Movie Nation

Their eyes lock in across the darkened room. They share a smile, and as their finely-waxed mustaches meet, they kiss.

“The Dance of the 41 (El Baile de los 41)” is Mexico’s “Age of the Not-So-Innocent,” a beautifully baroque period piece about a signature political/sexual scandal for a culture wrapped up in Latin machismo.

It happened in 1901, a “raid” on a private club that ensnared many of the country’s shakers and movers — Congressmen, bankers, the son-in-law of the president — generations of men in the exquisite beards and mustaches of the day, cross-dressed and dancing at a gala ball.

“Dance” tells the story of this exclusive “club,” whose members donned blindfolds, stripped off their shirts and confessed to their fellow practitioners of “Socratic love,” “Soy maricón.”

The story begins with the marriage of the Ignacio de la Torres (Alfonso Herrera) to Amada Diaz (Mabel Cadena) The groom, freshly appointed to Congress, becomes “the nation’s son-in-law” as Amada is President Porfirio Diaz’s daughter.

But whatever political advantages having him in the family entail, in the bedroom it’s instantly obvious that all isn’t as promised in the bedroom. Ignacio has to fake his way through it.

Meeting a colleague in government, Evaristo (Emiliano Zurita) confirms it. Yes, gaydar predated radar. And then we see him at his “club,” home to the “late night dinners” that keep him away from home and his increasingly frustrated and then furious wife.

“Tell your wife that we ladies LOVED her dress,” the other members cackle.

The strained marriage drives “El Baile,” but its life is this club where Ignacio can be himself, and doesn’t hesitate to. But amidst the hedonism, the drinking and orgies, staged operas and ribald pantomimes, initiations (for Evaristo, “Eva”) and figuring out what all these candlelit bathtubs are for, Ignacio commits a cardinal sin for the many powerful and married members. He falls in love.

“Dance of the 41” is a gorgeous, ornate and tragic romance that seems filmed and acted at arm’s length. We can’t embrace the characters of their plight, because the dry treatment ensures nobody is that sympathetic, no one is obviously worth rooting for.

The performances, save for Cadena, who brings hurt and fire to Amada, have a bloodlessness about them that hampers our connection to the characters.

The victim here is Amada, the one lied to, mistreated and gaslit by a husband who insists she has health and sleeping problems as he moves out of their bedroom. Ignacio may be derisively called “Nachito” by the bride’s military man brother, with a lamb left behind as a taunt at one point. But he’s a bit of a bastard, and impossible to feel sorry for as presented here.

Amada is likewise problematic, high-born and determined to make a go of this even if she has to burn his world down around him to keep up appearances.

Coming twenty years after “Y tu mama tambien,” “Dance of the 41” seems curiously cautious and tentative, aside from the orgy and sex scenes and the fact that it “outs” a Congressman and son-in-law of a long-serving Mexican president.

What’s served up is dry history that neither judges nor commits to what might be “tragic” in this story, which is understandable, given the principals.

That takes “Dance” into the realm of that Martin Scorsese movie I referenced earlier. Like “Age of Innocence,” this melodrama feels preserved under glass, an emotionally barren account of a “scandal” and its (briefly shown) aftermath, regarded from afar without much sympathy for anybody involved.

MPA Rating: TV-MA, sex, nudity

Cast: Alfonso Herrera, Emiliano Zurita, Mabel Cadena, Fernando Becerril

Credits: Directed by David Paplos, script by Monika Revilla. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:39

“Ferry” is a straight-up old-fashioned “mobster grows morals” thriller from The Netherlands, a movie that doesn’t surprise but does what it does with efficiency and a hint of style.

And I don’t think it gives too much away saying that this Cecilia Verheyden film, script by Nico Moolenaar and Bart Uytdenhouwen, is an homage to “Miller’s Crossing,” because it is.

The title character (Frank Lammers) is a hulking “enforcer” for Amsterdam mob boss Brink )(Huub Stapel). When Brink’s counting room is robbed and his son is killed, Ferry is the pitiless tough he sends to “The South” for answers, and revenge.

“I want you to find them, and I want you to shoot them.”

“The South” is where Ferry came from, the poorer trailer park corner of Holland that doesn’t make it onto the windmills and wooden shoes postcards, a region far removed from the hip, touristy, sexually and pharmaceutically-liberated Amsterdam.

The script is sort of a mobster procedural. See what resources Ferry calls on to get his first lead, see where he goes to get some names. And in this case, check out the past he was running away from.

