Erivo, Arianna and Goldblum again, Brendan F speaking Japanese and Stephen Lang as a Russian trying to kill an unkillable Finn. Again.
A few more songs, some curious corners of Japanese culture and dead Russians by the dozen.
A pretty good Thursday, one would hope.
At least the second half of a musical blown up to five hours is only 2:17 long, half an hour shorter than the bore that became a blockbuster.
An infamous police shooting leads to trials and a search for justice that doesn’t end in a courtroom in “Aftershock” The Nicole P. Bell Story.” It’s a sturdy, often moving fil built aroud Rayven Symone Ferrell’s affecting performance in the title role.
Years before Trayvon Martin, over a decade before George Floyd, Michael Brown and others, before “Black Lives Matter” became a national movement thanks to rampant, consequence-free police violence against Black men, a young man was killed in a hail of police gunfire in Queens, New York.
Sean Bell was 23, out celebrating with friends the night before his wedding when unidentified undercover officers emptied their weapons into him and the car he was driving friends home from a night club. Some of New York’s finest even reloaded their pistols and emptied them again.
There were child seats in the car, and fellow celebrants. But there were no guns and no warrants, just a cascading series of errors exposing ignored police “protocols” and alcohol impaired deicision making by officers whose shoot-first-rationalize-later defense was “I feared for my life.”
“Aftershock” takes us through the all-too-familiar “demonize the victim” news cycle as it was experienced by the woman Bell was set to marry, the mother of his two little girls. The film humanizes the victim and points its damning finger at a system more interested in protecting unionized police behaving badly than in keeping the peace and delivering justice.
We meet Nicole Paultre as a sixteen year-old whose crush on tall high school baseball star, Sean (Bentley Green) is requited, it turns out. She gushes, they chat, and when he asks her out, her sister notices her antic primping.
“Why’re you getting all cute?”
“My future husband,” Nicole declares!
Six years later, they’ve got a little girl and another newly born. It’s November of 2006, and Sean — catnip to the ladies, it is implied — is being cagey about something. Is he coming home late because he’s cheating? Nope. He’s been secretly planning their wedding.
But when Nicole’s small bridal shower breaks up, she gets alarming news. Something’s happened. Sean’s in the hospital.
“Afterschock” vividly recreates the indignities and outrages of this wee hours dash to the hospital. Nurses are evasive. The surgeon who’s “been working on Sean” is told not to talk to her. The cop who insists he can fill her in takes her name, hears the phrase “wife” and spits out “You mean ‘wife’ or wifey?'”
The police are “managing” this tragedy and circling the wagons. The only thing the medical establishment wants to establish is whether or not Sean’s an organ “donor.” That’s before anybody will admit Sean’s dead, much less the circumstances of his death. Nicole seeing his body is out of the question.
It’s only when Rev. Al Sharpton (Richard Lawson) expresses his condolences that Nicole sees a way to fight a “system” that is steamrolling her and the surviving victims thanks to police leaks, police spin and a court system setting the table for a “fix.”
Lawson, a veteran character actor whose credits go back to the original “Poltergeist” and Walter Hill’s underworld musical “Streets of Fire,” gives us an eye-opening rethinking of “Reverend Al,” already a public figure and TV fixture when these events happened.
This is a Reverend Al who promises to help “make sure nothing is covered up” and that the “people responsible are held accountable.” He will help arrange a lawyer (William DePaolo), give advice and arrange an appearance on “Larry King Live” to help her get the true innocent young man “shot down on his wedding night” in “a hail of bullets” story out there.
The only hint of the self-caricatured, attention-hungry opportunist Rev. Al that Sharpton has allowed to be his image is when he notes the importance of this case — “the biggest thing since Amadou Diallo.”
Ferrell, of “The Hate You Give” and “Through Her Eyes,” ably gets across Nicole transforming into the woman she needs to be, finding her voice to speak out before the eventual trial of the officers involved, and beyond. It’s a somber, sober-minded performance, showing us a young mom growing into someone not to be underestimated.
