Hawke plays brother roles in this Nov. 19 thriller set in Rome as it faces a terrorist bombing.
Ferrara hasn’t decamped from Italy, but he’s not working with his muse, Willem Dafoe, and he’s not making another indulgent navel gazing drama. Remember he did “King of New York” and “Bad Lieutenant.” Let’s hope he does.
The Polish thriller “Operation Hyacinth” (“Hiacynt”) is based on an infamous piece of Communist history, Poland’s systemic police harassment, arrest, documentation and blackmail of the country’s homosexual population in the mid-1980s.
If it was meant to create a database of Every Gay in Poland, it was a Polish joke. Some 11,000 names are all they came up with. But as a monstrous, violent violation of civil rights, it’s hard not to wonder if Nazi sympathizers were never rooted out of the “militia” — Poland’s national police.
The movie director Piotr Domalewski (“Silent Night”) and first-feature screenwriter Marcin Ciaston conjured out of that is an undercover cop chases a conspiracy tale, a somewhat “inevitable” story that invites application of that reviewing cliche, “solid.”
As in, the execution, acting and chilling Soviet Bloc production design are more impressive than any surprise “Hyacinth” struggles to come up with.
It’s just reminiscent enough of William Friedkin’s controversial undercover-in-the-gay-community 1980 film “Cruising” for the comparison to pop to mind in anybody watching “Hyacinth.”
Militia sergeants Robert (Tomasz Zietek) and Nogas (Jakub Wieczorek) are a crack team, with younger Robert the brains and Nogas the bulk. Robert, son of a government security minister (Marek Kalita), is nobody’s idea of a tough guy. But thanks to his connections, they’re the gruff boss’s (Miroslaw Zbrojewicz) favorites.
That’s how they’re handed a murder case, a “well to do” victim found in a Warsaw park close to “The Mushroom,” the men’s room, a favorite cruising ground for the city’s gay men.
To “make this go away, quickly (in Polish with subtitles, or dubbed into English), they’ll need the help of the “Operation Hiacynt” team, which has files, a record of gay haunts and a squad to help them round up suspects to blackmail or torture for “information.”
As they wade into this world, Robert is put off by the systemic injustice, and by his partner’s casual cruelty, brutality that leads to one arrested informant’s suicide.
When Robert goes his own way with the investigation, undercover, developing college lad Arek (Hubert Milkowski) as a source, other “suicides” come to light, connections are made and the higher ups announce that “The case is closed.”
As his Dad passes on warnings and his partner moves on, Robert digs into the case with a little help from his file clerk fiance (Adrianna Chlebicka) and we’re left to wonder how far Robert will go to maintain his cover, what makes this case so important to him and where this tangled web will lead him and us.
We’re “meant” to wonder that, anyway. That’s what I’m talking about when I say “inevitable.”
Zietek, seen in the Polish drama “Corpus Christi,” gives Robert a subtle intensity that masks some of what the character sees as his reasons for doggedly pursuing this case. He’s a lone seeker of justice and protector of a vulnerable population. But even this “protected” insider can’t see a payoff in taking on a corrupt and murderously homophobic system.
The script doesn’t adequately develop any of the other characters, although much-credited TV actress Chlebicka nicely suggests a woman whose seemingly narrow horizons and limited ambitions aren’t her whole story.
Kalita’s father figure lets a little sensitivity show, but not much. This is a commissar who knows what’s what and just what he’ll have to do if his son crosses one line too many.
“Operation Hyacinth” isn’t particularly progressive or surprising by Hollywood standards. But the mere fact newly nationalist Poland is opening this historical homophobic can of worms and putting it on Netflix counts for something. They probably never showed “Cruising” on that side of the Iron Curtain.
Rating: TV-MA, violence, sex, nudity
Cast: Tomasz Zietek, Hubert Milkowski, Marek Kalita, Adrianna Chlebicka and Jakub Wieczorek.
Credits: Directed by Piotr Domalewski, scripted by Marcin Ciaston. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:46
Peter Jackson finally finished his deep dive into Beatles vault footage from their mad rush to finish “Let It Be,” the album and a TV special meant to accompany it.
“Get Back” was the album’s ethos, getting the quarrelsome band back to their way of working under a deadline, a unifying “pressure” guiding them, according to Beatles historians, mostly quoting Paul McCartney. They even had roughed out a different LP with that as the title tune, and scrapped some of that as “Let It Be” shaped up in the sessions, filmed for a TV special.
Candid composition footage, rehearsal footage, arguments, jokes, and evey now and then a hint that they’re making their swan song. They broke up when the album came out.
