Movie Nation

I crack up every time Antonio Banderas lays on the jamon-laced purr in this role. Great voice casting, hilarious movies.

“Puss in Boots: The Last Wish,” comes to a cinema near your Sept. 23.

His gestures are economical and spare. Oscar winner Mark Rylance has his own particular interpretation of “underplaying,” turning a role into a life being lived in the moment on the screen.

His melodious line readings, taking care with every syllable, underscoring the idea that he’s pulling the words out of the situation and real life experiences, build on the reality his posture and physical presence are creating.

In “The Outfit,” playing a tailor that dresses the Chicago mob, his internalized, buttoned-down approach has a fine showcase. He is modest, meek, even as he’s correcting any “made man” who refers to the profession of the guy they all call “English” as “tailor.”

“I’m a cutter,” he gently explains. He measures men, draws patterns on paper and cuts the “four different fabrics” that make up a man’s suit. “I used to cut on ‘The Row,'” as if the savvier gangsters haven’t figured out what we did in the first moments of his voice-over narration about his work. He got his start on London’s famed Saville Row.

The directing debut of “Imitation Game” screenwriter Graham Moore has its hero share a profession with “The Tailor of Panama.” And like that film’s star, Geoffrey Rush, Rylance’s attention to the littlest details and measured, considered way with every word summons up memories of the actor both of these Oscar winners pay tribute to with their most careful work.

Like Rush, Rylance is a new Alec Guinness, letting characters put their imprint on him rather than the other way around.

Moore’s film. which he co-wrote, parks our “cutter” in a single location — his Chicago shop — on a single night. It’s December, 1956. And those many visits by overdressed guys with bespoke jackets cut to help conceal the shoulder holster they wear underneath, backroom “drops” left in a deposit slot, have been noticed by English’s young clerk, Mabel (Zoey Deutch).

In turn, Richie (Dylan O’Brien), the young heir to an established gang, has noticed Mabel. English takes the time to pass on an oblique warning — “These men may be customers, but they’re not gentlemen.” Is she hearing it?

Because this snowy night, Richie and his lieutenant, Francis (Johnny Flynn) visit twice. The second time, “the kid” has been shot, with “a marble” in his stomach, Francis says. And their laying low in this unassuming, dignified business presents the English cutter with a multi-layered dilemma.

There’s the matter of the man bleeding out in his shop. The gangsters hold one of the first audio cassettes ever manufactured, taped vidence of a “rat” in the ranks of their mob. The wounded man doesn’t trust his “trusted lieutenant,” and maybe Francis resents “the kid,” just a little.

Events conspire to murderously implicate and entrap our patient, mild-mannered “cutter” with the gang that’s been using his shop as a drop, forcing him to reason with, trick and manipulate his way out of a fix — at gunpoint.

The pun of the film’s isn’t the only “cute” touch in this screenplay, co-written by actor-turned-screenwriter Johnathan McLain. The mob threats have a “Guys and Dolls” gangland quality.

“Back up, English. This ain’t your purview.“

The dimly-lit shop closes in around characters as twists are introduced, nerve-wracking confrontations ensue and our tailor/cutter tries out approaches to wriggle out of this even as he’s forced to “sew” the injured man’s wounds.

But the third act’s over-the-top turns somewhat undercut the spell Rylance and this myopic, not-quite-paranoid story cast. We learn too much about English, when merely implying the pieces of his mysterious past would have been more effective.

English’s narration, the way he “measures” his customers, should be the filmmakers’ guiding ethos.

“Who is he underneath? Does he pine for grander things? You cannot make something good until you understand who you’re making it for.”

Rather than letting Rylance let us “see” how he sees these men, the script opts to overexplain and spoon-feed us logical “reasons” for this or that.

We notice things, like if Richie’s got “a marble” in him, why is the tailor sewing up an entry and an exit wound? Why is Richie able to get on his feet right after the last stitch is tied off?

And didn’t RCA introduce that original oversized-version of the cassette in 1958?

The former child-star Deutch holds her own with Rylance, no mean feat. And there’s solid if not crackling, stand-out work from the generally less-known supporting players.

