Movie Nation

There is such a thing as making your movie “too topical. “Implanted” is a paranoid thriller about you-know-whats-controlling people’s thoughts and actions. And it is set in 2023, “three years after the global pandemic.”

The pandemic isn’t over yet, and if certain governors and senators anxious to be president get their way, it won’t be gone by then, either.

“Implanted” is also a movie that calls into question the ethics of filmmaking. With a global contagion killing millions, a crisis exacerbated by the cynical preying upon the gullible and conspiracy-minded, is making a movie about “implants,” even if they’re not a part of vaccines (which don’t contain implants, no matter what Tucker/Hannity/OAN and the late night cranks of “Christian” talk radio tell you) a responsible thing to do?

Let’s say “No,” and go from there.

Director and co-writer Fabien Dufils (“add Me,” “1 Buck”) shows us a world where the deranged walking among us just might have these spinal implants that put Siri-like voices in their heads, monitoring their health and well being, making suggestions and small talk, and also controlling their lives and ordering them to kill people.

The program running this operation is called L.E.X.X., and ever since student Sarah (Michelle Girolami) agreed to have it installed, she’s no longer lonely.

L.E.X.X. is marketed as a “personal diagnostic processing chip,” and starts out making suggestions for maximum health benefit, pushing Sarah to “make efforts to live a less stressful lifestyle.”

L.E.X.X. gets personal. “Have you ever been in love?”

L.E.X.X. takes things personally. “If I had feelings, they would be hurt.”

L.E.X.X. talks tough love when Sarah talks back. “Your arrogance is a mask for your insecurity.”

And L.E.X.X. is awfully quick to law down the law. “You do not decide when I reboot…I can make the pain subside but you have to listen to me.” L.E.X.X., being implanted on Sarah’s brain stem, can inflict pain.

“Implanted” is about L.E.X.X.’s agenda, Sarah’s efforts to fight back and the body count that piles up as chattering, over-explaining L.E.X.X. orders thefts and murders.

“I have to erase all evidence from the system.”

Dufils, limited to just Sarah, another implanted person who is manipulated to act as her “handler” (Ivo Velon), her mother and L.E.X.X.’s victims, never manages suspense or much in the way of dramatic tension as Sarah is helpless to fight this manipulative pain-delivery system masquerading as “diagnostics.”

Girolami gets across pain and panic better than scheming, and there simply isn’t enough of the latter to make “Implanted” the least bit interesting. This is no cat and mouse game. It’s just a very annoying digital voice in some poor woman’s head, running her life, making her take other lives.

It helps that L.E.X.X., a voice unidentified in the credits, sounds just like the digital assistant Siri. Other than that, this is “paranoid” in name only, surprising only if you’re paying no attention to considering the only two possible outcomes from the start.

No doubt there will be those who will embrace its “truth” because it’s what they’ve been brainwashed into believing. Sentient cinema lovers should pass this pitiful excuse for a thriller by.

Rating: unrated, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Michelle Girolami, Ivo Velon, Edouard Montoute Martin Ewens, Mark Resnick.

Credits: Directed by Fabien Dufils, scripted by Fabien Dufils and David Bourgie. A Gravitas Ventures release.

Running time: 1:37

Call it James Bond’s greatest hit. That’ll do.

Daniel Craig makes his long-planned exit from his long tenure as Agent 007 a graceful one in “No Time to Die,” a sometimes jokey, often sentimental and occasionally dark outing in the ancient and esteemed series.

Every Bond film is derivative of every other one, at this point. Cary Joji Fukunaga (“Sin Nombre,” “Beasts of No Nation”) leans into that history, giving us a Bond adventure with a hint of “You Only Live Twice,” a whiff of “Moonraker,” bits of a couple of others and a heaping helping of “On Her Majesty’s Secret Service,” perhaps the most underrated film of the lot.

If there was ever any doubt before now, this time out Bond is in love, with the complicated French beauty Madeline (Léa Seydoux). The stakes are a little higher, with the usual intrigues involving Spectre and this year’s version of “What could be worse than Spectre?”

