Movie Nation

A thriller with disappearances at it’s heart and a “Three Billboards”like heroine.

Robyn Lively stars in this festival award winner on its way to a theater)streamer near you.

A rancher, his brother and the brother’s wife are the heart of this drama.

Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Keith Carradine and Thomasin McKenzie also star in this Jane Champion film for Netflix film, slated for a December awards season release

You might remember the end of this story. A murderous Saudi sheik buys a mysterious “lost” painting by Leonardo da Vinci for a king’s ransom and tries to get it wholly legitimized by loaning it to the Louvre Museum to display alongside a painting it somewhat resembles, the “Mona Lisa.”

There’s an uproar, and…

“The Lost Leonardo” engagingly takes us on the circuitous path this painting of Jesus, “Salvator Mundi” (savior of the world) took to get to that moment. It’s about a modest, period-correct damaged work on wood purchased in New Orleans that made its way, through restorations and a consensus of opinions by experts, scholars, dealers and curators to the center of conversation in the art world, setting staggering sales records all along the way.

Those appearing on camera testifying about “Salvator” range from the quizzical and amused to the defiant and defensive, with a little sheepishness creeping in here and there when the word “greed” enters the conversation.

A painting that cost “sleeper hunter” Alexander Parish and his investor/partner Robert Simon $1,175 went through sales and one of the most-hyped auctions ever before a Saudi sucker paid $450,000,000 for it a few years later.

All of it based on a series of assumptions, miscommunications, not-quite-endorsements and a major exhibition that lent it the aura of authenticity and led the auction house Christie’s to use the video below to hype it when it came up for auction, just people standing in rapt awe in front of a very famous painting, people including another “Leonardo.”

Director Andreas Koefoed interviews the journalists who dug into how all this happened and introduces the art skeptics who warned that someday, we’d all be looking back on this and wondering “how these idiots could have ever seen this as a Leonardo.”

But the “idiots” make a pretty compelling case, which lends “The Lost Leonardo” the air of an ongoing mystery that isn’t as settled as the skeptical — some of them loudly so — would lead us to believe.

Paintings by Leonardo — only 15 are known to survive — have “a strange presence,” one expert explains — “very assertive, very ambiguous.”

“Salvator Mundi” has that, and Christie’s used that awe-inspiring presence for what its discoverer snaps “is NOT even a good painting” to make that video above. It is just eerily enough like the “Mona Lisa” to give the non-expert pause.

Because who among us could tell the difference between a Leonardo, a “workshop of Leonardo,” a “follower of Leonardo” or “circle of Leonardo” or “copy of Leonardo” painting?

It’s on wood, which was Leonardo’s MO, plainly came from the 15th century, had damage and 500 years of attempted repairs, paint-overs and touch ups. “Salvator” invited the comparison and left room for doubt.

The film leaves much out of the picture’s provenance, its history of ownership, and not just the ancient gaps about who produced it and when. Was it really owned by Charles I or Charles II of England? How did it get from them to New Orleans?

But as reputations take credibility hits, sketchy Russians and slippery Swiss duck and weave and that one restorer finds her unfortunate place in immortality, “The Lost Leonardo” opens up a world to us that few movies — from “The Thomas Crown Affair” to “Tenet” — have ever let us see.

Obscene wealth, the gauche, unsophisticated rich, “experts” with agendas, “free port” storage and insane amounts of money float by under the unblinking gaze of an Italo-European Jesus, “Salvator Mundi” but still “not even a good painting.”

Rating: PG-13, for nude art images (seriously)

Cast: Alexander Parish, Robert Simon, Dianne Modestini, Evan Beard, Martin Kemp, Yves Bouvier, Jacques Franck, Georgina Adam and Jerry Saltz.

Credits: Directed by Andreas Koefoed, scripted by Andreas Koefoed, Christian Kirk Muff, Mark Monroe and Duska Zagorac. A Sony Pictures Classics release.

Running time: 1:40

The tennis is good, the filming and editing of the tennis even better in the French sports melodrama “Final Set.”

It’s a “Big Game/Big Match” movie with all the trappings of the genre — lots of foreshadowing, an aged veteran hoping for one last glimpse of glory, a cocky youngster, a still-demanding tennis mother, a spouse who realized it was time for her to move on and can’t make her husband see the same.

And it works. Quentin Reynard’s French Open tale has drama and splendidly compact performances that make its predictable journey a perfectly pleasant way to experience the clay of Paris’s Stade Roland Garros.

