The teaser trailer doesn’t tell us much — generations of women, Penelope Cruz of course, babies, life…
But how much does it need to tell other than it’s Almodovar?
“Madres Paralelas” is about to premiere at the Venice FFest. Sony Classics has it and we should see it this fall.
A rich eccentric finances an artiste’s latest movie “blockbuster” sounds silly enough.
But that cast!
A few things hamstring the “Affair to Remember-ish” romance “The Last Letter from Your Lover,” a Netflix film adapted from the Jojo Moyes novel.
One is casting. Shailene Woodley and Felicity Jones are marvelous, as one would expect, with Woodley as a posh 1960s Londoner trapped in a loveless marriage and Jones as a modern day London reporter who stumbles across the letters that linked that ’60s woman to another man and a “passionate.”
It’s a bit of a stretch seeing Woodley (“Big Little Lies”) as a ’60s socialite. But Jones as a plucky, lovelorn reporter who must simply find out “how it came out?” That’s a no-brainer.
It’s the menfolk cast opposite these two magnetic stars who let down the side. They practically wilt in their presence.
And then there are the letters themselves. As emotionally repressed as the English stereotype is, you’d think the Land of Shakespeare could come up with something more spicy than the banal “We could be happy, so happy” bloodless “Brief Encounter” prose the mysterious “B” or “Boot” writes to court a married woman.
Those shortcomings combine to make “Last Letter” a bit of a hard sell.
Jones is Ellie, a features writer for a London newspaper not quite over her last break-up, given to drunken hook-ups and clever if somewhat soul-bearing stories on “passionate vs. ‘companionate’ love.” The death of a prominent former editor sends her to the archives to dig into that woman’s life. And once she gets past the pedantic pissant (Nabhaan Rizwan) who officiously safeguards those archives, she stumbles into letters from “B” to his beloved “J,” neither one of them being the editor Ellie is supposed to be researching for a definitive obituary.
Flashbacks take us back to the London of the ’60s, where married-well Jenny (Woodley) is recovering from a car accident that left her physically-scarred and with little memory of the life she led before it. Her domineering, aloof and often-absent husband (Joe Alwyn) isn’t much help. But eventually, she too stumbles into a letter from this “Boot” fellow, stashed inside a copy of Evelyn Waugh’s comic riff on journalists, “Scoop.”
“Boot” was the name of the hero of that book. And as Jenny starts her own digging into clues from these letters, she discovers it was a pet name she gave to a journalist (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd) who came to interview her globe-trotting husband.
So the movie is giving us two tame versions of “meet cute” — Jenny and “Boot,” getting off on the wrong foot, but with the writer eventually charming the suffocated society wife, stealing her heart and unleashing her passion, and the far “cuter” “meet cute” of Ellie getting over her foul-mouthed annoyance at this fellow Rory blocking access to all she wants to find out about “J” and “Boot.”
“Last Letter” takes us through the present day research and the ill-fated affair that preceded the accident that took away Jenny’s memory.
The mystery-solving part of this plays a bit like “Letters to Juliette,” for those who know their epistolary screen romances. Jones makes this half of the story sweet and fun, although she has to do most of the romantic heavy lifting, and every time she describes the letters as being “so rich in feeling” we have to wonder how repressed the pretty English reporter is herself.
Woodley has to look comfortable in upscale ’60s fashions — evening wear with diaphanous capes, a sailing dress that looks “Mad Men” secretarial, with even midriff-baring casual wear requiring gloves and those little pillbox hats of the era.
Wealthy Jenny is hardly the 20something product of Swinging London. But would she really be this conservative? Did no one notice how Jackie Kennedy dressed for a day of sailing? Capri pants, etc?
And Woodley’s Jenny has to suggest timid compliance with a dismissive, interrupting husband and a willingness to swoon over a reporter who doesn’t exactly swagger into her life. She does, but the romance seems a personality/charisma mismatch, something the film’s leaden pacing forces us to notice.
The leads make this tolerable. The ’60s pop soundtrack of Melanie, Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood duets and the like and scenes set on the Riviera seem borrowed from a sunnier movie than the sad-faced, charisma-imbalanced slog that “The Last Letter from Your Lover” is.
