This has a whiff of “Canadian Indie” about it. Aykroyd, Henry Czerny, Scott Thompson.
Looked it up, yup. Sudbury, Ontario, Great White North.
R.L. Stine appears in an adaptation of one of his kid-horror tales. There’s another Chase — A daughter? — in the credits, which explains how they talked the obstreporous Chevy into making an appearance.
“Zombie Town” zombie walks into theaters Sept. 1.
This mildly chilling trailer for an indie horror that drops on Sept. 5.
Not that familiar with the cast, but if you went to the right acting conservatory, “How to respond to the terrifying” is covered fully sophomore year.
This looks utterly generic, but well-cast with possible charms for fans of the detective mystery genre.
Gillen’s got a rare lead, good to see.
Sept. 22.
Let’s celebrate the late summer release of “The Inventor,” a musically animated jewel about Leonardo Da Vinci’s last years that’s certainly the loveliest animated film of the year, thus far.
It’s more kid-friendly than “made for children.” You’ll find it helps to know a little or a little more than a little about Leonardo before watching it. And not every child is interested in Da Vinci’s late life obsessions with dissections and anatomy studies. Yes, it’s a bit of a hard sell.
But with Rankin-Bass reminescent stop-motion animation by Ireland’s Curiosity Studio and lots of lovely 2D dream/nightmare sequences by Cartoon Saloon, a stellar voice cast, pretty tunes by Alex Mandel, all of it conceived by Pixar alumnus Jim Capobianco, it’s simple yet gorgeous and quite the unexpected delight.
In 1516 the great painter, inventor and thinker (voiced by Stephen Fry) is trapped in Rome and under the thumb of the Medici Pope Leo X (Matt Berry of “The IT Crowd”), the heavy-handed and corrupt pontiff who prompted Martin Luther to start the Protestant Reformation.
Leo threatens Leonardo over his obsession with “desecrating” bodies “out of curiosity” and a pursuit of knowledge, perhaps in search of any evidence of where the soul might be in his cadavers.
Leo would rather Leonardo be “a good little painter” like his lad Michelangelo, muttering as he makes fixes to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (actually, Michelangelo was finished before Leo X was confirmed). Leo’s also having military troubles with the French and would love for Da Vinci to whip him up some wonder weapons.
The Great Polymath and his assistants invent animation and whip up a flipbook projection of Da Vinci’s ideas for a tank, an infantry-slicing scythe and what-not, a presentation that ends by showing the French stealing the ideas because “that happens in war” and the two sides pointlessly slaughtering each other.
Which also happens in war.
After pushing the Pope to show himself a prince of peace and end the fighting, Leonardo meets the French king, Francis (Gauthier Battoue), decides he’s young, more open-minded and less dogmatic so he and his two assitants grab The Mona Lisa and his papers and flee to France.
But once there, his ideas for a grand “Ideal City” take a back seat to the need to have him engineer a spectacle for the planned summit of the Great Kings of Europe — Francis I, Carlos V (Max Bamgarten) of Spain, and Henry VIII (Daniel Swan) of Great Britain. Something huge is needed for the French monarch to impress his fellow absolute rulers.
Like much of what we see in this fanciful film, that really happened. Well, sort of. Henry met them both, just not at once at that famous French fete, which included the two monarchs wrestling each other.
Yes, that sounds silly and yes it really happened and yes, it’s funny to see them stop-motion-animate their way into a tussle buried under a whirling cloud of dust (cotton balls).
Oscar winner Marion Cotillard plays the young French king’s advisor/mum, who’d be none-too-pleased if she knew the Italian had moved his graverobbing operation to La Belle France. And Daisy Ridley is the king’s smart, scientifically-curious sister, the one who wants to see Leonardo build his “man and nature in harmony” version of an “Ideal City.”
The estimable Mr. Fry sings, gets across Leonardo’s alarm at the dark, looming figure who chases and traps him in his flying (self-designed bat-wings) 2D animated nightmares. That would be death, determined to get him before his life’s work is done.
This Leonardo walks a tightrope between songs, recognizing that his curiosity has come close to getting him killed “on the heretic’s fire” before and may again, but determined to “learn everything” and inform the world and change it with his knowledge.
“There are three kinds of people,” he lectures at one point. “Those who see. Those who see when shown. And those who don’t see.” Period. Yes, he really said that.
