Tough urban youth “reformed” by bicyling one of the toughest places to bike in America.
Leslie David Baker from “The Office” is here for comic relief, Sean Astin for moral support.
“Hard Miles” has good festival buzz, a crew of generally little known “youth” and opens in theaters April 19.
Donnie Yen gets his ass kicked in one scene in “Polar Rescue,” titled “Sou jiu/Come Back Home” when it opened in China. And frankly, it’s not a good look for the martial arts icon, who has been more at home in the delivering of on-screen ass-kickings than on the receiving end.
But he’s over 60, so maybe the sentimental slop of “Polar Rescue” is his filmic fate from here on out.
It’s a “I lost my kid in a blizzard” story of a family vacation gone wrong in the frigid north of China. And it’s a tale of frustrating lazy cops, not-secret-enough guilt, a mini media circus and the struggle to find a kid we have just enough time to get to know to note is quite the spoiled brat.
De and Xuan (Yen and Cecilia Han) are making the most of their trip “north,” showing their two young kids the pleasures of snow and winter sports. But headstrong Lele (Yuan Jinhui) has his heart set on seeing fabled Lake Tian and its mythic “monster.” He throws a tantrum when Dad informs him that the road is closed. So indulgent Dad finds a back way to drive their rented Chinese SUV there.
Of course they get stuck. Remember, Donnie Yen, “there is only one Jeep.”
That’s when Lele recklessly almost gets run over, standing in the middle of the snowy-icy road. Next thing we know, he’s gone missing and the parents are pleading with a do-nothing cop — “Southerners are so RUDE!” — to try and a search launched.
“How did you lose him?” (in Mandarin with English subtitles) De is asked for the first and certainly not the last time.
Even after the chief (Hou Tianlai) intervenes and a massive search gets underway, a lot of the searchers have their suspicions, which they gossip about in the cold.
De grows more frantic with each passing hour, even as “There’s no hope” and “Even an adult would be dead by now” gloom sets in.
Diving into social media for crowd-sourced “help” just makes matters worse, as users voice their darkest fears for what this seemingly distraught father might have done and online predators show up.
The snowy production design is first rate as this frigid melodrama feels chilly, first scene to last.
But the script, which is credited both to director Chi-Leung Law as “written and directed by” and separately by three other “screenplay by” writers in the credits, is a maudlin mess of weepy anecdotes, head-slappingly obvious parental “blunders,” tepid flashbacks and a pause for a patriotic song by the Red Army Chorus of searchers.
Action beats involving a river the distraught father tries to cross, heedless of the danger, and a frozen lake are impressive.
It’s just that whatever they spent the money on — Donnie Yen, effects and location shooting — it wasn’t on a compelling or even all that competent script.
Rating: unrated, violence
Cast: Donnie Yen, Cecilia Han, Yuan Jinhui and Hou Tianlai
Credits: Directed by Chi-Leung Law, scripted by Xiaoli Zhang, Sin Long Young and Chi Wen Ying. A Well Go USA release.
Running time: 1:42
Apple TV+ has this bad boy who calls himself “one of the good guys.”
He finds missing people. And busts the heads of those who would stop him.
John “Sugar” drives a “car with character (’60s ragtop Corvette), keeps his dog close and his demons down. And he talks in voice-over. A lot.
That’s “private eye” life in the City of Angels, kids.
James Cromwell, Kirby, Adrian Martinez and Amy Ryan co-star in this eight-episode Apple challenger to…”Fargo,” I guess. April 5.
Last year saw a Bille August mini-series based on the famous Alexandre Dumas novel. Jeremy Irons was featured in that.
This new theatrical take stars Pierre Niney of the Yves St. Laurent biopic of a few years back as Le Comte, Edmund Dantes, and was scripted and directed by Alexandre de La Patellière and Matthieu Delaporte, writers of the French thriller “22 Bullets” of a few years back.
It looks as if no expense was spared for this summer release.
Alec Guinness brings a deft twinkle to G.K. Chesterton’s venerable saintly sleuth “Father Brown” in his only big screen outing as the Catholic crime solver, titled “The Detective” when it showed in the United States.
