Movie Nation

Rooney Mara, Sarah Paulson, Jessie Buckley and Oscar winner Frances McDormand star in this religious community of women menaced by toxic masculinity parable.

You had me at Sarah Polley.

“Emancipation,” Will Smith’s first film since winning the Oscar for “King Richard,” and the ugly way that night went, is a real take-stock moment.

For Will Smith, certainly. But for critics and the audience as well.

His entire career, Smith has coasted on limited acting range, a gift for comedy, his choice of plum blockbuster roles and a cheerful charm that made whatever he couldn’t deliver on the screen less a problem and more of a simple character quirk.

Sure, a big movie star but middling actor could crave an Oscar so badly that he was quick to try his hand at material that he wasn’t able to make work — “Collateral Beauty,” “Concussion,” “Seven Pounds.” Nicole Kidman coveted Oscar glory, as did Jessica Chastain, to name two recent examples. It can seem a little unseemly, but nothing more than that.

But take away the “good guy” image that Smith’s theatrical tantrum punctured and we’re staring down the simple superficialities of most every performance, and are a whole lot less forgiving of them. As an escaped slave stoically and doggedly running from hunters in Civil War Louisiana, The Shortcomings of Actor Will Smith are on full display.

Action auteur Antoine Fuqua, of “Training Day,” “The Equalizer” and “Olympus has Fallen,” keeps a gritty on-the-run narrative moving for much of this monochromatic and melodramatic thriller’s two hours and thirteen minutes. But there’s only so much he can do for a leading man who settles on an expression he plans to wear all the way through each dramatic movie, and rarely breaks it.

Peter (Smith) speaks in the Haitian/French patois of Civil War Louisiana as he washes his wife’s (Charmaine Bingwa) feet and intones “De lord eez wiss me,” to his children, urging them to be strong, and pleading with his wife to “stay together.” This is his leave taking. He’s being sent away.

“I will come back to you!”

Peter is then yanked out of the house by armed and waiting white men. He has been “requisitioned,” we learn, from the plantation owner (Barry Pepper), who delivers this “inspired by a true story’s” first factual error. He complains about the soldiers taking his “best blacksmith” under orders from “General Beale.”

General Beale was a Virginian, and never served in Louisiana.

Peter’s new life is a plunge into Dante’s Inferno, a hellish holocaust of wanton slaughter — runaways’ heads on pikes — and brutality, repairing a railroad.

But it’s 1863, and Peter overhears a Confederate tell a fellow soldier that a “gettin’ desperate” President “Lincoln freed the slaves.”

With the Union Army rumored to be in Baton Rouge, Peter resolves to escape, and in a burst of impulsive violence, he does, with many other slaves scattering. But the slave hunter Fassel (Ben Foster, sinister as ever) always gets his “boy.” He kept a soldier from shooting Peter earlier, and feels especially irked that this slave of all slaves made a break for it.

“You walk this Earth because I let you. You’re MAH dawg, now.”

The Bill Collage script takes us through an on-the-run slave’s odyssey of Louisiana — alligators to fear and fight, scenes of death and destruction all around and tone-deaf homey “sharing around the campfire” moments with our slave hunter and his mates.

The dialogue is creaky and crackling with cornpone. But “Emancipation” is about Peter’s physical and emotional struggle — against dogs, gators, injury (a little action hero self-surgery), memories of his family and the vague hope that he’s running and swimming in the right direction, that there is an army and salvation just ahead.

It’s a noble subject to take on and Fuqua keeps the picture moving between the familiar waypoints on the On-the-Lam-in-the-Swamp formula. But the third act lapses into “How do we get to the ending we have in mind?” drawn out clumsiness.

Smith? He’s wooden, scowling, determined and dogged. He brings little to the picture beyond that, overplaying Peter’s piety, going full ham when Peter lashes out at the men who have come to take him away from his family.

“Emancipation” is a decent enough slave-escape thriller, but one can’t help but wince at its lead performance and the clunky dialogue and cliched scenes that bring it to a stop, time and again. And as we’re taking in Smith’s return-to-overreaching pre-“King Richard” acting form, one can’t help but wish the far more skilled and talented Chiwitel Ejiofor had taken home an Oscar for his moving, thrilling turn in the far better “Twelve Years a Slave.” But he didn’t get the “what a nice guy” vote, apparently.

Rating: R for strong racial violence, disturbing images and language

Cast: Will Smith, Ben Foster, Charmaine Bingwa, Gilbert Owuor and Barry Pepper.

