Movie Nation

Egyptian cinema — born shortly after the Europe and Hollywood’s film emergence, was already mature enough to produce its “Golden Age,” in the 1950s. That’s the era when it produced its first international screen icon, the great Omar Shariff.

Youssef Chahine was the Egyptian filmmaker who popularized Shariff and brought him to the attention of the world and David Lean (“Lawrence of Arabia”). Chahine was already a veteran director when he directed and took the the villainous lead in his gripping potboiler, “Cairo Station.”

The film is a vivid black and white slice of life at Cairo’s Ramses Station in the late 1950s, with classes mixing and mingling in the secular Arabic state. Chahine shows us this hustle and bustle parade of traditionally clad and more religious rural folk, riding the (British built) rails back to their small towns and villages and Westernized sophisticates with their sports coats and cleavage, shorter hemlines and rock’n’roll tastes boarding for Alexandria and ocean liners that would take them abroad.

The few films of Chahine I’ve seen have a lot more in common with Carol Reed (“The Third Man”) and Hollywood noir specialists than the great artist and social observer Satyajit Ray, his Third World cinema contemporary over in India. Chahine liked melodrama and action and a little sexual sizzle. King Farouk or President Nasser, Chahine worked his way towards “lurid” and probably got his closest to that with the sexy and twisted “Cairo Station.”

Chahine, his camera chasing dancing around passengers as the men with shop stalls or carts make and sell juices or coffee, the female soft-drink peddlers with their buckets of bottles evade the cops and the porters bicker over who gets which client with baggage. We are instantly immersed in this milieu — “entrepreneurs” dashing onto stopped (or still moving) trains to sell drinks (and collect the empty bottles), hustlers of every age scampering through an unregulated, unsafe railyard outside the terminal.

The news stand owner Madbouli (Hassan el Baroudi) is our narrator, a man up on the news and gossip thanks to what he sells, but also someone who takes in the passing scene with a studied eye.

Madbouli recalls taking in the “lame” beggar Qinawi (spelled “Kenawi” on the Netflix subtitles), giving him a job hawking papers to travelers.

“How could anyone have foreseen how Qinawi would end up?” he wonders (in Arabic with English subtitles). We know who the villain is, right from the start.

Our filmmaker shows a little vanity, and a lot of Hollywood chutzpah in the way he hides Qinawi’s face, showing him only on the ground on his damaged leg, giving the character the director himself plays a “star entrance” in the best John Ford/Alfred Hitchcock/Orson Welles tradition.

The cause and effect of the screenplay involves showing us Qinawi’s railyard shack, papered with cut-out pin-up girls, and letting us just his guilty-pervy eyes as he finds a new beauty to gawk at, eavesdrop on and lust after.

But his heart seems to belong to blowsy, loud and vivacious Hunama, played by Hind Rustum, sort of an Egyptian Anna Magnani or Shelly Winters. Hunama is the loudest, most abrasive of the soft drink sellers. And she’s wondering if the smart, burly porter Abu Siri (Serih, on Netflix, played by Farid Shawqi) might be her man and her ticket out of this hard, dangerous work.

He’s tough enough and clever enough to realize the porters are getting screwed-over by the traditional pecking order that leaves a corrupt unofficial “boss” in charge of who gets to work, taking kickbacks as he does. Abu Siri’s talking “union.”

Qinawi just creeps around in silence, an “Incel” before Incels had the internet. We sense what’s coming, and Chahine underscores the guy’s stalker/serial killer vibe by letting us see the shifting cultural dynamics in play/

The young folks are dressing more Western than ever and listening to Mike & His Skyrockets, a rockabilly combo (with accordion) that jams for the youthful hep cats on the train.

“Newfangled ideas lead straight to old,” old Madbouli mutters. Murder is the effect, a sexualized permissive culture and toxic masculinity — check out the porters catcalling female passersby — is the cause, Chahine suggests.

The suspense comes from what we fear Qinawi will do, and what could happen at any moment at a pre-OSHA railyard this recklessly run. A couple of the stunts were shot in slow motion and played by at regular speed to heighten the danger. But most are not, and it’s easy to see workplace safety regulations weren’t common on Cairo film sets back then.

No “unions” in other words.

