Movie Nation

Terence Davies, a Liverpudlian who made a name for himself with semi-autobiographical films such as “Distant Voices, Still Lives” and serious-minded literary (“The House of Mirth,” “The Neon Bible”) and stage (“The Deep Blue Sea”) adaptations has died.

He was 77.

He was never a prolific filmmaker, as he also wrote fiction and worked in radio because financing his sort of movies — adult dramas, period pieces, literary-minded films — was never easy. He had 15 credits, including “Benediction,” which came out a couple of years back, and a daring Emily Dickinson bio pic (“A Quiet Passion”) a few years before that.

Not everything he filmed worked on screen, and not many earned much money. But there was a high mindedness to all of it. I never got a chance to see his take on Edith Wharton’s “House of Mirth.” Today would be a good day to track it down.

Sometimes you have to use the term “classic” the way it is applied, in property tax and collectible terms, to automobiles. Anything over 25 years old is a “classic.” Yes, that means most models of the Ford Taurus can be considered as such.

The 1958 WWII spy thriller “The Two-Headed Spy” promises a deep undercover tale of a Brit high up in the Nazi government, a starring role and rare romantic lead for Jack Hawkins, a chewy supporting turn by Gia Scala, and very early film appearances by Donald Pleasance and the Oscar winning legend Michael Caine.

Blacklisted Dalton Trumbo fiddled with the script, uncredited. And it was directed by Hungarian-born actor turned writer-director André De Toth, a filmmaker who tackled many genres, and is best known for “House of Wax,” “Springfield Rifle,” the bio-pic “Monkey on My Back” and a much later Michael Caine WWII actioner, “Play Dirty.” His was an uneven career of some acclaim, some misfires and a lot of 1950s and ’60s TV.

“The Two-Headed Spy” is a bit of balderdash about a deep-undercover Brit who becomes “a model National Socialist” amongst the Nazis and a general running supply-and-logistics for Adolf Hitler while passing on secrets to the Allies to foil German plans for conquest. Saying that it is based on “real exploits” of Col. A.P. Scotland, implying that this is a “true” story in any regard is a flat-out lie.

War time “secrets act” and all that made a lot of room for mischief in this clumsy, truncated “history of WWII inside the German General Staff” espionage thriller.

Hawkins plays the uber-loyal Alex Schottland, an officer in charge of logistics who, when the high-voiced tantrum tosser Adolf wants supplies for “75 divisions” to invade Poland, tells his Fuhrer “We will make it happen.” Not telling the Austrian corporal “No,” not daring to speak anything “defeatist” and reminding his fellow officers of “the faith we all have in the Fuhrer” is what gets Schottland, whose British birth puts him under Gestapo suspicion early on, promoted to general.

Schottland’s so passionate about pleasing his leader than he has no time for women, like the Italian songbird Lili (Gia Scala) thrown at him. But his new aide (Erik Schumann) notices he does make time for his clock collection, and regular visits to the clockmaker/repairer Cornaz (Felix Aylmer). Cornaz is Schottland’s contact, his intermediary with British intelligence.

Want to know German invasion plans, the locations of this industry or that supply depot? The Brits have a man who could not be more “Inside the Third Reich.”

The script comically leapfrogs through the early years of the war, and via montage we’re jumped forward into the pivotal year of 1944, when members of the General Staff have lost faith in the Fuhrer, D-Day signals the beginning of the End and paranoia and recriminations spread through the elite officer corps.

Walter Hupp plays the always-looked-the-other-way intelligence chief Admiral Canaris. Alexander Knox is the Gestapo head who figures Schottland is a mole and Michael Caine has a single scene as a intelligence officer (Gestapo in all but uniform) who comes to question Lili, whose loyalties are also worth questioning.

The picture’s third act, with desperate attempts to escape or at least warn the Allies about the coming “Battle of the Bulge” as the net closes in around Schottland, is far better than the first two.

Hawkins, a stage actor whose first wife was the future “Miss Daisy,” Jessica Tandy, rarely played romantic leads. His and Schottland’s discomfort with the vivacious Italian is almost eyebrow-raising. Quite aside from security concerns, a question at a celebration honoring his promotion hangs over the performance and intentionally so.

“Does he dislike all women?”

It turns out, our “perfect Nazi” is not the only insider spy. A lady who makes the bold request, “Start the attack on France soon, so I can see Paris while I am still young!” is beyond suspicion as well.

