Rory Kinnear has the title role, that of a bloke who wants to charter a small town bank to “help” his friends and other customers.
Lock! Him! Up! the conservatives shout.
Phoebe Dynevor, Paul Kaye, Naomi Battrick, Jo Hartley, Angus Wright, Joel Fry, Cathy Tyson and Hugh Bonneville also star.
This potentially adorable “true” underdog story opens Aug. 25.
That broken record that hits the turntable almost every time I have to review a thriller is skipping again, this time all the way through “The Engineer.”
“PACING,” skip. “PACING,” skip.
This inspired by “true events” picture is about the hunt for the most notorious Palestinian bomb-builder of the mid-90s, the cunning killer nicknamed “The Engineer.” He was the guy who built the vest-bombs that Hamas suicide-bombers wore onto buses and into Israel’s public places, killing scores and rattling the state that they saw as occupiers/tormenters, who took their land and created their own ethnic quasi-theocracy out of it.
Emile Hirsch leads a cast that saunters through this national crisis and frantic manhunt — agents taking a break for card games and the like — while Israel was being torn apart.
The film takes place in 1995, and “Oslo Accords” peace efforts by Israel’s leadership, the Palestinian Authority and U.S. President Bill Clinton were battered by the spiral of violence and reprisals, which climaxed when an Israeli right winger murdered Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
It’s an important piece of recent history undermined in the telling by slack pacing and a film agenda that seems intent on changing the subject re: Israel today, an apartheidist state morphing into authoritarianism.
Hirsch plays Etan, an American-born Israeli Jew suspended from intelligence work — Mossad and Shin Bet are the two agencies involved — for almost murdering a prisoner in custody. His boss (played by Danny A. Abeckaser, who also directed) summons him back with the “I need you, Israel needs you” speech.
There’s nothing for it but to try and talk the wife into taking their son to Marseilles because “nowhere is safe here,” and to work contacts and start rounding up people who know who this Yahya Ayyash (Adam Haloon), aka “The Engineer” is and where he might be hiding, building bombs and training recruits.
“The streets are getting covered in body parts and we’re sitting on our hands!” Etan protests.
But at least Mossad and Shin Bet are working together. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a wild card in the deck.
Robert Davi plays a fictional U.S. senator who loses a daughter in the film’s opening scene bus-bombing, so he hires his own ex-Mossad “friend” (Angel Bononni) to track down that “Engineer” because “I wanna look him in the eye and I want to shoot him myself.” Classic Robert Davi line.
Perhaps that fictional part of the story was inspired by this true one.
So the Israelis have taken any pretext of “due process” gloves off to catch or kill this killer. And now an American has hired a guy who assembles his own ex-Mossad and IDF (Israeli Defense Forces) team to shoot their way through Gaza without worrying about laws or optics.
That conflict isn’t actually a “conflict” here, and the blind alleys and dead ends in the hunt aren’t all that novel. The interrogations aren’t written, blocked, filmed or edited to give the film that “Munich/Zero Dark Thirty” rising suspense.
All involved could still have made this work by amping up their intensity, even as the film does a decent job of using news montages of each fresh horror to remind us of the stakes.
In this performance, Hirsch isn’t a particularly compelling, convincing or emotionally-committed presence to build this film around. The villain is barely sketched in, as if they lost their nerve at portraying Ayyash as a “villain.”
And none of that lets one forget the film’s unsavory pro-torture, pro-assassination, Israel-as-victim-again/change the-subject-from-Dictator-Bibi agenda.
Rating: R, violence, profanity
Cast: Emile Hirsch, Adam Haloon, Angel Bonanni, Tsahi Halevi, Yarden Toussia-Cohen, Danny A. Abeckaser and Robert Davi
Credits: Directed by Danny A. Abeckaser, scripted by Kosta Kondilopoulos. A Lionsgate release.
Running time: 1:32
Regular readers of movie reviews will recognize the words “beautifully-designed” and “handsomely mounted” as film critic speak for “The blind date we’re setting you up with has…a great personality.”
So it is with the lovely-to-look-at, well-cast old school horror tale “The Last Voyage of the Demeter.”
