This is the full first trailer to this star-studded November (Awards Season) release from Sony Classics.
Looks good. Excellent casting. But as producer turned director James Vanderbilt gave us the lightly-regarded Dan Rather vs. Bush II drama “Truth,” keep your fingers crossed but lower your expectations.
Stephen Lang is the villain, there’s more CGI to help make the slaughter more graphic and more over the top.
Our Finn who’s been wronged turned his attentions from Nazis to Soviets (Same diff?) in this sequel.
It’s short — 90 minutes long. So let’s hope they didn’t ruin a perfectly gonzo one-off Finnish Furioso.
Nov. 21 in theaters, the bigger the screen, the better.
Because the world needs a Midnight movie at film festivals all over, a no-budget creature feature with a pun title about turds.
Liquid Plumber won’t save us this time.
Oct. 3? Here goes.
Eddie Marsan and Burn Gorman, actor names made for Heavies.
Sam Claflin, Suki Waterhouse and Rory Kinnear also star in this thriller about hoodlums laying low in Dartmoor.
Sept. 18.
“What We Hide” is an engaging but unsurprising melodrama about a broken family and one teen daughter’s desperate, extralegal efforts to salvage what’s left.
Their addict mother has died. And rather than “let them separate us,” teen Spider (Mckenna Grace) convinces 10-year-old Jessie (Jojo Regina) to help her stuff Mom in a box in the barn and keep Child Welfare, the sheriff, mom’s dealer and others in the dark and at bay.
Writer-director Dan Kay’s second feature (he did “Way Off Broadway” 25 years ago) doesn’t score any points on originality. Every element in this plot has been introduced to many similar stories and fully explored. But the players hold it together even as it passes by one familiar waypoint after another.
Way down south in rural America’s Addiction Belt (Plant City, Florida), Jayce has overdosed one time too many. Pragmatic Spider gets Jessie to help deal with the body. And none of that “Shouldn’t we SAY something?” over the corpse sentimentality, either. Spider has no time for it, and no use for sugar-coating what their mother put them through.
What she’s about to put them through will be a bigger test.
“I’ll die before I let anybody break us up,” Spider vows.
There’s an overbooked social worker (Tamara Austin) who makes unscheduled visits. Spider’s bestie (Malia Baker) is the daughter of Sheriff Ben (Jesse Williams).
And then there’s Reese (Dacre Montgomery), their mother’s sometime beau and regular supplier. He’s thuggish and cunning, so fooling him and keeping him at bay will be their biggest threat.
The sisters struggle to keep up appearances, hiding mom’s car, keeping her phone active even if they don’t answer calls. Spider’s been running the household for a while. She knows when the food assistance card is renewed and how much they have to spend. Not that she makes the most pragmatic decisions when it comes to junk food binges.
Spider takes inspiration from a book she’s reading at school — “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Isn’t that on DeSantis’ banned-books list?
And she tries to keep her distance from that cute 17 year-old market clerk Cody (Forrest Goodluck) and budding photographer at arm’s length.
“What We Hide” is waiting game cinema, because we know this house of cards cannot stand.
Grace, of “Ghostbusters: Afterlife” and “The Handmaid’s Tale,” is the anchor of this narrative. She takes a stock character and makes her real enough to invest in.
Regina (“Where the Crawdads Sing”) does a decent job of depicting a 10-year-old who’s going to have to grow up too fast. “Stranger Things” star Montgomery makes a fearsome villain and Goodluck keeps Cody clear of coming off as a creepy stalker.
But the story’s drug abuse subtext and profanity provide what little edge it manages. At this stage, it’s only mildly interesting to see how a young teen cooks, how she might budget their limited cash (a pawn shop isn’t much help) and fend off a drug dealer capable of pretty much anything.
Spider’s problem solving is teen-accurate, but a tad familiar and always too-convenient. She stumbles into a document forger, for instance.
And not naming the setting robs the picture of the edge calling out the rampant rural Florida drug problem (overdoses everywhere, a sheriff not much on prevention) that Kay depicts.
So “What We Hide” is no “Winter’s Bone. But this isn’t a bad effort at capturing how the drug crisis impacts its youngest victims. It’s simply an unsurprising one.
Rating: drug abuse, profanity
Cast: Mckenna Grace, Jojo Regina, Forrest Goodluck, Dacre Montgomery and Jesse Williams
Credits: Scripted and directed by Dan Kay. A Gravitas Ventures release.