Quite aside from its outlandish premise presented as something based in fact, “The Two-Headed Spy” is never more than a wildly uneven affair — the occasional cleverly-framed shot, a few nice acting flourishes by Hawkins and Donald Pleasance, as a paranoid fellow officer, and professionalism in front of and behind the camera that the script never merited.

Sometimes we use “classic” just as a way of reminding ourselves that something’s old and old fashioned.

Rating: Approved, violence, smoking

Cast: Jack Hawkins, Gia Scala, Erik Schumann, Donald Pleasance, Alexander Knox, Felix Aylmer, Laurence Naismith, Walter Hudd and Michael Caine.

Credits: Directed by André De Toth, scripted by Michael Wilson and Alfred Lewis Levitt.. A Columbia release on Tubi, Youtube, Amazon et al.

Running time: 1:33

I could tell during the preview screening of “The Exorcist: Believer” that if nothing else, the audience of enthusiasts I was watching it with were cutting it a lot of slack, showing lots more patience with the long dull stretches than I was tolerating.

David Gordon Green’s latest horror franchise vandalism (no one will forget those “Halloweens,” chief) is reaching the faithful. But considering the name recognition of the franchise, maybe more of them are fretting about the “directed by” name below the title. Deadline.com projects a $28-30 million opening, far below Green’s “Halloween” reboot. Good, but not great.

The same strategy behind “Halloween” is there — bring back actors/characters from the original and people will get moist-eyed in nostalgia. But Ellen Burstyn –– 90 years old and long may she reign — and an under-written character didn’t keep it from getting a lot of bad reviews. No, it wasn’t just me who found it wanting. Audience “exit polling” scores are bad, too. It sucks.

The original film spawned a whole lot of sequels, prequels and TV shows, all of it based on a balderdash William Peter Blatty novel based on simple newspaper account from the 1940s of a Maryoand boy acting-out so severely/so strangely that his parents consulted priests, moved him to St. Louis and summoned a team of exorcists who spent many sessions trying to “exorcise” his demons. The victim grew up to have a NASA career and deny he was ever possessed. It’s an interesting rabbit hole to go down, because lots of people — and the pre-show “quiz” at screenings of this latest “Exorcist” — still lean on that “true story” crutch.

Here’s a good rule of thumb. Science teaches us that there’s the natural world, and…no such thing a the supernatural. Demons are the stuff of movies and the wet dreams of the gullible (Hellllloooooo “Nefarious”).

A whole lot of Catholic myth, practice and nonsense was legitimized by that original film and its self-serious supernaturalism. And an entire horror genre was launched fifty years ago.

I covered David Gordon Green, his favorite DP Tom Orr and Danny McBride (don’t remember running across his work) in film school when I worked for the newspaper where the UNC-SA School of Filmmaking was located. He had a beautifully eccentric career before McBride et al got him into gonzo comedies and horror franchises. (McBride is a producer on “Believer”). I wish Green was taking the horror money and making indie movies like “Joe,” “Prince Avalanche” and “All the Real Girls” with his pocket change.

But he’s doing TV (“Righteous Gemstones,” etc.) and spread pretty thin. So…

“Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie” is owning that family movie audience, pulling in over $11.6 million on its second weekend, based on Friday’s take. It’ll clear $50 million by the end of next weekend.

“Saw X” is falling off steeper, but not off a cliff — $8 million..

“The Creator” is cratering, a 60%+ falloff from week to week — $6 million.

“The Blind” is still making money, a Fathom Events (one time, one night special event screenings, typically) release that is bringing “Duck Dynasty” fans out of the woodwork. It will add another $3.6 million this weekend, and is up to $11 overall.

“A Haunting in Venice” will add $2-3 and clear the $35 million mark. I dare say it’s in the black, worldwide, and will cover production costs just with its North American take.

And “The Nun II” is still making enough cash (over $2) to sit in seventh place.

“Dumb Money” has one more weekend in the top ten, and is fading fast.

“Equalizer 3” won’t quite make it to $100 million, but it’s over $88 as of Midnight Sunday. So by the time it loses most of its screens, it’ll have come close.

The “Hocus Pocus” anniversary re-release barely made pocket change, but reached the top ten.

As always, I’m monitoring Box Office Pro and Deadline and others to update these figures as the weekend progresses.

Any list of the best vengeance thrillers of recent vintage has to include Park Chan-Wook’s “Oldboy” and
Hans Petter Moland’s “In Order of Disappearance.” Add your favorite here, because there are lots of examples through film history, movies about a great wrong that one furious character — most often a man — sets out to right, one malefactor at a time.

