Movie Nation

For a filmmaker who came from the world of editing to create a string of visually striking films, several of them epics and more than a couple regarded as masterpieces, “Madeleine” stands out as a venture that wasn’t as “David Lean” as one might like.

It’s a period piece, and a 1950 melodrama that evolves into a courtroom drama, based on an original script that set it firmly in the era Lean had proven most comfortable — Dickensian/Victorian Britain.

One can’t help but notice its Hickcockian touches — a suspicious death, a desperate suspect who could have been a Hitchcock blonde, incomplete visual evidence of her connection to the crime and a trial that serves up a surprise or two amidst its sometimes tedious details.

“Madeleine” feels like lesser Hitchcock in the viewing, though the visuals manage a Lean touch, here and there. But for a Lean completist, it’s fascinating to see him try to match “The Master of Suspense” in a dry, intimate romance-gone-wrong tale.

Ann Todd, fresh from Hitchcock’s “The Paradine Case,” has the title role, that of a pretty young woman of middle class affluence in 1850s Glasgow. Her father (Leslie Banks) has some notion she’ll marry a suitor of her station, preferably the kind and patient and monied Mr. Minnoch (Leslie Banks).

But being a headstrong (not really) lass, Madeleine Smith fancies this rakish, mustachio’d Frenchman. L’Angelier (Ivan Desny, preening and controlling) sees her after the rest of the family has gone to bed. We don’t know how they met, only that he swept her off her feet. A dandy with a cane that he rattles across the bars of her basement window, he is a wage worker who dresses well with an idea of marrying well.

We figure this out long before poor Madeleine. He is a seducer, an advocate of a secret “engagement” and of her thinking of herself as already his “wife.” If only she’ll broach the subject with her father.

She won’t. She even comes to Emile and begs him to take her away, and that’s where he lays it all out for her, as she’s the last one to get a clue.

“If we marry, we marry into YOUR life, not mine.”

When she makes the break, which she must, he has letters of proof of their affair, a framed photograph. She’d like to get them back and be rid of him once and for all.

Which is why when he dies, she falls under suspicion and becomes Suspect One.

Lean handles all this as deftly as anything this action-starved can manage. There’s a ponderous Scots-accented narration that frames the picture, with a couple of moments of Scottish piping and Scottish dancing to give us a parallel “highland fling” going on across the way as Madeleine and Emile have their own highland fling.

The story’s Glasgow Scottishness is mostly an afterthought, unless you take into account the highlands’ mistrust of the French.

There are some arresting images, but not enough to think of this as one of Lean’s black-and-white beauties. One striking moment has a street preacher inveighing against the sins of the wealthy during Madeleine’s trial. It stands out because much around it is so staid and stale.

One never loses the feeling that subtexts and psychology — personal and Scottish — aside, this is lesser Lean.

But it’s fun watching Lean take one last step in Dickensia — pale imitation though it may be — before turning towards more modern fare. Glory came later in the ’50s with “The Bridge Over the River Kwai” and basically ended only with the great editor and director’s death, preparing a version of Joseph Conrad’s “Nostromo” as a follow-up to “A Passage to India” some thirty years later.

Rating: passed

Cast: Ann Todd, Norman Wooland, Ivan Desny, Leslie Banks and André Morell

Credits: Directed by David Lean, scripted by Stanley Haynes and Nicholas Phipps. A Rank Org. release on Tubi, Amazon, Youtube etc.

Running time: 1:54

“Eye of the Storm” is a Taiwanese disaster movie built around a pandemic and set inside a hospital.

The coronavirus of this outbreak was SARS –Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome — which burst out of Asia in the spring of 2003. But the responses to a deadly, little-known virus will be familiar to anyone who lived through the COVID shutdown, especially health care workers. A quarantine generates responses that range from dutiful resignation to panic and cowardice.

The characters and situations will be familiar to anybody who’s watched a disaster movie or two, and caught a few episodes of “ER” “Gray’s Anatomy” or their clones.

