Movie Nation

“Satisfaction” ranks high up on the list of things a good thriller should provide, coming right after “thrills” and in the case of a horror film, hair-raising shocks and jolts.

Most horror movies adhere to a formula, so if you’re doing another version of “They’re picked off, one by one,” making the finale payoff with a surprise or two, a jolt and victims who fight back in the most satisfying ways is a must.

“The Conference” (“Konferensen”) is a Swedish bureaucritic-retreat-gone-wrong comic thriller. The “comic” side of things is a bit thin, as we see victims — the just and the unjust — meet their end in the usual (machete impaling, hanging by a flagpole or meat hook) horrific ways.

But by the time we’ve started to identify with this stressed, wronged public employee, that office pushover or this or that elderly cubicle drone, things get righteously violent in ways that satisfy even as the body count rises.

Tiny Kolarsjön, Sweden (It’s a real place. Ok, it’s actually a lake.) is about to break ground on a desperately-needed shopping mall, so its planning office is in a celebratory mood.

Boss Ingela (Maria Sid) has fudged the budget for them to take a celebratory “team building” trek to a rural resort, where team leader Jonas (Adam Lundgren) can do a victory lap with his lapdog/hype man Kaj (Christopher Nordenrot) there to prod everybody else into praising Jonas to the heavens.

But Lina (Katia Winter of TV’s “The Boys and “Dexter”), just back from a mental health leave of absence, isn’t in a celebrating mood. Others on their eight person staff have their doubts about this project — with a farmer they forced to sell, a developer’s sweetheart deal and the mall’s promised IKEA.

Even in Sweden they’re a little leery of IKEA.

“It takes money to make money,” Jonas chirps, breaking into English (the film is mostly in Swedish or dubbed if you prefer). “Dream work makes the TEAM work” is another American English bit of human resources-motivationspeak that bubbles into the conversation.

They’re just settling in to the resort where Jenny (Lola Zackow) presides over a tiny staff and sporty Cleo (Marie Agerhäll) will lead the “team building” exercises when things start to go wrong — the cook and others start disappearing.

A local mascot costume Jonas trots out falls into the wrong hands. And yes, the planners themselves join the ranks of the picked-off by a mascot-headed murderer.

An interesting choice in this Patrik Englund adaptation of a Mats Strandberg novel is having the women fight back with vigor, as if it’s their instinct to be on guard all the time against someone meaning them harm. The men? Not so much.

The characters are basically “types,” with Ingela being the boss who doesn’t want anybody questioning anything, accusing the newcomer Nadja (Bahar Pars) of sounding like “the Nuremberg Trials” for demanding details.

Jonas is the BS artist convincing everybody and the town they live in to give in to his bums rush about his Big Deal.

Torbjörn (Claes Hartelius) is the old guy who says “In MY day” more than once, in Swedish.

And Lina is the doubter who starts to see the big picture, if she can just survive long enough to put it all together.

Meanwhile, an unseen nut is hacking, stabbing and outboard motoring the planners to death.

The performances are adequate for the formulaic material, and the killings not as perfunctory as they might have been with victims frantically fighting back and learning about “teamwork” the hard way.

That makes for a Swedish thriller that picks off its characters, “Scream” or “Ten Little Indians” style, but satisfies us along the way, especially in the bang-up bloody finale.

Rating: TV-MA, graphic bloody violence, nudity, profanity

Cast: Katia Winter, Adam Lundgren, Christoffer Nordenrot, Maria Sid, Eva Melander, Amed Bozan, Cecilia Nilsson, Bahar Pars, Claes Hartelius and Lola Zackow.

Credits: Directed by Patrik Englund, scripted by Thomas Moldestad and Patrik Eklund, based on a novel by Mats Strandberg. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:40

Yeah, he plays the father figure to three dorks searching for a treasure. But still, it’s an NBC-U-Peacock project. And he’s in it.

A November 17 release on Peacock.

Amazon is streaming this Deal with the Holiday Devil comedy Dec. 1.

