Interesting time to be taking “A Few Good Men” tack on the big screen about police work, that it’s a rough, dirty job “but somebody’s gotta do it.”
You know, with the rash of “I shot because I was scared” police killings.
“Crown Vic” has Thomas Jane as the grizzled veteran of the force, the unfortunately-named Luke Kleintank as his “new partner,” and opens in November
Everything about “Street Flow,” a coming-of-age parable about two brothers wrestling over the future of a third sibling, is familiar.
It’s in the “projects,” called “suburbs” here.
The young men are black. One brother is a gangster, the other in law school. The “kid” they’re trying to help raise is their youngest sibling.
And their long-suffering mother is caught, like the kid, in the middle of this. Hollywood has pounded this theme since the beginning of cinema, in urban dramas, Westerns, the works.
The twist in “Street Flow” is the setting — Champigny-sur-Marne, outside of Paris — the language (French) and the framework and overt politics of the struggle. That makes this tried and true formula work reading a few subtitles and watching.
Co-writer/director Kery James is Demba, the eldest, the brother who “made good.” He drives an Audi SUV, impresses the teens when he drops baby brother Noumouké (Bakary Diombera) off at school.
But there’s a reason their mama (Kani Diarra) wants nothing to do with Demba, and wants her youngest to stay away from him. Demba runs a drug gang and is always mixed up in something violent. The middle brother, studious law student Souleymaan (Jammeh Diangana) is the one who has to keep reminding Demba to stop stuffing cash into the kid’s mitts. The last thing they want is for the kid to act tough, act-out and get in trouble, like Demba.
“Act like me?” he protests (in French, with English subtitles). “You and Mom are always saying that…Life is about making choices. He does what he wants!”
That gets Noumouké suspended from school for fighting, trying to impress a girl. And that’s the last thing Souleymaan needs as he’s prepping for a big law school debate with the “blonde bourgeouis” Lisa (Chloé Jouannet).
I’m not kidding when I emphasize how worn and over-familiar the storybeats of this “struggle for the kid’s soul” are. There’s the hothead in Demba’s gang who is sure to start something, betrayals in the offing, a kidnapping, the tit for tat war that escalates around their housing projects, Moma crying over the uncertain fate of her Malian immigrant children.
The tentative romance between Lisa and Souleymaan is just as predictable.
But what’s novel here is how the debate, which we see them practicing for (speaking their arguments into their phones, etc) interspersed with examples of what the subject they’re debating is.
Resolve — that the problems of French colonial citizens, crime and lack of opportunity, racism and poverty, are the fault of The State. Or The State isn’t to blame. The latter is the side Souleymaan must argue, even as he sees and experiences the exact opposite every day.
He wears a white shirt and tie every day, and damned if the thuggish cops don’t roust him, call him “Sambo” and bait him.
The path to wealth Dembo took is the one that most readily presented itself to him, crime — a criminal serving drugs to his neighbors, who crave them.
The film’s climactic debate is the best thing in it — witty, with sharp edges that cut as the two might-be-lovers get personal in their attacks.
The rest of “Street Flow” — the French title is “Banlieusards (Commuters)” is as generic as its title. Good acting or not, the scenes are tropes that the cinema wore down to the stump before any of these players were born, much less old enough to “commute.”
MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence
Cast: Jammeh Diangana, Bakary Diombera, Kery James, Chloé Jouannet, Kani Diarra
Credits: Written and directed by Kery James and Leïla Sy A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:36
Michael Moore (@MMFlint) Tweeted:
Here’s a clip from the opening scene of my film, “Bowling for Columbine”, which will have a special nationwide screening tomorrow night (Saturday) at 9pm ET on MSNBC…
“You Open a Bank Account, You Get a Free Gun!”
https://t.co/SxjrawMqwU https://twitter.com/MMFlint/status/1185259761262120961?s=17
Who would have guessed that Robert Pattinson would turn out to be the daring one, the “Twilight” star who filled his post glitter-makeup career with the most fascinating projects?
“Good Time,” High Life,” “Damsel,” “The Lost City of Z,” “The Rover” — the guy the fangirl mags labeled “R. Patts” has challenged himself and managed a nice Daniel Radcliffe second act to his career — daring indie fare.
“The Lighthouse” is a Pattinson tour de force, which it has to be because he’s paired with the great GREAT Willem Dafoe in a mythic horror tale about two lighthouse keepers, “wickies,” trapped on a rocky island with each other, a testy relationship tested by alcohol, and the horrors that a mermaid represents.
