Movie Nation

“The Midnight Swim” is a modestly-spooky example of that mumblecore unicorn — “mumblecore horror.”

It’s a talk-talk-talk indie drama about the lack of closure when a mother drowns and no body was found, about mythology and reincarnation, all set at a lakeside home in the Land of 10,000 Lakes, Minnesota.

Whatever attention it earned upon release in 2014, it’s finally available on disc and streaming and is well worth a look.

Writer-director Sarah Adina Smith (“Buster’s Mal Heart”) sends three half-sisters (Lindsay Burdge, Jennifer Lafleur and Aleksa Palladino) into the country, to their mother’s lake house to tidy up her affairs, bond and ponder the meaning of her life and death in a lake in which “nobody’s ever found the bottom.”

Annie (Lafleur, of “Take Back the Night” and TV’s “Search Party”) is the eldest, common-sensical and somewhat estranged from the mother who gave birth to them all, with different men as their fathers.

Isa, played by Palladino of “The Mandela Effect” and TV’s “The Loudest Voice,” is the moony-eyed middle sister, a bit airy fairy about “what Mom would have wanted,” what happened to her and what they should do with the house. “Art commune?”

And June (Burdge of “Black Bear” and “The Dark End of the Street”) is the youngest, the one we see little of as she’s “the family archivist,” videoing everyone and everything for a “documentary” about…whatever this is — a family coping with grief, disparate half-siblings bonding or breaking apart, a “mystery” that may have something to do with the myth of “The Seven Sisters.”

There’s a lad (Ross Partridge) that the oldest sister used to crush on. Now it’s Annie who figures “he might be good for me.” Annie grits her teeth over this. June? She just keeps on recording everything, unnerving some (like the realtor they consult), rattling others.

All the talk goes back to Mom’s personality, the different ways she related to each daughter, Mom’s passion for enjoying and preserving this lake, and reincarnation — a “River of Forgetfulness/River of Remembering” analogy that makes the daughters wonder if Mom’s oddball ad hoc belief system had some merit.

Then weird noises and bird deaths start happening, strange things turn up on camera, and the personalities of the three sisters are exposed and thrown into conflict because of it.

The “mumblecore” bonding elements here seem more rehearsed than is usual for the genre — a lip-synched music video to Mom’s favorite folk pop tune, a night of dueling impersonations of mom that is revealing and ugly.

And the spooky stuff, while understated, is effective. Something about being disoriented under water, a recurring visual motif, is no-budget scary.

Palladino is the stand-out in the cast, though each player carries off her “type” and corner of the story with affecting skill.

It’s not a great example of the genre (“Frances Ha”) or subgenre (“Baghead”). But “The Midnight Swim” demonstrates, yet again, that movies about fleshed-out characters with conversations that pull you in are a great way to tell a story with good actors and no money.

And you don’t need a nut-with-a-knife or murderous wraith makeup to give viewers chills.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Lindsay Burdge, Jennifer Lafleur and Aleksa Palladino

Credits: Scripted and directed by Sarah Adina Smith. A Yellow Veil release.

Running time: 1:24

Got to hand it to Well-Go USA. They’re going HARD against the grain, grabbing and releasing this Russian WWII agitprop.

Sure, Putin’s doing the over-compensating short guy “Give us the SUDETENLAND, um, UKRAINE” dance and bringing NATO back together in the process.

But let’s release a movie for the “I’d rather be a Russia-loving/colluding traitor than vote in my self-interests” crowd.

Enjoy, Comrade Tucker.

In the shuffling, postponing, “Who can keep track of it?” pandemic Third Wave release slate of American cinema, we hear this MGM laugher is slated for Feb. 18 and we’re taking their word for it.

And damn, it does look cute. Sentimental, “Thank you for your service, you big boo boo dog” cute.

Getting the French to admit “Journey to Greenland” was inspired by the Steve Coogan/Rob Brydon “The Trip” mockumentaries might be as difficult as filming this series turned into a movie. Because, you know, they filmed it in GREENLAND.