I’m thinking Korean writer-director Chung-Hyun Lee’s “Ballerina” is worth adding to that conversation, and not just because our avenger is a pint-sized pixie who punches well above her weight. The set-piece fights are epic, the “clean house” shoot-out is John Woo-sized and hell, this tiny dancer packs a flame thrower.

Jeon Jong-seo of “The Call” plays Ok-ju, not the “dancer” of the title, just the dancer’s friend. But as we’ve seen in the convenience store hold-up she interrupts in the opening scene, Ok-ju has her own special skills, her own way of staying en pointe.

She pummels and generally just messes up four hoodlums, deflecting and neutralizing their knives with cans off the shelf, kicking ass and paying her tab on the way out.

Later, her friend Min hee (Park Yu-rim) calls her over, and a box of wrapped ballet slippers are on the bed, a gift with a note — “Please avenge me!” Min-hee was mixed up with something, and someone. And the consequences of it caused her to take her own life.

There’s nothing for it but for Ok-ju to honor that last request and track down whoever did this. As flashbacks show us how the two met, how Min hee got into dancing while Ok-ju found a life in “security” work, we see where we’re going.

No private eye, bodyguard or “agent” or whatever Ok-ju is can rest until their friend’s killer is brought to justice — rough justice.

The suspect is perfunctorily narrowed down to long-haired, handsome and Lamborghini/gated estate-rich Choi (Kim Ji-hoon of “Money Heist: Korea”). Our villain is into BDSM, Ok-ju discovers.

But setting a trap for him is the easy part. Bringing him down is going to take more than one fight, villainous accomplices who must be dealt with and it might require some inside help.

I really like Chung-Hyun Lee’s debut thriller, “The Call,” a supernatural murder mystery. Here, he’s got a story stripped to the basics — kicking ass and breaking glass…that you shove in somebody’s mouth when they won’t talk.

The action scenes are shot and cut with brio — frenetic. The violence is over-the-top, so much so that every scene that lacks it feels slow. Set pieces in the kinky hotel our bad guy likes to take his BDSM victims to (he drugs them with his designer fish ampules) for his videotaped fantasies, in a drug lab and in a rich mobster’s riding stables deliver.

And there’s even time in this generally brisk thriller for a pause for a little humor. Gun shopping in Korea is a hit-or-miss affair, with our dealers here an elderly couple who sell out of a sideshow balloon-popping-with-pistols van. The old man pushes revolvers and a deringer. The old lady doesn’t mess around. Flame thrower.

The knives come out, the blood spills and sprays and the complications are mere afterthoughts in this march towards one last murder. A few plot lapses aside, it’s a lot of fun. And if it isn’t the best vengeance thriller in the age of four John Wick films, it deserves a place at the table and a mention in the conversation.

Rating: TV-MA, bloody violence, drug and BDSM content, profanity

Cast: Jeon Jong-seo, Kim Ji-hoon,
Park Yu-rim

Credits: Scripted and directed by Chung-Hyun Lee. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:34

The company is Hungarian, pressed into service with their German allies occupying a corner of the partially-conquered Soviet Union during World War II. But as they troop through the dreary woods, drifting from one fraught encounter with the locals to the next, a pall of doom hangs over their actions as they await the next partisan ambush and that next atrocity against civilians.

They could be any army or EveryArmy caught up in a Vietnam, Iraq, Central America or Central Africa, men in arms trapped in tedium, tit-for-tat reprisals and indefensible actions reconciled with a shrug and a thought but never said aloud excuse and explanation — “The fog of war.”

Director and co-writer Dénes Nagy’s “Natural Light” (“Természetes fény”) is a somber, myopic grunts-eye-view of occupation duty in a forested corner of the USSR in the early 1940s. We see the grim routine of men in their own country’s uniforms, but wearing the helmets of their German overseers, oppressing, exploiting and terrorizing the natives far behind the front lines.

It’s a movie of few words and a few telling incidents, all of it captured in a nearly monochromatic color film of wintry greys, browns and foggy, diffuse “natural light.”

Corporal Semetka (Ferenc Szabó) is our poker-faced guide to this world, a combat veteran just following orders, accepting the latest denial of leave, silent as his patrol relieves two hunters, who went to all the trouble to fashion a raft to bring the elk they shot home to their families, of the all their meat.

