Movie Nation

A lush and savory period piece about a love affair, perhaps unconsummated (Over the consumme? Mon dieu!), this “Best International Feature” submission from France will hit theaters in Feb.

I remember liking the book, about rowing and the 1936 Hitler Olympics that Jesse Owens ruined for the Austrian corporal.

I also remember when “George Clooney directs” ginned up a lot of buzz. He’s taken on another history lesson, but after bombing out with “Catch-22” and underwhelming with “Monuments Men,” “Suburbicon,” “Midnight Sky” and “The Tender Bar,” the bloom is off the Amalfi Coast rose.

That’s a lot of misses or near misses in a row.

Still, we’ll see.

The most chilling consideration in “The Royal Hotel,” a tense tale of two Canadian 20somethings stuck in a mining town bar in the middle of Toxic Masculinity, Australia, is how nothing that happens there seems the least bit far fetched.

There’s nothing melodramatic about Kitty Green’s latest feature with her muse, Julia Garner. Garner’s performance has a “seen this” and “on the lookout for that” wariness, making her something of an Everywoman wading through the minefield of A Man’s World. Whatever Hanna wants out of life, a free-spirited trip with her bestie Liv (Jessica Henwick of “Game of Thrones”), sight-seeing, partying, maybe even a little romance on the road has to be pursued or practiced with an eye peeled for threats.

The threats can be almost any man she meets, given the right “wrong” circumstances.

Garner plays a young Canadian leery and weary of male privilege, men taking liberties and masculine loutishness trapped in the Armpit of Oz because her traveling companion didn’t budget for the trek. Next thing Hannah and Liv know, they’re broke and have to take temp “travel” jobs as barmaids/waitresses at what probably isn’t the roughest roadhouse in the Outback. “The Royal Hotel” is just rough, retrograde, unenlightened and in all likelihood “typical.”

They could use a translator and the viewer wouldn’t mind subtitles for their communications with their boss, Billy (Hugo Weaving). His accent’s thick, his business practices simple and his bar a worn institution he inherited from his father. Carol (Ursula Yovich) cooks for the joint, tolerates Billy’s brusqueness and watches his alcohol intake.

He lives in a travel trailer out front, and most nights, he passes out before he gets there.

The one thing the Canadians figure they understand is what sounds like the ugliest insult they’ve heard in years. But maybe “Smart c–t” is just “a cultural thing,” Liv offers. Hanna is a tad appalled at the setting, the work and the miners, alkies and “sh–kickers” who frequent the place. Liv has a lot of get along to get by about her.

“It won’t be so bad.”

But they can’t help but notice the drunken send-off the English barmaids who precede them get, the liberties taken and alcoholic “consent” and risks involved. And we can’t help but notice what the customers gripe about and their new boss raises hell about.

“What, no smile?”

We see the harassment, hear the off-color come-ons and catch the leers. There’s a lot of testosterone and an air of violence about the place and most every man in it.

Hanna and Liv pick up on that. And seeing their far-more compliant predecessors leave under than safe circumstances has Hanna suspicious even of a guy (Toby Wallace) she might be interested in and Liv careful in how she rejects one (James Frecheville) interested in her.

Because they’re all potentially future Billies, and possibly present variations of the menacing Incel Dolly (Daniel Henshall). Staying safe long enough to save up to flee is going to be tricky.

Green and “Ozark” alumna Garner made “The Assistant” together, another sly and unsettling look at a powerless young woman in toxic male work environment.

Hanna here is aware of her surroundings, cautious when it comes to the situations she allows herself to get into, capable of being charmed but always guarded enough and assertive enough that we don’t naturally fear for her.

Unless, that it, we consider how the willowy, pale blonde could stand up to the brute force on display all around her. And trying to look out of Liv in all this alcohol and testosterone may be Hanna’s riskiest undertaking. Because Liv is forever minimizing the risk.

Green and Henwick never let Liv become just a “type,” the looser, more careless one less suspicious of the motives of men. But we can see Liv is the weakest link in situations that will require them constantly on guard for each other to survive.

Weaving looks like himself but is almost unrecognizable in a boozy, slang-slurring fury. It’s a marvelous turn, even if the character’s function is to play up the “harmless” self-destructiveness of the male culture.

But this is Garner’s vehicle, and it helps to remember her flinty, opportunistic turn in “Ozark” when we see Hanna veer from gentle mollifying to bluff and blunt “Last call” in a bar where the burly clientele might not want to leave, and what’re YOU going to do about it?