Filmmaker Ashley Avis made a pretty good modern American West version of the classic children’s novel “Black Beauty” for Disney a couple of years back. One thing she figured out adapting Anna Sewell’s novel is that it’s not really a “children’s book” at all, but a plea against the mistreatment of animals.

And another epiphany, shooting her film in and around mustangs of the West, is that all the years of TV news reports and TV magazine features about the Bureao of Land Management’s hand-in-glove-with-Big-Ranch-owners “management” of this symbolic animal of the West, hasn’t stopped the cruel “helicopter roundups.”

Over-“managed” herds are being decimated, with the BLM only fretting over the bad PR of the cynical sale of such horses to Mexican slaughterhouses, all to ensure “privileged” (fat cat) political donors secure all the water and public grazing lands of Arizona and Oregon, Colorado, Montana, North Dakota, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming et al for their herds of sheep and cattle.

So Avis made it her mission to further publicize this inhumane treatment of the Spirit of the West, and this wasteful stealing-in-plain-sight, and brought her filmmaker’s eye to the animals she’s dead set on protecting. “Wild Beauty: Mustang Spirit of the West” is a blunt documentation of the “incompetent” and “conspiratorial” way the BLM and the under-exposed forces of greed go about this dirty business, hiding it from the public eye. And she accomplishes this via a gorgeous appreciation for the animals themselves.

The most famous herds have recognizable “family” members and a hierarchy, and people, including Avis have named the most familiar horses.

The filmmaker documents uneasy encounters with callous BLM underlings and functionaries, catching them in lies, the junk science the BLM uses to explain itself, all the rationalizing and re-rationalizing done in the name of “reducing” the herds to “protect the eco system,” when it’s the damned cattle and sheep who overgraze, foul water supplies and stress or wipe out native grasses and plants.

There’s a hapless BLM PR person who really should get another line of work, but no higher ups and no complicit members of Congress appear here to defend the way they fund BLM, which is only empowered to “manage” the mustangs, not the Big Donor ranchers and their beef-and-mutton-for-export business empires.

Avis interviews scientists, Native American advocates and assorted activists on this issue, from children on up, and notes how “attention” curbs the BLM’s excesses, but not witnessing their horse-injuring-and-killing roundups and penning up just emboldens this taxpayer-money wasting project and assault on “public” natural resources.

And she points her camera, from afar, at one main villian –– Dave Catoor, a man contracted to run the helicopters roundups carry out this Western “wildness” depleting atrocity and feed the horsemeat processing beast.

Yes, it’s a lopsided film. No, the Native arguments that “horses have always been here” and that herds that existed before the last ice age wiped out prehistoric horses in the Americas aren’t backed up by science (“Yet,” Avis suggests).

But there have been decades of reporting on this ill-advised and inhumane waste of a public resource, debunking the BS “overgrazing/starvation of the herds” spin the government and the political lackeys and Big Ranchers have shoveled out there. The junk science and obvious corruption of this has just grown more stark, the outrage more pronounced as bought-and-paid-for politicians and look-the-other-way bureaucrats refuse to honor existing laws or to change BLM practices and fire leaders who resist that.

Avis, who uses “feelings” and equine “family” and “freedom” a lot more than the handful of ranchers she talks to here would have, has made a film renewing this wild mustangs debate, one that uses striking images of beauty and “The Cove” expose style documentation of the cruelty and waste to pound home the point.

We’ve known about this forever. And the fact that nothing’s being done about it boils down to a handful of folks who need to be thwarted from committing these unjust and wasteful actions in our name, mismanaging our land and killing off a symbolic resource just because a few privileged old men want two more dimes to rub together in the pockets of their designer jeans.

Rating: unrated, some disturbing images

Credits: Directed and narrated by Ashley Avis. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:39

Darin Scott directed, co-wrote and cast himself as the pre-Joseph Smith prophet Moroni from Smith’s “Book of Mormon” in a fourth century tale of white chosen people settling Pre-Colombian America, part of Smith’s 19th century religious text and historical thesis.

Smith “translated” this book from buried golden tablets which no else ever saw and which haven’t turned up since.

