Sony works works works its Spidery side of the Marvel street, adding this to “Spider-Man” in all its incarnations (and “Venom” too).
A paramedic who starts “having visions” and takes a turn to the superheroic.
I like the way the trailer goes all “Let’s EXPLAIN” the unexplainable, “Spider-Man” origin story style.
Silly, but it’s worked every other time.
BTW, if Marvel is in its over-exposed/”Jump the Shark” moment, you had to figure Dakota Johnson would be the dead giveaway.
Feb. 14?
A film festival favorite from Searchlight pictures, this dreamy drama is about meeting someone, and having that trigger what appears to be a reconnection with parents who died years before but are back — frozen in time.
This trailer makes Andrew Haigh’s film, based on a Taichi Yamada novel, seemvery screenwriterly (Andrew Scott’s character, the one doing the falling in love and parental bonding, is a screenwriter) and romantic.
Paul Mescal, Jamie Ball and Claire Foy also the stars of this of Awards Season contender, due out in January.
“Forever” is a Swedish coming-of-age-in-soccer drama that breaks just enough of the conventions of the genre to feel new and novel.
There is a third act “Big Game,” but is takes a back seat to the human drama playing out between two 15 year old girls. There are personality clashes and “tests,” but they aren’t all “character/team building.” And there are a lot of decisions that, made rashly or rationally, don’t always turn out “for the best.
Kia and Mila are 14 year old besties when we meet them, teens who do almost everything together, including playing soccer for the 14 year-old girls’ club in their hometown of Linden.
They’re both good enough at the game to shout “You’re the BEST” (in Swedish), “YOU’RE the best” at each other as they bicycle home after every practice.
Kia’s supportive parents have Mila over for dinner, drive them both to practices and matches whenever Mila — who is often late — shows up. But Kia (Judith Sigfridsson) is almost 15, a good student and noticing boys.
But Mila (Flutra Cela) to a single mom, a Serbian immigrant (Eleftheria Gerofoka) who nags her about grades, excelling in the Swedish language and just doing her damned homework. Mom no longer has to remind her of “what we went through to get you out of Kosovo.” Milandra has that memorized.
The problem is, Mila doesn’t “give a f–k” about school or any that. Football is what she studies, on the pitch or in her room, manipulating the ball, polishing her footwork. And having rage and impulse control issues, she isn’t shy about sharing that opinion LOUDLY with anybody who crosses her.
When we see her play, we get it. There isn’t much in the way of special effects needed in showing us the girl’s got game — dazzling footwork, cultivated instincts, stamina, a desire to excell and star built on fierce competitiveness.
When Lollo (Agnes Lindström Bolmgren), a former pro and star of the Swedish national team shows up and offers to take over coaching the club, everybody’s thrilled, and Mila figures she and Kia are one step closer to realizing their dream.
But the headstrong, ball-hogging star is destined to clash with the establish-authority/instill-discipline coach. This will test the team, the coach, the players and the Mila and Kia’s bond.
Is it “their” dream, after all?
The Jessica Jankert script tells this tale almost wholly from Mila’s point of view, and that’s tricky. The girl is so focused she’s scary, and obnoxious.
“Benched” because she refuses to pass the ball? “But I’m the f—king BEST!?”
Forced to do laps for every minute she’s late? Bring it on. Forced to realize teammates don’t necessarily relish her as a teammate? She’ll play one against the entire team.
An injury due to her ego, a near ejection because of her temper and sense of grievance, shoes she needs more than the rich swell who owns them, she is a model of self-serving behavior living through an undisciplined childhood.
Her rage is “your worst enemy” and her “greatest asset.” Lollo sees great things, and maybe personal advancement in this teenager on the first club she’s ever coached.
Cela’s performance is so grating and rebellious and recognizable that any parent watching this should marvel, and be thankful you’re not raising this jerk. Cela makes her as convincingly testy, self-absorbed and lost off the field as on it.
I like the way it is implied that Lollo wants to force the submissive femininity out of her girls, bring out their aggression and (it is implied) make themselves less Swedish. The success of the Swedish national women’s team is a testament to that sort of club level training and indoctrination.
I also like the way adults and kids make bad decisions in this film. And consquences might be delayed, or forgotten altogether. Because if you want to make it into professional sports, everything else — family priorities and moral upbringing included — is going to take a back seat.
“Forever” is still formulaic, still a bit soft in its cause-and-effect behaviors, many of which seem to lack consequences. But it sits comfortably above other less engaging coming-of-age girls’ soccer stories like “Her Best Move” and “Gringa.”
