Movie Nation

One of the toughest decisions facing anybody involved with a movie is recognizing “Well, Hell, somebody beat us to it” and knowing when to throw in the towel.

The Keke Palmer enslaved woman’s revenge thriller “Alice” went into production as Lionsgate’s Janelle Monáe vehicle, “Antebellum” announced its release date back in 2020. That’s a lot like plowing on with “Infamous” when the fanfare over “Capote” is just starting to build, and the writing’s on the wall.

As in, “Well, they’re not the same movie, but they’re damned close. Who’s going to want to see that twice?”

“Alice” opens, like “Antebellum,” with a vicious depiction of enslaved life on a Georgia plantation. Mister Paul (Jonny Lee Miller) rides his “domestics” hard, and as a lay preacher, inveighs upon them to “be fruitful,” multiply and increase the size of his enslaved “property” holdings — with mates of his choosing, of course.

House “domestic” Alice (Palmer, the “Akela and the Bee” star who reinvented herself with “Pimp”) has been secretly married to Joseph (Gaius Charles) when Mister Paul, a brute too-quick with the whip, informs Joseph that he’s to be married/mated with a slave from a nearby plantation. That’s what triggers one last furious effort to fight their way free by both Alice and Joseph.

Only Alice is able to gouge her way out, sprint through the Spanish Moss-covered forest and…almost get run over by a tractor trailer on a Georgia Interstate in 1973.

Sure, we had a clue, with her picking up a copy of her mistress’s Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” and holding it up to a mirror to compare herself to the heroine depicted on the cover. That novel was first published, in Russia, in 1878. Every American, save for the stupidest and the political cult who still embrace him, can manage that historical math.

Alice finds herself in future shock, with Diana Ross on the radio and on the cover of the “Rolling Stone” and Pam Grier at her “Coffey” “Jet” magazine cover icon action icon peak. With some understanding from the understandably confused truck driver (Common), Alice gives herself a rushed lesson in 100 years of civil rights, a Pam Grier/Angela Davis afro and the resolve to track down anybody from that plantation (Alicia Witt) who needs confronting and can give her some answers.

Because like “Django Unchained,” she’s hellbent on going back and having her revenge.

The best one can say about the heartbreaking opening act is that the Antebellum South might be where the phrase “The cruelty is the point” might have originated.

The best one can say about Alice’s blaxploitation era revenge fantasy is that it doesn’t play.

And despite Palmer’s investment in the title role, there’s little more to add about “Alice” except that it shows up two years too late, even less logical, and a lot of budget dollars short of “Antebellum.

Rating: Rated R for some violence and language

Cast: Keke Palmer, Common, Jonny Lee Miller, Gaius Charles and Alicia Witt.

Credits” Scripted and directed by Krystin Ver Linden. A Roadside Attractions release.

Running time: 1:40

Here’s the novel touch to “Rescued by Ruby,” an utterly adorable hero dog tale based on a true story.

Director Katt Shea and her team include outtakes of the gorgeous rescue border collie mix “Bear” who has the title role in their film. We see the patience and good humor it takes not just to train a dog, but to train and then film one to be a star who hits her or his marks.

“Ruby” is another “Who saved who?” t-shirt of a dog story about a short-attention-span Rhode Island state trooper (Grant Gustin) who dreams of taking his “protect and serve” duties to the ultimate — by joining the K-9 unit. But the officer (“Party of Five” alum and veteran character actor Scott Wolf) who runs that team keeps telling him “I don’t see it.”

Maybe he senses the fact that Trooper Dan O’Neil’s selling point on all this to his teacher/new-mom/and newly-pregnant wife (Kaylah Zander) is about the raise in salary. O’Neil just isn’t worth the risk, not when K-9 dogs are German Shepherds imported from Europe at a cost of $10,000 each.

O’Neil’s Hail Mary is to get his own dog, train it and try out for the squad. As $10,000 doesn’t grow on trees, to the shelter he goes.

Ruby has been there past her “put down” date, a smart but undisciplined and unruly mess who isn’t even house-trained. People keep taking this beauty home only to have her trash their house or run away. She prefers the company of Pat (Camille Sullivan) at the shelter.

Can this not-really-a-dog-guy with the big hat turn that train wreck of a canine into a search and rescue star?

Director Shea (“Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase”) and screenwriter Karen Janszen tinker with the formula for moist-eyed-dramedies starring dogs in a couple of cool ways.

Wolf’s K-9 chief shows us what is expected of such a dog and its teammate, stopwatch tests seeking objects, people and human remains. Spirited Ruby is sure to have trouble with even the simplest five-minute “stay” command.

This comes after the O’Neil has to trial-and-error his way through books, Youtube tutorials (director Shea plays the dog expert in the black hat) and simple desperation in order to civilize Ruby for living with her new family.