Director and co-writer Alesia Glidewell’s film started life as a planned web TV series, according to the Internet Movie Database, which has been Glidewell’s medium of choice. So the production values are good, but not major-studio-feature polished. The same is true of the casting, which has a few standouts (Richard T. Jones as the attorney defending the cops) among the parade of lesser-known talents given roles.
The narrative changes points of view a couple of times — we see the police getting their stories straight, protesting their innocence, with a commanding officer or two seemingly recognizing the right-and-wrong of the situation. Will they treat their fellow officers accordingly?
You don’t have to remember how this case played out and its place within the “Black Lives Matter” prehistory to be both outraged and moved by the story told here, and unsettled by the fear that “not much has changed” since.
This is indie cinema with a point and a point of view, and Glidewell, Ferrell and the cast deserve to have this engrossing and worthhile drama be a career highlight that should lead to others.
Rating: R, violence, some profanity
Cast: Rayven Symone Ferrell, Bentley Green, Richard Lawson, Richard T Jones, William DePaolo, Byron Kenneth Brown Jr. and Kevin Jackson
Credits: Directed by Alesia Glidewell, scripted by Alesia Glidewell and Cas Sigers-Beedle. A Faith Media release.
Running time: 1:48
The most violent children’s entertainment since “The Silence of the Lambs” stars Kevin James, features Isla Fisher as leader of a hard-drinking “gang” of soccer moms and gives the inventive character player Alan Tudyck his best shot at impersonating and mocking Elon Musk.
Which is to say “Playdate” is perfectly awful, glib in its violence, cavalier about “collateral damage” and packed with what regular family movie watchers might call “Hollywood parenting” — kids who curse, bully and have zero respect for sportsmanship and adults, especially parents.
But the producer of TV’s “Scrubs” scripted it and the director of “Let’s Be Cops” started every day on location with a perverse “Let’s GO there!” So there are a few sick, twisted and “Oh no they DIDN’T” laughs.
And no, these two — Neil Goldman and Luke Greenfield — should never be allowed anywhere near anything that could be called a “family” movie. Ever.
Kevin James stars as Brian, a nebbish of a “forensic accountant” who married Emily (Sarah Chalke of “Scrubs”) and took on “dad” duties with her tween son, Lucas (Benjamin Pajak).
The kid’s no good at sports, and his musical theater tendencies are a subject of fun. Hey now…
When Brian loses his gig at a family owned accounting firm inherited by douche bros and hos (one played by Greenfield), he becomes the stay-at-home-Dad. A day at the park is how he meets the “Mom Mafia” and hard-drinking, “Bitch” slinging/”windbreaker” insulting Leslie (Fisher), and how he sees how he measures up as a dad by watching Jeff, a walking muscle who doesn’t so much toss the football as fire artillery rounds at his son.
Jeff is played by Alan Ritchson of TV’s “Reacher” like a muscular actor liberated from playing tough and serious, or maybe one who’s just had his first taste of coke or amphetimines. Dude is WOUND up.
As butch and bonding-happy as Honda Odyssey (the best sport maternity vehicle) driver Jeff seems, he’s just off. A LOT off. He talks a gonzo fathering game, but the kid seems indifferent to his presence. CJ is on-the-spectrum weird, which is why dance-happy Lucas bonds with him.
Next thing newly-nicknamed “Bri-Bri” knows, he and Lucas are on the lam, on the run and on the road with Jeff and CJ (Banks Pierce) as they flee the mysterious minions of a tech tycoon (Tudyck), brawling in a “Buckee Cheese’s,” dodging bullets in parking lots and outrunning black SUVs in their turns-out-to-be-stolen Odyssey.
What’s the deal here? Yes, the answer is far out, and stupidly predictable.
Ritchson, channeling John Cena and Dave Bautista, just goes for it in scene after scene, a dope on some sort of adrenlin bender, “rescuing” this kid, “like the ‘Yellowstone’ guy from ‘The Bodyguard,’ only BADASS.”
The fun players are Ritchson and Fisher, only Fisher has her two scenes and vanishes after scoring a couple of laughs,. Characters played by Walter Hauser and Stephen Root are introduced and abandoned without a scripted thought of making them funny. And Tudyck, dropping “bitch” insults like the other 11 year-olds, doesn’t have much to play.
