This is a solo concert film by the Peal Jam frontman, with the performances filmed in Seattle, on behalf of charity aimed at finding a cure for epidermolysis bullosa.
The pitch is that this is more about the disease and those who suffer from it than it is about the grunge icon doing the singing.
“Matter of Time” opens in a platforming release in Nov.
A novel that wears its Agatha Christie antecedents entirely too obviously becomes a Keira Knightley star vehicle in “The Woman in Cabin 10,” a film whose producers were clever enough and careless enough to cast Guy Pearce as her foil.
There are two ways things can go when you put the estimable star of “Memento” and veteran heavy of “The Brutalist,” “Brimstone,” and many other villainous turns (He was even an “Iron Man” foe.) in your movie. He’s carried that baggage so well that the moment we see him in a thriller we figure either he’s whodunit or he’s a red herring tossed in to obscure the real killer.
Ruth Ware’s book updates the “Death on the Nile” formula for the age of oligarchs, and the screenwriters tap into the actual predelictions of ultra richies like Zuckerberg and Bezos — who compete to see who can build the priciest yacht, and then load it with fellows swells for ski trips or cruises to see the Northern Lights.
Knightley plays a reporter sent to document a seriously pricey charity cruise aboard a rich couple’s yacht, lazily-named the Aurora Borealis. Lisa Loven Kongsli plays a Norwegian shipping heiress who is dying of leukemia and has it in mind to donate a vast fortune to cancer research upon her death.
But who is heiress Anne Bullmer’s husband? The charming and faintly-patronizing Richard. When you cast Pearce in that part Richard instantly takes on sinister overtones.
Guardian newspaper reporter Laura Blacklock, “Lo” to her editor (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), was traumatized by her last story about a non-profit heroine murdered right in front of her after providing her evidence for that story. She needs a break. A short sail from Britain to Norway on a mini-cruise-ship-sized motor yacht to document a generous act and profile the woman making it would seem just the ticket.
But among those rich acquaintances — Michael Morrisey and Hannah Waddingham play a titled couple, Paul Kaye a swaggering, disolute rocker, Art Malik is a rich doctor friend of the Bullmers, Kaya Scodelario a rich guy’s trophy escort, etc. — is a photographer, Laura’s most recent ex, Ben (David Ajala).
Laura’s just started to try and fit in with this lot when she stumbles into the cabin next door and spies a blonde fresh out of the shower. She’s begun to accept that she’ll never fit in here when she hears a muffled, heated argument and a loud splash later that night.
Man overboard! Or woman overboard!
The vast crew springs into action, but there is no swimmer or body. Cabin 10? There is no one rooming there. That bloody palm print detail-oriented Lo spied? It’s gone.
The doctor is quick to suggest PTSD. The rich folk dismiss her as an “attention” you-know-what.
“I’m not imagining this.”
Confiding in her ex is a non-starter. She’s making waves and “these people run the world,” Ben warns.
But the reporter in her won’t let it go and the “investigation” begins, with the captain and owner Bullmer submitting to many a demand.
“I need to look at the CCTV!”
Knightley does justice to the doggedness one used to associate with journalism and the guarded contempt such people used to treat the world’s robber barons. We believe Laura’s discomfort in this world and even the peril she comes to feel she’s in.
But the plot rather lets Knightley and the character down, with one murder attempt so widely witnessed and calculated that nobody save for someone in a vested interest wouldn’t see it as such.
The casting makes us wonder if the screenwriters watched old episodes of TV’s “Columbo,” where a villain is ID’d in the opening act with the story about the heroine unraveling “your one mistake.” Then again, we figure, “They couldn’t be that obvious, could they?”
The action beats — chases and struggles to the death — play. But the finale is so hoary it’s covered in mold, almost laughably old-fashioned.
There’s too little “Is she just imagining this?” doubt, too few scenes for Pearce to tip us about whether he’s playing a killer or just someone everyone expects to be the killer.