The fights range from “stage slaps” to actual rolling tumbles down stone stairs.

And the acting is first rate, with Rustum and Shawqi shining and Chahine practically begging for a straightjacket as Qinawi.

As dated as such films inevitably are, the collaborators here ensure that this 1950s melodrama never feels like an artifact, but merely another era in the passing parade of Egypt’s rough and tumble underclasses, perhaps one less divided by religious conservatism than the Muslim Brotherhood Egypt of today.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Farid Shawqi, Hind Rustum, Youssef Chahine and Hassan el Baroudi

Credits: Directed by Youssef Chahine, scripted by Abdel Hai Adib and Mohamed Abu Youssef (dialogue). A Columbia Pictures release on Netflix, other streamers.

Running time: 1:17

There’s nothing. Go home. Let them clean the theater for the next showing. I stayed. I know.

Keke, Daniel Kaluuya, Michael Wincott, Steven Yuen, Brandon Perea and Keith David and “aliens” waiting for humans to finally film “the money shot.”

July 22.

Argentine filmmaker Daniel De La Vega runs a lot of standard horror tropes through a South American filter in “On the 3rd Day,” a well-mounted by seriously-unsurprising demonic possession thriller.

When the old man, Enrique (Gerardo Romano) takes a call and loads his “cargo” into his ancient Chevy pickup, because a caller summoned him for “your last trip,” we have an idea of what’s up.

It’s a coffin-shaped box, after all.

When a mother (Mariana Anghlileri) packs her little boy (Octavio Belmonte) in the back seat, we can guess what’s coming. Even the “distraction” that causes the collision, this moment when “worlds collide,” seems pro forma.

Cecilia wakes up, injured, in an abandoned house. Her boy is missing. It’s only when she makes it to a hospital that she realizes just how much she doesn’t remember, and who else has gone “missing” from that night.

Over the course of what plays as basically one long night (probably not), Cecilia will see visions of her son, in his red raincoat, in mirrors. She will have nightmares.

And others associated with that night will go missing.

The thin Alberto Fasce and Gonzalo Ventura script manages to find time for odd detours — the abuse Cecilia was fleeing, the old couple at the filling station whom she flees to after “escaping” a house where she wasn’t so much imprisoned, but dumped.

The police are introduced and put “on the case” as the missing persons pile up. But that entire story thread leads nowhere in this unthrilling dubbed-into-English thriller.

A couple of “solutions” present themselves to Cecilia’s plight. Does she need a priest, or a hypnotist (Osmar Núñez) to recall what happened and find her boy? Her doctor Lautaro Delgado) opts for the latter, leading to a mesmerizing and often-off-topic session that adds more clutter than clarity to the film.

Director De La Vega throws some spooky effects and seriously conventional “demon” costumes at this utterly generic story, which might have kept its secrets and worked better had mother Cecilia seemed more frantic or old Enrique seemed more conflicted.

But the film’s serious shortcoming is relying on a mystery that we guess instantly, and not serving up any real frights and stylish touches to distract us from the conclusion we see coming early in the first act.

Rating: Unrated, violence

Cast: Mariana Anghileri, Gerardo Romano, Lautaro Delgado and
Osmar Núñez

Credits: Directed by Daniel De La Vega, scripted by Alberto Fasce and Gonzalo Ventura. A Shout! Factory production on Shudder.

Running time: 1:25

No! NOBODY saw this coming!

The faith-based biographical drama “The Lady of Heaven” has faced sanction and banning, even having its trailers banned, in pretty much the entire Islamic world. Now Muslim protesters, calling it “blasphemous,” have gotten it yanked from cinemas in Great Britain.

This is, of course, a shameful and cowardly act, but quite understandable given the history of Islamic fundamentalist violence against the Free Speech West. Charlie Hebdo, anyone?

Right wing anti-Islamic columnists and newspapers are having a field day over this. British news and websites refer to “Lady” as being “Banned.” No. Cinemas have merely decided it’s not worth the hassle and security issues to show the movie. “Banned” is what happened in the Islamic theocracies of Asia and the Middle East.

It’s even given the much-maligned Catholic Church the license to “Tut tut” the newer Middle Eastern-founded religion, with one British Archbishop declaring it to be Islam’s “Life of Brian” moment.

