A feel good dramedy on our cinematic horizon starring one of Mexico’s most likeable stars.
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“When Evil Lurks,” the Argentinian horror thriller titled “Cuando acecha la maldad” in Spanish, drops the viewer into a world where “evil” is recognized, accepted and somewhat understood.
Even if the locals in this corner of rural Argentina can’t figure out why they’re dealing with a demonic possession outbreak, as such things are mostly in “the city,” they know “rotten” when they see it, hear it and smell it. They even have “rules” for coping with it.
“Do not use electric lights” (in Spanish with English subtitles) as evil travels “in the shadows” of those. “Do not try to kill them with guns.” “Do not name” this which must not be spoken of,.
You can go to the cops, because in this corner of the world, even the police know what “a rotten” is and what its presence heralds. But they don’t know any more than you do about how to stop what’s happening.
Brothers Pedro and Jimi (Ezequiel Rodríguez and Demián Salomón) hear shots in the dark from their farm. Older and savvier Pedro even identifies the weapon, a pistol. But they don’t go and check it out in the dark. They’re not idiots.
The next day they do, and sure enough, there’s a body. Or half of one. It’s entrails are laid bare, and neither one of them reacts with revulsion, surprise or fear. But Pedro has a suspicion.
Alerting their neighbor (Luis Ziembrowski) to this and visiting a third neighbor only confirms that hunch. There’s a Jabba-bloated, puss-filled man suffering in bed as his hapless mother and sibling fret about what to do, and what not to do.
Telling the cops is standard operating procedure, but pointless. Dashing to Pedro’s ex-wife (Desirée Salgueiro) and new family to get them out of there is futile. A “rotten” has been discovered and not dealt with. The body count has already notched multiple corpses.
Writer-director Demián Rugna, of “Cursed Bastards” and one of the talents behind “Satanic Hispanics,” plops us into this world unprepared, and turns our vague unease into genuine shocks when the violence comes.
His technique is sometimes crude — jumpcuts, sped-up camera effects — because visualizing how someone might kill herself with an ax in a way that doesn’t look faked is a challenge. But it’s a largely effective piece of storytelling as the day after the first night drags onto into a hellish second night where the outbreak spreads, children are involved and an “expert” (Silvia Sabater) may or may not have the answers necessary for fighting this contagion, or even surviving the night.
Rodríguez, in a Hugh Jackman as Wolverine beard, is the driving soul of the piece, showing us a man overmatched, not quite panicking and yet rattled enough to forget the rules, ignore warnings and act on instincts that may let him down in this, the crisis above all crises.
Chilling images — children, gathered and alert at their desks in a pitch-black classroom because they’re either already possessed, or adhering to that “no electric light” dictum — are scattered, and the moments of mayhem are spread a bit thin.
But “When Evil Lurks” is still one of the most original horror films of recent memory and a pretty convincing argument to turn out the lights when you’re not using them, no matter how scary the dark is, especially out in the sticks.
Rating: unrated, graphic, grisly violence
Cast: Ezequiel Rodríguez, Luis Ziembrowski, Demián Salomón, Isabel Quinteros, Desirée Salgueiro and Silvia Sabater
Credits: Scripted and directed by Demián Rugna. An IFC/Shudder release.
The great ones are all raving egomaniacs. Their focus and commitment are next level intense, and that intensity is all focused on them. Their egos are generally unchecked, fame and glory are birthrights, their narcissism a badge of honor.
Being in the presence of the famed swimmer, sportscaster, #MeToo activist so early in the fight she could rename it #MeFirst, Diana Nyad has to be a little like listening to Pavarotti warming up backstage.
“Me me me me me me MEEEEEeee!”
That’s the obnoxious-to-the-point-of-adorable portrait of Nyad that Annette Bening gives us in “Nyad,” a grueling, amusing and eventually inspiring bio-pic about the greatest long distance swimmer of them all, and Nyad’s great white whale — her unshakeable determination to be the first to swim from Cuba to Florida through the treacherous Florida Strait.