It’s got the great character actor Liam Cunningham going for it, Corey Hawkins as a sturdy lead and David Dastmalchian as a gloomy first mate, a beautifully-worn and recreated 19th century barquentine (‘Ees no a “SCHOONER,” ye lubber screenwriters. Yarrr.) and access to the finest backlot water tank for filming sea stories in all of Europe — in Malta — going for it.
The violence is gory and a Gothic air of dread and “doom” expressed by one and all sets the tone.
But as we know it’s “The Last Voyage,” Dracula’s sea journey from the Balkans to Britain, we know how it comes out, more or less. There’s little urgency or growing alarm about the sense that something is killing the livestock — and not eating it — and biting the crew to death, one member at a time.
It’s violent to an eyes-averting degree, but rarely scary. The script doesn’t follow the “Dracula/Vampire movie” rules, not rigidly, anyway. Dracula is a beast, with little trace of an actor underneath him, little chance he’d pass for a bloke you’d look past in a pub. And the “Demeter” just drifts between abrupt scripted-violence and abruptly-summoned storms, looking good but not really getting the job of frightening us done.
The framing device is the shipwreck on England’s shore that Bram Stoker included in his novel, the narration provided by the captain (Cunningham) and the journey all about how “he got here (the UK)” and started seducing women and biting necks.
Hawkins, of “Straight Outta Compton” and “BlackKklansman,” is Mr. Clemens, a Cambridge-educated doctor and curious man of science who can’t find work because of the color of his skin. A chance intervention on a Bulgarian dock lands him in the Demeter’s small crew, a “charter” trip by sail in the age of steam.
In the hold are a stack of crates embossed with the mark of a dragon. That spooks the locals, who refuse to load the cargo, with at least one of them declining the chance to sign on to sail.
Hawkins must literally “learn the ropes” and the ways of this creaky old windjammer, from the hold to the wheel and masts, the knocking on wood signal used to summon help (it’s heard throughout the ship), and the captain’s grandson Toby (“Oliver Twist” mop-topped Woody Norman).
The crew is a mixed-bag of Slavs and Scandinavians, with the exotic cook (Jon Jon Briones) a religious fanatic who might come in handy. Or not.
But when the new guy stumbles across a stowaway, near death, in the crates — a woman (Aisling Franciosi), aka “bad luck” on a ship — the ship’s fate seems sealed.
“We let Poseidon deal with stowaways,” Wojchek mutters. But there’ll be none of that. Not that it will help. Because as the doctor nurses her back to life, blood is shed.
“Evil is on board,” the men and woman of superstition try to convince the man-of-science doctor. “Powerful evil.”
The script provides a few good lines and the cast a few decent moments. But “old school” Universal horror — dating from the studio’s 1930s history — means “old hat,” in most cases.
Dracula is glimpsed and eventually wholly seen, but has no personality. “Powerful evil” rarely does.
Consulting “the bite-marked Roma girl” provides no new wrinkles to a timeworn tale.
They set out, fight the elements, search and re-search the ship after the rats disappear, the livestock are slaughtered and this or that man on watch dies or disappears. There’s little sense of growing alarm and horror, their greed to collect a bonus is so great that they don’t put in to port, and one and all seem resigned to their fate.
That includes “Troll Hunter” director André Øvredal, who content to make this Universal horror “universe” look beautifully lived-on, gruesomely died-in, and “handsomely mounted” when what it wants is the rising dread and blasts of terror that the name “Dracula” has inspired for over a ce
Rating: R, graphic, bloody violence
Cast: Corey Hawkins, Aisling Franciosi, David Dastmalchian, Woody Norman, Stefan Kapicic, Javier Botot, Nikolai Nikolaeff and Liam Cunningham.
Credits: Directed by André Øvredal, scripted by Bragi F. Schut and Zak Olkewicz, based on the novel by Bram Stoker. A Universal release.
Running time: 1:58
Layers of hurt and pieces of a puzzle peel away over the course of Kôji Fukada’s “Love Life,” a forlorn and downbeat drama with dissonant dramedy touches.
It’s intriguing yet so slow and quiet as to test one’s patience, duller than his manga adaptation, “The Real Thing,” and something of a “Yes, and?” letdown.
