Movie Nation

Yorgos Lanthimos strikes again? “A woman plotting her course to freedom!”

Jane Fonda wasn’t the star attraction, or even the prettiest actress on the screen in her third film, 1962’s “Walk on the Wild Side.”

The regal French beauty Capucine was higher billed. The versatile Anne Baxter and earth mama Joanna Moore were also on board, after all.

But try and take your eyes off Fonda in this melodramatic but rarely sentimental Great Depression tale of women, a Big Easy brothel and the innocent young man from Texas who doesn’t realize what his long lost love has been up to in the years since they parted.

Fonda pretty much steals the picture as Kitty Twist from Paducah, raw and broke and hungry and on the road until she makes her way to New Orleans where she’ll prove “a gal’s always…got other things she can use” to make a buck.

Barbara Stanwyck plays the madam of The Doll House brothel, so there’ll be no “stealing from the house” and no scene stealing on her watch, thank you very much.

Laurence Harvey has one of his better roles as lean, 30ish Dove Linkhorn, who just buried his daddy on the small family ranch outside of Arroyo, Texas. He meets the fiesty, amoral and light-fingered Kitty, who meets Dove on the tramp, hitchhiking and hoboing his way across Depression Era Texas for New Orleans.

Kitty takes Mr. “greenhorn” under her wing, jumping trains and showing a little leg to help with the hitchhiking.

“What’d you tell’em?” Dove wants to know about a compliant trucker.

“Never mind. Just cough now and then like you’re dying.”

Legend has it that Ben Hecht contributed to this screenplay. A safe bet would be that he wrote most of Hank Fonda’s daughter’s lines. Fonda lands the punch line like a pro.

“Talkers ain’t never cute, and the cute ones never talk.”

Dove is on his way to find a long-lost summer love, Hallie. But events conspire to sideline him at Teresina’s Cafe (Anne Baxter slinging the chicharrones and an accent) Cafe, for a bit. The utterly opportunistic Kitty goes her own way, for a while. And we miss her.

Turns out Hallie (Capucine, of “The Pink Panther”), an aspiring artist, lives and works in The Doll House. She’s in demand, which gives her throw weight about Madam Jo (Stanwyck) and her muscle, the sadistic Oliver (Richard Rust). She’ll need that pull when Dove finds her and tries to, as the cliche goes, take her away from all this.

The film, adapted from a Nelson Algren novel — he wrote the dope thriller “Man with the Golden Arm” — plays on screen likeTennessee Williams Lite, from its sordid New Orleans setting to the Big Themes of naive optimism struggling against cruel reality.

The abusive pimp puts on gloves before slapping around simple Georgia girl Precious (Moore, who gained a measure of immortality from a four episode arc on “The Andy Griffith Show,” of all things).

Ken Lynch, who played a lot of cops and heavies over the years, plays the city-hall-connected “friend” of the bordello, and a big fan of Hallie.

And Okie-lean John Anderson plays a judgmental, fire and brimstone street preacher who meets his match when he calls Hallie “harlot.”

“You’re no friend to God or man,” Dove barks, “standing there, hollering hate to the world. God is love. God is mercy and forgiveness! Try preaching that sometimes, Mister Preacher!”

Pretty topical, even today. And that’s an accurate taste of the South of that time, too. Every person you confront was liable to come back at you, and hot, with her or his own interpretations of Christiianity. I’ve seen it and it’s a wonder to behold.

But this movie is Jane Fonda’s “a star is born” moment. Stanwyck is fierce in her best scenes, a matriarch growing into her tough broad middle age. But Fonda lets us see Kitty working it, scheming it, sassing it, facing Terasina-might-steal-her-man-with-warmth with spit and a little xenophobia

“Tortillas? Chicharrones?”

“I hope it’s easier to eat than pronounce.”

It not as “Wild” as all that. It might be — OK it definietly is — Tennessee Williams Lite. But “Walk on the Wild Side” grabs its Southern sin and sadism cliches, its good-girl-gone wrong (NOT Kitty, oh no.) tropes and takes them for a spin. And in the hands of a pretty good director (Edward “Crossfire” Dymtryk) and a good cast including a future two-time Oscar winner, it more wild than mild, and that’ll do.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, sexual (bordello) setting

Cast: Laurence Harvey, Capucine, Jane Fonda, Anne Baxter, Richard Rust, Karl Swenson and John Anderson.