They assembled a cast worthy of a “Death on the Nile” variation set in a fjord. But director and co-writer Simon Stone, who did a fine job with Carey Mulligan’s “The Dig,” is utterly at sea in this genre.
Rating: R, violence, profanity
Cast: Keira Knightley, Guy Pearce, David Ajala, Gigge Witt, Art Malik, Kaya Scodelario, Michael Morrissey, Daniel Ings, Paul Kaye, Lisa Loven Kongsli, Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Hannah Waddingham
Credits: Directed by Simon Stone, scripted by Joe Shrapnel, Anna Waterhouse and Simon Stone, based on a Ruth Ware novel. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:33
Austin North‘s a son on his way to his wedding, veteran heavy Holt McCallany is his ex-con dad, the only guy he can count on when he’s jumped in an Interstate rest area by goons who appear to be above-the-law local cops.
There’s a dog who gets hurt. There will be hell to pay, as there should be.
The latest from the director of “Run Hide Fight” is now streaming.
A bit conventional for A24, a post mortem love triangle involving the one she spent her life with and the one who got away.
Nov. 26, we figure out whom she chooses.
Trapped in Bro-town, the lone survivor of a corporate jet crash aside from sexist pig boss Dylan O’Brien.
McAdams revisits her inner Mean Girl in this one.
I’m SERIOUSLY digging the vibe from this Jan. 30 release.
A great location is wasted and a true piece of Barcelona lore is exploited and clumsily “explained” in “Last Stop: Rocafort St.,” a supernatural thriller from director and co-writer Luis Prieto.
There really is a subway stop where suicides are not rare, but “Estación Rocafort” — which is also the Spanish title of this film — somehow finds the most far-fetched and not-quite least frightening version of what could cause such a phenomenon.
Japan has its Aokigahara Forest, a “haunted” magnet for suicides and the subject of several supernatural thrillers (“The Forest” is the best known abroad). Why not an exploration of that sort of mystery in the haunted underground of Barcelona?
Prieto & Co. take the bare facts of the suicides and add a possessed murderer — “The Yellow Line Killer” (Celso Bugallo) — who might provide clues as to why so many die there from his prison cell, an e- cop (Javier Gutiérrez) haunted by what he experienced confronting this killer and a young Mexican immigrant (Natalia Azhara) who needs a job badly enough that she accepts, as the newbie, the assignment of working the night shift in this creepy corner of Barcelona’s metro.
But the occasional inventive picture framing and upside down camera angle capturing the tunnels disappearing into the inky black distance and the cavernous and spookily empty station itself (nobody rides the Metro during Laura’s shift…apparently) doesn’t compensate for the film’s thin plot, lead-footed pacing, limited peril and the lack of hair-raising incidents in its 89 minutes.
Laura lives with a roommate who also works on the subway but frequently visits the aunt who is the main reason she moved here after the death of her mother. She doesn’t know much about the city, and to the film’s detriment, it spends no time introducing her to it. And she certainly doesn’t know Rocafort’s “history.”
The opening scene introduced a couple of cops racing to stop The Yellow Line Killer from murdering an entire family in the tunnel near that station decades before.
“They’re COMING for me,” the killer cries (in Spanish with English subtitles) after he and his victims see the blind stray dog meant to be the harbinger of death for those who kill themselves, or are killed at Rocafort.
Laura and her friend-with-benefits Cris (Valèria Sorolla) start asking around about the strange things the young woman is seeing while walking the station and monitoring its CCTV. That brings them to books on the subject, one of them written by former Det. Román Azpuru (Gutiérrez), who crawls out of the bottle long enough to renew his work on the case that ended his career and took away his last good night’s sleep.
Laura learns a new word — “esotericism” — and the embittered ex-cop stumbles into clues of an ancient and supernatural nature that point them to a closed amusement park whose rides are stored underground.
There are many promising directions this story could have taken, any one of which could have made use of the city’s iconic locations and figures from its history. But no, let’s stick with the underground settings and settle on the safest, most uninteresting “solution” to the haunting.