The opening scene shows his traumatic but toughening trailer park childhood, where he and his sister had to stick together under an abusive alcoholic’s manufactured-housing roof. Now, he’s catching up with that estranged sister (Monic Hendrickx), mainly because her husband (Raymond Thiry) was an old running mate.

Ferry embeds himself in a trailer park and waits. Danielle (Elise Schaap) is the damsel he rescues at the carnival, the neighbor he flirts with in the park and a woman who makes him wonder if there’s more to life than the one he’s been leading. He even starts to feel guilty about his sister, who is dying and all he wants is information from her husband.

The “investigation” isn’t deep or canny, the violence isn’t anything fancy. Tell me who you worked with, tell me who you’re working for, and no, there’s not much chance I still won’t shoot you if you do.

Lammers has a sort of Oliver Platt look with a Michael Shannon vibe. His Ferry learned from the school of hard knocks. He isn’t educated, sophisticated or even overly cunning. Brute strength, bulk and revolvers with a willingness to use them covers for a lot of disadvantages when it comes to life-or-death situations.

Schaap’s high-mileage Danielle is very pretty woman who started out in the hole and got beaten down every time she crawled out of it. I like that she’s not self-pitying, although her interest in her “rescuer” seems more primal than realistic.

Film buffs will catch the references to “Miller’s Crossing” even if nobody else does. That makes this a B-movie with a little something extra. What’s more important is that it’s a B-movie that works.

MPA Rating: TV-MA, violence, drug abuse, nudity

Cast: Frank Lammers, Elise Schaap, Huub Stapel, Monic Hendrickx and Raymond Thiry

Credits: Directed by Cecilia Verheyden, script by Nico Moolenaar, Bart Uytdenhouwen. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:46

Paul Sorvino, Lorraine Bracco, Ashley Benson, Aldis Hodge, Penn Badgley, Shiloh Fernandez, Luis Guzman, William Fitchner, Val Killer and Ewan McGregor are the stars of this June 18 release.

The thing about “feel good” movies is that, to work, they’ve got to flirt with making you feel awful. Edge of tears, disappointment, life’s pitfalls turning into potholes, the works.

And that’s never truer than in feel good movies about horses. We all know what can go wrong with horses you’re trying to race.

So a word to the wise about “Dream Horse,” about a Welsh village that pools its cash and breeds a racing stallion. Don’t watch it in your dressy face mask. This adorable tear-jerker is made for disposable ones.

It’s a movie whose winning warmth, plucky “up from nothing” story and genteel rowdiness are infectious. But its glory is in another gem of performance from Toni Collette. As Jan, the co-op clerk who decides that a race horse might be just the ticket to get herself, her marriage and her aging, dying town out of a rut, she leads our emotions in every gasp of unadulterated joy, every moment of slack-jawed horror, with every tear.

Jan Vokes is the sort of woman not quite resigned to this is “all there is.” She raises a duck, geese, goats and a wolfhound because her two kids have “flown the nest.” Husband Brian (Owen Teale) lost his job, and enough of his teeth to notice, years before. So Jan works two jobs, tending bar down at the club evenings.

That’s where she overhears the Cardiff tax advisor Howard (Damian Lewis, wonderful) talk about the glory days when he was in a syndicate, an “owner” (one of several) of a racehorse, something rumor has it almost ruined him and nearly wrecked his marriage.

Ownership via syndicate? “It’s more affordable than you think.”

Jan gets a wild hare to buy a mare.

“I’m going to breed a race horse,” she tells layabout Brian as she prints up fliers, struggles to win over Howard to the cause and recruit local “types” to join in. There’s old age pensioner Maureen (Siân Phillips), barfly and local “character” Kirby (Karl Johnson, of course), pedantic councilor Maldwyn (Anthony O’Donnell) and others.

They dream of riches, but Howard, thrilled as he is to have skin in the game again, sets them straight. “There’s less than a one percent chance it’ll ever win a race,” he says. If you’re buying in, “do it for the hwyl,” a Welsh lark and a laugh. And so they do.

The Neil McKay script that Euros Lyn directs hits the stations-of-the-cross of feel good movies, thus the “I need something to look forward to when I get up in the morning” speech, the “whole wide world out there” that punching out of your comfort zone brings.

It’s got horse racing movie staples, but skips over the hoariest. We see the naming of the newborn (“Dream Alliance”), watch the cute foal bottle-fed, grasp how Jan and Brian look at the critter as a beloved pet, and glimpse his uncertain start in training and in racing.

