Movie Nation

Take any genre, any movie in any film series and add Tina Fey to it and the proceedings are always going to be more fun.

Fey joins Kenneth Branagh‘s merry parade of Hercule Poirot period pieces for “A Haunting in Venice,” a spooky, stylish thriller loosely based on Dame Agatha Christie’s novel “Hallowe’en Party.”

Branagh’s ever-so-elegantly romped through these Poirot movies, vamping through murders that must be solved, a mustache and Belgian ACK-sant that must be curled. Now it’s time for someone to make fun of him to his face. The University of Virginia’s wittiest alumna is the perfect woman for the job.

“You’re doing that thing where you pretend to know more than anbody else.”

Fey plays a famous mystery novelist who “borrows” from Poirot’s persona and his cases for her books, a friend — “I ‘ave no friends.” — who is something of an irritant, showing up in Venice after The War, a place of peace and an epicurean life for the now-retired detective, interrupted only by frantic suitors who want Poirot to look into this or that mystery.

That’s why Poirot keeps Portfoglio (the wonderful Riccardo Scamarcio of “The Ruthless”) around, an ex-cop who serves as a bodyguard and personal assistant. But Portfoglio doesn’t keep Fey’s Ariadne Oliver at bay.

There’s a seance coming, a woman who wants to hear from her dead daughter in a supposedly haunted palazzo. Ariadne and Poirot have one thing they can agree on. “Mediums,” spiritualists and psychics are predatory frauds. Let’s go, Poirot, and poke holes in this mysterious Mrs. Reynolds and her “commune with the spirits of the dead” act.

“I am the smartest person I know, and I can’t figure it out,” Ariadne tells Hercule. “So I came to the second.”

Newly-crowned Oscar-winner Michelle Yeoh plays Reynolds with a self-serious gravitas that chills.

“It is the hallow tide (Halloween). We’re close. Your spirit is close…We are listening!”

Kelly Reilly is the mother of the dead woman, who may have killed herself over a love affair. Her “nerve storms” troubled doctor (Jamie Dornan) is present, the doctor’s young son (Jude Hill), along with a Russian who runs the household (Camille Cottin), all sitting in with Poirot, Ariadne, Mrs. Reynolds and her two Roma assistants (Emma Laird and Ali Khan).

Are Mrs. Reynolds and the others hearing from Alicia (via a spirit-typewriter)? Or will Poirot punch out Harry Houdini’s favorite punching bag, “mediums?”

“Terrors for children, Mrs. Reynolds,” Poirot grumbles. “I have been, in life, uncharmed by your kind.'”

A murder will intrude on this All Hallow’s Eve, and everybody’s a suspect. But Poirot is seeing things, and as reluctant as he may be, there may come a point when he has to agree with everybody else present, that there is something supernatural, something relacted to a “children’s curse” associated with this place, in play here. Or not.

“No one shall leave until I find if the living have been killed by the dead!”

Branagh is a stylish old school filmmaker sometimes unjustly criticized for the sort of camera flourishes — he films lots of characters in close-up, camera slightly above peering down on them to increase our unease — that whole schools of cinema worship Welles, Hitchcock and Kurosawa for. Critics have carped on his fondness for adding cinematic sizzle to his pictures since “Dead Again,” his first foray into mystery-thrillers.

Here he uses the beautiful and ancient city sparingly, and a watery palazzo gone to seed makes a splendid set for all these murders and frights and things that go bump in he night.

These Christie films have a shared air of lost affluence, of a more literate, high-toned age of conversation that vanished long before our age of tweets and modern vulgarisms.

“The voices speak,” Mrs. Reynolds intones, explaining her typewriter. “I take dictation.”

Mystery movies these days are harder to pull off as the audience has seen enough of these to often be a step or two ahead of the movie. As in the “Knives Out” pictures, Branagh isn’t constrained by playing by the rules and fear of “cheating.”

But it’s not just the mystery that recommends “Haunting” and its Christie/Branagh antecdents. It’s the world we’re immersed in, the grand casts playing colorful “types” we recognize in it, the forlourn air of this film, of a generation haunted by the second of two world wars which has just concluded.

“Scars are not always of the body,” Poirot knows.

I haven’t loved all of these semi-campy/semi-serious Branagh dates with Dame Agatha. But “Haunting” is an unadulerated delight. Only in “Venice” can you hear Tina Fey scream.

Rating: PG-13 for some strong violence, disturbing images and thematic elements

Cast: Kenneth Branagh, Michelle Yeoh, Tina Fey, Jamie Dornan, Kelly Reilly, Riccardo Scamarcio, Camille Cottin, Emma Laird, Ali Khan and Jude Hill.

Credits: Directed by Kenneth Branagh, scripted by Michael Green, based on the novel by Agatha Christie. A 20th Century release.