Of course, these days one must contend with auto-correct computer programs which rewrite “Moroni” as “moronic” (a couple of times as I type this), signifying…nothing, unless Joseph Smith was having people on and winking about it.

Billy Zane is the big name in the cast.

Dec. 8.

My review of “The Oath” is linked here.

A cast of aces, a playful turn by Jamie Foxx, Bill Camp‘s volcanic villainy and the mere presence of Tommy Lee Jones make “The Burial” a courtroom drama well worth your time.

A true-ish account of a battle with everybody’s favorite bad guys — the funeral industry — features Foxx vamping as a theatrical attorney who plays juries like a fiddle and Jurnee Smollett (“Spiderhead,” TV’s “Lovecraft Country”) as his just as Black, just as quick to play the race card foe in a Mississippi contract case that is all about “greed” and predatory business practices in an industry infamous for them.

Foxx is Willie Gary, wildly successful personal injury attorney from that Personal Injury Lawyer Mecca, Florida, a hustler with his eyes on the cash-money prize and an Evangelist’s way with juries — especially juries with lots of Black members.

Jones plays Jeremiah O’Keefe, a Mississippi funeral home and burial insurance business operator in trouble with state regulators (In Mississippi?) for having tried his hand at investments that left him undercapitalized to honor the policies on his books.

He needs to sell part of the business to a Canadian funeral home and burial insurance empire callously run by a bottom-line-boosting tycoon named Ray Loewen (Bill Camp). O’Keefe’s longtime lawyer (Alan Ruck) handles the negotiations, right up to the point where it’s obvious the Canadian will never sign the contract, as he’ll be able to wait out the elderly O’Keefe into bankruptcy and/or death.

A young second-chair attorney (Mamoudou Athie) suggests they sue, and hire this charismatic fellow from Florida to fight the case. Because the suit will be filed in a mostly-Black county in Mississippi, probably tried by a Black judge. And self-made Willie Gary — given to referring to himself in the third person — relates to being Black and coming up hard and poor,a and Black jurors relate to him.

All this is over the objections of O’Keefe’s “let’s settle” lead attorney and O’Keefe’s wife’s (the great character actress Pamela Reed) protest that “old men don’t file lawsuits.”

It’s the OJ/Johnnie Cochrine ’90s, and Gary is “introduced” to his new client via a “Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous” tape. Gary, in all his splendor, humors young Hal Dockins’ (Athie) pitch, as it’s not his area of specialty, and plainly small potatoes.

But there’s Big Money in Death, as we’ve heard Camp’s Loewen chuckling to O’Keefe about the impending demise of 30 million Baby Boomers. This guy’s a bad actor in an industry infamous for them. And he’s worth billions.

Foxx and Smollett have a meet-cute scene pre-trial, each character none-too-subtly suggesting that she or he is more Black and more “street.”

Foxx and Jones play off each other in grand style, the gruff, blunt and unemotional old legend reacting to the charismatic, brash and peacocking younger legend. Foxx makes Willie’s every cocky line crackle with fun.

“You see me fighting a bear? Poor honey on it!”

I got a big kick out of Dorian Missick’s performance as one of Willie’s partners, his second snarky voice in an argument, a hip hop hype man for the boss.

The screenplay by Doug Wright and director Maggie Betts has an “everything in America is about race” subtext, because it is. Even trying a case between two white men in Black Mississippi has that as a flashpoint — lots of flashpoints.

Betts, who did “Novitiate” and further back, “The Carrier,” keeps this all on the “feel good” end of the spectrum and lets Foxx do his thing and everybody else take a shot at stealing this picture from him, and good luck with that.

Yes, it’s fictionalized and yes, it’s got lawyers on one side and funeral tycoons on the other so it’s not easy to root for either.

But “The Burial” makes an entertaining story about standing up to legal mistreatment, sticking up for the Little Man and punching up at predators who never seem to run out of ways to misuse and overcharge the grieving at their most vulnerable.

Rating: R for profanity

Cast: Jamie Foxx, Tommy Lee Jones, Jurnee Smollett, Mamoudou Athie, Pamela Reed, Amanda Warren, Alan Ruck, Dorian Missick and Bill Camp.

