Movie Nation

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

Mental health “comedies” are a problematic genre, even when the film in question is an “Around the World with Netflix” rom-com from Italy. “Marilyn’s Eyes” proves that even Italy’s more old-fashioned sense of who and what we can laugh at in no way gives such a picture a pass.

This is meant to be a farcical romp about a therapy group who check in daily at a mental health center with all manner of maladies, but who run an exclusive, buzzed-about fine dining eatery out of the “food lab” kitchen, which is meant to be a part of their therapy.

“Only in Italy,” you say, and just for the first time. Because these assorted compulsives, manic depressives, Tourettes and you-name-its patients are unsupervised as they “invite the outside world in” as part of their treatment. What could go wrong?

Diego (Stefano Accorsi) is a wound-too-tight OCD sufferer who has lost his marriage and can only see his little girl in supervised visits. We get it. We’ve seen him have a complete restaurant-trashing meltdown in the opening scene, a rage captured in slow motion, no less. A customer “wound me up” (in Italian with subtitles, or dubbed into English) just by moving the flower in his perfectly-arranged table setting.

Diego’s therapist (Thomas Trabacci) insists that he keep coming to group therapy until he figures out that doing “things that have consequences” isn’t good for him.

That’s prescribed for Clara (Miriam Leone), too. She’s a vain, delusional free spirit who is an actress and a compulsive liar and prone to lashing out episodes, just like Diego.

“I didn’t mean to set him on fire!”

Clara can’t even bring herself to sit within the neat circle of fellow patients, convinced as she is that “I’m going back to my life.” No, she isn’t.

Group therapy is a chaotic shout-off amongst the extroverts — the martyred paranoid Armando (Mario Pirello) and Tourrettes-twisted Susana (Orietta Notari) are the loudest.

And whatever the reaction we’re meant to have to these creations of screenwriter Giulia Steigerwalt, director Simone Godano and the actors playing the roles, the thing that overwhelms the viewer in regarding them is sadness.

To a one, even the “pretty” ones (the leads and the younger, silent “Gina,” played by Valentina Oteri), are confused, upset and sick. Some of them are even potentially violent, and have that track record.

Diego’s visits with his kid are as apt to go off the rails, with or without supervision, as they are to bond father to a daughter he is sure will forget him thanks to her mother’s new man.

A chance “make a meal together” assignment shows everyone’s struggles, writ large. But that becomes a daily routine as they cook for outsiders from a senior’s center, Chef Diego prepping one main course every day, eventually adding dessert, etc.

From that comes Clara’s latest flighty delusion. They’ll use the cooking lab kitchen and informal “restaurant” to create a “real” fake restaurant. She’ll fake a website and fill it with fake reviews. And she’ll name the joint “Monroe’s,” because somebody told her she looks just like Marilyn.

The institutional furniture will be augmented with a few lampshades and a little neon, the walls decorated in deranged Armando’s tribute to Edvard Munch.

The servers will be passed off as “atmosphere.” Their “performance” will create a “unique dining experience.” Every screaming match, every meltdown, every profane Tourrettes “F-you” when taking an order are all written off to the vibe they’re trying to create.

The restaurant twist here, with the place attaining “real” buzz thanks to Clara’s “fake” buzz, is nonsensical. Even the OCDs amongst them wouldn’t be organized enough to pass a health inspection or remember to have cash on hand to make change for the legions of foodies who show up.

Yes, this review is doing a lot of “labeling,” summing up characters by their illnesses. It’s not fair, but that’s what the movie does.

There’s precious little comedy to any of this as distracted Clara takes her fragile granny to an amusement park where Clara lets her get hurt, Diego seems to go above and beyond “restraining order” in his meltdowns around his ex and his kid and even the too-many-crackpots in the kitchen and group therapy scenes fail to deliver laugh-out-loud light moments.

Leone, who once starred in the historical drama “A Cup of Coffee with Marilyn,” makes an agreeable “manic pixie dreamgirl with a side order of madness,” even if she’s a tad old for that label. Accorsi’s still too-obviously 14 years her senior, and Diego has so little charm peeking out from under his illness that we can’t figure out what she’d see in him.

“Marilyn’s Eyes” has a few ideas worth running with. But in an effort to not be “problematic,” to show these people’s problems as real enough to make them a danger to themselves or others, the filmmakers have created a mental health comedy that manages almost nothing that’s funny, and a dramedy nobody would believe, in or out of Italy.

Rating: TV-MA, violence, profanity

Cast: Miriam Leone, Stefano Accorsi, Thomas Trabacci

Credits: Directed by Simone Godano, scripted by Giulia Steigerwalt. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:54

Four and a half minutes into “Panama,” a spy games/Contra War thriller set just before the U.S. invasion of Noriegaland in 1989, I’m thinking “JAYZUS, that’s a lot of producer credits.”

It seems like a hundred (only 30something) of these folks, and not just the actors and their relatives, are packed into this drawn-out introduction. And then one remembers, “Ah, it’s a Mel Gibson movie.” He may not be “canceled,” but you’ve got to spread the risk around, I guess.

Because “Panama” is the worst of the B and C movies Gibson’s made during his years in the Anti Semite Wilderness. About the best thing you can say on the Oscar winner’s behalf is that he’s barely in it — an introductory scene or two, a couple of scenes at the end, and lots of grizzled tough-guy voice-over narration by Our Man Mel.

“Nothing’s more rock’n roll than takin’ out the bad guys for the ol” Red, White and Blue!”

Gibson’s a U.S. operative who lures grieving widower Becker (Cole Hauser) back to work with orders to go to Panama, interact with the assorted drug runners, arms dealers, Panamanian hustlers and suppliers for the Nicaraguan “Contra” revolutionaries in an effort to secure a Russian helicopter for…somebody.

