Haven’t seen much of that rascally rogue Karl Urban in recent years.
And truth be told, I may have bounced by this “Mortal Kombat II” trailer the first time I saw it posted because of the sea of fake trailers “fans” are cooking up for crap franchises they worship or fantasy team-ups and re-castings “they” would love to see.
But this red band take on a reboot much of the non-gaming world would shrug off has my interest.
Oct. 24? Let’s see what they do with it.
The stunning scenery of Yosemite National Park, sturdy performances by Eric Bana and Sam Neill and Rosemarie DeWitt’s best turn since “Mad Men” recommend “Untamed,” an engrossing murder mystery that trots through genre tropes and leans into melodrama but never stops being worthy of our attention.
It’s a tale about crimes of the present re-entangling people trapped by pasts destined to catch up with them. Murders, dormant investigations, wildlife being wild and secrets and lies are uncovered in one of the most gorgeous with the most gorgeous backdrop imaginable.
The Aussie Bana, star of two similar Australian Outback detective thrillers (“The Dry,” and “Force of Nature”), is perfectly cast as Kyle Turner, an Investigative Services Branch detective with the National Park Service at Yosemite, a grizzled man’s man outdoorsman who likes to investigate his cases — deciding or not if this fall, that mauling or disappearance is a crime — by horseback.
He’s a loner, divorced, a dad given to long life-lesson conversations with his little boy. We quickly figure out that the kid’s been dead for five years. We guess that’s when ended his marriage (DeWitt plays the realtor wife, remarried but suffering in her own way), sent Kyle into a bottle and has him teetering on the edge of suicide.
Hunting for his child’s killer broke him, and now some law firm’s investigator is asking him about his mental state all those years ago, when a man disappeared in the park and somebody is aiming to file a “wrongful death” claim about how the case was mishandled.
His boss (Sam Neill) is ever-understanding and indulgent, protecting Kyle from the park’s PF-conscious Director Hamilton (Joe Holt), grabbing the car-keys when he’s had too much.
Kyle needs to be sharp as the park’s had a high-profile death on El Capitan, the climbers’ Mecca in the midst of all this untamed nature. We see that plunge in a gripping/shocking opening scene. As the series progresses, Kyle pieces together bits of the back story that put this young woman on that summit and sent her over the edge there.
No grizzled investigator can pursue a case without a newby by his side. Lily Santiago of TV’s “La Brea” plays Vasquez, an L.A. cop and single mom and new-to-wilderness park ranger assigned to shadow and assist him. We will see many of the dazzling vistas and the unforgiving nature of the beautiful terrain and its critters (digital deer and bears) through her eyes.
So much can go wrong in a remote, forbidding place where natural dangers abound and there are no witnesses to the unnatural ones.
“How do we catch them,” then, Vasquez wants to know of those responsible for this disappearance or that “accident?”
“We don’t.”
The “jumper” will face a coroner’s probing and Kyle’s astute observations, which carry out into the wild as he retraces her last hours and days.
Other deaths and disappearances will be introduced into the mystery. There’s a drug problem in and around the park, with sketchy characters linked to it. A wildlife management officer (Wilson Bethel) comes off as a prickly rival for Kyle’s “man of the wilderness” title. Kyle’s rubbed more rangers than just Milch (William Smillie) the wrong way.
But maybe weathered Native American employee Jay (Raoul Max Trujillo) can keep Kyle on the right path, in between cracks about being on “the white man’s” payroll on land stolen by “the white man.” And Vasquez brings enough to the table to make the park service veteran question his limits and methodologies as a sleuth.
“So what might the next move be for a cop down in LA?”
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The horror audience has proven a hard sell in the post-COVID movie-going marketplace. New titles that reliably opened in the low to mid $teens made cheap horror productions a staple of most every studio’s release slate. And franchises could reliably be expected to roll up over $20, sometimes over $25 million on their opening weekends.
Rebooting 2000’s “Final Destination” with “Bloodlines” paid off with an epic turnout, over $50 million earlier this summer. But that’s been the rarest of exceptions, as even the most reliable franchises have consistenly underwhelmed, with only the occasional prestige horror project — “Sinners” and the like — delivering big paydays.