Pair up a couple of comic actors named Thomas — Thomas Scimeca, recently seen in “La Belle Epoch”, and Thomas Blanchard, one of the players in the absurdly quirky “Mandibles” — find an excuse to put them on a chopper to remote Kullorsuaq, an Inuit community on the icy coast, and see if something funny turns up.

It’s a deadpan “fish out of water” comedy that has a script but rarely seems like it. Perhaps writer-director Sébastien Betbeder gave them more of a Coogan/Brydon outline.

“Thomas, your father moved to Greenland. And Thomas, you play his struggling actor friend, so you tag along.”

What ensues is are some seriously deadpan takes on Greenlandish life, just enough back story to show how the two-guys-named-Thomas met (an improv class in which they questioned and irritated the teacher, then walked out of together), and let the cultures clash.

Tall Thomas (Blanchard) wants to be introduced to Miss Kullorsuaq, who is quite cute but a bit young for the scruffy, 30something failed-actor.

But, but…”I am in a period very conducive to falling in love!”

Short Thomas, visiting the father who gave up his life, career, marriage and perhaps some parenting responsibilities to stay in Greenland after a visit years ago, marvels at being in a land of the Midnight Sun.

“The sun is shining all the time,” he notes (in French, with English subtitles), and looking at every house in the village, including the one he’s trying to sleep in, his father’s. “Not a shutter in sight.”

The guys jog on the ice floes, with the locals wondering (in Inuit) “Why are those guys always in such a hurry?”

They check out a local rock band, try a few local delicacies, and pick up on how hard lives are there, the loss every family has faced at one point or another. They dabble in ice fishing and find themselves on a seal hunt and its gruesome aftermath. Here, try an eyeball.

“You’ll taste the lens,” father Nathan (François Chattot) coaxes. “Not bad.”

There’s a little melodrama, a couple of flashbacks to their lives back in France (a botched take on a movie set) that hint there’s more comedy to be found there, and plenty of reminders of how easy their lives are when compared to the ones they’re dropping in on.

And at every point — the failed womanizing, the “fine dining” (raw seal liver), the sight seeing (ice, more ice) — they seem to send up the various “Trip” movies that Coogan, Brydon and Michael Winterbottom turned out.

“Journey” isn’t a laugh riot, but there are enough quirky grins and giggles that you can almost feel the structure of the three half-hour (or so) TV episodes aired back in 2015 that were edited together to make this film.

Rating: unrated, graphic animal slaughter scenes

Cast: Thomas Scimeca, Thomas Blanchard, François Chattot, Ole Eliassen

Credits: Scripted and directed by Sébastien Betbeder. A UFO release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:38

Marin Alsop was the only child of two accomplished freelance classical musicians — a violinist and cellist — who gigged all around New York during her childhood. They’re the ones who signed her up for piano lessons as a tyke, and sent her to violin camp when she was older.

She grew up watching Leonard Bernstein’s celebrated “Young People’s Concerts,” not from the provinces on Saturday morning TV, but from the hall where “He talked directly to me” in between pieces played by the New York Philharmonic.

Alsop started at Juilliard at 7, attended Yale, founded her own 14 piece string “swing” ensemble, String Fever, and later got a backer to help her launch the Concordia Orchestra.

Later in life, she was personally mentored by the charismatic and hugely-influential Bernstein.

Every step of the way, she gained media attention, write-ups in the New York Times, feature coverage on New York TV and even network TV.

And STILL nobody wanted to give her a crack at her lifelong stream, to be a conductor and music director of a symphony orchestra. She remembers every time she heard “women can’t do that” and “no.” She’s held onto every rejection letter from college conducting programs.

“The Conductor” is an engaging, musically-adept documentary that tracks Marin Alsop’s dogged march to make her “first woman to head a major symphony orchestra” dream come true, taking on that job at the Baltimore Symphony, the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra and until 2020, with the Orquestra Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo.

Bernadette Wegenstein’s film doesn’t just show us the family photos, early video and later footage of Bernstein’s “hugging, attacking” and effusive instruction and encouragement of Alsop on the podium. And it doesn’t just hit the highlights of her rise to the top — skipping many of the waypoints of her orchestral journey. “The Conductor” shows her mentoring, remote teaching, working with young women and men as she helps train those who will take the baton from her.

