An IRA hit man is hunted by a relative (Kerry Condon) of someone he killed.
This period piece from “The Troubles” has Ciaran Hinds and Colm Meaney and all of my attention, as it looks a step above the films Liam Neeson is offered these days.
Looks great, doesn’t it?
Can a collegiate puppeteer find love as an au pair in Paris?
That’s the not-quite-burning question at the heart of “Goodbye, Petrushka,” an amiable but aimless romantic comedy that struggles to tie puppetry, filmmaking and figure skating together in a story of a coed’s first shots at love.
It’s an occasionally cute, strained attempt at twee that never quite comes together or comes off.
Lizzie Kehoe is Claire, a New York college filmmaker trying to make something out of her lifelong love of puppets. She’s got a self-impressed teacher who isn’t impressed with her. Any guy who refers to himself as “Professor Steve” (Dhane Ross) and eschews teaching his class about the great films and great filmmakers because he’d rather talk about “Professor Steve” is suspect.
Claire’s got a richer, prettier, dizzier friend (Casey Landman) who wants them to skip off to Paris for a semester or so. That’s not something Claire considers until she stumbles into the handsome Frenchman, Thibaut (Thomas Vieljeux). But his days in New York are ending, he says. Adieu!
Claire is instantly smitten and totally-obsessed. She had no idea he was a failed figure skater, having just gotten the “past your prime” and “I strongly advise you to end your career yourself” lecture from a skating federation chief. But some anxious Google searching and she’s all about Thibaut, or plans to be.
Claire, who speaks French and is flattered when he compliments her French, impulsively decides to go to Paris, become an au pair rather than split expenses with spendthrift friend Julia (Landman), get involved with the famous French puppetry school and make a film about them, with Thibaut, while she’s there.
Writer-director Nicola Rose has some fun with the French language and French snootiness (every “Your accent is terrible” French bureaucrat is played by Joëlle Haddad Champeyroux in a different wig), the traps and warnings Claire misses when the au pair recruiter “warns” (tricks) her about the nature of the job. And Rose takes a shot at faking a trip to Paris on an indie film budget.
But the film plays like “Hey, this guy can skate so let’s use it” in the strained ways it tries piece all this into a narrative, to add a figure skater to the film Claire wants to adapt from the story of “Petrushka.”
Claire’s crush on Thibaut seems headed nowhere, so she takes up with the first young Parisian (Bartek Szymanski) to flatter her accent, a detour that has a chuckle or two but nothing more.
The performances overall are more competent than compelling, affecting or particularly funny.
And for all this talk about puppets, some of whom we see, but never “in action,” the film has no idea of what to do with them. Claire’s fantasy sequences in which she can imagine the story she wants to tell or the romance with Thibaut she wishes she had are illustrated with drawn (CGI assisted) animation.
Why have a puppeteer and a story about puppets if you’re not going to use them as anything but an occasional sight gag? That’s a serious aesthetic and logical stumble in a movie that is already a little light on charm and very thin entertainment.
Rating: unrated, some scenes of a sexual nature
Cast: Lizzie Kehoe, Thomas Vieljeux, Casey Landman, Bartek Szymanski, Joëlle Haddad Champeyroux, Marine Assaiante and Dhane Ross
Credits: Scripted and directed by Nicola Rose. An IndieRights release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.
Running time: 1:40
The plot of “Love Again” is so over-familiar I stopped streaming it not once but thrice to make certain I’d never seen it before.
It’s so forumulaic that I hope writer-director James C. Strouse is blushing if he’s walking a Screen Actor’s Guild picket line. This movie could have been conceived, cast and scripted by AI, almost as easily as, say, a movie review generator AI could have panned it.
But for what it is, a sort of wistful, sad Hallmark romance with pretty leads who have little chemistry, it’s not terrible. Random laughs are scattered throughout.
“Love Again” stars Priyanka Chopra Jonas (“Baywatch,” “The Matrix Resurrecions”) as a grieving woman who can’t get over her dead, about-to-propose boyfriend, and features Priyanka’s real-lie husband Nick Jonas as a gym-rat personal trainer dating app set-up who is Mr. Wrong with a capital “W.”
And the idea of casting the ever-emotive singer Céline Dion as a slightly surlier version of herself, making our leading man (Sam Heughan of “To Olivia”) “grow up” — “I’m 35!” — “So there’s still TIME!” — is fun.
Those gimmicks were the chief appeal of this limp late spring release, which nobody saw, but which is now finding an audience on Netflix thank to palpitating Jonas Brothers (and Priyanka) fans, and the unfortunate news about Céline Dion’s health.