Case in point — the reboot of the venerable “I Know What You Did Last Summer” franchise. Launched in ’97, relaunching with a good looking young cast and the nostalgia of Jennifer Love Hewitt and Freddie Prinze for older fans, this should have been bucks in the bank — BIG bucks. Pre-COVID, this project could have been expected to do $25-30, a lot more than the $13 million it opened with.
So that “reliable” audience has grown discerning? Or just more fickle?
“I Know What You Did Last Summer,” but I no longer care?
Ari Aster turned boutique distributor A24 into the home for discriminating horror, thanks to “Midsommar” and “Hereditary.” His latest, “Eddington,” is a political allegory/”Western” starring his “Beau is Afraid” leading man Joaquin Phoenix. It’s on a lot of screens and nobody is showing up.
“Eddington” cleared $4.25 with the reviews for this one suggesting a rare misfire for Ari A.
James Gunn’s “Superman” is on track to dominate its second weekend, following its $125 million opening with a big but steadily sliding-off opening week, a $16 million or so Friday, a better Saturday and Sunday that added up $57 million second weekend. It cleared the $235 million mark (by midnight Sunday).
The “Smurfs” reboot that who-knows-who asked for is a taking in a tepid $11 million. Sony made a $billion off these films before the “Sing” and “Trolls” movies made them redundant. Paramount is releasing this latest one. The last “Smurfs” was only released in the Middle East, and the one before it, “The Lost Village,” barely cleared $13 million on its opening weekend.
Stock a fork in’em, “The Smurfs” are done.
“Jurassic World: Rebirth” should cling to second place, clearing $23.4. “Last Summer” and “Smurfs” will lap “F1” for third and fourth putting Brad Pitt’s hit in fifth at $9.6.
The remake of “How to Train Your Dragon” and the original children’s cartoon “Elio” drop out of the top five, the quickest exit ever for a Pixar release.
“Dragon” came in sixth at $5.35. “Eddington” managed seventh with that $4 million and change take. “Elio” is a Dead Pixar Pic walking, grabbing a last $2 million before losing many of its screens and heading to streaming.
The “Lilo & Stitch” remake, the biggest hit of 2025, is winding down its $415 million domestic/$billion dollar worldwide run with one last weekend in the top ten at $1.5.
“28 Years Later” is zombie-ing its way to a $70 million or so take, all-in (it’s at $68 thanks to another $1.3 million).
A lot of movies lower in the chart show us a “Phoenecian Scheme” that will never clear $20, “Ballerina” falling short of $60, “Materialists” paying off and “M3GAN 2.0” being one of the bigger horror bombs of the year.
Militarizing “Tron” in an age of AI fears and Big Tech Supervillain abuse seems…on the nose.
Jared Leto, Gillian Anderson, Greta Lee and Jodie-Turner-Smith are the stars.
And here’s Jeff Bridges, still taking a “Tron” credit, all these decades later. I interviewed him when the original film came out and we fanboyed about my favorite arcade game, the one he played over and over again on set to get into the mood — “Battle Zone” — a primitive first-person shooter tank battle.
Yeah, he and I have both been doing this a long long time.
Oct. 10.
This Spanish drama about an expectant mom fretting that her baby-to-be might inherit whatever made her deaf from birth stars Miriam Garlo and Álvaro Cervantes as her hearing partner/baby daddy, the one she clings to/fights with over childcare difficulties for those who can’t hear.
Writer-director Eva Libertad’s festival darling looks worthy of a wide-ish release. Let’s hope it gets one.
It was this. Not the Turkish mustache business. “The Big Fat Bribe” rant.
Paramount will rue the day it didn’t simply pay out on his contract rather than have him sticking around for more months, bad-mouthing Skydance, Paramount and their apparent Big Daddy, Trump.
There’s a veritable NRA convention of ordnance discharged in “Eddington,” Ari Aster’s All American parable of “How did we get here?”
