Movie Nation

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

You can’t really call it a preview when it’s the night before opening. But I missed it on the festival circuit and had to see it in a theater, no matter what my kidneys might say.

Three hours and 24 minutes of erased American history. Here we go.

The Czech and Slovak joint production “Nightsiren” is a witchy tale about superstition, ritual and the function of witchcraft in an age-old patriarchy.

Director and co-writer Tereza Nvotová has conjured up an obscure, opaque thriller of symbolism and violence, old grudges and dots that don’t quite connect. When the events of this film cross that fateful date, “midsummer,” we have our easiest, most apt analogy for it.

It’s a slightly dumber “Midsommar.”

Years ago, a girl fled her brutal, widowed mother and in so doing caused the death of her little sister. Twenty years later, Sarlota (Natalia Germani) returns with her backpack, some supplies, a big wound she’s treating, psychic scars she’s ignoring and a guilty conscience she’s not quite reconciled.

Local yahoos on ATVs accost her as she rummages through a building on her mother’s old property.

“The witch dropped a tree on the last person who stayed here,” they warn (in Slovak with English subtitles).

But the armed tough guys are a little rattled with she tells them her name. Her mother was the one they called “the witch.” The place is cursed.

For real answers about this unfriendly village and what’s going on here Sarlota turns to one seemingly sympathetic older woman, and to the free spirit Mira (Eva Mores).

But even Mira can’t tell her what happened to this “wild child” her mother kept around after Sarlota fled. Might that be the sister she’s long believed died? And as we’ve seen the same body at the bottom of a cliff that Sarlota has, we wonder “Was it witchcraft that brought that wild child back?”

Actress turned director Nvotová’s film has a dreamlike quality to its folklore and a grim women-in-a-man’s-world reality to the daily indignities and violence the women in this village endure.

Some seasonal ritual has the menfolk dunking every woman they can get their hands on in water. Sarlota isn’t having it.

Every time it seems she might be fitting back in where she grew up, something about livestock or the local children comes up to shine suspicion on her anew.

Nvotová — “Filthy” was her debut feature — goes for tone more than linear coherence in this somewhat slow sex and superstition and gender-politics tale. Situations aren’t explained, various aspects of Sarlota’s physical state hinted at with contradictory explanations.

And just when you let the “witch” thing slip to the back of your mind as the film plods forward, here’s a moment where one suspected witch must strip and another where Sarlota finds herself stumbling into a witches’ orgy in the woods, nude bodies cavorting about a bonfire.

“Nightsiren” is too ponderous and self-serious to ever earn the label “exploitation,” but with all the nudity, sex and sexual violence in a somewhat less than it seems story, that’s where it belongs.

That laborious “chapter” heading editing and organizing principle (faddish screenwriters everywhere do this) is trotted out. And while the picture reaches a climax and wanders into an ending, there’s not much pace or ugency to any of it.

Even connecting with our heroine seems a stretch, despite her and Mira standing up to the child beating-spouse-abusing locals. Germani’s performance has purpose, but no pathos.

It holds one’s interest, if only to make the viewer wonder if this connection to that new state of affairs will ever be expained, or if more semi-gratuitous nudity will pop up between the bonfires, campfires and housefires that are what stick in the mind’s eye about “Nightsiren.”

Rating: unrated, lots of violence, nudity

Cast: Natalia Germani, Eva Mores, Juliana Olhová, Marek Geisberg, Jana Olhová and Noel Czuczor

Credits: Directed by Tereza Nvotová, scripted by Barbora Namerova and Tereza Nvotová. A Breaking Glass release.

Running time: 1:47

“Open” is an “open marriage melodrama complete with “rules” that are broken, celebrity, an unplanned pregnancy and stalking.

But the hook here is that writer, director and co-star Miles Doleac imagines our heroine, played by his wife and co-star Lindsay Anne Williams, dreaming about the principals in this messy menage as members of a band, with all of them in ’80s bandwear and her the most dolled-up of all.

“I’m open for anything,” our rocker-in-her-dreams croons, “except pain.” Later, she changes her tune.

“This isn’t what I thought it would be.”