Credits: Directed by Edward Dymytck, scripted by John Fante and Edmund Morris (with Raphael Hayes and Ben Hecht), based on a Nelson Algren novel. A Columbia release on Tubi, Amazon, Youtube etc.

Running time: 1:53

It sometimes seemed, in the long years of trials, deflections and evasions that comprised the last days of Chile’s murderous looter and dictator Augusto Pinochet, that the monstrous bastard would never die.

A “normalized” and “accepted” despot with a tidier media image in the U.S. and the UK than his true peers, Marcos, Franco, various Duvaliers and Battista, he must have seemed like a vampire as he evaded accountability for his coup, his crimes and his amassed stolen fortune.

Certainly Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larrain must have thought so. The director of “Jackie,” “Neruda” and “Spencer” branches out from revealing bio-pics for “El Conde,” an often beautiful but always dry and slow motion black and white tirade about the fascist dictator he and his countrymen grew up under.

“El Conde” — the title was from the “Captain General’s” preferred mode of address “in private,” “the Count” (Maybe he WAS a vampire!)– sets up as a “Death and the Maiden” reckoning for an evil-doer, an “Interview with the Vampire” interrogation for an old immortal who has faked his death as he murdered his way from 18th century France to Russia, Haiti, Algeria and Chile. It plays out as somewhat less focused than that, and a lot more frustrating.

Pinochet’s great hidden wealth seems lost. His five reviled, avaricious children join him and his “dwarvish, hateful” wife Lucia (Catalina Guerra) on an island estate, presided over by the vampire’s aide de camp, the “White Russian” Fyodor (Alfredo Castro), “a Cossack forged from vodka and steel,” as El Conde (Jaime Vadell) waits for help doing something he’s avoided for centuries — dying.

His friends at the Catholic church provide him with a winsome young nun (Paula Luchsinger) to research his financials and “exorcise” him so that he can at long last die.

She smiles coyly and speaks to him in French, “the language of treason,” he calls it, from his days in Revolutionary France. Sister Carmen asks him about “the murder and disappearance of thousands of children” between queries about looted money and assetts hidden in plain sight in Britain, the U.S., and elsehwere, “sales” of Chile’s industry and patrimony to him or his vile (but not vampire) offspring.

And as The Count and his wife swan about in minks, the young nun prays and prepares to chase away the demon so that the hijo de puta can be removed from the human race.

Larrain’s film, mostly in Spanish but endlessly-narrated in British English, has lovely images from the moors and tundra of Chila, and the flying sequences here as the Count and his bitten minions set out “hunting” are almost breathtaking.

Great conceit, seeing the always caped and military-capped Captain General as Dracula in a military uniform.

But the middle acts are consumed with laundry lists of Pinochet and his (sometimes foreign) enabler’s sins, crimes for which Larrain has much zeal for bringing up and none for resolving.

The endless narration is mostly here for layering insults on everyone attached to Pinochet, for explaining and over-explaining the exposition that never seems to end. Once we’ve gotten the “joke,” that the vampire was born in France and used to lick the guillotine after executions during the Revolution and ended his days as a blood-thirsty fascist dictator, focusing on what is known about his regime and pecadillos by showing us is always better than having a narrator explain it.

Yes waiting around to see who that Brit-accented narrator is worth one’s while. But Larrain’s polemic, giving us bare glimpses of the man’s crimes and wallowing in whether this blood or that heart is “old” or “young” and thus more nutricious for vampires adds nothing to the experience.

Larrain takes Netflix money to ensure “El Conde” has striking images, but no tasty “acting” moments. It’s an allegory that works but never quite scores a knock-out blow and a satiric thriller that manages a lot of still-angry name-calling but little sense that this will ever be enough.

Rating: R, violence, sex

Cast: Jaime Vadell, Catalina Guerra, Paula Luchsinger and Alfredo Castro

Cast: Directed by Pablo Larrain, scripted by Guillermo Calderón and Pablo Larrain. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:51

It’s hard to work up much enthusiasm — or any at all — for “Little Jar,” a limited-cast/couple of settings COVID comedy that comes too late to cash in on “Look at the movie they got made despite restrictions” and far too soon to tap into COVID lockdown nostalgia.

It’s a “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On” without the wit or charm, tracking the ways an obsessive-compulsive loner (Kelsey Gunn, no, not related to James, near as I can tell) goes nuts when she’s trapped at home with no phone, wifi or for some reason, TV.

