perhaps owing to fear of what waking these “Sleeping Dogs” will do to her, Roy, the past and all of their futures.
Rating: R for violence/bloody images, sexual content and language.
Cast: Russell Crowe, Karen Gillan, Tommy Flanagan,
Pacharo Mzembe, Harry Greenwood and Marton Csokas.
Credits: Directed by Adam Cooper, scripted by Adam Cooper and Bill Collage, based on a novel by E.O. Chirovici. Released by The Avenue.
Running time: 1:50
“The Last Exit” isn’t the most evocative title for a home invasion thriller. But “Little Bone Lodge,” the earlier release label on this Joely Richardson genre picture, might have been a tad too on the nose.
It’s a solid “You don’t know what I’m capable of” story of hoodlums who picked the very worst place in the middle of nowhere, Scotland, to bust into after a heist gone wrong. It plays around with a theme explored in many a home invasion predators-become-prey tale — David Hyde Pierce’s “The Perfect Host” and “Don’t Breathe” are examples that leap to mind.
Richardson stars as Mama, a woman who runs a remote sheep farm with her doted-on daughter Maisy (Sadie Soverall of “Saltburn”), taking care of her invalid, mute husband (Roger Ajogbe) in the bargain.
There’s something a little “off” here. You can see it in the eyes of the heavily-medicated husband and a few other “tells.”
And there’s something off in the screaming, pleading way a stranger (Harry Cadby) frantically pounds on their door on a pitch-dark night. His weeping answers to Mama’s “What are you doing all the way out here?” don’t allay suspicions.
But she opens the door and lets the weeping, troubled and “simple” young man drag his bleeding friend in. There’s a an impaling puncture wound, an “accident,” he says. Lucky for him Mama knows her way around pulling out a piece of rebar, stopping bleeding and sewing “Jack” up.
Teenage Maisy is filled with questions which wary Mama can’t stop her from asking, even after Jack (screenwriter Neil Linpow) comes to and starts eyeballing the place, and rummaging through the duffel bag hysterical Matty (Cadby) brought with them.
Jack needs a to make a call. Like NOW.
“No reception here. No phone. No TV. No computer.”
Jack’s insistence that Mama accompany him back to the road where their car crashed triggers a tense negotiation. Yes, he’s been impaled. But he’s wild-eyed enough to alarm anybody. Maisy doesn’t seem afraid. But Mama?
“You don’t know my life,” she hisses. Jack and we don’t know what she’s done, what she’s capable of. But we can guess, even if he can’t.
That’s a shortcoming here, the script and the performances’ failure to truly misdirect us from what we figure is headed our way.
“Jack’s “You ain’t gonna like what you’ve made me do now” doesn’t make Mama blink. Mama’s “You touch my daughter and I’ll kill you” is a lot more alarming.
The violence, when it comes, it hard to rationalize, given Jack was passed out from the loss of blood because he was IMPALED. The story beats — other “visitors,” complications, back story, alliances forming — are familiar, manipulative and yet more or less pay off.
Richardson is fierce, Linpow is vile, Cadby is a varying degrees of hysterical as a classic “criminal savant,” a simpleton badgered and brainwashed into crime.
Director Matthias Hoene cranks up the narrative and action to “over the top” too early, and aims even higher for the finale.
I can’t say it all works, but “The Last Exit” pulls you in and slaps you around a bit before it’s done. Not all that, but not that bad, either.
Rating: R, graphic violence, profanity
Cast: Joely Richardson, Neil Linpow, Sadie Soverall, Roger Ajogbe, Cameron Jack and Harry Cadby.
Credits: Directed by Matthias Hoene, scripted by Neil Linpow. A Saban Films release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.
Running time: 1:33
Lindsay Lohan’s not exactly an old pro at rom-coms. But as she’s a producer on her new film, one would have hoped she’d do the homework that would tell her how they function, what pay-offs they need to deliver and how important chemistry is.
Setting can be a plus, supporting players should be amusing and colorful. And the leads absolutely positively have to “click.” Take care of those concerns, and parking the redhead into a romantic comedy set in Ireland should have been a slam dunk.