Semetka is savvy enough to silently de-escalate an encounter with wood-cutters, even if he guesses their partisan sympathies, human enough to fancy a local widow in a village his company takes over as shelter, man enough to recognize that walking away from that tempation as the most humane thing he can do in a world of rape, summary executions and stealing food from the starving.

And he’s experienced enough to know the proper pace to set on a march into partisan-infested woods, which his brusque commanding officer ignores and promptly gets killed for swapping out Semetka from walking point.

“Natural Light” is more a study in sober, building dread than a straight-up combat film. The action is limited to a nightime firefight, a couple of harrowing moments of interrogation and threats and a rare burst of emotion.

Nagy lets us sense what is coming and steadily steel ourselves for it and resign ourselves to it as it happens.

The lack of action beats makes it somewhat static and dull at times. But the film fits into a rich tradition of combat cinema where the dangerous drudgery of the work, the moral compromises it demands and the ugly shocks of action and reaction are both sudden and wholly-expected long before they happen.

Others step into the frame with Szabó, but he is the face and the conscience of the movie, not quite playing the Hungarians as Victims party line of that country’s right wing historical revisionists, acknowledging guilt and expressing remorse only with his thousand yard stare.

And Nagy immerses us in this time and this world with simple images, archetypal characters and common-to-combat-film situations, another army far from home, out of its depth and uncertain of the necessity and ethics of its mission.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Ferenc Szabó, László Bajkó, Illés Pál and Anna Lancenka

Credits: Directed by Dénes Nagy, scripted by Dénes Nagy and Pál Závada A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:43

If you’ve ever seen a Kevin Costner interview or heard an acceptance speech from him, you know his “movie that changed my life” was the big, bloated Cinerama Western “How the West was Won,” an all-star epic that took viewers from the post-War of 1812 frontier to a final showdown, “High Noon” style, at the closing of the frontier.

I’ve interviewed him a few times, and it’s never far from the conversation, especially when he’s talking about anything with horses and bad hombres.

This movie event from Warners, slated for next summer, will be released in two parts and will give the “Yellowstone” icon one last swing for the fence.

Sienna Miller, Jena Malone, Giovani Ribisi, Sam Worthington, Jeff Fahey, Dale Dickey, Luke Wilson, Danny Hiuston and Thomas Haden Church saddle up for this pre and post Civil War “saga.”

Fingers Crossed. But that…title. Ugh.

That’s Willa Holland, Dermot Mulroney and Shane West starring in a honky tonks and Chevy Chevelles and small town corruption and cover-ups.

“The Dirty South” indeed.

Mesmerizing from its crypto-poetic opening to its drop the mike finale, “Candela” is a thriller as exotic and mysterious as its locale, a brisk and atmospheric tale bathed in drugs, sex and corruption.

First-time feature director Andrés Farías and his award-winning film’s co-writer, adapting a novel by Rey Andújar, give us a daring and dark fever dream of the Dominican Republic, a film that is as quintessentially Caribbean as any in recent memory.

A drag performer — Candela (Cesar Domíngue) — in native garb, bathed in black, intones that there’s a hurricane coming, but not to worry, that it will “fall in love with us,” and only kill a few thousand. Such is the fatalism of the poor islands off the Fodors Guidebook to the Caribbean.

An inutterably gorgeous woman — Sera (Sarah Jorge León) — in impossibly high heels and an erotically short skirt begins and ends her days with “a bump” of cocaine, her very essence reminding us that around the world, there’s no substitute for being young and beautiful and incredibly rich. She quietly bridles at the corporate “merger” facing her senator-father’s company and another, one that entails her marrying the boor-heir to the other firm. She acts-out through bar pick-ups and furtive infidelities in the alley behind The Remora, the toniest night club in the Caribbean.

Sera’s most reckless act that night sets our plot in motion and her in collision with working poor Lubrini, the gay drag performer Candela who utters poetic pronouncements from the stage between lip-synced Latin pop.

Because who does Sera stalk, kidnap at gunpoint and demand sex from? That would be the college-educated poet, Renate Castrate (Richarson Díaz), Candela’s lover. When Renate doesn’t come home, Lubrini gets a lady friend to summon her estranged father, the cynical loner Lt. Perez (Félix Germán of “The Projectionist”).

And even though his captain assures him that this body below the open window of the rich brat’s penthouse will be a matter “Everyone’s going to drop…like nothing happened (in Dominican Spanish with subtitles),” even though the dazed coronor (Pepe Sierra) would rather watch Internet porn on the clock than do a job the “higher ups” want dropped, Perez is determined to stay in his daughter’s good graces by pursuing something like “justice” here. More or less. And up to a point.