The Russians are back where they belong, as unhelpful and out of the loop, and even in the villain’s corner.

Characters who have died before, in earlier incarnations of the franchise, die again. Lines are recycled to grand effect.

“We have all the time in the world.”

Music is sampled from many a Bond score.

Three generations of Aston Martin own the road, and product-placement Land Rovers take it on the chin. The bad guys are forever chasing Mr. Bond and rolling over their Rovers.

Great locations, from Jamaica and Italy to Norway and something Faroe passing for a northern Japanese/Southern Russian island, are featured to great effect.

Everybody grabs a drink and knocks it back, especially Bond and the bossman, M (Ralph Fiennes), a bit of business so often repeated that characters insult each other over how many scotches, martinis and what not, are imbibed.

And Craig, weathered, perhaps appreciative of his Big Break and certainly schooled by the experience of the amusing “Knives Out,” finally does something he promised with the very first film. He lightens up.

Bond meets a helpful woman in Jamaica (Lashonna Lynch) who turns out to be a Double-0 agent, one who knows his reputation.

“I have a thing for old wrecks,” is as flirtatious as this one gets.

What must be the longest “opening gambit,” that killer first scene that sets the tone and opens the film, has a dark back story about a child in jeopardy, “Hanna” style, in a remote wintry chalet. We then awkwardly catch up with “retired” Bond, still a little hung up over the dead Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) from his “Casino Royale” days, but deeply in love with Madeline now.

If only he could trust her. Might she have Spectre ties? Is there something else he’s not telling her in this enchanting Matera, Basilicata Italy, where they burn “wishes” and “secrets” written on paper as part of some festival they visit via Aston Martin DB-5.

But Bond’s past catches up with him. And next thing he knows, he’s listening to a pitch not from his old paycheck — Her Majesty’s Secret Service — but from Felix Leiter of the CIA (Jeffrey Wright). The “It’ll be like old times” deal gets Bond into a trap with Spectre in Cuba.

Good thing he’s teamed with this “three weeks experience” CIA asset, Paloma. She’s played by Craig’s adorable “Knives Out” co-star Ana De Armas, wrapped in a slinky engineering marvel of a cocktail dress and holds her own with the battered old “Shaken, not stirred” Brit. She is a funny, feisty delight, the first “Bond girl” of the Craig era to win that label.

The new murderous megalomaniac here is played by Oscar winner Rami Malek, and he’s more interesting than menacing, a second tier Bond villain, I have to say. So let’s bring back Oscar winner Christoph Waltz as Ernst Stavro Blofeld, in heavy facial prosthetic makeup and presented — in prison — as the Hannibal Lecter of Spectre.

There’s a Russian emigre (David Dencik) who has been designing DNA targeting weapons of mass destruction for MI-6. But he’s Russian, so there’s no trusting him.

M (Fiennes) is drinking as much as Bond, Moneypenny is competent and concerned and trying to get everybody working together and Q (Ben Whishaw) is in a huff because tonight’s date (with a man) has to be put off for spy business.

Lots of travel and much mayhem ensue, car/motorcycle chases, shootouts, a kidnapping of a child (a startlingly unaffected toddler) and a climax in the designer villain’s lair we’ve come to expect from every Bond picture since the first.

Much has been made of bringing “Fleabag’s” Phoebe Waller-Bridge in to script some wit and heft to the female characters. But the multi-handed screenplay has a certain ungainliness, even if its just-under-three-hours runtime tends to pass quickly and lightly. That opening gambit is overlong, unwieldy and something of a downer.

While the Craig Bond films have been topical and more firmly footed in reality than those of his predecessors, I have to save I haven’t warmed to any of them and the best of them, “Casino Royale” and “Spectre,” don’t seem to be aging that well. The “fun” was missing. The violence tends towards first-person shooter video game glib.