But it’s the mesmerizing Rylance and the film’s theatrical single-set stage “mystery” that sell “The Outfit,” a “cutter” in his element, showing not just what he makes, but what he’s made of in this minimalist mob tale built around a mild-mannered man who takes the measure of everyone he meets.

Rating: R for some bloody violence, and language throughout

Cast: Mark Rylance, Zoey Deutch, Dylan O’Brien, Johnny Flynn, Niki Amuka-Byrd and Simon Russell Beale.

Credits: Directed by Graham Moore, scripted by Johnathan McClain and Graham Moore A Focus Features release.

Running time: 1:45

What a tepid treatment of an intriguing piece of murderous plotting “Measure of Revenge” turns out to be.

It’s a star vehicle for Oscar winner Melissa Leo in which she plays a grande dame of the theater, a woman famous for witches and murderesses and divas, whose past roles come to advise her on how to avenge the death of her musician son. The twist, once “legendary” Lillian figures out who caused her lad’s death, she uses her nightly “on the stage” alibi as a way of covering up the killings.

One by one, down they go, with our heroine stop-watching herself between her character’s appearances in a show of her own devising.

Yes, it’s plotted like a “Columbo” episode, or two or three. In this case, it’s a clever idea utterly botched in the production.

Lillian has just gotten her star singer-son Curtis (Jake Weary) out of rehab, he’s just shown her the ring he plans to give his pregnant girlfriend (Jasmine Carmichael) when he turns up dead on a night Lillian wasn’t following orders to “never let him out of your sight” from the rehab team.

Both her son and his fiance-to-be overdose, “accidentally” the detective (Michael Potts) on the case declares. But he’s a theater fan who hears the stage legend out when she claims her kid was clean, that no way would he and his pregnant wife-to-be have been using some dangerous new drug flooding the city. And he’s also understanding, paying a courtesy “warning” call when she starts sniffing around, finds out who used to be her boy’s dealer and confronts Taz (Bella Thorne) in her car.

Lillian has met her son’s oily record producer (Kevin Corrigan, on-the-nose casting), who’s tactlessly said “You know Curtis is gonna be a bigger star than ever before,” now that he’s OD’d.

She’s used Taz — a photographer who moonlights as a drug dealer, or vice versa — to ID other people in her son’s orbit who might have caused him harm, accidentally or on purpose. She’s staked out those folks, found ways to size them up.

And she’s seeing all the murderous figures from her theatrical past, hearing voices of Shakespearean characters and Poe killers. They’re egging her on, and once they’ve got her convinced, there’s no turning back.

The sound design in the film tries to simulate Lillian’s frazzled state of mind with an aural blur of mostly-unidentified characters badgering her, giving her advice with lines from plays or short stories. Visually, she sees badly-rendered “ghosts” of characters past (Leo in different costumes) in bathroom or dressing room mirrors, even physically in the room with her.

Leo does her best, but the film has little pace and the production seems malnourished in ways that call attention to why this or that big murder moment lands flatly. The camera isn’t in a position for maximum dramatic impact, the music is off and the editing so static as to render even the murderess’s performance flat.

There’s no suspense to the cop’s curiosity about these “connected” murders.

The directing credit here goes to someone named “Peyra,” apparently the “directing” name of producer Peter Wong. “Alan Smithee” is a little too white bread for him, I guess. And there is no writing credit. If you see “Measure of Revenge,” you’ll understand why one wanted to use an assumed name and the other wasn’t clever enough to come up with one.

Rating: unrated, violence, drug content

Cast: Melissa Leo, Bella Thorne, Jake Weary, Michael Potts, Adrian Martinez, Jasmine Carmichael and Kevin Corrigan.

Credits: Directed by Peyfa, scripted by ? A Vertical release.

Running time:

Writer-director Pushpendra Singh’s “The Shepherdess and the Seven Songs” has a lyrical, folk parable simplicity that instantly summons up memories of India’s greatest filmmaker, Satyajit Ray.

Singh’s poetic film tells us the story of a Kashmiri woman’s marriage into “another camp,” and the tests she faces as she and others sing us through the “seven songs” of her early married life.