“It’s too soon to be tired,” he tells the losing-faith Lubrini. “That’s how things are in this country.”

The story, divided into narrative “chapters” like the book, takes some effort to grab hold of early on. Farías and co-adaptor Laura Conyendo cast us into mystery and slowly lead us out into something more conventional than it looks at first glance.

The exotic drag act and glimpses of extreme wealth, isolation and privilege in a poor country misdirect us from the only-in-the-movies nature of the crime and death, the inevitable attempt at a cover-up, the insertion of “drugs” and a Jabba-the-Hutt sized drug dealer — all elements of a much more ordinary thriller.

But “Candela” isn’t ordinary. It’s smart and strange and damning and frustrating, immersive in the ways it layers in Perez’s only friend, a hooker (Ruth Emeterio) who sees him as her lifeline as he should see her as his, in the details about the coronor, the rich bride-to-be’s bodyguard.

That hurricane we hear is coming is just another spiritual cleansing, another punishment for a place set up to serve the needs ot the very rich and which keeps everybody else blaming Haitian immigrants for their troubles.

What Farías and Conyendo conjure out of Andújar’s novel is a poetic allegory wrapped around an ordinary murder mystery thriller, and one of the best films ever to come out of the Dominican Republic.

Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse, sex, nudity

Cast: Cesar Domínguez, Sarah Jorge León, Félix Germán, Ruth Emeterio, Pepe Sierra and Richarson Díaz

Credits: Andrés Farías, scripted by Laura Conyendo and Andrés Farías, based on a novel by
Rey Andújar. A Breaking Glass release.

Running time: 1:29

The best survival narratives, from “Robinson Crusoe” through “The Martian” all focus on “work the problem” details.

How do you survive a shipwreck or sailboat sinking (“All is Lost,” “Dead Calm”), being trapped in a forest fire, being marooned on Mars or kidnapped by murderers? The most fascinating part of such films are their “MacGuyver” DIY, reason-it-out elements.

In “Nowhere,” a new Spanish film (dubbed into English if you prefer) on Netflix, Anna Castillo plays Mia, an expectant mother, an emigrant fleeing a draconian “auesterity regime” Spain and mainland Europe.

“Governments are falling everywhere,” she and husband Nico (Tomar Novas) know. They’ve already had a child snatched from them as fascist “Not Enough for All” measures are enforced. She and Nico have paid a smuggler for their escape. But they are separated and she finds herself trapped in a shipping container that was washed overboard, supposedly on its way to safety, sanctuary and civilization — Ireland.

Mia must fight back her terror, find out what’s in the few crates in her floating coffin that might be useful, and reason and work her out of a deadly dilemma to save herself and their baby.

That’s what’s fascinating in this Albert Pintó (“Money Heist”) thriller. But in a bold and misguided move, we see a lot of the backstory that puts Mia in that predicament in a drawn-out opening act that explains the political situation spreading across Future Europe, lets us meet the murderous goons doing the enforcing and the pitiless predators smuggling people out — for a price.

The typical way to handle that sort of back story is to dole it out in quick impressions and slightly longer flashbacks. This straight-forward narrative is dull enough for long enough to make us ponder a much bolder take on this subject — casting a native African or Arab, setting her story in the present day, and daring the viewership, many of whom are going to be anti-migration, to root against her.

We see the ontrived way the couple is separated, get a glimpse of the authoritarianism, riots and chaos, and pause for a long “search the false-walled container” and government massacre that is more momentum killing than riveting.

But four screenwriters serve up all manner of melodramatic menaces facing the lone survivor in that container, from machine gun bullets to whales, leaks to the impossiblities of breaking out of it at sea. That’s all with a baby in her belly or in her care, because you just know her water’s going to break before the waters rise inside that metal box and add even mure urgency to the need to escape it.

The film’s problem-solving is mildly inventive, when it isn’t being creatively lazy. And Castillo maintains a plucky determination that hardens into resolve, with the occasional lapse into despair throughout.

If survival against the odds tales are your thing, it’s worth a watch despite the occasional eye-roll.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity, childbirth

Cast: Anna Castillo, Tomar Novas and Tony Corvillo

Credits: Directed by Albert Pintó, scripted by Indiana Lista, Ernest Riera, Seanne Winslow and Teresa de Rosendo. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:49

Oct 13, a bunch of streaming ghost hunters get more than they bargained for.