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.
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.
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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.
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.
“Soul on Fire” is a touching faith-based bio-pic that pushes all the right emotional buttons. It rarely misses a beat and never misses a button.
It’s about a child burned nearly to a crisp who survives through perseverance and a vast passing parade of physical and emotional supporters — from siblings and parents to doctors and nurses through orderlies on to the near-divine intervention of baseball legend Jack Buck.
An able cast and the director of “Soul Surfer,” one of the best faith-based films ever, and screenwriter of a “National Treasure” sequel and John Singleton’s “Rosewood” make this conventional inspirational drama play and pay off almost every step of the way.
And when the emotion of seeing a child suffer, admiring the persistence of caregivers and the kindness of strangers isn’t enough, the filmmakers know there are still more buttons they can push.
Cue “Don’t Stop Believin'” by Journey. The Cardinals ae playing a home game? Cue “Centerfield” by John Fogerty.
The kid needs his faith to go on living and make it through piano lessons? Let’s pick out “Amazing Grace” on the ivories.
Yes, it’s manipulative. But you can’t fault a tear jerker for doing precisely what its designed to do.
John O’Leary (James McKracken) was an avid Cardinals fan, just nine years old, when he had that accident every parent warns every little boy caught playing with matches about. He blows up himself and burns the family house down.
This traumatic scene is marked by almost shocking realism, by heroics by his siblings, and what sounds like melodramatic child dialogue ginned up by a guy who grew up to become a famous motivational speaker.
“I want to die! Please kill me!”
Nobody does. And despite the “one percent” survival chances he’s given, with burns covering 100 percent of his body, a team of doctors (Iyad Hajjaj plays the surgeon) and nurses — including physical therapy Nurse Roy (DeVon Franklin) treat little John and his family is taught how to communicate with him until his burned lungs and voice box recover.
Losing his fingers, despairing of his lack of mobility and vastly diminished future, John doesn’t want to go on. But his story gets around St. Louis. And when Baseball Hall of Fame announcer Jack Buck (Willim H. Macy) gets word, he goes for a visit and a little pep talk.
That becomes the first of many. The Cardinals get in the World Series, and there’s Jack Buck, offering words of encouragement over the air for “the kid” with long odds of ever recovering.
Those “long odds” follow John out of childhood and into college, where the badly-scarred teen (Joel Courtney) becomes everybody’s favorite drinking buddy. He’d love to ask out the pretty physical therapy major Beth (Masey McLain), but “Why would any girl like that want me?”
And as the narrative jumps back and forth in time, we see shy, stammering and guilt-ridden John as a successful adult building contractor urged to speak to a Girl Scout troop and overcome that latest obstacle to become a famous public speaker and published motivational memoirist.
“Tron: Ares” is a shiny, shambolic bauble, a film of CGI red neon streaks that no longer obsesses about taking us inside the electronic video game metaverse, but with bringing the grim, unemotional and “programmed” ethos of the electronic ether into a real world run by heartless, emotionally stunted and utterly unaccountable oligarchs.
Why director Joachim Rønning didn’t give the villains South African accents is its central mystery.
Disney puts the franchise in the hands of the director of a later, lesser “Pirates of the Caribbean” installment and “Maleficent” sequel and the screenwriter of TV’s “Daredevil” and some truly awfully scripted films (“It Runs in the Family,” “The Prince”), gave them $170 million+, and this is what they gave us.
This “Tron” is a dry, disorganized and empty viewing experience whose digital universe idea of “Ares,” a combat-ready Master Program named for the mythic God of War, is Jared Leto in brooding beardo mode.
The stakes should feel the highest of any of the films in the series — giant corporations “battle…for control of the future.” It’s reduced to the lawless/ruthlessness of yet another limited little man (Evan Peters) with dreams of megalomania and global dominance.
The characters and plot of “Tron: Legacy” (2010) are dispensed with in a news coverage montage in the opening credits. These days, the legacy of Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) is in the hands of a surviving sister (Greta Lee) of the duo that ran the ENCOM empire that Flynn built from a video game store/startup in the ’80s.
“Flynn Lives!” remains the company’s motto as it battles Dillinger Corp, run by heir Julian (Peters) under the disapproving eye of his mother (Gillian Anderson).