Tell me if this plot doesn’t sound too familiar. Children’s book illustrator Mira has a mushy lunch with lover John (Arinzé Kene) only to witness him killed in an accident that happens right in front of her. Two years later, Mira’s not over this loss. But she starts texting John, and during a thunderstorm, those texts turn up on the phone of a slightly bitter, freshly-jilted New York Chronicle music journalist, Rob (Sam Heughan).
He doesn’t respond. But after figuring out these “I spend every day thinking of you” texts aren’t a prank, “catfishing” or anything of the sort, he becomes intrigued and maybe a bit obsessed. He attends the opera (“Orpheus & Eurydice”) hoping to find her, and is moved by the story on stage.
As he’s been assigned to write a profile about the culture’s “Celinaissance” — a Dion comeback — he finds himself scolded, insulted, cajoled and invited back among the land of the living and loving by the great romantic balladeer with the Big French Canadian voice.
When Rob finally “meets” Mira, the only questions are, “How long before he tells her? and “How bad will it look when she finds out?”
Yes, that “secret” that “we didn’t meet by accident” plot has been around since before “Meet John Doe” used it during The Great Depression. No, these leads don’t set off any real sparks, because there’s nothing flinty, nothing with a steel edge about this.
A major problem? Rob isn’t nearly cynical enough, and rubbing any unlikable edge off the character is Against the Law, as far as screen portrayals of jaded journalists go. Love, this jilted bore reminds us, “It’s just a bunch of pheromones that wear off. Then you get your heart ripped out, covered in bleach, stomped on” and “set on fire in front of your friends and family.”
Awww. Poor baby.
That’s the short summary review of the movie, too. “Poor baby.”
They had a formualic plat, a few good lines, a few cute scenes, and two fun cameos — Mr. Jonas, and a tasty Celia Imrie turn in which she pleasantly calls in an intern at her children’s book publishing house, recounts the young woman’s struggle to get to this job, and tells Mira she’ll FIRE the intern if Mira doesn’t sort out some good (not weepy) ideas for illustrations of a new book — pronto.
What they didn’t have was a movie as compelling as the various parts they pieced together.
Rating: PG-13 (Some profanity, sexual content)
Cast: Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Sam Heughan, Céline Dion, Sofia Barclay, Arinzé Kene, Russel Tovey, Steve Oram, Lydia West, Celia Imrie and Nick Jonas.
Credits: Scripted and directed by James C. Strouse. A Sony/Screen Gems release now on Netflix.
Running time: 1:44
Not sure how this is being released, seeing as how it’s only 31 minutes long. But the trailer is now in theaters, so we’ll see.
This features connections to the original film, and amped-up frights.
David Gordon Green seems trapped in horror these days. Pity.
Oct. 6, “The Believer” hits theaters.
The jocks are insecure drama queens who parade through school all day in their pads and uniforms and the girls who aren’t cheerleaders form their own “fight club” to remedy the lack of “female solidarity” in “Bottoms,” an amusingly outrageous queer spoof of high school comedy hetero-norms.
It’s a fun romp that never quite has the pacing — lurching along in fits and starts — to “romp.” But the snappy banter, over-the-top (bloody, but comic) violence and sparkling performances put it over.
It’s a little “Mean Girls,” a slap at “Fight Club” and a heaping helping of “Glee!” — a dark and absurdist LGBTQ fantasy in which virtually no one in this truly looks “high school” age — and a short film whose start-and-stop pacing makes it feel longer.
Rachel Sennott re-teams with her “Shiva Baby” director Emma Seligman for a comedy that boils down to two lonely, lesbian high school outcasts (Sennott and Oyo Deberi of “Theater Camp”) just trying to make love connections with their respective crushes.
PJ (Sennott) and Josie (Deberi) are besties who share their hopes and dreams and schemes with each other, and have adjacent lockers Rockbridge Falls High, lockers which are defaced with gay slurs on a regular basis. School administrators are no help.
“Could the ugly, untalented gays please report to the principal’s office?”
They are not-quite-invisible, but are “literally at the bottom” of their school’s social strata. But THIS year will be different! PJ has the cocky swagger to approach and converse with the impossibly gorgeous fashion plate Brittany (Kaia Gerber). Not that it gets her anywhere. Josie, smarter and more guarded, can barely get a word in with Brittany’s BFF Isabel (Havana Rose Liu), who is all wrapped up in a relationship with peacocking quarterback Jeff (a hilarious Nicholas Galitzine of “Purple Hearts‘).
Ideally, PJ would find a way to “get to know” Brittany and maybe Josie could lure Isabel away from the jock. “Running over” (not even close) cheating, abusive jock Jeff with PJ’s car doesn’t help matters.