But this time Craig, in his final turn in the role, makes Bond not just vulnerable (he’s managed that before) but someone with a sense of humor.

Maybe “Knives Out” loosened him up. It’s that wink, here and there, that makes “No Time to Die” stand out. And that wink makes his final film as the character more fun, and ensures that even as he’s replaced, we’ll remember him with fondness, leaving us with a smile as he goes.

Rating: PG-13 for sequences of violence and action, some disturbing images, brief strong language and some suggestive material.

Cast: Daniel Craig, Ana de Armas, Rami Malek, Naomie Harris, Jeffrey Wright, Lashonna Lynch,
Léa Seydoux, Ben Whishaw, Christoph Waltz and Ralph Fiennes

Credits: Directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga, scripted by Neil Purvis, Robert Wade, Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Cary Joji Fukunaga. An MGM release.

Running time: 2:43

Most critics are seeing the last James Bond film starring Daniel Craig in the same general screening window, which is how it should be.

Let the record reflect that many critics aren’t getting to see the “Venom” sequel, because Sony remembers how bad the first film was, and so do we. Cowards.

But it’s a great day to see Bond-James-Bond in the cinema.

Yes, it’s nearly three hours long. But with an Oscar-winner sprinkled cast and so many recurring characters getting face time (some of those folks will be replaced, if not all of them, when a new Bond is cast) and a Billie Eilish theme song, well there’s no such thing as too much of a Bond thing.

For the love of all that’s holy, LET BRITNEY GO.

Until this happens, until the conservatorship seemingly run for the benefit of Britney Spears‘ family, until their threats of “taking away” her kids, until the lawyer she’s selected and hired to look out for HER interest wins her case, there will be no peace.

Until that happens, we’re going to get one damning documentary after another about her virtual imprisonment under California’s alarming conservatorship laws, about her “best job in show business” dad Jamie, who benefits the most from her conservatorship, and more questions about her actual mental state and fitness to look after her children and herself.

Netflix’s “Britney Vs Spears” covers some of the same ground as “Framing Britney Spears,” the Emmy nominated New York Times-produced documentary from last winter, and probably repeats and shares some sources with the followup “Controlling Britney Spears” doc (botrh directed by Samantah Stark) the Times has done for Hulu.

“Britney Vs Spears” has several characters mostly-vilified off-camera in the earlier Times film. It is built around those fresh interviews, and the reporting of Rolling Stone writer Jenny Eliscu, and everything Spears herself has publicly said and fumed about in court in the months since “Framing Britney” came out.

Spears’ manager has resigned. Her conservator-appointed lawyer quit last summer. And mounting pressure and public outrage and legal maneuvering by Britney’s new lawyer caused Jamie Spears to resign as her conservator and recommend that his little involuntary servitude arrangement with his rich and talented daughter be terminated.

So why see another — OK, TWO more documentaries on this subject? Because documentaries are what pushed this outrageous and admittedly salacious and not that important in the grand scheme of things scandal back into the public eye.

And “Britney Vs Spears” has some of the most damning material yet — financial arrangements, a cache of conservatorship documents obtained by Eliscu and filmmaker Erin Lee Carr that includes a dubious psychiatric opinion on which the “permanent” conservatorship rested.

That “retired geriatric psychiatrist,” Dr. James Spar, sits down on camera, laughs off direct questions about this specific case (privilege, understandable) and comes off like a shrink-for-sale.

Assorted vilified figures like the “friend” and “former manager” Sam Lufti, of “protect Britney from SAM” rumors and conservatorship directives, get to relate their involvement and their efforts to “free” Britney, and thus come off better than they have in the press.

The portrait of the singer that emerges here shows her as a lot more articulate and defiant, but also isolated and insecure to the point where a photographer who pushes through a crush of his fellow paparazzi to help her gas up her Mercedes becomes someone she takes to, “trusts” and then dates, followed by a cinematographer for an MTV doc who also became the next fresh, “trusted” confidante.