Running time: 1:43
“Restless” is a spare, reasonably taut thriller of the “Neighbor from Hell” subgenre, the sort of movie most any member of Western or Eastern Civilization can relate to.
Writer-director Jed Hart serves up a little suspense and a few surprises even as he never quite makes all of this that he could have.
Lucky for him Lyndsey Marshal’s here to win our empathy and our outrage.
Even when her character, rest home caregiver Nikki, is blundering in over her head with a situation she can easily escalate, but may not be able to escape or win any sense of satisfaction from, Marshal — of TV’s “Rome” (she was Cleopatra), “Hanna” and “League of Gentlemen” — immerses herself in sleep deprivation, the helplessness and a rising fury as a woman trying to cope with a loutish, noisy and bullying new neighbor in the duplex she used to split with her parents.
An empty-nester with a son at “uni” and a nursing home employer who keeps imposing on her, Nicola grasps for what few shreds of civility life in this downmarket, rough-edged subdivision affords her — meditation podcasts and classical music radio.
But her new neighbor (Aston McAuley) is given to all-night raves — loud music, coarse characters for friends, the works. Reasoning with him might work, for a while. But his unruly mates insult her and that sound system is just too tempting for the short-attention spanned and self-absorbed.
The police, in the UK as in the US, put all their efforts into an indifferent not-our-problem shrug.
“Take it up with the Council.”
And her neighbors, young and old, “don’t want to get involved.”
As matters spiral, things are certain to get out of hand. But how far will this go?
As the opening scene was Nikki heading off to the country with a load in the trunk and a shovel, and as Nikki’s week-long unraveling has revealed she has a cat, we think we know. But maybe not.
Writer-director Hart serves up a stock doofus parking enforcer (Barry Ward) who has crushed on middle-aged Nikki forever, a sister who never answers her phone to give Nikki advice and hooligan friends of that new neighbor, and other toughs who preceded this “Deano” and his substance-abusing blokes into their corner of suburban Jolly Olde.
Some are scripted to infuriate and intimidate, others to frustrate and foreshadow, in an under-developed way.
As someone who appreciates actors and actresses who commit, to the hilt, to even the indiest of indie films, I relished Marshal’s wrung-out turn as Nikki. If you’ve ever been sleep deprived for even a week, you’ll recognize the clumsiness and poor decision-making that is Nikki’s character arc from timid, polite and civil to something else.
How desperate do you have to be to basically come on to an unappealing admirer just to have a quiet place to sleep?
As someone who’s lived in dorms, apartments, marinas and long-term mortgage neighborhoods, and dealt with the biker who likes revving his Harley at 4:30 a.m., the farmer who’s moved to a subdivision and who figures butchering your shrubs and trees is doing to a favor, the party-every-night college kids and the like, I was right there with Nikki as she looks for solutions “the system” isn’t willing to provide.
Like you, I see her mistakes and how they contribute to the movie’s surprising but less-than-satisfying third act.
Sometimes, it’s not as simple as throwing a power breaker, shoveling up a belligerent old man’s massive mastiff massive poops on your sidewalk and flinging them against his door or “SWATTING” noisy, out-of-control jerks who don’t want cops knocking at their door for any reason.
Whatever lessons the movies try to deliver in “revenge” tales like this, escalations almost never pay off, no matter how impotent you feel at having your sleep and sanity assaulted. Sure, pouring powdered Quikrete into their drain pipes works. But for how long?
Some neighbors are just too dim to get Will Rogers’ maxim about freedom, rights and neighborliness and how it applies to maintaining a civil society or a community where people make an effort to be considerate and get along.
“Your right to swing your arms stops just short of my nose.”
Rating: TV 18+, violence, drugs, nudity, profanity
Cast: Lyndsey Marshal, Aston McAuley, Denzel Baidoo, Kate Robbins and Barry Ward.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Jed Hart. A Quiver release on Amazon Prime.
Running time: 1:31
Josh O’Connor has the title role in the latest film from the director of “Wendy & Lucy,” “First Cow” and “Showing Up.”
Bill Camp, Hope Davis, Gaby Hoffman, Alana Haim, Matthew Maher and John Magaro also star in this Reichardt style take on a heist picture, a heist that has consequenes.
October 17.
