This isn’t the 1940s British play of the same title, although am characters name, Inspector Stoddard, hints at perhaps its inspiration.
It stars Sam Rockwell, Saoirse Ronan and Adrien Brody about is about time cast of an about to film murder mystery who start dying.
Hilariously set in the 1950s, a touch of “Knives Out” magic is what they’re hoping for.
Sept. 30.
A teensy tiny hint of Get Out?” You think?
This horror tale and all it’s digging and creepy preacher frights opens Friday.
Flying to Bali for their daughter’s wedding. To break it up.
Cute. Kind of madcap. Ish. Trying WAY too hard.
Apt use of Three Dog Night singing a Randy Newman tune.
Look for this one Oct. 21, because you know I will.
Victimhood is a scab that should never be picked, because the last thing the martyred want is for a wound to heal.
And there it is. You bathe in the proverbs and aphorisms of John Michael McDonagh long enough, he’s got you doing it.
“The Forgiven” is a decadents-in-the-desert parable from the writer-director of “The Guard” and “Calvary,” the brother of the more famous Irish playwright and writer-director of the Oscar-winning “Three Billboards Outside of Ebbing Missouri.”
Alternately stark and lurid, poetic and very well acted, it’s a return to form for McDonagh, who rather lost the plot with “War on Everyone.” He’s adapted a Lawrence Osborne novel, a story of infidels gathering to party in the desert — Westerners doing what they’ve long done in Morocco — until an accident sobers at least one of them up.
Londoners Ralph Fiennes and Jessica Chastain spend a bit too much time in the Tangier bar, and bars along the way, to get to a party in the middle of nowhere on the edge of the Sahara. That’s how it happens — a boy, standing in the dirt road in the pitch black night, a driver arguing over directions with his wife, an accident.
But we’ve seen the teenager having his own argument, egged on into something other than selling fossils to European tourists. We’ve seen the pistol, even if David and Jo Henninger — even their surname is alcoholic — never do.
They show up at the Baccanale tossed by the rich gays Richard (Matt Smith) and Dally (Caleb Landry Jones) with a crumpled bumper and a dead boy in the back, which barely interrupts the festivities.
Rent-boy Dally might gripe “What a bore they are, what a mess they’ve made,” but at least Richard has the good sense and character to call the police and face whatever limited music there might be for killing “a nobody” standing in the road in the middle of the night.
David’s an instant reminder that the Brits invented most of the world’s racial slurs, and probably xenophobia, too. What might the locals have in store for him? “Lynch me? Public castration?”
His American wife has had about enough of this boozy, posh poseur.
“What a nice little fascist you’ve become.”
But maybe David’s right to be paranoid. The foreigner-coddling cop wears his sunglasses at night for effect and keeps his reassurances short. Still, there’s also the matter of the boy’s father.
The stars of this movie may be two Oscar winners, with a Doctor Who and former X-Man (Jones) to boot. But the Arabic cast is what really classes it up.
Mourad Zaoui plays the Islamic aphorism-quoting Hamid, an unflappable but judgmental head servant, who shames David –“It’s the honorable thing.” — into meeting with and then accompanying the boy’s grieving Berber father (Moroccan actor Ismael Kanater) back to his distant home village to be buried. The father is a bitter, self-righteous man who seems capable of just about anything, which gives David pause, but only a pause.
And the wonderful French-Arabic character actor Saïd Taghmaoui (“Wonder Woman,” “Hate”) plays the sad old man’s translator, who might be here to comfort David, or lead him to his fate.
“The desert is what we fish,” he says of the vocation of the boy who died. “The fossils are what we catch…God is making a joke.”
The story has familiar McDonagh themes of redemption of the irredeemable and is overflowing with the tasty, testy dialogue of the witty and the damned, his family’s true gift to the cinema.
“The tongue has no bones, sir,” Hamid says, settling a boozy dinner-table argument. “But it crushes, all the same.”
“Piece by piece, the camel enters the couscous.”
You can see why McDonagh was drawn to this material, and why actors fight for the chance to work in either of the two gift-of-the-screen-dialogue-gab siblings’ movies. You’d swear Moroccans settled Ireland, or the other way round.
The film flirts with a few tropes that drag it down — sexual misadventures, a glib, uncaring and arrogant man finally feeling remorse, the idea of martyrdom as something a gentleman might find “honorable,” if told that’s “customary in these parts.”
There’s also something inherently silly in all these coddled pale-faces exposing themselves to the Saharan sun, SPF450 Brits and Americans (Chastain, Jones and Christopher Abbott) oblivious to the irony.