Green takes some pains to avoid letting this story play out in tried and true “ladies face perils” or “women finally have had enough” fashion. She skips over moments that seem fraught in their build up — that tiny women “clearing the bar” at closing time (there is no law enforcement in this corner of Oz, even if the menfolk are forever wary of DUIs — or say they are) for instance.

But filmmaker and muse/alter ego have put recognizable, human characters in an extreme situation and dared us to guess how they’ll exit it. And no matter how they might leave, we absolutely believe every possibility of what might come, because that just comes with being a woman in a world that’s more hostile to them than you think.

Rating: R, violence, alcohol abuse, profanity

Cast: Julia Garner, Jessica Henwick, James Frecheville, Daniel Henshall, Ursula Yovich and Hugo Weaving.

Credits: Directed by Kitty Green, scripted by Kitty Green and Oscar Redding. A Neon release.

Running time: 1:31

Phylicia Rashad is his neighbor.

Presented without further comment. January.

“Story Ave.” is a Bronx tale about graffiti, growing up and coming to grips with grief.

The debut feature of commercial director Aristotle Torres, it’s immersed in street life, a vivid portrait of gangs — “crews” — that spread their name and mark their turf with “bubble letter” art and logos, and occasionally defend it with pistols.

It sets up as a “life choices” lecture and relationship between a teen street artist (Assante Blackk of “This is Us”) trying to pass his “initiation,” and the widowed MTA (trains/transit) lifer he tries to rob, played by the terrific and instantly-recognizable character actor Luis Guzmán.

But as good as the leads are in what is written and cast as a star vehicle for them, Melvin Gregg (TV’s “Snowfall”) almost walks away with the picture as the charismatic, “prophetic” leader of the OTL (“Outside the Lines” gang) and mentor to young Kadir, the artist.

As “Skemes,” he has a lot of the best lines, maybe even the best advice.

“You know writers is fighters,” he preaches. Life is all about “family,” “the one you’re born into, or the one you choose.”

Kadir (Blackk) has chosen the OTL, thanks largely to his running mate, graffiti assistant and “twin” Mo (Alex R. Hibbert). He’s just got to pay attention to Skemes’ guidance.

“Know your role,” the streetwise poet, artist and straight-up thug counsels.

Kadir, aka “Kid,” just lost his brother. His mother’s (Olivia Grayson) inconsolable. And Kadir, a smart kid, is acting out, at least in part as a response to this trauma and his role in it.

He accepts the pistol Skemes gives him, takes on the “stick-up” as initiation rite and after a false start, picks his victim — the older man on the train (Guzmán). Yeah, that’s going to change his life, and in all the predictable ways.

Director and co-writer Torres milks sequences, scenes and relationships for all they’re worth in this ambling, downbeat drama. There’s violence and the threat of it, but Torres is more interested in the kid’s missteps, in Luis (Guzmán), his waitress friend (Coral Peña) who also happens to be a photographer and the kid’s journey — through them — to see that there’s more to life than his “hood.”

The narrative starts out immersing us in this world, challenging us to cut through the slang and street enunciation of the characters, and finishes with something of a flourish. But the stumbling middle acts kind of hit the wall, making me wonder if some critics were seeing a shorter cut of “Story Ave.” (it’s listed as 12 minutes shorter than it really is on IMDb) than the one reviewed.

It’s still a sharp portrait of a world we don’t often see on screen, the art and art pretentions of those in it and the violence that hangs over their work, especially if they paint over a rival gang’s handiwork.

Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse, profanity

Cast: Assante Blackk, Luis Guzmán, Melvin Gregg, Olivia Grayson, Alex R. Hibbert and Coral Peña

Credits: Directed by Aristotle Torres, scripted by Aristotle Torres and Bonsu Thompson. A Kino Lorber release.

Running time: 1:46

Perhaps the last thing you’d expect a reboot of “The Exorcist” franchise to botch is — you know — the exorcism scene. But that’s what “The Exorcist: Believer” does.

It’s another David Gordon Green (“Halloween” franchise) reboot, so you can expect sentimental returns of surviving characters from the original film, a renewel of the threat and an attempt or two to up the ante from that first film, William Friedkin’s chilling 1973 masterpiece, based on a William Peter Blatty novel.