Pattinson is Winslow, the new assistant to the keeper, Thomas Wake (Dafoe). The old man is a bossy bully, ordering the newcomer about on their one month shift on this desolate island off New England.
Winslow totes the coal that runs the steam-engine-powered foghorn in this late 19th century station, hauls the whale oil that fuels the light, fixes the roof, whitewashes the tower and “swabs” the floors in this weather-worn outpost of shipping.
The old Yankee Wake limps about, filling the wind-whipped air with tales of his sailing past, with poems about “pale death,” and sea chanteys, most of it fueled by the vast supply of booze he brought with him.
“Man what don’t drink best ‘ave his reasons,” he growls to the tee-totaller Winslow.
Wake takes the “dog watch,” the night shift that keeps the wick lit and the fresnel-lensed light steering ships clear of the rocks. He guards this duty as a sacred rite. And he won’t share it, won’t hear of training the new guy in operating the light. He keeps keys for the lens-deck on the lighthouse, and locks himself in there every night.
Winslow can only guess what the old salt does up there. But he has hints, which his dreams, and a carved whale tooth mermaid he found stuffed in his mattress, flesh out.
Might the seas surrounding their island have shrieking sirens or selkies? Mermaids?
Robert Eggers, who gave us this splendid, understated and primitive horrors of “The Witch,” brings us another gritty period piece, this one shot in black and white and in the old silent film “Academy Aperture” (square picture) aspect ratio.
He pounds us with the silences and the noise — from the incessant foghorn and shrieks of the sea to Wake’s incessant Yankee blarney and farts.
And he parks two very good actors, deep in character, in a claustrophobic space, fuels their characters with fear, jealousy and alcohol and lets the chips fall where they may.
“The Lighthouse” has an oppressive dramatic weight about it, like a Samuel Beckett play with misery and magic, bodily fluids and violence enveloping two men “Waiting for Godot,” or God or rescue or waiting for some explanation or confession about what’s really going on around there, or between them.
There are ranting monologues and chanties sung in drunken duets, dances and brawls.
And always, there’s the near-silence interrupted by the clockwork lighthouse gear, the THUMP thumping of the steam engine, the howl of the wind and the tearing/exploding sea all around them.
Madness? It’s a pretty safe bet we’ll get a taste of that. It’s just a question of who cracks first.
“The Lighthouse” has another thing in common with “The Witch.” It plays and feels longer than its 100 minutes. The picture’s relentlessness takes on an aimlessness in the latter acts. It wears you out.
And then there’s the myopia of the setting and the characters, and an ickiness that surpasses anything anyone mocked the Oscar-winning “Shape of Water” for. Some of the same folks pushing that one into a Best Picture Oscar are making the same arguments here.
Perhaps not. But with another grand turn by Dafoe, menacing and vulnerable, experienced and apprehensive, and the new gravitas of Pattinson as a brand name for “challenging cinema,” “The Lighthouse” stands apart as one of the beautifully composed, shot and acted films of the year, as well as the most harrowing.
MPAA Rating: R for sexual content, nudity, violence, disturbing images, and some language
Cast: Robert Pattinson, Willem Dafoe, Valeriia Karaman
Credits: Directed by Robert Eggers, script by Max Eggers, Robert Eggers An A24 release.
Running time: 1:49
“Zombieland: Double Tap,” the ten-years-later sequel to “Zombieland,” turns out to be one tap too many. And a tap way-heyyy too late.
The returning cast is less interested, the new characters less interesting. The violence is less shocking, the only laughs anybody appears to be going for are the cheapest ones the script provides — f-bombs.
All the freshness has gone out of it. It smells as stale as ten year-old living dead corpses.
As the voice over, by the ostensible author of “rules” to survive the zombie apocalypse, shows self-awareness, speaking directly to the audience in the theater, we might have expected a bit more honesty in advertising, or at least in break-the-fourth-wall narration.
“Zombieland 2: We Came Back for the Money.”
Jesse Eisenberg, the actor with the second most pressing need for this project, returns as Columbus — remember, everybody’s named for their hometown/state — long involved now with Wichita (Emma Stone), big brother figure to Little Rock (former child star Abigail Breslin, the actress who needed this the most) and son or “sidekick” to the redneck Dale Earnhardt fan/father-figure, Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson).