We meet Laila (Navjot Randhawa) as she’s about to be “abducted” by a suitor, an ancient tradition among her nomadic sheep, buffalo and goat-herding people. A “lift this rock, win my daughter” contest has proven Tanvir’s (Sadakkit Bijran) worthiness, at least to the old men who make these decisions in such tribes. But Laila is a great beauty and we sense she’s not too keen on these naive shepherd’s interest.

Still, “fulfilling our custom” is paramount, and we hear the women sing the “Song of Marriage” as they braid Laila’s hair and dress her for the ceremony. This is in the summer pastures where Tanvir’s camp/family grazes, on a high Kashmiri plateau. “Song of Migration” is what Laila and we hear as they all, newlyweds included, lead their herds down from the mountains and into the valley below.

It’s not until this moment, some minutes into the film, that we see road signs as they cross a highway, hear radio reports of changes in rules and regulations and protests in this disputed corner of the Subcontinent and figure out that this seemingly-timeless life and tale is set in the present day.

If Tanvir and the others want to finish their animal drive, they need permits. They earn a pass from the guard they encounter. But we notice that he (Shahnawaz Bhat) has noticed Laila. If we don’t sense trouble, she soon does. And as Mushtaq takes an interest in her, stalks her and talks her up to his boss (Ranjit Khajuria) one can’t help but wonder if the feigned “abduction” earlier, quaint as it seems, hints that something more sinister, perhaps related to “rape culture,” is on the horizon.

Singh, an actor turned director, quickly shows us that Laila’s somewhat submissive acceptance of her fate when it came to marriage is nothing like the more defiant Muslim woman she is after the move. When her two harassers have the effrontery to show up as she’s trying to get her cows to mate, cracking wise with livestock inuendo, she gives them the slaps and kicks they so richly deserve.

Mushtaq proceeds to try and woo her, allegedly on his boss’s behalf. But Laila takes up the “Song of Playfulness” as she hears out his “I want you to roam like a tigress, absolutely free” proposal. As we say in the West, it’s “game on” — with Mushtaq popping by all the time and her coy replies suggesting either her reciprocated interest or some eagerness to trick him and perhaps punish him.

Each night’s “come to the banana field,” “the old mill” or “the sheep enclosure” has the whiff of a trap about it. What’s she up to?

Singh lets us see officialdom’s view of these Gujjar Bakawals people, with uniformed men debating how much trouble they’ll take from the folks so slow to accept “new ways” of doing things. Mushtaq speaks with disdain of the “cow protectors” (Indian Hindus) that these Muslim migrants must pass through.

The writer-director shows us Laila’s life — chores, livestock management, sex — as well as the interior life of a woman trapped in a patriarchy and either bored enough to tease the guard, or furious enough to want him harmed.

“Why am I playing this dangerous game?” she muses, as songs and seasons pass and the stakes seem to rise.

Singh relies on metaphors — a burning tree, the goat Laila sees in Tanvir’s place when she’s considering his offer of marriage — the details of everyday life, and the striking scenery of what is widely regarded as one of the most beautiful places on Earth to lift Laila’s story from melodramatic parable into something of higher ambition.

And for the most part, he succeeds. “The Shepherdess and the Seven Songs” becomes a rare look into lives we never see on film and their struggles in a place we never see on film — sunny, scenic and hotly contested Kashmir.

Rating: Unrated, with sexual situations, nudity

Cast: Navjot Randhawa, Sadakkit Bijran, Shahnawaz Bhat and Ranjit Khajuria.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Pushpendra Singh. A Deaf Crocodile release.

Running time: 1:36

April 8, it’s Sonic the Hedgehog vs. Knuckles the Hedgehog, and Jim Carrey vs. a very big mustache.

“Squared Love” is a vapid little “Around the World with Netflix” bauble from Poland, a romance about a teacher whose side hustle is modeling.

By day, Monika is a doting Polish elementary school teacher, an innovator beloved by her kids and envied by her colleagues. But early every morning, Miss Monika (Adrianna Chlebicka) becomes curled, blue contact-lensed Klaudia, a mysterious model who can only work before 9. She’s gorgeous enough that her manager and client put up with her peculiar work demands.