As there’s an atmosphere of violence hanging over the school, particularly in its blood-rivalry with Huntington High, whose “homecoming game” with them is looming, perhaps starting a self-defense club where the friends instruct their female classmates in protecting themselves would work?
After all, the rumor that Josie and PJ won’t shoot down is that they were arrested and thrown in “juvie” last summer. Surely they’re tough, prison-hardened lesbians who have a thing or two they could teach their classmates.
The plan goes a little awry when “a bunch of sixes” and not their fantasy girls (“Tens?”) show up for the club, which mouthy, impulsive PJ immediately barks into rebranding a “fight club.” But the fantasy figures eventually show up and friendly and pragmatic gay classmate Hazel (Ruby Cruz) sort of makes things work. They con their unfiltered, f-bombing history teacher (ex-footballer Marshawn Lynch) into being their club advisor.
And almost in spite of themselves, as the bloody noses and black-eyes add up, they start to bond and maybe something good, something beyond sex with their fantasy girls, could come from all this. Or not.
The one-liners land and the stacatto banter just sings in “Bottoms.”
“Annie, you may be a black Republican, but you’re the smartest out of all of us.”
“OK, so um who’s been RAPED?” Pause. “Grey area stuff counts, too.”
The romantic entanglements, sucker-punching meetings and threats of greater violence to come just add to the film’s surreal bent reality.
The players are all fun, the situations more silly than sexual and this cast and this director deliver a few big laughs, even if their satiric “statement” seems muted and muddled.
Lynch is no actor, but he’s a very funny presence and “character” to be ironically tossed in with this salad.
The stop and start pacing and scenes that don’t really flow into one another work against “Bottoms.” For all its cheekiness and wit, this isn’t clever or cutting on a “Heathers” or “Booksmart” or “Election” level.
But Seligman and Sennott serve up a timely and bracing counter-punch and counter-narrative in the ongoing culture wars, a fun poke-in-the-eye at gay bashers and stereotypes that amuses almost as much as it transgresses.
Rating: R (Crude Sexual Content|Some Violence|Pervasive Language)
Cast: Rachel Sennott, Oyo Deberi, Havana Rose Liu, Ruby Cruz, Nicholas Galitzine, Kaia Gerber and Marshawn Lynch.
Credits: Directed by Emma Seligman, scripted by Emma Seligman and Rachel Sennott. An Orion/MGM release.
Running time: 1:28
These renditions of the classic, most-filmed tales from Dame Agatha’s canon feature shimmering production values, all-star casts and Sir Kenneth Branagh vamping up Hercule Poirot amongst them and expertly-handling the murder-mystery directing chores.
Newly-crowned Oscar winner Michelle Yeoh, Tina Fey, Jamie Dornan and Riccardo Scamarcio are among the suspects, with Kelly Reilly, Amir El Masry, Emma Laird and Camille Cottin also on board for a story of a death that might have supernatural implications.
This one opens Set. 15, but 20th Century Studios figures they have another winner on their hands and they want to get the word out.
“No More Bets” is a heavy-handed Chinese thriller about the evils of gambling, the perils of emigrating and the righteousness of Chinese policing as it pertains to international online scamming conspiracies.
Overlong and somewhat lumbering, it’s sometimes entertainingly suspenseful, built around a pop star/actor who plays a young programmer enslaved in an online gambling organization’s predatory Malaysian operation. But it’s xenophobic in the ways it lectures Chinese expats to only trust each other and the Motherland in the face of all these Malaysian/Singaporean scammers, thieves and human traffickers. There’s even a side swipe at a couple of “other” cultures China has beefs with (the Philippines, for instance) in its messaging.
Yes, it was a huge hit in China. So its Malay distributors have packaged it for release in North America, where I caught with an all-Asian audience in Durham, N.C.
Pan (Zhang Yixing) is a disgruntled 30ish programmer who has a backup plan when a promotion he was counting on goes to “Kevin.” He’s been recruited, along with a few others, with the promise of big bucks and a quick access to promotions with a Singaporean “Firefly” company.
Pan is cocky enough to drop his ID badge and stalk out in the middle of his a big promotion ceremony for his rival, and to hack into the phones of his fellow recruits and their smiling, glad-handing recruiter, Cai (Sunny Sun) before the plane even takes off.
But upon landing (in Singapore, I think), as they take a little walkabout, members of the group are ambushed by organized street gangs. Pan isn’t able to escape, and when the gangster Cai delivers a final blow, the jig is up.
They’ve been conned and kidnapped, and they’re taken — in hoods — to their new sweatshop. Their real “employer,” GoldenCarp.com, is a vast online conspiracy of scammers, recruiters, catfishers, human traffickers and enforcers.