If you’re thinking this review has a lot of linked-footnotes for a piece on “children’s entertainment,” you’re right. The film started life as a short financed via Kickstarter, and grew in thematic depth, animated sophistication and historical accuracy when Capobianco built it into into a feature.
Still, there’s not quite enough slapstick and goofiness — even counting one hide-the-cadaver gag — to keep your average 8 year-old interested.
But that’s no reason to not see it with your child and do a little teaching as you watch, or to cheat yourself of this multi-national treat, especially if you love the archaic animation that showed off Rudolph’s red nose and a burgermeister impressed that “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.”
Rating: PG
Cast: The voices of Stephen Fry, Marion Cotillard, Daisy Ridley,
Gauthier Battoue, Max Baumgarten, Natalie Palamides and Matt Berry
Credits: Directed by Jim Capobianco and Pierre-Luc Granjon, scripted by Jim Capobianco. A Blue Fox Entertainment release.
Running time: 1:40
Brie’s a journalist about to interview a dictator, Cena’s the ex-special forces guy hired to provide security.
And then the coup begins.
Alice Eve plays the grumpy…ex?
Oct. 6 and only in cinemas.
This one comes to Netflix Oct. 6.
Looks good. Haven’t seen nearly enough of Benicio del T of late. Or his one-time co-star, Ms. Silverstone.
Nowicki? I know the guy. Winter Park, Fl, “Blindside” and a lot of other movies. Coroner, here?
It’s no shock that screenwriters who gave us “Hoosiers,” “Rudy” and “Men of Honor” could get a few tears out of a tale an aspiring baseball player struggling to overcome the degenerative spinal disorder he was born with and make it to the big leagues.
But what three credited writers, stars Dennis Quaid, Colin Ford, Bonnie Bedelia and Scott Glenn and director B-movie Jeff Celentano (“Breaking Point”) have a harder time managing is finding a point to “The Hill.”
The story is that Rickey Hill (played by Jesse Berry in his younger scenes) was born with that medical issue in the late ’50s, wore leg braces into his tweens, but practiced swinging a stick or a bat obsessively until that day he shed the braces and became a Texas teen hitting phenom.
His father (Dennis Quaid) was a “hardscrabble” preacher who never believed he could or should try to play baseball. He has a “higher calling,” Dad said at the time, with Mom (Joelle Carter) rarely objecting but granny (Bonnie Bedelia) and his siblings sticking up for little Mickey Mantle-obsessed Rickey.
The family struggled in near poverty but Rickey was hellbent on proving he could play, even if his father was sure his ability to memorize and apply lessons from scriptures was his true “calling.”
But if you haven’t heard of Rickey Hill, however miraculous or at least inspiring it was that he was able to play the game, you shouldn’t have. He never made it to the big leagues, one of the hardest journeys any athlete can undertake.
So, what’s this movie about?
The baseball episodes are rules, logic, tradition and reality-bending enough that the broadcast announcer for an exhibition “tryout” game doesn’t have to say “This is something that norally doesn’t happen,” because “Duh.” At least he isn’t the announcer from an earlier game, going on about “another game-winning home run” and the friends and family who marvel how Rickey’s four-for-four night “gets” his “average” “up to .400.”
If you don’t know how ridiculous that sounds, you don’t know what “season opener” means any more than three credited screenwriters — Angelo Pizzo, Scott Marshall Smith and Aric Hornig -do.
The kid doesn’t grow up (Colin Ford plays him as a teen) to embrace Daddy’s hopes for him and become a popular preacher.
So are we looking at another “Rudy” story here, some self-promoter who spends his life pitching the “miracle” of his “almost” overcoming-every-adversity story and gets a movie made? I honestly don’t know.
That said, the long flashback scenes recreating the 1960s childhood of growing up with a baseball-hating father who had little tolerance for backwoods Texas Baptists who smoked and chewed and spat tobacco during his (indoor) sermons are somewhat interesting.
What isn’t intersting is almost everything else — the little moments meant to be “a sign” when the preacher gets another job from the rich lady who happens to pick them up when they run out of gas, or the junkyard owner (Ray Clemons) who shrugs off little Rickey’s leg-brace long fly-ball (rock) that breaks a windshield on his lot and becomes the kid’s cheerleader and backer, etc.