There are young lovers (Chloe Xiang, Jing-Hua Tseng) barely past the “crush” stage but forced to make major life decisions and deal with terrible losses.

A taxi driver (Yung-Cheng Chang) trapped in the locked-down Taipei hospital has to take on the responsibility of a small child whose nurse/mother was one of the first to get sick.

A cynical reporter (Hsueh Shih-ling) trapped with them, tries to find out how many SARS cases, how they’re being treated and how the disease got into the hospital and the country, and there’s a narcissistic, dismissive surgeon (Po-Chieh Wang) forced to do his duty and stay on the job despite family demands, and just curious enough to help that pesky reporter track down the history of this virus getting in.

The film echoes much of what we saw in the early days of COVID-19, a quarantined hospital with the sick, the dying and the trapped — hanging homemade banners about their plight out the window — even as it follows medical drama/disaster movie formulas.

Dr, Xia (Wang) is an aloof surgeon determined to cut out of work early to make it to his daughter’s birthday party. He is curt with callers who want to transfer a patient “too old” for him to treat to their hospital, to staff who hit him with question after question as he’s dashing for the door, to every caller on his constantly-ringing phone, including his wife.

He browbeats the cabbie who “just got off duty” to drive him home, and when he’s summoned to another emergency surgery during what’s left of his shift, he gets the guy to turn around. Xia isn’t moved by the cabbie’s compassion and doesn’t thank the nurse who hands him the belongings the cabbie rushed into the hospital to drop off ,which the doctor had left in his taxi.

A lost little girl, almost trampled as the facility is thrown into lockdown, becomes the cabbie’s next mission. Xia? He’s stuck here doing his job

The lovers may be heading in different directions. Ang’s a male nurse interviewing with “Doctors Without Borders” in Hong Kong. Petite Dr. Lee is ready to turn clingy over that.

And the reporter, always whipping out a camcorder to “document” a hospital whose SARS cases he reported before they did (“educated guess”) is now stuck with a surgeon adamant about not being photographed, but maybe willing to help find the truth that those “pretentious bastards who hide in meeting rooms” (in Mandarin with English subtitles) are covering up, or too inept to recognize.

Director Chun-yang Lin (“The World Between Us”) keeps things moving, although suspense is in short supply. The performances are more adequate than moving.

The inclusion of lots of bloody ER and surgery scenes, complete with background “coughing,” set the story on familiar, foreshadowed ground.

Xiang has maybe the best acting moment in the picture, capturing a bit of human nature not typically covered in tales of hospital heroics during COVID. A furious Dr. Lee, tiny little thing that she is, leaves behind her latest attempted resuscitation to pound on doors on her hospital wing, raging at staff hiding in locked rooms to “stop being cowards,” to come out and “do your jobs!”

It’s all standard-issue medical drama material, with SARS as the “disaster movie” wild card, the instigating action that sets our soap operatic story in motion. And it’s handled with skill, speed and dollops of drama and compassion.

Rating: TV-14, graphic surgery footage

Cast: Po-Chieh Wang, Chloe Xiang, Jing-Hua Tseng, Yung-Cheng Chang and Hsueh Shih-ling

Credits: Directed by Chun-yang Lin, scripted by Tsun-Han Liu. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:58

The true story of a pig farmer who killed hired hands and fed them to her hogs becomes an amateurishly awful thriller in the hands of first-time feature director Adam Fair, as “PigLady” fails in pretty much every way a movie can.

It’s built on that “weekend at my Dad’s cabin” in Oregon formula, four young city folk of the SOTA demographic head off for a vacation amongst the scary rural folks, and find themselves fighting for their lives against a monster and her swine, who have developed a taste for human flesh.

That’s as gross as it sounds, but not nearly as scary as it sounds.

Our “monster” (Sandra Dee Tryon) is a unisex lump we never really see in the face. She’s adept at using a machete like a throwing knife and single-minded in her pursuit of “junkies” nobody will miss to hire and eventually kill on her remote pig farm.