Laura Dern, director Bradley C. and Andra Day also star in this latest riff on the toxic lifestyle and broken souls drawn to stand-up comedy.
A December release, right in the heart of Awards Season. Looks good. Novel and new? Not so much.
Alfred Hitchcock polished his anecdote about how to become “The Master of Suspense” over the decades, refining his definition of “the ticking clock” thriller to the “bomb under the table” analogy he related for a TV interview very late in his career.
But Hitch figured this business of building unbearable tension early on. “Sabotage” became the textbook “ticking clock” thriller and the model for all that came after it way back in 1936.
A boy, dispatched to deliver film cans and a parcel, doesn’t realize there’s a bomb in the package. The audience knows the timer on the bomb is set for 1:45. The kid keeps getting delayed — by the friendly fruit merchant next door, by traffic, by a parade, hassled by the tram ticket collector. And the clock keeps ticking.
A monochromatic film both of its day and transcending that era in cinema, “Sabotage” is brisk, brief and ends rather abruptly. The romantic lead — not Hitchcock’s first choice — doesn’t bring much sizzle to the screen. And a couple of plot turns are old school meloddramatic.
But over 90 years later, that ticking time bomb sequence still has the power to alarm and even shock.
Hitchcock was on a roll by the mid-30s, already a “brand name” filmmaker, already doing his cameos (aptly enough, he’s glimpsed leaving a darkened cinema early on). However, his most prolific period would produce confusion in the canon.
His earlier 1936 film, based on a play that was inspired by the works of W. Somerset Maugham, was titled “Secret Agent.” “Sabotage” is based on Joseph Conrad’s oft-filmed novel “Secret Agent.” And in the most confusing addition to that “artist is someone who pounds the same nail over and over again” allegory, Hitchcock Americanized this plot and put it on the road across country in WWII for the similarly-titled “Saboteur,” the most delightful variation on that theme.
A foreigner (Oscar Homolka) runs a London cinema, a hard way to make ends meet in the middle of the Great Depression. He’s married a young American (Sylvia Sidney), who sells tickets, and taken in her much younger brother (Desmond Tester) in the bargain. Living behind the auditorium only saves them so much.
But Karl Verloc has a side gig. He’s taking money from a mysterious man whose overseas employer wants to strike “the fear of death” in the hearts of Londoners. The film opens as Verloc dumps sands into the works at a London power station, crashing the city into a blackout.
As the Brits laugh off this convenience, that act of sabotage plainly wasn’t serious enough. Another act is called for, this one widening the conspiracy. A bomb is to be set off during a Lord Mayor’s celebration at “the heart of the world,” Picadilly Circus.
Verloc must visit a bomb maker (William Dewhurst) and confer with other conspirators (Peter Bull plays one) if he expects this side hustle to finally pay off.
It’s just that the fruit-seller’s clerk next door (John Loder) is paying a lot of attention to him. And his wife. “There’s a mystery about me,” he teases after he’s stuck his nose in her business over refunds for tickets sold the night of the blackout. Mrs. Verloc is put out, and flattered by the attention.
That clerk in a white coat is actually Sgt. Ted Spencer of Scotland Yard. They’re keeping an eye on this menacing-looking movie-theater operator with the sinister name.
The people or foreign power pulling the strings are never identified. The script walks a tightrope between making them anarchists of novelist Conrad’s era or German or perhaps even Soviet puppetmasters.
Hitchcock demonstrates, early on, his grasp of what Hannah Arendt labeled “the banality of evil” when talking about ordinary Germans carrying out the Holocaust.
Bushy eyebrows and sketchy side-eyeing aside, Verloc is a little man, a cowardly cog in a machine who may protest participating in any act that will cause “loss of life.” But he does it.
He’s the fellow who entrusted the bomb to his wife’s teen sibling because the police are watching him too closely to “make the delivery” himself. His amorality is dissociative and narcissistic, prefiguring an American politician with heedless “burn it all down” to save himself proclivities.
Mrs. Verloc may be in the dark about everything her husband has going on, but we see the bombmaker’s family listening in as he discusses details of what he’s built and what it will be used for. That’s his side hustle. He runs a pet shop.
That celebrated “ticking clock” sequence is one of the most studied in all of cinema for a reason. The zooms in on the “parcel,” the masterful editing, the coded message and clockwork superimpositions, the syncopated score mimicking a clock’s ticking right down to the Jack Russell terrier he pets on that tram is all of a piece — building suspense, manipulating our fear of what might happen and to whom.
