Movie Nation

I’m not being flippant when I refer to the gritty, soulful urban drama “Signs of Love” as very much “a family affair.” It’s about drugs, dealing and addiction and how that weighs on one neighborhood and one family, and the violence attached to that on the mean streets of Fishtown, Philadelphia.

And it stars two of Sean Penn and Robin Wright’s children, and Rosanna Arquette and her look-alike daughter. So it’s a drama with “bloodlines.” But not all Hollywood nepotism is bad. This is pretty good, and the acting children famous actors are all good in it.

Hopper Penn has just the right rawboned seller/user look for Frankie, our antiheroic hero. When we meet him, the post-high-school punk’s watching the skateboarders and BMX riders practicing their moves on the curbs and culverts under an overpass. A kid leaves his bike for a second, and Frankie’s on it in a flash.

But he’s not just stealing for money or for his own use. He drops in on his teen nephew (Cree Kawa), pretends he doesn’t realize it’s Sean’s birthday, and then gifts him with the new ride.

So I guess that makes it all right.

Sean’s mom, Patty (Dylan Penn) has the self-involved air of an addict She cares about her child, but “taking an interest” seems a stretch.

Frankie deals, buys food for the house, gripes at his sister and once a week, meets his dad (Waas Stevens, outstanding) at their favorite local diner. Dad used to have a thing with a waitress (Roseanna Arquette). Now, he’s a bit too happy to see his boy.

“Are you high?” the kid wants to know. But commenting in his father’s rough appearance is a “You don’t want to go there” line of attack.

“You’re gonna look just like me at this age,” the old man chortles.

Frankie might want to “think about my future,” but his father pops that bubble.

“What? As a pusher? You ruin people’s lives for a living, at $10 bucks a pop!”

But in between sales and pitching in to strong-arm other dealers out of his boss’s territory, Frankie sees a vision. She has heart-stopping smile, freckled, tattooed, slinky and sexy, with a “Desperately Seeking Susan” look about her. He’s just got to make a move.

But Jane (Zoë Bleu Sidel, Arquette’s daughter) is deaf and mostly mute. She reads lips, which is something deaf characters in movies do for screenwriterly convenience. But mainly she communicates via text.

Frankie is smitten, and the beaming Jane is dazzled by his attention. Could this be “Signs of Love?”

Writer-director Clarence Fuller gives us plenty of colorful but utterly realistic characters in his feature debut.

Fuller and his players make this world feel lived-in, down-and-outers scraping by on hustles and government assistance. Frankie is hard-pressed to keep Sean out of this life, considering his environment, and taking into account his sister’s attitude.

“Relax, it’s only oxy,” she tells him when he finds pills the kid’s been selling.

We notice how quick Frankie is to play the victim card and the blame game. He holds his sister and his father responsible for his lot in life.

“Did your dad ever try to sell you for crack?” he spits at Jane, during one testy moment.

Fuller gives his story conventional pitfalls — Jane is well off and headed for college out of state, Frankie’s unsavory work (D’Jour Jones plays a menacing colleague) gets in the way – and a very familiar story arc. Some of the bigger scenes don’t pay off well because the script gives short shrift to “consequences,” except in the most melodramatic moments. And the finale is kind of an eye roller.

But this cast is top drawer, with Hopper Penn taking his first big lead and running with it, his sister furthering her character-turn trip towards a career and Sidel showing promise beyond the “socialite” label prominently-applied to her profile on the Internet Movie Database.

And Fuller shows us enough promise that we can see this movie working, even without the benefit of the scion of Hollywood bluebloods decorating its cast.

Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Hopper Penn, Zoë Bleu Sidel, Waas Stevens, Dylan Penn, Da’Jour Jones, Cree Kawa and Rosanna Arquette.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Clarence Fuller. A Blue Fox release.

Running time: 1:38

There’s a grandeur to the finest moments in David Gordon Green’s “Halloween Ends,” a film meant to wrap up the saga that made Jamie Lee Curtis famous.

Green, an indie film mainstay before “Pineapple Express” made him famous, finishes up his “Halloween” trilogy by having Curtis recreate iconic shots and moments from John Carpenter’s “Halloween” (1978).