Quaid is a terrific actor, and if you’re a fan, make a double-bill out of “The Hill” (PG) and “Strays” (hard-R) this weekend if you want a case of whiplash. But as righteous and stern as the character is, he’s one-dimensional and not scripted into being the one who brings you to tears.
That would be David Silverman‘s job as the bluff, no-nonsense elementary school Coach Don who doesn’t let us or anybody else know his lay preacher background until he confronts his fellow preacher to make him recognize his little boy’s “gift from God.” And Bedelia and Carter have some touching moments as well.
By the time Scott Glenn shows up as the famous baseball scout who bends all sorts of rules and and any sense of simple fair-play common sense to give the freshly-redamaged Rickey a last showcase chance to get signed, I was all out of eye-rolls to give.
Rating: PG
Cast: Dennis Quaid, Colin Ford, Bonnie Bedelia, Joelle Carter, Jesse Berry, Siena Bjornerud and Scott Glenn
Credits: Directed by Jeff Celentano, scripted by Angelo Pizzo, Scott Marshall Smith and Aric Hornig. A Briarcliff Entertainment release.
Running time: 2:04
Someboy is stalking Nancy, messing with her Smart House, phone, work and home computers, her electric and electronically-wired-in car.
Somebody murdered her fiance the night before their wedding. Somebody is sabotaging her at work, setting traps in her personal life and framing others for the misdeeds.
And that somebody could be any one of four obvious suspects, or maybe somebody she hasn’t met yet.
Paranoid? She should be.
“The Admirer” is a cleverly-timed, well-structured but clumsily scripted and flatly played thriller about that almost universal paranoia about “wired” life. Every “smart” gadget in our lives is a “data breach” waiting to happen. Every one with a camera and/or a microphone is a privacy violation in progress.
Roxanne McKee (“Game of Thrones”) plays Nancy, who is on the phone Facetiming with her fiance (Lucas Aurelio) when a shadowy figure she sees rushes into view and pushes Ross right out a window.
A year later, the cops never caught anybody or took her “stalker/murderer” story seriously. And it’s starting up again.
Missteps at work, settings changing on the themostat, water temp for her showers and music volume in her house, anonymous “secret admirer” flower deliveries at the office — who could be doing this?
Might it be the backstabbing subordinate, Sarah (Christina Bennington), the “unstable” IT guy/lover Doug (Jack Parr) who just got fired, brittle boss Gina (Tina Cascia), new IT guy Martin (Richard Fleeshman), Nancy’s all-access personal assistant Simon (Jordan Ford Silver)?
Nancy’s going to be the last one to figure out everything is out to get her.
“My house is trying to kill me!”
Her “You can’t trust anyone” is meant to be a complaint about her love life. Maybe she’d better apply that more broadly.
Some cop is going to assure her “You’re going to be OK. I’ll make sure of it.”
And somebody better call HR, because this ad-agency of the over-dressed is a minefield of inappropriate relationships and unprofessionalism.
Director Martin Makariev filmed this Rolfe Kanefsky and Chris Philip script with “Lifetime Original Movie” parameters — no swearing, no skin, no sex, mostly off-camera, with only a few smatterings of blood.
That isn’t the reason it plays so emotionally dry or that it struggles so much to create suspense. Everything feels articifial and bloodless, even the murders.
“Peaky Blinders” alumnus Parr has the only role with real rough edges, and even dangerous IT Doug should be afraid of this “work enemy” or that boss quick to blame everybody else.
I invested in figuring out whodunit. But the “talking villain” finale is an eye roller and that’s just indicative of what a slick, soap operatic melodrama “The Admirer” is, pretty much start to finish.
Rating: unrated, violence
Cast: Roxanne McKee, Tina Casciani, Christina Bennington, Jack Parr, Jordan Ford Silver and Richard Fleeshman.
Credits: Directed by Martin Makariev, scripted by Rolfe Kanefsky and Chris Philip. A FilmRise release.
Running time: 1:29
Whatever the highs and lows of his earlier and later career, the years 1962-64 stand out as the most ambitious of legendary screen comic Peter Sellers. He made a string of films, just as he was blowing up as a screen star, that stand out for their sophistication and feature many of his greatest performances.
