Pedro Pascal plays the rich dude who hires Nicolas Cage to come hang, Tiffany Haddish and her bud Ike Barinholtz are CIA agents who need Nic Cage’s help, and Neil Patrick Harris is his agent in this potentially hilarious self own/spoof.
As he has proven, time and again over his checkered career, that Nic Cage is down for ANYthing.
April 22.
Somewhere on the dystopian Road to Nowhere — Destination Thunderdome –a drifter stumbles across a giant nugget and must battle the desert, snakes, scorpions and wild dogs, interlopers and his sketchy partner to hang onto his hunk of “Gold.”
That’s the premise of this “Treasure of the Terra Australis,” a down and dirty and entirely-too-minimalist sci-fi spin on what greed does to a man. So little happens that this might have passed unnoticed had Zac Efron not signed on to star and take a suffer-for-your-art paid vacation in the Outback.
Anthony Hayes‘ film’s stark, arid beauty reminds us of why so many primal tales — apocalyptic to horror to “Priscilla, Queen of the Desert” — have been set there. There are no distractions and survival is visually reduced to its most elemental — water, shelter from the heat, and transportation to get the hell out of there.
As Efron’s loner notes to the roughneck (director and co-writer Hayes) he hires to drive him across it, “It is what it is.”
That goes for the nugget, which is too huge to move without help, and the movie itself. As the driver must go off to obtain the gear to extract it, Efron’s limping, scarred survivor of whatever reduced civilization to this, must stay alive, protect their “claim” and keep his wits in the baking heat and other tests this too-simple thriller throws at him.
Susie Porter plays an Irish-accented trekker curious about what the Man with No Name is doing here, scavenging a crashed airplane for shelter, lighting fires at night to keep away the “dogs” nobody dares call “dingoes.”
I like the look and minimalism in play here. But at some point, something needs to happen — something more, anyway.
Hayes blows the “discovery” moment and gives his own character lines that hint at a gentility his brute of a driver-bloke might have once had — “I don’t mean to condescend to you or nothing,” but this desert can leave a lad in a very bad spot “indeed.”
Efron, covered in stubble, scars, grime and flies, doesn’t do enough to animate the character, give away his past or consider his interior life. He’s just there, exerting himself despite having little water, and we assume going a tad mad over the few days that are the film’s timeframe.
“Gold” isn’t really bad. It’s just not enough to amount to anything, or anything much.
Rating: R for language and some violent content
Cast: Zac Efron, Anthony Hayes, Susie Porter
Credits: Directed by Anthony Hayes, scripted by Anthony Hayes and Polly Smyth. A Screen Media release.
Running time: 1:37
A “different” sort of marriage, with rampant cheating and murder.
Lil Rel Howery and Tracy Letts also star in this Mar. 18 Prime Video release.
Encounters with real-life survivors of the Holocaust can be wrenchingly emotional. The stories of suffering and travail, the grim resignation of starvation and sudden, brutal death all around you, the soul-searing realization of the inhumanity of humanity can turn even a stony heart into a puddle of tears.
The first survivor I ever interviewed was in Charlotte, N.C., when I worked for a public radio station there. I’ve been grateful that every such interview I’ve done since was for newspapers, because keeping one’s composure can be a real struggle when listening to such narratives, doubly so when you’re in front of a live mike.
“I Am Here” tells the remarkable story of Ella Blumenthal, a survivor who came to the filmmaker’s attention for writing a compassionate “loving” open letter to a Holocaust denier, insisting there was more “that unites us than divides us.”
Born in Warsaw in 1921, Ella was the youngest in her family and one of only three extended family members to survive the mass deportation, enslavement and murder of Jews by Nazi Germany. She witnessed the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, hid out in a walled-in basement with her father and niece, and survived not one but three Nazi concentration camps — Majdanek, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.
Framing the film with Ella’s 98th birthday party, with family gathered around her, South African documentarian Jordy Sank captures a woman of wit, warmth and pathos as she interacts with her family. She shows old photographs and embraces great grandchildren, grandchildren and her children, who remember hearing her night terrors growing up and the “story” she told them about the car accident she used to explain the scar on her arm, the one where the tattoo with “48632” and a triangle, “for Jews,” used to be.
Sank uses newsreel footage and animated recreations of Ella’s experiences as she narrates her story. We see and hear of the idyllic childhood interrupted by invasion, the terrifying upheaval that entered her life, her fleeing, hiding out and her eventual capture and deportation.