As a player, the oddly-named Thomas Edison (Alex Lutz of “The Visitors: Bastille Day” and “Paris-Willouby”) peaked about twenty years earlier. He had his shot at the big brass ring, only to see it slip through his fingers.

Twenty years and three knee surgeries later, he’s facing the twilight of his career, facing a slow recovery from the last surgery and a lot of canceled offers for seeding in tournaments.

He’s got a wife, a former player herself (Ana Girandot). They have a little boy who is just showing interest in playing games with balls, but mother Eve coos to him (in French with English subtitles) “Oh, Gaspard won’t be a tennis player. He’ll be a doctor!”

And Thomas, at 37, still has his tennis mother. Kristin Scott Thomas brings a lifetime of formidable women to Judith, still “correcting,” still “coaching,” still his sternest critic, the one who hasn’t seen him play live in years.

Writer-director Quentin Reynaud, who plays Thomas’s playing partner and coach, shows us the indignities of a career on the wane. Eve fields the calls with canceled offers, debates her husband’s deep slide in the rankings, and plans to start a course in sports management.

But if she’s done, she’s pretty damned sure he is, too. He’s just not seeing it. He’ll try for the French Open, joining 127 other “qualifiers” competing in a grueling pre-tourney round of matches just to win the privilege of being crushed by one of the top seeds in the early rounds.

Another indignity? The town cars that take players to and from the tourney are for the seeds, not you, old sport.

Thomas might use this as motivation, the fact that nobody believes in him.
But to meet his goal, Thomas focuses on the cocky younger version of him, a 17 year old played by French tennis star Jurgen Briand. The onetime “future hope of French tennis” only hopes to get the chance to play the current version.

What can I say about this pre-ordained plot and film of archetypes, aside from “It works?”

The Oscar nominee Kristin Scott Thomas is just as intimidating in French as she is her native English. “We all get old, Thomas” could have been vamped up. But KST keeps the “disappointed in you” hidden, unspoken. “Try the over-35 championship.” Nobody does “brittle” better.

Lutz makes a believable athlete and Thomas an intriguing character, a man whose recovery included memorizing all the pushing-40 tennis stars who got one last hurrah just before they bowed out.

The supernaturally beautiful Girandot manages to be both sympathetic and cruelly, perhaps selfishly pragmatic, pointing out Thomas’s delusion, even as he’s punching through qualifying, picking up a tiny product endorsement and wondering just how far he can go, this time and “next year.”

“Final Set” isn’t leaps and bounds better than Paul Bettany’s Brit-tennis has-been tale, “Wimbledon,” or any of the other tennis dramas. But in keeping it simple and personal, Reynaud finds the sweet-spot in a movie whose ebb and flow we know by heart, whose finale is the one we’re almost sure to expect.

Rating: unrated, some profanity

Cast: Alex Lutz, Ana Girandot, Jurgen Briand, Quentin Reynaud and Kristin Scott Thomas.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Quentin Reynaud. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:52

It’s a tribute to the professionalism of your typical movie set that all C-movies don’t face that mid-production attack of the giggles that impacts what we see on the screen.

The film has little budget. The cast has been on TV shows and films that did. And if just one or two people hit the “This is rubbish, I’m just going to have a laugh with it” phase, the giggles spread.

“Final Frequency” is a movie that lets us see that happen. At some point, even the behind-the-camera talent threw up their hands. Because this serious and seriously bad thriller about a lost notebook of scientist Nicola Tesla and his his research into frequency weapons could trigger an LA earthquake in the middle of a G-20 summits goes all goofy for some of the second and all of its third act.

Loopy LARPA (live action role player) laughs, as our “team” is assembled from gamers, cosplayers, LARPAs and a cop (Lou Ferrigno Jr.) reduced to campus security guard, all try to pitch in and rescue the kidnapped scientist played by Charles Shaughnessy, who never recovered from co-starring in “The Nanny.”

Kirby Bliss Blanton of “The Young and the Restless” is the pretty graduate assistant searching for her academic boss and concealing his Tesla notebook from villains led by the still “Seinfeld” “breathtaking” Richard Burgi.

It’s all predicated on the idea that Tesla was “100 years ahead of his time,” and this notebook, whose theories and research could be used to cancel out earthquakes, or cause them, “can’t fall into the wrong hands.”

Our grad assistant refuses the help of the smart-aleck security guard (Ferrigno Jr.) and her deafened by combat brother (Luke Guldan) until the chips are really down, and even then only a couple of campus IT nerds (Abhay Walia and an almost-amusing Nikki Soohoo) will do.