Yes, Catholic panties were all in a twist over Monty Python’s “Not the Life Story of Jesus” comedy. The Cambridge comics spent a lot of time on the telly (shoving aside the penguin on the telly) defending their movie from the humorless and the “How DARE you!” crowd in the late 70s.

But their movie wasn’t banned. Islam is the world’s only religion that not only hates criticism or careful documentation of the life stories of The Prophet and those surrounding him. They condemn it, sanction it and even draw blood over it.

Sorry, that’s not how things work here in the West, folks.

As somebody who had to cross a picket line to see Martin Scorsese’s controversial film of “The Last Temptation of Christ,” which was sort of America’s Christian “Life of Brian” moment, close examination for religious claims, fact-based debate and criticism are considered fair game.

Many in the West have an eyerolling view of Islam over its intolerance of such questioning. What are these protestors afraid of? Why were those who codified “Thou shalt not depict/question The Prophet” into the Koran or its interpretation hellbent on doing that? What were THEY afraid of?

“The Lady of Heaven,” which I reviewed some while back, takes pains to get around the many restrictions on how Muhammed, his family and the conquest-oriented origins of his faith are depicted. It still manages to lay some blunt facts out there for the faithful to mull over.

How DID Islam turn into what is widely perceived as a violent global patriarchal cult, all but enslaving women in places where its most extreme practitioners hold sway? A movie that suggests the faith has been twisted in some ways, and was grimly-flawed in others by its founders, was sure to stir up debate.

DEBATE is what’s called for, here. And by the way, if you haven’t seen the movie, put down your placard and go home. You’re “condemning” something you have no real knowledge of. If you can’t LET yourself see the movie, ask yourself why that is?

And if you didn’t want to live in a society that values free speech and open debate, why did you emigrate to one?

If the Catholic and Protestant, Jewish and every other religion can grit its teeth and take it, Islamists have to see how insecure and inferior their faith comes off, with adherents losing their collective minds over a movie or ANYthing that suggests that maybe the flawed founder of that faith was human, wasn’t perfect, and that those jockeying for power after his death had venal self-serving intentions.

I can’t recall which publicity house pitched me the movie some while back, but like the filmmakers, I had to bend over backwards to footnote the damned review because while every religion can and should be critiqued, I’m still just reviewing a movie that does that. My main concerns are the quality of the production and the performances and the veracity of its “true story” script.

That Muslim fundamentalists won’t even allow people to see it without threats and protests damns them in the eyes of the world. They come off as childish, intolerant and violent fanatics,

The producers of the film should stream it, let anybody who wants to see it find it online that way. Now that it’s got controversy surrounding it, they should make their investment back. Let the outspoken and superstitious avoid it, if they must. There’s no way to put the Internet genie back in the bottle. Not here in the West, anyway.

If this is a “Life of Brian” moment, the world is watching to see if you actually start the process that “The Lady of Heaven,” a middling, overly-careful hot-button biopic, advocates. What we’re waiting to see is if you finally grow up.

Of course Stones Fanatic Martin Scorsese produced this look inside the “Chelsea drug store.”

A notorious landmark of rock history is explored in this documentary, coming out July 8.

Cannot wait to see it, and hopefully Magnolia Pictures won’t make me.

A life limited by poverty and rigidly patriarchal Catholicism is what Clara always has. Does her niece, about to have her quincenera, deserve better?

This one opens July1.

“Nude Tuesday” is a a deadpan, daft and seriously off-center comedy from The Other Land Under, New Zealand. No, it’s not their first. The presence of Jemaine Clement in the cast reminds us of that.

But this screwball/screws-loose “Couples Retreat” farce plays around with a prejudice foreign film fans have had since the movies learned to talk. The film has a story, but all the dialogue is gibberish, a sort of Muppets “Swedish Chef” meets The Minions mush of what sounds like Danish or maybe Dutch or perhaps German that’s gone Scandinavian.

That doesn’t matter, because as any film snob (or those put-off by snobs) will tell you, it’s SUBTITLED. So of COURSE it’s more “important.”

Screenwriter and co-star Jackie van Beek and co-writer/director Armagan Ballantyne showed their finished film, about a couple sent on a ditzy get-away with some relationship/sex guru (Clement) on what looks like New Zealand’s wild and snowy South Island, to comics in Australia and elsewhere.

