Movie Nation

“Cousins” is a hamfisted and campy gay romance from Brazil, the sort of gay rom-com North American indie cinema moved on from decades ago.

The broad characters, the eye–rollingly obvious come-ons may produce a few laughs…in between the groans. And moans.

Lucas (Paulo Sousa) is a shy, orphaned lad who has been living with his devoutly religious aunt (Juliana Zancanaro), practicing his music, switching his Yamaha keyboard into organ mode to serenade her friends at the end of their weekly Bible study.

Those friends wonder about Lucas, who is handsome and talented, but seems to have no friends or prospects for friends.

Then Aunt Lourdes gives him news straight out of a gay porn comedy. There’s this handsome cousin that Lucas has never met. He’s coming to stay with them. He’s just been kicked out of his parents’ house, thanks to a short stretch in jail.

“I don’t want to know what he did,” Auntie says (in Portugeuse with English subtitles). We practice unconditional “forgiveness in this house.”

They’re a little pressed for space. Mind sharing a room with him?

Oh, and one other thing, Aunt Lourdes will be away on a Catholic retreat when “Mario” arrives.

Mario, played by writer and co-director Thiago Cazado, has a swagger and a cigarette when we meet him. He hugs a little too hard, “for all those years we have not hugged!” He’s amusingly eager to walk about with no trousers, making this a “bulging underwear comedy.”

He’s full of stories about the sorts of “games” cousins play, suggestions that “we push our beds together” because “I’m afraid of ghoosts.

Yeah it’s like that.

A little piano serenade, a little air guitar rocking out, a little alcohol and then it’s naked time, sex scenes set to insipid English language pop.

All the while, Lucas is fending off Bible study Julia (Duda Esteves), a coming-on-strong beauty who seeks piano lessons, even though her screeching shows her to be tone-deaf, and whose ditzy flirtation means every lesson end with her bouncing on the lad’s lap.

Give “Cousins” a couple of points for attempts at “cute.” That hugging line made me laugh, and the fact that even the devout in the household curse like sailors, turning to apologize to the nearest crucifix (they’re everywhere), is worth a grin.

Poor Esteves has to vamp through a character so broad you’d swear she was created in the 1940s, and performed by somebody yanked from a community theater stage in mid-mugging.

“Cousins” may be a cinematic novelty in Brazil, but aside from the nudity (more or less tastefully handled), there’s little novel or entertaining for film audiences this far north, just titillation.

MPAA Rating: Unrated, with nudity, sexual situations, profanity

Cast: Thiago Cazado, Paulo Sousa, Duda Esteves, Juliana Zancanaro

Credits: Directed by Mauro Carvalho and Thiago Cazado, script by Thiago Cazado. A TLA release.

Running time: 1:22

England’s “warrior king,” Henry V, earns a beautifully detailed period piece biography, a martial showcase for Timothée Chalamet, best known for fey roles that play up his beauty and sensitivity.

As “The King,” he twirls a mean broadsword, draws his dirk and wrestles armored French noblemen into the mud where they writhe until he stabs them in the neck until dead, the way it was done in the 15th century during the Hundred Years War.

But period piece detail aside, it’s a pedestrian, sodden film. It’s not Shakespeare’s “Henry V.” The odd good line aside, without Shakespeare, there is no poetry to it.

Not one moment thrills or moves.

A quick trip to Wikipedia reveals the degree of dramatic license and downright historical poppycock.

And if it’s not history and it’s not thrilling Shakespearean poetry, what the hell’s the point?

The idea behind Aussie David Michôd’s film is making Henry a reluctant warrior, a man who counsels peace, does not get along with his paranoid, power mad father (Ben Mendelsohn).

“You will NOT inherit this crown,” his father growls.

“Nor have I SOUGHT it!” the kid bellows back.

Henry engages in single combat to prevent battles, struggles to guard his younger brother, the newly-anointed heir, and spare the army slaughter in the process, and is slow to anger at French provocations when he takes the throne.

He’s almost embarrassed at his coronation, telling his nobles “You shall suffer the indignity of serving me, the wayward son you despise.”

The “man of action” that’s been the traditional way of presenting Henry V is made more thoughtful, more in conflict with the temper of the court and public opinion (the English always spoiling for a fight with the French).

The middling mini-series style script mashes up the history that Shakespeare drew on — Holinshead’s Chronicles — and Shakespeare’s “characters.” We see the same callow partying Prince Hal of Shakespeare, the drunken whoremonger who had to grow up to fill his father’s crown, and his mentor during his wastrel years, Sir John Falstaff (Joel Edgerton, who co-wrote the script). But Hal becomes “Henry” without denying Falstaff, with no “I know thee not, old man.”

And Falstaff? The comical coward of Hal’s youth and Shakespeare’s showcase comedy for him, “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” becomes a humorless and brave old soldier whose many war stories aren’t whoppers, after all. Heck, even the sharp-tongued Shakespearean innkeeper who lets him run a tab (Tara Fitzgerald) has been neutered.