But the one weapon not discharged is the most apt metaphor for the latest from the writer/director of “Midsommar,” “Hereditary” and the Joaquin Phoenix puzzle “Beau is Afraid.” “Eddington” is a shotgun of a movie, aiming at many targets and trying to hit them with all the randomness of a 12 gauge shell full of pellets.
It’s kind of a mess, but an ambitious one hitting on themes Aster’s fans will recognize as his favorites. And as Aster scores points on conspiracy-obsessed America, cultish America, gun-fetishizing America, virtue signalling America and the limits of “back the blue,” he’s pretty much earned the right to be heard out, if not the benefit of the doubt.
The microcosm of society here is a tiny, dying New Mexico town where the longtime sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) has come up with a laundry list of reasons why he won’t wear a mask as the country shuts down and the “mask to stop the spread of COVID and save lives” vs “I ain’t maskin’ cuz FREEDOM” divide opens up.
Sheriff Joe Cross (subtle) defies the statewide mandate in front of Mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) and others, a version of the last straw between these two locals who have history, which is connected to Cross’s fragile, conspiracy-crank wife (Emma Stone).
Not many people respect the sheriff. We’ve seen a crazed homeless man (a nearly unrecognizable Clifton Collins Jr.) drop him and evade capture in front of a city council meeting at the mayor’s closed-by-COVID bar. And we’ve met the last deputies (Michael Ward and Luke Grimes) who will work for Cross, and let’s just say they’re not exactly White Sands test-facility job candidates.
The mayor’s gay punk son (Matt Gomez Hidaka) and others like live-streaming the sheriff as he stumbles through his duties and tries to control his temper and hide his cluelessness. Popularly elected or not, the town has grown jaded on him, and one suspects the mask thing is about more than “I have asthma.” He’s ready to run for mayor on a “How did we get here?” anti-mask, “There IS no COVID in Eddinton” platform.
His “getting better” but dark web-obsessed wife and her even crazier mother (Deidre O’Connell) have fallen in with a charismatic “How the world REALLY works” cult leader (Austin Butler).
There’s a big data processing facility that promises to “bring jobs” and suck the local aquifer dry as it makes crypto-dolts temporarily rich. That’s another issue in a Cross “campaign” run by attacking everyhing the mayor is for, and by enlisting his two county-payroll deputies (there is no dispatcher) as campaign workers.
He’s decorated his Sevilla Co. sheriff’s dept. SUV with print-shop misspelled slogans, an effort that takes an even darker turn a we see the suspicious bursts of violence inserted into nationwide Black Lives Matter protests which Fox News, the sheriff and the old and white electorate insist are “George Soros backed…antifa terrorists.”
National TV coverage will bleed into Eddington’s politics and everything we saw in Minneapolis, Portland and elsewhere will play out on a smaller scale in this not-quite-empty town on the edge of an Indian reservation which has tribal/pueblo police jurisdiction issues with the law-unto-himself sherrif.
Blood will be spilled and the viewer will be jolted at how quickly and how wide the schism between the “free-dumb” crowd, and the “woke,” sane and often annoying virtue signallers — from the unseen governor on down to high school white guilt agitator Sarah (Amélie Hoeferle), whom Brian (Cameron Mann) obsesses over, whom his gay bestie Eric the mayor’s son (Hidaka) toys with and who has “history” with one of the deputies.
If that reads like a LOT of plot and characters and agendas, it is. Aster has as much keeping them straight as we do.
So it’s almost natural that the third act descends into bloody first-person-shooter video-game styled mayhem, with under-identified outsider-snipers, the pueblo police, the sheriff and others caught up in it.
There’s nothing like raid-a-gun-shop wanton slaughter to thin out a cast and simplify a plot contrived to show America along its fault lines.
Phoenix is settling into middle aged man roles well enough, and he makes this simple man with the power of life and death over everybody alarmingly his own. Cross seems depressed, barely holding it together. And he’s armed and like all law enforcement, knows just what he can get away with. Pascal gives a shallow, shiny political sheen to the mayor that makes a nice contrast.