Nicholas Farrell of “Chariots of Fire” is the wealthy trainer who journeys from dismissive snob to “He’s got something…spirit” in a flash. And there’s an upper class rival who doesn’t really add up to being the villain here, nobody is.

Because “Dream Horse” is about the fractious “syndicate,” competing agendas, family discord and the triumphs and tragedies of race horse ownership.

We sit in on giddy sing-alongs, tearful choruses of the Welsh national anthems — both of them, including “Delilah,” a hit for native son Tom Jones.

Characters take sentimental inner journeys and tears are shed.

It’s not “Seabiscuit,” but plucky winners like this are a great reason to get back into the cinema-going habit.

Just remember my advice about the face mask. You can’t “feel good” without a few tears.

MPA Rating: PG for language and thematic elements

Cast: Toni Collette, Damian Lewis, Owen Teale, Siân Phillips, Karl Johnson, Anthony O’Donnell

Credits: Directed by Euros Lyn, script by  Neil McKay. A Bleecker St/Topic Studios release.

Running time: 1:53

This is now slated for August. Respect my need to see this in a theater and wear a mask until all doubt and COVID vanish.

Jennifer Hudson, Audra MacDonald as her mom, Forrest Whitaker, and in a cleverly apt bit of casting. Marc Maron is producer Jerry Wexler, the one person in this story I met and interviewed.

The director has Dolly Parton movies and “Walking Dead” on her resume. Perfect.

(UPDATE: Roger Moore’s review of “Respect,” opening Aug. 13, is here)

Frenetic scenes over-stuffed with pop art/comic-bookish visuals, politically-savvy “tech is taking over” messaging and a handful of seriously silly and over-the-top moments give “The Mitchells vs. the Machines” its fizz and buzz.

And Oscar winner Olivia Colman, voicing a cell phone digital assistant app out for revenge, is worth a laugh or three. Throw in Maya Rudolph and a generally colorless voice cast doesn’t seem like the dead weight it might with a muted Danny McBride and unamusing turns by SNL folk and Eric Andre in other roles.

That adds up to a somewhat fun if cluttered and fatiguing animated action romp of the short attention span school. Produced by Sony Animation and sold to Netflix, it’s a more manic “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” and the sort of animated comedy that gains swoons from some quarters, and is forgotten by Awards Season.

To be fair, catching up with any film just as the wind (gas) has gone out of its breathless hype is always a little deflating. But my honest reaction was a half dozen good laughs, dozen more decent chuckles, a shrug at the rank sentimentality (better handled in “Meatballs”) and occasional annoyance at all the intentional visual overkill, meant to make the viewer ignore how slack and predictable this all is.

The hook here? An aspiring filmmaker, a teen Youtube regular thanks to her “Dog Cop” comedies starring the family pug, is heading for film school. But a family feud with her more low-tech, pragmatic (“Can you make a living doing that?”) Dad causes Mr. Outdoorsy/Tool Handy (Nick Offerman wasn’t available?) patriarch to pile everybody into the ancient “learn to drive a stick” station wagon for a cross-country road trip.

Dad’s all “unobstructed eye contact” (for 30 seconds) at dinner in this cell-phone addicted household. Everybody else is into their digital PAL (Apple-Siri with sinister side), daughter Katie (Abbi Jacobson) is annoyed that she’s finally found her “tribe” and is being delayed in joining it by square Dad (McBride, not giving us much) and Mom (Rudolph) isn’t taking her side.

But as they settle in for the arduous drive and make that necessary kid brother (co-director Michael Rianda, sounding like an adult voicing a little boy) visit to Dino Stop, wouldn’t you know it? That’s the moment the robots take over.

That bit of business is cleverly handled as a sort of Apple product rollout, with heartless tech tycoon Mark (Eric Andre) assuring a screaming mob of fans that “we just gave your smort phone arms and legs.” And “I know what you’re thinking, ‘Are they gonna turn EVIL?'”

Sure enough, they do.

Next thing we know, humanity’s being trapped and readied for liftoff in “Human Fun Pods,” and the Mitchells — not their “perfect” neighbors the Poseys (John Legend and Chrissie Teigen, with Charlyne Yi voicing their daughter) — are humanity’s last hope.

Can they upload the “kill code” that will stop “The Machine Apocalypse?”