James? He shows up, but he emptied his bag of tricks years ago.
The final edit included a whole TV season’s worth of musical needle-drops — chases set to “Gimme Some Loving,” with “Carmina Burana” and Wagner and “Stuck in the Middle” and KC & the Sunshine Band and Nilsson and Ice Cube’s greatest hits thrown in. That’s a dead giveaway that the distributor knows this dog isn’t getting by without a LOT of purchased music rights.
It doesn’t help. Nothing does.
Rating: PG-13, lots of violence, much of it involving children, profanity, much of it uttered by children
Cast: Kevin James, Alan Ritchson, Banks Pierce, Benjamin Pajak, Sarah Chalke, Stephen Root, Isla Fisher and Alan Tudyck.
Credits: Directed by Luke Greenfield, scripted by Neil Goldman. An MGM/Amazon Prime release.
Running time: 1:33
“The Wolves Always Come at Night” is an evocative immersion in a dying way of life, that of nomadic Mongolian goat, horse and cattle herders. Gabrielle Brady’s documentary captures the stark beauty of the treeless brownscape of the Mongolian steppes, with climate change as the subtext the locals are struggling to live with.
There’s a reason this once temperate grassland is brown and more desolate than usual these days.
Brady’s film, Australia’s best hope for a Best International Feature (or Best Documentary) Oscar nomination, is a fly-on-the-wall intimate look at the changes coming to the lives of Davaasuren Dagvasuren and Otgonzaya Dashzeveg. They’re a shepherding coupling raising four children among their horses and goats, living in their roomy, round ger (tent), doting on their kids and their animals but with desertification staring them and their way of life in the face.
They and their relatives have thrived on these steppes for millennia. “Davaas” teaches their son the work from the back of the motorbike he tends their goats with, noting which nannies are lying down, ready to give birth and which ones will need their help, just from the length of time the goat is down.
He treasures his short, sturdy Mongolian horses and happily adds to his herd a prized stallion from his uncle.
But the dust is noticable and omnipresent, and when the community gathers to discuss local issues, the years of drought dominate their worries. We know change is coming, and when a dust storm like “I’ve never seen before” bowls them over, forces them to release their horses from the corral to flee for any shelter they can find, a tragedy will uproot them, perhaps permanently.
They have to move to town, with Davaas taking a job driving a shovel at an open pit quarry. He laments the “untouched land” and good soil that his employer is violating with every shovel scoop. And at night, he confesses his failings to his wife.
“I’ve done nothing but waste the blessings of our animals,” he tells her (in Mongolian with English subtitles).
The poetic nature of some of the dialogue and the pillow-talk intimacy of the conversations and filming reminds one that documentaries now include screenwriting credits, and make one wonder just how much of what we’re seeing is staged, repeated for the camera or “scripted” for heightened effect. Documentaries often seem like docudramas these days.
But “The Wolves Always Come at Night” is a vivid document of a family and culture struggling to adjust to the harsh realities of climate change and just what that “change” means on a personal level to people who may not know the science, but they believe what they’re seeing with their own eyes and have experienced within their own living memory.
Rating: unrated
Cast: Davaasuren Dagvasuren and Otgonzaya Dashzeveg
+Credits: Directed by Garbrielle Brady, scripted by Gabrielle Brady, Davaasuren Dagvasuren and
Otgonzaya DashzevegA BBC Storyville/Madman Entertainment release.
Running time: 1:35
Rayven Ferrell, Bentley Green, Richard Lawson, Kevin Jackson, and Richard T. Jones star in this damning true story about trigger happy, out-of-control policing.
“Aftershock” hits cinemas Nov. 28 and streaming Dec. 15.
François Ozon has to be the French cinema’s premier poker player.
With his genre-bending/expectations-upending dramas (“Everything Went Fine”), dramedies (“In the House”), feminist comedies (“Potiche”) and musical drama mysteries (“8 Women”), you’d hate to be seated at the same table as Ozon for a card game. You just know the sneaky Frenchman’s got aces in the hole, even if he doesn’t.
“When Fall is Coming” is a darkly comic tale of secrets within secrets, a mystery that doesn’t “solve” its mystery at all, but winks at what it might all be about in a finale that playfully doesn’t give us the answers.