“Nyad” blends TV news coverage of the marathon swimmer’s various epic swims and attempts at her longest — the Havana-Key West quest — with sometimes uplifting, sometimes grim childhood flashbacks and fun and fiesty scenes of the unbearable bore she (Bening) is at 60, raging about “mediocrity” and “laziness” and, it is implied, the lack of a spotlight shining on her.
“I don’t believe in imposed limitations,” she sermonizes to her long-suffering friend-not-lover and audience-of-one, Bonnie Stoll (Jodie Foster). Don’t talk about her age. Don’t let her think she’s just another woman over 60, silenced by the culture and left “waiting to die.”
Spurred by a book of poetry she comes across by Mary Oliver, Nyad takes Oliver’s most famous line as a credo, a challenge, a call to (getting her swimmer’s) arms back in shape.
“Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”
Bonnie, an ex-athlete herself , has to listen to this endless monologue of on-the-spectrum narcissism — again, great singers, actors and especially athletes are often like this — and when her closest friend decides to renew her greatest challenge thirty years after her “last swim” attempt to conquer it failed, Bonnie has to be there.
“Free Solo” co-directors Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi transition from documentaries to feature films with a sports bio-pic that checks off many of the genre boxe — the obstacles, moments of truth that will test our plucky and amusingly unbearable heroine, the tragedy that enters the picture, the full “thrill of victory, agony of defeat” experience that Nyad used to chronicle herself during her years with ABC’s “Wide World of Sports.”
The tests of her childhood include abuse, and implied abandonment issues.
Where the filmmakers score is in the casting. Bening, perhaps sensing an Oscar nomination in the role, lets us see her at Nyad at her insufferable worst, and Bening herself at her least glamous no makeup, swimsuited and fit enough but AARP-aged in every moment. Her form in the water is impressive enough for us to make the buy-in, her depiction of Nyad so fearlessly unlikable that you have to wonder if they’re on speaking terms.
Foster’s Bonnie is the audience’s surrogate, the one who endures Nyad’s endless versions of her “You’re named for a water nymph” speech from her adoptive (Greco-Egyptian) dad, who suffers through all the training and attempts Nyad would make in her 60s what she couldn’t manage in her late 20s.
We wait for Bonnie to protest, punch back or just demand that her closest friend dial back her “superiority complex” just a tad. Foster, her luminous screen presence undimmed, makes Bonnie the fabric softener to Bening/Nyad’s abrasive wet wool performance. Loved Bening. Foster is who makes “Nyad” bearable.
Ryhs Ifans comes on as the crusty Florida Keys “navigator,” “The King of the Gulf” who would chart a path and track the shifting currents of the Florida Strait, while others would figure out solutions to the sharks and killer jellyfish that awaited our intrepid swimmer as she tried to put in her 250,000 strokes, covering 103 or so miles, singing pop hits of her youth to herself to pace that voyage.
I kept thinking of that obnoxious Millenial put-down, “Okay, Boomer” during “Nyad,” because living in Florida and having sailed the Florida Strait, one remembers the many attempts, the needy-seeming media attention and maybe even feeling “Oh, give it up, sister” at all the self-aggrandizing hooplah.
And yet, she persisted.
Maybe it’s the ultimate “Boomer” picture. But if you can’t connect to her story or that megaphone Nyad kept raising to her lips as she raged, raged “against the dying of the light,” you will. Just give it time.
Rating: PG-13, peril, some nudity, profanity
Cast: Annette Bening, Jodie Foster and Rhys Ifans.
Credits: Directed by Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, scripted by Julia Cox, based on Diana Nyad’s (4) memoirs and other writings and public pronouncements. A Netflix (theatrical first) release.
Theo Rossi, Kate Moennig and an old favorite, Graham Greene (as a doctor) are also in the cast of this bloody-minded Nov. 3. release.
Here, piggy piggy.
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Slap the words “unsolved crime podcast” and any hoary old “gather all the suspects” whodunit is “fresh” and new? Is that the idea behind “A Deadly Invitation,” titled “Invitación a un Asesinato”(Invitation to an Assasination/Murder) when it was released in Mexico?