The quest these days is for a “permanence code,” a form of digital immortality in the electronic universe that Flynn first visited and disappeared into while the rest of the world was sure he’d died.
Dillinger is offering the U.S. military digital soldiers generated in that world but easily matter-transferred to ours. Ares (Leto) and Athena (Jodie Turner-Smith, fierce and focused) are two top tier programs among the “expendable” digitally-created footsoldiers who can be summoned to battle in digital-to-real Tron tanks, upgraded Light Cycles, Recognizers (those Lego-looking U-shaped patrol craft) and digital jetbikes which can tear through the watery canals of the Tron-world.
Eve Kim has cracked the “permanence” code. Julian Dillinger wants it. And when he sends Ares to grab it from the returned-from-reclusive-mourning Kim, he shows just how far he’ll go to achieve his goal.
But Ares? He’s a computerized foot soldier who isn’t about to kill a human over this. No, that’s not logical. But why would you give your god of war warrior a beard with no Tron-verse barbershops to trim it?
Chases and digital, death-dealing (“deresolution” is a defeated game character’s fate) triangular boomerangs and lance fights, explosions and light cycle red streaks invade our world as Julian battles to punish Ares, abduct or kill Kim and get his mother to stop slapping him.
Back in 1982, “Tron” felt like the fun present talking to the dark future. “Tron Legacy” reached back to the past to speak to that same menacing future. “Tron: Ares” plays as the present talking about the unpleasant present.
But that’s a conversation this movie leaves hanging at every turn.
Bridges returns as the mythic Flynn, cashing a fat check (one hopes), robed and speaking in the ethereal netherwords of his character in those vapid young adult “Giver” movies.
In the end, whoever is foiled and whatever is “achieved,” all we’re sure of is the possibility of setting up a fourth film, which judging by the early box office take of this one, is no sure thing.
Director Rønning and Co. ignored Hitchcock’s edit that “Good villains make good thrillers. “Tron” had David Warner. “Legacy” had a digitally twisted younger version of Bridges. And “Ares” has Quicksilver from the latter X-Men movies.
Anderson would have made a better heavy. But that doesn’t fix the bland, chemistry-free leads Leto and Lee, of “Past Lives” and miscast here. Throwing in unamusing archetypal sidekicks (Arturo Castro, Hasan Minhaj) with little to say and whose only purpose was representation didn’t help.
The sad truth of the matter is that Disney took 15 years to make a sequel and never came up with a compelling story for that sequel to tell, and spent all that money without casting anybody who’d hold our interest dashing through all this red-neon nothingness for two hours.
Rating: PG-13, violence
Cast: Jared Leto, Greta Lee, Jodie Turner-Smith, Evan Peters, Arturo Castro, Hasan Minhaj, Gillian Anderson and Jeff Bridges
Credits: Directed by Joachim Rønning, scripted by Jesse Wigutow, based on Steven Lisberger and Bonnie MacBird. A Walt Disney release.
A dopey “on-the-spectrum” crook on the lam plot and two movie stars who know how to work a closeup headline the charms of the delightful and just dark enough “Roofman,” a caper comedy where the real caper is getting away with it.
It pairs up the graceful, athletic and best-in-comedic roles Channing Tatum and Kirsten Dunst, an earthy actress who easily summons up wary, wounded and beguiling with just a dimpled smile and a twinkle in her eye.
Throw in the deadpan delight Lakeith Stanfield,June Temple who brings more to trashy-funny than any of her peers, Peter Dinklage at his most irritable and veteran Oz-villain Ben Mendelsohn — cast against type as a good-hearted pastor — and you’ve got yourself a winner.
Still not sold? Dinklage and Mendelsohn SING. Bet you didn’t hear that coming.
“Roofman” is a period piece comedy from the golden age of Big Box Stores, from Blockbuster Video to Best Buy and Toys R Us.
In the early 2000s, one physically fit and clever robber terrorized McDonald’s stores all over because he’d found the billion dollar franchise’s security Achilles Heel. Busting in through the roof after hours, and then making the manager empty the safe before opening in the AM was easy money. He did it 45 times.