We guess this and we surmise that, and damned if we aren’t wrong again and again. Better fold that hand, sit back and see if anybody else calls his bluff so that he has to show us what ‘
Hélène Vincent, a screen veteran who made her debut in the ’60s, is Michelle, a lively little old lady spending her days in a cozy farmhouse on the outskirts of a small town in Burgundy. She tends her garden, dutifully attends church every Sunday, takes long walks with her longtime bestie Marie-Claude (Josiane Balasko of “French Twist”), plucking mushrooms when they’re in season.
But what Michelle really looks forward to is visits from her not-quite-estranged daughter Valerie (Ozon favorite Ludivine Sagnier, most recently seen in “Napoleon”) and her tween grandson Lucas (Garlan Erlos). When they roll in for a fall school break, we wonder why.
The kid adores his doting grandmother. But his mom does not. She is a distracted, snappish finger pointer who looks away from her phone long enough to blurt out a fresh blast of tactlessness.
“If you give me the house now, I’ll pay less tax when you die,” is just as jarring in French (with subtitles) as it is in English.
Mom is taken aback, perplexed. “But I already gave you the (Paris) apartment!”
“So?” the 40something brat spits back.
A meal that goes wrong and puts Valerie in the hospital has us wondering if she “knew” the difference between edible and poisonous mushrooms. Valerie hints at Mom’s background when she grabs the kid and storms out.
“You’re TOXIC!”
Michelle is distraught. But old friend and confidante Marie-Claude has her own problems. Michelle drives her to the local prison on visitation days. And now Marie-Claude’s convict son Vincent (Pierre Lottin who was in “The Night of the 12th”) is getting out.
Michelle gives him work, and as he overhears her pleas and complaints about her now-estranged daughter and the loss of visits from her grandson, Vincent takes it on himself to visit his old classmate in Paris to get her to “go easy” on her mother.
What we get from that encounter is more clues about Michelle and Marie-Claude’s past, and somebody ends up dead. But we’re not exactly sure why and by whose hand.
The movie is about making no effort to allay suspicions that those who benefited from this turn of events didn’t conspire to cause them.
The foreboding music underscoring seeming innocuous scenes suggests Ozon’s having one over on us. A couple of laugh-out-loud action, reactions and under-reactions might confirm this. Or not.
The performances are defined by the evasive quality Ozon insists upon. Is this character capable of killing? Has she/he killed in the past? Is this or that one gay, has she or he had an epiphany that they’ll share and clear everything up?
What Ozon flirts with is the superior adaptability and endurance of those who can let the past be the past, and the costs of not getting over to those who won’t.
For all his elusiveness, Ozon can’t wholly hide the fact that he’s written himself into a corner and that the movie has nowhere to go in the third act. With ghosts and repercussions and new cop questions involved, “nowhere” means “nowhere new and surprising” in this case.
I’d still steer clear of any card table with this filmmaker, whose next trick is an adaptation of Camus’ elusive “The Stranger,” sitting at it.
Rating: unrated, adult subject matter, smoking
Cast: Hélène Vincent, Josiane Balasko,
Pierre Lottin, Garlan Erlos, and Ludivine Sagnier
Credits: Directed by François Ozon, scripted by
François Ozon and Philippe Piazzo. A Music Box release on Amazon Prime.
Running time: 1:44
Universal is so underwhelmed by the cast of this spring rom-com that they don’t list any of their names in the first trailer for it.
That’s “Little Mermaid” Halle Bailey and “Bridgerton” hunk Regé-Jean Page as the meet-by-accident, lies and trespassing couple.
The studio figured “Marry Me” (meh) director Kat Coiro was worth plugging, but not the stars?
April 10.
“Beast of War” sets up as a fine if not wholly novel approach to the WWII combat “grunts” journey long before it settles into its true destiny — a shark attack tale.
Writer-director Kiah Roache-Turner trots through the tropes of boot camp, with its training, bullying, standing up to bullies, flirting with nurses and the like in a story that reminds us the Aussies took a back seat to almost no culture when it came to racism. We taste the experiences of an Aboriginal recruit (Mark Coles Smith) who is too competent, too big and too tough to take much guff off his tormentors.