A couple preps for a celebration, but we don’t know what it is that’s being celebrated.
Wife Taeko (Fumino Kimura of “Love for Beginners”) dotes on their six year old, Keita, accepting his many challenges to play “Othello” with him.
Husband Jirô (Kento Nagayama of “The Pass: “Last of the Samurai”) does the cooking and decorating. And he’s arranged for some friends at work to stage a little display with balloons waving placards that spell out “Congratulations.”
She interrupts her day to rush out and mediate another dispute between the homeless and someone who’s antagonized them. That’s her job, working with social services for the homeless. He has work in another state social service office.
Something is riding on this party, the first since their wedding. There’s bad blood with his parents — his father, in particular.
And his co-workers, organizing those placards, are a tad put-out when Yamazaki (Hirona Yamazaki) from the office insists on taking part. We hear (or read the English subtitles) the first whispers about what might be a little “off” here.
Yamazaki was Jirô’s ex. “He cheated on her” with Taeko, the woman he just married. And she’sthe one bringing the balloons.
Taeko’s son is from a previous marriage. Her first husband walked out on her.
Even though the party seems to come off, despite the clouds hanging over it, his Dad uses the first opening he hears to lash out at the “cast off (second hand)” wife. His apology isn’t all that impressive, but eventually the evening starts to seem like a success,” acceptance” at last.
Until, that is, the child has an accident. That tragedy tears at the couple as her ex, Park Shinji (Atom Sunada), shows up and emotionally-stunted Jirô starts wondering about the beautiful Yamazaki he wronged to marry Taeko.
Fukada picks at the emotionally raw parents via the tactless police inquiry. “Why didn’t you adopt the boy?” the cops ask Jirô.
Taeko wants to bring the body “home,” to an apartment that belongs to his folks, before the funeral. And that flips his mother out. “What will the NEIGHBORS say?”
And things continue to unravel from there, as we’re shown a Japanese funeral interrupted by out-of-character explosions of grief, the stunted way the husband can’t make eye contact and a bereft mother and wife staggers on in shock, not comforted by a culture not known for its hugging. At all.
Fukada gets caught up in the layers of connection and little revelations that entangle these people in a large web of regret, duplicity and impulse control. But he gives us little feel for the characters and no reason to empathize with them despite all we see them going through.
Truth be told, the tragedy is potentially wrenching, and then all but abandoned.
Several good scenes resonate, and one sublime scene stands out — Taeko’s heartfelt confrontation with the man who ditched her and their son, acted-out in sign language, because Park Shinji is deaf and mute.
But “Love Life” doesn’t coalesce into anything deeper than “Everybody’s dealing with something” and “Life’s a mess that only gets messier.” And in the end, this quiet drama — stumbling into near comedy for the finale — is just pointless enough to pass for “dull.”
Rating: unrated
Cast: Fumino Kimura, Kento Nagayama, Hirona Yamazaki and Atom Sunada.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Kôji Fukada. An Oscilloscope Labs release.
Running time 2:05
Gibson joins Collin Woodell, Nhung Kate, Katie McGrath, Jessica Alain and…Ray McKinnon in this continuation “prequel” of Wickworld and the hotel for assassins.
For those not following the post-“cancellation” Mel Gibson saga, this sort of violent action setting has been his bread and butter in B-and-C movies the past ten years. No, he wasn’t really “canceled.” He’s just an action star aged into grizzled shoot-em-up roles.
This three part series comes to Peacock this Sept.
A tone poem on rural life, community and Black life in the rural South.
A fall feature from our friends at A24.
“The Pod Generation” is an aridly-dry sci-fi satire about childbirth in a more technologically convenient future.
It’s a dark comedy that’s more cautionary than amusing, and downright triggering at times. Writer-director Sophia Barthes extrapolates our app-obsessed/mega-corp-controlled present world into that day, not far down the road, when “the singularity is near” and the “natural” way of doing everything is out of fashion, so “naturally” few people think twice about passing the life-changing disruption of having a baby on to a”Womb Center,” where nothing is left to chance.