“The King” tells a version of their story that falls somewhere between “Henry V,” most recently filmed to great and glorious effect by Kenneth Branagh, and Orson Welles’ 1960s compression of the “Henriad” plays about Hal and Falstaff, “Chimes at Midnight.”

The climactic battle draws heavily on “Chimes'” depiction of the grisly, grimy and unromantic nature of hand-to-hand combat in armor in the mud. It’s as realistic as any medievalist might want, even if the events of the battle are pure poppycock.

The only laughs in the film’s 140 minutes are provided by Robert Pattinson, the “Twilight” veteran and future Batman milking his turn as the French dauphin (prince) who taunts Henry, goads him into battle and slings a wicked French accent during his many atrocities and insults.

“Please speak English,” he teases. “I ENJOY to speak English. So…simple and…dirty!”

His trash talk-threats are the best lines in this Michôd (“Animal Kingdom,” “The Rover”) and Edgerton script.

“I ‘ave come to de-SCRIBE for you your end days,” he purrs. “ze SCREAMS of your men…I will DRAIN your blood from your body and bury you under a tree, a tiny French tree!”

Pattinson is more fun than Chalamet, and more instantly credible, I have to say. None of this pop idol mop top and chicken-chested machismo that Chalamet brings to the young king.

I love a funny French accent more than most, treasure most any period piece and revel in Medieval historical pics like this.

But “The King” is something of a tin-eared bore and a massive waste of time. It so wants to follow “Henry V,” without the grace notes of Shakespeare’s “Saint Crispin’s Day” speech and Henry’s courtship of the French princess (Lily-Rose Depp). Lacking those linguistic flourishes, the damned thing just plods along, and brings me back to my original complaint.

What the hell’s the point?

MPAA Rating: R for some strong violence, and language.

Cast: Timothée Chalomet, Robert Pattinson, Joel Edgerton, Sean Harris, Ben Mendelsohn, Tara Fitzgerald and Lily-Rose Depp.

Credits: Directed by David Michôd, script by Joel Edgerton, David Michôd. A Netflix release.

Running time: 2:20

The grace notes almost outnumber the grimaces in “Harriet,” an insistently melodramatic and sometimes affecting film biography of Abolitionist and heroine of the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman.

Edit out the theatrical, eye-rolling third act, and Cynthia Erivo‘s fiery, righteous turn as the escaped slave who led scores of other enslaved Negroes to freedom in the mid-19th century, would stand tall — or at least taller than she does in the closing credits of director and co-writer Kasi Lemmons’ film.

The fact that the enterprise never looks as epic as its heroine, that too many supporting roles show a production short of cash to hire “names” and charismatic villains, wouldn’t matter as much. The speechifying, predicting the near future (the Civil War) and other excesses of Lemmons’ (“Eve’s Bayou,” “Talk to Me”) and Gregory Howard Allen’s (“Ali,” “Remember the Titans”) script only truly grate in that never-ending finale.

We meet Araminta “Minty” Tubman (Erivo, of “Widows” and “Bad Times at the El Royale”) just as her husband (Zackary Momoh) is presenting their claim, drafted by a lawyer, for freedom to their Maryland “massa.” John Tubman was a free man who’d hired a lawyer, seeking to enforce a will that should have granted Minty and her parents freedom.

Their owner (Mike Marunde) isn’t having it, and his cruelest son Gideon (Joe Alwyn) counsels selling Minty off to head off the trouble she was stirring up.

“Harriet,” the film and the heroine who will wear that name, leaps into action, putting her on the run to avoid “being sold South.” The local Negro preacher (Vondie Curtis-Hall, best of the supporting players) may lead hymns about keeping “your hands on the plow,” and sermonize Biblical obedience. But when Minty shows up at his door, he is the man with the plan.

Illiterate Minty sprints into the night, makes her way 100 miles (via the preacher’s connections) and escapes to discover the “colored” elite of Philadelphia, where “The Committee” runs the Underground Railroad, William Still (Leslie Odom Jr.) publishes their Abolitionist broadsides and the prim and ladylike Marie Buchanan (Janelle Monae) shows escaped slaves how to fit into white society.

“Walk like you got a right to!”

Minty takes a new name, her mother’s real name — Harriet. And before too long, Harriet, a pious woman who has “spells” in which she communes with the Lord (a head injury may have caused these), decides those she loved must experience the freedom she has claimed.

She starts making treks South to free her husband, her family and others.

The grandest conceit of this telling of her epic story is the way Harriet, who wore disguises and used fake papers to make her way into the South, came by her nickname “Moses.”

It wasn’t just the fact she was leading her people to “the promised land.” In the film, she hides in the woods just off the fields where the hands are working, and sings (Erivo played a jazz singer in “Bad Times at the El Royale,” and is Aretha Franklin in the upcoming TV miniseries. Yeah, she’s got pipes.). She sings “Go Down, Moses,” with its lyrics demanding the Pharaoh “let my people go.”

The field hands hear her, drop their tools, and follow her.

These moments are electric, up to a point. Repetition eventually wears out even this intensely moving and magical device.

Erivo runs as if her life depended on it, flashes her eyes as if she Talks with The Lord and “The Lord talks back,” as one convert to her cause puts it. And that’s a good thing.