The reason for the secret is that no school would tolerate a teacher “showing my ass” on billboards and magazine ads, according to the movie, anyway. And Monika’s got an even bigger secret. Her recently-widowed mechanic dad (Miroslaw Baka) is in hock to loan sharks. She needs this side hustle to save him, and he has no idea. He just laments the fact that she isn’t married, in love or even dating.

“Real love is always squared,” he tells her, as if she has any time for that.

Enter Enzo (Mateusz Banasiuk), a handsome, extremely shallow engineer whose real name is Stefan, who started modeling because he’s so pretty and he adores the client cars (Audis, Porsches, Camaros) he gets to borrow to pick up chicks.

Not that his boss/live-in lover (Agnieszka Zulewska) approves.

His “Being a heartbreaker isn’t a full time job for me,” (in Polish with subtitles, or dubbed into into English) doesn’t let him off the hook.

One day Enzo picks up Monika dolled up for a shoot, mistaking her for a streetwalker. She mistakes him for a “whoremonger.” Once they get past that misunderstanding, can “Squared Love” be far behind?

This Polish comedy piles up seriously weird complications as obstacles to true love, starting with the whole loan shark business, edging into a teacher afraid of losing her much more lucrative gig as a model if anybody finds out, topped by the way the “childish” engineer/womanizer/model is taught to grow up.

The moment his jealous girlfriend/meal-ticket kicks him out, Enzo’s brother’s wife flees her family, for no reason the movie can actually explain. Enzo finds himself moving in with that brother and forced to be a nanny to young Ania (Helena Mazur), who — you guessed it — is Miss Monika’s star pupil.

As illogical as these many complications are, in the film — tilted “Milosc do kwadratu” in Polish — none of them are cute or remotely amusing either.

Yes, models are largely creations of the right clothes, hair, nails, eyelashes and makeup. But come on. Putting on glasses and pulling one’s hair into a ponytail, even the schoolroom shift in setting, should fool no one who meets both Monika and the bombshell Klaudia.

Chlebicka and Banasiuk generate barely enough chemistry to make the whole journey from loathing to love believable. And a moment of “cute,” here and there, is all any of the actors can wring out of this insipid script.

The most interesting element to the film is the offbeat (mostly) American pop song soundtrack — Leah Nobel, The Majority Stays, Duncan Townsend, etc.

Rating: TV-14

Cast: Adrianna Chlebicka, Mateusz Banasiuk, Helena Mazur and Agnieszka Zulewska

Credits: Directed by Filip Zylber, scripted by Wiktor Piatkowski and Marzanna Polit. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:42

Oscar winner William Hurt has died, four years after letting us know that he’d been diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer. He was 71.

His stand-out performances were legion — “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” “Broadcast News,” “A History of Violence,” lots of quality TV, Marvel movies and indies, a real “actor’s actor.” The last thing I saw him in was “The King’s Daughter,” but when I heard the news of his passing, I thought of “Altered States” and “Jane Eyre,” the warm and wonderful “Accidental Tourist,” indie films like “The Yellow Handkerchief” and the way he seemed out of place in those Marvel movie authority figure/villain turns.

A sex symbol during his “Body Heat,” “Big Chill,” “Eyewitness” and “Children of a Lesser God” years, he evolved into a great character actor, seething menace in “A History of Violence,” inscrutable in “The Good Shepherd,” earthy and empathetic in “Into the Wild.”

I interviewed him a few times over the years — for “Michael,” “A History of Violence,” an indie film here and there. Studio publicists would pitch him, I’d remember how much like his “Broadcast News” and “Michael” characters he always came off in person, and start to beg off Then I’d say “Oh hell, it’s William Hurt — sure.”

Talking to him was a bit like chatting up the more charming and amusing but just as chaotic and verbally-disorganized Jeff Goldblum. Endless Henry James-length parenthetical digressions, a real stream of consciousness conversationalist, which can be maddening if you’re looking for pithy quotes for a newspaper profile or — you know — a straight answer.

When he found himself in a palimony suit some years back, TV viewers of the trial got a lot of that rambling, disconnected way of thinking and talking in live coverage. But his line readings on screen were just the opposite — considered, soulful, intense and every bit as distinct as Goldblum or even Christopher Walken.