And while I can’t say with certainty that this 1954 British classic is the most faithful to Christian apologist Chesterton’s vision of a priest who solves crimes and tries to keep the coppers at bay as he tries to “save” the criminals, it does feel like one of the definitive takes on the character.
There’d been one earlier film of Chesterston’s crime solving creature of habits, and there have been several TV and radio series based on the “Father Brown” stories. But what other Father Brown got so into the part and so swayed by the man’s humanity, Christian piety, charity and forgiveness that he converted to Catholicism?
“Kind Hearts and Coronets” and “School for Scoundrels” director Robert Hamer, co-screenwriter Thelma Schneed and the cast get a lighthearted, faintly mysterious and fun film out of Chesterston’s oft-filmed first-ever Father Brown short story, “The Blue Cross.”
Father Brown is soft-spoken in the pulpit, ensuring that “He that maketh haste to be rich shall not go unpunished” (Jeremiah) plays to every parishioner, not just the burglar he interrupted and convinced to go the straight and narrow the night before.
Of course, as he was returning the man’s ill-gotten pounds sterling to the safe he’d cracked, Father Brown was arrested and spent the night in a cell. But once all that was cleared up, without the priest ratting out the thief despite the irritation of the cops and the church hierarchy, a little lecture seems in order.
“I’m disappointed in you, Bert,” he offers. “Firstly, because you did wrong. Secondly, because you did wrong in the wrong way. Frankly, you are an incompetent thief.”
We’re tossed into Father Brown’s world, in which most police don’t know of his amateur sleuthing, which his bishop (Cecil Parker) barely tolerates, a priest preaching to a full house in a modest old church in which no Sunday would be complete without his own personal Kato — a local tough – jumping him afterwards, giving him a weekly wrestling-for-your-life workout.
But the Church is lending out the one “priceless” relic housed in Father Brown’s parish, a cross owned by St. Augustine, to a Catholic convocation elsewhere in Europe. The police have gotten wind of plans by a notorious master thief named Guy Flambeau to snatch it.
Father Brown is merely warned of this, and told to leave guarding the cross to the authorities. But he preps several packages, only one of which holds The True Cross, to tote with him by train and ferry all the way to his destination.
Father Brown, wearing spectacles and wide-eyed with curiosity, must consider every fellow passenger, even ones from the sea of clergy making this pilgrimage with him, a suspect. See how he trips up James Bond’s future boss (Bernard Lee), a jolly chap who passes himself off as a Jaguar salesman.
The British carmarker, the non-driver Father Brown notes with a raised-eyebrow, “made a mistake” by equipping current models with “a single downdraft carburetor.” Only a con artist, or a cop traveling in disguise, would miss the fact that Jaguars were using twin “horizontal” (side-draft) carbs in the early ’50s.
Then there’s the helpful fellow priest who picks up on Brown’s concerns aboit his parcel and urge to ditch those tailing him. “A danger shared is a danger halved,” his fellow Bible-quoting Catholic clergyman intones.
Naturally, he’s the real thief, played by a bearded future Oscar winner (like Guinness himself) Peter Finch.
So this is to be one of THOSE sorts of mysteries, with the thief and the his pursuer meeting, bantering, matching wits and wrestling skills as crimes are considered and carried out. The twist here is that Father Brown isn’t interested in an arrest.
“I want you on behalf of a higher power.”
Guinness is so delightful in the title role that had this been a modern production, he might have been urged to sacrifice half his career to “franchise” the character.
Finch is properly sinister, but also amusing in various disguises. Joan Greenswood is the lone female presence of note, a widowed rich parishioner who becomes “bait” to trap our thief. And Lee and Parker play varying degrees of befuddlement as characters trying to track and rein in a priest who won’t stay in his lane.
A standout comic scene is an auction meant to smoke out our master criminal, with bit player Lance Maraschal hilariously embodying the British idea of a boorish, wealthy “Texan” — then and forever. Watch auctioneer Noel Howlett instantly convert the drawling blowhard’s Yankee dollar bids to “pounds sterling,” then “guineas” as the duel between our Texan and an Anglofile Indian (Marne Maitland) turns teasingly testy.