With executions and people starving to death all around her, one cannot help but be moved by the many awful tests of Blumenthal’s touching story of endurance. She even chillingly recalls being stripped and “pushed into a gas chamber” with her niece Roma, comforting the child with “We’ll see our loved ones soon,” only to have the officious Germans open the door with a gruff announcement that they’d met their “quota” for the day.
Through it all, “I never lost hope.” To her offspring, she lectures “Who left this biscuit?” Wasting food remained a cardinal sin for someone who nearly starved many times over five hellish years.
And to the great grandkids who might doubt her, “It’s not a STORY. This really happened!”
But this film’s sentimental depiction of Ella Blumenthal’s later years, thriving and raising a family, gives it a problematic, unspoken subtext. There’s a South African elephant in the room that the South African filmmaker didn’t notice. As we see images from Ella and her husband’s thriving Johannesburg retail clothing establishment in the 1960s, of course we don’t see a single Black face among the staff or the customers.
The Blumenthals lived their entire married lives, with Ella surviving her husband, in the most racist country on Earth. Are we to believe this woman who went through so much in her teens and 20s didn’t have reactions, even flashbacks, seeing the violent removal and relocations of millions of Black South Africans in the 1960s, ’70s and 80s, the “separation” and brutally violent repression of the nation’s majority native-born population?
She didn’t have opinions? Even if she didn’t speak out due to past trauma or fear, surely she had something to say about that. Why not ask? And since you the filmmaker didn’t ask, we left wondering what we don’t know.
Not even touching on this in the most basic documentarian’s CYA way makes this film problematic in the least, damning if there are stories of exploitation and racism woven into what has to be a more complicated family history than Sank presents here.
I dare say only a South African filmmaker would have so conspicuously avoided that, but only if he was planning on showing it mostly abroad. Hearing Blumenthal’s adult children talk to her and about her in their Afrikaans accents just underscores it.
There’s an urgency to every film capturing the stories of the last of the survivors. There are scores of these documentaries, and every survivor telling her or his story is varying degrees of gripping, moving and “life affirming” in that “we must go on” way. Blumenthal’s stirring story would be an invaluable addition to any anthology of various survivors’ experiences.
But when the ethos of keeping these stories alive is “Never Again,” and “Never again” was happening again right in front of Ella Blumenthal and her entire family for decades upon decades, it isn’t “off message” for your movie to make some effort to address it.
Ignoring that is disingenuous at best, and tone deaf at the very least.
Rating: unrated, discussions of genocidal violence
Cast: Ella Blumenthal, her children and grandchildren
Credits: Directed by Jordy Sank. A Blue Fox release.
Running time: 1:12
There’s no horror movie that’s ever been made that wouldn’t benefit from a proper blood-curdling scream, delivered at the right moment by a character under life-threatening distress.
Screen veteran Melora Walters of “Dead Poet’s Society,” “Beneath the Leaves,” “Big Love” and scores of other credits, delivers a doozie of a shriek to open “Offseason.” Playing a vampy actress-mother, she tells her story to the camera, and perhaps her daughter, of running, of “never going back.”
But “Wherever I went,” she laments, “there they were!”
“Offseason” is about that daughter (Jocelin Donahue) being summoned back to the island where her mother is buried. Her tombstone’s “been vandalized.” A storm is ‘a’coming.” So she’d best make it to this remote, palm and palmetto-covered section of the southern coast, where the drawls are thick and the mystery thicker.
Boyfriend George (“Mumblecore” mainstay Joe Swanberg of “Drinking Buddies”) is her hapless, somewhat put-out driver for this emergency trip. He’s the one ready to turn back the moment they reach the drawbridge where the tender (Richard Brake) warns them it’ll be locked up — for the storm, and for the season — if they don’t hurry.
George, of course, is right. Anybody living along the southern coast knows drawbridges are locked “down” not up in storms. There’s something fishy about an island hellbent on being isolated during “off season.”
What ensues is a “Twilight Zone” waking nightmare, with apparitions in the saw palmetto forest and creepers all gathered at the Sand Trap, the local bar where we see just how “off” the inhabitants all seem and how unfriendly they most certainly are.
Daughter Marie finds herself on a lonely quest through the vacant village, along the spooky beach (the “storm” is an indifferent presence, mostly-forgotten), remembering her talks with her mother, scaring George to death with an account she never told him that her mother passed on to her. Mom “didn’t want to be buried here,” no how, no way.
George is, like the viewer, thrilled with this revelation and that it came too late to get them off the island, or keep him from agreeing to risk his neck and his late model Mercedes on whatever the hell Marie’s family’s mixed up in.
