Movie Nation

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

I was traveling Monday when word came down that the great action director William Friedkin died.

I only interviewed him once, about one of his lesser titles, “Blue Chips,” which brought him to Orlando where he and Shaquille O’Neal held forth about the state of college hoops and the film.

But a couple of revealing documentaries I’ve reviewed in recent years paint a great picture of this Oscar winner, art lover and all-around colorful figure, director of “The French Connection,” “The Exorcist,” “To Live and Die in LA” and “Killer Joe.”

My favorite among the two docs is “Leap of Faith,” his deconstruction of how he made “The Exorcist.” But this one, “Friedkin Uncut,” is worth tracking down on this or that streamer if you want a feel for the man.

“Leap of Faith” is on Youtube subscription, Vudu and Amazon. “Friedkin Uncut” is on free streamers Tubi and Pluto and elsewhere.

“Sorceror,” his Roy Scheider remake of “Wages of Fear,” is a favorite among his fans, and I’ve watched “The French Connection” so many times I’ve memorized the damned license plates from that movie’s epic, on the fly, “guerilla filmmaking” (to hear Friedkin tell it) chase scene.

He was adept at turning stage plays into movies, too — “The Boys in the Band,” “Bug” and “Killer” Joe.”

His style was that he had a LOT of styles. Actors turned in great performances in his films, largely due to his refusal to rehearse and love of “accidents” and tricks he’d play on his actors — live (blank, we trust) gunshots to get a jolt or moment of shock, etc.

Raconteur, epicurean. iconoclast, Old School Director as Emperor. RIP, Billy Friedkin.

This looks like a great production values period piece that ably mimics old school Universal horror fun.

“Jules” is a bland comedy about aging and an alien, of little consequence save for its impressive and whimsically-engaged cast.

Oscar winner Ben Kingsley, Emmy winner Jane Curtin and always-amusing Emmy nominee Harriet Sansom Harris take their shot at this twee tale of elderly small-town eccentrics who have a close encounter, and that trio gets everything they can out of it. The trouble is, there isn’t enough to “get.”

Milton, Joyce (Curtin) and Sandy (Harris) are classic “types,” features of many a small town’s active, functioning democracy. They’re” regulars” at tiny Boonton, Pa.’s council meetings, always there to speak up in the public comments after business of government has been transacted.

The council has to sit there and silently endure these aged broken records and their suggestions and complaints, meeting after meeting after meeting.

Sandy has “helpful” projects she’s undertaking that she wants government to be aware of. Joyce is a bit of a “pickleball” obsessed crank. And Milton’s got an endlessly-repeated suggestion for a new crosswalk, and repeatedly passes on his concerns that the town motto, “a great place to call home,” is confusing. “A great place to refer to as ‘home'” would be more to the point.

They’re all in their ’70s, and these meetings are a part of their regular, lonely routine. He’s widowed, estranged from a son who never calls, looked-after by his veterinary nurse daughter ( Zoë Winters of “Succession”) who takes care of his bills and frets over his mental health.

And then there’s a loud noise that wakes him up, and 911 doesn’t want to hear about it.

“A spaceship has crashed in my backyard, and it has crushed my azeleas!”

Damned if he doesn’t bring it up at a council meeting and drop the news on the checkout clerk at his local market. If you have enough “senior moments,” people stop listening to you. So the only people to take him seriously, in concerned (Sandy) and “You make us all look bad” (Joyce) ways, are his contempories.

That 70something brain trust has to figure out what to do with the alien and his or her busted spaceship, its appetitite for apples and its silent obsession with cats.

Screenwriter Gavin Steckler got a few very short-run TV series up and streaming, and here mashes up bits of “Cocoon,” “E.T.,” “Starman” and “A.L.F.” to make a not-at-all-veiled comment on the indignities of growing old. First among them is not being listened to or taken seriously, second might be the loss of control that comes when your child (Winters) insists you see the doctor, who has the effrrontery to give you one of those humiliating congitive tests that Trump was given while in office.

As director Marc Turtletaub has had much better lucky as producer (“The Farewell,” “Little Miss Sunshine”) than director (“Gods Behaving Badly”), that leaves this cast kind of on its own to add laughs and pathos to very thin material.

Despite having Curtin sing “Free Bird,” a career-first for a “Saturday Night Live/Kate & Allie/Third Rock” legend, the only laugh-out-loud bits were the shock-value profanities that pop up when everybody but the unflappable Milton reacts to this unprecedented visitation.