It’s always delightful to stumble across that rare Guinness comic outing you haven’t seen, and while “The Detective” is no “Kind Hearts and Coronets,” “The Ladykillers,” “Lavender Hill Mob” or even “The Horse’s Mouth,” it showcases him in fine form in a role that would change his spiritual life and inform many of his serene, considered and cerebral performances to come.
Rating: TV-PG
Cast: Alec Guinness, Joan Greenswood, Peter Finch, Bernard Lee and Cecil Parker.
Credits: Directed by Robert Hamer, scripted by Thelma Schneed and Robert Hamer, based on the Father Brown stories by G.K. Chesterton. A Columbia release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.
Running time: 1:26
“My Name is Loh Kiwan” is a downbeat Korean melodrama peppered with violence and victimhood and adorned with too many trials and tribulations for its own good.
Writer-director Kim Hui-jin stuffs a TV soap opera season’s worth of over-the-top challenges, sad flashbacks, ugly injustices and an unlikely romance in adapting Hae Ji-Cho’s novel for the screen.
It’s watchable but utterly predictable.
We lose track of what it is our titular hero is escaping and never are allowed to see the appeal in fleeing to racist, immigrant-bashing Brussels, Belgium. I guess between the EU red tape, the Chinese efforts to cover up corruption and crime, drug abuse, fake identites and sketchy workplaces that hire undocumented migrants and all those flashbacks to tell us about two dead mothers, they just didn’t have the time.
We meet Loh Kiwan (Song Joong-ki) as he’s weeping, cleaning blood off a street.
Next think we know, he’s on board a jetliner with several other folks who have paid to be taken from China and smuggled into Belgium, coached by their “mule” to not look sketchy and to just say “Je ne parle pas français” to the customs officials at Brussels airport. On the way from that airport, Loh Kiwan tries to pay a driver in blood-stained U.S. dollars.
“Bad luck.”
Loh Kiwan is fleeing North Korea by way of China. And since Koreans long native to China have been using that dodge to backdoor their way abroad, he is instantly under suspicion. He tells a customs officer, and the Korean translator who came to his aid, his sad story.
Up to this point, we’re allowed to wonder if he killed somebody, if he’s Chinese pretending to be Korean and just saying “Comrade” a lot to “pass” for a People’s Republican running from persecution and famine.
But as we see or at least feel implied in flashbacks, his mother sacrificed everything to get him across that North Korean border into China and later onto that plane. An uncle urged him on, no matter the cost. Who wouldn’t be moved? Who’d want to escape North Korea only to get stuck in China?
Loh Kiwan gets a hearing date for the chance to land a work Visa. It is months away, and all he has are a few bloodstained greenback dollars to tide him over.
“I don’t exist here,” he complains, in subtitled Korean (and French) or dubbed into English.
He is bullied out of a hostel, locked out of a public restroom where he hopes to winter, beaten up by xenophobes and finally robbed by a pretty punk as he’s passed out in a laundromat.
That’s how he meets Marie Lee (Choi Seong-eun), a sullen, well-kept junky in open revolt against her father (Jo Han-chul) but in debt to her dealer (Waël Sersoub).
Our hero finally turns tough guy with the skinny Chinese/Belgian woman. He wants that damned wallet back. It isn’t long before their fates are locked as we take a tour through the working poverty of illegal immigrants, high stakes gambling on an arcane European sport and the one thing these two have in common — losing their mothers.
As one bad circumstance after another piles up on his life, she invests in his wellbeing. As she struggles with her own demons, he invests in hers.
And every flashback takes us back to the trauma they’re both shouldering, which grows more dire with every bit of retelling.
For a story with this much overwrought tragedy attached to it, I found “My Name is Loh Kiwan” an oddly unemotional “weeper.” One can sympathize with the immigrant’s plight and still shake your head at the theatrical nature of the tragedies, which come close to “Oh come on now.” The layers of hurt and self-destruction added to it via flashbacks overwhelm you with soap opera suds.