MPA Rating: TV-MA, sex, profanity
Cast: Felicity Jones, Shailene Woodley, Jacob Fortune-Lloyd, Joe Alwyn,
Nabhaan Rizwan and Ben Cross.
Credits: Directed by Augustine Frizzell, script by Nick Payne and Esta Spalding, based on a novel by Jojo Moyes. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:50
A not-exactly-torrid, not particularly romantic “torrid romance,” “Curiosa” takes us back to 19th century Paris, when the camera and indoor plumbing were new, and sexual mores seemed in a mad rush to catch up.
This French melodrama, loosely based on the surviving writings and photos of its two principals, takes its title from a term of the day. A “Curiosa,” an opening title tells us, “is an erotic object or photograph.”
Marie, played by Noémie Merlant ( “Portrait of a Lady on Fire,”), is the oldest of three sisters, and the great beauty of the trio that includes Louise (Mathilde Warnier) and Helene (Mélodie Richard).
Family friend Pierre (Niels Schneider), flirts and keeps them under his lusty gaze, which the sisters, especially Marie, notices.
“Girls to be wed put on a show, like houses for rent awaiting buyers,” she teases (in French with English subtitles). “We can be visited. Boy not every floor.”
All of the “gentlemen” of their acquaintance fancy themselves poets and writers. Pierre’s lifestyle of the idle rich includes photography, “candid photography,” as the old Monty Python sketch winked. Pierre takes photos of nude women, and rakishly makes a point of finishing the seduction that lured them to his studio with sex.
Pierre is what they’d have called “a bounder” or “cad” in Victorian Britain. In Paris, he still flings around the word “gentleman” as if it applies to him. Marie doesn’t pick up on this, as she’s got a crush on him like every other young woman he meets.
But when stodgy, conservative and wealthy Henri (Benjamin Lavernhe) out-maneuvers Pierre when the rake is out of town, Marie is married off not to Pierre, but to one of his many “friends.” And the way the “gentlemen” handle this unpleasantness is for Pierre to have an affair with Marie, mostly at her instigation.
She runs to his arms and his bed. But as she submits to being photographed, she gradually absorbs what Pierre promises to “teach you vices you can’t even conceive.” And trying on each other’s clothes is merely the start.
But as a man who disappears on “travels” and returns with a gorgeous Algerian prostitute (Camélia Jordana), who bandies the idea of menage a trois with Marie and shows off his photo diary of “The Female Posterior” with his pals, whom he also shares his Algerian with, we wonder what Marie will sacrifice in transitioning from “conventional” to “modern.”
Lou Jeunet, who works mostly in French TV, serves up a “Madame Bovary” without the morality or tragedy of Flaubert’s novel. She and her co-writer play up the sex scenes, and although this never quite descends into “a young woman’s ‘awakening'” softcore of the “Emmanuelle” variety, that’s the general direction of things.
Pierre is something of an artist, but as he does nothing with these “candid” shots, it’s really all about sex and the pursuit of it. Marie’s in love, but miserable.
Jeunet is intent on showing a little of the kink of a stodgy belle epoch that wasn’t as moral and unsophisticated as it might have appeared.
The trouble is, that’s a given. Paris all but invented modern porn, Parisians kept their mistresses, Pierre is quick to admit “Of course I have others,” and there’s not enough of the “poor cuckold” Henri or anyone else damaged in this promiscuity to give this story a tragic edge.
It’s all very civilized and oh-so-French. But frankly, for all the posh settings and lovely costumes, all the lovely nudes and copulation, “Curiosa” is a chilly, unemotional drag. And the performances do little to warm things up.
MPA Rating: unrated, nudity, sexually explicit
Cast: Noémie Merlant, Niels Schneider, Benjamin Lavernhe, Camélia Jordana, Amira Casar, Mathilde Warnier, Mélodie Richard
Credits: Directed by Lou Jeunet, script by Lou Jeunet and Raphaëlle Desplechin. A Film Movement release.
Running time: 1:40
“The Unknown Saint” is an understated, chuckle-out-loud caper comedy from Morocco. It works the deadpan side of the street, spare in its dialogue, leaning on sight gags and situational ironies. What you get is an intimate parody of a parable, a comedy content to earn smirks and knowing grins and never reach for belly laughs.