Everything about “Jules” — from complications to the ongoing TV coverage of a National Security Agency search for a “missing weather balloon” — feels pre-digested and been-there/seen-that winded.

But all that aside, the players make “Jules” a perfectly pleasant piece of counter-programming for any fan of its cast or anyone in search of late summer cinematic comfort food.

Rating: PG-13, profanity, a couple of comic expletives

Cast: Ben Kingsley, Jane Curtin, Harriet Sansom Harris and Zoë Winters.

Credits: Directed by Marc Turtletaub, scripted by Gavin Steckler. A Bleecker St. release.

Running time: 1:27

A French best seller about “making the invisible visible” among that country’s under-employed and over-worked “gig economy” cleaning crews becomes a sentimental, occasionally-moving melodrama built around Juliette Binoche, playing a well-known writer/researcher undercover among those crews, trapped “Between Two Worlds.”

At its best, Emmanuel Carrèr’s film based on the Florence Aubenas non-fiction book “Le Quai de Ouistreham” gives us an up-close look at people trapped at the bottom of the employment ladder, sprinting through the staterooms and gangways of a French ferry that hauls tourists back and forth on overnight trips to Britain, scrambling to clean and replace the bedding in every stateroom before the next departure.

“Four minutes” per room, her fellow cleaners tell posh, 50something Marianne (Binoche) on her first night, in Frenchg with English subtitles. That’s all the instruction she gets.

“You either cut it or you don’t.”

We’ve barely had time to ponder why any filmmaker — French or otherwise — would think the luminous Binoche could pass for “invisible” or even “working poor,” when her voice-over narration, Marianne taking notes in various cleaning jobs in and around Caen and the way she befriends and questions co-workers give away the game.

She’s researching her new book, an expose of the employment crisis created by the gig economy and how it’s impacting those stuck on that bottom rung. But early on, when an employment counselor discovers her secret, we’re asked to ponder, as she must, the morality, ethics and authenticity of dipping her toes in a world the real people have to struggle through for days and years on end.

We think it even if no one says it out loud. She’s a wealthy, coddled dilettante lying to young Marilou (Léa Carne), struggling Cedric (Didier Pupin), who hits on her in the most chivalrous ways and on testy, single mother-of-three Chrystèle, given a wary, guarded resignation by Hélène Lambert.

We hear Marianne invent her new past, brag about how she goes “off grid” to do this sort of background research, but we can only imagine the world of letters, publishing and privilege she’s come from.

But she does her damnedest to fit in, learning the various cleaning regimens — public restrooms to rental vacation trailers to the ferries that rotate through the port of Ouistreham.

Strangers become new friends who entrust her with the loan of an ancient Citroen, which enables her to find more “hours” in more jobs, and to make more acquaintances.

Some folks have a dream, but many, like Chrystèle, barely have time for that. A lottery ticket and a laugh about meeting “some rich guy” is all she has energy to hope for.

I love the way Lambert side-eyes this stranger when Marianne detours them to a beach, an over-worked working-class single-mom forced to bask in the beauty of the coast and to indulge this stranger who figures a little dip in the sea would be just the sort of lark she could use right now.

We know everything that’s going to happen here, including how these “two worlds” are destined to collide.That robs the film of some of the pathos of Netflix’s “Maid” and similar productions that really get into working class reatlities. Yes, there’s always a bowling alley scene, even in French entries in this genre.

So there’s a distance between us and cinemantic immersion and investment here just as Marianne feels a distance thanks to her dilettantism, how different she is from “these people.”

Its predictability doesn’t break “Between Two Worlds,” but it does soften the blows it intends to deliver.

Rating: unrated, profanity, smoking

Cast: Juliette Binoche, Hélène Lambert, Léa Carne, Emily Madeleine and Didier Pupin

Credits: Directed by Emmanuel Carrèr, scripted by and Hélène Devynck and Emmanuel Carrère, based on a book by Florence Aubenas. A Cohen Media Group release.

Running time: 1:46

Daisy Ridley and Oscar winner Marion Cotillard also provide voices for this multi-animation style whimsy, coming to theaters Aug.25.

Considering the middling kids’ fare this past summer, that’s a nice counter- programming move.

When it comes to comedy, “tone” counts for a lot. So hats off– OK, Keffiyehs off — to director Malik Nejer, screenwriter Abdulaziz Al Muzaini and their cast for going for “goofy” with “Head to Head,” that rarest of rare birds, a Saudi Arabian caper comedy.