“Why would any of us want to feel nauseus and gain 35 pounds?”
The endgame Barthes — “Cold Souls,” and the Mia Wasikowska “Madame Bovary” were hers — is poking at here is a feminist future when full female participation in the workforce, value in the workplace and professional and personal “fulfillment” can be truly realized by giving women the option of having their babies incubated in portable, egg-shaped “pods.”
That’s a choice facing Rachel (Emilia Clarke), a rising star exec with a marketing/”influencing” division of the hydra-headed tech/digital/cloud/services Pegazus Corp,, and Alvy (Chiwetel Ejiofor), her boat-against-the-current college botany professor husband.
They’re living in the city, like everyone else, constantly assisted and monitored by “cognitive assistants” provided by Rachel’s company, “influenced” by paid influencers in the media and in their daily lives.
The chirpy “Siri” like voice of Elena lets Rachel know if she’s in sync with the “national bliss index.” Elena is a lot testier with plant-and-“nature” obsessed Luddite Alvy, hiding his coffee, deliberately burning his toast.
The whole “baby” thing comes up when Rachel is summoned in to be queried about a promotion. All the data Pegazus and its subsidiaries collect on her suggests she’s killing it at work. Her boss wants to know if there are “any plans on extending the family?”
In the near future, this sort of invasive data-collecting and nakedly sexist questioning (her boss is a woman) is legal and an accepted part of life. I guess.
Rachel finds herself having to “decide” on parenthood in the middle of an impromptu sit-down with her boss, urged to check by with the corporation’s “Womb Center” affiliate, “take a tour,” with none of it involving her “He wants a ‘natural child” husband.
The couple finds themselves down the rabbit hole of trying to have a moment to “process all this” in an everything-tech world in which not just human peers, but Rachel’s AI psychotherapist (a giant eyeball surrounded by a frame of grass and flowers) are pressuring/brainwashing them into avoiding all things “old fashioned” and going with the flow.
Alvy side-eyes Rachel’s parrotted talking points, and argues with her AI therapist.
“You don’t have a consciousness. So you are not QUALIFIED to take a look at mine!”
The couple fights over semantics — “the baby” vs. “the pod,” as in “I can’t do it (sex) with the pod in here — over outdated parenting manuals and selling their beach house because “we never go there” and “no one goes ‘into the country'” any more.
“That’s so…20th century!”
Fake treehouses with hologram-equipped meditation pods are how city slickers get their taste of “nature,” here.
But even though Barthes imagines this future in deep detail — the Steve Jobs-era Apple design of the pob, citizens surrendering control and personal information without thinking of the consequences, a government which is “no longer funding education” or much of anything else, because corporations will take care of that — and the satiric points seem clear enough, the “comedy” part of this dark comedy just dies.
We can tell it’s supposed to be funny when our dismayed then amused couple watching as his donated sperm fertilizes her ovum in real-time on a video monitor while their Womb Center counselor (Rosalie Craig, as creepy as she needs to be) cheer-leads this most unnatural version of a “natural” process.
Ejiofor’s side-eying makes a comical contrast to Clarke’s eyebrow hokie pokey looks annoyance with Alvy, then puzzlement, disapproval and perhaps a complete change of heart.
But the tone is “2001” icy, impersonal and bloodless. It’s as if Barthes has taken tale’s implicit warning about “detachment” being all important in an even more digitized future and made a film that we’re not allowed to engage with.
A couple of third act sequences generate empathy and suspense, but only barely. The flat tone Barthes goes for undercuts the poignant wince we should feel when we learn how machine-assisted-and-dominated life discounts dreams, “which do no serve any evolutionary purpose,” the AI therapist snaps, but which Rachel keeps having. She imagines a natural pregnancy and birth, a “connection” with a baby growing in her womb.
Pod babies aren’t dreaming, they’re told. Which should be alarming to the prospective parents, but isn’t. They, like the viewer, are propogandized and narcotized out of thinking dreams are necessary.
Modern life has stripped bits and pieces of their humanity and their human rights, but “convience” supposedly makes it all worth it.