The “quest” takes them a journey by “camouflaged” station wagon, and an inner journey from people who are disconnected and at odds and “incapable of change” to a family that finds inner resources as they’re remembering dormant skills and forgotten teaching that will help them save the world.

There’s a wonderfully clever “donkey tour” of a Grand Canyon that floods that’s practically a throw-away moment. But the money scene? A mall full of Furbies, and every other damned gadget with a microchip in it, attacks them — toasters and drones, vending machines and those dolls that everybody had to have decades ago. Because they’re coming back, I tellya.

Fred Armisen and Beck Bennett forgettably voice a couple of glitchy robots who become co-conspirators.

But Colman, as a cell phone assistant who’s been wronged, steals the show, a gadget that we’re always leaning on for “the world’s knowledge” put right at our fingertips, but which e keep dropping into toilets.

There are vocal and visual interjections filling out this adventure, little “Batman” the comic and original TV series flourishes, Youtube videos and real-life photos mixed in with the animation and Katie voicing over this or that effect tossed in for a laugh.

“Maybe this would be less horrifying with the cat filter” on her phone, activated. Not quite a laugh, any more than the character’s incessant efforts to visualize what she’s experiencing as a student film.

But the sentiment, pithily summed up by Mom, stings.

“Who would have thought a tech company wouldn’t have our best interests at heart?”

Funny enough, but overhyped — kind of a mixed-bag of a film, one that makes me hope “The Mitchells” may not fare all that well vs. the other animated offerings this year.

MPA Rating: PG for action and some language 

Cast: The voices of Abbi Jacobson, Maya Rudolph, Danny McBride, Olivia Colman, Eric André, Fred Armisen, Beck Bennett, and Chrissie Tiegen and John Legend.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Michael Rianda and Jeff Rowe. A Sony Animation/Netflix release.

Running time: 1:53

“I Am All Girls” is a melodramatic South African thriller about the international sex slave trade, with hints at its vast reach and its long sordid history and a suggestion that the only “solution” to it is avenging, in-the-know cops.

Which is to say, it starts off with pathos, heart and purpose, and kind of devolves into derring do and shootouts. Kind of frustrating that way, really.

It’s “inspired by” a true story, although its historical background isn’t easily ascertained on the Internet. In 1994, a child trafficker confessed, fingered higher ups in the Apartheid government, and did all this on tape, only to wound up dead in his cell the next day.

This was all covered up by the corrupt, racist regime of the day.

“All the Girls” is about that story, and its present-day blowback. As it flashes back and forth in time, freeze-frames show us photos of missing girls, black and white, from South Africa.

Somebody in the present day has access to that long suppressed video confession. Somebody is watching it, tracking police investigations and showing up ahead of the cops, or getting the “justice” that the “system” isn’t — shooting offenders, past and present, and carving initials in their chest.

Erica Wessels plays Det. Jodie Snyman, the archetypical “cop who cares too much.” She’s getting ahead of herself, making mistakes, failing to get convictions.

Because she weeps when she raids a brothel or busts open shipping containers filled with kidnapped girls bound for the Middle East.

She’s constantly lectured about by her captain (Mothusi Magano), who takes her off her Hawks (Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation, DPCI) team and pushes her onto a simple murder case just to get her to “take a break.”

Only her colleague, the quietly intense Ntombi (Hlubi Mboya) understands. These two have history and/or chemistry. Too bad special police like this aren’t supposed to know where each other live.

Jodie’s new case connects to her old case, the bodies pile up and little girls, then and now, go through the hell of abduction, transport and sex slave lives — murdered when they’re “used up” — in scenes that cut back and forth between 1994 and today.

Because the person doing the executing has a connection to that past, and no, that isn’t made a a secret here.

Donovan Marsh’s film bounces from Johannesburg to the port city of Durban, chasing shipping containers and those who fill them with children and ship them abroad.

Yes, shipping manifests play into the case, and yes, we see just enough of this from the victims’ point of view to be moved. Just not as much as you’d expect.

Wessels is pretty good at playing a drink-to-forget cop-movie archetype, Mboya’s role is under-developed, and the villains mostly faceless and certainly no one the film focuses on, any more than the faceless, mostly-nameless “girls.”

The most chilling scenes are the grainy video from 1994, a kidnapper (J.P. du Plessis) spilling the beans, naming names, suggesting that the worldwide traffic in children for rich and powerful pedophiles is indeed everything recent news reports says it is.

Giving up on maintaining the story’s mystery might seems like a cop out, and “I Am All Girls” gains nothing, dramatically, from this early revelation.