They throw in mistaken identity, a corpse that must be disguised so an old patriarch is painted-up and dressed as a woman, a madcap mad bomber, Saudi swearing and Saudi Arabian catfishing and assorted hustles and schemes circling around a long missing “egg.”

As a character nicknamed the King of Diamonds is being released from a Russian prison in the opening, you can guess what kind of “egg” that might be.

I wish I could say it works, that it’s light of foot with a comically subversive streak that speaks to everyday life in a sometimes murderous and always repressive, sexist and dictatorial monarchy. But despite having the makings of a fun farce, “Head to Head” never quite clicks.

But that’s me writing having watched it through the eyes of a Westerner. Maybe the baby-steps in this ongoing search, “Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World,” plays as more riotous in Riyadh.

Over the top threats and violence are filmed in comic bug-eyed close-ups, jokey split screens and almost jaunty montages attempt to force laughs into sequences that aren’t that funny.

But there are laughs amongst the tried-and-true darkly comic situations and often cartoonish characters.

This King of Diamonds crime figure (Shaher Al Qurashi) is released from a Russian prison and flies into Riyadh the same day as the patriarch (Saleh Alkhalaqi) of Sheik’s Chauffeur limo service, a company whose scheming, low-life son is putting on the market for an IPO.

The inbound father-figures are mixed-up by the blundering limo service, which has abruptly been put in the hands of a new CEO, the dopey, corrupt (parts stealing) mechanic Fayadh (Abdulaziz Alshehri).

The ex-con’s mob family in lawless Bathaikha wants their leader. The limo firm’s IPO can’t go forward without their now-hostage owner.

There’s nothing for it but for Fayadh and distracted, ready-to-flee-the-country-with-his girlfriend (Ida Alkusay) limo driver Darwish (Adel Radwan) to take their elderly mob boss to the “exchange.” Only he dies before it can happen.

Mortal threats and a hail of bullets don’t solve anything. They’ll have to scheme with an ever-widening selection of screwball local miscreants, including the catsfishing mugger (Ziyad Alamri) and his ginormous, short-tempered bomb-maker/accomplice (Hesham Alhosawi).

Things sort of bog down as this simple tale turns cluttered and over-complicated in the middle acts. And some funny characters and situations aren’t milked for all they’re worth.

I got a kick out of the parts-swapping/Cadillac-customization hustle Fayadh’s accomplice is running, with his help — new parts swapped out for old, “extra” parts stolen and sold.

“This Cadillac doesn’t go in reverse,” in Arabic with subtitles — or dubbed.” You sold REVERSE?”

“Why do you want to go in reverse? The FUTURE is out there, in FRONT of you?”

What they do with this corpse is not Ghusl in the worst way. Pity they don’t get more giggles for their trouble.

A couple of low-comedy slap fights are worth a chuckle. Female impersonation (post mortem) is a plot point, and the lone woman character has agency and pluck. The lawlessness in this or that corner of the Kingdom is ridiculed, as is “global warming.” No, the Saudis don’t want you to believe in it, either.

The giggles don’t add up to much, but you’ve got to walk before you sprint. I’d love to see more attempts like this as Netflix, Malik Nejer and Abdulaziz Al-Muzani try to show us that Saudis like to laugh, too, and that they can make a comedy that transcends religion and desert borders.

In the meantime, let’s just say “Nice try.”

Rating: TV-MA, violence, death, profanity

Cast: Abdulaziz Alshehri, Adel Radwan, Ida Alkusay, Mohammad Alqass, Ziyad Alamri and Hesham Alhosawi.

Credits: Malik Nejer, scripted by Abdulaziz Al-Muzaini. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:31

Elizabeth Falkner was a jet-setting, TV-friendly chef and “food personality” at work on a documentary project of some sort when the COVID pandemic hit in 2020.

She recognized the calamity unfolding around her, and also admits to being triggered by memories of closing her restauranst and getting out of that work-yourself-to-death business during the financial collapse of 2008.

She and filmmaker Peter Ferriero (“Her Name is Chef”) switched gears and decided to document, in real time, what the pandemic and the various shutdowns were doing to one of America’s largest industries, one in which she’d already seen an “unsustainable” and toxic mix of workloads, tiny profit margins, burnout risks, ever-more-demanding “foodie” customers and a health care system not set up to take care of those who feed us.