From “Lolita” and “Waltz of the Toreadors” through “Doctor Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” to “The Pink Panther,” “A Shot in the Dark” and “The World of Henry Orient,” we catch Sellers as an actor on the rise and on the make — taking every prestigious role he was offered, putting in the work, climbing the ladder of stardom, just starting to be demanding and “difficult” and throw his weight around, on his way to iconic status and the truly huge paychecks to come.
And then he had that first heart attack, and a lot of that wind left his sails, pretty much forever.
“Only Two Can Play” of 1962, is a droll sex satire and send-up of Welsh pride that if not one of his very funniest films, stands out as among Sellers’ most sophisticated. Based on a Kingsley Amis novel, as a film it is classic Sellers, built on a sometimes amusingly antic but often buttoned-down performance.
Sellers plays John Lewis, a Welsh librarian with a wife, two small children, and a bit of ambition. He’d like that big promotion at work, and his wife (Virginia Maskell) would dearly love the “extra 150 a year” that would offer.
Lewis may not be the best candidate for the job, as he is “not sufficiently up on Welsh literature.” But he can turn on the posh accent when needed and affect enough snobbish authority to be the theatre critic at the Aberdarcy Chronicle, their Welsh town’s local newspaper.
It’s his wandering eye that could be his undoing, or his “doing.” Lewis notices, checks-out and leers at every lovely lady in a skirt he spies — on the streets, in their apartment building, on the tennis courts or at work, and many seem to give him the eye back. A pretty woman looking for a book he can’t lay hands out — something just off “the banned list” — gives him her number, and temptation becomes opportunity.
As he notes in voice-over, he’s constantly facing this choice of “doing something and regretting it,” or not.
Mai Zetterling, the first Scandinavian beauty paired-up with Sellers, on or off camera, becomes his ultimate temptation. She’s a Norwegian war immigrant who married well — she drives an imported Mercury convertible — and is helping out a local theatre company find reference books for costuming its next production. Lewis flirts, and she flirts right back.
“I’ll try anything, once.”
And she is connected, someone with the ear of the chair of the search committee for that library promotion. She’s married to him. She could be Lewis’ edge over his competition for the job, his nervous, tic-ridden and very Welsh colleague, the Welsh lit expert Ieuan Islewyn Owen Dafydd ap Jenkins (Kenneth Griffith).
And you thought Ioan Gruffudd was a mouthful.
The role stands out for the scenes of domesticity Sellers plays with Maskell, a husband nagged into pursuing the promotion by his wife, a dad indulging his children and tormenting that one shrewish neighbor. He’s a threadbare posh, a librarian with a tux, a worn suit and enough of a literary-air to have that critic job as a side hustle.
Sellers does a few of the “voices” the actor put on that made him him famous. And Sellers as Lewis scrambles madly to extract himself from Mrs. Liz Gruffydd-Williams’ (Zetterling) many-roomed house when her husband and “the council” come home, abruptly.
There’s a sly innocence to the ways Lewis tries to put his wife at ease, or throw her off the scent as he’s trying to make time with this never-quite-consummated fling. Wife Jean lets us know she’s not falling for it in all sorts of ways.
Maskell and Zetterling head a sparkling supporting cast that includes a hilarious Richard Attenborough as a preening, diminutive, goateed local hipster/poet/playwright and lifelong rival of Lewis, Griffith’s twitchy turn as a librarian, a single-scene Welsh lampoon by Graham Stark, Sellers’ future subordinate in years of “Pink Panther” movies and no less than “Q” himself, Desmond Llewelyn, future Bond movie gadget guru, shows up playing a priest.
Mayhill, Swansea in Wales beautifully subs for the fictional city of Aberdarcy, just high-faluting enough to be pretentious about Welsh culture, have a literary and theatrical scene and require the services of a theatre critic, just rural enough to have cattle, who interfere with an attempted assignation in the back of Mrs.Gruffydd-Williams’ amusingly-complicated convertible.
Sellers effortlessly casts off lines like “People invite me (to society parties) just to get the name of my tailor,” fitting in with “that crowd” with witty observations such as deconstructing the working methods of much-lauded painter of the day.
“What he does, you see, he puts the canvas on the floor, chucks some whopping great dollops of paint on it and drags a naked woman across it. Yes. Yes. Sort of job I’d like, that. I’d enjoy cleaning the brushes anyway.”