There isn’t much new under the sun in these movies. Show us a few sequences seen from (low, handheld camera, slightly distorted lens) the dog’s point of view. Deliver a lot of mishaps and hijinx.

The ending is always a real get-choked-up moment if they do it right. Shea, Janszen, Gustin, Wolf and especially Bear trainer Tiffany Wall (Who’s a good girl? YOU are!) pull it off with family-friendly panache.

Rating: TV-G

Cast: Grant Gustin, Camille Sullivan, Kaylah Zander and Scott Wolf

Credits: Directed by Katt Shea, scripted by Karen Janszen, based on a short nonfiction story by Squire Bushnell and Louise DuArt. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:30

The chases are pulse-pounding and the fights and shoot-outs — in streets and bars, hotel suites and inside a BMW SUV — are visceral, almost epic.

Just don’t let the fact that the Korean body-switch thriller “Spiritwalker” is confusing on a whole new level throw you. When your hero is literally switching bodies, left and right, literally every time his watch reads “12,” when the bodies he leaves — bad guys, to a one — stick around and return to the action later, when there’s some inconsistency to who exactly we’re looking at, rest assured you’re not the only one confused.

It probably all makes more sense in writer-director Yoon Jae-Keun’s head. It’s been ten years since his last film (“Heartbeat”). From the looks of “Spiritwalker,” he’s been writing and rewriting this thing that whole time, folding in more complications all the while.

A man (Yoon Kyesang) wakes up, bloodied and battered, after a car wreck. “Where am I? WHO am I?”

The homeless guy (Ji-hwan Park) rummaging through his wrecked SUV can’t help with that. But at least he called an ambulance. With no memory of his identity, a bullet wound, a photo of a pretty woman in front of a landmark Seoul church, he has the vague sense that maybe he shouldn’t wait in the hospital long enough to be interrogated by the cops sends him on his quest.

A few “OK, try to forget this detail” moments hit us straight away. No, that bleeding shoulder isn’t treated, not that we can see. Time passes very strangely in this film’s reality, as “Ian” or “Yoo” or “Baik” or “Jee” or whoever this dude is passes from person to person every time whatever watch he’s wearing tells him it’s 12 o’clock. That’s a lot of 12s.

People recognize him in this or that guise. Some are puzzled, some afraid and some come after him, pistol, hammer and tong. Depending on who he is, he might reflexively have mad “fighting back” martial arts skills. But sometimes it takes a moment or three to summon them up.

And reloading any of the pistols he fires in shoot-outs is a rare afterthought as whoever this guy is pursues whoever that woman Jina (Ji-hwan Park) is, and she either recognizes him warmly or (depending on his guise) pummels and threatens to kill him.

That hobo, who stole his car’s “black box” data and video recorder? He’s a hapless helper and comic relief bystander to all the mayhem to come.

It’s hard to say much about the acting, as our writer-director isn’t wholly consistent in who is “playing” the lead. Sometimes, the body switch is obvious, mostly we’re seeing Yoon Kyesang, who sees whoever he is supposed to be “now” in this or that mirror. Most viewers outside of Korea won’t recognize the leads and various fresh bodies inhabited or villains introduced. Lots of TV credits and films little known outside of the Peninsula among them.

But for all the body switheroos, the “MacGuffins” here are as commonplace as every other thriller you’ve seen in the past thirty years and the villains just as generic.

Well, one bad guy gets good and stoned and makes rash decisions accordingly, so that’s kind of novel.

Mostly, Yoon keeps his energy and attention on getting his characters to their next switch, their next fight or chase. The film’s loose grasp of time, gun magazine capacity and severity of injuries can’t all be written off to the biggest MacGuffin here, so “Spiritwalker” can play like a “Crank” with a hint of the supernatural.

But it’s still a fun ride, even if it’s hard to keep up with who the body-switched “star” might be.

Rating: unrated, lots of violence, drug abuse

Cast: Yoon Kyesang, Ji-Yeon Lim and Ji-hwan Park.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Yoon Jaeo keun. A Well Go release.

Running time: 1:48

Ahh, the quaint corruption, criminality and coercion of the Nixon era, now just the second most evil Republican administration in living memory.

Julia Roberts plays the mouthy Steel Magnolia Martha Mitchell, who played a major role in exposing the unsavory side of her Attorney General husband, John Mitchell (an unrecognizable Sean Penn), and the mediocre third rate goons of the Nixon White House.

I recognized Chris Messina in here. Shea Whigham looks to be a scene stealer as Mr. Butch by self-proclamation, Gordon Liddy, one of the “masterminds” of this assault on democracy. Wonder if they cast somebody to play that terminal cancer on America, William Barr? He was involved in Nixoniana long before he became Trump’s cover-up comrade.