The performances are engaging but not affecting, and the point of view of the story is kind of xenophobic itself. A South Korean film avoiding condemning its belligerant failed-state northern neighbor, condemning China without flinching and then slamming Europe and Europeans for bigotry, and simply being leery of taking in this guy with no marketable skills and no grasp of the language because they and we are supposed to be believe his increasingly fraught and over-the-top story?
It seems a bit much.
The sad saga kind of plods along a predictable path — courts, violence, love — with only a couple of mild surprises in store in the third act. But no, there’s nothing remotely surprising in the finale.
Rating: TV-MA, violence, drug abuse
Cast: Song Joong-ki, Choi Seong-eun, Jo Han-chul and Waël Sersoub.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Kim Hui-jin, based on a novel by Hae Ji-Cho. A Netflix release.
Running time: 2:12
Memorial Day Weekend, Sony Animation takes another shot at turning “Garfield” in a franchise.
Samuel L., Chris Pratt, Cecily Strong, Ving Rhames, Hannah Waddington, Nicholas Hoult, Bowen Yang (of course) and Snoop Dogg?
Whose idea was it to cast Bowen Yang and NOT make him the voice of Garfield?
“Outlaw Posse” is a scruffy, old school blaxploitation Western from Mario Van Peebles, son of iconic African American filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles, who put the “Black” in blaxploitation, back in his “Sweet Sweetback’s BADASSSSS Song” day.
Mario V. P. charmed a lot of co-stars into mounting up for another movie reminder that the Old West wasn’t as John Wayne white as it has traditionally been portrayed. As with his 1993 Western “Posse,” this is a movie as intent on delivering a history lesson as it is on entertaining.
But the lessons here are heavy-handed, because while only one character stops the narrative cold with a “How about a little history?” suggestion, such pauses run right through to the anti-climactic climax. That weighs down the blazing shoot-outs, dance-hall girl come-ons, chases and trash talk.
“Take your Aboriginal Ass back to Africa!” “I ain’t killed nobody in a month!”
Van Peebles is “Chief,” given a heroic, backlit, super-sized-sombrero introduction by…himself — he also wrote-and-directed this. Chief is a gunman in a border town cantina who sticks up for a Native American against a punk gunslinger (Cam Gigandet) and his accomplices (Neal McDonough and M. Emmet Walsh).
No, “I got nothin’ against darkies” won’t get you off the hook when you start something.
Chief has re-crossed the border for a reason, a reason the one-handed outlaw king Angel (William Mapother) is most certainly interested in.
Chief will have to assemble a gang, an “outlaw posse,” to evade Angel’s outlaw posse. Gunslinger Southpaw (Jake Manley), dynamite fiend Carson (John Carroll Lynch), whiteface comic Spooky (D.C. Young Fly) and sex-worker Queenie (Amber Reign Smith) join up.
And Chief’s long-estranged son Decker (Mandela Van Peebles, Mario’s son) rides along as well. But Angel is the one who recruited him, to help Angel track down Chief and that buried Confederate gold he’s after. Decker’s musician wife (Madison Calley) is being held hostage until he delivers his father to Angel.
They stage a hold-up, get caught in a shoot-out and a chase or two, and track north through the Old West, meeting figures both historic and fictional on their way to a showdown.
While there are anachronisms in the speech, the historical figures — included hard-nosed mail driver Stagecoach Mary (Whoopi Goldberg), boxer Jack Johnson and the founders of the oldest Chinese restaurant in the United States — are real people, often erased from American history and the myth of the Old West.
But this isn’t “history.” It’s a movie. They turn a Black saloon into a 1908 juke joint at one point. Buthc and Sundance references are both historical and meant for amusement. And “dynamite” is a dead giveaway that your Western isn’t all that serious.
While Van Peebles is to be commended for his history lessons, for knowing how to film (with one impressively long take) a good shoot-out and chase, “Outlaw Posse” is at its heart cornball and old fashioned and entirely too wedded to its good intentions and self-righteousness.