Their “family” has set up shop in the ruins of the White House, but Little Rock’s itchiness to meet somebody her own age and Wichita’s efforts to flee the clingy Columbus (he proposes with the Hope Diamond) split them up. Again.
We barely have time to get used to Columbus meeting “Miss Forever 21” Madison (Zooey Deutch, on her game) in a derelict mall, when the need for a new quest arrives. Little Rock ran off with a patchouli oil musician who’s seen “Yesterday” and figures he can get away with claiming Bob Dylan’s songs as his own.
Berkeley (Avan Jogia, playing a dull cliche) and Little Rock are on the run.
To Graceland? That’s where the family meets “Hound Dog Hotel” operator Nevada (Rosario Dawson, as tough as you’d expect) and doppelgangers for Tallahassee and Columbus named Albuquerque (Luke Wilson) and Flagstaff (Thomas Middleditch).
If Woody Harrelson can’t make Elvis jokes land, you know your movie’s in trouble. Wilson and Middleditch seem like the stars of the movie this one’s limited ambition wanted it to be — a direct-to-Netflix sequel with dull substitutes cast in the leads.
Deutch does dizzy and annoying quite well. “I’m getting a real anti ME vibe.”
The best sight gag might be a White House Christmas tree decorated with Pabst Blue Ribbon cans.
Oscar winner Stone and Eisenberg have grown apart, and there’s no retrieving what little chemistry they had in the first film. The direction is flat and listless.
Even the graphics denoting Zombieland “rules” (“Double tap,” shoot the zombie twice, is one of those) seem a lot less clever and are generally botched in presentation, here.
Harrelson’s Tallahassee has moved on to a less cool ride (a Pontiac Transporter) and a far less cool hat.
And the action climax has more in common with “Hobbes & Shaw” than it does with the original film.
It’s enough to make you wish they’d tapped out before they cut that first check, buying a sequel the cinema did not need or even ask for.
MPAA Rating: R for bloody violence, language throughout, some drug and sexual content
Cast: Jesse Eisenberg, Abigail Breslin, Emma Stone, Zooey Deutch, Rosario Dawson, Luke Wilson, and Woody Harrelson
Credits: Directed by Ruben Fleischer, script by Rhett Reese, Dave Callaham and Paul Wernick. A Sony/Columbia release
Running time: 1:39
The journalist, memoirist and writer-director Nora Ephron kept this phrase as the creative person’s mantra — “Everything is copy.”
In an artist’s life, everyone you meet, everything you hear and see, everything you experience is fair game to be used in your creative process.
So when the Franco-American sculptress, performance artist and art video creator Prune Nourry was diagnosed with breast cancer, her first reaction was the one any woman would have.
And the second? She was going to use it in her art.
“Serendipity” is a career retrospective documentary she’s made, framed by her fight against cancer, all the way up to and including surgeries.
“Everything is connected,” she says. “I don’t believe in ‘coincidence.” So titling her film/journey “Serendipity” is a little French irony for the art consuming masses.
In her case, considering the fallopian/female fertility-centric nature of her art, she could do nothing else.
“Serendipity” shows her working with large-form sculptures, wandering through stick tunnels meant to suggest fallopian tubes. She gives us a laugh with her video of a staged sculptural demonstration she once did of a five course meal at a four star restaurant where babies are made.
“The Procreative Diner” begins with the “cocktail” course — in vitro fertilization — and plunges on until we reach the finale, the “Cheese Course,” delivery.
There’s the street food cart “Sperm Bar” interactive installation, where passersby can check the “menu” of sperm donor traits they’d like.
Meanwhile, she’s braided her long black hair one last time, and invites friend, the late filmmaker Agnes Varda, to talk with her and photograph her as she chops it off.
“Am I still a woman with short hair and only one breast?” she asks the director of “Le petit amour.”
Later, she shaves her head. We’ve begun with her videoing her trip into surgery, a hospital gurney’s eye view of what she experiences. And we end with meeting her doctor as he marks her up for restorative surgery to fix the skin around the implant she had when her breast was removed.
We revisit her most ambitious works, seeing the Ganges River mud harvested and packed on straw frameworks for an installation called “Holy River.” Then there’s her optimistic piece,”Terracotta Daughters,” which she began in 2012 and plans to finish by 2030. Because she plans to survive.