The subtitles are thus written by a comic, who invented (in the case of edgy Brit comic Julia Davis) dialogue that changed the situations, added in sexual indiscretion confessions and ran even further with the wordplay of the enterprise.

“I vibrate on your frequency,” our over-sexed guru/therapist “Bjorg” (Clement) says as he touches Laura (van Beek) intimately, right in front of her hapless husband Bruno (Damon Herriman). “Together we tremble!”

References to a “toothy vulva” and “You biggened my mister” were not what Clement or anybody else had in mind when they were gibbering, which adds a comic irony to the enterprise.

Group therapy sessions include the introduction of livestock — animals that “choose” to be with this or that couple; a pig with these folks, a goat chooses to hand with Bruno and Laura. The rooster?

Look, “the feathery gigolo” has chosen “our lesbian potters. Enjoy some c–k, ladies!”

Davis must have a working knowledge of the comedy stylings of Jemaine Clement (“Flight of the Conchords,” “What We Do in the Shadows”), I must say. Her fleshing out the story is most convincing with the words that aren’t really coming out of his mouth, printed out on the screen beneath him.

The oddest touch for me in this experiment in improvisation was the inclusion of gibberish versions of very familiar pop songs on the score. It takes a moment to recognize “Sea of Love,” “Time of the Season” and Kenny & Dolly’s finest duet.

The soundtrack plays like “The ‘Despicable Me’ Minions Sing the Hits,” and it’s a hoot.

But when the bouncy beat of “Road to Nowhere” rolls out, you have to wonder, “Why didn’t they use the original David Byrne gibberish in this case?”

Not all of it works, but more than you’d expect does. Sure, there are entirely too many d–k jokes (a failing stand-up’s best friend). But there is nudity, it is comic and the actual “Nude Tuesday” may just involve a dip in a glacial pool high up in the mountains.

And “experiment” or not, what actor’s going to risk hypothermia or “shrinkage” just for a gag? Yes, that’s a rhetorical question.

Rating: unrated, comic violence, full frontal nudity

Cast: Jackie van Beek, Damon Herriman, Chelsie Preston Crayford, Ian Zaro, Byron Coll and Jemaine Clement.

Credits: Directed by Armagan Ballantyne, scripted by Jackie van Beek, Armagan Ballantyne, with subtitles by Julia Davis. A Cornerstone release.

Running time: 1:40

Here’s how that film franchise practice of “fan service” can bite you right in the arse. You bring back the stars of the original trilogy, have them share the screen with your “reboot” cast, and everybody watching is slapped in the face with this self-evident truth.

Nobody cares what happens to Chris Pratt, and poor Bryce Dallas Howard doesn’t fare much better in the finale to the “Jurassic World” trilogy, “Jurassic World Dominion.” Not with Laura Dern, Sam Neill and His Hipness Jeff Goldblum back on the screen.

The original cast and the studio had their reasons for moving on. But damn, it’s great seeing Dern, Goldblum and Neill replaying their greatest hits like this. Every time the movie drifts away from them, we know we’re in the hands of lesser mortals.

“Dominion” is a perfectly-serviceable popcorn picture in that it does what it does well enough, even if we’ve seen tiny humans terrorized by prehistoric beasts five times before. Perhaps having a character say “You never get used to it” is a stretch, but we’ll allow it. Just so long as the screenplay has somebody bring up the “Jurassic World” theme park, the title of the first film in this trilogy, and Goldblum’s droll Dr. Ian Malcolm intones, “Jurassic Wooorld…did…not care for that.”

Director and co-writer Colin Trevorrow’s (“Safety Not Guaranteed”) takes us into a future where humans and dinos-on-the-loose are uneasily co-existing, a bizarre concept seeing as how the phrase “apex predator” has a new meaning, and plenty of variations in all the new/old carnivores on the loose on the land, sea and air.

The new threat is to humanity’s food supply, and it looks like this global conglomerate BioSyn (say it out loud) might be behind the oversized locusts threatening to devour everything and everyone in their way.

The new villain is a Muskian/Zuckerberglish megalomaniac played by Campbell Scott, a character happy to play God to get even richer, with nary a thought to consequences.