And as how “Next Goal Wins” is more of a comedy than a “soccer movie” (and not particularly funny either), “Forever” gets my vote as the best soccer movie out there at the moment.
Rating: TV-14, profanity
Cast: Flutra Cela, Judith Sigfridsson, Eleftheria Gerofoka,
Mustapha Aarab, Joel Forslund-Nylén and Agnes Lindström Bolmgren
Credits: Directed by Anders Hazelius, scripted by Jessika Jankert. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:43
Before you write a script or even a plot, you have a “conceit,” and before you can make your movie, you have a “pitch.” And it’d better be a killer.
That’s all “It’s a Wonderful Knife” is — a conceit and a pitch without much of a movie as a result.
It a slasher thriller re-imagining of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” a clever-enough conceit. Let’s see what life would be like if the girl who saved her family and her town from a Nut with a Knife “had never been born.”
That idea was enough to attract two “names” to the cast — Justin Long and Joel McHale. And that pitch, with them attached, got this half-baked project before the cameras and before it was fully baked into something that might be worth watching.
Jane Widdup of “Yellowjackets” plays winsome Winnie, perky Angel Falls High School junior with a boyfriend, a passion for photography, loving parents (McHale and Erin Boyes) and a gay star quarterback brother, Jimmy (Aiden Howard).
Dad works for the local rich guy/mayor (Long) who is gambling it all on a big development he just HAS to pull off. That’s how an old homeowner and holdout winds up dead, along with his granddaughter, Winnie’s bestie Carol (Hanna Huggins).
But plucky Winnie saves herself, her brother and the city from the white masked and cowled angel dolled up like the ornament on the top of the downtown Christmas tree. She kills and unmasks the mayor himself, a guy willing to murder to save his business.
One year later, everybody’s “moved on,” and that’s a tad maddening. Nobody, especially Winnie’s FAMILY, remembers and appreciates her Jamie Lee acts that saved the place? As she stares out into the Northern Lights, she wishes she’d never been born.
Just like that, she gets her wish. I love the “explanation” for this bit of supernaturalism. The lights are “a spirit of someone who died violently.”
They didn’t cover that in my Welcome to Alaska, Thanks for Moving to North Dakota brochures.
The Hell that Angel Falls has turned into is more surreal than realistic. That “Angel” is still going around knifing people, something the mayor’s dopey brother (Sean Depner), now the police chief, seems unconcerned about.
The mayor’s development went forward. And that alternate-timeline party Winnie shows up for is drugged-up and out of control. Nobody recognizes her, not even the town teen “weirdo” Bernie (Jess McLeod) she rashly dissed at the same sort of party one year ago.
But friendless Bernie might believe her, might buy in to her fantastical story, and could have some ideas about how to set this all right.
Director Tyler MacIntyre makes decent use of some wintry Vancouver locations and the script works in a bit of old downtown cinema into the action — a place to girl-bond and battle the bad guy.
But the narrative’s bend from reality to surreal is abrupt and head-scratching, a great leap beyond other “It’s a Wonderful Life” parodies, like the one in “Back to the Future II.”
Treating the entire enterprise as a blood-spattered goof doesn’t pay off, with only Long reading the screenplay that way. His choice to play this mayor as a gladhanding fraud with fake teeth and Dustin Hoffman’s affected voice from “Tootsie” is more curious than amusing.
The slashings are reasonably alarming even as the deaths are perfunctory. The murderers seem more or less properly motivated by the switches in the plot from one “life” to the next. But Winnie’s timeline-to-timeline “change” has an abrupt and weird lifestyle leap in it. The picture never shakes the feeling that this is all a hallucination or dream, one that looks like a made-for-TV movie.
“Yellowjackets” fanatics and horror devotees will excuse a lot, but “It’s a Wonderful Knife” doesn’t just slash through our expectations about what we’re going to see. It stumbles in managing the basics, starting with “Must make some kind of sense, surreal or otherwise.
Rating: bloody violence, drug use and profanity
Cast: Jane Widdup, Jess McLeod, Aiden Howard, Hanna Huggins, Erin Boyes, Katharine Isabelle, Justin Long and Joel McHale.
Credits: Directed by Tyler MacIntyre, scripted by Michael Kennedy. An RLJE/Shudder release.
Running time: 1:27
So he needs the guy’s ex wife to ID…the rest of the body so’s he can get paid?
A hitman that long in the tooth is going to forget things.