This series was, as originally pitched by Jackson, a single film to be released theatrically.
Now it’s a three part series “event” meaning he’ll get to use more footage. Probably cut down on his editing it into a theatrical cut, too.
Nov. 25, Beatlemania streams on Disney +.
A missing person, suggestions of crime and down-and-out working poor trailer-park Angelinos struggling to get by — let’s label “The Cleaner” an indie film noir and see if I can make that stick.
This quirky, laid-back and downbeat drama is a star vehicle for King Orba, whose credits cover a wide range of jobs, positions, “additional crew” and the occasional acting job (“The Mighty Orphans,” TV’s “Stargirl”). He co-wrote it with first-time feature director Erin Elder and plays Buck, a broke 50ish house cleaner who lives in an RV next to the trailer housing his retired “piss and vinegar” house cleaner mother (Shelley Long).
Buck’s barely getting by on a good day, pedaling an old beach bike to cleaning jobs from a client list he inherited from his mother Sharon..
It wasn’t always like this, though we get the impression it was never much better. Buck used to sell RVs, like the one he lives in. But something happened.
At least his make-ends-meet struggle leaves him just enough cash to score a little weed from his younger friend, James (James Paxton of TV’s “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”). James is all about making his own marijuana blends and giving them cute names — “marketing.”
Buck juggles work and keeping an eye on his medicated, beer-loving Mom, and not very successfully. Their new neighbor Becky (Eden Brolin of TV’s “Yellowstone”) might help out. It’s the least she can do after she gets Mom drunk at her trailer-warming party.
Then this new client, Carlene (Lynda Carter, TV’s “Wonder Woman”), an elderly retired singer, springs this on Buck.
“I don’t want you to clean my house, Buck. I want you to find my son.”
Buck, a guy without a car, without a computer, without a cell-phone, is supposed to locate an estranged adult son with “problems,” somebody who doesn’t want to be found in one of the largest cities in the Americas.
Even with a little help from James, who at least knows how to use social media, and Buck’s cop-brother Craig (Faust Checho), Buck is plainly “not qualified” to do this and is out of his depth.
But the singer favors him with a song, and shoves cash in his hand. It’d be rude not to try.
“The Cleaner” is so laid back it’s on the Matthew McConaughey “J.K. Livin'” spectrum.
The dialogue is spare, the “clues” Buck picks up on simple and obvious as he pedals his bike around East L.A., following up, masking his innocuous requests (“You seen this guy?”) behind unnecessary mystery because he’s probably seen the way the gumshoes do it in old movies or “The Rockford Files.”
The screenplay has just enough peripheral complications to keep things interesting. Cop brother Craig is almost estranged from his mother. He tries to bring his fiance (Soleil Moon Frye) to meet her, and that dinner goes from awkward to “trailer trash” ugly in a flash. Neighbor Becky is in an abusive relationship.
The script’s grace notes include a clever way of introducing Craig. Buck comes home to find his mother’s turned her ankle at Becky’s beer bust. He goes to get her pain med prescription filled, learns the medicine isn’t covered by Medicaid and winds up shoplifting batteries for her TV remote. He’s caught.
The cop who picks him up starts in with “Aren’t you ashamed?” Then we find out he’s his brother.
“The Cleaner” is the sort of movie you can make if you spend a lot of time on film sets and are personable enough to start conversations with the stars. Luke Wilson starred in “The Mighty Orphans” with Orb in a supporting role. Hey Luke, wouldya do me a solid?
Wilson, long a champion of indie cinema, signs on for a couple of scenes as a house cleaning client.
Veteran character players M.C. Gainey and Mike Starr join Long and Carter and Moon Frye and Shiloh Fernandez (of “Evil Dead,” playing the missing son here) and Sean Penn and Robin Wright’s son Hopper Penn in a cast whose assembly would be a fun tale to tell, and who ensured “The Cleaner” got financed.
And all that pays off with a quietly-compelling mystery set in a milieu that’s grittier than most of the characters living in it are willing to admit, struggling people who are colorful, believable and (mostly) relatable.
It’s not a polished jewel, but even in the rough “The Cleaner” shines, more proof that you don’t need to limit yourself to horror to get your first film made.
Rating: unrated, violence, drug abuse
Cast: King Orba, Shelley Long, Eden Brolin, Lynda Carter, Soleil Moon Frye, Mike Starr, M.C. Gainey and Luke Wilson.
Credits: Directed by Erin Elders, scripted by Erin Elders and King Obra. A 1091 release.
Running time: 1:33
Well-crafted but not particularly well thought-out, “Halloween Kills” is a hot mess of a horror homage.