Who gets “Gaslit,” April 24, on STARZ?

The 31st Florida Film Festival announced its lineup tonight — ten days, some 160 films, filmmaker panels, parties, many venues, many movies, much much fun, as always.

After losing a year to the pandemic and coming back in an altered, online-friendly, tentative-reopening form last year, the FFF is back with a vengeance April 8-17.

Sundance films, music docs (A GWAR doc?), indie fare and foreign language films (Iran’s “Hit the Road”), many of them months before they get a regular run, see them all in the company of your fellow film lovers. There’s nothing like a film festival experience.

And of course there’s a special guest, as always. This time it’s the TV icon, big screen mainstay, international treasure, ASTRONAUT and Father of Fanboydom, WILLIAM SHATNER.

If you’ve never seen him in the flesh, if you only know him from the “Star Trek” series and movies, his later Emmy and Golden Globe winning work, his documentaries and many killer guest-starring turns on popular sitcoms, if you’ve only caught his caustic wit on Twitter, you’ve got to come.

He’s a sci-fi fan’s bucket list item…Item One.

The Enzian Theater will be hosting “An Evening With William Shatner,” and I’ll be moderating a Q & A after a screening of one of the best “Star Trek” films, “The Voyage Home,” a comic classic directed by his co-star and friend Leonard Nimoy.

He’s been making such appearances for years and always creates a stir and puts on a show, even if you’ve seen him before. And if you haven’t been to “an evening with,” well, “bucket list.”

He’s the guy who turned us all into fangirls and fanboys.

Over the years I’ve had the pleasure of accompanying Nimoy on a location scout for a movie he never made, interviewed James Doohan after a speech at UNC-Charlotte, caught up with George Takei and the great Mark Leonard (Spock’s dad, and the Romulan commander in my favorite Original Series episode, “Balance of Terror”) before their appearances at fan conventions, a phenomenon that “Star Trek” created.

But Shatner? He’s my Great Canadian White Whale. I’m sitting here watching “City on the Edge of Forever,” the classic episode written by star sci-fi writer Harlan Ellison, whom I had the pleasure of catching up with at a writer’s conference in snowy North Dakota, hyperventilating a bit about what to say in introducing Shatner, what one question remains to be asked and answered by The Source.

You can’t afford Stones tickets, and if you missed them while Watts was still on the drums, why bother anyway? This is like that.

Come on, don’t make me ask all the questions. I’m counting on you to serve up those.

See you at the Enzian on April 15!

An April 15 tax day fright — that’s when Shudder streams the movie about an “ancient evil” in…”The Cellar.”

In the thriller “Tethered,” a little blind boy is raised by his parents to live self-sufficient and alone in the woods, keeping himself tied, by rope, to the home he makes his way back to each day after checking his trapline.

That’s about as minimal as minimalist thrillers get, which can be a virtue but in this case produces a movie sorely lacking in surprises, action or suspense.

Solomon — played by Brody Bett as a tween, Jared Laufree as a teen — traps animals for food, plants root crops in a garden and keeps a goat. Mom (Alexandra Paul) raised him to follow three rules to keep himself alive out here by himself.

“Always give back to the forest when it provides for us.” That means leaving a little bit of squirrel meat or what have you out there for the critters. “When your will is almost gone, find comfort in singing our song.” She and his father read his children’s books on cassette tape, and she sang with little Solomon as well. And thirdly, “Never ever let go of the rope. The rope will keep you safe.”

“Tethered” is about what the near-adult Solomon starts hearings in those woods, and what he and a hunter (Kareem Ferguson) who stumbles into him try to do about it.

The narrative of Daniel Robinette’s debut feature is seeded with clues about what’s happened, what’s happening and what’s to come. Something sent the father away, something Mom doesn’t talk about even as she teaches their son to celebrate Dad’s birthday with a fishing trip and birthday cake.

And once Mom is gone, we continue to wonder about those things even if Solomon doesn’t.

There are nits to pick here, about how the kid is really getting by. But mainly this is a simple creature feature variation, without the frights to back that up. Something is growling unearthly noises in the dark, leaving claw marks high on trees. Something got Solomon’s goat. Something might be disappointing when we see how obvious that something is.

The acting isn’t bad, and the sense of primitive isolation is palpable. As debut features go, I’ve seen worse, which is about as far as this review goes by way of endorsement.

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Jared Laufree, Brody Bett, Alexandra Paul and Kareem Ferguson.

Credits: Directed by Daniel Robinette, scripted by Aaron Sorgius and Daniel Robinette. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time:

No, I get no kickbacks from posting this. No sample bottles to make me give up Bombay Sapphire. Dammit.