Barthes has given us an immaculate, vividly-believable future to be dreaded and avoided. But she’s put it in a movie so unemotional that we can’t invest ourselves in taking a stand to prevent it, even if the script ordains that the under-motivated Rachel and Alvy do.
Rating: PG-13, for brief strong language, suggestive material and partial nudity
Cast: Emilia Clarke, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Rosalie Craig, Jean-Marc Barr and Vinette Robinson
Credits: Scripted and directed by Sophia Barthes. A Roadside Attractions/Vertical release.
Running time: 1:43
Decades of “Twilight Zone” episodes and movies from “Primer”” and “Timecrimes” to “Safety Not Guaranteed” have demonstrated that you don’t need a huge budget to tell a time travel story.
The best films of the genre are intellectual exercises, and for all the laughs and “cool” parts of the blockbuster “Back to the Future” franchise, the mental math required to keep timelines straight is at least half the fun.
Time travel tales make us face choices, dilemmas and unforseen “Butterfly Effect” repercussions that are theoretically probable if anyone masters the machinery of giving a life or a historical period a temporal “do over.”
“Aporia” brings a fretful melancholia to the genre by taking away the “travel” from time travel, and letting characters impact the past and future by pushing a button that kills someone. So it’s a little like like a laugh-free “Safety Not Guaranteed,” a less moral version of the Frank Langella/Cameron Diaz thriller “The Box.”
The word “aporia” means an unresolvable dilemma, some situation that’s crated an impasse.
That’s what the characters here face as they ponder the possibilities, the ethics and the pitfalls of using “a machine that can (metaphorically) fire a bullet into the past” at the target of their choice. Well, kind of ponder.
We don’t learn about “the machine” until after we’ve met Sophie (Judy Greer), a struggling nurse and single-mom whose daughter (Faithe C. Herman) is getting kicked out of school for “not showing up.”
The fact that the school is calling and that Sophie is “there” even though they’re suspending for her skipping school is just the first unresolved puzzle facing us here.
Riley has been acting-out ever since her father died. In flasbhacks, we see how close she and Mal (Edi Gathegi) were and how much in love Sophie and Mal-short-for-Malcolm were.
But something happened, something that keeps dragging harassed Sophie back into court seeking justice. for Mal’s death.
Mal is gone, their daughter wants nothing to do with her mother and Mom is at her wit’s end.
Mal was a scientist living on disability after an on-the-job accident some years before his death. His best friend, the immigrant physicist-turned Lyft driver Jabir (Payman Maadi) is Sophie’s “rock,” the one she turns to in her many crises.
He’s the one who mentions this “machine” he and Mal had been working on. It hadn’t worked-out as a time travel device. But with a computer interface aimed at someone at a particular place at a very particular (very recent history only) time, it can engineer the death of the guy who killed Mal and bring the much-missed husband and fatehr back to life.
Smart filmmakers find ways to dodge “explaining” the means of delivering time travel. Sometimes, a DeLorean is all it takes. Writer-director Jared Moshe explains less than most — there’s this “abstract particle” — which is all well and good.
But there’s kind of cavalier, justify-this-as-it-goes improvisational feel to some of the many ethical and moral debates that the picture tries to introduce.
Jabir’s “What harm is there in trying?” flippancy comes before “There is no ‘undo’ button,” and before any consideration comes up about the morality of their actions.
They’re killing a guy, after all. We overhear enough about how he caused Mal’s death to wonder if this is defensible in the least.
But this being a movie, we know that A) Mal is going to find out what they did and B) there will be other calls to use that gadget — which uses car batteries and jumper cables in its design — to kill a mass shooter or school attacker, and tidy up lives that were dirsupted by that first “kill” intervention.
The stunning life make-over that bringing Mal back creates has Jabir and Sophie ecstatic, and unknowning Riley reborn, to say nothing about what it does for Mal. But unforseen consequences ripple away from that first killing.
Greer, in her best role in years, really sells that moment where Sophie morphs from angry, desperate skeptic with dashed hopes to wife who gets a cell phone call from the beloved-but-dead and much-needed partner and husband she lost eight months before.
It’s not Kathleen Turner answering a phone from her long-dead granny in “Peggy Sue Got Married,” but it’ll do. Greer give the nost nuanced performance here, and I didn’t feel much from any other actor’s effects.