Not sure if and when this will see the light of day.
Is it just me, or
are all these CGI animated kids’ films starting to look alike?
The style, the color palette, the look of the characters, it’s a lot harder to tell Disney from Dreamworks from Illumination from Sony from Netflix, etc.
“Classic” traditional animation, done well, would stand out like an emerald in a sea of shiny zirconia right about now.
But this looks decent enough — Ariana DeBose and Chris Pine and Alan Tudyck voice the leads.
“Wish” opens next Wednesday, right before Thanksgiving.
No contest, right?
An Iron Man (ish?) competition involving a hyper-competitive guy and his team picks up a stray along the way.
Hankies come out all over. Bear Grylls cameo to follow.
There’s a corner of America that likes its murder mysteries convoluted and its detectives gathering all the suspects in a drawing room to go through them, one by one, in unmasking “The Real Killer.” But they probably wouldn’t appreciate the idea that a thriller titled “Hayseed” was tailor-made for them.
I mean, it climaxes with a tedious, “process of elimination” gathering of the suspects in a sanctuary, not a drawing room, doggone it.
This indie whodunit is about a dead pastor, lazy local police rushing to an “accident” conclusion, an ex-cop insurance investigator and the one person in town who wants this guy to not rush to judgement because she’s sure the pastor was murdered.
She’s the one who stands to inherit his fortune, for Pete’s sake.
“Hayseed” is an amiable but fatally low-energy and over-complicated mystery that benefits from a droll, laid-back turn by veteran character actor (“American Psycho”) and occasional lead (“Evenhand”) Bill Sage, who dons a trench coat and endures digs about dressing the stereotypical “part” as he lazes through sleepy Emmaus, Michigan, where Rev. Dowding (Peter Carey) turned up bled-out and drowned in the Emmaus Holy Church baptismal.
“It’s a slip-and-fall, a tragedy,” the boyish State Policeman Kyle (Kyle Jurassic) intones.
But ex-detective Leo Hobbins has bosses, and they want to make certain it wasn’t a suicide because being an insurance company, they’d rather not pay out.
First time feature writer-director Travis Burgess treat us to an endless “meet all (not really) the suspects” series of interviews with church staff, congregants and business associates, a “formality” Hobbins insists on, but an annoyance to some of those folks and a deathly drag on a movie’s opening act, even if it is another “whodunit” convention, even if it is edited down into a sort of montage.
It is the pastor’s go-to assistant Darlene (Ismenia Mendes) who stands to inherit the reverand’s home and who called the insurance company in. She’s sure somebody killed him.
Who? Maybe a parishioner (Kathryn Morris of TV’s “Cold Case”) jealous of the pastor’s trust in Darlene. Perhaps her dizzy waitress daughter (Marta Piekarz) knows something? The banker/real estate couple (Amy Hargreaves, Nolan North)?
Young and sketchy groundskeeper “Duck” (Jack Falahee) seems a likelier suspect than the aged, deaf organist (David Luther Glover).
Secret relationships, mysterious “meetings” the night before and the Reverand’s unsavory “secret” figure into all this.
Hobbins thinks the cops got it right until he realizes how easy it would be for these small-towners to get it wrong. So he settles in at the diner and with Darlene egging him on, starts asking questions.
“Humor me,” he says.
There’s enough here that a 75-80 minute version of this pokey picture might have worked, played or simply come off.
The picture’s title is a bit of a misnomer. We expect more examples of “hayseeds,” and while a few folks are quirky eccentrics, nobody adds up to a laugh-out-loud clueless clown or a “sage” in small town sheep’s clothing. That’s kind of a promise that this title makes. “Local color” is sorely lacking.
Sage is a steady presence at the heart of it. But Burgess switches points of view to throw us off, glibly overdoes the few flashes of violence, entangles characters in unexpected romances and withholds details that would allow the viewer to keep up, come to our own conclusion or, you know, stay interested.
Rating: unrated, violence
Cast: Bill Sage, Ismenia Mendes, Kathryn Morris, Marta Piekarz, Peter Carey, Caitlin Carver, Kyle Jurassic and Jack Falahee
Credits: Scripted and directed by Traviss Burgess. A Good Deeds Entertainment release.
Running time: 1:45
This stylish looking British psychological thriller looks to have been filmed in the Med, and stars Natalia Cordova-BuckleyR, yan Kwanten and Virginia Madsen.
Dec. 8, “The Portrait” is unveiled.