Writer-director Mickey Keating, while taking a step up from “Darling” and “Psychopaths,” can’t help but lean on pointless crutches like “chapter” headings for an 83 minute movie. We don’t need to be told a sequence is set in “Lone Palm” cemetery or “The Sand Trap,” or that a character’s about to meet “The Damned.”
And golly, there’s that “locked-up” bridge thing, no necessary to the plot but illogical on every level. Again, the storm bearing down on them is dispensed with. For that matter, who in the name of Jamie Lee Curtis would risk life, limb, boyfriend and Mercedes over a vandalized tombstone?
But Donahue (“Doctor Sleep”) makes a properly spooked heroine, antsy as she pokes around an empty village, puzzling out an answer to this mystery which early on she hints has to do with her fate.
Swanberg? He does “irked” and “ill-used” well. And the locals, including Jeremy Gardner as “The Fisherman,” may be horror tropes, but they’re interesting variations on a theme.
The occasional blood-curdling scream notwithstanding, “Offseason” is more chilling and gloomy than frightening. But the fog, the creepy old coots, the formidable drawbridge as an obstacle and Mama’s cryptic warnings and horror diva shrieks tip the scales. There’s a reason the locals call it “off season,” after all. “Stay away” sounds too hostile.
Rating: unrated, violence, profanity
Cast: Jocelin Donahue, Joe Swanberg, Richard Brake, Jeremy Gardner and Melora Walters
Credits: Scripted and directed by Mickey Keating. A Shudder/RLJE release.
Running time: 1:23
There are more than a few laughs in the coming-of-age dramedy “The Invisible Thread,” about a teen coming to terms with himself and his life with “my two dads.” This Italian “Around the World with Netflix” outing (in Italian, or dubbed into British English) has lovely messaging about parenthood, first love, infidelity, drugs…oh, and Italy’s laughably slow march to legal and social acceptance of gay rights.
And even if “Il filo invisbile” as they call it in Rome stumbles a lot, lapses into melodrama and really doesn’t know when to get off stage, it finishes with a simple “family” image so warm it could move you to tears.
So, a mixed bag? Very much so. But it’s one of the most interesting Italian offerings Netflix has financed, a comedy of misunderstandings and gender expectations, “traditional” vs “unconventional” family clashes and that “edge” that even teen-oriented tales from Italy always deliver.
Leone (Francesco Gheghi) is 15 and together with his best-mate Jacopo (Emanuele Maria Di Stefano) is putting the finishing touches on their class video project, “My Colorful Family.” He’s narrated the broad strokes of all his two dads (Francesco Scianna, Filippo Timi) went through and gave up to have him, from California college pal surrogate (Jodhi May) to legal battles in Italy over everything from his parents’ right to marry to whose names would be on the kid’s birth certificate.
One dad is an anthropologist who ended up running a restaurant, the other a trained architect who settled for owning a kitchen-renovation design business. But they’ve raised a kid in comfort and love, which is all anybody could ask for.
They’ve never taken DNA tests to see who exactly “fathered” the lad. There was never any need, even though “knowing” that would make their documentary more exciting, Jacopo argues.
The parents are uneasy about this project as it is, with restaurateur Simone (Timi) feigning annoyance but architect Paolo (Scianna) fretting that they’ve “raised an opportunist,” willing to “exploit” their unusual private lives for personal gain.
Naturally, events conspire to make that test a necessity. What’s impressive here is the amount of clutter director Marco Simon Puccioni and his co-writers conjure up to point us to that foreshadowed climax.
Leone has to fall in love with the new French girl Anna (Guilia Maenza). Her family has to get all confused over Leone’s parentage, with her brawling bully of a brother Dario (Matteo Oscar Giuggioli) leaping to the his own conclusions.
Jacopo’s science experiments with drugs could interfere — the subtitling/dubbing tries to scrub “cocaine” and ecstasy down to “weed” in a couple of instances. And the school’s obsession with rock-climbing as a sport sets us up for tests beyond the emotional ones that Leone is overwhelmed with.
Puccioni (“Shelter Me”) serves up a few almost-madcap fights and ever-so-Italian shouting matches about sex, sexuality, parentage and cheating and makes a few jokes at California’s expense, a whole lot more at Italy’s expense, with various characters stirring the pot and creating the misunderstandings.
Gheghi is something of a blank slate as our lead, but Maenza picks up the slack as a classic “I’m pretty so I get away with being rude, creating conflict and what have you.” Di Stefano and Giugglioli make sharp impressions in roles that border on being simple “types.”