This laughably arch and obvious murder mystery is tedium itself, a tale with little wit, no sense of menace, no urgency and little to no mystery about it.
It’s bad, and thanks to an anticlimax or two, the badness just won’t end.
Agatha (Regina Blandón) is a successful podcaster from the big city, summoned to meet her money-marrying estranged sister Olivia (Maribel Verdú) at her clifftop seaside mansion.
Villa Elisa was named for Olivia’s adopted child, who died five years ago. Since then, she’s lost contact with her sister and divorced her latest rich husband (Pedro Damián), but not before making him buy her a yacht. And she’s invited her almost-estranged sister, her ex Carlos, old friend Sonia (Stephanie Cayo), Sonia’s hunky yoga instructor/lover (Aarón Díaz), a young doctor (José María de Tavira) and an actor friend (Manolo Cardona) to a mysterious gathering.
Olivia hints at old grudges and fresh grievances, at motives and messy history in giving her “Why I brought you all here” (in Spanish, or dubbed) speech. There’s a hint of a threat in her suggestion this gathering will be one of discovery.
“You should figure out who should should apologize to, and who you should say goodbye to,” she advises.
We know, the moment we meet her, that golddigging Olivia won’t last the night. When the cops are called about her “murder, accident or suicide,” there’s bickering over jurisdiction and a local cell service outage that forces the captain to go back to the office.
That leaves impressionable Lt. Julian (Juan Pablo de Santiago) in charge, all by himself. As he’s a fanboy, he enlists podcaster Agatha to solve this mystery, to help interrogate one and all, to literally sniff around when and find secret passages and secret motives and old rivalries and blood grudges that might drive one or more of the “suspects,” who include not just guests but staff.
The script is so half-assed that the cell service issue is abandoned to expedite Agatha’s mystery-solving. Her producer (Mariana Cabrera) is so helpful, sent details to nail down back in the city, she should crack the case herself.
Gadgets and secret associations described in flashback don’t do a damned thing to throw the viewer off our initial thoughts about the death, and who exactly benefits from it and might have further motives to harm others.
This isn’t a “They die, one by one” thriller, which would have raised the laughably low stakes. There’s no suspense. The clues aren’t much of anything even a sharp-eyed viewer would pick up on, because most of them are off-camera complications.
The script, based on a Carmen Posadas novel, doesn’t play fair and doesn’t play smart. The light touches land like rotten tomatillos.
“Knives Out” revived this genre with wit and panache, and Kenneth Branagh reminded us of the many dated pleasures in the works of Dame Agatha, even when the mystery isn’t as mysterious as you might like.
“A Deadly Invitation” is as dumb and dull and creaky as the drawing room mysteries of old, a film that started life with little promise and never fails to live down to that.
Cast: Regina Blandón, Pedro Damián, Aarón Díaz, Stephanie Cayo, Manolo Cardona, José María de Tavira, Helena Rojo, Juan Pablo de Santiago, Mariana Cabrera, Juan Manuel Pernas and Maribel Verdú
Credits: Directed by J.M Cravioto, scripted by Javier Durán Pérez and Anton Goenechea, based on a novel by Carmen Posadas. A Netflix release.
The first rule a Western fan applies to any modern take on the genre is the eyeball test.
“Butcher’s Crossing,” a lean, gritty parable about shortsighted greed and environmental destruction, looks right. Not original “True Grit” celluloid cinematic, but “Lonesome Dove” authentic, with sweeping vistas, herds of buffalo and a star — Nicolas Cage –– who looks at home in the saddle and scary in his mania for bison hides.
Director and co-writer Gabe Polsky (“The Motel Life”), adapting a John Williams novel, gets good value from his lead, his supporting players and his Montana locations in a film that makes up for its somber pacing and downbeat subject with its fascination for details.
Fred Hechinger of Netflix’s “Fear Street” movies stars as Will, a Unitarian pastor’s son and Harvard boy from “back East” who quit school in search of “stronger purpose and meaning in my life.” The greenhorn has made his way West, to Butcher’s Crossing, Kansas.