Here, Green summons back Ellen Burstyn, now 90 years old and reprising her turn as Chris MacNeil, actress turned exorcism activist in the 50 years since her daughter Regan was freed from a demonic possession in Watergate Era Washington, D.C. Seeing Burstyn again is worth a lump in the throat, until you see her limited function in the story and hear some of the lines she’s commissioned to intone.

“There are many dark forces in the world, Mr. Fiedler,” she tells concerned widowed dad Victor (Leslie Odom, Jr.). “Not all of them supernatural.”

You, um, don’t say? I guess she has her reasons for accepting the supernatural as a norm.

Green’s reboot slowly introduces two tween girls (Lidya Jewett, Olivia O’Neill) to us, their dabbling in the occult and their joint disappearance for three days, a frantic local (Georgia) search that ends with them alive, but “changed.”

Green’s big contribution to this venerable franchise is two-for-one demonic possessions, both in need of exorcisms. Eventually. After medicine has run out of options, of course.

Angela (Jewett) lost her mother in the Haitian earthquake of 2010, which explains who she is reaching out “beyond.” That’s a pretty conventional motivation/”explanation” slapped onto this story, traditionally treated as simple innocence under assault. Classmate Katherine (O’Neill) comes from a devout, church-going family and she’s the one who knows rituals and summoning spells and such.

When the girls go missing, photographer and aetheist Victor is thrown in with Katherine’s equally alarmed but religiously-inclined mother (Jennifer Nettles) and pious-but-hotheaded father (Norbert Leo Butz).

And when their “answered prayers” daughters return and show “symptoms” and start acting out, it’s the religious folks who start wondering about supernatural causes. Victor has to hear that from them, and from his Catholic nurse/neighbor (Anne Dowd).

How long before they convince him to summon The Exorcist?

In the fifty years since Max Von Sydow brought an Oscar-worthy gravitas to a priest charged with performing this ritual, the movies have given us dozens of exorcists played by the likes of Anthony Hopkins, Tom Wilkinson, Stellan Skarsgard and even a Vespa-riding Russell Crowe. Not all of them played Catholic priests, but casting adds weight to such a part, no matter the faith.

Here, Green and his co-writer seek a sort of pantheistic legitimization of Catholic dogma, stripping the story of much of its Catholic mystique. Considering the half century the Catholic Church has had, its shrinking membership and its widening separation from American mainstream thought, perhaps that’s understandable.

“Believer” introduces a conservative Protestant pastor (Raphael Sbarge), a speaking-in-tongues church friend of Victor (Danny McCarthy) and an oncologist turned “healer” and perhaps voudou mystic (Okwui Okpokwasili), as well as a “hands are tied” Catholic priest (E.J. Bonilla) and that Catholic nurse. At least a lot of groups are represented here.

The film has gone to some pains to show the search for the girls, their discovery, the police and medical procedures they endure and the symptoms they start to show. Green has taken his sweet, methodical time getting us to a payoff.

And then we’re treated to a room full of faiths and non “experts,” with none of the actors — some more accomplished than others — getting across the idea that they’re seeing and experiencing something that reason would tell them “This cannot be real.”

Perhaps they’re under-reacting because they, like we, have seen too many exorcism movies to be rattled by foul-mouthed, floating or vomiting girls any more. No, “possession” effects haven’t improved that much in fifty years.

Green manages a grabby moment or two, a child busting up church communion with a Satanic shriek — “The Body and the Blood!” There’s one legitimate moment of pathos, and another achieved by stunt-casting.

But after taking forever to open up the story (some good on location footage in Haiti) and stumbling a bit in setting the “growing sense of doom” tone, Green loses the plot and with it the power to land a big third act punch. Finishing with a swing and a miss can’t have been his intent.

Rating:  R for some violent content, disturbing images, language and sexual references.

Cast: Ellen Burstyn, Leslie Odom, Jr. Anne Dowd, Lidya Jewett, Jennifer Nettles, Norbert Leo Butz, Olivia O’Neill, E.J. Bonilla, Okwui Okpokwasili, Raphael Sbarge and Danny McCarthy

Credits: Directed by David Gordon Green, scripted by Peter Sattler and David Gordon Green, based on characters created by William Peter Blatty. A Universal release.

Running time: 2:01

I’ve seen “Stop Making Sense” a few times over the years, and that was reason enough to duck back into this re-issued classic 1984 concert film between other new releases to catch it on the big screen the other night.