Credits: Directed by Antoine Fuqua, scripted by Bill Collage. An Apple TV+ release.

Running time: 2:13

Sam Mendes’ “Empire of Light” bathes the viewer in the warm glow of nostalgia even as its reminds us that the Technicolor past had its sharp edges.

It’s a tale of memories and emotions, which will have to do, as the story has the studied aimlessness of a dream, and an unfinished dream at that.

The nostalgia is for the ebbing grandeur of the cinema, exemplified by its title character, a grand old art deco movie house by the sea, in Margate on the southern English coast. Mendes (“1917,” “Road to Perdition,” and a couple of Bond films) waxes lyrical about the last years of celluloid cinema and the unifying experience of seeing epic, broad-appeal comedies, character studies and histories in the “Blues Brothers,””Being There” and “Chariots of Fire” very early 1980s.

But he doesn’t really have a coherent story that would give his movie a point.

Olivia Colman is Hilary, the “duty manager” (assistant manager) of The Empire, a regal picture palace built before “The War,” a tourist town theater which in its glory days, had a ballroom and cafe on the roof, and as many as four screens. Now it’s a faintly-seedy but still popular duplex destination for the locals who still queue up for “Stir Crazy” and each week’s new attraction.

Hilary is a sad, efficient loner, drifting through her duties, smiling just enough at the banter among the Empire’s large, friendly working class staff. We see her solitary life — meals alone, solo visits to a an old dance hall where she takes a whirl with strangers in between perfunctory summons to the cinema manager’s (Colin Firth) office for illicit sex, doctor visits which note her late 40s state, weight gains and the medication.

Hilary’s on Lithium. And whatever ails her, there’s no joy in this life. She doesn’t even watch the movies she sells tickets to, no matter how the elfish, poetic pedant of a projectionist (Toby Jones, of course) goes on about the experience, the “illusion of motion” which is “an illusion of life, so you don’t see the darkness.”

“This whole place is for people who want to escape.”

Then a new usher is brought on board. Stephen, played by Michael Ward of TV’s “Small Axe,” is young, handsome, an aspiring architect who failed to get into university and is staring at a stark future himself. If any of them seeing the impending death of their jobs and that “experience” of going to the movies, they don’t let on. Stephen’s limited future is compounded by the fact that he’s Black, and this is Margaret Thatcher’s Britain.

Stephen and Hilary start one of those circumscribed, fatalistic affairs that the theater and the movies so adore, a “Frankie & Johnny” romance between two lonely people, showing us triggered flashes of the disorder that limited her life and the ugly, skinhead racism that is his lot to face, something that she would have never recognized had they not found a connection.

“Empire of Light” is being advertised with trailers that romanticize the cinematic past and promise that, if we aren’t getting a nostalgic romp like the early Peter Sellers cinema-set comedy “Big Time Operators,” at least Mendes will treat us to something like “The Majestic,” a Jim Carrey drama that used the same, sentimentalized “good old days of the movies” as its backdrop.

Mendes invites us to dream along with him, of beach town life and its rhythms, rocksteady and ragga music, double-decker bus rides up the scenic coast, a romance in which she encourages him with “Don’t let them tell you what you can or cannot do,” and he tries to get her to lighten her mercurial moods by watching the movies she never takes the time to see.

“Honestly, anyone would think you worked in a bank!”

But dreaming along only takes this movie so far. The affair is secret. Then it isn’t. Hilary is a poetry fan. And? Stephen’s interested in learning the archaic technology and art of carbon arc celluloid movie projectors. There’s a “regional premiere” of “Chariots of Fire” that promises to be a Climactic Event, and a harbinger of The End. The movie is littered with such details and not-quite-but-close random episodes, and the picture’s meandering drift becomes wearing.

We keep waiting for that defining, lump-in-the-throat statement of what all this might mean, a sense of the cinema as a cultural touchstone, a communal magic lost in an age of streaming video, empty spectacle, comic book and horror movies which reach their narrow audiences, but not “the” audience.

And as I check my notes, hunting for some grand Toby-Jones-as-projectionist profundity, I’m sad to say it never comes.

Colman is brilliant, Ward brings a lovely wounded nobility to Stephen and the warm and cuddly Jones is set up to sum it all up. But Mendes will not or cannot take us there in this personal project that perhaps needed another person or two’s input, and loftier re-writing before the camera ever rolled.

Rating: R for sexual content, language and brief violence.