Running time: 1:43

A woman tries to reconnect with her estranged…and very rich French family in this Sébastien Marnier (“School’s Out”) thriller.

Looks privileged and acrid.

Sept. 22, this rolls out in select cities.

A fish-out-of-water thriller about two lasses taking work in the most sexist place on Earth.

Hugo Weaving? Scarier as he gets older. Neon has “The Royal Hotel,” so the release date is TBD. Worth keeping an eye out for, though.

This looks cute and mean and comes out Oct. 27 on Netflix.

But it’s directed by the guy who dragged Harry Potter over the finish line. It’s over two hours long, and sorry, but David Yates? Not a handler of deft dark comedies.

You’d think restaurants would know better than to name a cheese dessert “Fromage a Trois.” A label like that can get couples thinking and talking about the other trans-national use of “trois. And one thing might lead to another, or two others, as it turns out.

But they don’t fret over suggestive dish-naming in The Netherlands. “Fromage” or “Menage,” it’s all good, as long as everybody has a “Happy Ending.”

That sexy TV-MA movie your kids are sneaking onto Netflix to watch this summer is a tepid Dutch treat about sex, communication, relationships, and actresses exploring the difference between play-acting a fake-orgasm and faking a “real” one.

No, it’s not as “meta” or as complicated as I’m making it out to be, and the movie is as gentle and sensitive as a softcore and seriously predictable version of this scenario can be.

But who, other than curious teens, wants to see that?

Luna (Gaite Jansen) is our heroine, the one who voice-over narrates (in Dutch with subtitles, or dubbed) about “my 132nd faked orgasm” as we meet her. She’s smitten with Mink (Martijn Lakemeier), her year-long beau. But he isn’t doing it for her in the bedroom. And at this stage, Luna figures it’s too late to bring up problems with his Touch of Mink.

She, like everybody in this movie about cute Dutch 20somethings, overshares with her friends (Claire Bender and Sinem Kavus), who fret on her behalf and make bad suggestions.

Rather than be honest — he tends to bowl over her, conversationally, but he does show a bit of consideration in bed — Luna uses that dessert menu item to suggest a solution to her unspoken “problem.”

“Threesome” it is.

Awkward flirting — as a couple — dating app consultation and “bike flirting” (making eyes as you pass each other by bicycle), which is all Luna thinks she’s good at, is how they meet Eve (Joy Delima).

And guess what? That complicates matters in exactly the way most movies about threesomes do.

Writer-director Joosje Duk handles the ”attraction” sequences with a little flair and the well-short-of-porn sexcapades with discretion, if not a lot of heat.

But this isn’t a comedy or a romantic comedy. It’s a romance, and wringing laughs out of that First Time You’re in Bed as a Throuple doesn’t suit the tone.

As we see Mink blow through Luna’s reluctance to try and set Eve up with his pal Samir (Sidar Toksöz) it becomes hard to root for them as a couple. And backing away from the deep sexual attraction between Luna and Eve seems cowardly.

What are we left with? Middling sex scenes, desultory arguments, and “real” and “fake” orgasm faces.

There’s an “After School Special” lesson here for the teens who’re logging onto Netflix to watch “Happy Ending,” about boys-to-men learning to be more generous lovers and girls-to-women realizing the need to speak up and service their needs.

But to anyone of voting age, “Happy Ending” is too unsurprising to be happy, too perfunctorily plotted to supply an ending that will satisfy anybody.

Rating: TV-MA, (somewhat) explicit sex, brief nudity, sex talk

Cast: Gaite Jansen, Martijn Lakemeier, Joy Delima, Sidar Toksöz and Sinem Kavus

Credits: Scripted and directed by Joosje Duk. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:31

Somebody on your movie-buff birthday or holiday shopping list is a Clint Eastwood fan. This luxe new pictorial with essays on the man and his films comes in its own box, a beautifully presented book that matches its author’s thesis — that what Clint gave us is “not a career, it is a landscape.”

British writer Ian Nathan has turned out picture-centric appreciations of the works of Ridley Scott, Tarantino, The Coen Brothers, Peter Jackson and Tim Burton. “Clint Eastwood: The Iconic Filmmaker and His Work” is a handsome remembrance of the Hollywood icon’s career with some solid observations, a bit of The Man Himself (interviewed for this) and a lot of folding in the research of other biographers, all of it built around gorgeous still shots from Eastwood’s films, on-set directing photos and moments of Clint playing jazz.

It’s not meant to be deep or personal, and as such, it can read a tad glib and fanboyish. But it makes for a glorious gloss of the filmmaker’s career that celebrates the “simplicity” which Eastwood’s films are touted for, which Nathan describes as his “purity.”