David Gordon Green’s take on venerable slasher franchise has ambition, an attempt at intellectual heft and one of the most empathetic performances of the great Judy Greer’s career. What it lacks is frights. What it traffics in is nostalgia, a warm feeling for John Carpenter’s 1978 horror classic. And it all but murders that.
The Scott Teems (“That Evening Sun”) script travels along two timelines –1978 and 2018 — and weighs in on our troubled era as Haddenfield, Illinois descends into mob rule and sloganeering mob violence.
No, Michael Myers hasn’t changed masks as he enters his AARP years. But the Trumpism analogy is right there in the open, with no less than Anthony Michael Hall (“Sixteen Candles” to “The Dead Zone” to “The Goldbergs”) playing a child survivor of that “Halloween” night long ago, leading the enraged citizenry in “Evil Dies Tonight!” chants as he sends vigilantes far and wide, hunting for the masked mass murderer who is literally changing the town’s demographics in a single night.
This is a “Frankenstein” village, assembling to meet a threat, but ranting and raving and following their worst instincts. All that’s missing are the Tiki torches.
The story begins as Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), that babysitter of yore for kids like Tommy (Hall), now “that crazy lady that almost got killed,” is wheeled into a hospital, gut-stabbed and still screaming “We GOT him. Shot him in the FACE. BURNED him alive!” She’s sure they finally shot, clubbed, stabbed and burned Michael Myers to death.
Her daughter (Greer) isn’t relieved. And when others start showing up — a bleeding-out Officer Hawkins (Will Patton) and corpses — daughter Karen starts shouting what we already know from the film’s dull “first kills,” what the TV news is in the process of confirming. Myers isn’t dead. He’s staggered out of that burning house, wiped out a fire brigade, impaled and gutted a teen or two and shown us he’s just getting warmed up.
Nobody listens as Karen pleads and demands police protection for her mother in the hospital, or that her daughter (Andi Matichak) at least stick around, help keep watch over her grandma.
But Tommy, who we see tell “The Haddenfield Boogeyman” story as part of a bar talent show this All Hallow’s Eve, has other ideas. Hall takes on the “Dead Zone” scowl of a man scarred by trauma, enraged into fanaticism by this latest twist in that murderer’s story. He picks up a baseball bat and rallies the citizenry.
Flashbacks take us back to Tommy, Laurie and others 50ish adults’ (Kyle Richards, Richard Longstreet) childhood memories of that awful Halloween of 1978. We see the worst night of Officer Hawkins’ life (Thomas Mann plays Patton’s character as a rookie).
New characters are introduced, set up to become someone the audience might root for, and pitilessly ventilated with knives of every description, without suspense or frights. As we hear the random giggles of slasher film fans feigning appreciation of this fireman’s saw slaughter or that pithy punchline — “This is for Doctor LOOMIS, Michael!” — punctuated by Michael killing the speaker, “Halloween Kills” pretty much goes to hell.
The idea here, aside from giving this renewed franchise some topical/socio-political relevance, it to make an “Empire Strikes Back” chapter in this planned trilogy. There’s a hopelessness and sadness that permeates every scene that doesn’t have mouthy tweens playing pranks on the gay couple (Scott MacArthur and Michael McDonald) now living in Michael Myers’ old house. Greer’s now-ironically named “Karen” embodies this.
Karen weeps for her murdered husband, fears for her hunted, wounded mother and her vengeance-seeking teen daughter and despairs at “what Michael Myers has done to us” — fomented an unthinking, chanting mob, misled by fear and ignorance.
Much respect for the director of “Pineapple Express” and the franchise-renewing “Halloween” of 2018 and the screenwriter for trying, but this misshapen, unfocused blunder is never more than a space-filler franchise installment, killing time and a whole lot of Haddenfield until the third film comes along.
The flashback references but doesn’t use Carpenter’s iconic film or even get a firm handle on its style in recreating the slaughter way back when. Finding a Donald Pleasance impersonator is just one of the crimes against cinema of those scenes.
Curtis isn’t the only actor from the original seen in this sequel, but not all of those cast as “surviving kids who grew up and hit middle age in Haddenfield” are very interesting actors. And Curtis, burdened with heavy-handed sermonizing speeches at the film’s conclusion, wipes away some of the goodwill the 2018 “Halloween” won her.
The film’s flurry of close-ups, a view of a fireman facing death by fireaxe from inside his glass-covered helmet, can be arresting.