It’s not. That’s not really on her, but as she took that producing credit and deepens her connection to Netflix, it might have been nice if she’d insisted on someone with more than mawkish Hallmarkish “Christmas” romances on her resume as director, and pushed for a rewrite that spiced up the sparks between her and co-star Ed Speleers.
Because, saints preserve us, one and all wasted a good trip to Ireland with “Irish Wish.”
The last half of the third act has the right energy, if not the jokes and romantic whimsy that the entire movie cries out for. It’s just not funny enough, not romantic enough and not Irish enough to come off.
Lohan plays Maddie, a New York book editor who swoons over Paul (Alexander Vlahos), an Irish author who became a star thanks to her endless rewrites. She thinks he’s going to propose, the silly thing. Her mother (Jane Seymour) knows this, but not Maddie’s friends, who meet her for the most glamorous book-reading/signing ever.
That’s where bestie Emma (Elizabeth Tan) makes eyes at the author and next thing we and Maddie know, she’s boarding a plane for Knock Airport in the west of the Olde Country for Paul and Emma’s big fat Irish wedding.
Sure, Maddie met a rude local (Speleers of “Downton Abbey”) at the luggage carousel. But that “meet cute” with a photographer isn’t spirited or amusing and holds little romantic promise.
If only she could make a wish by an enchanted lake in Old Eire, sitting herself on the stone wishing chair and praying to Saint Brigid (Dawn Bradfield) to make her Paul’s bride to be.
And so it shall be. She wakes up with a fellow she’s pined for, scrambling to ensure the wedding his stage-directing mother (Jacinta Mulcahy) always dreamed of, and noticing that there’s still “something” between Paul and Emma, and that there might be “something” in this nature photographer James (Speleers) that she’s drawn to.
Lohan’s third act cameo in the musical movie revival of her earlier triumph “Mean Girls” was the most charming thing in that sometimes grating and oversexed “remake. If we can root for Robert Downey Jr., who put himself through some things, we can surely still pull for Lindsay.
But as much as we root for Maddie here, it’s hard to see her engagingly paired-up with any of her co-stars. Lohan’s still a likable presence. But Speleers’ James lacks the roguish edge of say, a Matthew Goode in the middling-but-still-better-than-this “Leap Day” Irish rom-com of some years back.
This “Irish Wish” sits uneasily in the gap between “competent” and “moderately inspired.” The hints of local color — a twinkly priest (Aidan Jordan), a generic barman (Tim Landers), a few lovely settings, including The Cliffs of Moher — just aren’t enough to deliver the charm the picture sorely lacks.
Rating: TV-G
Cast: Lindsay Lohan, Ed Speleers, Alexander Vlahos, Elizabeth Tan,
Dawn Bradfield and Jane Seymour.
Credits: Directed by Janeen Damian, scripted by
Kirsten Hansen. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:33
A slap happy farce from the former “Star Trek” star, playing a pool cleaner with private detective and Hollywood screenplay dreams.
DeWanda Wise, Jennifer Jason Leigh, John Ortiz and Ray Wise are also in the cast.
Frenetic trailer, a couple of laughs in it. This got panned, apparently at some film festivals where it played. But maybe they recut it. In any event, Vertical, a court-of-last-resort distributor has it.
May 10.
Years of lobbying against digital dogs and cats in live action movies go out the door when one takes in the French-Canadian farce “Cat and Dog,” with its many slapstick animal-abusing moments.
I mean, thank heavens “No (digitally animated) dogs or cats were injured” in the making of this movie.
And before you say it, I have no idea what market research convinced Netflix to retitle “Chien & Chat” (Dog and Cat) to “Cat and Dog” for U.S. streaming. Maybe the fact that I’m reviewing it on “Caturday?”
It’s an irreverent-to-the-point-of-rude “romp” about two critters, reluctantly teamed-up and on the run from the cops and a jewel thief. The wee Labrador puppy has swallowed The Candy Apple Ruby, and somebody — a couple of SOMEbodies — want it back.