And making Chastain’s character’s husband a dermatologist is just, well, rich.
But you can tell McDonagh’s back on form just by the way he throws all these pearls — either cribbed from the novel, Mark Twain, or his own inventions — before us, as if there’s a never-ending supply of them. Because maybe, in his case, there is.
“A woman without discretion is like a gold ring in a pig snout,” is funnyand biting in English or in Arabic with subtitles.
“You should have a Twitter account.”
Rating: R for language throughout, drug use, some sexual content and brief violence.
Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Jessica Chastain, Ismael Kanater, Saïd Taghmaoui, Mourad Zaoui, Marie-Josée Croze, Christopher Abbott, Caleb Landry Jones and Matt Smith.
Credits: Scripted and directed by John Michael McDonagh, based on a novel by Lawrence Osborne. A Vertical/Roadside Attractions release.
Running time: 1:57
The French invented the “menage a trois,” so leave it to them to conjure up a particularly messy one that looks at love from “Both Sides of the Blade.”
Titled “Avec amour et acharnement” in French, and first-titled “Fire” in English by director Claire Denis, this Juliette Binoche drama has heat and hurt and a whiff of intrigue as Denis (“High Life,” “Beau Travail”) peels away layers of background that reveals more and more of the true nature of her characters.
For her third film with Denis (“Let the Sunshine In” was the first), Binoche gives us Sara, a smitten but wholly adult 50something who is all over her lover of several years, Jean (Vincent Lindon of “Titane”) — in a solitary romantic cove on the Riviera, in their apartment — filling his ear with “Mon amor, mon amor, mon amor” as they make love.
But a glimpse of a former lover, a younger man, François (Grégoire Colin), rattles her and sends Sara into reveries of the past.
“François, François, François,” she purrs, hoping no one hears. Being a radio talk show hostess, she hides nothing from Jean, who is 60ish and struggling to keep a handle on his acting-out teenaged son (Issa Perica), who lives with Jean’s constantly-calling elderly mother (Bulle Ogier), who is raising him.
It turns out Jean and Sara’s meeting is something she remembers more fondly than him, a meeting that happened when he was still married and she was still with “François, François, François,” who left her alone at the end of the night while Jean showed concern for her over her then-lover’s callousness.
“Why am I with the one who leaves?” she asked herself, recollecting that night to Jean.
So much is revealed in that simple exchange — Sara’s willingness and ability to get the she wants (casting Binoche makes that a no-brainer), her tactless confidence in mentioning that she’s seen François, and Jean’s solicitous devotion, a devotion that can be re-directed.
When François reaches out to Jean with a business proposition, we figure the younger man out with his first line (in French, with English subtitles).
“So, you kept her?”
It takes Jean and us a moment to figure out he’s talking about Jean’s 35 year-old Mercedes. And then we and he wonder if that confusion is intentional, what François really wants and what he and Sara might be up to, or get up to if given the chance.
“Both Sides of the Blade” is a film of chats that sound like interrogations, big revelations that drop in normal, everyday transactions and mixed emotions all around. Jean’s acceptance of a business offer from François might seem easy and natural, but Lindon’s tight-lipped playing of it suggests just how fraught all of this whole situation is to him.
Is Sara adult enough to resist swooning? How dark is Jean’s dark side, and when will he show it? And just what is François on about with this “offer?”
Denis, who co-wrote the script with Christine Angot, gets at the fragility of relationships and the narcissism of love in a film where the stakes might be low, but promise to go higher at any moment.
Every character has her or his “sketchy” side, impure motives or selfish desires. Even though we’ve glimpsed an idyllic romance in the opening scenes, the three corners of this menage seem co-dependent. Perhaps that loving couple needed whatever drama in the past launched and fed that relationship, and everything they do now is overcompensating for that.
But Denis won’t let us wrestle with that directly as we listen in on Sara’s radio show or lose ourselves in whatever drama’s going on with Jean’s biracial son Marcus. Thus, the testy and tender resolution simply sneaks up on it.
Life and love on can be harrowing and messy. And maybe you have to be your most selfish to get what you want from it, grabbing that knife from “Both Sides of the Blade.”
Rating: unrated, sex, nudity, profanity
Cast: Juliette Binoche, Vincent Lindon, Grégoire Colin, Bulle Ogier and Issa Perica
Credits: Directed by Claire Denis, scripted by Christine Angot and Claire Denis. An IFC release.
Running time: 1:56
Here’s a film that exposes the sketchy scam that is Major League Eating, and that July 4 Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest and the power drunk mini Vince McMahon who runs it for what they are.