Younes Bouab plays our unnamed “Thief,” on the lam when his car breaks down in BFE, Morocco. Thinking fast, he grabs his haul and buries it on a rocky desert hilltop. He cunningly makes the buried bag look like a grave, because the man knows his culture. No self-respecting Muslim would stoop to desecrating a grave. Then the sirens wail and “Hands up!” and “On your KNEES!” commands become the film’s first words (in Arabic with English subtitles).
Some time later, the thief returns to the exact spot to collect his reward for his time in prison. Damned if the locals haven’t built a shrine to “The Unknown Saint” buried up on that hilltop.
“Are you a pilgrim?” the villagers want to know. Sick? “You came to be healed by the saint?”
His long hair and beard give everybody the wrong idea. As he rents space in the local inn and takes a shave and shearing with the eccentric yet fastidious local barber/dentist (Ahmed Yarziz), he ponders his situation. There are pilgrims at the shrine every day. The locals are sure they can be healed there.
And at night, the Guard (Abdelghani Kitab) keeps watch with his beloved Alsatian.
The thief doesn’t know that there’s a new doctor in town (Anas El Baz), and that he is quick to take up a cause of his crotchety nurse (Hasan Badidah), who loathes this shrine and the superstition it feeds. Who will see the doctor for a real ailment when they think they’ll be “cured” with thoughts and prayers and shrine visits?
And the thief could never know that the aged farmer Brahim (Mohammed Nouaimane), and his son Hassam (Bouchaib Semmak) are both desperate for rain a place where the soil “is no longer earth, just dust and rocks,” and resent the shrine for the friends it has displaced from their land.
Not knowing he has anti-shrine allies, the thief summons a cellmate (Salah Ben Saleh) whose nickname in prison was “The Brain,” but which the Thief acknowledges was given him “ironically.” Can two thieves, dressed in black, pull off the caper of distracting or dispensing with the guard so that they can dig up the treasure buried beneath the floor?
First time feature director Alaa Eddine Aljemon finds laughs in the elaborate hand-washing ritual the barber practices, in the way the locals start to regard the guard as a hero for fending off would-be assaults on his shrine, the guard preferring his dog to the company of his “useless” little boy and the “ailments” everybody concerned brings to the new village doctor.
“I’m here for my headaches.” “How long have you had them?” “Twenty years.”
Naturally, the nurse keeps the supply of placebos stocked.
The thieves argue about how far they should go to retrieve the loot, with one willing to do what it takes and the other insisting, “I’m a thief, not a criminal.”
The slight charms here include the story’s droll unpredictability and the utterly deadpan, irony-free performances. But those charms are “slight” above all else. In the poker game that every screen comedy plays, pretty much anybody watching will spot the money — aka “laughs” — that Aljemon leaves on the table. He’s not the Moroccan Keaton, Chaplin or Jacques Tati.
But anybody still “looking for comedy in the Muslim world” can be encouraged by this offbeat and off-the-beaten-path charmer.
MPA Rating: unrated, some violence
Cast: Younes Bouab, Salah Ben Saleh, Bouchaib Semmak, Mohammed Nouaimane,
Anas El Baz, Abdelghani Kitab, Hasan Badidah, Ahmed Yarziz
Credits: Scripted and directed by Alaa Eddine Aljemon. An A-One Films/Match Factory release, on Netflix.
Running time: 1:40
“Snake Eyes” is quintessentially that deflating moment when a bad guy or gal — or a good guy etc. — hisses “This isn’t over.” And your heart sinks because of how dismayingly dull the movie’s been up to that point, with the threat of more to come.
This G.I. Joe universe “origin story” has so little going for it that you give yourself a headache wondering “Who thought this was a good idea?”
This isn’t fan-generated “Give us RYAN REYNOLDS as DEADPOOL,” or anything the universe ordained, just an outgrowth of a Hasbro toy/comic book/TV cartoon property that’s produced crap movies that made money. Somehow.