“I had just realized I was a human being and I could die,” she says, undergoing chemo. She has no time for death.
You’ve heard and seen pictures of the ancient Chinese Terracotta Army commissioned by an emperor of the distant past. Nourry is photographing Chinese girls and designing and sculpting and commissioning her own terracotta army around them. This army is of girls, less valued around the world, even by her own French grandmother.
“Terracotta Daughters” is an immense piece, blunt in message and clever in execution.
Every artist has a hint of the self-obsessed navel-gazer about her or him. And “Serendipity” has its share of that.
And suffice it to say, if you’re not into modern conceptual art, this isn’t for you. But if you are, there’s something celebratory in this artist obssessed with female sexuality, fertility and the female form taking this potentially deadly diagnosis and making art out of it.
“Serendipity” isn’t necessarily what Nourry will be remembered for, but it makes a fascinating primer on her work, her obsessions and how she turns around breast cancer into a disease she was meant to have all along.
MPAA Rating: Unrated, nudity, profanity
Cast: Prune Nourry, Agnès Varda
Credits: Directed by Prune Nourry, script by Prune Nourry, Alastair Siddons. A Cohen Media Group release.
Running time: 1:15
This documentary about the big rivalry game between two largely Latino high school football teams, opens Nov. 8.
“JoJo Rabbit” is “Life is Beautiful,” as directed by Wes Anderson, co-starring Pee-wee Herman as Adolf Hitler.
Yeah, that’s it.
New Zealand director Taika Waititi’s playful, wildly eccentric film of Christine Leunens’ satiric novel mixes daffy charm with poignant personal politics in a coming of age story set in Nazi Germany.
A little boy (Roman Griffin Davis), a new member of the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth), is an ardent Nazi at 10, and a devout anti-Semite, even though he — like his best friend (Archie Yates)– doesn’t really understand what that’s all about.
And his imaginary friend, that dizzy Adolf himself (Waititi), isn’t much help in that regard, either.
The tale, set in a colorful bubble of “No war, here” Bavaria in the last months of World War II, follows little Johannes or “JoJo” as he tries to fit in with the Hitler Youth, struggles to master the martial skills passed on to him by the older boy/bullies in his troop and please the commander, Captain Klenzendorf (Sam Rockwell), a soldier demoted to this duty after losing an eye in combat.
They give the children uniforms with an “S” rather than “SS” on the lapels, stylish daggers — which lead to dagger accidents — and indoctrination. How do you recognize a Jew? Look for the scales, the tail, the horns, their instructor (Rebel Wilson) insists.
“They smell like Brussels sprouts!”
The older boys are already fanatics, and JoJo is one in the making, thanks to his obsession with his playime friend, who quizzes him on Nazi dogma and propaganda, and makes him practice his “Heils.”
“Heil Hitler” jokes have been around ever since the silly phrase was invented, and that’s a running gag here, worn-out, but still funny and thanks to the global revival in mimicking Hitler’s “very nice people,” still germaine.
JoJo gets his “Rabbit” nickname when he refuses to murder a bunny in a Hitlerjugend initiation rite. But his pal Adolf isn’t hearing the “You’re a coward, just like your father” taunts, and the Captain is more understanding than the Proud Boys of their troop.
JoJo’s adoring mom (Scarlett Johansson) accepts her kid’s fanaticism in the “just a phase” sense. We see her tiny acts of defiance and resistence to the fascism that rules their lives long before JoJo stumbles into “the Jew in the walls.”
That would be Elsa, played by Thomasin McKenzie of “Leave No Trace.” She’s being hidden by JoJo’s mom, and she’s mean enough to fit JoJo’s idea of a Jew. But what about the tail, the scales, the horns?
“We get those when we turn 21.”
Think she might temper JoJo’s devotion to Naziism?
Johannson has never played a sweeter character on the screen, and she delivers an endearing performance.
Rockwell can always be relied on to find the off-center center of an oddball like Captain Klenzendorf.
Stephen Merchant makes an amusing, “Heil” happy Gestapo agent, and young Mr. Davis makes this little Aryan adorable, but deeply troubling. McKenzie is a teen talent to be reckoned with.
But Waititi makes the overpowering impression here, one played up in all the film’s advertising. He does everything but sing “Springtime for Hitler” in this performance, the writer and co-star of the vampire dramedy “What We Do in the Shadows” giving us the insanely silly, and just enough of the psychotic menace of Hitler to remind he wasn’t that funny.