I wasn’t nuts about the abrupt shifts in ethics and stumbling debates over taking this or that action in the middle acts. We never actually “see” the killings, which makes for an interesting series of ways to test if the outcome they sought turned out. Well, the first time we see that it’s “interesting.”
And the conclusion has a rough logic to its consequences, but seems arrived at abruptly. Big emotions we expect never quite arrive after that first “machining.”
Taking all this deathly serious has its own downside. There’s pathos and guilt we see but never raelly feel it.
If you’ve seen the several titles I mentioned at the outset — obvious sources of inspiraction here — this film’s big surprise or two will still land. But nothing outside of those third act twists feels fresh or as cleverly thought-out as the many antecedents to “Aporia,” several of which play better and challenge the viewer more than this version of a time-tested, time-honored genre.
Rating: R, profanity
Cast: Judy Greer, Edi Gathegi and Payman Maadi
Credits: Scripted and directed by Jared Moshe. A Well Go USA release.
Running time:
This looks fascinating, a “hack” that hit the weakest link in a banking/Federal Reserve chain.
“Billion Dollar Heist” comes out Aug. 15.
Writer-director Roderick MacKay’s “The Furnace” is a solid if somewhat slow Australian variation on the “gold fever leads to gold madness” “Treasure of Sierra Madre” theme.
MacKay’s debut feature is about a blood-stained quest to get stolen gold out of the Outback in 1897, the latter years of that Down Under experiment in using camels as desert transport and impressing Afghans, Sikhs and others from the sandy quarters of The Empire to drive them.
As a subtext, the film shows the connection many of this camel drivers made with the country’s other outcast class — Aborigines. So MacKay makes some pointed observations about Aussie racism, as well.
Hanif (Ahmed Malek of “The Swimmers”) and Jundah (Kaushik Das of “The Dog Days of Christmas) are “cameleers,” drover-partners trying to make a business out of the work that began as “indentured servitude.” Hanif, a Muslim, wants to save enough to go home to Afghanistan. Jundah, who is Sikh, is more resigned to this place and its people — Aboriginies like their friend Woorak (Baykali Ganambarr of “The Nightengale”).
The most important thing they all have in common? They’re all “Boy” to any white man they meet, with the South Asians — Sunni, Shia and Sikh — merely lumped together as “Ghans” to the whites.
The faintest hint of talking back at a well, a simple “No problem,” gets Jundah murdered. Woorak and his spear provide swift retribution to the killer.
Hanif gives some thought to laying low with Woorak’s tribe before going off on his own. But stumbling across the scene of a shoot-out changes his mind. The lone survivor (David Wenham of “300) needs medical help.
Oh, and don’t forget my “goods.” This is the aftermath of a gold heist. He has crown-stamped ingots, and all belong to him since everybody else is dead.
The Aborogines who figure this out eventually chase them away, fretting over “the dust storm you kick up behind you.”
Because soon a special crown army “gold squad” (Jay Ryan, Samson Coulter and Erik Thompson) are on their trail. But if our desert duo can make it to a town with an off-the-books smelter, they’ll be rich, with Hanif able to return home.
The film follows a generally predictable path with many of the usual obstacles — mutual mistrust, third party, fourth party and fifth party interfence, the risk of dying of thirst.
That “path” includes personal story arcs the characters traverse, something MacKay handles a bit more clumsily. Some of the action beats digress from the leads and feel arbitrary in their inclusion.
But it’s a sturdy yarn that hits many of the right notes, with Malek and Wenham setting off a few sparks and the quarrelsome army squad setting off others, as they have as many problems among themselves as with assorted “others,” most of them labeled with racial slurs.
And the bloodletting, when it comes, it as pitiless as it would have been anywhere that called itself a “frontier” whose inhabitants reconciled themselves to “life is cheap” as a creed.
Rating: TV-MA, violence
Cast: Ahmed Malek, David Wenham, Baykali Ganambarr, Jay Ryan,
Trevor Jamieson and Erik Thompson
Credits: Scripted and directed by Roderick MacKay. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:56
Movie Nation 