We see Alsop rehearsing and leading orchestras through the classical music warhorses — Beethoven and Dvořák, Mahler and Mozart. And we see her drilling students in “playing” the group of sometimes 100 musicians, mastering the gestures, the timing and the posture that a conductor needs to generate the sound that is just notes on a page until a conductor and ensemble interpret it.

On the podium, with her mop of hair flipping hither and yon, her face a mask of beatific intensity, she can’t help but bring to mind Bernstein’s soulful theatricality.

Think of what you’re told about “confronting a bear,” she tells her students. The idea? Make yourself as BIG as possible.

The point of it all is that being one of the first and for most of her career the “only” woman in such a prominent position in classical music — the 2018 bio-pic “The Conductor” is about Antonia Brico, who conducted major orchestras from the 1930s onward, but who never took on the role of music director at a major American symphony — Alsop is doing her damnedest to make it easier for women who follow her.

“The Conductor” doesn’t just document her efforts in this regard, it amplifies them.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Marin Alsop, Michael Cooper, Tim Smith, and Leonard Bernstein

Credits: Directed by Bernadette Wegenstein. A Cargo release.

Running time: 1:30

“Munich: The Edge of War” is a moderately suspenseful piece of historical revisionism, a thriller that dangles an intriguing “What if” in its fresh take on the shameful Munich Agreement, which delayed but did not prevent World War II.

Handsomely-mounted and well-acted, never quite lapsing into melodrama if never quite breaking from formula, it’s too narrow in focus and too shallow a gloss on the subject to placate historians. But it’s worth taking in just for its novel views of Neville Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler and the accord that became historical shorthand for “appeasement.”

The story begins, as any tale of World War and Cold War intrigues must, at Oxford in the early ’30s, and climaxes at the actual Munich conference, where Britain and France signed over a corner of Czechoslovakia to forestall a threatened German invasion in 1938.

George MacKay (“1917”) is Hugh Legat, who graduates from Oxford to join the foreign service and become one of the private secretaries of Conservative Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, given gravitas, wariness and a much deeper voice by casting Jeremy Irons in the role.

Jannis Niewöhner (“Je Suis Karl”) is Paul von Hartmann, the idealistic classmate who drunkenly extolls the promise of “The New Germany” in 1932, but who finds himself alarmed enough to have joined “deep state” resisters to “this madman” by 1938, He works as a translator in the foreign ministry, someone a bit over-awed when he finally meets Hitler (Ulrich Matthes) in the crisis leading up to the conference.

Legat has worn the “distant” label von Hartmann gave him at university, which puts his marriage (Jessica Brown Findlay) on thin ice long before he gets the “one’s family has to take a back seat” lecture from his Foreign Office boss as the crisis begins.

Von Hartmann’s idealism has been replaced by vain “hope” and promises that the German Army will intervene if Hitler pushes them into war just 20 years after the last one ruined Germany. “Hope,” von Hartmann now believes, is futile, this notion that “somebody (else) will do something” to prevent a catastrophe.

It’s a remark that stings today, magnified by the historical distance, resonant in other crises. It’s more seriously addressed here than in the glib “The King’s Man,” this idea that history might be changed and this or that ideal or state can be saved by one rash act, an assassination when all the “debates” and political maneuvering has failed. “Munich” reminds us that changing history like that takes more than desperation and “wishing someone” would do it, and that when the chips are down, few are capable of it.

A “falling out” between the two college friends must be ignored as back-channel word travels to Hugh that Paul might be reaching out with some information that could sway Chamberlain into acting differently. If only both of them can get to Munich.

The tropes of such “What if” tales, indeed of espionage movies in general, are clearly spelled out in the Robert Harris novel this is based on. German director Chrisian Schwochow (“Je Suis Karl”) and screenwriter Ben Power (TV’s “The Hollow Crown”) don’t avoid them, but make them land lightly enough.

The leads are quite good, even if their characters are thinly-developed and the big moments of suspense and action few and far between.