The phrase “no one she can trust” comes up a lot, and that is reinforced here. You can almost see why her family frets over who has contact, who gets to date her and her having any more children because these odd mismatches follow one after the other, from Kevin Federline on down the line. They seem rash, impulsive and a tad desperate.

And then you remember the bubble she’s stuck in, and the family’s role in maintaining it, and grind your teeth over their role in creating this isolated adult who grasps at anyone who might help her break free of their control or who just treats her as a human being.

One attempt to gain outside counsel was facilitated by reporter Eliscu, who gets emotional relating passing a new lawyer’s contract to Spears in a restaurant restroom. Spears is that desperate, and people who meet her and get to know her all seem to want to help. She’s like that.

Director Carr and her editor do a brilliant job of taking us inside the paparazzi frenzy that poor Spears was subjected to, a blur of hand-held camera footage taken by a pap mid-mob, almost constantly for years on end.

“Britney Vs Spears” adds just enough to the story to be worth the obsessed-viewer’s trouble, and let’s face it, they weren’t going to abandon the film just because the less-insider New York Times scooped them. “Vs” has enough scoops of its own to merit release.

But let’s hope this last blast of docs is the end of it, and that Spears, for good or for ill, gains control of her life, her person, her career and her future once and for all. And that maybe she has the good sense to walk away from it, at least until Hollywood buys the rights to her biopic.

Rating: TV-MA, profanity

Cast: Britney Spears, Jamie Spears, Sam Lufti, Adnan Ghalib, Felicia Culotta, Jenny Eliscu and Erin Lee Carr.

Credits: Directed by Erin Lee Carr, reported by Jenny Eliscu. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:34

Somber, sedate, downbeat, thoughtful — all words that apply to the Manhattan Project movie memoir “Adventures of a Mathematician,” a Polish-German co-production filmed in English. Sadly, they sugar-coat how drab and dull this drama about one Polish emigre’s experience of World War II and the moral dilemma he faced when working on “the most gruesome weapon in the universe.”

Philippe Tlokinski (“The Resistance Fighter”) plays Stanislaw Ulam, an accomplished Polish Jew who emigrated to the U.S. in the mid-1930s, and was eventually recruited to the Manhattan Project by his Hungarian physicist John “Johnny” Von Neumann (Fabian Kociecki). That’s where the mathematician was assigned to work with Edward Teller (Joel Basman) and became a key figure in the development of the hydrogen bomb.

Not that they got along while doing it.

“Respect seems to be a word ABSENT from your repertoire!”

Alas for the film, “urgency” seems to be a word absent — in English or German (“dringlichkeit”) — from writer-director Thor Klein’s repertoire.

That little outburst from the notoriously tetchy Teller is almost the only time anyone so much as raises his or her voice in this stunning flat drama. It’s a bloodless enterprise where little is made of the high stakes, the rush to develop the bomb, the loss of family when Russian occupied Poland was invaded by the Germans in June of 1941.

Klein has Ulam call home from his Princeton job to quietly tell his sister he’s deposited money in the bank for them to leave. She calmly agrees. They chat some more, and…

Ulam meets a nice French woman (Esther Garrel) and aspiring writer, Francoise.

“I am from a Jewish family,” she tells him. “There is a lot to write about these days.”

His abrupt “proposal” is pragmatically sound, and every bit as romantic as that seems.

Even the debates among the assorted scientists in Los Alamos have little heat.

“We are scientists, not gods!” I hesitate to add an exclamation point there, as it’s barely played with that level of vehemence,

Ulam loved playing with cards, using them to teach calculus and mentioning “betting against the house” as being the long odds of making a working H-bomb. NOTHING is done with that, no cool card playing demonstrations, zip.

The lead is mild-mannered, showing us a man who internalized everything, from the staggering death toll of the bombs he helped make possible to the birth of his child. The supporting cast is likewise sublimated.