Our traveling quartet — played by Alicia Karami, Karri Davis, Liam Watkins and co-writer/director Adam Fair — are a dull collection of “types,” with Fair giving his SoCal character a gun, a drawl and a Marine Corps background.

There are a lot of ways to save money on a low-budget film, and one of them is staging the entire introduction to your would-be victims in a parked SUV because driving shots are complicated and driving and acting and directing is hard.

Remembering lines like “I have a chronic disorder of ‘douche bag,'” without rolling into the ditch can be tricky. Drawling “I will protect you and I am strapped” with a straight-face just doubles the degree of difficulty.

Despite peppering the footage with hogs wandering through the frame and XCUs of porkers, the pigs never look menacing.

There are continuity errors, incompetent efforts to speed up a sheriff’s dept. vehicle’s response to a call and some of the worst run-for-your-life/pass yourself off as terrified “acting” I’ve seen outside of a student film.

A pig is butchered (killed off camera) for a cookout, there’s gratuitous hot tub scene and a lot of bad dialogue, some of it from their gay/transgender friends, but most of it delivered by the co-writer/director and co-star.

“When I’m done with your man, he’s gonna be shakin’ it with BOTH hands.”

Fair enough.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, drug abuse, nudity, profanity

Cast: Alicia Karami, Sandra Dee Tryon, Karri Davis, Adam Fair, Shyvan Storm, Liam Watkins, Lazarus Tate and Geno Romo.

Credits: Directed by Adam Fair, scripted by Adam Fair and Alex C. Johnson. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:40

The f-bomb is dropped 15 times before the opening credits of “Strays,” a raunchy new talking-dogs comedy that’s sort of “The Incredible Journey” without Disney, an “Incredible Journey Through Profanity and Every Vulgar and Gross Thing Dogs Do.”

Will Forte, playing a dog-neglecting, dog-abusing stoner who keeps his cheated-on ex-girlfriend’s border terrier out of spite, plays a game the dog (voiced by Will Ferrell) names “Fetch and F–k!”

Forte gets his 14 of the 15 opening F-bombs out by yelling every time little Reggie fetches that ball, no matter how far off stoner Doug drops the dog, and returns to Doug’s bong-decorated hovel.

All this is BEFORE Reggie meets Buzz, the Boston terrier voiced by R-rated comic Jamie Foxx. So that’s the kind of movie you’re facing, friends. Don’t go bringing Granny because she loves her Boston terrier or the kids because it’s a movie with talking dogs.

This is one foul-mouthed, leg-and-everything-else humping, dog vomiting and dog pooping extravaganza. They don’t hand out R ratings because it’s “ruff.” Ok, actually they do.

Country dog Reggie finds himself alone in the big city, where veteran stray Buzz meets him and helps him accept that Doug didn’t “love” him and doesn’t want him back. With Buzz’s pals Hunter, the Great Dane therapy dog (a “police dog” washout voiced by Randall Park) and Australian shepherd Maggie (Isla Fisher), an ace tracker and smart-enough-to-realize-her-owner’s all about the puffy Pomerian she just brought home, and not her anymore.

Reggie resolves to go back to where he came from, find Doug and bite his (penis) off.

The four friends undertake this quest, facing sketchy directions from Reggie and every dog’s greatest nightmares — dog catchers and fireworks.

They curse, get stoned off mushrooms, plucked up by an eagle and hump all sorts of stuff along the way.

Cute bits include Buzz teaching Reggie the “rules” of being a stray — “Rule number one, you want something, PEE on it.” Foxx’s way with an off-color line lets him steal the movie.

The idea here is to riff on real dog behavior — the more gross the better — and a dog’s eye view of human interactions such as humans “collecting” their poop.