Leo has been through things as a boy and survived. No “darkie” or “rock ape” insult from his better-paid white comrades (his training and combat pay is two thirds theirs) shakes his self-assuredness. He helps weaker Will (Joel Nankervis) through a jungle run, and when Will is picked on, Leo gets even on his behalf.
Nurses (Lauren Grimson, Lara Logan Browne) at the boot camp? Leo’s the one confident enough to flirt with them.
But we know a few things about what’s to come. It’s 1942, and boot camp doesn’t last long. They’ll be shipping out for the fight over Papua/New Guinea sooner rather than later. And our writer-director is known for horror — “Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead” and “Sting” were his.
It won’t be long before their troop ship is sunk in the Timor Sea, and Leo, Will, bully Des (Sam Delich) and others (Lee Tiger Halley, Sam Parnonson, Maximillian Johnson) are staring out into the dark fog of night in a sea of debris and corpses and somebody says that line somebody always says in a shark movie.
“What the Hell was that?“
Truth be told, that turn towards finned terror is a disappointment, seeing as how Roache-Turner cast this well and has an interesting angle for a combat film. There hasn’t been a movie about Aboriginal Austrlian soldiers jungle-fighting for King and racist country in WWII, near as I can tell.
Once the narrative shifts to surving that shipwreck, the small group friction and terrors of survival on floating debris, “Beast of War” becomes a simple “Who gets eaten next” and “How can we fight back/survive” tale, albeit one with a spiritual subtext as our young recruit knows sharks and experienced the trauma of an attack as a tween.
Mechanical/CGI shark attack simulations have improved over the decades, and are as terrifying as ever. But the longer this brief “inspired by true events” tale goes on, the more tropes and far-fetched cliches Roach-Turner trots out.
It’s a pity, because the generic story he begins with had more to offer the generic shark/horror tale he winds up telling.
Rating: R, graphic, gruesome violence
Cast: Mark Coles Smith, Joel Nankervis, Sam Delich, Lee Tiger Halley, Lauren Grimson, Sam Parnonson, Lara Logan Browne and Steve Le Marquand
Credits: Scripted and directed by Kiah Roache-Turner. A Well Go USA release.
Running time: 1:27
It’s odd to think of the ’80s as a movie decade in which we can bandy the phrase “They don’t make’em like that any more” about. Hollywood’s blockbuster obsession almost wholly took over, and the roman numeralization of cinema “franchises” became the business model.
It wasn’t just “Rocky” or Indiana Jones or “Jaws” or any Eddie Murphy smash hit that served up sequels.
But there was were defiant voices shouting into the hurricane of mass market commodities that the movies were becoming. Producer David Puttnam was a maverick of the British cinema, an instinctual artist who put his energy into financing and filming “Chariots of Fire,” “The Killing Fields,” “Local Hero,” “Midnight Express” and Ridley Scott’s first film, “The Duelists.”
His movie-making motto was “I’m not afraid to fail, providing I fail honorably.” And he didn’t really fail until he tried to reform Hollywood from within by taking over as head of Sony/Columbia/Tristar in the mid-80s, fired “honorably” but quite quickly (after about a year) for pushing smart cinema like “Someone to Watch Over Me,” “Little Nikita,” “Hope and Glory” and the Bill Cosby bomb “Leonard Part 6” into production.
One of the last films he got into theaters before taking Columbia’s reins was quintessential Puttnam and something of a deal-maker for the Columbia hire. “Defence of the Realm” was a jewel created on a modest budget. It’s a crisp, smart, sharply-observant and perfectly paranoid thriller about a government scandal that might have been ginned up to cover up a bigger scandal. A reporter who must turn over clues, take ethical shortcuts, follow his insincts and fight lies, pushback, government threats and the unholy truth that big media companies — even then — are owned by rich men with self-serving agendas that trump independent journalism, no matter how important.
It’s a movie that spent its production money on the cast — Gabriel Byrne, Greta Scaachi, Denholm Elliott, Ian Bannen and Bill Paterson for starters. The director came from and would go back to British TV, an unfussy master of unflashy story-telling and making a production’s trains run on time.