It’s a comedy of crotch shots and poo-poo/pee-pee humor, New York putdowns and Trump insults, Jesus jokes with nuns and blindness as a sight gag.
The dog gets kicked, the cat is tortured and shot at, and that’s just the beginning of their peril.
The most hilarious thing about this generic juvenalia might be its rating — “TV-MA,” for mature audiences. As if. This lowbrow and limp comedy has pretty much nothing to offer to anybody over the age of eight, with a stern “don’t try this at home” proviso as a warning to parents.
Frank Dubosc is our cunning “Cat,” aka “Jack,” the burglar who steals the Candy Apple Ruby from a Montreal museum, but whose getaway is foiled by A) a yappy stray puppy and B) the parkour-crazed policeman and animal-hater Brandt (Philippe Lacheau).
When cop and burglar tangle, the dog ends up swallowing the jewel and the vain, superhumanish policeman gets scalped. Jack barely has time to put a diaper on the dog for when digestion releases the ruby and board a plane for New York.
That’s where he meets Diva the big, fluffy “influencer” kitty and her owner/handler, Monica (director and co-writer Reem Kherici). Jack must pose as a blind man and lean on her help when his dog and her cat are mishandled as luggage and escape.
Monica’s manic deployment of the escape slide on the jetliner tells us just what is at stake. And no, she’d have never gotten out of the airport without wearing handcuffs, but whatever.
The animals — who talk to each other in insulting cat speak and endearing naive puppy talk — and their pursuers must brave winter and snowy roads and mishap after mishap on their way to NYC, which is where the story resolves itself.
I’m all for rude humor for little kids, but even by low-hanging-fruit standards, PooPoo (as the puppy is named by the cat in the English dubbed translation) declaring “I wanna sniff your butt” isn’t much to giggle over.
A terroristic tween tries to take home and torment the plump social media star cat, the uniformed cop tries to shoot them and death is dodged in multiple ways in a kiddie comedy that isn’t quite comical and won’t appeal to most kids, even the ones whose parents figure it’s appropriate.
Rating: TV-MA
Cast: Franck Dubosc, Reem Kherici and Philippe Lacheau
Credits: Directed by Reem Kherici, scripted by Reem Kherici and Tristan Schulmann. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:28
The week-old release “Kung Fu Panda 4” is falling off faster than the blockbuster of the year “Dune Part 2,” and that’s going to make this weekend’s box office race hard to handicap until Saturday’s receipts are counted.
Deadline.com is putting both films in that $30 million range– big numbers anyway you cut it — as of early Saturday AM. Those are slightly higher than pre-weekend projections from others predicted.
Right now, it looks like the Panda will win another weekend, tracking towards a $31.5 million weekend based on Friday numbers.
As I’ve said many times, Deadline especially has a habit of underestimating Saturday takes on kids’ cartoons. So don’t bet against the bear, as that number should drift upwards.
“Dune Part 2” is the biggest hit of 2024 thus far, and is racing past the $200 million mark in North America and should be in the $205-210 range by midnight Sunday. It will have cleared $29.1 million by Midnight Sunday.
Mark Wahlberg’s effort to reclaim his box office value by taking second billing to a dog hasn’t exactly worked out. “Arthur the King” is an Americanized spin on a true story that happened to a Swedish Adventure Racer (I had no idea they existed either), and is crowd pleasing in just enough sentimental ways to play. But it won’t hit the $10 million mark — weak for a PG-13 dog movie (profanity, puppy peril) on Saturday — $7.5 million is projected for that one, enough to open in third place.
The dud horror movie “Imaginary” will clear $4 million and probably finish its run in two weeks short of $30 million.
The Italian-born “first American saint” bio pic “Cabrini” opened so-so last weekend, and is falling off steeper than any “sleeper hit” should — over 60% — and will fall short of $3 million this weekend.
The terrific and seriously edgy “Love Lies Bleeding” opens wider this weekend but won’t do much better than $2.75 million from Kristen Stewart, female bodybuilder and queer cinema fans.