Eli Roth’s back to take more perverse pleasure in pain — his movies’ “victims,” and that of viewers laughing at the gore but grimacing at the cruelty — with a holiday treat titled “Thanksgiving.”
At least with “Thanksgiving,” a splatter comedy that brings “Halloween” to Turkey Day, he’s moved on from “torture porn.” More or less.
Originally pitched as a gag trailer in “Grindhouse” many years back, the laughs here come from the horror movie archetypal characters, from the unsubtle politics and from the WAY over the top means that our “Carver” dispatches his victims over the holiday in Plymouth, Massachusetts, home of America’s second Thanksgiving.
Not going to lie, I laughed a lot until I stopped. The first act is funny, the second somewhat less and the third a dull, mostly humorless let-down of the first order. And really, how many times can we see a beheading, disemboweling or baking to death before the “joke” gets old?
Thanksgiving meals hosted by RightMart manager Mitch (Ty Olsson) and his wife (Gina Gershon) and by the RightMart owner (Rick Hoffman) and new wife Kathleen (Karen Cliche) are interrupted by the fact that “Black Friday starts on Thursday” now, and there’s already a mob down at the discount warehouse store.
Maybe Sheriff Newlon (Patrick Dempsey) should stop by, too. The store owner’s daughter Jess (Nell Verlaque) and her crew can get in early. But the crowd outside is ugly and getting uglier as “the store will open in ten minutes” announcement s plainly a lie. We hear for it repeated for twelve minutes.
And then all hell breaks loose as Eli Roth pays “tribute” to the January 6 assault and attempted coup in Washington. People are crushed and trampled in a bloody “Waffle House” brawl that Jess’s piggish jock pal Evan (Tomaso Sanelli) streams on his cell phone.
Her star baseballer boyfriend Bobby (Jalen Thomas Brooks) has his arm busted. And he got off easy. People died.
“One year later,” the store is enduring protests for daring to open for another “Black Friday.” The lawsuits died down thanks to CCTV footage that mysteriously disappeared. The holiday, the parade, the meals and the shopping are back on schedule because “I thought we moved on from that.”
And then somebody dressed in a mask of the Pilgrim town’s founding father “John Carver” starts carving, chopping, running-over and beheading people whose behavior was less than civilized in that riot the year before.
The creative killings are packed with jokes — a woman, disfigured by the madman, can’t unlock her phone to call for help because the phone doesn’t “recognize” her face, a victim stuffed in an oven with turkey thermometer as a punchline.
The traditional horror idea of “they had it coming” is underscored by the victims’ connection that “Black Friday” massacre that happened a year ago Thursday.
Jess and her pals (Addison Rae, Gabriel Davenport and Jenna Warren) are targeted in videos showing a murderous dinner’s place settings with their names on it. As the police seem indifferent or at least slow-footed considering the rising body count (events aren’t canceled), as her new boyfriend Ryan (Milo Manheim) is nobody’s idea of “protection,” where can they go for safe refuge?
Maybe the party thrown by the creepier-than-creepy son of the owner of the Plymouth Rocks gun store?
“It’s the only place in town where you won’t get killed,” is McCarty’s (Joe Deflin, funny) invitation.
The performances are rarely pitched at a level of panic, suggesting pretty much everybody’s here for the laughs.
But the audience that loves eyes-averting gore in their horror will have a “Thanksgiving” feast with this one. Eardrum puncturing to axe beheadings, many of them involving struggles, are served up for your viewing pleasure.
I’m not sure noting that the script is seemingly intentionally bad is an endorsement.
That really plays into how stupidly easy it is to figure out “whodunit.” The misdirections and false leads are barely attempted. And the film’s utterly deflating finale isn’t amusingly awful. It’s just awful, and in the most half-assed ways.
The Cult of Roth will almost certainly eat this holiday horror feast up. But this turkey is never more than a mixed bag, and as the laughs peter out and the “clues” are contrived to fit the finale, “Thanksgiving” takes that tryptophan turn towards nodding off, the curse of Turkey Day since that first Thanksgiving — in Virginia.
Rating: R for strong bloody horror violence and gore, pervasive language and some sexual material.
Cast: Nell Verlaque, Gina Gershon, Addison Rae, Gabriel Davenport, Milo Manheim, Karen Cliche, Tomaso Sanelli, Jenna Warren, Joe Deflin and Patrick Dempsey.
Credits: Directed by Eli Roth, scripted by Jeff Rendell. A Sony/Tristar release.
Running time:
Movie Nation 