Gunn plays Ainsley, a cubicle inmate who can never have too little “face to face” time with her annoying colleagues, and never too much “personal space.”

“I just don’t like people,” she admits, and we get it. So does her brother. When the COVID lockdown kicks in and she’s sent home to her house in the woods for “two weeks,” he (Jon Snow) phones her with a “This is really working out for you, huh sis?”

Groceries delivered by a handsome but far-too-chatty Marvin (Nicholas Anthony Reid), endless hours to do her compulsive cleaning, meticulous button replacement on garments and the like. A little “if I got out without a mask on I’ll die” paranoia seems like a fair tradeoff.

And then her phone and wifi service goes out and Ainsley is all alone. Don’t even THINK about visiting the coughing neighbor. Finding a dead mouse just tops it.

But when she hesitages to send the corpse down the garbage disposal we wonder. When she dresses it up, gives it pins for eyes and a nose and names it “Ulysees” because she’s tackling James Joyce, we wonder more.

And when she starts having conversations with it, making it tiny furniture, framed photos and outfits, when it starts showing up places she didn’t “put” him, and when a well-dressed lady-mouse (also “stuffed”) starts keeping his company, we know she’s lost it.

Whatever potential this material might have had is frittered away in a script that doesn’t play or read as funny and direction that can’t help that.

Ms. Gunn mugs a bit and isn’t so much bad as not colorful enough to pull off what is almost a one-woman show. Movies that fail are rarely the fault of the actors. Unless they co-write the mostly charmless script.

Rating:unrated, a little profanity

Cast: Kelsey Gunn, Nicholas Anthony Reid, Jon Snow

Credits: Directed by Dominic López, scripted by Kelsey Gunn and Dominic López. A Good Deeds Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:30

Reshoots, delays, less Amber Heard, maybe no Aquaman at all in James Gunn’s vision for DC comics movies down the road. In any event, here’s the sequel now slated for a few days just before Christmas.

This Rodrigo Moreno thriller opens in late October in New York and LA and stars Daniel Eliás and Esteban Bigliardi as an Argentinian bank employee who does the crime and confesses to do the time, and the pal he stashes the loot with.

Es una pelicula muy larga. Damned long. Three hours? Aye caramba. But it looks good, oh yes.

When streaming was still new, I had a notion that it might be the perfect place for movies and filmmakers who’d rarely fill-four-corners of a theater with their work, the creators of romances, dramas and thrillers on a smaller scale.

Who’d have figured that sci-fi, comic-book content and streaming “blockbusters” would take up as much bandwidth as they have?

“Flora and Son” is the latest from the musically-romantic Dubliner John Carney, who gave us the Oscar winning “Once,” then “Begin Again” and “Sing Street.” It’s an adorable small-scale romance with music, a film that’s perfect for a short theatrical run and a good reason to sign up for Apple TV+, where it will stream afterward.

It’s a tale set in Dublin and LA’s Topanga Canyon, a digital-age tale of connection through Facetime and music and a single-mom growing up at about the same time as her 14 year-old son. It’s adorable.

Eve Hewson of “Tesla,” “Bridge of Spies” and the “Papillon” remake has the title role, a too-sexy-for-her-own-good 30 year-old still hitting the clubs, drinking too much and bringing guys home. When they wake up/sober up and realize she has a 14 year-old son?

“You said you were ‘COOL’ with it” is all she can get out and the race to the door.

She and son Max (Orén Kinlan of “Sunlight”) fight like a doomed couple heading for divorce, cutting cursed insults that aren’t a sign of love, but deep dysfunction. Flora scrapes together enough money to house them and keep herself in smokes and wine through childcare and waitressing jobs.

The kid? He’s a burden, the abortion her friends couldn’t warn her into getting at 17. His acting-out includes a lot of petty theft and a “one more time” and you’re in juvenile detention lecture from the Garda (police youth liaison officer) who never calls Flora out for her partial blame in all this.

“Sometimes I’d like to come home and he just wasn’t there,” she tells her classmate (Marcella Plunkett) who got around to having a baby much later. That’s enough to make Aisling call her the same name her ex (Jack Reynor) uses.

“Psycho.”

She even forgets her own son’s birthday. Spying a guitar in a dumpster, she gets it repaired and gives it to him, but he’s not biting. Oh well. Maybe the ex-wife of a formerly-promising bass player can pick it up, “commit” to something for once in her life and learn to play well enough to write her own songs.