If “Bob Marley: One Love” is going to hit that $100 million mark before exiting cinemas, it has basically one week to do it. It will add another $2 million and change by Sunday midnight, putting it over $93 with only a narrow chance to getting that last $6 or $7 million by next weekend.
I was going to trek over to catch “The American Society of Magical Negroes” this weekend, as its studio, “the witness protection program of film distribution,” didn’t bother to preview it. But it’s bombing so badly I’d better hurry — $1.25 million in fairly wide release.
“One Life,” hero of the Holocaust story from the UK, manages $1.7 million.
Oscar winners Whoopi Goldberg and Robert DeNiro, along with Rose Byrne, Vera Farmiga and Rainn Wilson signed on for this summer release, directed by Tony Goldwyn.
William A. Fitzgerald has the title role.
We know a lot more about autism than we did when “Rain Man” came out, or “The Last Right,” for that matter. Our understanding of “the spectrum” is outstripping the movies’ efforts to depict it.
This looks sweet and inspiring.
The French thriller “The Animal Kingdom” is set in an alternate reality where humans are starting to transition into animals of various species — snakes and lizards to walruses and birds. The authorities treat this as a contagion that must be isolated and attacked.
But to those whose loved ones are infected, like François and his son Émile, that woman was his wife and his mother. She is “still there,” just in a less recognizable form.
So the latest film from Thomas Cailley (“Love at First Fight”). co-written by Pauline Munier, touches on themes that films from the various X-Men installments to the zombie infection tragedy “Maggie,” on back to “Teen Wolf” wrestled with.
Someone you love has changed. Does that mean the end of your love for them? Yes, that’s an allegory for our “transition” headlined age, handled here with sensitivity if not a lot of emotion.
Romain Duris of the recent “The Three Musketeers” remakes and “Waiting for Bojangles” plays François, whom we meet trapped in traffic with his 16 year-old (Paul Kircher) and the family dog.
A violent racket emerges from an ambulance stuck in the same traffic jam, and damned if a human in “critter” form doesn’t bust out. People take cell phone videos. Some even get out of their cars. But nobody’s freaked-out. This has been going on awhile.
“Strange days” a stranger mutters (in French with subtitles) to François, who shrugs “Strange days, yeah” back at him.
What rattles father and son is the news that their plans to move, with wife/mother Lana in care (containtment) to a treatment facility outside the city has gone awry. The vehicle carrying her and others like her crashed and most inside escaped.
Father and son have to break the law to drive into the forest looking for her. But the cop on the case (Adèle Exarchopoulos of “Blue is the Warmest Color” and “Mandibles”) seems sympathetic. Father and son and their dog Albert hunt for Lana when they can, and adjust as they must.
Starting a new school in a new town, Émile should be a lot more bothered than he seems. He’s just lost his mother, and in the most bizarre way imaginable. His coping mechanism is to tell his new classmates she’s “dead.”
Maybe on-the-spectrum curious Nina (Billie Blain) will get it out of him. Maybe he’ll tell after he’s the one who secretly makes contact with a couple of “the creatures/critters” in the forest. Maybe “contact” means he himself will sprout feathers and try to fly.
This world is divided into people who fear and attack the formerly human animals which they don’t understand, people who lost family that way and want to understand, and people like Nina and some of her classmates, who leave food out for them for their own reasons — compassion chief among them.
Cailley never really reaches for the heartstrings in this story, which seems odd. The emotional heart of the picture is the father seeing his philosophy and moral center tested, and the son’s underreaction to what he’s finding out about “them” and himself.
And while the effects are terrific, the action beats are effective but limited in number. One chilling chase features locals wearing drywall stilts to wade through a cornfield on the hunt for “critters.”
“The Animal Kingdom” does what it does fairly well. But what it does isn’t all that original, and lacks the pathos you’d think such a situation might generate in those who live through it.
Rating: unrated, violence, disturbing content, smoking, profanity
Cast: Romain Duris, Paul Kircher, Adèle Exarchopoulos, Tom Mercier and Billie Blain
Credits: Directed by Thomas Cailley, scripted by Thomas Cailley and Pauline Munier. A Magnet release.
Running time: 2:08
Movie Nation 