Credits: Directed by Maggie Betts, scripted by Doug Wright and Maggie Betters, based on an article by Jonathan Harr. An MGM/Amazon release.

Running time: 2:07

Theater managers I chat with on a regular basis had their fingers crossed and their eyes wide in expectant riches over the big Taylor Swift concert film that they knew was coming.

Fall has been mostly a bust. Advance ticket sales or no, they knew “Eras” was going to be a big deal.

And so it is. Hell’s bells, “Taylor Swift: Eras Tour” the film will clear the $93 million mark and save October at the cinema, according to early numbers from Box Office Pro, Deadline.com and others.

For a two hour and forty eight minute concert film, that’s…epic. Eat your hearts out, Talking Heads.

That’s challenging the “Joker” October box office record ($96+) if it holds, and would be the third biggest opening weekend of the year, after “Barbie” and those “Super Mario Bros.”

Fans are delirious for it, and the reviews have been excellent — if pandering. The lady puts on a good show, and she’s smart to roll this self-financed film out before Beyonce’s concert epic, just in case Queen Bey’s is even better.

A decent Thursday and big Friday had Deadline.com projecting HUGE things, but a $39 million take opening day points and brisk Saturday to a still-big/robust $93 million opening, give or take a million.

Considering how slack things have been this fall, that’s a game saving catch for the footballer-dating pop superstar.

“Exorcist: Believer” is settling into an $11 million second weekend. Pretty steep falloff for a pretty underwhelming reboot.

“Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie” will be just under $6 and close to the $50 million mark by midnight Sunday.

That’ll edge “Saw X” ($5+) which will clear the $40 million mark by Sunday.

And the sci-fi spectacle “The Creator” will pick up another $3 and clear the $30 million mark on its third weekend, making it perhaps the biggest bomb of the fall.

“Desperation Road” is a Southern Gothic tale of blood, family, a debt that may never be repaid and the debtor who is determined to change that.

Actress turned director Nadine Crocker’s cast gets the little things right as their director gets a few big things wrong in this story of small town crime, coincidence and the lingering ripples of a tragedy that throws one and all together in BFE, Mississippi.

The film, producers boast, was shot in a brisk 16 days in which a cast of seasoned pros — Garrett Hedlund, Mel Gibson and Willa Fitgerald of the “Scream” TV series and the new Netflix “House of Usher,” create hard lives they’ve lived, established relationships that we believe on screen and guilt and regrets we buy into.

And Crocker’s leaden, under-edited movie of a Michael Farris Smith novel sleepwalks us through those lives. It’s a slow-moving tragedy that never betrays the frantic pace of the production or gets up to speed at all. As Smith scripted it, did he refuse to slim this narrative down so that it plays in a way that holds our interest? Or does Crocker not get cutting for “pace” yet?

Fitzgerald plays a single mom scraping together enough money for a cheap motel by sex working the truckers who park outside. She’s in her late 20s and the mileage shows, but little Annalee (Pyper Braun) comes first.

A sexual shakedown by a local sheriff’s deputy turns deadly when she refuses to let herself be used by his “friends,” too. That’s when she gets his gun. And that’s when another movie dirty cop breathes his last.

On the lam and armed, a women’s shelter proves little refuge. She ends up carjacking a good’ol boy (Hedlund) at gunpoint.

Russell is fresh out of prison, and his return to town was accompanied by a beating. His dad (Gibson) figures ex-con or no, he needs a hunting rifle for protection. They’re not practical folks in this here corner of Mississippi.

Russell resolves to help this woman, who eventually reveals her name to be Maben.

“You don’t look like a killer to me,” he drawls. Where he’s been, “I seen plenty.”

He’ll have to keep that from his old buddy, Deputy Boyd (Woody McClain), maybe from his widowed Dad and Dad’s girlfriend Conseula (Paulina Gálvez) as well.

And he’ll have to steer even more clear of the vengeful, alcoholic Larry (Ryan Hurst), one of “the brothers” who beat him on his return and who plan to torment him to death, or so we gather.