The score might be that twinkly synthesized tinnitus that was the soundtrack of ’80s cinema, a hallmark of the era thanks to the Puttnam-produced/Vangelis-scored “Chariots of Fire.” But it’s the understated, limited dialogue of the underexplained story that makes the viewer pay attention and “come to” the movie rather than having it simplistically served up that makes this crackling, cynical tale a classic.
An unfussy, unspectacular car chase open “Defence,” retitled “Defense” for its m. A stakeout follows. But it isn’t cops or government agents who’re watching who goes into a prostitute’s flat. It’s a newspaper photographer, under orders from editors at the Daily Dispatch. A few snaps confirm what they’ve been told to expect. A Member of Parliament (Ian Bannen) named Markham is seeing the same sex worker of an East German/Russian-connected spy.
Rumpled, seasoned and sometimes sauced political reporter Vernon (Elliott) may advise caution and take the job of confronting his old MP friend/source with the accusation. But younger “ink-stained wretch” Nick Mullen (Byrne) is all over it, and his underhanded Fleet Street ethics have him passing himself off as a policeman to get the MP’s wife to get a rise out of her. Which he does.
The “Red Markham” headlines write themselves.
But Vernon hints that there’s something seriously wrong with this story. And when Nick catches a couple of fellows rummaging through Vernon’s newsroom desk after hours and takes Vernon home from the pub to find the man’s flat has been tossed, he develops his own suspicions.
When someone winds up dead, it’s on Nick to work the phones, follow leads and track down the truth, no matter what his editor (Paterson) and rich, connected publisher (Fulton McKay) think.
“Defence of the Realm” plays as a snapshot-in-time period piece today, a film that captured peak Fleet Street newspapering, with profitable enterprises all up and down that London thoroughfare sending reporters hither and yon to scoop their legions of competitors. The Aussie oligarch Murdoch had already bought his way in and ethics were in a downward spiral that the digital era would only amplify.
The typewriter-filled newsroom is quieter than any depicted in American films. But even if they didn’t call their library/archives “the morgue” filled with story clips (“cuttings,” the Brits called them), the photo archives and chemical, analog enlargement process — following another “tipped” scoop — were the same at pretty much any newspaper in what we used to call “the Free World.”
Decisions are made by the mostly elder statesman of the newspaper’s masthead — senior (white, male) editors. But the publisher is destined to intervene, even though they all say they’ll “not interfere” with what’s being reported.
Martin Stellman’s script — loosely inspired by the Profumo affair of the ’60s (filmed as “Scandal” with Joanne Whalley) — is thin on dialogue. So director David Drury (TV’s “Prime Suspect”) has Byrne get across his state of mind and the next clue he might follow with gestures and facial expressions, not words. Byrne has long been one of my favorite actors, and this is one of his greatest and most compact performances.
The accomplished cast of supporting players gets across their roles and function in the story even if we can’t pick up everybody’s name or actual job.
Scaachi plays the accused MP’s secretary, that one source our reporter is destined to plead “I need your help” to. She’s too smart to get involved with him, even if he was to allow the distraction of acting “interested.” There’s an early appearance by Robbie Coltrane as a fellow reporter,
Drury gets great suspense out of simple matters like collecting a hidden stash of incriminating documents before a rickety elevator arrives. And he, Stellman and Byrne keep the tone relentlessly downbeat.
We’re warned, with every turn of events, not to expect a Hollywood ending. Because there isn’t one coming. Because, as ’80s thrillers go, “Defence of the Realm” is as blunt and bleak as anything the more celebrated ’70s cinema produced. In either case, they really “don’t make’em like this any more.”
Rating: PG, smoking
Cast: Gabriel Byrne, Greta Scaachi, Denholm Elliott, Ian Bannen, Fulton McKay, Bill Paterson and Robbie Coltrane
Credits: Directed by David Drury, scripted by Martin Stellman. An MGM release streaming on Tubi, Amazon, etc.
Running time: 1:36
An all star cast and Daniel Craig doing the genteel gay Southern detective bit to the max, one more time.
Nov. 26.
Movie Nation 