Chronologically going through Eastwood’s life and career, Nathan separates “Clint” the film star with his legendary squint and understated acting style from “Eastwood” the artiste, and rightly parks him in the company not of the New Hollywood tyros like Coppola, Lucas, Scorsese and Spielberg, but with Redford and Beatty, great leading men who stepped behind the camera to ensure their vision of cinema is what we saw in their movies.

Eastwood’s quiet simple directing style is traced to his upbringing, and his first experiences on the “Rawhide” set, without much dwelling on actors or critics who find the impatient “One Take Clint” work ethic an increasingly serious drawback, the older and more dogmatic he became.

“The shadow (‘Dirty Harry’) cast over Eastwood’s career,” Nathan writes, “is hugely significant…Throughout his career, Eastood had sought to explore, satirize, oppose, and repeat the cultural event” that character and that first film to feature him created.

The writing here is often choppy, sometimes unnecessarily so, and had me parsing the pages to see if two had stuck together and I’d missed a transition that Nathan doesn’t provide as he skips back and forth. Some of that is the nature of the form, some of it a sort of Britishness in the sentence structure and punctuation (and many many sentence fragments). Every now and then a sentence turns into a paragraph that one simply must puzzle out what this chap is on about.

One must.

The don’t-offend-the-subject ethos in this “unauthorized” biography turns up in groaners like “Tied in with this were Eastwood’s memories of women who struggled to let go of him.” Translation — he’s dated and summarily dumped more than his share of wives, partners and female companions for younger models.

But the insights are solid, the sourcing the book relies on uniformly good and the book, like Eastwood’s movies, plays to his strengths. You don’t have to read it cover-to-cover in one sitting (although it’s that brief). A mere page or even an image brings back memories of a movie, a trademark Eastwood character, wardrobe choice or grimace.

The “Unforgiven” chapter, as a stand alone essay, is superb, if a tad breathless.

A giant who still walks, sings, protests and preaches among us gets her due.

Oct. 6.

Bill Camp, Pamela Reed, Alan Ruck and Jurnee Smollett star in this serio-comic courtroom “true story” about little men sticking it to The Man.

Oct. 6.

There’s something about Rhys Darby’s quick, quizzical-voiced Kiwi cadences in “Relax, I’m From the Future” that remind me of the performances in the BBC Radio series (broadcast on NPR in the US) “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”

I love the radio version of Douglas Adams’ “Hitchhiker’s Guide.”

Low-budget time-travel movies like “Time Crimes,” “Safety Not Guaranteed” and “Primer” are very much a guilty pleasure.

And “Relax” is Canadian, the second film from writer-director Luke Higginson, and who doesn’t love Canada?

“Relax” is a chatty absurdist comedy with “Terminator” stakes, a future characters either want to change, or are determined not to because the first time traveler from the future whom we meet assures everyone “everything’s going to work out.”

There are cute performances, cute twists and daft scenes as we go back and forth about the sort of future the few people in the know in the present might prefer, and then stumble their way towards achieving or avoiding.

But the film kind of loses itself in its chatter, it its arcane bits of science and plot points and sources of menace. No, the eccentric Casper (Darby) isn’t “changing the fabric of reality.” No, there’s no hint of choosing between assorted “multiverses.”

“No, that’s ridiculous,” Future Man Casper assures disaffected lesbian of the present Holly (Gabrielle Graham), poking a decade of comic book movie obsession right in the eye. “No, there are no time machines,” puncturing another sci-fi trope.

But the film’s brisk pace becomes a burden. Wait, what’s that now? And as not everyone is pitched at Darby’s often antic energy level and the tone that he and almost he alone seems in tune with, the picture just doesn’t do it for me.

I gave the last half of this multiple viewings to be sure I wasn’t missing something, and the film sags, lacking the wit, spark and feather-light touch of the early scenes.

But Darby’s kind of a hoot. He drops in on a suburban Ontario neighborhood, emerging from a cloud of smoke and a “Terminator” (on the cheap) bubble, a weird blond in a blue jumper with a New Zealand accent. Kids are playing, and before the stranger can gasp, “Relax, I’m from the…” a local grump has shouted “PEDERAST” and punched him in the eye.

Casper narrates his tale on a note he writes to the future, griping about his lack of “immediately useful information” on this era — money evades him — and is in a fix until Holly feeds him some inferior quality street-food nachos, hears out this homeless loon in his “from the future” jump suit and eventually takes him in.

Casper knows things, about the band whose T-shirt Holly is wearing and how they’ve already peaked, about the loner/waiter (Julian Richings) at a local diner destined to become a famous cartoonist.

Casper has a handle on present day sports betting (“Back to the Future”) outcomes that he retains from his life in the future He talks to old folks in rest homes, collecting anecdotes and artifacts. And he buries stuff, his stab at “nuclear semiotics,” basically reporting to the future via signs (not language) something about his present.