What’s fascinating to anyone casually acquainted with this era and this particular event is how the principal figures in it are portrayed. “Downfall” veteran Matthes makes his Hitler a precursor to the “final days” Hitler Bruno Ganz gave us in that landmark film. There’s a hint of paranoia, a seething distrust of “educated” members of the German gentry like von Hartmann. But the politician is very much in evidence in this Hitler, a sober valuing of any new face that might give him something beyond the moronic “yes men” he has surrounded himself with.

He is dangerous, sinister even in revealing what we’d call today his “superpower” — “I read people” (these passages are in German with English subtitles). Hitler can’t decide if he wants to frighten or charm von Hartmann, and he’s obsessed with how his actions play in the press, at home or abroad.

Irons’ Chamberlain is fixated on public opinion, a man “too old to have fought” in the Great War, confiding every now and then with Legat, who was “too young” to have served. Chamberlain’s narrow focus — preventing a repeat of the mass slaughter of just 20 years before — seems rational and understandable. History has shifted from the simplistic “appeasement” label for the give-away Chamberlain signed at Munich, with the phrase “he bought us time” to prepare for the coming conflagration.

“The Edge of War” bends over backwards even further, making Chamberlain aware of how history will treat him, aware that he is “playing poker with a gangster.”

“As long as war has not begun, there is hope that it may be prevented!”

All that’s interesting enough to the armchair historian. But the stumbling block of many a “What if” story from World War II is easily evident in “The Edge of War.” For all the talk of the inevitable worst case scenario, the stakes feel awfully low. The narrow focus mean we see the graffiti on storefronts and humiliations and “Emigrate to Jerusalem” taunts aimed at Germany’s Jews.

Just a scene or two suggest the alarm in Britain about the consequences of failed talks — barrage balloons inflating to rise over London, gas mask public service announcements painted onto sidewalks, Hugh’s little boy trying his on as his wife resists being evacuated.

Legat’s functionary is the only one who bemoans the fact that the Czechs are the only ones not given a seat at the table that decides their fate.

Consequences are something for the near future, not September of 1938. That renders “The Edge of War” somewhat bloodless.

The film still manages to be a beautifully-detailed recreation of a well-worn piece of history, most thought-provoking in its novel approach to the motivations and intent of those involved.

Rating: PG-13 for some strong language, thematic elements, smoking and brief violence

Cast: George MacKay, Jannis Niewöhner, Jessica Brown Findlay, Sandra Hüller, Ulrich Matthes and Jeremy Irons

Credits: Directed by Christian Schwochow, scripted by Ben Power, based on the novel by Robert Harris. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:09

Yo ho hos served up in half hour doses this March?

I smirked at a few of the cameos in this trailer — Fred A. and Leslie J., Taika plays Blackbeard without an Ocracoke accent.

Hey, anything with pirates can’t help but amuse, right?

It’s pitched as an Argentine “Waking Ned Divine,” and one can certainly see a couple of similarities between that beloved comedy and “The Finger (El Dedo).”

There’s a death that could play a key role in the future of a village, if and when word of it gets out. The dead guy was a local character, somewhat beloved.

But the deaths aren’t the same, the local response to that demise is quirky, and the entire affair is more convoluted in the South American tale and handled in a sort of aimlessness that somewhat robs “The Finger” of its point.

This “true story” comedy is as distinctly Argentine as any picture in recent memory, a movie charmingly disorienting in tone thanks to that whole “Feels like Italy, with Italians speaking Spanish” vibe Argentina gives off.

 
In 1983, sleepy Cerro Colorado is on the verge of greatness just as Argentina is on the verge of democracy — again. A birth has given the village a population of 501, qualifying it for an election, a “mayor” who will represent it, and other signs of “progress.

Yes, people still get around on horseback. Mostly. Only the chauffeur-driven Don Hidalgo (Gabriel Goity) has a car. He seems seriously worked-up over this “town” news. Because being the richest guy in town, landed gentry going back generations, he will of course stand for election and maintain the control his family’s had over the place forever.