There are tons of tuturoials for aspiring musicians (and pretty much anything else) on Youtube these days. After rejecting the “posers” and not-very-good teachers, she latches onto Jeff. Sure, for $20 a week, she’ll give him a try.

Hewson brings an earthy, overripe vitality and Irish outspokenness to Flora. Joseph Gordon-Levitt becomes the living embodiment of the soulful, sensitive West Coast singer-songwriter.

He comes on all mellow, laid-back and catering to her needs, wondering “What do you hope to get out of this?” She’s evasive, maybe wanting to be taken seriously, possibly wanting to “win my ex back,” perhaps envisioning a better pool of men becoming available in a pursuit she’s always seen as “just sexy.” And she’s not having any LA airs from Jeff, thank you.

“Yer teachin’ guitar online, luv.”

And “you’re…Irish,” is the best he’s got for a comeback.

Carney’s great-gift as a filmmaker is bringing heart to musical moments of creation. Jeff sings a song he’s written as a country boot-shuffle, then again as an introspective ballad, and Flora, like the viewer, is taken aback and moved. To top that, he covers “I Get Along Without You Very Well,” which stuns Florda, who doesn’t recognize it as being an American Songbook standard by Hoagy Carmichael.

When he gives her homework, and it’s Joni Mitchell singing “Both Sides Now,” she is touched by the on-the-nose expression of her mental state, and the simple profundity a great tune like that or “I Get Along Without You” shares, that “three and a half minute pause in time” is how Jeff puts.

The “lessons” scenes have Flora envisioning this romance novel/Hallmark Channel romantic ideal at the same kitchen table with her, in the same park where she Zooms one lesson, or on the rooftop of her grim Dublin flat. They’re magical and give one a new appreciation for a filmmaker who is able to create that, seemingly at will.

“Flora and Son” is about music’s impact on Flora and her aspiring rapper son, their discovering their first real connection, about him facing the music of his choices and her facing the arrested development that her narcissism betrays. .

And it’s all set in post-card pretty or inner-city grey Dublin, from Griffith Park to Temple Bar. If that isn’t what movie streaming was invented for, I don’t know what was.

Rating: R for profanity, sexual references and brief drug use

Cast: Eve Hewson, Orén Kinlan, Jack Reynor, Marcella Plunkett and Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

Credits: Scripted and directed by John Carney. An Apple release, in theaters Sept. 22, then moving to Apple TV+.

Running time: 1:37

It takes a good 70 minutes for Danish filmmaker Bille August’s period piece “Ehrengard: The Art of Seduction,” to get through its talk-talk-talk opening acts, on its feet and find its fun and its purpose. It’s a 94 minute film, so you see the problem in that.

While it’s grand that Netflix provides work for the esteemed director of “Pelle the Conqueror, “House of the Spirits” and “Night Train to Lisbon,” this adaptation of a Karen Blixen novel (“Our of Africa” was hers), sort of a Danish take on “Dangerous Liaisons,” doesn’t quite pay off. But it comes close.

It’s a gorgeously set and costumed early 19th century tale of royal succession and birth lines in an imaginary duchy, where a seductive painter finds himself commissioned not just for portraits, but to arrange palace intrigues so that a royal heir can be provided.

Cazotte, played by Mikkel Boe Følsgaard (“Land of Mine”) at his most dashing, is a rakish portrait painter to the great royals of Europe. He’s brazen enough to flirt with those sitting as his subjects. The Grand Duchess (Sidse Babett Knudsen of “Limbo”) flushes and blushes and reciprocates his attentions.

But she has a problem. Her boyish teen son and heir (Emil Aron Dorph) doesn’t seem interested in girls. Yet. Perhaps Cazotte can instruct him in the allure of l’amour and the ways of love?

Sure. And while he’s at it, he’ll arrange to put the lad in the company of an eligible royal teen of a nearby duchy (he will paint the family, the boy will pose as his assistant).

But that’s just the start of the “complications” of this affair of the heart, inheritance and a “wager” that the painter can seduce the lovely, aloof and vigorous “maiden in a long line of warriors,” Ehrengard (Alice Esther Leisner).

The performances have a mostly stately nature, rarely hinting at the playfulness we get the feeling the material called for. Every variation of “Dangeous Liaisons,” even one based on a Karen Blixen novel, should be fun.

August, using a script by his son, takes his sweet time setting all this up, as if he’s got “Out of Africa” as his subject matter and planned run time. The better model for him to lean on might have been Orson Welles’ poignant, unhurried and masterfully short film of Blixen’s “The Immortal Story.”