The imperiled kid is Maize (Isabella Sermon), cloned daughter of a long dead scientist, introduced in the last “Jurassic” film. She’s been promoted to most wanted” around the world because of who, or what she is.

And those keeping her safe and secluded are the former Jurassic World operations manager, now an animal/dino-rights activist Claire (Howard) and her hunka man-meat beau, the animal tracker/trainer Owen (Pratt).

With dinosaur poaching and illegal breeding all the rage, it’s only natural that bad guys figure out who this rebellious teen is and a way to steal her from her foster family, which is holed-up in the snowy forests of the Pacific Northwest.

The best things about “Dominion’s” first act are how Trevorrow & Co. transition from all this exposition-heavy introductory stuff and some idiotic and seriously fake-looking chasing-dinosaurs-on-horseback (in the snow) sequences to a straight-up James Bond action picture.

The kid and a missing velociraptor toddler are traced to Malta, a lawless locale where the black market rules and there are lots of ancient, narrow streets and aged buildings to chase one and all through.

A ruthless trader with a hint of raptor in her appearance (Dichen Lachman) must be confronted, a smuggling, swaggering, spa-and-hair-salon-haunting pilot (DeWanda Wise) must be befriended.

Meanwhile, Dr. Ellie Sattler (Dern) is seeing evidence of biological chicanery and food-supply tampering that points to our villain (Scott). There’s nothing for it but to get The Band Back Together.

The old crew get nice “introduction” moments — Neill, especially.

Dr, Alan Grant is back where he started out, a fussbudget bachelor paleontologist digging for dinosaurs, and there are adorable scenes where Neill sputters and blushes through the visit from old flame Ellie, now divorced with grown kids.

Goldblum’s Dr. Malcolm is already in the belly of the beast, trying to teach “The Ethics of Genetic Power” to the oligarch and his minions. Is Ian really a complete sellout? Not that we didn’t see that coming.

“The only play nooooow is…take the time we have left, and you know, squander it.”

Dern replicates her Oscar-worthy slack-jawed terror at being chased by this or assaulted by that.

And Scott does well at channeling the “Bond villains” among us — super-rich, super-ruthless guys that no one should mistake for being the brainiacs they envision themselves to be.

The action beats are OK, the CGI next-gen level, although I was startled to see how poorly the overcast and snowy greenscreen chases and action matches up with the shot-outdoors-in-real-daylight footage at some points.

There are new species of dinosaurs depicted, but they don’t recapture the awe and terror of earlier iterations of those beasts.

I’d call the story silly, but a movie where “dinosaur whispering” is kind of a thing has that hard-wired into it. That said, a LOT of science has come out since Michael Crichton wrote the novel this film franchise is based on. Who’s to say that pea-brained monsters aren’t trainable?

The little humor present here all spins around Goldblum and comes out of his mouth, which just underscores how deflating it is to see director/co-writer Trevorrow reduced to on-set traffic cop making the digital dinosaur buses run on time.

Because that’s a thankless directing job, trying to jam every surviving character who ever registered in earlier films back in here — plus Omar Sy and Mamoudou Athie. It just makes for a cluttered, derivative and somewhat soulless finale to a trilogy that millions embraced and some folks love.

Me? “Did not…care for that.”

Rating: PG-13 for intense sequences of action, some violence and language

Cast: Chris Pratt, Bryce Dallas Howard, Campbell Scott, DeWanda Wise, Isabella Sermon, Mamoudou Athie, BD Wong and Omar Sy, with Laura Dern, Sam Neill and Jeff Goldblum.

Credits: Directed by Colin Trevorrow, scripted by Emily Carmichael and Colin Trevorrow. A Universal release.

Running time:

A star poet is handed the latest work by his younger protege. It is titled “Disabled.” The protege is Wilfred Owen, one of the great voices of the trenches of the Great War. The mentor is Siegfried Sassoon, the other famous British voice of World War I, both of them poets with grimly heroic combat experience.

In Terence Davies’ recounting of this moment in his film “Benediction,” he takes the time to let us watch Sassoon (Jack Lowden) read the entire poem. There is no music underscoring the scene, no voice-over narration of the poem, no interruptions to praise Owen (Matthew Tennyson, a descendent of a pretty good poet himself, Alfred), just an actor playing a poet silently reading for a solid two minutes or more screen time.