The others might shrug that off as noblesse oblige and what not, but the increasingly eccentric Baldomero (Martín Seefeld) just might raise some objection. Which is why Don Hidalgo tries to enlist him as his “campaign” lieutenant. Oddly enough, Baldomero turns up dead, stabbed and left lying in a creek bed.

This one-store, one-church, one-priest, a lone “no letters today (in Spanish with English subtitles)” postman, one-real-policeman village that wants to become a town has both a crime and an ethical dilemma on its hands. Who did it, and why? And can we keep that a secret until after the election, being “civic minded” and all?

The guy who won’t let this go is Florencio (Fabián Vena), proprietor of the Casi Todos Ramos Generales, “Almost Everything General Store.” Baldomero may have been off his nut, but he was Florencio’s brother. When Florencio and a friend retrieve the sibling’s body, Florencio chops off one of the dead man’s fingers and makes a vow of what he’s going to do to the killer, and where he’s planning on jamming that finger.

Director Sergio Teubal, whose directing career seems to have ended with this 2011 film, tries to weave together the disparate threads of this story, the various agendas in play, with mixed success.

The finger is dropped into a jar of formaldehyde on the counter of the store, and people start “consulting” it, making decisions based on which direction it floats into. The finger could help with the investigation, or at the very least, lead a “loyal opposition” to the free-spending, influence-peddling Don Hidalgo.

Don Hidalgo and his vote-fixing shenanigans must be thwarted. Florencio must confront the killer. The police chief must turn a blind eye. And the finger must keep its secret from anyone who would let the news out that it belongs to the guy whose death dragged Cerro Colorado back down to a population of 500 living souls.

Teubal, working from a Carina Catelli script — she has “Noche Americana” coming out this year — loses track of where to go with all this even as he’s layering in plenty of local color and dollops of quirky.

There’s a French hiker who doesn’t speak Spanish and can’t seem to find his way out of town. Either he “just missed” the weekly bus, or the bus doesn’t stop.

A Greek chorus of old timers — male and female — sit on a bench in front of the sheet they use to project movies in the Town without TV and mock themselves in commentaries to the camera, ridiculin, the idea of a movie being made of what happened here, who “the guy playing me” is, all of it.

“There’s no hell like a small town,” one confesses, and the movie backs up that point. As charming as any country’s “quaint” and “picturesque” villages are, as tempting as it might be to “Escape to the Country,” living amongst the entrenched locals is almost sure to be arduous.

Teubal gets so many things right that tthe drifting, meandering film that tells this story is never so far adrift that it loses its New World-Old World Italian/Spanish charm. The Old World Spanish/Italian violence, political mischief and blood oaths play as just quaint enough to be “cute.” But not so cute that you’d ever want to live here, no matter which direction The Finger points you.

Rating: Unrated, violence, sex, profanity

Cast: Fabián Vena, Martín Seefeld, Gabriel Goity, Rolly Serrano and Mara Santhuco.

Credits: Directed by Sergio Teubal, scripted by Carina Catelli. A Film Rise/Tubi/Mubi/Amazon release.

Running time: 1:33

The Tom Holland web slinger returned to the top of the box office with another $13.5 million added to Sony and Marvel’s coffers this weekend.

Paramount’s much cheaper “Scream” reboot/sequel added another $12 million and change ($12.4) in its second weekend.

An $8 million weekend pushes “The King’s Man” over the $100 million mark, worldwide.

The wide release of the long shelved fantasy “The King’s Daughter” pulled in an anemic $750k in wide release.

“Belle” did another $2.3 million on its second weekend, not bad for an anime release, wide or linited.

One thing you could never accuse Michael Winterbottom of is sentimentalism. The British director of “Welcome to Sarejevo,” “24 Hour Party People,” “A Mighty Heart,” and those hilarious “The Trip” movies with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon specializes in dramas of unadorned, harsh truth and comedies just dripping with cynicism.

His period pieces show us a past of stark beauty, difficult lives where the ugliness isn’t hidden behind Empire waistlines, stunning scenery and “quaint” romanticized mores and struggles to get by.