I got into the band right around the time the film originally came out and was thus late to the art-school-kids-play-arty-proto-punk-New Wave thing they were surfing at this, their peak moment. But watching it anew, I was instantly swept up in memories of my first impressions of this piece of art-rock theater, reinforced 39 years later.

You remember the grey-on-grey and black production design — costumes, etc. — that David Byrne conjured up for this series of shows, the big smiles — apparently genuine — of the expanded version of Talking Heads that took the stage, the “huge suit” which became a pop cultural punchline, and the sweat one and all worked up, which future Oscar winner Jonathan Demme captured with his on-stage or just offstage cameras.

The show, conceived almost as a play, quietly opens, builds, transcends, climaxes and delivers its curtain call in 90 sometimes antic, always-considered and choreographed minutes.

And then, ever so briefly, Demme scans the diverse and seriously hip crowd that was at the Pantages Theatre in LA on these select nights. Oh yeah, THAT’s the phenomenon that they were. This band — Tina Weymouth, Chris Frantz and Jerry Harrison — in service of their mad, artistic and autistic genius (not known at the time) leader, were much bigger than the occasional bit of radio airplay they’d had up to now, or the radio/MTV hits that would follow in the few years they stayed together afterwards.

Some of the songs were already touchstones in the culture — “Psycho Killer,” “Life During Wartime,” “Burning Down the House,” their quirky New Wave cover of Al Green’s “Take Me to the River.” The rest would help expand their fanbase after this widely-hailed concert doc by a Big Name filmmaker came out.

Byrne would take his vision of music and visuals into a feature film (“True Stories”) and Broadway (“American Utopia”) and his sense of theater into every aggregation he gathered around him to perform his hits in later years. There was a joyous tour with the art rocker St. Vincent, a drummer and eight-piece brass band about ten years ago whose excerpts are my favorite Youtube “happy place.”

But there’s a frosty remove to most of Byrne’s self-consciously avante garde work that’s always made “Stop Making Sense” a sterile experience to me. Watching it now, that “Sheldon Cooper Starts a Band” joke attached to the on-the-spectrum sitcom character comes to mind. The “Oh, he’s autistic” news came along later and just sort of explained the disconnect of the music and this film.

Smiles on stage notwithstanding, the emotional heft of “The Last Waltz” or even U2’s “Rattle and Hum” is lacking. The colorful, creative chaos of “Mad Dogs & Englishmen” or a few other great music docs — Scorsese’s “Rolling Thunder Revue” comes to mind — is missed.

The energy exerted is extraordinary. One can feel exhilarated and exhausted at the same time at the musicianship, dancing and constant running in place.

This is a good stage show concert film that feels a little dated in light of the grand stage shows of the bigger, more flamboyant tours to come. It still holds up, but that somewhat heartless art feeling that crept up on me watching it, decades ago, hasn’t faded with the years.

“Stop Making Sense” is a very good concert film, an excellent snapshot of an offbeat band at its peak, but “the greatest concert film ever?” I’ve never thought so and never will.

Rating: PG

Cast: David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, Bernie Worrell, Jerry Harrison, Chris Frantz, Ednah Holt, Lynn Mabry, Alex Weir and Steven Scales.

Credits: Directed by Jonathan Demme, scripted by Jonathan Demme and Talking Heads. A Cinemom release re-issued by A24.

Running time: 1:28

“On Fire” is a solid if generally unsurprising drama spun out of every week’s headlines, a tale of a family scrambling to escape the wildfire that’s exploded all around their rural home in the dry, mountainous American West.

Starring and co-directed by Peter Facinelli (“Twilight”), it’s got impressive fire effects, a few jolts and moments of pathos mixed in with lapses in logic and urgency and the odd bit of over-the-top “silliness.”

May co-star Asher Angel, as the teen track-star son of contractor Dad and very pregnant Mom (Fiona Dourif of TV’s “Chucky”), has a long and fruitful career, and lots of talk show appearances where he can laugh off his signature silly moment in this generally sober-minded treatment of an increasingly common and fraught experience — escaping the flames from another blaze in an historically fire-prone, drying, climate-changed world.

“F— you, FIRE!” young Clay yells into the flames.

An opening montage of news audio captures fire coverage from Canada and the US to Australia, Greece, Turkey and Russia, which isn’t necessarily the global take that Dave and son Clay, and later Dave and wife Sarah exchange when they note the ominous towering cloud of smoke a couple of ridgelines beyond the one they live on.