It’s funny and goofy and kind of charming until you get into the blackballing, strong arming, match fixing allegations, and deaths.
A cautionary tale — “Scarf Face” — for Casselberry Florida residents to chew on via DVD and IndiePix.
Movie Nation, spreading fine cinema across America, one DVD, one library at a time.
In a large, repurposed open floor-plan warehouse in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, a man in baseball cap and sweater vest exhorts his charges, a sea of high school kids whose uniforms are often augmented with college sweatshirts.
But the shirts — Harvard, Stanford, Princeton — aren’t for the state’s football-first schools, and these kids aren’t athletes, Too many bow-ties for that. And the coach leading them through a morning drill isn’t prepping them for sports.
“You CONTROL your own DESTINY…You’re about to change your great great GRANDchildren’s lives! You KNOW what’s at stake.”
Louisiana schools, ranked as some of the poorest and worst in America, aren’t known for producing scholars. But these kids — mostly Black and brown and disadvantaged — are the hope of T.M. Landry Prep, a high school whose claim to fame is getting all its graduates into college, “32% into Ivy League” universities.
At a time in history when prestigious degrees have become the nakedly-obvious yardstick for indicating future success in life, this school is winning the race to changing lower class kids’ futures.
“Accepted” is Dan Chen’s feel-good documentary about an American success story — the school and its businessman and nurse founders, Mike and Tracy Landry, and the kids whose lives are being changed by it.
We hear born-salesman/minister-who-missed-his-calling Mike Landry challenging his kids to “Be aggressive” with the commitment to school work, “make sure you’re taking care of business” by putting in the 11-12 hour days he expects. Landry answers calls re: homework and study at all hours, and we see him leading by example.
The film follows Alicia, Adia, Isaac, Cathy and James through their struggles, hear their classic “against the odds” stories as they shoot for Wellesley, Georgetown, Stanford and Yale. As Oprah has taught us for generations, we’re all the heroes of our own story, and it’s easy to root for these kids. One needs to succeed to create a decent life for her single mom and two special needs sisters. Another’s mother has cancer and may not live to see her graduate from college.
These students are focused, never letting their eyes off the prize.
And then the “feel good” story blows up. The school with the staggering success rate, whose videos of all the kids gathered around a computer and wildly celebrating when this one gets into Yale or that one Harvard went viral, is gaming the system.
The open “no schedule” academics of Landry, showcasing third graders doing algebra on TV, might as well be Trump University. It’s a con.
Or IS it?
Chen’s film, tracking this school through the 2018-19 school year, had the luck — good and bad — of having cameras rolling just as America’s school admissions scandal was laid bare and its academic “meritocracy” myth dashed. Chen seems to be caught just as off-guard as these students, celebrated on TV chat shows from “ellen” to “Today” to “The Steve Harvey Show,” when a New York Times expose blows the whole T.M. Landry thing up.
We have just enough time to wonder why we’re not seeing actual “instructors” working with students, just enough time to think “These kids are exceptional” but “These hard-working folks running this school aren’t,” before “Accepted,” and we its viewers, are forced to reckon with bigger questions.
If these students don’t deserve a shot, where are the tails-tucked-between-their-legs flunkout walks of shame from those who get into prestigious schools and fail? Why should nouveau riche celebrities be able to game the system for their little mediocrities, and working class kids from rural Louisiana, who are putting in the effort, not be able to play to racial stereotypes of “disadvantaged” to get the same opportunity?
What are we not being told about how the upper class, producing more than its share of upper class twits (i.e., the “founder” of Trump University) is operating under a fixed system with rules bent in their favor?
And what kind of country educates its kids and looks for “the best and the brightest” in such a short-sighted, money-matters and patronizing way?
“Accepted” isn’t as thorough as you’d expect (Again, NO teachers are interviewed.). But it succeeds by not offering a simple black and white take on what went on and what is going on with how schools “accept” students and just how arbitrary that unjust system is.
It’s damning, but not in the ways you might expect. “Accepted” offers a “jury’s still out” look at T.M. Landry and its kids, and a serious start to the soul-searching America might want to do over its worship of elites and elitism and anybody who, by hook or by crook, hustles their way into the exclusive schools that perpetuate such elites, merit, “best” or “brightest” be damned.
Rating: unrated
Cast: Mike Landry, Alicia Simon, Isaac Smith, Adia Sabatier, Cathy Bui and James Dennis
Credits: Directed by Dan Chen. A Greenwich Entertainment release.
Running time: 1:32
Heres the final trailer. I don’t get hyped about comic book movies. But this one has me wound up, I tell you what.