He folds in flashback montages that remind us of all Laurie Strode (Curtis) and her family have endured from the monstrous Michael Myers. And he exits with the serenely spooky song that Carpenter put on a car radio back in 1978, the unironically ironic “Don’t Fear the Reaper.”

Perfect.

But the direction Green and a tag team of screenwriters take the characters and the story in this finale is hard to defend, harder to swallow. So, “pure evil” is contagious, “an infection?” Wait, it’s also learned behavior, created by environment, bad parenting and cruel peer pressure?

Even by Hollywood’s twisted “cinematic psychology” standards, that’s messed up.

The present day finds Laurie writing her memoir about her life of “looking in the shadows for the boogeyman.” Her daughter (Judy Greer) died on a previous Halloween. Granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) is now a nurse, looking for career advancement, trying to shrug off a stalky law enforcement officer she used to date.

But there’s a new guy on her radar. Corey (Rohan Campbell of TV’s “Hardy Boys” reboot) is a nerdy, shy 20something who is henpecked at home, struggling to make college money working at the auto repair shop with a handy scrapyard and car crusher on site.

We meet him as he’s called in to babysit a rich family’s brat. And it’s when that night goes horrifically, accidentally wrong that Corey gets on Laurie’s radar. She instinctively throws this traumatized young fellow in the path of her similarly traumatized and stigmatized granddaughter.

“I know what it’s like to have everybody looking at you like they think they know you,” Allyson says.

But Corey has “issues.” He’s being bullied by kids still in high school. And then there’s the homeless guy watching him, and that culvert running into the bowels of tiny, traumatized Haddonfield, Illinois. Wonder who lives in there?

Green and his college pal, the comic actor and writer Danny McBride, ensure that the jokes in this “Halloween” land. A child cracking that he’s not afraid of Michael Myers “because he always goes after the BABYsitter, not the kid” is always going to be funny.

But as the narrative wanders off the straight and narrow, we lose track of Laurie for stretches. Relationships seem forced, conflicts feel contrived and logic flies out the window.

And while one can appreciate the effort to deconstruct “how monsters are made,” the rationale is as leaky as your average Michael Myers stabbing victim.

Creative killings aside, when you leave Laurie out and then have to back-engineer ways to shoehorn her back into the story, when you water down the basic rivalry — Laurie vs. Michael — when you decide that victims are making the leap from near-death trauma to “burn it all down” mass murderers, you’ve lost me.

Pacing is another problem, as this film feels “saga” length and feels much longer than it is.

Give Green props for all that he got right, bringing Curtis back and making her the focus, for starters. But all involved seem to have painted themselves into a narrative corner that they weren’t able to write their way out of.

If Green wanted to remind us how all three of his “Halloween” films have a whiff of “there’s something off” about them, at least succeeded in that. As he’s filming he new “Exorcist” reboot, and will probably never get back to making the fascinating indie fare like “All the Real Girls,” “Joe” and “Prince Avalanche,” I guess that makes David Gordon Green one more victim of Michael Myers.

Rating: R for bloody horror violence and gore, language throughout and some sexual references.

Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis, Rohan Campbell, Andi Matichak, Keraun Harris, Kyle Richards and Will Patton.

Credits: Directed by David Gordon Green, scripted by Paul Brad Logan, Chris Bernier, Danny McBride and David Gordon Green. based on characters from the John Carpenter/Debra Hill film. A Universal release.

Running time: 1:51

A little Aviation Gin/Funny or Die soaked spin on Mister Scrooge’s Big Night.

Just in time for the holidays, early Nov. from Apple.

This looks and sounds wonderful.

Oct 28, it comes to Apple TV+.

Unfortunate timing brings the latest of a string of “Zoom” films set during the COVID lockdown, “The Same Storm,” to theaters and home streaming after the funniest outing in the genre, “7 Days,” long after the solid drama “Together” and the higher profile projects filmed in this split-screen/isolated style like “Locked Down.”

But the latest from writer-director Peter Hedges, who gave us “Pieces of April,” “Dan in Real Life” and “Ben is Back,” finds its first laughs quickly, and achieves its first tears within a scene or two. There’s tragedy to come, and irritation, loneliness and loss.