“You need a purpose, I got one for you.”

“Mission creep” on this assignment involves hanging out with the high-placed, drug-snorting womanizing low-life (Mauricio Hénao) who has access to the chopper, and cocaine, a pal with a casino and scores of swimsuits models.

That one who looks like a former Miss Universe contestant? That’s Camila (Miss Universe Puerto Rico, Kiara Liz Ortega). “She’s dangerous.”

So is accompanying some commando commander named Steadman Fagoth Müller (Julio Ramos Velez) into the jungle, wiping out Sandanistas, “no prisoners” style.

“I thought you Americans hated Bolsheviks?”

But that chopper, to be swapped for a million dollar bag of cash, that has everybody Becker meets in between sex scenes with the former Miss Universe-Puerto Rico, shoot-out (not often) or chase scenes saying “later” or “mañana.”

Hauser, a handsome second lead for his entire career who has now found a home on TV’s “Yellowstone,” doesn’t give us much to hang onto here except a growing appreciation of his dye job.

Gibson shows up just to add a splash of color and swagger to what seems like an endless wait between action beats. A pointless dirt bike race through the muddy jungle impresses no one and barely advances the plot.

But director Mark Nevldine (“Crank” was his high water mark) stages a bracing foot chase through Puerto Rico’s imitation Panama City.

Aside from that? “Gibson’s worst movie” about covers it, until the next contender comes along.

Rating: R for violence, sexual content, nudity, drug use and language

Cast: Cole Hauser, Kiara Liz, Mauricio Hénao, Julio Ramos Velez Kate Katzman, Hank Weber and Mel Gibson

Credits: Directed by Mark Neveldine, scripted by Daniel Adams and William Barber. A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:35

“The Hater” is a light political satire struggling to escape from a somewhat cumbersome big screen comedy, a classic 85 minute movie not-quite-smothered inside a 108 minute one.

It has too many characters to do justice to, even at that length.

But get past a shrill and exhausting opening act overstuffed with manic patter from our idealist/environmentalist “yellow dog Democrat” speechwriter, played by Joey Ally, who wrote and directed this. Let this just-burned-a-flag-in-protest speech writer go “home” to Alabaster, Texas and move in with the guy she refuses to call “Grandpa.”

And darned if this wry, sideways look at “the way things are today” doesn’t find its heart and its spark. Grandpa is a Fox News-addicted old coot played by America’s Coot, Bruce Dern. These two aren’t going to see eye to eye about much. But they’re family. So, your move, old man.

“What else are you doin'” these days, he wants to know, “besides criticizing America?”

Dorothy has come home to a place she hated, a place where being the daughter of a beloved drama teacher didn’t spare her from bullying as we’ve seen in an opening scene set in her childhood. Her chief tormentor back then was rich boy-quarterback Brent Hart. Decades later, smug, handsome Brent (Ian Harding), the son of a state senator, is running for the legislature.

Dorothy, who breathlessly-arrived with a notion of “flipping Texas blue” has a new idea. She’ll run against this smirking Summer’s Eve in the primary, beat him for the first time in her life, and then drop out, guaranteeing the seat will flip to a Democrat in the general election.

She doesn’t know how to dress for the campaign trail, how to tone down her rhetoric, how to hide her ardent passion for environmental causes. She can only hope to not choke on her own bile when the Women’s Chamber of Commerce chair (Nora Dunn), a gun-shop owner, dismisses climate change with a “God’ll take care of that” and wishes, fervently, that people would “just support our president.”

Did I mention “The Hater” is set in 2020? No? Kind of an important thing to leave out.

Smiling, perky and popular ex-classmate Greta (Meredith Hagner) is here to introduce Dorothy to some folks, and then add “campaign manager” to her Army wife lifestyle. No, they don’t have a prayer in this race. But in the movies, fate intervenes the way Russians intervene in actual elections. Dorothy catches a break.

She accidentally disrupts a robbery in a convenience store. And by the time ditzy ex-classmate Vicki (Ali Larter) has blundered through a breathless “hero” story about this “attempt to burgle” (Armed robbery, honey.), Dorothy is a “gun hero,” celebrated all over town. If she can make a dent in the Jesus vote, corrupt Brent may be in trouble.

Ally, an actress turned first-time feature writer-director, straddles a lot of political fences, or tries to, in this role and with this film.

“Abortion” is a “third rail” in the red corners of Texas, unless somebody personalizes the decision and reminds Republicans of their anti-government “personal freedom/responsibilities” credo. Guns are as convenient a prop as cowboy boots (there’s a joke they missed), but a conservative mom with kids in school whispers her plea for “some sort of regulation” of AR-15 Nation after Ally speaks.

Ally’s Dorothy can’t avoid the right wing TV, right wing talk radio, conservative pulpit preaching, bumpers sticks and what not. But that doesn’t mean she won’t grit her teeth at Grandpa’s Tucker Carlson fixation. “How can you WATCH that racist gnome?”

The cleverest thing about “The Hater” is the way it upends expectations just enough to keep things interesting and make you wonder “How will Ally write her way out of this?” And then Ally manages just that.

Movies oversimplify politics, and the film’s message that you vote for people, not ideologies, seems dated and quaint in the bloc-vote Susan Collins/Joe Manchin/#MoscowMitch rubber stamp era.

But Ally’s still managed a movie that reminds us of when almost all of us listened to science, when “compassionate conservative” was a label worth selling and why idealists get into politics, to change something most of us want fixed, no matter what the NRA or Big Oil want.

Rating: unrated, some profanity, violence

Cast: Joey Ally, Meredith Hagner, Ian Harding, D’Angelo Lacy, Ali Larter, Bruce Dern and Nora Dunn

Credits: Scripted and directed by Joely Ally. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:48