But you can’t help but sense Green, who used to make self-conscious, sensitive and geography-specific indie films like “All the Real Girls,” “Undertow” and “Snow Angels” until the New York Times profiled him and noted that he’d never made a movie that made money, isn’t wholly invested in this genre or this subject. The director of “Joe” and “Prince Avalanche” and TV series like the hilarious “Vice Principals” seems to more interested in commenting on horror than actually delivering frights.
Even die-hard horror fans can’t help but notice “Halloween Kills” stumbles through the nostalgia that made Green’s “Halloween” reboot work, and that “Kills” isn’t scary in the least. Is he laughing with you as you giggle as the many ways Michael Myers kills (not that inventive), or is he saying “Dear Dr. Fauci, here’s what happened to American empathy for others” with his latest?
The fact that Green is in pre-production on “Halloween Ends,” the “finale,” and “Hellraiser” and “The Exorcist” should give Green fans, horror fans and Green himself pause.
But at least the New York Times will be happy.
Rating: R for strong bloody violence throughout, grisly images, language and some drug use
Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis, Anthony Michael Hall, Judy Greer, Andi Matichak, Thomas Mann, Kyle Richards, Dylan Arnold and Will Patton
Credits: Directed by David Gordon Green, scripted by Scott Teems, based on the John Carpenter/Debra Hill films and characters. A Universal release.
Running time: 1:46
Scott Adkins, Ashley Green and Ryan Phillippe star in this Nov. 5 release, which the CIA and the Navy SEALS trying to avert a dirty bomb disaster.
The title also refers to this being a story filmed in “one take” (simulated).
Looking forward to this one, mainly because of the history of the franchise and Jamie Lee and Judy Greer.
Bitterly disappointed that this Australian trailer wasn’t dubbed into…Australian.
Why would actor, writer and director Miles Doleac (“Hallowed Ground,” “The Dinner Party”) set his latest horror fiasco in Der Black Forest of Deutschland? Did he meet folks he’d eventually cast in it at a continuing education class, Conversational German?
Just a guess. But there is no guesswork, or mistaking the sounds of second year community college German from the villains of “Demigod,” a disastrously dull dud of a thriller that makes you question the origins of the word “inept,” because “ept” never figures into it.
Robin (Rachel Nichols of TV’s “Man in the High Castle”) and Leo (Yohance Myles of TV’s “First Family”) are a couple checking out her late grandfather’s Black Forest home when they stumble into the legend — or a cult that’s really into it — of Cernunnos, “Supreme hunter” in this forest according to forest lore.
Not for a while, mind you, For nearly half an hour, we’re bored to tears by them wandering around the house, admiring grandpa’s stuffed critters, gutted critters and antique gun collection, eventually stumbling into Mr. “Yah, I knew your grandvatter,” the hunter Arthur Fuchs (Doleac in front of the camera). He briefs them on these “haunted woods” and the “monster” who lives therein.
This demigod/demon was “der lord of de before,” Arthur intones in Olde Hollywood Germanic English. “Before men began to wreck ZE VORLD!”
People disappear here and “It iz as if ze voods SWALLOWED zem whole!”
The couple is then attacked and kidnapped in the dark of night by this cult, mostly women, in one of the lamest kidnapping scenes ever staged in front of a camera.
But that’s nothing to what happens, slowly and dully, to Robin, Abe, Arthur and others rounded up by that cult and tied up in what looks to be a pine forest in the rural American South.
“Let ze disemBOWELing commenze!” Because they must make things ready for their “hunter” lord’s return.
“Ve vill repay hiss comink mit fresh game und sport!”
Every act of violence against the group of strangers tied up in the woods is met with an awful under-reaction by one and all.
Every line is worse than the one before, with those deigning to speak German sounding as if they’re not quite finished with Hooked on Der Phonics.
“Demigod” is awful, so bad that I grow weary of mocking it. Approach at your own peril.
Rating: unrated, bloody violence, entrails and whatnot, and profanity
Cast: Rachel Nichols, Yohance Myles and Miles Doleac.
Credits: Directed by Miles Doleac, scripted by Miles Doleac and Michael Donovan Horn.
Running time: 1:34
The French leader, WWII hero and long-serving president of post-war France is remembered in his first blush of fame, trying to keep France in the fight while badgering Churchill for aid and standing in London after the French surrender in 1940.
Lambert Wilson has the title, role, with Tim Wilson as Churchill and Gabriel Le Bomin (“Fragments of Anton”) behind the camera. “De Gaulle” opens Oct. 22.
“She Paradise” arrives in North America just as the first snows hit — mid-November.
A little island patois and Jamaican music, post-Marley, and some seriously sexy dancers.
Movie Nation 