“Roofman” gives our anti-hero a best friend and former comrade in arms (Stanfield at his most sarcastic) who tells him “observation” of “details” is his “superpower.”
The “Roofman” desperately wants to provide the finer working class things to his in-the-process-of-moving-on-ex (Melonie Diaz) and their three kids. But “superpower” or not, sooner or later — 45 robberies in — even physically fit commandos get caught.
This movie by writer and director of “The Place Beyond the Pines” and “The Light Between Oceans” (Derek Cianfrance) is about what happens after Manchester gets caught, ingeniously escapes from prison and has to hole up for months in the crawl space and after hours floor space of a Charlotte, N.C. Toys R Us.
Our lovable, pushover criminal — he gives his jacket to a McDonald’s manager (Tony Revolori) when he locks him in the store freezer — finds he can’t go home again, his wife’s moved on and the cops are watching all his old haunts like a hawk. So on the advice of that old Airborne comrade Steve (Stanfield), he shelters in place.
His dream? Fleeing the country to “somewhere with beach and NO extradition treaty,” Venezuela or Brazil.
But hiding out in that big box toy store, bathing in the bathroom, sleeping behind a false wall, clothing himself with colorful not-quite-kiddywear and dining on peanut M & Ms’, he immerses himself in the dynamics of the business and the friction within this culture.
The boss (Dinklage) is a brusque bully, not interested in the “personal life” issues divorced mom Leigh (Dunst) trots out whenever she needs time off. Our store squatter surreptitiously intervenes on her behalf. When Leigh asks that same boss for donations to her church’s toy drive, she’s rebuffed. The handsome ex-con can fix that, too.
That’s how they meet and how the “detail” oriented criminal falls in love and his best laid plans “gang aft agley,” as the poet said.
That church introduction is an unalloyed delight, almost wholly out of character for this filmmaker but not these two stars. Tatum’s Jeffrey, going by “John,” goes all tongue-tied amidst the widowed and divorced man-eaters of this integrated, musical and joyous church. Dunst does the worn down divorcee charmed to blushing by the hunk who pays her extra attention.
And seeing Mendelsohn (“Rogue One,” “The Dark Knight Rises”) paired with Uzo Aduba (“Orange is the New Black,” “Tallulah”) as the bubbly married couple who minister to this flock is enough to restore your faith in casting directors, if not Southern Fried Christianity. She plays matchmaker and when he breaks into song I just about fell out of my seat. They’re a hoot.
Juno Temple (“Ted Lasso”) scores points as shifty ex-Airborne Steve’s partner in crime.
I don’t know what it is about Charlotte, North Carolina and goofball crime stories — many of them true — that have big screen appeal. Remember Zach Galifiankis and “Masterminds?” Steven Soderbergh’s NASCAR yahoo caper comedy “Logan Lucky?” Something about the city, or maybe it’s haughty self-regard (I used to live there) makes dumb criminal tales from there irresistible.
Cianfrance betters those two earlier efforts by leaning into the “Cool Hand Luke” of the caper, the ways Manchester gets away with this and that, avoiding capture.
“When they stop watching you,” he says of “working” the guards and those he deals with in prison, “you can start watching them.”
That “keep running” and you’ll outdistance any police dragnet theory is dismissed by Manchester, who narrates his story and insists “The trick is to stop — find a place no one will look.”
No wonder the cops refer to this guy as some sort of savant, “maybe a genius,” and kind of “an idiot.”
The narrative drags on a bit as the story makes its turn towards the dark finale. But with its Christmas shopping climax, we may have ourselves the first delight of the holiday cinema season right here in mid-October. And if you miss Tatum and Dunst’s chemistry in cinemas, don’t fret. They’ll be “out” for good behavior and out on video by Veterans’ Day.
Rating: R, some violence, nudity, sex, profanity
Cast: Channing Tatum, Kirsten Dunst, Lakeith Stanfield, Juno Temple, Melonie Diaz, Uzo Aduba, Ben Mendelsohn, Tony Revolori and Peter Dinklage
Credits: Directed by Derek Cianfrance, scripted by Derek Cianfrance and Kirt Gunn. A Miramax/Paramount release.
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