Because once this picture finally rises out of its torpor, it’s damned delightful. The third act has action, intrigues, comedy and a jaw-dropping surprise or two. More’s the pity since the opening acts are such a sexless, humorless drag.

Rating: TV-MA, some nudity, adult situations, mild violence

Cast: Sidse Babett Knudsen, Mikkel Boe Følsgaard, Alice Esther Leisner, Emil Aron Dorph, Sara-Marie Maltha and Jacob Lohmann.

Credits: Directed by Bille August, scripted by Anders Frithiof August, based on a novel by Karen Blixen. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:34

Payne and his “Sideways” star/muse take us to a boarding school over the winter holiday of 1970, a student whose parents don’t seem to have time for him, a teacher (Giamatti) no one likes and a cook (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) are stuck together and forced to get along and get real with each other.

The trailer to this Nov. 10 release mimics the style of ’70s movie trailers, graphics included. Cute.

Vampires, lest we forget, are very old. How old? Grandma’s Consumer Cellular flip-phone-using old.

Some of them could stand to do some situps. And given their druthers, when they “vant to drink your blood,” they’d prefer to serve it to themselves in shot glasses.

Those are just some of the insights in the horror comedy anthology “Satanic Hispanics,” which turned five horror directors — “Blair Witch” icon Eduardo Sánchez serves us the chapter titled “El Vampiro” — loose on Latin legends and lore, with a little Tex-Mex mayhem to tie it all together.

Like all such anthology packages, “v.h.s.” and its sequels being the most famous horror collection of such short takes, it’s uneven. But when it’s good, it’s chilling, or in the case of “El Vampiro” and “The Hammer of Zanzibar” (directed by Alejandro Brugués), a guaranteed spit-take or two.

Cops roll up on a crime scene in El Paso, a scene of Mexican-American slaughter with a lone survivor. Call him “The Traveler” (“Napoleon Dynamite’s” Efren Ramirez). He’s the fellow two Texas detectives (Sonya Eddy, Greg Grunberg) interrogate, and that’s the connecting thread here.

The Traveler tells the skeptical, impatient cops that they have to let him go, that there’s a demon on his tail and that they have maybe 90 minutes to free him and/or prepare for the worst.

“You have no idea what is coming.”

Every time the police think they have him pinned down as to his name, his actual age and what really happened, he launches into another anecdote that becomes a flashback in the film. The Traveler has seen horror and its many Latin American faces.

An OCD Rubik’s cube champ (Demián Salomón) has a brain wired in such a way that he can “see” beyond, or perhaps open a portal that allows the dead to poke back into the world of the living just by manically waving his cell-phone flashlight and chanting an incantation at the colored glass that separates the rooms in his grandmother’s house South of the Border.

A murderous politician finds himself holed-up on his rural estate, waiting for the revenge and judgement of a witch (Gabriela Ruíz) from the Nahual native people of his region.

A portly vampire’s (Hemky Maera) Halloween bacchanal in a border town is interrupted by his longtime love (Patricia Velasquez) ringing him up and chewing him out for not grasping the Gringo concept of “Daylight Savings Time,” and what that means to someone who needs to be in his coffin and out of the prematurely returning daylight.

And a battered dude (Jonah Ray) meets his documentary filmmaker ex (Danielle Chaves) in “the restaurant where we broke up,” to find a little closure that gets out of hand.

The connecting interview segments are probably the weakest links here, lacking urgency on the part of the time-pressed Traveler and police who should be getting more anxious themselves. Other pieces seem so stand-alone they barely “fit” in the story the Travelor is weaving.

The jolts may be few, as most chapters focus on the don’t-look-away gruesomeness of what they serve up. But almost all of the jokes land, because when you’re trying to buy “The Hammer of Zanzibar” “We don’t really have time for a back-story, man,” which is exactly what they and we get, time after time after time.

Rating: R, bloody gore, sexual content, profanity

Cast: Efren Ramirez, Hemy Madera, Patricia Velasquez, Gabriela Ruíz, Demián Salomón, Sonya Eddy, Greg Grunberg and Jonah Ray

Credits: Directed by Alejandro Brugués, Mike Mendez, Eduardo Sánchez, Gigi Saul Guerrero and Demián Rugna, scripted by Peter Barnstrom, Alejandro Mendez and Lino K. Villa. An Epic release.

Running time: 1:50