It’s 1874, and for a naive lad with designs on “seeing the country” and experiencing the Frontier, he’s found it. Butcher’s Crossing is where the buffalo hunters roam.
Will looks for guidance from a man his preacher-father once took in. But McDonald (Paul Raci, irrascible and fun), who trades in buffalo skins to be turned into the warmest fur coats of their era, is full of warnings and depradations. No, boy, you DON’T want to go hunting.
“It’ll ruin you. It’ll get in you.”
That Miller fellow (Cage) down at the saloon fits the iconic image of a buffalo hunter. Bearded and broad, bald and wrapped in a buffalo robe, he’s as dismissive as McDonald was cautionary.
“Ain’y no ‘tours’ around here.” But if the lad would care to underwrite an outing, the somewhat disreputable Miller knows of a valley where the herd hasn’t been thinned, way off in Colorado.
Finding men to ride with them isn’t all that hard. Old cookie Charlie (veteran character player Xander Berkeley, instantly credible) is Miller’s superstitious, tippling sidekick, ready to drive the wagon. The skinner Fred (Jeremy Bobb of TV’s “Russian Doll” and “Godless”) is another matter. He’s a skeptic.
Miller, it seems, is a big talker whom some have taken for a crank. Chatty, bickering Fred will take a flat fee, thanks. None of this “share the take” risk for him.
They set off through “Indian country” to find the mother lode of buffalo herds. And once there, Will starts to figure out what McDonald’s warnings and Fred’s doubts were about.
The script leans into some tropes of the genre — Will’s pursuit by the saloon’s resident sex worker (Rachel Keller) and dodges others. “Indian country” isn’t particularly perilous.
Cage doesn’t go full NIC CAGE in this role, playing a man more interested in a bragging-rights take to silence his doubters back in Butcher’s Crossing than in settling some darker psychic score. The threat of violence is more subtle, Miller’s monomania is expressed in smaller, meaner ways — refusing to help a stranded widow and her two boys who lost their wagon train.
Polsky focuses on the how-to’s of buffalo hunting as we watch Miller shave his head, load his own rounds and lay out the ways to pick off the herd without scattering it. It’s heartless work, and to Will, starts to seem heedless.
“We’ve got enough,” he insists. “No sense shooting more than we can skin.”
Some old fashioned Cage mania might be appropriate here. Perhaps the John Wayne as Ethan Edwards rationalization from “The Searchers” — killing buffalo to starve out the Natives — might have given this unslakeable thirst for wiping a herd out more meaning.
Bobb adds value as the voice of experience and doubt. Berkeley’s superstitious Charlie gives us just enough (barely) of a “deliver us from evil” message. And Hechinger’s journey from naive to experienced enough to have doubts is adequate, if little more.
But the big setting, big themes and big star’s subtle turn as a blowhard more misguided than manic are enough to put this Western over.
What few real tests the young man from Back East must face, the picture about his coming of age passes the most important. It looks and feels right, with buffal-in-their-element scenes that don’t have the scale of “Dances With Wolves,” but play big enough to make the parable’s point land and land hard.
Rating: R for language, some violence/bloody images and brief sexual content
Cast: Nicolas Cage, Fred Hechinger, Jeremy Bobb, Rachel Keller, Xander Berkeley and Paul Raci
Credits: Directed by Gabe Polsky, scripted by Gabe Polsky and Liam Satre-Meloy, based on a John Williams novel. A Saban Films release.
Old World War II films that age well tend to have an artist behind the camera and eschew patriotic cheerleading for a weary “war is futile” but “fascism must be stopped” messaging.
Carol Reed’s “The Key” brings the cynicism of William Holden to a stiff-upper-lip/”Every man must do his duty” British WWII drama, and Sophia Loren arrives to give it a hint of sex, of a woman being “passed down” from man to man, and a romance with a whiff of the supernatural about it.
Reed made the most cynical post-war film of them all, “The Third Man,” and here tells a compact story of less glamorous but grim and deadly stakes, a tale of the ocean-going tugs sent to help ships attacked by U-Boats in British waters.