“Jude,” his adaptation of the last novel of Thomas Hardy, is an unblinking plunge into Victorian prudishness, selfishness, hypocrisy and classism — postcard pretty people and settings filled with the ugliness of animal slaughter, the bloodiness of childbirth and the harsh realities Dickens saw and somewhat sugar-coated, but not Hardy. It’s very obviously the work of the filmmaker who stripped the romance of the Alaskan Gold Rush in “The Claim” and mocked the oversexed and unsanitary world of the rogue “Tristram Shandy.”

The author of “Far from the Madding Crowd,” “The Mayor of Casterbridge,” “The Return of the Native” and “Tess of the d’Urbervilles,” finished his long form fiction career with a story of a farm lad who aspires to a life of letters, and the obstacles he either discards — an inappropriate marriage — or cannot surmount as he pursues it and the free spirit who settles down to a life of shame, struggle and tragedy as he loses his way.

Biographers see a hint of Hardy’s own life in “Jude.” Winterbottom saw a blunt condemnation of Victorianism and all but marches through the story, often in quick lurches, to get it all into this, one of his earliest films.

A black and white prologue captures the primitive world young Jude Fawley is born into and makes little attempt to reconcile himself with from the start. A beloved teacher (Liam Cunningham) departs, and points to distant Christminster (Oxford) as his destination, to study languages and literature and live a more lofty life. That becomes the orphaned working class lad’s goal.

Future Doctor Who Christopher Eccleston plays Jude as a young man, absorbed in books, deep into his Latin and Greek and longing to make the journey his mentor made. But the saucy, sexy Arabella (Rachel Griffiths) gets in the way. Nothing like lobbing a pig’s heart into his lap to break up his brookside idyll and tease Jude into literal rolls in the hay.

Aunt Drusilla (June Whitfield), who raised him, should probably have made this point before the untimely union.

“Frawleys are not cut-out for marriage.”

Jude figures that out when he flees to that aunt after a particularly gruesome bit of business Arabella has to handle almost single-handed, butchering a pig. The wife figures out the mismatch and announces she’s leaving for Australia to start over. Jude drifts away to Christminster and plots his entry to university while working as a stone mason.

The rigid hierarchy rejects his application to move up in class by attending university. But as consolation, he meets the orphaned cousin he never knew, Sue Bridehead. As she’s played by Kate Winslet, he’s hopelessly smitten and willing to ignore his fellow masons’ “What’s the law saying about marrying cousins?” jabs.

But does she share his ardor?

Like a lot of filmmakers faced with a novel of daunting length and dense texture, Winterbottom makes a deft waltz through the early chapters of this life journey only to, by necessity, jump and skip and stumble through the later ones.

Eccleston makes a more sturdy than stirring lead, whose best moment may be a tipsy recitation, in Latin, before students and stone masons drinking in a public house. Who eggs him on? Why, it’s another “future Doctor Who,” the sparkling David Tennant in a bit part. Eccleston doesn’t bring pathos to the morbid moments even as there’s plenty of heat and infatuation to the frankly sexual ones.

Griffiths all but devours him in their shared scenes.

But Winslet’s arrival as Sue marks the picture’s true beginning, and her “bright girl” turn — smoking, convention-defying, witty and atheistic — simply dazzles Jude and us even as the story settles into its long, tragic descent.

I’ve never met a Winterbottom film I didn’t like, and this Hossein Amini (“Driver”) adaptation is never less than engrossing. To maintain its stately, purposeful pace, the picture’s later acts should have been longer, although considering the harsh content, that might have been unbearable.

And in the cold light of day with the unsentimental passage of time, I dare say the director, BBC Films and even Eccleston might agree that there was a serious charisma gap in the casting that turning to the other future “Doctor” on the set might have solved.

Rating: R for strong sexuality and intense depictions of death and birth

Cast: Christopher Eccleston, Kate Winslet, Rachel Griffiths, Liam Cunningham, June Whitfield, James Nesbitt and David Tennant.

Credits: Directed by Michael Winterbottom, scripted by Hossein Amini, based on the novel “Jude the Obscure” by Thomas Hardy. A Gramercy/BBC release on Amazon, Roku, Tubi, other streamers

Running time: 2:03