The screenplay gives us yet another tale of a boy who “sees his father killed” — Google that phrase — and who vows revenge on the killer, after he grows up and becomes Henry Golding of “Crazy Rich Asians” and “The Gentlemen.”
All the kid remembers is that Dad’s killer (Samuel Finzi) stole his overcoat from Elton John and made his father roll a pair of dice to decide his fate. But that keeps the lad going for decades, getting by as a bare knuckle, underground MMA brawler.
Seen that before, maybe sixty times? Google that, too.
Snake Eyes throws in with a yakuza thug (Takehiro Hira), then with a young heir (Andrew Koji) to a Japanese ninja clan, all with an idea of finishing the job of tracking down the Eastern European who rolled the dice and executed his father.
We’re treated to derivative, sleep-inducing “tests” that might allow admission to the clan and intrigues and double-crosses that eventually introduce assorted G.I. Joe characters —
Úrsula Corberó is the Baroness, Samara Weaving is Scarlett.
Snake Eyes appears to be a ninja in training in some scenes, and some supernaturally-gifted master of martial arts and Bugs Bunny physics in many others. Is he a pupil of “Hard Master” (Iko Uwais, not bad) and “Blind Master” (Peter Mensah) or not?
A magical talisman sits at the end of the rainbow — or locked in a super-secure vault in a building no one bothers to lock.
If this picture had anything to it, it might have furthered Golding’s transition from sensitive romantic lead to tough guy. It doesn’t. He manages the fight choreography well enough, and looks at home on the assorted seriously-sharp electric motorcycles (and cars) trotted out for product placement purposes.
What kind of whisky do the villains drink? Stay for the after-credits teaser for that.
Blase villains and seriously underwhelming supporting players flesh out a supporting cast that is in no danger of upstaging our lead.
Sorry for any feelings that get hurt over this, but as source material goes, this feeble-minded garbage makes even the weakest “comic book movie” seem like a loving adaptation of a literary classic.
There isn’t an original idea in “Snake Eyes,” so even if the first big brawl is cool enough to give one false hope, the puerile story leaves our star and the director of “RED” (and “R.I.P.D.”) nowhere to go, even on a cool, whining electric street bike.
Pretty much from the get-go, “Snake Eyes” craps out.
MPA Rating: PG-13 for sequences of strong violence and brief strong language
Cast: Henry Golding, Haruka Abe, Samara Weaving, Andrew Koji, Peter Mensah, Samuel Finzi
Credits: Directed by Robert Schwentke, script by Evan Spiliotopoulus, Anna Waterhouse and Joe Shrapnel. A Paramount release.
Running time: 2:01
Aug. 20 this thriller rolls out. Looks messy and maybe…fun?
Reviews are embargoed until 7pm Aug. 19. Make what you will of that.
Wow. Did not see THAT coming.
The German hijacking thriller “Blood Red Sky” hides its hand so well early on that it’d be a shame to give much of that away. The surprises have a grim delight about them, the violence a righteous, maternal fury.
It’s a clever blend of over-the-top supernatural and “work the problem” logical. It’s well-acted, harrowing and violent. And every now and then, this absurd German thriller is more fun than it has any right to be.
The framing device is a hijacking that’s just ended, the transatlantic jetliner, piloted by a passenger, has touched down in Scotland. There are hijackers still on board, but a little boy (Carl Anton Koch) slips off before the hijackers start negotiating.
And boy, does he have a story to tell. Only he’s not speaking.
A long flashback shows how young Elias boarded the plane with his sickly mother
(Peri Baumeister of “The Last Kingdom”). We’ve seen her don the wig, seen her Skype with a New York doctor. They’re flying from Germany to America for treatment.
The mid-flight assault itself is brutal and coordinated. The hijackers know how to “out” air marshals and aren’t shy about spilling blood. There are “crew members” in on it. There’s a “frame-up” planned.
The leader (Dominic Purcell) is pitiless. But his gang includes at least one psychopath (Alexander Scheer). Let’s call him “Eightball.”
The passengers panic and weep and submit and can’t reason out what the villains’ motive or end game is.
“Our one demand is strictly monetary,” the leader purrs, after the first killings. The passengers have their doubts.