The Dan Perrault script gets gooey and sentimental about every dogs’ sad story, and outraged at the sorts of ways humans abuse, neglect or misunderstand Man’s Best Friend

But the talking dogs effect is pretty much perfected now. And there are juvenile laughs scattered throughout, with the most sophisticated gag a send-up of “A Dog’s Purpose,” with Josh Gad voicing a “Narrator Dog” (Labrador Retriever) and his human co-star in that film spoofing himself.

You’ll avert your eyes from some of the more disgusting stuff. But as a dumb movie that makes you laugh, “Strays” falls somewhere between “Ted,” the cussing Teddy Bear tale, and “Cocaine Bear.” Just don’t go if you’re easily offended.

Rating: R for pervasive language, crude and sexual content, and drug use.

Cast: The voices of Will Ferrell, Jamie Foxx, Isla , Randall Park, Josh Gad and Sofía Vergara, with Will Forte.

Credits: Directed by Josh Greenbaum, scripted by Dan Perrault. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:33

This looks good and damned timely, I must say, an appreciation of a pioneer in his field, Dr Lonnie Thompson, who documented climate history via ice core samples

Sept 15, this comes to NYC and LA. Sept 20, it comes to the world.

You don’t have to have ever been in a Home Owner’s Association (HOA) to be triggered by Jirí Havelka’s “The Owners, (Vlastníci),” a cynical and dark Czech comedy about “democracy” in action.

Basically a real-time nightmare of an HOA meeting about residents/owners of an old apartment building who can’t seem to decide on anything, or decide on deciding to decide, it gave me chest pains.

The characters are “types,” the laughs are scattered and cutting and the parable intended is pretty obvious.

Democracy is difficult to attain, more difficult to maintain and easy to disrupt. All it takes is one obstructionist, dimwit or cunning saboteur and nothing will ever get done.

The “owners” in this one vote per apartment HOA, with one cantankerous old coot owning three and having three votes, meet off property to talk about structural problems, financial limitations and possible improvements to their “pre-revolution” multi-storey mid-city building.

A go-getter on maternity leave (Tereza Ramba) and her placating husband (Vojtech Kotek) are the chairwoman and minutes-taker, respectively, ready to run through their 90 minute gathering, but braced for the fact that there’s no “running” in this building, or anything to do with it.

A pedantic martinet (Klára Melísková) is Ms. Roberts Rules of Order, barking “We have to VOTE on that”(in Czech with English subtitles) about literally every wrinkle in the way the meeting is conducted.

The cranky old man Milos (Jirí Lábus) mutters about “When I ran this” and other reminiscences of Life Under Socialism, repeatedly.

A dolt (David Novotný) sitting in for his dying mother can’t be persuaded not to vote for both sides on every issue.

A dim, reading-and-or-sight-impaired old gossip (Dagmar Havlová) interrupts every train of thought with random complaints, blurting out bits of gossip the way Milos drops casual racial, sexual and gender insults.

“What did you MEAN by that?” she fumes at every comeback and clapback her obnoxious busybudy asides earn her.

As she is prone to malapropisms — “Embola Virus,” “Conflict of Pinterest” — there’s a lot of “explaining” to do.

The gay guy (Andrej Polák) is quicker to exasperate over the state of the meeting than the couple running the show.

There’s a woman subletting her flat out to “six students from Ghana,” her sketchy “business advisor” who hands out a card for a different business every time something needs to be inspected, fixed, replaced or built, a pair of twins who’ve just inherited their late father’s flat and pregnant newlywed newcomers easily bullied into voting this way or that.

It’s a home or condo-owner’s nightmare of sincere, smart and reasonable people outnumbered by obstinate skinflints, greedheads, obstructionists and shortsighted idiots.

Sound like any voting/elected bodies you know?

Actor-turned writer-director Havelka — “Emergency Situation” was his — treats this like a play filmed in real time, with steadily rising frustrations and a few third act fireworks.

The laughs are mostly winces of recognition as we hear unfiltered fools let their inner prejudices out, others respond to those insults and a few HOA members struggle mightily to keep the meeting going so that they can actually get something done.