Blending lots of ship-at-sea footage and a few reasonably convincing models for the rescue/combat sequences with a fatalistic love story, and built on outstanding performances by Trevor Howard, Kieron Moore, Noel Purcell and Oscar Homolka in support, it’s a damned entertaining yarn and beautiful to look at to boot.
Holden plays Captain David Ross, an American who enlisted and became a sergeant in the Canadian Army at the outbreak of war. Now it’s 1940 about to turn ’41 and he’s been re-assigned to duty doing what he did years before — skippering a tugboat.
Howard’s Capt. Chris Ford is a grizzled old salt at the tugboat trade, and a hail-fellow ex-shipmate, ready with a dozen wisecracks about his old friend’s new gig.
“You’ve heard of ‘Lend Lease?’ They sent him.”
Capt. Ford takes new Capt. Ross out at the behest of the commanding officer (Bernard Lee, just a couple of years shy of becoming James Bond’s boss) and shows him the ropes of this dangerous duty — burning or sinking munitions ships and the like, U-Boats even more deadly on the surface than underwater, at least to the outgunned tugboats.
And when they finish the day with drinks at the pub and the camaraderie of his flat, complete with beautiful lady love Stella (Loren), Ford has some explaining to do to Ross.
Stella wears a wedding ring. She has a lovingly-signed photo of another skipper on her mantle. And that better-fitting jacket she passes on to new guy Ross has yet another name stitched in the lining.
In the crudest terms, Stella “comes with the flat,” even though Ford goes out of his way to avoid saying it. And he’s hasty to offer a key that flat to Ross. Apparently, one of her now-dead former flatmates started that tradition, a way of looking out for Stella, ensuring her a place to live and well…
“Make me a promise right now,” the not-so-old-salt insists. “The moment you use (the key) it, if you ever have to, (promise) that you’ll get another one made. And you’ll give it to someone, someone on the tugs.”
Keep things in “the family,” as it were.
Stella is a passive figure in all this. Still, she loves Chris and agrees to marry him. But Stella has premonitions. All it takes is a joking spilling of the wine all over his shirt — “Look, I’m wounded!” — for her to know his number’s up.
How will the American handle this responsibility, now that it’s fallen to him? How will he accept his “duty” and hers, and the notion that she’s “bad luck” thanks to her premonitions?
It’s Bill Holden playing the guy, remember. “Bridge over the River Kwai/Stalag 17” Bill Holden. He’ll handle it with that trademark American cynical skepticism, of course.
The combat scenes aren’t heroic, just frustrating as the dated and small-caliber firepower provided to tugs wasn’t enough to defend themselves. A good day is weaving about, reversing and turning, escaping destruction and getting a hearty handshake from whatever freighter captain they’ve rescued and towed to port. A bad day is not coming home yourself.
Holden and Loren are OK in the romantic scenes, little more. It’s the action, the fatalism, Reed’s attention to the details of this sort of work at sea and the men among men relationships that stands out.
Moore gives a fine edge to Ford’s first mate, who resents the American interloper. Lee is unflappable and droll, practically auditioning for Bond’s “M” here. And the veteran character actor Homolka shows what he can do with a meaty role as a pious, professional and helpful Dutch skipper who splits shifts captaining the W-86 tug with Ross. He makes short briefings on seamanship and lectures on sobriety and avoiding loose women entertaining, realistic and compassionate.
Capt. Van Dam owns this tug. He wants it to survive the war.
Reed manages some splendid black and white compositions reminiscent of “The Third Man” — a train departing in steam and twilight — and oversees magnificently-edited action beats.
It’s not quite “Kwai” in “prestige picture” polish. But “The Key” is damned good, and a terrific addition to your “Victory at Sea” World War II drama bucket list.
Cast: Willian Holden, Sophia Loren, Trevor Howard, Bernard Lee, Kieron Moore, Bryan Forbes, Noel Purcell and Oscar Homolka.
Credits: Directed by Carol Reed, scripted by Carl Foreman, based on a novel by Jan Hartog. A Columbia release on Tubi, Amazon, Youtube etc.
Running time: 2:06
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