A few jolts are provided with the editing and Azahara’s ability to hit just the right pitch in her bloodcurdling screams, which always take us by surprise. I liked the Chinese bar milieu that our sauced detective has lost himself in.
The subplots are barely developed and the resolution so frustrating I’d hate to get lost in thoughts on this film while standing too close to the edge of the platform. “Last Stop” doesn’t take away your will to live. But it does give you reason to wish you’d never settled in for a thriller this disappointing.
Rating: unrated, violence, some of it against children, nudity and profanity
Cast: Natalia Azahara, Javier Gutiérrez, Valèria Sorolla, Xavi Sáez and Celso Bugallo.
Credits: Directed by Luis Prieto, scripted by Ivan Ledesma, Ángel Agudo and Luis Prieto. An Omnibus Films release.
Running time: 1:29
Let CBS/Paramount/Skydance pay extortion money and ABC/Disney shake in its boots.
Netflix defiantly taps into the zeitgeist with a tale of President James Garfield and the guy who stalked and shot him.
Michael Shannon plays Garfield, Matthew McFadyen is the fellow who stalked and shot him, with Shea Whigham (old pals with Shannon), Betty Gilpin, Nick Offerman and Bradley Whitford also in the ensemble.
Nov. 6 on Netflix.
Native tribes, troublesome Frenchies and those imperious Brits face “Young (George) Washington” during the Seven Years War, aka “The French and Indian War” now recognized as the “First World War” ever fought.
Way back when Virginia’s young gentleman was just learning to act like a soldier and think like an officer.
Angel Studios has had good luck with period pieces set from the Biblical era to Nazi Germany. Here they take on THE key figure of American history and remind us what heroes and statesman look like in the Golden Age of Bone Spurred false prophets.
Utterly unkown Will Joseph has the title role. Mary Louise Parker gives a beguiling take on Mary Washington, with Andy Serkis as Washington’s blundering commanding officer General Braddock. Kingsley is Va. Lt. Governor Dinwiddie, who gave Washington his military commission.
July 3, 2026.
A “degenerate” artwork by Egon Schiele, long lost and then found…with a messy stolen-by-Nazis history.
Alex Lutz and Léa Drucker are among the stars of a “Who really owns this?” art world saga. This “true story” drama by Pascal Bonitzer goes into limited release (at Film Forum) Oct. 29.
The death of Diane Keaton over the weekend had a lot of us poking around streaming services, hunting for something to remind us of what made the Oscar winner an icon of her era.
We settled into “Baby Boom” in my house, a 1987 wish fulfillment fantasy about what “having it all” was coming to mean for working women of the go-go “Greed is Good” ’80s. And watching the then-40 year-old Keaton manhandle the twin little girls who play the daughter foisted on her character remains an unalloyed delight.
The toddler Elizabeth is tucked under an arm like an afterthought, dangled by this or that limb and often upside down as her unmotherly and most reluctant foster parent treats her like an umwieldy piece of baggage. Which she is.
I found myself envious of veteran character actor Britt Leach. He landed the plum role of the lone long suffering plumber in the “Newhart” era Vermont village of Hadleyville. That’s where Keaton’s “Tiger Lady” New York management consultant J.C. Wiatt moves to raise a child away from the rat race she reluctantly dropped out of. Leach even gets to sing at the local harvest dance, lucky dog.
Keaton and screenwriters Nancy Meyer and Charles Shyer (he directed) subject Leach — often cast as yokels — to an epic rant about the perils and insane costs of buying an older farm house — “Ya WELL’s dried up!” — and the infuriating inconveniences of moving to the sticks with the hicks. Keaton’s tantrum was shot in basically one long, snowbound take, and it’s a doozy.
Oh, to have been on the receiving end of that. Lucky man.
And to anybody who’s ever “escaped to the country,” this scene still stings, especially the dreaded “Ya WELL’s dried up!”
“Baby Boom” began Keaton’s long association with Meyers and Shyer — two “Father of the Brides” and “Something’s Gotta Give” — and set her up for her “woman of a certain age” career, decades of comedies that would include “The Family Stone” and “First Wives Club.”