One reassurance he gives Holly is definitely wrong. Noooo, nobody else from his future is visiting this ear. She (Janine Theriault) is just across town, hunting down time travelers as they emerge from known rips in the fabric of time, zapping them with the film’s lone gadget.

There’s so much science clutter in the film’s convoluted twists on a “Terminator/City on the Edge of Forever” plot that several themes and characters get lost in the shuffle.

This reassuring idea that “everything will work out” begs the question, “Works out for whom?”

That, like most everything else in this promising second feature from a CBC TV editor, is brushed past, the impact of many themes, threats, clever turns and Darby’s sparkling turn in the lead performance muted by the rush to get on to the finale.

Pace is a great thing in any funny movie. But there’s a point when you aren’t finishing a thought, doing justice to this character or that threat. When you’re skipping by the cool stuff, you know you’re going too fast.

Rating: unrated, violence, some profanity

Cast: Rhys Darby, Gabrielle Graham, Janine Theriault and Julian Richings.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Luke Higginson. A Blue Fox release,

Running time: 1:33

As a critic, I’ve been listed with the online movie review aggregator site Rotten Tomatoes since the day it went “live” in 1998. Because, as every ageist troll who disagrees with a review I’ve written likes to point out, I’ve been reviewing movies a long time, having written for newspapers, wire services, radio and TV stations and online.

It’s a site that rounds up reviews from all over (mainly North America, but also the UK, Australia, India and Spain, etc) and boils movies down to a “rotten” or “fresh” score based on those cumulative (and weighted) reviews. As a website, it’s a logical extension of the way the old Siskel & Ebert TV show reduced every film to a “thumbs up/thumbs down,” removing nuance and simply giving a filmgoer a notion of what the critical consensus on a film is to help decide whether to spend the money — worth seeing, or not.

Critics like it because it “legitimizes” those included there and broadens our reach with a site that has a much higher click-through rate on online reviews than Facebook, Twitter or any other social media does. That helps our Google search position when people are looking for moviegoing recommendations.

Movie studios and filmmakers hate it. It over-simplifies the expansive take a professionally produced, longer and considered review delivers. It further dumbs down criticism on the “Thumbs down” slippery slope. And it gives the oversimplifying Tomatoes website power over a multi billion dollar business.

I have taken many a call and irate email over the years from publicists and filmmakers, some of them even friends of mine, who would love for me or RTomatoes to change a “rating” to help their movie in the marketplace.

I never do. Ever. So stop asking.

But apparently there are PR firms working for film distributors that have figured out a pay-for-play way to “game” the Tomatometer. A couple of days ago, this piece in New York Magazine’s Vulture column talked of “critic” payoffs that cause shifts in the tomatometer. And we get a picture of matured (legacy, little growth) website that is so high-handed, cavalier and unconcerned that they’ve been letting critics get paid to endorse movies and perhaps boost a film’s box office take accordingly.

I used the word “apparently” for good reason, as Lane Brown, the Vulture reporter, doesn’t have literal “receipts.” There’s no smoking gun, no whistleblower “critic” who has admitted to getting paid cash for being so unethical. There are other errors (weighted reviews) and omissions in the piece which tell me Brown doesn’t have the deep knowledge of RT, its history and operations the writer seems to pass off as expertistise there.

But what the piece does explain is the odd and infuriating letter I got, apparently (not sure) from Rotten Tomatoes last month. It looks like most every other communication I’ve had with the company, where I deal with their Movie Data team and Critic Relations staff (of one).

“Dear Roger:

We have become aware of potential violations of Rotten Tomatoes’ Critics Code of Conduct regarding one or more of the titles that you have reviewed. As you are aware, Tomatometer-approved critics are not permitted to review a film and/or TV series based on financial incentive. Our Code of Conduct is attached, as a reminder.

If we find evidence to support future violations, your Tomatometer status will be removed. Please be aware that Rotten Tomatoes reserves the right to remove and suspend reviews and Tomatometer approval is Rotten Tomatoes’ sole discretion.

Regards,

The Team at Rotten Tomatoes

Critic Relations

Rotten Tomatoes

407 N. Maple Dr., (etc)”

So it’s a suggestion that they suspect I’ve taken money from someone to endorse a movie. That is legal-action libelous and utter BS and naturally I am still FURIOUS about the mere accusation. The fact that they put “reminder” in the email, as if they’d contacted me about this previously, is just another damned lie in this communication.

This didn’t just come to me, but to several other critics I know. We conferred on it, couldn’t decide if it was a prank or not. I complained LOUDLY to RT contacts, and heard nothing but crickets from Beverly Hills. That’s telling.

So the letter seems to be a legit CYA preemptive response to a pretty good hit they knew they were about to take from New York Magazine’s culture “Vulture.”