Amis’s novel “That Uncertain Feeling,” written about his own experiences moving to Wales, a writer exasperated by the pretention of the Welsh locals, provided Sellers with a role that demanded he tone down the “Goon Show” business, the love of donning disguises, silly voices and playing broad characters and just be a lightly-funny, somewhat unsympathetic leading man.
Sellers didn’t do it often, and this film may not be remembered with the same affection as “The Ladykillers,” “Lolita,” “Dr. Strangelove,” his many turns as Clouseau or his last gasp of glory in “Being There.” But “Only Two Can Play” shows us a broader career that might have happened had the ever-growing paychecks not limited him to farces and his first heart attack turned him cautious.
Rating: “approved”
Cast: Peter Sellers, Mai Zetterling, Virginia Maskell, Kenneth Griffith, Raymond Huntley, Graham Stark, Desmond Llewelyn and Richard Attenborough
Credits: Directed by Sidney Gilliat, scripted by Bryan Forbes, based on a novel by Kingsley Amis. A British Lion release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.
Running time: 1:44
“Don’t Look Away” is a textbook film for anybody hoping to learn how to make a scary, fun and attention-worthy thriller with next-to-no-money.
Need something to “stalk” victims, a variation on The Many Faces of Chucky that’s fresh and a novel bit of scriptural problem solving? What could be scarier than a murderous mannequin?
“It moves without moving,” one alarmed would-be victim mutters in a less-experienced actor’s version of shock.
“It’s everywhere, and nowhere at the same time,” another gasps.
That’s how you solve the problem of “animating” an inanimate object, a mysterious and murderous “mannequin, like they have in Bloomingdale’s” who in shadows and silhouette looks like Gort from “The Day the Earth Stood Still” went on the Slenderman Fast diet.
He doesn’t really “move.” He’s edited, quite clevery, into this spot, that shadow and right into your face.
It’s creepy as hell, and it has the young people it’s chasing shouting “Don’t LOOK AWAY” because that’s when it sneaks up on you. “Run! GET OUT!”
Well, they’re young Canadians, so it’s “Get OOOOT!” But you get the idea.
Kelly Bastard (okaaay) stars as Frankie, the young woman who accidentally stumbles into a truck-hijacking where the hijackers are slaughtered when they open the lone box in that trailer. She “sees” what did this. She is rendered speechless.
Phd candidate beau Steve (Colm Hill) has a hard time getting a word out of his LSAT-studying girlfriend, or taking her fear seriously.
But her friends drag her to the club. A little molly from her pal Molly (Vanessa Nostbakken) and Frankie isn’t just seeing things in the shadows, she’s struggling to explain to cops how she’s covered in another person’s blood, seeing as how it’s not the first time in the past two days.
Her friends don’t believe her, until they see “it.” Steve may never buy in, but old beau Jonah (co-writer Michael Mitton) does. He sees this plastic “SlenderMan.”
Mitton and director Michael Bafaro, billed as “The Michaels, shared writing credits in this hit-or-miss indie. They might have leaned a little more into how darkly funny this all is. Horror references abound in the dialogue, the editing (“Signs”), and we “hear” friends watching “The Shining.”
There’s a too-slowly rising threat level that should ratchet up suspense and fear, but doesn’t. Only a couple of the players seem very good at conveying “terror” anyway.
A brisk, bravura opening with mostly off-camera violence (slaughter and gunshots heard, not seen) and the viewer getting just a fraction of a glimpse of this scary prop in the shadows out of Frankie’s field of vision eventually sags into a duller talky, relationshippy middle act. And the “explainer” finale leaves a lot fo be desired.
But blocking, shot compositions, cinematography and editing energize it, and a chilling electronic score by Phil Western brings to mind John Carpenter’s musical gifts, which is the whole idea.
Shortcomings aside, by all means take that title seriously. “Don’t Look Away,” you might miss something scary, funny and pretty good.
Rating: unrated, bloody violence, drug abuse, profanity
Cast: Kelly Bastard, Michael Mitton, Colm Hill, Abu Dukuly, Jason Haney, Sophie Thom and Rene Lai
Credis: Directed by Michael Bafaro, scripted by Micheal Bafaro and Michael Mitton. A Level 33 Entertainment release.
Running time: 1:23
Movie Nation 