“SAVE the universe!”

The effects are mostly limited to contact lenses that let us know a character has been sonically hypnotized by these sonic mind-control guns, which Burgi’s villain urges his minions to use with extreme prejudice.

“Shoot! Shoot to KILL!” Pause. “Why aren’t these things WORKing?”

The science is gibberish, the dialogue likewise, the characters cardboard with stiff performances to match.

Aside from that, tho…

Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Kirby Bliss Blanton, Charles Shaughnessy, Lou Ferrigno Jr., Richard Burgi, Luke Guldan, Kim Estes, Abhay Walia and Nikki Soohoo.

Credits: Directed by Tim Lowry, scripted by Penny Gibben. A Winter Star release.

Running time: 1:31

Ruth Platt’s “Martyr’s Lane” is horror at a low simmer, a triumph of tone over content, performances over frights.

This beautifully Gothic ghost story rests on the shoulders of two angelic moppets, a film that makes its myopic simplicity a virtue in every perfectly-composed frame.

Kiera Thompson plays Leah, a parson’s daughter living in the eerie rectory provided by her father’s parish. She keeps to herself and plays alone. But there are voices in this house, and Leah hears them. And there’s something haunting her mother (Denise Gough of “71,” “A Dark Place” and “The Kid Who Would Be King”) that may or may not be related to the whispers Leah hears in the shadows.

Leah’s cruel college-bound sister Bex (Hannah Rae) makes sure to add the spooky story of how they live down the street from an old monastery that was the scene of a Catholic massacre in the Church of England’s violent birth years to her teasing and tormenting routine. Bex sees the worst in the kid, even in Leah’s asthma attacks.

“You’re an attention-seeking little brat,” she hisses.

Father Thomas (Thomas Cree) is devoted to his parish, and popular. But wife Sarah sees the nuisance the older women parishioners are, bridling at the bossy fussbudget (Anastasia Hille) who’s always going on about the books and “receipts.”

All of them are too busy for Leah, whose curiosity has her wondering what she’s hearing and coveting what Mum has hidden away in her locket.

That’s about the time that the late night visits begin. The little girl (Sienna Sayer) is dressed in a battered white outfit, with wings clipped on. She can’t recall her name, but calls herself Leah’s “guardian angel.” And in their giggling games and chats, she challenges Leah to find this or that item lost or buried on the church grounds.

We adults know that those are “clues,” clues with a hint of menace about them.

Thompson and Sayer’s scenes are a moppet-sized marvel, natural, polished, perfectly-enunciated — empathetic acting at its most natural. They’re a big reason this picture, which has a guessable “mystery” and a lot more lowering gloom and dread than frights, comes off.

Leah’s travels make us fear for her. And the fact the family has a pet dog and a white rabbit Leah’s named “Mary” because it somehow got pregnant locked up in a rabbit hutch make us wonder what other grimness awaits.

Actress turned writer-director Platt (“The Black Forest”) draws us in and serves up just enough foreboding to keep us engrossed. There’s not a lot here, but the well-crafted minimalism and occasional moving moment pay off.

“Martyr’s Lane” is a reminder that you don’t need entrails and screams, demons and cadavers to cast a ghostly spell. Sometimes, a weathered abandoned doll in a fall-cluttered English garden, a lock of hair or faint scratching at a window is all it takes.

Rating: unrated, mild horror violence

Cast: Kiera Thompson, Denise Gough, Sienna Sayer, Thomas Cree and Hannah Rae.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Ruth Platt. A Shudder release.

Running time: 1:36

This opened in the UK during the pandemic (Streamed?) and finally gets a US release Sept. 17.

Melissa McCarthy is in mourning, and a damned starling is ruining her garden and her life.

Chris O’Dowd raises the bar, playing the spouse of this broken relationship. And Oscar winner Kevin Kline lends grand seriocomic support.

This looks like a contender.

A “Chinatown on the Cheap” tale of a missing teen, gangland shenanigans, water rights, the works, all uncovered by a “special ops” (the hoariest trope in action cinema) veteran.

Oscar winner Richard Dreyfuss, Paul Sloan, Taryn Manning, Jake Webber and Michael Madsen are among the stars of this Oct. 22 vengeance thriller.

The plot has been around since Shakespeare sold out to Netflix. Guy courts woman, or vice versa, based on a dare, a bet or some other “arrangement.”