The two dads are best showcased in shouting matches that point towards a breakup, which plays out as alternately sad and amusing.
And always in the background are those not-quite-getting-it Italians — Anna and Dario, their mom, lawyers, “the system,” hospital doctors and admissions clerks. Perhaps that “culture changing/culture clash” stuff plays funnier in Italy. Let’s hope so.
“The Invisible Thread” could do with a little streamlining, although some of the complications produce daft moments and exasperated laughs.
Clutter aside, it’s a likeable, well-intentioned mess of a comedy, one that’ll leave you with the warm fuzzies even if it loses the “thread” once, twice or thrice along the way.
Rating: TV-MA, drug abuse, sexual situations, profanity
Cast: Francesco Gheghi, Francesco Scianna, Filippo Timi, Giulia Maenza, Emanuele Maria Di Stefano, Matteo Oscar Giuggioli and Jodhi May.
Credits: Directed by Marco Simon Puccioni, scripted by Luca De Bei, Gianluca Bernardini and Marco Simon Puccioni. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:49
This minimalist, mostly wordless depiction of a milk cow’s life, with human analogies as we see the world from two females’ point of view, has endless buzz, an April 8 release date and almost no awards season attention.
“Cow” is from the director of “American Honey.”
The old Nirvana song and even older joke “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re NOT out to get you” comes to life in “All My Friends Hate Me,” a dark cringe of a comedy direct from the UK.
College friends gather for a friend’s birthday, and the birthday boy Pete starts to get the feeling that A) they’ve never grown up, B) they’ve all turned against him and C) some “stranger” they’ve added to their ranks, a bloke they met “down’tha’pub,” is behind it.
They’re a posh crowd, but Pete (Tom Stourton, who co-wrote this) has moved on to a life of working with refugees for a non-profit, traveling the world doing good. He lets that fact drop a tad too often as his friends gather at the family estate of George (Joshua McGuire), with George’s girlfriend-since-college Fig (Georgina Campbell), the snooty, snorting snob Archie (Graham Dickson), and Pete’s fragile one-time artist girlfriend Claire (Antonia Clarke).
Pete is nervous about them meeting Sofia (Charly Clive), whom he lets slip he’s going to propose to. He’s been rattled by the drive up to Cleve Manor thanks to a random run-in with a homeless man, the man’s whimpering dog, and a “colorful” old local who gets cute and cagey about giving directions. Arriving alone — Sofia is coming later — with no sign of the others, for hours, also throws him off.
And he is really put-out about this tipsy, tactless lout Harry (Dustin Demri-Burns), who stumbles back with the others, who’ve been pubbing, who is anxious to meet the guy the others described as “apparently one of the funniest guys on the planet,” and who proceeds to test, tease, and provoke Pete at every turn.
Harry’s needling seems to encourage the others, one by one, to up the ante in their own poking and joking with Pete abouthis righteous job, which “makes up for past crimes,” about him not actually being “invited” to his own birthday party, his rising paranoia (pranks with weapons) and his reluctance to play along with every fresh insult, afront and pointed jab.
Has Harry got into his head, or into the head of the others? Is this some serious mass gaslighting, or is Pete off his meds? Which he is sure Harry has stolen from him?
Stourton (“The Spy Who Dumped Me”) makes a depressingly relatable Mr. Put-Upon, with a hapless humorlessness that makes that “one of the funniest guys on the planet” the biggest insult of all.
Tricks of memory, petty put-downs and accusations pile up on this out-of-place guest-of-honor, and Stourton’s Pete wears them like sackcloth and ashes.
Demri-Burns, also in “The Spy Who Dumped Me,” and “Alan Partridge,” utterly inhabits that “fun drunk” who can hold his liquor and never lets it get in the way of his bullying. He smirks, winks, undercuts and suggests a guy everybody underestimates and no one should.
Dickson makes his mark as the indulged, privileged poshest of the posh, “dressing for dinner” and mocking the idea of some “random pez (peasant)” interfering with a good time.
And Campbell is the embodiment of the great beauty who paired up with a richest lad, doubly-entitling her to be Pete’s judge.
“Just so you know, you’re not doing well.”
“The Office” was where “cringeworthy comedy” had its finest hour, and “All My Friends Hate Me” reminds us that show was a Ricky Gervais/Stephen Merchant oh-so-British invention. The fear of public humiliation, of not fitting in, the constant apologizing, the aggrieved victimhood aren’t just national punchlines, they’re badges of “Keep calm and carry on” stoicism.
Which of course makes all of Pete’s slights, real and perceived, more wincingly painful, if not always painfully funny.