A stop by a utopian racial settlement is just an excuse to give Cedric the Entertainer a scene or two and a lecture on tolerance. And everything from the “getting the gang together” bits to the shopkeeper (Edward James Olmos) they meet and chat up, to the arbitrary stagecoach ride from Stagecoach Mary is clumsily introduced. The narrative doesn’t flow, and some scenes seem superfluous or at least poorly set-up.
Mapother is a passable villain-on-a-tight budget, and the almost-ageless Van Peebles has always had great screen presence.
But this “Posse” is never much more than a mixed-bag — sometimes entertaining, sometimes pedantic, and never as quick or as nimble on its feet as it needs to be to come off.
Rating: R, violence, profanity, nudity
Cast: Mario Van Peebles, William Mapother, Amber Reign Smith, Mandela Van Peebles, John Carroll Lynch, D.C. Young Fly, Madison Calley, with Edward James Olmos, M. Emmet Walsh, Cedric the Entertainer, Cam Gigandet, Neal McDonough and Whoopi Goldberg
Credits: Scripted and directed by Mario Van Peebles. A Quiver release.
Running time: 1:48
“Unfriending” is a deadpan Canadian comedy with “film festival darling” engrained in its DNA. It doesn’t quite come off, but being dark and droll, it might play to the right audience, a forgiving film fest crowd willing to ignore how slowly it starts, how low the ceilings are for the performances and how quickly it bogs down before The Big Finish.
It’s from The Butler Brothers, Brett and Jason, whose specialty is film festival movies such as “Confusions of an Unmarried Couple” and “Mourning has Broken.”
Blake and May (Sean Melrum and Simone Jetsun) are hosts for a dinner party, taking care to get the potroast just right, to make the table settings perfect and get their lovely two-story frame house ready for company, and to sneak their box wine into pricier empty bottles their more pretentious friends will lap up.
So what if blowhard Blake pours red wine into bottles that plainly say “blanc” on the label?
“I’m not bilingual! You can’t judge me!”
Mutual friends Radia and Barclay (Jenna Vittoria and Michael Pearson), models of political correctness, and former punk rocker Darby (Honor Spencer) and her lover Giselle (Rachelle Lauzon) all show up early for the “adult sleepover” in the country, most of them well-prepared for the occasion.
But being 30ish, this isn’t Blake and May’s house. It belongs to his parents. He’s a tad too prickly and myopic to have ever been a success at everything.
It isn’t just a “dinner party,” with “good friends, good wine and good conversation.” It’s an “intervention.” And it isn’t an ordinary intervention, either. They’re here to convince their awkward, introverted and suffering friend Isaac (Alex Stone) to kill himself.
It’s a pot-luck for suicide, with some friends bringing suggestions, and Blake contributing several possible means of Isaac’s self-administered demise — a rope, a switchblade, a pistol that was “John Wick’s” mass murder weapon of choice in the movies, pills, a hair dryer for dropping in the tub, a list of local bridges worth jumping from and, in the garage, “my 1999 RAV 4.”
Carbon monoxide? Good to keep your options open. And be thorough.
They do whisky shots and rehearse, with PC policeman Barclay correcting everything.
“I don’t think we can say ‘guest room’ here. Vintage things (Barclay shows up with a trunk, not a suitcase) are cool, vintage thoughts are not.”
And just as everybody save for the failed punk rocker have signed on for the evening’s activities, sad sack Isaac arrives, with a smart, assertive Black woman, Lexxi (Golden Madison) as his date.
Wait, what? Isaac doesn’t date! Might this change everything they think about him? Or does it merely “complicate” the best laid plans of May and especially Blake?
There are a few promising directions the Butlers could have taken this story, but the twists they toss at us are barely able to keep this short, dark comedy in motion.
A couple of the performances have enough charismatic pop to come off, but the dialogue and characters they play aren’t enough to push “sit-com bit players” out of one’s mind.
The whole “circle of care for our friend” selling point doesn’t make the sale.