His ability to touch the viewer in profound ways in films such as “Children of a Lesser God” and “Accidental Tourist” wasn’t just a product of his quirky, heartfelt and off-tempo way of delivering a line. Check out this finale, for instance, an “accidental” tourist travel-writer admits the time for mourning a lost child and the marriage it broke is over. And he does it with a gesture, and a look.

 Hearing from old friends how much his work spoke to them is his best eulogy. A quintessentially soulful actor, even if as his character in “Broadcast News” suggested, it was all just the tricks of the trade.

Fascinating guy, big “process” actor and one of the greats of his generation. Rest in peace.

Ana De Armas is the bad girl/cheating wife/maybe femme fatale/might-be-victim in this thriller, with Ben Affleck carrying the cuckold duties.

There’s an embargo on reviews, but let’s dive in today, because well…it’s Ana De Armas.

“Win a Trip to Browntown!” is a “family” comedy about anal sex, an almost-laugh-free lurch along the not-so-fine-line between “insipid” and “insufferable.”

Broadly, dully acted, with a script that sounds like a beer-soaked brainstorming session from your 25th college reunion — “Let’s see how many euphemisms we can come up with!” — “non-starter” might be the nicest way to describe writer-director-producer-star George A. Tramountanas‘ sophomore screen effort.

His debut feature was “Screwed: A Hollywood Bedtime Story,” which nobody saw in 1998. Over twenty years later he brings us this, which shows how some never outgrow tone-deafness and how short the memory is when the universe has already tried to tell you something.

He stars as Frank, a cubicle drone at a Seattle college struggling to get published as a writer. There’s this big annual “impress publishers, get published” contest called “Pitchfest.” Maybe this year he can come up with a story somebody sees a way to make money from and will put in print.

Frank is a doughy 40something, with an almost-overwhelmed wife (Kendra McDermott), a youngest son still wetting the bed, a young teen daughter struggling with weight and body issues and an oldest son stressing over the academic perfection it’ll take to get into MIT.

Not a bad life, he narrates as the family celebrates Mom and Dad’s 21st anniversary, “to 20 wonderful years…Every couple has a bad year.”

But what matters most to Frank is getting published. It’s what he obsesses about on his “anonymous” blog, a place where he shares his ambitions, dreams, plans and occasionally over-shares about his family. He saves his rejection letters, notes how all of them point to bland characters and a tendency towards “nice” when conflict is the lifeblood of fiction — drama, tragedy or comedy, on the page or on the screen.

Yes, the line between the writer-director-star and his hero blurs as neither seems to ever get a handle on this basic concept.

The “conflict” at the center of “Win a Trip” hangs on is Frank’s self-centered focus on this goal, those neglected because of it and the idea he and Laura cook up to give him the incentive to look his best at Pitchfest.

If he can lose 50 pounds before the event, he’ll “Win a Trip” to you-know-where with her.

There are cutesy scenes of Laura and her sisters (Heather Reynosa and Amelia Samson) talking their “timid titmouse” sibling into “training” for this new sexual experience, with a shockingly humorless trip to the sex-toy shop as part of that process.

We see and hear Frank’s confiding in his boorish, younger supervisor (Phillip Dean Silva), something we just know will blow up on him.

We get glimpses of what all this self-attention-not-kids-attention is doing to their children.

And we hear every PG-13 rated euphemism for masturbation (“fist kebobs”) and anal sex known to middle-aged man, virtually none of which are as amusing as the ones listed on this site.

Just getting a movie made, talking people into financing it and convincing a distributor to put it out is a Herculean task, and there’s no denying that in itself is an accomplishment.

But if this is the best you have to offer, a comedy as edgy as a “naughty but nice” T-shirt that wouldn’t raise an eyebrow at a church bake sale and as funny as a stand-up comic who works funerals, maybe this time when the universe tries to tell you something, you should listen.

Rating: unrated, endless innuendo about innuendo

Cast: George A. Tramountanas, Kendra McDermott, Phillip Dean Silva and Heather Reynosa

Credits: Scripted and directed by George A. Tramountanas. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:34

We shall see what we see. This opens in April, but when you can’t wait and you don’t have to…