Cast: Olivia Colman, Michael Ward, Toby Jones and Colin Firth

Credits: Scripted and directed by Sam Mendes. A Searchlight release.

Running time: 1:58

Ernie Hudson, Cheech Marin and Kaitlin Olson star in this plucky sports dramedy.

It’s from those PR and marketing geniuses at Focus Features, so who knows if anybody or any critics will see it.

Mar. 24.

“Patient” is the operative word in the French thriller “Le Patient,” retitled “The Lost Patient” for North American Netflix release.

It takes forever to get going, seems to give away where it’s headed early on, and traffics in modestly tense moments, melodrama and the mysteries of hypnosis to such a degree that it’s never much more than a a mild mannered bore.

A young man, Thomas (Txomin Vergez) awakens from a coma three years after being the lone survivor in an attack that wiped out his family — mother, father and a cousin who was visiting.

Physical therapy is one part of what can bring him back. But it is his psychotherapist, Anna (Clotilde Hemse) who must probe his mind, lead him on hypnotic flashbacks to that day, to the life his family lived, its stresses and strains. Anna hints that he should talk to her before he is visited by the police.

Thomas has just one question he wants answered.

“Where is Laura,” (in French, with English subtitles, or dubbed)? She is his older sister (Rebecca Williams), glimpsed in theses memories of tense family dinners, spied on as Thomas saw her with her lover, another young woman.

A mysterious hooded figure haunts Thomas’s nightmares. Could he be a man his mother was taking lots of calls from, her lover? Could he be the killer, the one who knows where the gun that killed the Thomas’s family, ended up? Might he have wielded the knife that put Thomas in a coma?

Will he be the answer to “Where is Laura?”

Movies dabbling in studies and manipulations of the mind are always on shaky ground, as new research makes old depictions — Hitchcock’s Freudian “Spellbound” comes to mind — seem quaint and even daft.

Director Christophe Charrier, who co-wrote the script with Elodie Namer, focuses on the details Thomas remembers — the incessant barking from a neighbor’s dog, the testy exchanges at dinner, the way his sister hurt herself under stress (pounding her head on trees, the wall, etc.

The clues to where this is going are not obscure enough that we’re not two or three steps ahead of this all the way through it.

A few tense moments is all it manages, a mild twist or two is all they could come up with, and our patience winds up being the only thing truly tested by “The Lost Patient.”

Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Txomin Vergez, Clotilde Hesme, Rebecca Williams, Audrey Dana, Alex Lawther and Stéphane Rideau

Credits: Directed by Christophe Charrier, scripted by Elodie Namer and Christophe Charrier. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:34

January, on Netflix, the new home to all things Jonah Hill.

There’s a laugh or at least a chuckle in this trailer.

Well, this probably seemed like a slam dunk movie pitch. Channel Allison Janney’s not-taking-your-s–t energy into a sort of “Gloria” meets “Hard Rain” thriller.

But as the action tropes quickly devolve into cliches and the hard-bitten dialogue lapses into a parade of eye-rollers, “Lou” — the movie, and the character named after her — loses her mojo.

Lou is a loner, living on a remote island in the Pacific northwest with her trusty cattle dog, Jax. She’s a known quantity to the locals, stalking with purpose from errand to errand, not wasting energy or words, not suffering the rude, the unreliable or strangers gladly.

As a bad storm’s rolling in, she’s tempted to say something soft and supportive to single mom Hannah (Jurnee Smollett), who’s renting a trailer from her. But Hannah’s late on the rent, and stern Lou is easier than the effort it takes to be sweet Lou, so nothing doing.

Lou’s got money buried in a box on her property. She’s handy with a rifle, and a gutting knife. And as she burns old photos, film and partially-redacted “Dept. of State” papers in the fire, we start to piece together who she was.

Her wincing at Reagan lying on national TV almost finishes the picture. It’s the ’80s, and the note she’s writing for whoever finds her as she rehearses how the rifle will fit right below her chin cinches it.

“I left the world a more dangerous place than I found it.”

As the storm pounds in, Hannah rushes in to use her phone — suicidus interruptus. Somebody’s grabbed her pre-schooler, Vee (Ridley Asha Bateman), somebody serious enough to kill a mutual friend to get to her.

“Turns out I’m not done yet,” Lou mutters to Jax the dog as she springs into action.

Turns out Hannah’s “dead” ex (Logan Marshall-Green) has snatched her. Inexplicably, he’s brought a “team” to carry this out. But as this is staged on an island, they can’t get away clean while there’s a storm going on. Lou, with Hannah tagging along, is dogged set on “tracking” them.