“Sorry, We’re Closed,” is a hopeful, brisk and sprawling “cook’s tour” with “self-care” and support for COVID closed eateries and their stressed chefs and staff as its subtext. They’d not only be visiting scores of closed eateries as their chefs “pivoted” to take-out and home delivery. Falkner would be checking in with stressed chefs — many of whom were filling their time with TikTok and Instagram performative cooking, lessons, etc., and many more of whom were drinking and “crying in a fetal position” about their finances, their inability to pay their stressed hired help and their mental and physical health during a global pandemic.

Falkner and her fellow restaurateurs bristle at the mishandling of the pandemic, then-president Donald Trump “actively sabotaging” the pandemic response and the restaurant industury when he tried to give the flu’s origin racist labeling. Chinese and Asian-American chefs and their friend Falkner express outrage and fear at the division and hate-crimes this was sewing.

The Black Lives Matter protests became another challenge, mid-pandemic, trying to protect one’s restaurant from marches that sometimes led to vandalism.

And all of these tests — disruption of the food supply, laying off of labor, forced closures and general unrest, are just “a dress rehearsal for climate change,” warns the sage and chef Alice Waters, godmother of modern American foodie culture.

The broad swath of people Falkner and Ferriero track down give the film a diffuse focus. It might have been better-served by limiting the number of people interviewed and using fewer chefs, servers, “mixologists” and others to illustrate the myriad problems facing an industry that didn’t get an airline-sized bailout, despite dwarfing most other American workforces in size and reach.

The lack of European-style universal healthcare is listed as one of the biggest burdens facing the “tips” side of the workplace. Millions didn’t return to those jobs after the pandemic, and not just those working for fast food giants or unscrupulous business owners who hoarded all their PPP loan for themselves rather than keep workers on the payroll, which was the entire point.

Burnout and substance abuse, already widespread in this all-consuming/endless days-and-nights job (read Anthony Bordain’s “Kitchen Confidential”), got worse.

But Falker, allowing herself to get very emotional about all this at times, gives us an idea that she didn’t just want to document a crisis and its impact on a corner of the culture. Inspired by an essay by Prune owner and chef and New York Times columnist Gabrielle Hamilton, Falkner wanted to provide a voice to those struggling, a place for those personally impacted to vent and sound the alarm and a filmed visit to boost morale.

Judging from the finished film, she met most of those goals.

Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Elizabeth Falkner, Alice Waters, Esdras Ochoa, Perry Cheung, Gabrielle Hamilton, Ann Kim, Gerald Sombright, many others

Credits: Directed by Peter Ferriero, written and narrated by Elizabeth Falkner. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:18

Skip past the odd lapses in logic and boil down the new “version” the of river-rafting-with-a-murderer plot titled “River Wild” to its basics.

It’s a thriller. Does it provide thrills? Does it serve up a surprise or two? Does it make you feel for its victims, root for the hero/heroine?

Yes it does, on all counts.

There’s no Meryl Streep or Kevin Bacon in this tale of terrord that have nothing to do with the rapids they’re running. But Leighton Meester and Adam Brody make decent substitutes in a lean, tight and violent tale of a family reunion rafting trip that goes ever-so-wrong.

Meester plays Dr. Joey Reese, motoring into remote Idaho to take a weekend trip down river with her burly rafting-guide brother, Gray (Taran Killam). A phone call with her fellow-physician and beau James lets us wonder if she’s fleeing the mad-rush of “commitment.”

No worries. They’ll “look for a house when you get back.” Just remember, “If you hear banjos, RUN!”

Cute. But it becomes pretty obvious not-too-far-downstream that not everything that wants you dead here is wet and filled with rocks, rapids and waterfalls, or playing the banjo.

Gray’s old pal and fellow guide Trevor (Brody) is on board the smaller-than-you’d-think inflatable. And he’s trying WAY too hard to strike-up whatever he wants to strike up with the woman he used to call “Jo Bean” back in the day.

Two pretty young Continentals (Olivia Swann and Eve Connolly) are the “paying” customers to Kootenai’s River Raft Tours latest ride down the Kootenai River. Nobody knows what they have in store for them, not even the instigator of their troubles and trials.

Gray, we learn during a campfire pass-the-bottle, is “sober.” Trevor, not everybody knows, is an ex-con. He and Gray have an unusually close relationship, one that will be tested when somebody gets hurt and no, it wasn’t an accident.