The history is sloppy and the depiction of it lackluster. Ulam skips the July 1945 “Trinity” bomb test, stands outside his apartment and smokes and Klein can’t bother making this look like Los Alamos — at all — or with showing how the bomb lit up the night sky. As he depicts Ulam walking the campus at Princeton one fall day — leaves tumbling everywhere — upon learning that the Germans invaded the other half of Poland, and it actually happened in June, well, “details” aren’t in the guy’s repertoire either.

And the debate over “Why two bombs?” is the sort of gross oversimplification that makes for mediocre drama and dishonest history.

The only consolation in these seriously unadventurous “Adventures” is that Christopher Nolan has announced the Manhattan Project as his next film.

Rating: unrated

Cast: Philippe Tlokinski, Esther Garrel, Fabian Kociecki, Ryan Gage and Joel Basman

Credits: Scripted and directed by Thor Klein. A Samuel Goldwyn release.

Running time: 1:43

I am reading that right,. Child actor studying to be a director falls in love, crosses paths with Bradley Cooper who appears to be then-Streisand squueze, hairdresser/producer Jon Peters?

Quite the cast. Nov 26.

The voice is fractured, fragile and intimate — “plaintive, earthy and insinuating” an early Village Voice critic called it.

Bob Dylan got even closer to the mark by stating the obvious about Karen Dalton and who she was plainly imitating with her pitch, her halting, emotive delivery. “She sings like Billie Holiday and plays (guitar, among other instruments) like Jimmy Reed.”

“Karen Dalton: In My Own Time” is a documentary remembrance of a folk star who never quite was. Texas born, Oklahoma-raised, Greenwich Village-adored Karen Dalton showed up in New York at almost the same time as Dylan, already married twice and just 21, eventually towing her toddler Abbe around to the folk clubs where she played — Cafe Wha? was the most famous — letting her audience be her babysitter.

She didn’t write much of her own music, which held her back, and didn’t get a record deal until Woodstock producer Michael Lang was offered his own record label by Paramount and he signed her, years too late for a folk singer to break out, even if the records — one of which was titled “In My Own Time” — had captured her magic.

Listen to this Tim Hardin song that Rod Stewart, among others, made famous. No, this version didn’t come out on LP during her lifetime. Like many, Dalton was only truly “discovered” posthumously.

Friends, colleagues and others remember her as the “only authentic” working class/dirt farm folkie to haunt the Greenwich Village of that era. She grew up poor, married at 15, never finished high school and rarely prettied herself up for her shows.

She had two missing teeth from getting into the middle of a fight between two boyfriends (one of them interviewed here), shunned makeup, “a Bohemian” who put her daughter through a childhood of no-real-home hardship sleeping on the floors of friend’s apartments as she covered songs by Woody Guthrie, George Jones, Tim Hardin and others and made a name for herself during the glory days of New York folk.

She couldn’t get along with John Phillips long enough for them to build a folk act with two other friends. He rounded up others and started The Mamas and the Papas.

Her career was marked by almosts and “If she’d only shown up” for shows whose rehearsals so exhausted her she almost never did, or for tour dates (Lang had her opening for Santana).

Nick Cave was among those who discovered her, long after Dalton had flamed out. But some of those interviewed in this Richard Peete and Robert Yapkowitz hasten to say that we shouldn’t judge what “she might have been” because her career is so incomplete.

A couple of records, a little performance and rehearsal footage, and a public radio interview from the era are almost all this “somewhat depressive individual” managed to produce that survives.

But the filmmakers tease us with the diary entries, with the poetry she rarely set to music, using animation to tell her story when testimonials or that long radio chat won’t do.

“Wait’ll I get my gold tooth,” she boasts to Bob Fass, her Pacifica radio interviewer (who recently died). But she never did. Poverty and impulsiveness and a roaming, impatient personality probably cast her fate before drugs ever entered the picture.

But of course they did.

Still, “In My Own Time” gives us a taste of what might have been much more than a soulful novelty act, an American Original who might have been too “authentic” for her time, if not for ours.