Ramba, Havlová, Melísková and Lábus are standouts in the cast, displaying varying degrees ot exasperation, stubbornness, concern and blithe dismissals of concern without a whit of expertise.

Havelka’s not-quite-farce reminds us of how important “rules” are,” and how bad actors can bend them into obstruction, how important civility is and how pointless it is for a gay man or anybody else to try and explain “solidarity” and group action to the dogmatic, the dim and the determined-to-do-nothing.

No, it doesn’t make legislative “gridlock” any more appetizing or understandable. But “The Owners” does a good job of reminding us that the alternative to this messy, exhausting, time-consuming business of “every voice” must be heard and every vote should be equal (giving Milos three votes because he has three flats is America’s broken “system” in a nutshell) is almost unthinkable.

Rating: unrated, profanity, smoking

Cast: Tereza Ramba, Vojtech Kotek, Dagmar Havlová, Klára Melísková, Andrej Polák and Jirí Lábus

Credits: Scripted and directed by Jirí Havelka. A Big World Pictures release.

Running time: 1:37

“Madeleine Collins” is an utterly fascinating spin on the “He/She’s living a double life” dramatic trope, and another fine showcase for the wonderful French actress Virginie Efira, of “Revoir Paris” and “Benedetta.”

Her character in this Antoine Barraud drama is a translator splitting her time between France and Switzerland. Her job has her constantly traveling all over Europe, turning negotiations in English, Spanish or whatever into French.

It’s nothing for her to say “I have to go to Spain” or “Warsaw” for a while. Her husband thinks nothing of it.

But “Judith,” (or is it “Margot?”) seems to have two of those, along with two names. Melvin is a French classical music conductor (Bruno Salomone), father to their two sons — a tween and a teen. Abdel (Quim Gutiérrez) is an unempoloyed Swiss hunk, father to little Ninon (Loïse Benguerel), a four year-old who pouts when Mommy can’t read her a bedtime story or show up for her first-ever dance class.

The viewer is instantly filled with questions. Wait…how did she…? How did he not…? And how does this tie into the opening scene, a young woman (Mona Walravens) who has an “accident” while shopping?

We’re about to find out, and none too quickly. Because Judith and Margot are going to have a hard time keeping these lives separate. The world she travels in is professional class, and there are sure to be accidental overlaps. There are too many people involved — her nosy teen and a judgmental, pushy Mom (Jacqueline Bisset) among them.

And those men in her life? How are they blind to all this, or “Ok” with it if they know? If indeed one or both of them do?

Efira lets us almost empathize as we watch our anti-heroine misstep, or get tripped up by circumstances. We see the wheels turning as she tries to keep these two separate “worlds” from colliding, the lies upon lies, the constant ducking out of a meeting, dinner or “family time” to take a call — outdoors.

“I need someone to be with me all the time,” Abdel complains (in French with English subtitles). “Let’s look at new houses,” Melvin suggests for her next stretch “at home.”

There’s so much to keep straight, which name she ordered that snowglobe from that city she was supposed to have visited under, which name to give to a stranger who flirts?

Because she is blonde and beautiful, and even the sketchy guy she secures fake IDs from (Nadav Lapid) is smitten.

Efira’s ability to play manipulative and nurturing, cunning and hurt, selfishly deceitful and vulnerable is impressive, and utterly necessary for the twists this script (by Barraud and Héléna Klotz) serves up.

Because “Madeleine Collins” doesn’t surrender her secrets easily, and by the end (a bit of a let-down), when we’ve figured it all out, we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Rating: unrated, sexual situations

Cast: Virginie Efira, Quim Gutiérrez, Bruno Salomone, Jacqueline Bisset, François Rostain and Mona Walravens

Credits: Directed by Antoine Barraud, scripted by Héléna Klotz and Antoine Barraud. Greenwich Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:46

This looks good, but has just a hint of Netflix “blank check” indulgence filmmaking.

Cooper got the externals right, although the fake nose is drawing some unwanted attention.