It’s a “Taming of the Shrew” variation, whether it’s “Cruel Intentions” or “Ten Things I Hate About You,” Kate Hudson chasing Matthew McConaughey, Matthew McConaughey chasing Kate Hudson, or hunky jock Freddie Prinze Jr. pursuing wallflower Rachel Leigh Cook, as a bet, in “She’s All That.”

That’s the movie Netflix gender-flipped and remade as “He’s All That.” It’s a not-quite-note-for-note remake, with a few fond nods to the original film — Rachel Leigh Cook plays a mother, this time, and Matthew Lillard graduated from popular guy’s best friend roles a while back. He’s a dorky high school principal here.

And if you remember the original with any fondness at all, recycling that pop classic “Kiss Me,” used in the “She’s All That” soundtrack and again here, may give you the warm fuzzies. Enjoy them while they last, because they don’t.

Padgett (newcomer Addison Rae) is a popular teen “makeover/influencer,” the well-paid and perfectly-put-together queen bee of Cali High, vlogging and live-streaming her way to being able to afford the college of her choice.

Because unlike her prettiest girls posse (Madison Pettis, Myra Molloy) and pretty much everybody else at the school, she’s not Child of Hollywood rich.

That’s become the studio style of Netflix teen movies. Not all of them have the gloss and glitz of absurd affluence. But most of them do.

Padgett dates hunky pop idol classmate Jordan (Peyton Meyer) because of course she does. She needs his Instagram followers, and he needed hers, and her gift of a makeover. But as is the way of social media romantic comedies, she catches him cheating and melts down while live-streaming.

She’s caught in a spitting fury, chewing him out in his trailer on the set of his latest music video. And a little bit of teary mucus that slips out her nose kills her online image. She goes viral as “Bubble Girl” (snot bubble), and her main beauty products sponsor (Kourtney Kardashian) drops her like Johnny Depp.

Losing followers is one thing. Losing her prom date, and the sponsor she was depending on for college, matters more. She’s got to rebound, and quick. Maybe she can pick a new guy, give him a makeover, and get back everything she’s lost by prom night.

Sidekick Alden (Pettis) suggests making it a bet, with Alden selecting the “loser” who will be Padgett’s “Makeover: Impossible.”

Enter scruffy, outspoken outcast Cameron (Tanner Buchanan of “Kobra Kai”), the flannel-and-stocking-cap kid Jordan and his entourage bully, the anti-social photographer with only his gay BFF (Annie Jacob) and sassy younger sister (Isabella Crovetti) to hang with.

He shovels horse excrement in a tony local stable, takes photos with real film, mourns his dead mother and plans to “opt out” of college because he’s fighting the system, man.

“High school is just a bunch of scared people trying to be something they’re not.”

He’ll do nicely. Let the pursuit begin, and let’s make sure to hit every single waypoint on this wellworn path along the way — his secret grief, her secret shame, awkward not-quite-a-date, Big Romantic Gesture, fistfight for honor, her keeping the “bet” secret, all of it.

At my most generous, I can say “He’s All That” passes by without a whole lot of unpleasantness as it does.

The leads don’t really click, the situations are ordained by formula and the extreme wealth grates in ways only a Kardashian fan can ignore.

Teenagers having a “Drop it like F. Scott” “Gatsby” themed birthday party in the family mansion? A pool party that would put a decade of “MTV Spring Break” beach-blasts to shame?

The film’s only bow to diversity is shoehorning in a cute same-sex flirtation for the gay BFF.

But by themselves, the chirpy Rae and sullen-according-to-script Buchanan aren’t bad. And the “makeover” montage is punctuated with a cute punchline.

“How do you feel?”

“Like I just lost ‘Dancing with the Stars!'”

The reason this formula endures is that, done right, it works. It’s proven to be Freddie Prinze Jr. proof over the centuries, from “Shrew” to “Dangerous Liaisons” and “Cruel Intentions” to any of the dozens of sitcoms that have trotted it out.

But the charm is thin and the laughs hard to find in this iteration. Aside from a little nostalgia for the middling film this is based on, “He’s All That” just isn’t all that.

Rating: TV-MA, a sexual situation, a fistfight, but mainly because of one F-bomb.

Cast: Addison Rae, Tanner Buchanan, Madison Pettis, Annie Jacob,
Isabella Crovetti, Myra Molloy, with Kourtney Kardashian, Rachel Leigh Cook and Matthew Lillard.

Credits: scripted by R. Lee Fleming Jr. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:28