Stone and O’Connell border on parodies of conspiracy cranks, a group beyond parody. The younger players play up the fickle nature of “politics” among teens just learning to be outraged, sometimes just to attract the cute girl who’s outraged herself.
And Collins staggers through the picture, the personification of that insoluable problem no one wants to deal with or see. The mentally ill homeless? Sure. But he could also be a stand-in for victims and perpetrators of violence or for a schizophrenic country that’s lost its collective mind, and its way.
Making sense of it all on Aster’s behalf is hard enough. But “Eddington” runs up against a challenge even he can’t have forseen. It’s just unlikeable, with unpleasant characters, unpunished wrongs and wanton violence as a shortcut to unraveling any quandary or mystery.
Holding up a mirror like this was never going to win a lot of friends. Aster so stuffs that mirror with ugliness that “Eddington” is harder to take than it is to decipher.
If he knew more about firearms, he’d have recognized these targets as more suitable to precision — sniper rifles — and not his shotgun-hope-I-hit-something approach.
Rating: R, graphic violence, explicit nudity, profanity
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone, Deidre O’Connell, Michael Ward, Luke Grimes, Matt Gomez Hidaka, Amélie Hoeferle, Cameron Mann, Austin Butler and Clifton Collins, Jr.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Ari Aster. An A24 release.
Running time: 2:25
The barn-raising scene in Peter Weir’s masterpiece, “Witness,” is one of the most perfect pieces of pure cinema the movies have ever produced.
Beautifully conceived, shot (by future Oscar winner John Seale), edited (by Oscar winner Thom Noble) and scored (by three-time Oscar winner Maurice Jarre), it informs, moves and underscores the dilemma and love triangle dynamic at the heart of this classic almost without words.
Looks are exchanged between the on-the-lam cop (Harrison Ford) “passing” for Amish, the wide-eyed Amish widow (Kelly McGillis) and her more suitable suitor (dancer/actor Alexander Godunov) from her rural Pennsylvania community. Disapproving scowls are glimpsed from her stern and elderly father-in-law (Jan Rubles). And screen newcomer Viggo Mortenson gapes and grins and takes it all in, a balletic trio acted-out in stares of longing, staredowns and smiles between saw-strokes, hammer blows and twists of the hand drill.
It’s so perfect that this single scene can’t fail to produce tears, not just for the romance-that-should-not-be or should-be, but for “community,” the earnest generosity of people pulling together for a common goal.
When we talk of movies in “They don’t make’em like that anymore” terms, we’re not just speaking of epic productions of the past and their “cast of thousands.” “Witness” captures a great filmmaker in his prime and a star coming into his own depicting an Amish community that has changed much in the intervening decades and an America that has changed as well.
But we can go back and watch that barn-raising scene and at least hope the community connections, values, the urge to do the right thing and find fulfillment, happiness and justice can stage a comeback.
A couple of veteran TV writers specializing in Westerns such as “Gunsmoke” and the series version of “How the West was Won,” Earl K. Wallace and William Kelley, conjured up this Oscar-winning story of an Amish family and a police detective who run afoul of murderously corrupt cops and must lay low in Amish country.
A St. Paul-quoting “Come out from among them and be separate” culture with no phones, no cars and little connection to the world of “The English,” as they call America in the film, it was a stroke of genius realizing that these people would make a great hiding place for a child witness (Lukas Haas, amazing) to a murder and a cop wounded as he tries to protect that Amish boy and his mother (McGillis, in her breakout film role).
Weir, fresh off of “The Year of Living Dangerously,” keeps the romance on low-to-high simmer with scene after scene of McGillis drinking in this tough, heroic and manly cop like a widow dying of thirst. And he handles the many set-pieces — action and otherwise — with a surehanded skill that should be taught in film school thriller classes.