Davies (“The House of Mirth,” “A Quiet Passion”) had his reasons for this early scene, jarring for its quiet, in “Benediction.” He reprises the poem, in full, in the film’s most emotional moment — its finale.

But that scene and the sole emotional moment reminded me of one reason I never warmed to Davies, widely acknowledged as one of the masters of modern British cinema. He takes his artful sweet time making his points, and that leaves us with a long film that never feels deeper that a surface gloss on most of the characters, the career and the era.

Later on, when Sassoon meets the musical theater icon, lyricist and film star Ivor Novello (Jeremy Irvine), Davies treats us to part of one of Novello’s lighter tunes, and then another, sung and played in full by the tuxedoed life-of-the-party at the piano.

Was this solo really necessary?

Davies’ films are often slice-of-life vivid, detailed and patient. But at his most indulgent, they’re mini-series length and paced, and delivered in a single too-leisurely sitting.

“Benediction” takes in several large passages of Sassoon’s life. We glimpse his war service (recalled, but we never see him in combat), Sassoon’s public protest against the way the war was conducted, and subsequent military trial and institutionalization.

He and Owen met at a military hospital where they convalesced and had an affair. We skate through Sassoon’s often unhappy post-war romances, scenes filled with the famous — Novello was another affair — most them of merely named-dropped (Gershwin, T.S. Eliot, etc.) or limited to miniscule cameos (Robert Graves, T.E. Lawrence).

And then there are the bitter years, the 1950s and ’60s, in which Sassoon is played by the biting Peter Capaldi. That Sassoon bickers with his son (Richard Goulding) over his late-life conversion to Catholicism and refuses the apologies of those who wronged him, way back when.

Scene after scene suggests the viewer needs to do her or his homework to appreciate who the parade of characters passing by are.

It’s a beautiful film, and a well-cast one. Many snippets of Great War archival footage are artfully-used to illustrate the trauma and horrors that the film suggests haunted the famous poet to the end of his days. The slow-passing pageant can feel like some sort of staged tableaux. But Davies gets a lot of characters and a lot of years into this survey of Sassoon’s life, shortchanging the career save for snippets of voice-over-narrated poetry.

The dialogue is witty with an emphasis on bitchy, a smart, educated gay man from the “love that dare not speak its name” era insulting a narcissistic lover so shallow that his life isn’t a life, “it’s barely a hobby.”

“What shall I do with my hair?”

“Have you considered topiary?”

Julian Sands plays the medical officer who walks in on Sassoon and Owen practicing a dance for the hospital musicale, and grumps that such gentlemen formerly went “into the library with their service revolver and did the decent thing.”

But if you don’t know who Robbie Ross was in London literary (and homosexual) circles, Simon Russell Beale’s screen time in that role doesn’t explain it.

Davies messes around with the timeline of events, and toys with Sassoon’s most legendary gesture, tossing his Military Cross medal into the River Mersey after writing his scathing “A Soldier’s Declaration” and seeing it published in a newspaper and read in the House of Commons. The medal-tossing never happened.

But all these quibbles aside, Lowden, Capaldi and Davies still give us a beautiful sketch of a poet who peaked writing about the war that traumatized him, and who lived on for another half century, published, appreciated and lionized but never honored as much as he felt he deserved.

That comes across in a sumptuous period piece that will send curious viewers (like me) to Wikipedia and their favorite search engines, just to finish the writer-director’s work for him.

And for all his “slow cinema” indulgences and patience-testing “patience” as a story teller, the old master Davies, Lowden (“Dunkirk”) and the poet Sassoon mentored make sure “Benediction” leaves us with an emotional punch that no film this year can match.

Rating:  PG-13 for disturbing war images, some sexual material and thematic elements

Cast: Jack Lowden, Kate Phillips, Jeremy Irvine, Geraldine James, Gemma Jones, Simon Russell Beale, Calam Lynch, Anton Lesser, Ben Daniels, Richard Goulding, Julian Sands and Peter Capaldi.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Terence Davies. A Roadside Attractions release.

Running time: 2:17