I noticed it, but it doesn’t scream “inaccurate” to me and doesn’t make the character or actor playing him less attractive. I watched Lennie on TV growing up and this seems a decent approximation. He struck me on “Young People’s Concerts” as a handsome version of a favorite character actor of my childhood, Hans Conried.

But I’m not Jewish so we’ll see how this plays out.

The public image of “Lenny” had “ebullient” and “mercurial” and “genius” attached to it. Did Cooper get there? Will the picture be under three hours long?

November in theaters, and then streaming.

But we’ll see and hear for ourselves shortly. “Strays opens Thursday night.

A hometown hero, the Samson of Rajavaram, who only needs to don his white shirt to lay waste to all who would brawl with him, sees his love of that town put to the test in “Rangabali,” a soap operatic Indian fable with music.

But after it bounces out of the gate with spirited fights and an epic production number stuffed into a packed first act, this once-jaunty “RRR Lite” withers like a mango left in the sun.

A star vehicle for Teualu actor Naga Shaurya (“Aswathama” was a recent success), it’s only when this Pawan Basamsetti film abandons its Bollywood excesses — epic song and dance numbers, slo-mo brawls, hair and sarees and shirts billowing in the omni-present slo-mo breeze, a big seduction dance — that the picture grinds to a halt and tests one’s patience.

It’s only 135 minutes long, short by Indian cinema standards. But going an hour between dances just kills it.

That winning first act sees the kid who loved attention and fighting from childhood so much that he was nicknamed “Show” grow up be the go-to guy when his town’s statue to Lord Ganpati is about to be removed by a rival town’s ruffians.

He gets up from his nap, stops by the laundry to pick up a fresh white shirt, and slo-mo head-butts, crotch-kicks and haymakers his way through a sea of men in black…with orange headbands.

How does one celebrate that victory? With a huge drum-corps production number, of course.

Show’s a big deal in town, close-pals with with his local MLA (Member of the Legislative Assembly), Parasuram (Shine Tom Chacko). But he needs to pilfer from his father’s pharmacy to have the cash to entertain his friends because he never went to pharmacist school.

He’d rather mix drinks than prescribe pills.

As our Samson realized long ago that his power, influence and indeed his very physical strength derives from his hometown, he’s very reluctant to travel to the city and get that degree.

“The crocodile is stronger under water. But when he comes out, people throw stones at him!”

But he leaves, and once there, accompanied by his sadistic bestie Agadam (Satya), who only derives pleasure from others’ failures, injuries and misfortunes, he is promptly distracted by the fetching doctor-to-be Sahaja (Yukti Thareja).

He puts on the moves, gets as far as asking her father (Murli Sharma) for her hand, only to discover that the wealthy dad has bad memories of his village, so “no marrying my daughter.”

Show must go home and “fix” this little problem.

The movie throws its big romantic/erotic dance duet AFTER a long dead stretch of “college” and other filler scenes of no consequence and after he’s been turned down by the father yet promised his love he will make things right.

That delay took me right out of the movie.

Director Basamsetti and his comic leads know that comedy is a genre that works best at great speed. The prattling banter and one-liners fly by at a sprint. Characters are self-aware of the absurdities going on, not quite calling attention to the ever-present fans off-camera that never seem to disturb Show’s aircraft carrier helmet of hair, but joking about other conventions of the cinema.

“What’s with that look?” (in Tegulu, with subtitles) “It’s as if you’re carrying a terrible FLASHback!”

What “Rangabali” needed is more dancing, more brawling and a romance that throws the traditional courtship/seduction duets at us a lot sooner.

The flashback that explains the film’s title and the difficulty of the quest Show has taken on, salving egos over the infamous name of the town civic center, is cute and gory.

But getting to that moment is a slog, and everything that follows is either nonsensical, dull or both.

Rating: TV-MA, violence

Cast: Naga Shaurya, Yukti Thareja, Satya and Shine Tom Chacko

Credits: Scripted and directed by Pawan Basamsetti. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:15