The structure is ad hoc and the plot choppy, with the action beats — such as they are — holding the movie together and maintaining our interest. But just barely.

MPA Rating: TV-MA, violence, sex trafficking subject matter, profanity

Cast:  Erica Wessels, Hlubi Mboya, Mothusi Magano, J.P. du Plessis and Brendon Daniels.

Credits: Directed by Donovan Marsh, script by Wayne Fitzjohn, Emile Leuvennink, Marcell Greeff A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:47

A Quebecoise drama due out June 18. It’s from Oscilloscope, so you know it’s going to be good.

When is imitation NOT the sincerest form of flattery? When you’re imitating Alfred Hitchcock, ALL of Alfred Hitchcock’s ouevre in a manic misshapen mess of a thriller meant to be an homage.

“The Master of Suspense” never managed “manic,” recognized it as the enemy of “suspense.” And director Joe Wright (“Atonement,” “Darkest Hour”) surely should have known that, even if playwright, actor and in this case, screenwriter Tracy Letts didn’t.

“The Woman in the Window” is about an agoraphobic movie nut who thinks she’s witnessed a murder in the brownstone across from hers on West 121st Street.

Amy Adams plays Anna, a child psychologist whose “anxiety” pushed her into this isolation. It may have busted up her marriage (Anthony Mackie plays the husband) and landed her in therapy (Letts plays her shrink) and on medication.

The therapy and the meds are really working, as Anna’s going through wine like she’s hydrating with it and neither she nor anyone else around her can believe what she sees or says she’s seen.

And like L.B. Jeffries, Jimmy Stewart’s character in “Rear Window,” she’s become obsessed with the folks within her limited field on view on West 121st street. Those new neighbors? They get ALL of her attention. Maybe that’s a good thing, she tells her therapist.

“People who snoop on their neighbors don’t kill themselves,” she reassures him.

Julianne Moore is Jane Russell, friendly, coming over to give her a scented candle, sip wine and complain about her “tight, controlling” husband. Fred Hechinger is their son, the outgoing Ethan, who is allergic to her Persian cat, Punch.

And the testy guy who crosses the street looking for those two, Alastair? That’s Gary Oldman. He’s just the sort of husband you’d picture as “tight, controlling.” And when Anna sees something happen to Jane through that window, Alastair must have been the fellow holding the knife.

Oldman as a possible psychopathic killer? Kind of on the nose. When Anna makes her accusations, his rants are vintage, pre-Oscar Oldman.

“A drunken, shut-in pill-popping CAT lady!”

Wyatt Russell plays the singer-songwriter Anna rents her basement apartment to, and imposes on and generally worries to death. Brian Tyree Henry is the detective who shows up to patiently investigate her latest accusation and burst of “mania.”

It’s based on a novel by A.J. Finn, and freely acknowledges its “Rear Window” connections (unlike “Disturbia”) by having that as one of the movies Anna watches, along with anything Bogart or Bacall or Clifton Webb made in the black and white ’40s.

Adams gives some interesting wrinkles to a woman who studies the mind and has seen patients, and can’t get a handle on whether or not what she’s seeing or experiencing is real or a product of her guilt-ridden mental breakdown. She knows what’s happening to her, with or without “gaslighting.”

Oldman is sinister enough to make you think he’s giving away the game from the get-go. But there are all these other obvious “tells” in the clumsily “tricky” screenplay.

We can’t be sure of anything, because Wright shoots and cuts this thriller to death. Tilted camera, extreme close-ups and whip-pans, snippets of classic films in Anna’s mind, with Letts’ staccato take on film noir patter, the strident Bernard Hermann Hitchcock strings and Adams amping up the mania, who can believe any of it?

It’s so overdone it’s as if they’re all panicking over the balderdash they figured out — after filming started — they were collectively serving up.

Shortcomings aside, stylistic overkill (Hellloooo Brian DePalma) included, the only real downside to all this is the too-obvious “mystery” is the dishonor it does the filmmaker Wright, Letts & Co. are “paying tribute” to.

Don’t let a bad Hitchock homage scare you away from The Master of Suspense.

MPA Rating: R for violence and language

Cast: Amy Adams, Gary Oldman, Julianne Moore, Wyatt Russell, Fred Hechinger, Brian Tyree Henry, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Anthony Mackie.

Credits: Directed by Joe Wright, script by Tracy Letts, based on a novel by A.J. Finn. A 20th Century release on Netflix.

Running time: 1:42