Director and co-writer Ben Katai — best-known for the TV series “Chosen,” “StartUp” and “The Expecting” — shows a nice feel for the river and the material and doesn’t get stylistically carried away with a story that demands streamlined speed to come off.

Most every twist in character behavior here is at least defensible — if not the most logical — given the dramatic circumstances.

Meester dresses down and toughens up, save for one scene that makes her almost eye-rollingly vocal. Brody oozes cornered-animal panic, which gives this picture its electric charge and momentum.

The neatest feat pulled off here is how this “River Wild” uses our connection with the heroine to empathize, as she does, with that first victim — someone gravely hurt simply for protecting herself, someone we see pitifully panicked, then drifting into seizure and shock.

It’s heartbreaking. That’s kind of a jaw-dropping thing for a simple, blunt-instrument thriller inspired by an earlier and somewhat similar tale.

No, it’s not a font of originality or endless blast of excitement. But “River Wild” does what its inspiration did and manages to move us as much as the Streep and Bacon Curtis Hanson film of 1994 did, and does it in a much shorter thriller.

Rating: PG-13, violence, bloodshed, profanity

Cast: Leighton Meester, Adam Brody, Olivia Swann, Taran Killam and Eve Connolly.

Credits: Directed by Ben Katai, scripted by Ben Ketai and Mike Le. A Universal production released on Netflix

Running time: 1:31

“Mickey Hardaway” is a well-intentioned, slow-moving indie drama about a sensitive young man’s hard upbringing and the consequences of all the blows he’s taken along life’s way.

It’s your standard-issue “film festival movie” — indie, an unknown cast shot mostly in black-and-white, just polished enough to avoid the “amateurish” tag, but not compelling or exciting enough to draw the viewer in.

Static scenes, stentorian writing and flat performances work against the plot’s good intentions and make the first feature from writer-director Marcellus Cox — expanding on his earlier short film of the same title — kind of a slog.

We see a couple enjoying a glass of wine on the patio after a hard day, when a young Black man (Rashad Hunter) shows up with a gun. We don’t see the trigger pulled.

The story, told in flashback, sees that title character, mildy-embittered/mildly-disturbed comic artist Mickey Hardaway, convinced by his loving girlfriend Grace (Ashley Parchment) to see a local shrink. When we meet that psychotherapist (Stephen Colfield) in his home-office, we recognize him. He was the shooting victim.

Whatever happens in these long chats/treatment sessions in which Mickey recalls his abusive childhood, those who had faith in his talent and the rageaholic father (David Chatham) who didn’t, we know the therapy didn’t work. Mickey got a gun.

The sessions aren’t quite sleep-inducing, but underlit, filled with tired platitudes by the doctor and starchly-written lines stiffly-delivered by an unanimated Mickey.

“Life,” he says, is his “problem. Life is hard. I GET that.”

Each actor seems to be competiting to see who can wholly master monotone first.

The flashbacks are generic, never moreso that when Mickey recalls meeting “the oine Grace and their day at an amusement park dissolves into living color.

Mickey’s scintillating description of their first meeting sets the tone, here.

“It was an interesting encounter.”

Not exactly words that make one swoon.

Mickey standing up to his abusive father, as a teen, has a whiff of Tyler Perry lecturing about it. He’s finally “not afraid” of the old man, and openly wishes he’d abandoned his family.

“That’s a Black stereotype (runaway fathers) I could actually live with.”

Dad rants on about an abortion that should have been and a son who is a “waste of flesh.”

The characters are stock tropes, the situations predictably abrupt and contrived.

A teacher (Dennis L.A. White) wants to help your kid follow his dream to a better life? Let’s punch him out. It’s more dramatic.

A good scene passes by, here and there. But the monotony — of message and line-delivery — is contagious.

The overriding gripe I have with this modest-budgeted pic is that there’s zero urgency to any of this. Leaving out the beating heart of any involving narrative proves fatal here.

Removed from the rarified air of film festivals, where rooting for every “plucky, sensitive, underdog” indie is the rule, always in competition with other “plucky, sensistive, underdog” indies, a “film festival movie” like “Mickey Hardaway” is exposed to the REAL competition — meriting the viewer’s attention over everything else competing for it. That’s a contest this one can’t win.

Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Rashad Hunter, Stephen Colfield Jr., Ashley Parchment, Gayla Johynson, Alana Aspen, Dennis L.A. White and David Chatham.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Marcellus Cox. An Indie Rights release on Apple TV, Prime Video, Youtube Movies

Running time: 1:45