The child is unlucky witness to a murder in the Philly train station bathroom, and this sheltered boy’s gaping shock and plucky, think-on-his-feet reaction becomes one of the signature moments of the movie. Likewise, when Haas’s Samuel wanders the police station where John Book (Ford) and his partner (Brent Jennings) show him police line-ups and mug-books of photos, only to have the child spy a photo commemorating the murderous cop (Danny Glover made great villains back then) is another piece of acted, shot and edited perfection.
The boy stares at Book across the room and silently points at the photo, with Ford slowly taking the kid’s hand and balling up that accusing finger because they don’t know if they can trust anybody in that precinct.
“Witness” covers familiar police procedural ground in violent bursts — Book and partner rousting a bar and mashing a suspect’s face against a police car window — and mesmerizing pauses, just like that moment of recognition.
The betrayal and violence that send Book and Rachel and young son Samuel on the run puts them back on the farm where she lives with her father-in-law ends with a slow-motion crash between a bleeding-out-Book in his sister’s VW Squareback and a huge birdhouse on a pole.
What follows, as Book is nursed to recovery and takes stock in what options he has, is a gentle culture clash comedy with serious undertones. He learns to milk a cow. He revives his latent carpentry skills. And he tries not to fall in love with the young widowed mother who fears the influence of a “man with guns” given to “whacking” people over her son, but who is plainly smitten by the decent person he seems to be — profane and tempermental or not.
The tall, lean and charismatic Russian defector/dancer Godunov almost steals the picture as the stoic but good-humored neighbor who comforts Rachel with an eye towards courtship and another eye on the “Yankee” she has staying with her under her roof.
“You look plain, Book. Very plain.”
But barn-building or not, Book’s headed for a reckoning with the world he left behind. And when it comes, “old ways” and community will face off with violence and the pitiless men with guns and badges who wield it.
Weir, already proven as a filmmaker at home with drama, action with lighter moments and “communities” in his films, would trot out that mastery here and later with “Green Card,” “Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World,” “The Truman Show,” “The Way Back” and “Dead Poet’s Society.”
He makes “Witness” a movie of grace notes, grim violence and touches of humor. Book is wary and wry about the “quaint” Amish, and Weir lets us see bits of bawdiness in this tightknit, Bible-based enclave.
We see the wind breezing through the barley, hear Harrison Ford sing along with Sam Cooke on “What a Wonderful World” and catch Godunov’s Daniel showing off for Rachel and Samuel, racing his wagon beside the train they’re leaving on, striking a heroic pose as he does.
Patti Lupone makes an earthy sister who takes in her cop brother’s “witness” and his mother, Josef Summer puts a disarming, grandfatherly face on cunning cop corruption at the higher levels, Glover is pure menace and Czech actor Rubes pulls off stern, with a touch of humor, judgemental but wise.
Old Eli’s heartfelt lecture to young Samuel, who is fascinated with Book’s bravado and especially his service revolver, becomes a grace note for the ages.
“What you take into your hand, you take into your heart,” Eli warns, wary of the cult of the gun.
The Oscar-winning “Witness” became one of those cultural shorthand film phenomena of its day, with “You look plain” (a high Amish compliment) becoming a punchline and eventually the inspiration for a Weird Al Yankovich song and movie parody.
Weir, like other members of Australia’s 1970s “New Wave,” became “go-to” director, with the credits of a star filmmaker who had his pick of great projects to attempt.
The Juilliard-trained McGillis would follow up this film with the blockbuster “Top Gun,” and had a nice run of decent roles before interrupting her career for a second marriage that produced two children and a Key West restraurant infamous for its terrible service. Thankfully, she got back to acting.
“Witness” was and remains Harrison Ford’s best shot at an Oscar.
If The Academy gets its act together and serves up a much-deserved lifetime achievement award for him, “Witness” won’t be the only picture they show clips from, but it’s the best, a classic from a decade that produced as many of those as the much-more-praised 1970s.
Rating: R, violence, nudity, profanity
Cast: Harrison Ford, Kelly McGillis, Lukas Haas, Alexander Godunov, Jan Rubes, Patti Lupone, Brent Jennings, Josef Sommer and Danny Glover.