Rating: R for language throughout, drug use and brief graphic nudity.
Cast: Tom Stourton, Georgina Campbell, Antonia Clarke, Graham Dickson, Joshua McGuire, Dustin Demri-Burns, Charly Clive and Christopher Fairbank.
Credits: Directed by Andrew Gaynord, scripted by Tom Palmer and Tom Stourton. A Neon release.
Running time: 1:35
There’s a “China Syndrome” coincidence greeting the arrival of “Fear” in North American cinemas this weekend.
All those news reports about an outpouring of support for refugees fleeing Ukraine for points West have come with one seriously ugly sidebar. African students attending college in Ukraine have been badly misused and abused at the border.
“Fear” isn’t about that Russian invasion or about Ukraine. But this biting parable about an African fleeing violence in Mali, trapped in a Bulgarian town near the Turkish border, still resonates. The part of the world that perfected anti-Semitism and hardwired hatred of Gypsies into its various cultures isn’t exactly famous for its liberality and tolerance when it comes to people with darker skin, as “Fear” reminds us.
Svetla, played by the Bulgarian Frances McDormand, Svetlana Yancheva, has just lost her job at a school that closed. The village where she lives isn’t dying. It’s all but dead. A half-finished Iron Curtain era resort stands stark guard over this section of the coast. And even the winter-stripped trees, shorn and so ashen as to make one question if life will ever return there, underscore the death and emptiness there.
Svetla will stay on, job or no job, to tend to her husband’s grave and carry on one-sided conversations with him. Luckily, she’s handy with a shotgun and there are hares to be had. So at least she won’t starve.
The local border guard garrison, commanded by the bearishly uncuddly Bochev (Stoyan Bochev) may drag a fear-mongering TV reporter out for a “NoSir” hunt — “We yell, ‘Are you armed?’ at the immigrants,” a subordinate jokes. “NOsir!” And all the spit-flinging xenophobic talk on TV and among her neighbors should harden Svetla’s attitudes towards “foreigners,” too.
But damned if she doesn’t roust one up while out hunting hares.
The language barrier between them is complete. He speaks English, tells her he’s from Mali, begs her not to shoot. She sputters in Bulgarian and rages and marches him, at gunpoint, to that garrison. It’s empty. Everybody’s out hunting up immigrants trying to cross in groups.
She asks the mayor where to take him and gets the runaround. Even reaching the guards earns a gruff, racist dismissal from folks who still make simian insults when they see a Black face. They have no room for him.
There’s nothing for it but to take him home, try to communicate just enough to keep him in line, and sleep with her shotgun as she keeps the stranger locked in her cellar.
“I have human rights!” he protests in vain. “Don’t cry, you African man,” she pleads, also in vain.
Actor turned writer-director Ivaylo Hristov paints this village in compact, subtle strokes of intolerance. They’re bigots to a one, irate at the cornucopia of refugees from Afghanistan and Syria and elsewhere, all trying to get to “Germany” by way of their dying, flat-broke community.
“No dirty Gypsies in my hotel,” growls Ivan (Ivan Savov), a council member and local shaker and mover who crudely flirted with Svetla right up to the moment she took in an African stranger, who turns out to be named Bamba (Michael Flemming).
Bamba smiles, speaks English to all he meets and tries to placate fears. He’d also like to move to Germany. Anything’s got to be better than this racist rathole, right?
But he is rebuffed at every turn. Only Svetla warms to his plight, and that seems to be as much the result of local harassment as any milk of human kindness coursing through her heart. Threats, vandalism and worse face them, and in the manner of a hundred movies about people making a journey to interracial understanding, Svetla gets her back up.
The film’s grim black and white cinematography rules out much in the way of cute. But Bamba’s pluck and Svetla’s softening have an upbeat quality. The village is so bereft of cosmopolitanism that they need a schoolboy to translate their instructions to their detained migrants into fractured English, always good for a laugh.
“Fear” can’t help but cover familiar immigrant narrative ground. But Hristov and his characters maintain a deadpan drollery that makes this grimmer take on the migrant’s plight and Eastern Europe’s often hateful backwardness play as lighter than it really is.
Rating: unrated, violence, racial slurs, profanity
Cast: Svetlana Yancheva, Michael Flemming, Stoyan Bochev, Ivan Savov, Miroslava Gogovska and Krassimir Dokov
Credits: Scripted and directed by Ivaylo Hristov. A Film Movement release.
Running time: 1:40
This promises to be an eye popper.
April 1, Focus Features remind us that Noomi doesn’t mess around.
Movie Nation 