“Everything is fine, sweetie,” Mom assures Elias. He doesn’t believe her. He’s a smart kid trying to form his own escape plan.
And the villains? They haven’t reckoned on sickly Momma Nadja. They haven’t seen her flashback-within-the-flashback. They don’t know she’s been through worse. And now it’s not her trapped in a jetliner with them, it’s a gang of brutes trapped onboard with one fiercely protective Mama.
Director and co-writer Peter Thorwarth, best known for the cautionary parable “The Wave” (a high school exercise in how Nazis take over), and co-writer Stefan Holtz (they did “Not My Day” together) work the genre conventions to contrive their screenplay’s obstacles, and the characters’ solutions to those.
There’s an efficiency that settles in and manifests itself through the problems and the problem solving. The viewer is in on it, because we “get” the genre conventions they’re playing around with, we know why X, Y or Z as a counter-measure will work.
And Baumeister, playing the struggle of maternal instincts vs. more base and horrific impulses, is terrific as Nadja. There is pathos and power, fury and fatalism in this tightly-coiled turn.
Sorry for being so cryptic, but the first big “reveal” here is a winner, and best served cold. Suffice it to say that this is a lot closer to “Snakes on a Plane” or “Into the Night” than “Flightplan” or “Die Hard 2.” Kind of a send-up, but serious as a heart-attack.
If gory genre pics with subtitles (its in German and English with subtitles, or dubbed into English) don’t scare you off, “Blood Red Sky” could be just the ticket.
MPA Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, profanity
Cast: Peri Baumeister, Carl Anton Koch, Alexander Scheer, Kais Setti, Graham McTavish and Dominic Purcell
Credits: Directed by Peter Thorwarth, script by Stefan Holtz and Peter Horwath. A Netflix release.
Running time: 2:03
No Kyle. No Sting. No Lynch.
This is not your Mom’s “Dune.”
The third crack at Frank Herbert’s sci-fi epic may be the one that delivers its desert planet pre George Lucas, its neo Arabic/Bedouin arid life in space novelty.
“The Five Rules of Success” is a compact, artful and blunt take on an ex-con’s life “outside,” re-entering a world tempered by violence and fraught with the perils of recidivism.
Writer/director/cinematographer and co-editor Orson Oblowitz immerses us in a very-indie drama that covers familiar ground with gritty style and feverish flourishes.
We meet out unnamed “hero” (Santiago Segura) on the day he gets out of Chino, his every worldly possession stuffed into a single cardboard box.
He has a probation officer (Isadora Goreshter) who is full of warnings and reminders that “parole is a privilege… consider yourself on prison vacation, for now.”
He gets an apartment and buys a mattress for the floor. And he lands a job making deliveries for the Olympus, a Greek restaurant owned by a Greek (Jon Sklaroff) willing to give a con a chance, with the “first time you mess up” threat built in.
This is life with zero margin for error.
But this ex-con has plans, and a means of recording his self-motivational musings, “rules of success.” “Rule I), Aim High, be delusional…Rule III), Manifest Goals into Reality: Focus, discipline and perseverance.” He has “Solve et coagula,” a Latin expression for something that must be broken down before they can be built anew.
Our hero faces many obstacles and temptations, such as customers who stiff him on their deliveries, shoving drugs in his hands for payment. His probation officer is drunk on her power, threatening him at every turn. And the boss’s son (Jonathan Howard), a cook at the restaurant, is straight-up bad news, a bad influence who does drugs and runs “errands” for a local gangster (Roger Guenveur Smith).
And then there’s the hero’s haunted past, flashbacks that start as a blur of violence and eventually coalesce into a depressingly familiar “How he got here” story.
The acting is solid, the settings seamy and the messaging both surprising and poignant.
Oblowitz weaves all this into a rough-cut but seamless stream-of-consciousness narrative, taking us into a life lived as a post-prison parable, every familiar pitfall rendered into something fresh, hard and documentary real.
MPA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, drug content, sexual situations, profanity
Cast: Santiago Segura, Jonathan Howard, Jon Sklaroff, Isidora Goreshter and Roger Guenveur Smith.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Orson Oblowitz. An Ambassador Film release (on Amazon July 30).
Running time: 1:23
Movie Nation 