Credits: Directed by Peter Weir, scripted by Earl W. Wallace and William Kelley. A Paramount release on Pluto, Amazon, other streamers
Running time: 1:52
Many an aspiring filmmaker looks to horror as her or his way of launching a career in Hollywood. Get your hands on a generic script, finance a thriller on the cheap, deliver a shock or two and show’em what you’ve got.
Of course, not every filmmaker taking that first shot has A Magic Surname like Spielberg. Whatever “nepo babies” complain about being labeled thus for following a parent into show business, the leg-up they get in a brutally competitive profession is undeniable. Doors are opened and “name actors” are lured in, because there’s always a chance Daddy or Mommy will appreciate that and remember those names when a bigger project they have in mind comes along.
“Please Don’t Eat the Children” is a post-apocalyptic cannibalism thriller directed by sometime actress/first-time director Destry Allyn Spielberg. It is a competently filmed but utterly unsurprising tale of a group of imperiled kids trying to make it south, across the border to escape their fate in an America that hates, fears and imprisons them for either spreading the “cannibal virus” or for reminding them of the promise the surviving adults once had to live normal lives, with family, meaningful careers and the like.
Generic unoriginality aside, the picture features “Downton Abbey” star Michelle Dockery as the villain, someone whose clutches these Lost Boys and Girls fall into, and Giancarlo Esposito, one of the most accomplished character actors of his generation as a lawman.
That’s what “Spielberg” will get you. The skill, talent, flash and watchability you have to come up with on your own.
Zoe Colletti is Mary, a haunted teen fleeing the authorities as she makes her way south. She has nightmares about the kid sister she couldn’t protect. Deep in the southwest, she throws in with a blustering tween (Dean Scott Vasquez), a self-described “master thief” who drags her into his “Oliver Twist” gang of artful dodgers.
But with soldiers and law enforcement hunting kids like them, the others (Regan Aliyah, Andrew Liner, Emma Meisel and Joshua Melnick) are beyond wary at what this new face, new unwanted attention from the authorities and new mouth to feed represents.
Sure enough, they have to flee their production designed to death hideout/clubhouse and hit the road. And that’s how they come upon that big, remote farmhouse and Clara (Dockery), the guarded and untrusting “nurse” when tends to one’s wounds but proves to have her own agenda.
“I’m not supposed to take in children,” she protests in the sketchiest manner possible. Sure, she drugs them. And when one of their ranks doesn’t wake up locked in the basement with them, “Where’s Seth?” earns the stock, not-that-cagey reply.
“You’ll be joining him soon.”
Colletti’s Mary is the ostensible “star” here, but whatever the script and occasionally the direction do to verify that, she comes off as too passive to carry that weight. The other kids are so thinly drawn as to barely register as “stock types.”
The work-the-problem elements of the script are lazy to the point of half-baked. And the shocks only serve to remind us of what set off this apocalypse in the first place.
There’s little flair to the compositions and shot selection and little that the editing and the acting — Dockery turns it up when necessary — can do to cover up that.
Did filming this 2022-23 movie earn Dockery a role in Spielberg pal Robert Zemeckis’s “Here?” That didn’t really pay off either, did it?
I wasn’t going to dwell on the “famous” named filmmaker element of this picture. But nothing else about it merits discussion.
With so little to recommend this outing, the real nepo baby test will come if Destry Rides — and directs — again. Most first-time directors get only one shot at proving they’ve got the goods.
Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, profanity
Cast: Michelle Dockery, Zoe Colletti, Regan Aliyah, Andrew Liner, Dean Scott Vasquez, Emma Meisel, Joshua Melnick and Giancarlo Esposito.
Credits: Directed by Destry Allyn Spielberg, scripted by Paul Bertino. A “Tubi Original” on Tubi.
Running time: 1:
David Strathairn and Celia Weston are the parents, Will Pullen the straying son and Jane Levy the daughter in law and mother of their granddaughter whom they’re trying to help without “interfering” in this dramedy from the writer of “Junebug” and writer-director of “Abundant Acreage Available.”
Music Box films has this set for Aug 29 release.
Movie Nation 