Every actor in this picture makes the character feel lived in. Look at the way Fitzgerald scoops up young Miss Braun, a maternal connection from both that is credible from the start. Likewise, Gibson and Hedlund click as father and son, and Hurst shades his rage with layers of hurt and regret, a life unended by trauma years before.

But there’s no urgency to any of this. A cop-killer is on the loose, and the investigation isn’t that calling-all-cars/we-avenge-our-own emergency that reality and a hundred years of manhunt/womanhunt movies have taught us to expect. Maben’s in no mad rush to get away, and Russell is pretty laid back about everything he’s mixing himself up in.

That slack pacing gives us time to explore the dimensions of Larry’s pain and Russell’s guilt, but makes the tale’s coincidences stand out and lets impatience settle in.

Taking a pause for a bit of Mel Gibson theology may seem like a good idea.

“I got to believe we can be forgiven.”

And a few big moments happen. But Crocker dallies so much between them that we forget the stakes, as do the characters. “Desperation Road” staggers into “Slightly Inconvenienced Street,” and bores us to tears as it does.

Rating:R for some violence, sexual assault, language throughout, brief sexuality and nudity.

Cast: Garrett Hedlund, Willa Fitzgerald, Ryan Hurst, Woody McClain, Pyper Braun, Paulina Gálvez and Mel Gibson.

Credits: Nadine Crocker, scripted by Micheal Farris Smith. based on his novel. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:52

Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and Blues fan Martin Scorsese must have had fun selecting the string band music, jazz and blues for his long period piece about the nearly erased history of “Killers of the Flower Moon.”

Some of the music is diegetic, played in person or spun on a 78rpm record seen in the scene.

Then there’s this tune Scorsese heard a lot when he helped assemble the classic documentary “Woodstock.”

It’s an old song revived by Canned Heat as a ’60s hippy anthem. Here’s the 1928 version we hear in “Flower Moon.”

The odd lovely moment slips into “Killers of the Flower Moon,” Martin Scorsese’s grim and epic treatment of a systemic mass murder of Osage Indians for oil rights in 1920s Oklahoma. But then, when you’re Martin Scorsese and you put 206 minutes on the screen, something beautiful is sure to get in, if only by accident.

Scorese’s most indulgent film since the bloated gangster epic “The Irishman,” but with echoes of the patience-puncturing “Silence” and “Kundun,” “Flower Moon” is an intimate and detailed immersion in a horrific, slow-motion crime committed by a predatory political boss and his henchmen to manipulate, marry and even murder tribe members on “Indian land” that was rich with Oklahoma Crude.

It is forgotten “erased” history in the American epoch of manifest destiny and unfettered capitalism, and as such, it is designed to frustrate. Who are the “good guys” here? Who do we root for? Is justice coming, or at least comeuppance?

But the frustration extends to the “streaming length” “Netflix editing” of this bloated low-boil movie. Even with his trusty and equally-seasoned editor Thelma Schoonmaker — she, like Scorsese, is over 80 — the director of “Wolf of Wall Street” and the long and breathless “The Departed” turned in a cut nearly three and a half hours long.

Depending on how ruthless you are with repetition, excess coverage, scenes that add “color” but do nothing to advance the plot and indulgent pauses for self-conscious acting mannerisms (Jesse Plemons, take a bow, but blush when you do), this beast is burdened with 45 minutes or as much as 75 of pace-killing, story-deadening filler.

The film begins with a poetic prologue of oil discovery straight out of “The Beverly Hillbillies,” and follows that with a  SECOND prologue of mock (and real) newsreel accounts of the richest people in America in the Jazz Age 1920s, the luxury-car (Pierce Arrow) luxury-goods buying Osage of Oklahoma.

I mean, I LOVE Scorsese. But come on. Choose ONE prologue.

I couldn’t stop thinking “Heaven’s Gate” as this crime-spree-as-saga unfolded, another tale of the unpleasant truth about America and The West. But that, at least, was burnished with the glow of grandeur, gorgeous images and compositions, production design that looked epic and lived-in, even if, like “Flower Moon,” it’s a tale where it’s hard to find somebody to root for.