The heightened navel-gazing that the pandemic and its life-and-society-put-on-pause produced gave everyone doses of pain, worry, melodrama and political outrage. And that’s all here in this 24+ character collage, which takes its title from a quote from Scottish writer, broadcaster and wit Damien Barr.

“We are not all in the same boat. We are in the same storm.”

The relay-race narrative links characters together, one connection at a time. There’s the woman
(Noma Dumezweni) who struggles through a Zoom yoga class, only to get a call from a nurse (Raúl Castillo), his face bruised by the DIY PPE goggles, who has to pass on the news that her husband had to be intubated.

He becomes a comforter, struggling with the added responsibilities that an overloaded (New York) system lays on him. So when a fishnet-stockinged online sex worker (Mary-Louise Parker) greets a “Man from Queens,” it’s no surprise that it’s him, Nurse Joey.

And when they’ve worked through his “Wait, how old are you?” issues and her “granny” and “early bird special” insults, he shares that iPads have become “Goodbye pads” for so many. Roxy lets down her brusque front for a moment of tribute.

And then she moves on to a chat with her isolated mother (the great Elaine May). Talk about a conversation worth listening in on.

Mom: “Get a job?”

Yes.

“Is it essential?”

I like to think so.

They bicker with the brittle bite of co-dependency. Daughter Roxy uses a euphemism to describe her work as a “counselor.” Not that anything impresses her kvetching grump of a mother.

“Do I stay on this call, or do I hang up and go to bed?”

On and on the connections unfold, this health-care worker sending her son to hunt down a missing grandfather, teen lovers negotiating “Send me a photo” and we know what kind of photo, older paramours dancing on camera, serenading each other by ukulele.

Sandra Oh plays a mother checking in on her children, one of whom is having sex and the other is “off his meds” (Jin Ha, a stand-out in this star-spangled cast).

Ron Livingston and Rosemarie DeWitt play comically-frazzled careerist parents throwing themselves at this “school at home” environment, and drowning as they do. Of course the poor teacher (Alison Pill) bears the brunt of their meltdown.

But that’s nothing compared to what the teacher’s gay journalist brother (Corey Michael Smith) endures from their MAGA/anti-masking family (Joshua Leonard and John Gallagher Jr.) and their cancer-stricken mother (Judith Light).

A cop father (K.Todd Freeman) frets over his “Black Lives Matter” protester daughter (Moses Ingram). Can an online memorial service be in the cards? Some folks figure this is a good time to double-down on AA meetings, thanks to the horrific stress of the situation.

By design and by definition, movies like this are “uneven.” Some sequences are more relatable, more entertaining or more moving than others. All of the films of this COVID-generated genre have their limitations. But Hedges, seen in the film’s Zoom prologue greeting the actors, gauging everybody’s technical savvy to see who’s up for tracking shots and trickier framing and who is Comedy Legend Elaine May and doesn’t need to know that, ensures that this is one of the most emotional (his “brand”) and also the best-crafted.

Of all the Zoomed pandemic movies, big budget and small, the brilliant storyboarding, concise scripting, motivated and moving performances (direction) and editing of “The Same Storm” make this the one they ought to teach in film schools. And of all the lockdown films, this is the one that brings back the fullest range of experiences, emotions, fears, fury and hope of 2020.

Rating: unrated, profanity

Cast: Sandra Oh, Mary-Louise Parker, K. Todd Freeman, Ron Livingston, Moses Ingram, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Jin Ha, Judith Light, Rosemarie DeWitt, Joshua Leonard, Corey Michael Smith,
Noma Dumezweni, John Gallagher Jr., Camila Perez, Alison Pill and Elaine May.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Peter Hedges. A Juno release.

Running time: 1:39

Jacki Weaver and Idina Menzel co star in this Oct. 21 release about a veteran con artist who aims higher and the FBI is all over it.

Stephen Lang has “Avatar 2,” “3” and “4” coming up. So he’s got that going for him.

Meanwhile, he’s got at least two more C-pictures of his post-“Don’t Breathe” thriller career slated to arrive before “Avatar: The Way of Water” decorates cinemas this holiday season.