Generations of filmmakers, film scholars and film fans latched onto Hitchcock thanks to this and the many versions of such sequences the legendary filmmaker served up in the decades to come.
The 1930s “made” Hitchcock, sharpened his skills and established his reputation for tense thrillers with a dash of style, romance, edge and manipulations that could be obvious and sometimes downright fun.
“Secret Agent,” “Sabotage” and “The Lady Vanishes” weren’t Hitchcock’s very best work. But each of these key stepping stone hits set the table for future classics as this cinematic artist would identify the nails that he would, indeed, “pound” “over and over again” on the screen.
Rating: “Approved,” violence
Cast: Sylvia Sidney, Oscar Homolka, Desmond Tester, John Loder, Matthew Boulton, William Dewhurst and Peter Bull
Credits: Directed Alfred Hitchcock, scripted by Charles Bennett, Ian Hay and Helen Simpson, based on a novel by Joseph Conrad. A Gaumont/British Picture Corp. release on Tubi, Plex, The Roku Channel, HDNet, etc.
Running time: 1:16
“The Last Ronin” is a derivative, dull and exeptionally slow martial arts variation of the Hero Wanders the Wasteland quest that we’ve seen in scores of martial arts sagas, Westerns and sci-fi over the centuries.
A man of violence meets a girl and her “delivery” to “The Wall” or someplace beyond it becomes his quest.
This time, the wasteland is in a post-Putin Russia. Because it’s not like the Russians needed a translation of Joseph Campbell’s “Hero of a Thousand Faces.” Vladimir Propp led the way and others were eager to join in boiling down the number of plots in all of fiction and folk tale tradition to just seven. Or maybe six.
Yuri Kolokolnikov has the title role, a guy who may not call himself a Ronin or even know that it means “wandering unemployed soldier/samurai.” He just dresses the part — all in black, samurai blade at the ready — walking the desert that’s all that remains of human civilization after climate change, famine and world war have turned the planet into Death Valley or something damned near like it.
The currency in this world of “The Laws of the Scorched Earth” is bullets. Very “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga.” But our Ronin is impractical. The only firearm he carries is a vintage Colt .45.
Russia may have spent almost all of its 7.62 mm bullets, all its tanks and a generation of its youth trying to conquer Ukraine. But nobody and I mean NOBODY is going to have :45 caliber rounds any within walking distance of this tale.
But the blonde girl (Diana Enakaeva) has bullets. She can pay him to get her to The Market and on to The Wall, beyond the reach of The Commune she escaped from.
They must contend with crossbow-armed hunters, Ninjas of assorted agendas, a cannibalistic cult that gets high on mushrooms before flying into a fury and so on.
“Runners” dressed up in “Star Wars” Sandpeople cosplay costumes carry communications through this hellscape.
There’s this French-speaking king with a crown of ammo sitting on a throne made of AK47s who has a need for this blonde teen.
Kolokolnikov has a past and a future in film. An imposing, bald Russian hulk who can handle fight choreography? Get him on the phone, William Morris! Nobody else here makes much of an impression. Static scene after static scene makes it hard for Ms. Enakaeva and others to hide their boredom.
The settings are striking but flatly shot and blandly color-corrected. Characters slow-walk through most every scene, and the fights are nothing to brag about.
The “universe” depicted here is “Russian” in ways faintly racist and not exactly wholeheartedly anti-fascist.
The reason one makes mention of the fact that there are only so many “plots” to choose from is that every film or play or novel or TV series is a variation on a timeworn tale. As we’ve all absorbed scores of versions of every “plot,” a review becomes a simple compare-and-contrast exercise.
“The Last Ronin” compares to a lot of films with the same basic story and a nearly identical setting. It’s inferior to pretty much all of them.
But hell, with a new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles tale titled “The Last Ronin” due out at Christmas, why not contract for the title and stream it and hope for the best? That fans will think it’s a leaked copy of the latest TMNT tale?
Rating: Unrated, bloody violence
Cast: Diana Enakaeva, Yuri Kolokolnikov,
Daniil Vorobyov, Robert Yusupov and Yerden Telemissov
Credits: Scripted and directed by Max Shishkin. A Well Go USA release.
Running time: 1:55
Movie Nation 