This take on the Aug. 5 IFC Midnight/Shudder release plays up the war of nerves, Hall tormented by Roth.
It looks good, yes indeed. Hall is raising standards for horror, one high-toned tale at a time.
Anybody hoping to put Louis C.K.’s “issues” and cancellation out of their minds when watching his new film will be sorely disappointed, as there he is, right in the opening scene and playing a therapist, no less.
He’s not the star of “Fourth of July,” just a bit player. But he co-wrote it with comic Joe List, and he directed it. Seeing as how C.K.’s other films as writer-director were “Pootie Tang” and “I Love You, Daddy,” which was abandoned by its fourth-tier distributor when his sexual abuse scandal blew up and shut-down his career, perhaps shying away from the spotlight would have been the smarter play.
Then again, notoriety sells. Ask any Kardashian.
So here Louis Louis is, leaning into the public shunning (by “polite society,” not by his all-forgiving fans), right from the get-go. The movie? It’s not “atonement” for C.K.’s s sins or a stark reminder of “the genius we lost” when he was cancelled. It’s a serious “meh,” squishy and sentimental — like a Woody Allen (cough cough) rough draft, with lots more swearing.
List plays a Manhattan jazz pianist with some serious mommy issues to break down with his therapist.
“I don’t want to talk about it!”
“Then maybe we should.”
Nebbishy Jeff is married, plays in a popular jazz quartet and is two-years-and-change sober. His sponsor (longtime Letterman writer Bill Scheft) figures it’s time Jeff took on an AA “sponsee,” somebody just deciding to get sober.
“Either lean in, take the next step, or lean back and fall down a flight of stairs…Take the next right action.”
Jeff’s new sponsee (Bobby Shelton) is a drummer, a month sober and not into this newbie “speaking in bumper stickers” as advice. But they give it a try.
And then there’s the happy life at home, where Jeff and his wife (Sarah Tollemache) are dreading the annual July 4 trip to Maine to hang out with his family. But the scar tissue of this marriage — Jeff’s issues with his parents — might not be the seat of wife Beth’s unhappiness. Nothing for it but for our nebbish to motor north and finally “confront” the folks he’s told his therapist he would confront many times before.
A sober alcoholic hanging with a bunch of drunks. What says “family” and “our nation’s birthday” better than that?
What ensues is a day or two of dysfunction, none of it all that novel, only some of it funny and only in a bittersweet way.
The family dynamic here has its obvious characters with “toxic” tattooed on their foreheads and “tactless” in their DNA. Mom (Paula Plum) is a braying bully, dad (Robert Walsh) something of a shrinking violet, and everybody else is several degrees better or worse on the spectrum.
His mother bum-rushes Jeff into having “the talk” he tells them they need to have, and Mom promptly betrays that trust and exposes Jeff to endless family ridicule and recriminations. Homophobes, beer-guts and MAGAs, they literally gang up on him.
Stranger Naomi (Tara Pacheco) is here, as a witness and an innocent. Jeff’s one relatable relative is his close-in-age Uncle Mark (Chris Walsh) who helps explain things to her.
“We were drinking buddies since we were 10 (Jeff) and 12 (Mark). The quitter!”
The cast might have been the best they could manage, considering C.K.’s pariah status. The only “name” in the ensemble, aside from him, is veteran comic Allan Havey, currently on TV’s “Billions.”
List may be convincing enough at the keyboard and competent with a line, especially a funny one, whether spoken or reacted to.
“You’re the WORST therapist. I’m suffering here!”
“Maybe you’re not suffering enough.”
But List lacks acting polish or the charisma to be an arresting screen presence. A funnier script might have minimized that. It kept Woody Allen on the screen for decades, after all.
There’s promising if timeworn material here — the jazz milieu, the AA routine, the toxic parents, the jerkiest cousin (Nick De Paolo) of them all. But there’s no pop to the picture, no compelling answer to the question, “OK, why is this a movie?”
One gets the feeling that C.K’s track record of marketing his stand-up specials and the like directly to his fans is the main reason “Fourth of July” was made. As his Kardashian role models showed him, scandal or no scandal, content is content as long as it’ll sell.
Rating: unrated, profanity, smoking, alcohol abuse
Cast: Joe List, Paula Plum, Sarah Tollemache, Nick De Paolo, Chris Walsh, Tara Pacheco, Bill Scheft, Robert Kelly, Allan Havey and Louis C. K.
Credits: Directed by Louis C.K., scripted by Joe List and Louis C.K. An Abramorama release.
Running time: 1:32
Movie Nation 