Well, yay.

“Old Man,” the first of them, is typical of what’s been offered Lang in recent years. He has the descriptive title role, a longjohn-wearing hermit living in an a mountainside shack in the Knoxville corner of Appalachia, a demented paranoid who calls out for his missing dog, and has a stranger knock on his door instead.

What follows in this Joel Veach screenplay is an interminable interrogation, a question and answer session taking place inside that cabin, pierced by the occasional flashback.

Wherever this is going, whatever the “reasons” for having this chat sound and play the way it does, nothing excuses the inane, fingernails-on-a-blackboard verbiage coming out of Long and co-star Marc Senter’s mouths.

The paranoid “Old Man” recalls another stranger at his door, a Bible salesman (Patch Darragh). As he holds his latest hostage at shotgun point, he tells him the tale of capture, questioning and torture, perhaps the fate facing this young married hiker named “Joe.”

“I drugged him.” “You drugged him?” ” Yes I did.” “With what?” “I don’t actually remember. Must be here somewhere.”

“What’s the difference between poisoning and drugging?” “I don’t know, one is sinister and the other isn’t!”

“So you drugged him…”

And on and on this line of questioning goes, the most stunningly repetitious and reductive dialogue I’ve heard in a motion picture screenplay in years.

“I tied him to the stove.” “You tied him on the stove?” “No, that would be too cruel and crazy. I tied him TO the stove.”

And “The Cherokees had a story about The Purple Lake…”

“The Purple Lake?”

Here we go again.

Like David Mamet and the Ancient Greeks, Veach figures dialogue’s got to be repetitious. Only his has no rhyme or rhythm to it, Mamet’s trademark.

Director Lucky McKee is here for the violence — mostly in flashbacks. Perhaps Veach talked him into the idea that the “twist” everybody with a pulse sees coming is explanation enough for how maddening this drivel is to listen to.

As for Lang, the “Gettysburg” and “Gods and Generals” veteran has only 65 days, as I write this, for A-picture salvation to arrive. Let’s hope James Cameron hasn’t lost his mojo, for Lang’s sake.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Stephen Lang, Marc Senter and Patch Darragh

Credits: Directed by Lucky McKee, scripted by Joel Veach. An RLJE release.

Running time: 1:38

You know, you don’t need to take two and a half hours to do a funny, modern riff on Lina Wertmüller’s class-warfare-among-castaways classic “Swept Away (1974).” Even if you’re that Swedish slice of wry, Ruben Östlund.

But if cutting “Triangle of Sadness” means snipping off one second of a glorious, drunken mid-storm-at-sea debate about planned political economies between a tipsy Russian capitalist (Zaltko Buric) and a blitzed American Marxist (Woody Harrelson), well forget my pacing or excessive length complaints. Just pretend I never brought them up.

This mid-movie face-off, held aboard a small, exclusive and obscenely-expensive luxury cruise ship, begins with a Russian who made his money in “sh-t,” aka “aneeemal FERRRRtilizer,” quoting Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and the ship’s American alcoholic captain firing back with Eugene V. Debs and Mark Twain.

“‘Never argue with an idiot,” the Captain says, quoting Twain. “They will drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.”

This tirade goes on, at length, as the Ship of Rich Fools is foundering in a storm, everyone on board too seasick to protest and the crew in total dereliction of duty — nobody’s on the bridge. And these two finish their debate locked in the cabin where the PA system to the ship is at their disposal and no crew member able to interrupt.

The director of the somewhat inscrutable “The Square” and the droll and dark “Force Majeure” (remade as “Downhill” with Julia Louis Dreyfuss and Will Ferrell) has filmed an amusingly heavy-handed smackdown of modern economic justice in a satire that, like “Swept Away,” is all about what happens when the social order is upended.

“While you’re swimming in abundance,” Captain Woody opines, “the rest of the world is drowning in misery.” That’s messed up. The rich folk, including the Russian “King of S–t,” are about to find out.

Our avatars in this comical riff on haves and have-nots are two beautiful people — together, it would seem, because of that one thing they have in common.