“There’s no ‘help’ coming! I’m all you’ve got!”

Janney does “mean” so well that we don’t spend a lot of time dwelling on the 60something woman pummeling, stabbing and out-punching assorted ex-military chaps that are much stronger and younger and hellbent on getting away with this little girl. A bit of an eye-roller, but so’s Eastwood, throwing punches into his ’70s and ’80s.

What’s grating is the way Hannah starts running down the resume of her murderously dangerous, disgraced ex-Green Beret husband. Yes, exposition is often handled this way — in bad B-movies.

Lou hands Hannah the rifle and asks ” You know how to use this?” when the viewer can guess the answer. Lou gives her a knife — “Go for the eyes. A man can’t kill what he can’t see.”

And you think, “All this to steal a child? What’s really going on here?”

Janney is flinty enough in what isn’t one of her best performances. Smollett, recently seen in “Lovecraft Country,” but a reliable screen presence since “Eve’s Bayou,” gives the picture its heart.

But “Lou” turns out to be one of those “once in a century storm” movies that um, forgets the storm. The story staggers from assorted body blows, and teeters over into nonsense as the pieces in the ditzy puzzle supposedly fall together, this after the action beats — a rope bridge, “the lighthouse” — start to feel like cut and paste items from a multiple choice thriller template you find online.

“It’s a trap!”

Yes. Yes it is.

Did you miss “Lou” when Netlix released it on late Sept? Turns out, you should have.

Rating: R, Violence and profanity

Cast: Allison Janney, Jurnee Smollet, Ridley Asha Bateman, Matt Craven, Logan Marshall-Green

Credits: Directed by Anna Foerster, scripted by Maggie Cohn. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:47

Ever since “Platoon,” Hollywood has parked Tom Berenger behind a rifle. A string of “Sniper” movies, “Blood and Money,” assorted soldiers and shooters, on into his dotage. Sure, he’s done other films, but he’s the go-to guy when you cast an assassin, an ex soldier, an elderly hunter that bad guys under-estimate.

“Black Warrant” puts his eye to the scope one more time for a bad-guys-have-a-secret weapon thriller whose sloppy plotting causes it to bleed out in the second act, and whose lamer-than-lame “surprise twist” delivers the kill shot in the third.

Every scene in the third act goes a bit more wrong that the one that precedes it, and no amount of blandly-handled, poorly-set-up gunplay can save it.

It’s a B-action pic set in Tijuana, with the DEA chasing drug-connected mobsters who have gotten their hands on something that will “level the United States economy.”

Cam Gigandet plays a DEA agent whose partner is killed when they bust a Tijuana smuggling operation. One higher-level villain (Peter Nikkos) is caught, and he hints at something truly sinister his big boss, Hussein Bin Farri (Hani Al Naimi), is up to.

But for some other reason, some other Federal agency wants this witness dead. That’s how a grizzled control agent (Jeff Fahey) winds up at a swank Tijuana marina tracking down Nick Falconi (Berenger), a former government killer for hire, retired and living on a sailing yacht.

Here’s an odd thing about “Black Warrant.” We not only never learn why this other supposedly Federal entity wants a GOVERNMENT WITNESS dead. The reason for these “Black Warrants” is basically brushed-over as our shooter works his way up the villainous food chain, DEA be damned.

It makes less sense the longer this short and sloppy thriller goes on, because our hired killer apparently knows nothing about what the bad guys have acquired. Nor does the dude who commissioned the hit, so far as we can tell.

DEA agent Anthony joins Mexican cops on stake outs, trying to figure out what our villains are up to, only to watch them get shot up.

Anthony takes up with a cook (Helan Haro) whose help he enlists, who agrees to do it so that she can get into America’s CIA.

“The Culinary Institute of America,” Mina tells him. That’s her dream.

Great joke. About as great as all the other banter than ends up with them locking lips a scene or two later. Their scenes together are so badly blocked and scripted and shot that we think “zero chemistry” because we have no reason to think otherwise.

Berenger is never bad, and this white hair/biker’s Fu Manchu mustache he’s got going on works. Like Berenger, Gigandet, already in theaters in a scene-stealing turn in “Violent Night,” deserves better.

By the third act, everybody involved has just thrown up his or her hands as bad jokes find their way onto the set and into the script and the climax manages to be even more of a soggy tamale than everything that’s come before.