Smooth-talking Mr. Lu (Chuan-jun Wang) is the charming “good cop” of the operation, promising big paydays — money sent back home to families that need it — and suggesting promotions and “freedom.” Eventually. But he packs a pistol and is utterly ruthless when it comes to his unwilling indentured servant workforce and the hapless Chinese gambling addicts they prey upon. Cai gets to be the “bad cop,” a brute who makes examples of those attempting to flee or get word about their enslavement out, “whistleblowers.” They’re beaten and tortured.
Pan resolves to outsmart these creeps, but he and we can’t help but notice the cultish “Money is EVERYthing” indoctrination that he and his fellow programmers and “employees” live under. Starved, housed in a filthy warehouse, they’re broken. He will almost certtainly be on his own.
But maybe he isn’t. Anna (Gina Chen Jin) is a beautiful model there under duress, one of the legion of multi-national “dealer” women used to smile and deal cards, to advertise and lure in new gamblers, who are then scammed via offers of “inside deals” which expose their online accounts to hacking and looting.
Anna’s back-story suggests a broad conspiracy as she was sabotaged at her modeling agency, entrapped by those who wrecked her career, lured to a not-really-named foreign country and just as much a slave to all this — despite promises of release when she reaches her “sales” goal — as Pan.
Conventional thrillers like this would spin around these two meeting, scheming and outsmarting their captors, but that only happens in the most teasing sense here.
“No More Bets” suggests all are helpless, especially the new college grad Tian (Talu Wang) whom we watch spiral into gambling addiction. Even his girlfriend (Ye Zhou) can’t break his habit, and his family melts down around him as his debts and addiction deepen and his exposure to Golden Carp’s predation grows.
Who can save them? Perhaps Madame Zhang (Mei Yong), the leader of a police task force eventually shamed into taking action and who lucks into leads.
Director and co-writer Shen Ao’s (“My Dear Liar”) narrative is meandering to the point of frustrating, and not simply because he’s avoiding the Hollywood touches by downplaying the two trapped and attractive victims — whom we’re meant to identify with — and their role in getting out of this predicament.
Tian’s descent into gambling is overwrought, melodramatic and yet at least familiar enought to feel “realistic”.
But with the introduction of the email-tapping Chinese police, “No More Bets” seems more nakedly agenda-driven. Local police are uniformly corrupt. When the Chinese task force finally makes its way into the country, only a powerful local Chinese expat businessman can be trusted to give them help and save them from the corrup cop “connected” mob that’s doing all these awful things to the innocent Chinese.
Why, exactly, does the film show villains praying to Buddha? People’s Republican fear of religion?
The film’s focus on “the other” as the source of a gambling-crazed culture’s woes is faintly racist right up to the film’s final image, which is nakedly racist. It’s a Byzantine Chinese version of every American thriller about cops battling “cartels” and their Spanish speaking minions South of the border.
Stretches of “Bets” work. And suspense builds as the stakes rise and we note how insidious this “organization” is and puzzle over how our heroine and hero will escape its clutches. It’s only when their scheming to escape is given short shrift to work in another lecture on the evils of gambling and the crusading efforts of civil rights-trampling Chinese police that we start to pay attention to the film’s darker failings.
Rating: violence
Cast: Zhang Yixing, Gina Chen Jin, Mei Yong, Sunny Sun, Chuan-jun Wang, Talu Wang and Ye Zhou and Talu Wang
Credits: Directed by Shen Ao, scripted by Shen Ao, Xu Luyang and Zhang Yifan. A Mega Films release.
Running time: 2:10
A string of movies escaped at the end of summer, as they do every summer, as August-Labor Day is the traditional dumping ground of titles with low box office expectations which studios unload on cinemas, desperately in need of content that isn’t “Barbie” or “The Sound of Freedom.”
One of those titles is MGM’s “Bottoms,” which I’ll get to on the road, traveling back from a (working working always working) vacation in God’s Country.
That Rachel Sennott (“Shiva Baby,” “Bodies Bodies Bodies”) is working that New Aubrey Plaza thing, I tell you what.
Holy Karla Goes to the Circus!
I had no idea this happened or was in the works. The obscurant title flitted by once or twice, but I didn’t realize is harkened the cinema’s greatest interviewer sitting down and going deep with the greatest spy novelist of them all.
Apple TV has “The Pigeon Tunnel.” I cannot wait. No really. I am getting after this the minute I see it in my Apple previews.
October 20. Cornwall fans, get your Apple TV+ subscriptions in order.
Movie Nation 