We meet British pretty boy Carl (Harrison Dickinson of “Trust” and “The King’s Man”) as he’s going through the shirtless and degrading audition for a fashion shoot, which a wag with a video crew sums up as “smiley brands,” aka cheaper products that sell you on the illusion of happiness that accompanies wearing them, vs. “grumpy brands,” in which the models must look sullen, aloof, too beautiful, expensive and unattainable, like the clothes they’re hawking.

The trick, one of the ad men says, is mastering control of “your triangle of sadness,” the space between your eyes and nose.

Carl reads and he thinks, which leads to quite a row with his model/influencer girlfriend Yaya (Charlbi Dean of “Don’t Sleep” and TV’s “Black Lightning”) over money, dinner, who’s picking up the check and “gender role stereotypes.”

But when they find themselves with a free trip on this luxury superyacht, with a wait staff of 15, a cleaning crew of five, armed security guards and a regular ship’s crew catering to maybe 25 guests, egalitarian Carl is the one who gets a crew member fired for almost flirting with Yaya.

Butch blonde Paula (Vicki Berlin) runs this operation and keeps everybody mindful of the crew’s job — “Say YES” to everything. But she hasn’t planned on the idle rich abusing that.

And nobody can get the damned captain out of his cabin for this one night-only “dinner with the captain” gourmet meal. He keeps drunkenly shouting them off through the door over the sounds of “The Internationale” on repeat on his stereo.

It’ll all come to tears, we just know it.

The passengers are a quirky collection of aged British arms dealers, rich men and their trophy women and the German couple whose wife (Iris Berben) has had a stroke. The only thing she can blurt out is “In den WOLKEN,” “in the clouds.” She shouts this a lot.

Östlund sets the clueless, entitled clowns up, and then knocks them down with one of the great seasickness vomit-offs in screen history. And as they exit the dining room and the ship rolls in the battered seas, the skipper and the amusing oligarch have their little good-natured drinking-game/debate.

Few of the characters are painted with anything resembling “broad, comic strokes,” and Östlund doesn’t fill in much background detail before the shipwreck, because we don’t know who’ll make it and who won’t.

That tends to undercut the “just desserts” nature of the satire. How can we relish the upending of the social norm if we can’t ID the most egregiously Musken/Bezos-ish of the entitled? Who among the working stiffs in the crew should we root for?

And how will this inform our beauty-is-fleeting model couple, who are just smart enough to know their earning window is closing and their relationship may have to find something else to lean on to survive?

I liked the whole first-season-of-TV’s “Survivor” turn things take, when the simple skills to survive are something no passenger in the lot has any clue about. Very “Swept Away.”

And I loved the long Woody and Zaltko (he was in “2012,” and the Danish “Pusher” trilogy of movies) face-off over the winner-take-all economy’s fascist tendencies.

The rest is entirely too obvious for its own good, something we’ve never been able to say about a Ruben Östlund before, and hopefully won’t ever say again.

Rating:  R for language and some sexual content, and that’s leaving out a scene of violence against an animal

Cast: Harrison Dickinson, Charlbi Dean, Vicki Berlin, Dolly De Leon, Alicia Eriksson, Iris Berben, Zaltko Buric and Woody Harrelson.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ruben Östlund. A Neon release.

Running time: 2:27

Nothing ever “ends” any more. Everything is drawn out, from film and TV franchises to criminal investigations.

But 45 years or so after “Halloween,” which launched Jamie Leigh Curtis as a star, she says goodbye to the story that made her.

Let’s see How The Indian Trailer looks, shall we?

“Till” is a period piece that reminds us of a time when an image could shock the conscience of a nation. It’s an object lesson that chills when we realize this isn’t ancient history, that this happened within living memory, that had he lived, young Emmett Till would’ve been 81 this year.

And the law that made his murder at long last illegal nationwide, a law named The Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act, only passed in March of this year.

Chinonye Cukwu, who directed the very fine “Clemency,” brings us the same sort of spare, narrowly-focused drama here, a story of a Chicago mother who worried about what might happen when her child visited relatives in Mississippi, and had her worst worries come true.