“Little brush fire” comments lead inevitably to “It’s getting bigger,” and last minute fire prep — extra hoses, sprinklers, fire blankets and an Internet check of “how to fireproof your house in a forest fire” list.

Dave scrambles, Sarah tries to rouse Dave’s aged, on-oxygen-and-still-smoking father George (Lance Henriksen) to action and considers packing up to flee.

Meanwhile, things at the local 911 call center are heating up as new-to-the-job Kayla (Ashlei Foushee) tries to reassure locals that it’s all under control.

There’s an urgency to the prep — setting sprinklers on the roof, raking away acres of dry pine needles (good luck) that is never quite mirrored in the 911 call center scenes.

And once the inevitable happens, the fire blows up and cinders in, the family is separated and accidents, tragedies and think-on-your-feet changes in plans kick in. The narrative takes a few too many pauses for the story to propel us into the blaze and through it in the shoes of people who have never faced anything like this.

“On Fire” looks pretty good for a picture of obviously modest budget. They didn’t have the cash to mimic the winds and “firestorm” such forest-devouring furnaces create. I mean, Clay’s track team uniform looks off-the-rack-at-Dollar-General, after all.

But characters take the time to bicker over climate change, lament the struggle of having a single-wide home with “no insurance” in ways that many experience life in low-opportunity, rural and sylvan slices of “Paradise.”

“On Fire” isn’t all that, but all things considered — the cast is good, and the fire is impressive — it’s not half bad, either.

Rating: PG-13 for action/peril, disturbing images, smoking and some strong language.

Cast: Peter Facinelli, Fiona Dourif, Ashlei Foushee, Asher Angel and Lance Henriksen.

Credits: Directed by Peter Facinelli and Nick Lyon, scripted by Nick Lyon and Ron Peer. A Cineverse release.

Running time: 1:20

The cinematic label for any film under 40 minutes is “a short.” But in the case of “Strange Way of Life,” Pedro Almodóvar’s half hour long gay Western romance with gunplay, the better descriptor might be “small.” Truncated, even.

A tale of two former “hired guns” reuniting 25 years after a brief two month love affair, Almodóvar (“Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” “Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down” and “Parallel Mothers”) dances down a fine line between soap operatic melodrama, Western tropes, bittersweet romance and camp.

He puts his two stars, Pedro Pascale and Ethan Hawke, on horseback, but keeps the camera tight for the most part. That makes the movie, with its sublimated emotions and romance — or at least a sexual relationship — rekindled by liquor, intimate.

But the Old West never seemed quite so small as it does here.

Hawke plays a sheriff resigned to chasing down a murder suspect with a locally-familiar limp. Pascal is Silva, his old riding mate who shows up at just this moment to get reaquainted.

The suspect is Silva’s son. Might a seduction spare his offspring?

“Don’t look at me like that.”

“How do you want me to look at you?”

Old wounds are reopened, old plans long abandoned revisited, and hard truths faced. Justice and loyalty demands that the son’s got to be brought in, dead or alive.

There’s even a flashback, showing our two drunken, whoremongering pistoleros (Jason Fernández and José Condessa) shooting wineskins, cackling madly and ignoring the sex workers they’re partying with to drinking from tehir bullet holes with their hands down each other’s chaps.

While the same sex romance may be somewhat novel, and the minimalist plot and narrow focus on a scale with many classic Westerns, it’s hard to imagine the Spanish Oscar winner getting a full length feature out of this. It’s a one-joke short. /Thus, “Strange Way of Life” is paired for release with the filmmaker’s more symbolic and cryptic 2020 short “The Human Voice,” starring Tilda Swinton, which is also half an hour long.

Sure, this hour of filmmaking is by Almodóvar, and is always going to be a little clever, a bit daring and maybe even subversive at times. But premium prices at your favorite art cinema for an hour of movies makes this package (I vaguely remember “Human Voice” but didn’t review it) an iffy recommendation at best.

Rating: R, violence, sexual situations, nudity, profanity

Cast: Ethan Hawke, Pedro Pascale, George Steane, Jason Fernández and José Condessa

Credits:Scripted and directed by Pedro Almodóvar. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: :31

Here we go again, Ellen Burstyn may be 90, but she’s still getting a demon exorcising job done.

My review is here.