Tijuana isn’t used to great effect. But that’s a nice 44 foot sailing cutter they hired, I will say that. Too bad they never get it out of the marina. Perhaps they figured it’d sink like a stone, like the rest of “Black Warrant.”

Rating: R for violence, and language throughout

Cast: Cam Gigandet, Tom Berenger, Helan Haro, Hani Al Naimi, Peter Nikkos and Jeff Fahey.

Credits: Directed by Tibor Takács, scripted by D. Glase Lomond and Joshua A. Cohen. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:34

A lot of movies this fall have something to do with The Magic of the Movies.

Filmmakers are made in “Armageddon Time” and “The Fabelmans.”

Early Hollywood invents “The Movies” in “Babylon.”

And this British awards season contender, with Olivia Colman, Toby Jones et al, is centered around the sort of carbon arc projector single screen cinema that lured in audiences before the cineplex, digital projection and Maria Menudos commercials were invented.

I worked in such a cinema in college, keeping the tips of the spark-jumping carbon arc lamps lined up, manually switching projectors and reels, trying to do it gracefully enough so that the audience wouldn’t notice, fiddling constantly with a balky sound system.

The good ol’days, in other words. Looking forward to Sam Mendes’ memories of cinema past, “Empire of Light.”

There are scenarios where one could see “Christmas Bloody Christmas” appreciated for what it is — a cheesy, gory, dumber-than-dumb C-movie about an animatronic Santa going on a snowy Xmas Eve rampage.

Such situations might be limited to drunken, half-stoned gatherings of C-movie cognoscenti, midnight movies at your multiplex or last-showing-of-the-day horror film fan conventions.

It begins badly and turns progressively worse before rallying, “Terminator” style, in a test of human against machine that will-not-die in a movie that does not want to end.

But hey, I’ve seen worse.

Writer-director Joe Begos did the geezer veterans vs. crazed, killer-druggies thriller “VFW,” so he’s used to this “Shaun of the Dead” formula. Eventually, survivors are going to be holed up against some monstrous menace which has slaughtered or is slaughtering one and all outside the bar, house, office or precinct that this movie uses as its “last stand” fortress.

The biggest problem with “Christmas Bloody Christmas” is the many offhand, almost-improvised, unfunny and tedious scenes that set up this inevitable eventuality.

Riley Dandy plays the randy and bawdy record store owner Tori, whose establishment is a statement in neon and Goth. Sam Delich is her mulleted minimum-wage helpmate Robbie, whose sexualized banter suggests he’d like to be another kind of “mate.”

The film’s first act is their running flirtation, metal music and horror cinema debate, pick-up-lines at closing time the Night Before Christmas.

A Metallica with hair vs. Metallica without, Chris Cornell and “Van Hagar” riffs — none of them funny — are worked into the argument over which “original” “Pet Sematary” as better, “I” or “II.”

Fred Gwynne was in “I,” kids. No debate necessary.

This low-life/low-laughs “High Fidelity” back and forth continues as they bar-hop and make their way towards the evening’s climax.

But “the news” has shown that this “military grade” animatronic Santa Claus gadget that all your lesser malls have installed to save themselves the trouble of hiring bearded and/or boozy locals, has been recalled worldwide. Let’s not give a thought to the fact that a local store had one, that it’s gone missing, and that it’s grabbed a fire ax off the wall as a weapon.

Let the holiday festivities start. Eventually.

The satanic laser-eyed Santa is created with a couple of lights, a dude in a suit and a metallic gears and servos whirring sound effects. We see many of “his” attacks through those piercing green luminescent eyes, a killer-cam eye view.

The slaughter is gruesome and perfunctory, sparing neither the unsavory nor the innocent, law enforcement or stoner, adult or child. The acting is nothing special, though our heroine works up a fine lather of panic and frenzy in fighting back, or trying to get the cops to help.

Got to love commitment from a horror movie heroine.

Begos bathes this picture in a closing-time bar or retail establishment with holiday lights gloom. And once it gets on its feet and starts chasing down victims, it’s marginally better than the dull opening scenes or the amateurish TV channel-surfing (analog era) through “local TV” commercials opening credits.

But again, in a group setting, with the right level of appreciation for C-movie cheese and/or the proper degree of inebriation, “Christmas Bloody Christmas” could go over.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, explicit sex, profanity, alcohol abuse

Cast: Riley Dandy, Sam Delich, Elliot Gilbert, Joe Begos and Kansas Bowling

Credits: Scripted and directed by Joe Begos. An RLJE/Shudder release.

Running time: 1:26