Danielle Deadwyler, electrifying in the indie thriller “The Devil to Pay,” gives a breakout performance as Mamie Till-Mobley, a doting widowed mom utterly charmed by her outgoing, irrepressible 14 year-old son, Emmitt (Jalyn Hall of “The House with a Clock in Its Walls”).

But like Black mothers in 1955 Chicago, and today, she had to give him “the talk” before sending him South to visit his country cousins back in her native Mississippi.

“They have a different set of rules” down there, she begins. “Be extra careful,” something that does not seem to sink in to the 14 year-old. Emmett would rather dance along to the record player, which reminds us, “What 14 year-old wouldn’t?”

Her last warning gives us pause, and might even get through to her bubbly son.

“Be small down there.”

But once in Money, Mississippi, Emmett cuts up with his cousins when he’s supposed to be picking cotton. And when they all gather at Bryant’s Grocery & Meat Market, Emmett forgets himself and forgets where he is. The owner (Haley Bennett of “The Girl on the Train”) looks “like a movie star,” and he has the temerity to tell her.

And when he has the gall to whistle, worlds collide, Emmett Till’s fate is sealed and America is shocked at the horrible price this child pays for stepping out of line in the racist South.

We see the first crime committed against him — kidnapping — and hear the second. We don’t see the half-hearted “search” by local law enforcement. From here on out, this is Mamie’s story — her grief, her doggedness, her fateful decision that “everybody” needs to see her son’s mutilated corpse once he’s fiund.

Racism’s ugly violence would be exposed on a Jet Magazine cover, in newspapers and on TV. And a country that had treated this open sore with a shrug would be forced to confront it.

Chukwu turns this much-told story into an intimate film of extreme closeups of faces bearing up under racism or cowering from its worst consequences, of fear and defiance and paroxysms of grief.

We don’t need to hear about J. Edgar Hoover’s dismissal, at first, of requests for help, of the Eisenhower administration’s slowness to act. We see Mamie make decisions that shock her mother (Whoopi Goldberg, who produced “Till”), her divorced and remarried father (Frankie Faison) and her barber-beau (Sean Patrick Thomas).

We see the first requests for assistance from the politically-connected local NAACP (figures played by Kevin Carroll and Keith Allen Bolden), and the steps Mississippi locals, led by a genteel but fiery local doctor and activist (Roger Guenveur Smith) and civil rights icon Medgar Evers (Tosin Cole) take to keep Mamie safe when she travels South to testify in the trial of those who killed her son. https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/emmett-till-murderers-make-magazine-confession

Chukwu keeps the scale small and the story deeply personal, a family riven by grief and in the case of the uncle, “Preacher,” (John Douglas Thompson) who wasn’t able to protect Emmett in Mississippi, gut-wrenching guilt.

“Till” tells an epic story in simple, unfussy strokes, an important film more concerned with building a feeling of dread than in dazzling us with fireworks. It hews close to a single point of view — Mamie’s — and avoids the pitfalls of many a story set in this era by the simple fact that there was no “white savior” figure who was a part of this narrative.

The mostly-unnamed, pink-faced and murderously racist white Mississippians circle their wagons around the still-living Carolyn Bryant’s lies, and Bennett takes care to let us see nothing but the “banality of evil” in her.

It’s an actor’s picture. Hall lets us understand a child “brought up without fear” in a relatively progressive midwestern city, utterly unequipped for the “rules” of a violently racist patriarchy. Deadwyler internalizes the bravery that changed a middle class working mom to a civil rights warrior whose blunt “I want them to see” what they did to her child, shocked the world and changed
America. Our star makes sure her character breaks your heart.

And as Chukwu keeps her camera on Mamie, she turns a blow against racism into a history lesson with human faces — good, poisonous, and so mutilated that we have to be forced to see it to understand our culture’s ugliest truth.

Rating: PG-13 for thematic content involving racism, strong disturbing images and racial slurs.

Cast: Danielle Deadwyler, Jalyn Hall, Haley Bennett, Frankie Faison, Roger Guenveur Smith and Whoopi Goldberg.

Credits: Directed by Chinonye Chukwu, scripted by Michel Reilly, Keith Beauchamp and Chinonye Chukwu. An Orion/MGM release.

Running time: 2:10