But the ads are cute.

British filmmaker Adrian Lyne made a name for himself in the ’80s and ’90s thanks to lurid thrillers (“Fatal Attraction,” “Indecent Proposal,” “Lolita”) that put the “sexually” in “sexually-charged” and “sexual taboo.”

He didn’t make a lot of movies, but from “Foxes” and “Flashdance” to “Jacob’s Ladder” and “Unfaithful,” his work always grabbed attention and often titillated its way into the national conversation.

The long dormant Lyne turned 81 on March 4. But with his first film in 20 years, “Deep Water,” it’s like he never left, and the years certainly haven’t altered his cinematic appetites or dulled his scalpel. Much.

“Deep Water” is based on a Patricia Highsmith novel, a writer (“The Talented Mr. Ripley,” “Strangers on a Train,””The Two Faces of January”) right up Lynne’s dark and sordid alley. As with other Highsmith works, it gives us jealousy and murder, lays a suspect at our feet and dares us not to believe he did it and not to root for him if he did.

Ben Affleck is Vic Van Allen, a retired-wealthy chip designer whose reserved bearing might be a reflection of the ease of his station in life, or be a part of the moral compartmentalization he developed when he designed a microchip that made U.S. military drones all the more deadly in tracking down and “killing people.”

He’s not inclined to lose control, something his too-young/too-promiscuous wife (Ana De Armas of “Knives Out”) tests constantly. She cuckolds him pretty much constantly, pretty much openly and pretty much everybody in their social circle knows it.

His friends (Devyn A. Tyler, Lil Rel Howery) give him the “OI just don’t want you out here looking foolish” and “You’ve gotta rein Melinda in” speeches, but he remains unrattled.

“Sometimes I think he’s not normal” seems to be the consensus. And as we see Melinda flaunt this Brad Pitt/Kato Kaelin look-alike (Brendan Miller), that piano player (Jacob Eloridi) or an old flame (Finn Wittrock) suddenly showering attention and returning her stolen kisses, we might agree.

“I don’t find the need to dictate her choices” is what he says. But we’ve seen the erotic control she’s exercising over him, heard her arrogant “You’d be bored” if she wasn’t this way rationalizations.

And then we see one of those shameless philanderers button-hole him at one of the endless parties they attend, hear Vic drop the name of this “guy who’s been missing for a while,” mention the missing man also “saw a lot of my wife. And then Vic matter-of-factly tells his wife’s paramour “I killed him.”

It’s kind of a casual admission tinged with an emotionless menace.

“Are you threatening me?” “Do you feel threatened?”

And that’s your movie. Maybe the first guy disappeared by coincidence Maybe the second guy leaves this Louisiana setting in a hurry for good reason. A new writer in town (Tracy Letts) hears the murderous rumors that Vic has started and gets curious. And as we wonder what Vic is capable of, we also wonder what Melinda knows knows, and if she’s playing this game of sexual brinksmanship against her husband, or with him.

De Armas gives us a taste of femme fatale in her sexy wild child. She makes a believable life-of-the-party drunk and an utterly convincing “I’m beautiful enough to get away with anything” bully.

Affleck has spent a lot of time perfecting his poker face, and that gives the moments Vic let’s us see his pained victimhood or barely-contained fury pay off.

Highsmith was a novelist of an earlier age, and the same could be said of Lyne. He finds little sexual touches to give his picture an up-to-the-moment edge. But he’s big on dropping on-the-nose dated pop tunes into the diegetic music — songs that Daddy Vic sings in the car with their “brilliant” little girl Trixie (Grace Jenkins), played at parties etc. — as joking references to what story is being told, from “Sneaking Sally Through the Alley” to “The Lady is a Tramp.”

Some plot twists are introduced and abandoned in the editing — just a guess, because the film does drag a little and feels a tad long. And the finale has just enough “Oh come on” in it to make us look for another bunny drowned in a cooking pot or Glenn Close rising from the drowned in the bathtub.

Mostly though, Lyne plays it straight and lets the clockwork thriller script tick through its minutes, giving up one revelation only to tease us along with fresh questions.

Whatever the film’s shortcomings, you can’t say the cast isn’t on the mark and that Lyne, at the very least, still has it and remains very much a master at sucking us in and making us care, no matter who the hero and who the villain might be.

Rating: R for sexual content, nudity, language and some violence

Cast: Ben Affleck, Ana De Armas, Tracy Letts, Lil Rel Howrey, Finn Wittrock, Jacob Elordi and Grace Jenkins.

Credits: Directed by Adrian Lyne, scripted by Zach Helm and Sam Levinson, based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith. A 20th Century release on Hulu.

Running time: 1:55