“Boom” presents J.C. as a woman with “it all,” or everything she thinks she’s ever wanted — Harvard degree, top job and partner prospect at a management consultant firm run by Fritz (Sam Wannamaker), a workaholic who wears out her staff (“SNL” vet Mary Gross) and her protege “Ken” doll, James Spader.
She works 70 hours a week and shares that work-work-work ethos with partner and fellow over-achiever Steven (Harold Ramis), where even their posh apartment sex life seems on the clock.
And then a “really BAD connection” late night phone call from overseas upends it all. Partnership in the firm? That big deal landing new client The Food Chain by impressing their CEO (Pat Hingle)? No longer your top priority, J.C.
Some distant English cousin died on vacation and has left her his toddler.
Exasperated J.C. has to park the fussy kid with secretaries and coat check girls, weigh her in supermarket produce scales so that she gets the right Huggies, dismiss her to her sexist boss and agree to give her up for adoption to keep her no-time-for-babies live-in beau.
“I can’t HAVE a baby, because I have a 12:30 lunch meeting!”
J.C.’s story arc has her coping with the male-dominated office politics of her workplace, which suddenly limits her career, and with the insensitivity of Mr. Wrong at home by chucking it all and moving to a Vermont apple farm — just her and a baby.
Once there, she meets just enough of the locals and copes with just enough of the culture shock — and home repairs — to faint from her exasperation. That sets up her “meet cute” with the lanky, hunky local doc (Sam Shepard). She doesn’t find out he’s actually the local veterinarian until after she’s spilled her overwhelmed with “no sex” guts to him.
But the wish fulfillment fantasy doesn’t begin and end with having a baby accidentally thrust upon you, with none of the messy business of coupling, carrying and giving birth. There’s got to be a way for a “Working Girl” like J.C. to identify a niche market and make a killing and “have it all,” even in rural Vermont.
“Baby Boom” came out in the middle of the baby boom/baby-busters have-to-figure-out-parenting cycle of films and TV series that followed “Mr. Mom, “Three Men and a Baby” and “Parenthood” and led to TV’s “thirtysomething.”
I was just starting my career in this era, and I had an editor whom I worked with who never tired of writing columns about all these movie and media parents acting as if their generation “discovered” parenting’s woes and demanding that they “stop the whining.” They never did.
The worst film of this cycle was John Hughes’ militantly retrograde “Curly Sue,” an against the grain condemnation of working womanhood so backward it’s a wonder Joe Rogan wasn’t in it. I first realized Siskel & Ebert had gotten “old” the moment they raved that toxic dump up the way they raved up all of Hughes’ Chicago cinema.
“Baby Boom” got mixed reviews on its release, and that’s understandable. The “wish fulfilment” stuff is a bit hard to take. And the short production schedule meant that little Kristina and Michelle Kennedy didn’t grow up on camera, but stayed the same wide-eyed-and-gurgling age for the film’s year-long story.
But the movie ages and ages well. Every year or three, it’s rediscovered as fodder for “what it says to working women” as America’s workforce achieves numerical gender parity, if not compensation parity.
And it still plays, making one marvel at the career third act it led to for the eternally hip, thin and cool Keaton. “Funny is money,” she told me once in an interview, and that was her secret and her creed. Whatever this film and many of those that followed it lacked, parking Keaton in it guaranteed laughs.
She makes J.C. Wiatt brusque, businesslike and intimidating, but also approachably human. Sure, it’s a cliche that she softens up in the presence of a toddler. But she’s so amusingly unsuited to “mothering” that the main thing “Baby Boom” lacks is this post credits title.
“No toddlers were harmed in the making of this comedy.”
Rating: PG, sex is discussed
Cast: Diane Keaton, Sam Shepard, Harold Ramis, James Spader, Pat Hingle, Victoria Jackson, Mary Gross, Kristina and Michelle Kennedy and Sam Wannamaker.
Credits: Directed by Charles Shyer, scripted by Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer. An MGM/UA release.
Running time: 1:50
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