By the time the narrative rallies for an over-the-top finale, the deadpan has drained most of the energy out of it and “Unfriending” simply lurches over the finish line when it should sprint.
But in the right film festival with the right audience…
Rating: unrated, violence, sexual situations, profanity
Cast:Sean Melrum, Simone Jetsun, Jenna Vittoria, Michael Pearson, Honor Spencer, Rachelle Lauzon, Golden Madison and Alex Stone.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Brett M. Butler and Jason G, Butler. A Tiny Cabin release.
Running time: 1:27
The coming-of-age teen sex comedy genre goes younger and supposedly edgier in “Snack Shack,” which tells the story of randy Xennials in 1991 Nebraska City, Nebraska.
The follow-up to writer-director Adam Rehmeier’s quirkier “Dinner in America” is a transgressive, tedious and terribly predictable slog whose few light moments don’t break the coarse spell it casts.
The novelty here is that A.J. (Conor Sherry), aka “Eagle” (as in Eagle Scout) and Moose (Gabriel Labelle), the besties smoking and hustling, cutting out on the class field trip to bet on greyhounds at an Off Track Betting office in Iowa, learning how to make beer and learning how to make bongs out of beer cans, are 14.
All their best-laid plans all seem to pay off. Betting at the track, for instance, requires a “system,” they assure the adults.
“You’re 14 years old! You don’t have a friggin’ SYSTEM!”
Imagine how shocked A.J.’s parents, Jean and The Judge (Gillian Vigman and David Costabile), are to learn that he’s emptied out his college savings account for their next scheme, bidding on the rights to run a small business — the “snack shack” at the popular town pool over the coming summer.
The generation that would later be labeled “lazy” (by Time Magazine and other old timers) has produced two chatterbox entrepreneurs who have brewed some convincing “real beer,” and who — Moose insists — are about to make bank on selling hot dogs, drinks, candy and other snacks to avid poolgoers the summer after “The Liberation of Kuwait.”
Their protector and chief enabler is a soldier (Nick Robinson) pal and mentor home on leave. And the free electron who will break up these two molecularly-joined friends is the hot new lifeguard and “cousin” to a neighbor kid, Brooke (Mika Abdalla) who is old enough to drive and oddly “interested” in each boy in a kind of pervy “Jules and Jim” way.
Such pictures typically trot through the usual rites of passage — coping with bullies, after hours “night swims,” pre-Rave “raves,” bringe drinking, non-sibling rivalry over a lady fair, bonding, making big plans and playing poker.
As our two leads in no way pass for middle schoolers chomping at the bit to go to high school, Rehmeir is offering up a genre parody, just not a funny one. And he’s not actually sending-up the male wish fulfillment fantasy that drives some male-dominated movie memoirs, but he might as well be, leaning on “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” and others that trafficked in that.
Young Sherry, an alumnus of Nickelodeon’s “Are You Afraid of the Dark?” makes a sensitive-if-not-remotely age-appropriate lead. Labelle (“The Fabelmans”) is Every Teen Hustler you’ve ever seen, and former child actress Abdalla, most recently seen in “The Flash,” is well cast as that voluptuous “older woman” object of many a horny teen’s desire.
The period piece setting is indifferently managed, with more cars from the ’70s than the ’90s, and a modest sampling of the pop music of the era — Tone Loc’s “Wild Thing,” etc.
For a film that flirts with a statutory rape/child endangerment edge, “Snack Shack” is awfully tame, a movie about enterprising kids growing up too fast and permissive parenting that enables that with trite lessons about life and love and recklessness borrowed from decades of movies like this, going back to “American Graffitti.”
“Personal” picture or whatever larger objective Rehemeier was aiming for, he’s made a very long and not that funny comedy connected by disjointed and generally unoriginal scenes rather than a coherent narrative.
Rating: R, fisticuffs, sexual situations, underage drinking, pot use and profanity
Cast: Conor Sherry, Gabriel Labelle, Mika Abdalla and Nick Robinson
Credits: Scripted and directed by Adam Rehmeier. A Republic release.
Running time: 1:52
Movie Nation 