But the film’s blend of the precious with the precarious, pratfalls chased by poignant moments that remind us of the historical trauma that was unfolding around them, can be jarring.
Truth be told, the laughs rarely have much gusto to them.
Yes, these children will be hurled into combat, something JoJo’s grenade accident in the Hitlerjugend foretells.
Yes, millions of Jews, gays, Gypsies and Slavs were murdered — outside of this picturesque Bavarian bubble. Elsa gets that. Rosie (Johannson) knows.
Yes, it’s kind of funny that people fell for an infantile, tantrum-tossing fraud like ditzy Adolf. Or it used to be.
And yes, it’s topical. The accident of timing could make one wince when the film does its own version of “American liberators” arriving, a familiar trope of World War II movies set in Europe only recently stained and tarnished by the direction the “liberators” and their current dear leader have taken.
It’s just that removed from the heady group-think of its various film festival premieres, “JoJo” seems like a serio-comic hothouse flower, too fragile to pack much of a satiric punch, too delicate to deliver the comic sting Waititi aspires to.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for mature thematic content, some disturbing images, violence, and language
Cast: Roman Griffin Davis, Thomasin McKenzie, Sam Rockwell, Rebel Wilson, Stephan Merchant and Scarlett Johansson
Credits: Written and directed by Taika Waititi, based on a Christine Leunens novel. A Fox Searchlight release.
Running time: 1:48
Canadian iconoclast Neil Young is one classic rocker you can be sure will never just “show up and play the hits.” He’s still making new music, still cranking out ballads, rockers and protest songs well past his 70th year.
“Mountaintop” is his fly-on-the-wall-in-the-studio documentary about recording an album that’s due out Oct. 25. It’s a choppy film, using everything from time-lapse to fish-eye lenses to put us in the place where it was recorded, the Studio in the Clouds outside of Telluride, Colorado, and capture the process by which he and his sometime band of 50 years, Crazy Horse, arrange, practice, engineer and record their songs.
And in between takes, they take hits off small, disposable bottles of oxygen. They’re recording at 8750 feet above sea level, we’re reminded.
We watch four jowly, white-haired old gents — only “new” guitarist Nils Lofgren is under 70 — show the kids how it’s done. They joke, complain, curse and harmonize, everybody deferring to Young, who is still in fine voice and still in charge — of the tunes, the arrangements, the recording session and the film, which he directed under a nom de plume, “Bernard Shakey.”
Ten new songs including “Milky Way,” “Shut it Down” and “Think of Me” are put on (analog) tape in a ski-lodge like studio that one and all complain about — loudly.
Drummer Ralph Molina steps out from behind the hit to add a “clickety clack, clickety clack” soft-shoe tap dance (on a tap dancer board) to one track. Young and Lofgren trade licks on their Gibson Les Paul guitars.
A glass harmonica — an instrument invented by Benjamin Franklin that never caught on (wet fingertips play a spinning series of glass jars, leading to nerve damage) — is trotted out to play chords on a mournful ballad.
Engineer and co-producer John Hanlon listens to the band’s complaints about feedback, poor playback quality studio monitors (speakers) and hits the roof over the state of the place’s wiring and electronics. Of course, that could be his epic poison oak infection acting out.
“Rollin’ around in the grass with some babe in Malibu?” Young slyly jokes.
Young reminds us he can still high some pretty high notes, and he still has a political chip on his shoulder, on songs like “Rainbow of Colors,” his denunciation of Trump era xenophobia.
“There’s a ‘Rainbow of Colors’ in the old U.S.A.,” he croons. “No one’s gonna whitewash those colors away.”
The sessions, according to a Telluride newspaper account I read, happened in August, so this project was pieced together in great haste — live, on tape, with snatches of songs performed in an intimate concert setting edited in.
As a film, it’s not particularly revealing and adds little to what we know and understand about Young, who has been the subject of more tour documentaries with snippets of biography included than virtually any musician alive. The best were made by his friend and devoted fan, the late Oscar winning director Jonathan Demme.
But Young believes in documenting it all. He’s got 15 more concert and studio recording films in production, sessions recording the album, “Harvest” in 1971, Tokyo and London concerts, solo tours from the ’80s.
Yes, they’d make a better movie if they were artfully cut together to create a single complete “history” of the man and his band. But he’s hellbent on serving the “completists” in his fanbase, so into the editing bay he goes — suspending touring while he knocks these many projects out.