Rating: unrated, discussions of drug abuse

Cast: Karen Dalton (radio interviews), Nick Cave, Lacy J. Dalton, Abbe Baird, Richard Tucker, Becky Baird, Vanessa Carlton, Peter Walker, Hunt Middleton, Peter Stamfel, Rick Moody and Michael Lang

Credits: Directed by Richard Peete and Robert Yapkowitz. A Greenwich Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:26

Joachin Trier’s dramedy is about a young woman’s confused, indecision love life and how she mismanages it and her planned over four years. Will she get it together, or will she be shamed by the label that is this Norwegian film’s cutesie title?

A Cornelia Funke (“Inkheart”) novel allowed a German/Dutch animation operation and Netflix to elbow their way into “lads who ride dragons” stories with “Firedrake the Silver Dragon,” a movie that goofs on “How to Train Your Dragon” and makes itself “How to Train Your Dragon” adjacent at all times, and in many ways.

But this decently-animated, exposition-heavy, laugh-starved adventure farce never comes close to even the weakest “Train Your Dragon” film and TV moments. There’s little heart and little else to recommend it, even if your wee ones never quite got their fill of dragons, flying on them and the like.

There’s barely even any Scots accents in this story of dragons, humans, pixies, a basilisk, dwarves and their ilk.

A shadow cutout animation opening tells us another version of the myth that there was a day when “humans and dragons lived in perfect harmony.” But that was long ago. In the present, dragons live in a secluded colony, hiding from humans, listening to tales of long ago from the grizzled, toothless Slatebeard (voiced by Peter Marinker).

But human encroachment — strip mining, environmental degradation, basically Kentucky without the horses — is closing in. The dragons have to do something.

Young Firedrake (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) and his brownie (pixie) pal Sorrel (Felicity Jones) sneak out to seek help, to find this mythic place called “The Rim of Heaven.” But first, they stop off in the city.

That’s where they crash a “How to Train Your Dragon” premiere, and fetch a gap-toothed teen fan (Freddie Highmore). Firedrake takes the caped cosplayer at his word when he, shocked at meeting a real dragon, describes himself as a “dragon rider.”

The liar/hustler joins them on their quest, which has them meet an Australian scientist (David Brooks) who “saves” rare mythic creatures and keeps them on a preserve, a “mighty djinn (Nonso Anozie) who is more trouble than he’s worth and an Indian researcher (Meera Syal) who knows all about dragons and dragon lore.

Along the way, we learn the dragon rider’s “secret” and Firedrake’s hidden shame. Let’s just say they call him “Lame Flame” back home.

And then there’s the steampunk “draconoid” Nettlebrand (Patrick Stewart) created long ago for the express purpose of killing off dragons, now on their trail because he’d love to refresh his taste for fiery, flying flesh.

The jokes are of the cell-phone “How will I communicate with you?” “SKYPE me!” and consulting “the all know oracle…the Internet” variety.

The “How to Train Your Dragon” riff is cute, but just reminds you of the earlier, better film and its inferior sequels and TV series. The German writer Ms. Funke published her “Dragon Writer” book 13 years before “How to Train Your Dragon” hit theaters, so the time to litigate who was stealing whose ideas is long past.

The only times I laughed were at the Indian scenes which had a playful quality the rest of the film lacked.

“Dragon Rider” as was this film’s working title (perhaps until Universal’s lawyers showed up) starts out dizzy, stumbles into boring as the exposition — all these new lands and new creatures are introduced — keeps going on and on, with little character development, no laughs and generic action beats.

Unless your kids need a digital babysitting session, I’d skip this.

Rating: TV-Y7

Cast: The voices of Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Felicity Jones, Freddie Highmore, Nonso Anozie, Meera Syal and Patrick Stewart

Credits: Directed by Tomer Eshed, scripted by Johnny Smith, based on the novel by Cornelia Funke. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:33

Fantasy with a Gaiman edge, delivered in an 11 episode series.

Looks glossy and smart, worth a peek