We meet Ernest Burkhart, in uniform as he steps off the train in Fairfax, Oklahoma shortly after World War I. Played by a paunchy, 1920s dentistry version of Leonardo DiCaprio, Ernest is a man of simple wants and simple skills. He was a cook in the Army and ruptured himself so he can’t do manual labor any more. And “I love money.”

But not to worry, his uncle, the “King of Osage County,” rancher and deputy sheriff William “King” Hale (Robert DeNiro) can hook him up. There’s work, sure. But the money is with the Osage tribe, where the free-spending men are ripe for robbing, and women with a “full blooded stake” in their oil wealth, control of “head rights,” are there for the marrying.

The Osage are dying, and under suspicious circumstances, the viewer learns and Ernest eventually figures out. But not until after he’s met and taken a shine to fair Mollie Kyle. She’s played with a quiet, modest inscrutability by Lily Gladstone of “First Cow” and TV’s “Billions.”

Ernest finds himself smitten and ingratiated into the 25 families of Osage who supposedly hold the power in the place. But he’s also tangled up in his uncle and ruthless brother Byron’s (Scott Shepherd) assorted “jobs” related to procuring “head rights.”

In scene after scene, we see patronizing white banker “guardians” who make Mollie and others identify their status as “incompetent” when coming to them for their cash, unscrupulous doctors who “treat” Native Americans who all die by 50, many much younger, paternal King Hale and workers, servants and others who glower at the money the Osage have “but didn’t ‘earn.'”

Mollie, chatting in Osage about the white WWI veteran’s attention, acknowledges that this “coyote wants money.” “But he wants to be settled,” too. She warms to him.

It’s only after the marriage that we see the degree the Osage have been dehumanized by the racists in charge, and that worries about The Klan getting a foothold there are nothing, because the whole white power structure of the place is into killing Indians for profit.

The story is designed to frustrate because we keep waiting for conversions, characters to grow a conscience, for “The System” to protect victims from predators. Not in the unfettered 1920s, friends.

Tribal elders are at a loss. The days of Indian Wars are long past, they are few in number and now they’re being murdered with “no investigation,” one by one for this wealth they stumbled into.

“We can’t talk to the County” about this, one complains. “We can’t even go to The State of Oklahoma.”

And approaching President Laissez-Faire himself, Calvin Coolidge, seems as futile as it is desperate. But there’s this new tool in the Justice Department, the (Federal) Bureau of Investigation. That’s how ex-Texas Ranger Tom White (Plemens) is brought to town.

The leads are quite good, even if it seems DiCaprio is taking pains to sport the same puffy scowl, first scene to last. Other performances have an untrained-actor documentary reality about them, and some are “Come on, give the poor fellow another take” clumsiness. John Lithgow and Brendan Fraser are brought in for third act legal histrionics.

The music, musician cameos and period details are great, and I loved the way Scorsese stages the “Here’s what happened to everybody” epilogue, as a 1940s radio drama’s closing summation.

But the film is frustrating in unplanned ways, too. He’s made a grossly-under-edited picture too ready for its Apple TV+ afterlife, a drag that becomes an endurance contest without the dramatic flourishes to make anybody want to pause streaming it when they leave the room for a toilet break.

Compare this to Christopher Nolan’s flashy and brisk and quite long “Oppenheimer” and you’ll understand the difference between long and engrossing, and just long and wearing.

As with Cimino’s The West at its Ugliest “Heaven’s Gate,” Scorsese has delivered an ordeal pretty much guaranteed to leave a bad taste in your mouth, one that in this case plays as pedestrian and repetitive, and never feels like an “epic.”

Rating: R for violence, some grisly images, and language

Cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Robert DeNiro, Lily Gladstone, Jesse Plemons,
Tantoo Cardinal, Tatanka Means, Brendan Fraser, Yancy Red Corn, William Belleau and John Lithgow.

Credits: Directed by Martin Scorsese, scripted by Eric Roth and Martin Scorsese, based on the book by David Grann. A Paramount release.

Running time: 3:26