Vanity? Money? Money for charity? Who knows? He’s determined to do it and he’s certainly enough of a presence in music to pull them all off.
“Mountaintop’ will have a special one-night-only national theatrical release Oct. 22, three days before the album “Colorado” comes out.
MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity, drug jokes
Cast: Neil Young, Billy Talbott, Ralph Molina, Nils Lofgren, John Hanlon
Credits: Directed by Bernard Shakey (aka “Neil Young”). An Abramorama release.
Running time: 1:31
The horror B-movie “The Gallows” opened four years to near universal critical derision and a piddly $22 million or so, all in, at the box office.
So why, exactly, is there a sequel? Did it blow up online? Was it a Netflix smash?
Whatever its reception, SOME of us thought enough of the premise back in 2015 to think SOMEbody missed an opportunity with it. Bringing back the same writer/director team for “The Gallows: Act II” and making it for another distributor turns out to be no way to avoid repeating that mistake.
The pitch? There’s this haunted play, “The Gallows,” that a kid named Charlie Grimille died performing, hung onstage by the “gallows” of the show’s title. Just reading the play aloud sets “the curse” in motion.
So what we’ve got is a high school theater geeks version of the “Slender Man” or “Bloody Mary” curses of legend, hyped into “Blair Witch” territory by Internet viral discussion, shared videos of deaths, theories, etc.
If you’ve ever worked in the theater, on any level, you’ve heard ghost stories — the older the theater, the better the tale. My college theater allegedly had one, and a theatre I’ve attended and reviewed shows in over the years has long had an infamous spectral inhabitant.
For the sequel, the writing/directing team of Travis Cluff and Chris Lofing keep the play, abandon the “theater” and limply play up the viral side of the “curse,” how it is spread, how information about it is shared and why teenagers would put this stuff up online.
For fame and money, of course.
The prologue has teens messing around with a fake ouija board, scaring each other and recording it on their phones, before pulling out a battered copy of the play’s script. Reading from it brings rumbles of thunder, and a delayed hanging or two via a swingset.
Ema Horvath plays Auna Rue, and with a pretentiously theatrical name like that, you KNOW she’s got a yen to perform. She’s starting a new school, living with her step-sister (Brittany Falardeau), a costumer at a local theater company. And she blows her big reading in front of drama class because it’s from some insipid kiddie fantasy video she loved as a child, and she’s nervous and maybe a little light on talent.
But she’s led to this play, that sure enough, the library has on file. A reading from “The Gallows” for a college theater program talent scout could be her ticket to fame.
Because this Youtube channel she started isn’t doing the trick. Like every cute teenager, she wants attention and “followers” online via her vlog. It’s not until she starts reading from the play for that vlog that the traffic explodes.
She’s at a loss to explain that. Then she watches the video. Furniture MOVES in the background. A later reading is interrupted by something flying off the wall at her.
Best moments in “The Gallows: Act II?” Hovarth, as Auna, giggling at this as if the supernatural is something every kid her age accepts at face value. The dears.
Reading from “The Gallows” turns around her standing with the drama kids and teacher (Dennis Hurley). The only problem is, she tends to zone out and not remember performing the piece, she’s so lost in the part.
She’s hallucinating threats, as is her stepsister — shapes in the shadows around the house. Even her first injury at the hands of this “curse” isn’t enough to wake her up.
Who can she turn to? The classmate/cute former child actor (Chris Milligan) who’s hitting on her? The step sister that thinks she has no talent?
The INTERNET!
The web-side of the storytelling has been done better in scores of movies over the years. The plot packs all its surprises in the finale, which is cheating of the far-too-little-too-late school.
I’m guessing Lofing and Cluff do really good pitch meetings, because there’s nothing here that explains that “green light.”
The frights the filmmakers conjure up are middling, at best. And “Act II” may be the mildest “R” rating in the history of horror films. Garroting the victims with ropes and whatnot is never going to be as gory as the leavings of a chainsaw massacre.
No tension, no titillation and far too little theater nerd connection leave this sequel — say it with me — hanging.
MPAA Rating: R for some disturbing violent content
Cast: Ema Horvath, Chris Milligan, Brittany Falardeau and Jono Cota
Credits: Written and directed by Chris Lofing, Travis Cluff. A Blumhouse/Lionsgate release.
Running time: 1:37