And “The truth will set you free,” she goes on. “Truth, you mother-f—-r.”

The Boss couldn’t have put it better.

It’s pretty bad, a listless, no-energy quickie about Kristina and Robert (Williams and Doleac), months into their trial co-habitation separation (“Swingers,” somebody jokes. But “swingers” have more fun than this.). She dates a fading TV star Erik LaRue (Jeremy London, who did years on TV’s “I’ll Fly Away”), ends up getting tipsy and breaks the “no sleep-overs” rule she and Robert had.

As first Erik and then Kristina try to break it off, things turn stalky, acting teacher Robert, friends (Elena Sanchez, Amber Reign Smith) become more than bystanders and a policeman relative of one friend (William Forsythe) gets involved.

And every so often, there’s another song, or bickering in the band as Erik and others get added to its lineup. Again, all that is in Kristina’s dreams.

The songs aren’t that good, but they fall well short of terrible. The acting is more indifferent than bad, the direction lackluster and the scripted proceedings are cheesy enough to earn a National Dairy Council seal of approval. And that’s case closed on “Open.”

Rating: unrated, nudity, some violence, profanity

Cast: Lindsay Anne Williams, Jeremy London, Miles Doleac, Amber Reign Smith, Elena Sanchez and William Forsythe.

Credits:Directed by Miles Doleac, scripted by Miles Doleac and Lindsay Anne Williams. A Virgil Films release.

Running time: 1:58

I counted one legit laugh in the Danish pregnancy comedy “Maybe Baby (Bytte bytte baby),” a film about two couples of differing ages experiencing the (scientific) miracle of childbirth.

They have a joint baby shower, and the holisitic “hippy” couple’s mom brings just what you’d expect — a cake shaped like a vagina. Vagina cakes always crack me up.

This blandly predictable difficult pregnancies comedy’s one wrinkle is having the pricey, busy and carely private in vitro clinic that hard-driving, demanding lawyer Cecile (Mille Dinesen, fierce and kind of funny) and her husband Andreas (Lars Ranthe) visit as a last resort mix up her fertilized egg with that of younger, closer-to-broke Liv (Katinka Lærke Petersen) and partner Malte (Kasper Dalsgaard).

As the fertility specialist (Thomas Bo Larsen of “Another Round”) is prone to implanting eggs and telling the biological father “We finished without you. I’m almost like a stepdad!” we can see how that might happen.

Fine. Fine. Just bring your babies to term and swap them, right?

But short tempered Cecile is ready with a writ, actually a contract, to make sure that happens. And laid-back Liebraumilch drinking Liv — Ms. “A Little Wine Can’t Hurt” — isn’t sure about that, as she expends to bond with this child growing inside her,

Cecile? “I refuse to have their hippie baby!” (in Danish with English subtitles).

Each must bend to the other’s preferred way of approaching pregnancy to mimic the experience the child will be brought up in.

Dinesen (“Hold My Hand”) is the only one who reaches for laughs here, although Larsen sneaks in a lighter touch. Everybody else plays this fairly straight, and dull.

Nothing particularly original or hilarious spins out of this Pia Konstantin Berg screenplay. Cecile’s sexist “I would have like to have gotten a head’s up” boss is predictably unsupportive.

But as the mothers fight over holistic, laid back, “no meat,” herbal this and “natural” that vs. Cecile’s “no cats — litterbox germs…No wine!” and “My baby needs MEAT,” the film lapses into that just-as-sexist menfolk are the reasonable ones ytp[, with Andreas consoling Cecile, accomodating Liv and Malte and Malte protesting how Liv is leaving him out of the decision-making process.

Even in enlightened Scandinavia, old movie comedy tropes die hard.

Rating: TV-MA, explicit sex, profanity, alcohol

Cast: Mille Dinesen, Katinka Lærke Petersen, Kasper Dalsgaard, Lars Ranthe and Thomas Bo Larsen

Credits: Directed by Barbara Topsøe-Rothenborg, scripted by Pia Konstantin Berg. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:44

A chauffeuring courtship scene involving DiCaprio and Gladstone, as the oil-rich young Osage woman Mollie.

I do love me a good period piece and a Scorsese epic.