Because the villains here are almost silent-movie dastardly, with Alwyn looking like he took time off from a Lynyrd Skynyrd tribute band to blast us with some Old Time Racism.

“Having a favorite slave is like having a favorite pig. You can play with it, give it a name. But one day you might have to sell it or eat it!”

The word “Negro” never figures in the script. Everybody, Abolitionists and Harriet herself, labels the black folks they’re dealing with by the Biblical-age term for less than human property — slaves. That’s tin-eared screenwriting, and you would have expected much better, given the credentials of the writers.

Slave hunters and slave owners keep staking out the same wooden bridge to intercept their escapees on their flight north across the Mason-Dixon Line. It never works. They never learn.

Versions of Frederick Douglas and John Brown turn up, the rising tensions and Congressional stop-gaps that pushed the country toward Civil War are addressed.

And while there’s a historical exclamation point to one event depicted in the third act, it all plays as dramatically-flat, subtlety-abandoned theatricality, and takes the wind right out of whatever forward motion the first two acts had.

Tubman’s case to be on the $20 bill, as a heroine straight out of American myth, is made, a brave Christian woman sprinting down the path of the righteous. “Harriet” stumbles when it makes her more mythic than human, and less the woman of action than she was.

MPAA Rating: PG-13, violence, racial epithets, profanity

Cast: Cynthia Erivo, Janelle Monae, Vondie Curtis Hall, Leslie Odom Jr., Joe Alwyn and Tim Guinee

Credits: Directed by Kasi Lemmons, script by Gregory Allen Howard and Kasi Lemmns. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 2:05

Competently animated — OK, competent “ish” — and heartlessly scripted, “Arctic Dogs” plays like an Entertainment Studios production not written and drawn so much as engineered, contrived by market necessity.

Give theaters something animated to drag kids and parents to in between Pixar, Dreamworks, Sony, Laika and MGM (“The Addams Family”) releases.

Terrible? Kind of. “Joyless” is much more apt, though. That’s usually what you get when you try to fix an awful animated script by hiring big names to read it into a microphone for your cartoon.

Jeremy Renner voices an Arctic Fox who dreams of being “Top Dog” in the Arctic Circle overnight delivery business. Michael Madsen voices one of those delivery huskies.

“Swifty” the white-camoflaged and too-tiny-to-pull-a-dogsled fox is consigned to package sorting at ABDS, Artic Blast Delivery Service. His boss, Magda the Moose (“I am CARIBOU!” she hisses in an Anjelica Huston Russian accent) will never let him move into deliveries.

Until that day all the huskies quit. Actually, they were dog-napped. And it’s not until Swifty realizes the red fox he crushes on (Heidi Klum), an inventor, has been taken that he figures out that they’re all being held in an evil Doc Oc styled walrus (John Cleese) in his self-described “lair.” Evil walrus has minions — puffins — and a big mouth, barely concealing “the secret of my nefarious plans.”

Swifty may be “just a fox” to the other residents of Taigaville, where “the only thing I’ll be remembered for is not being memorable.” But he’s on the case, and PB, his Polar Bear pal (Alec Baldwin) might help, even if dimwitted slacker-albatross Lemmy (James Franco) can”t.

There’s precious little action, and beavers with Italian accents, weasels with German and French ones (“Vive l’resistence!”) and zero laughs spread over 92 minutes.

As I said, “Joyless.” Any questions?

MPAA Rating:PG for some mild action and rude humor

Cast: The voices of Jeremy Renner, Heidi Klum, Alec Baldwin, John Cleese, James Franco and Anjelica Huston

Credits: Directed by Aaron Woodley, script by Bob Barlen, Cal Brunker and Aaron Woodley. An Entertainment Studios release.

Running time: 1:32

Good cast, properly dramatic, poetic and action-promising trailer for this 2018 film, earning a Nov. 22 release.

Well, the “Fast and Furious” thing was never going to last forever. Close, but not forever.

So Vin Diesel is going down the “Universal Soldier” route with the comic book based “Bloodshot.” Guy Pearce? Man.

Once more, dear friends, once more, cast and crew, once more — ACCOUNTANTS — let us return to “Jumanji” for a little more Kevin Hart/Dwayne Johnson cold hard buddy-teen movie cash.

North American audiences an be forgiven for scanning past this title on Netflix, “Revenge of the Pontianak,” and wondering if the first half of is missing.

Shouldn’t it be “Aztek II: Revenge of the Pontiac?”

No, nothing to do with the former GM home of the Bonneville, the G8 and the GTO. This is a Malaysian vampire tale (in Malay, with English subtitles), a soapy horror melodrama that’s very similar to Hollywood’s “Ghost Story” of some decades past.

It’s pretty tame, by Western horror standards. But it plays by the rules, it’s in an exotic setting and it’s a period piece — colorful costumes from Malaysia’s swinging ’60s clothe the cast, all characters trapped in a sylan village in the mountainous suburbs.

It’s 1965, and everybody’s gathered to celebrate the wedding of Siti (Shenty Felizaina) and Khalid (Remy Ishak).

He has a little boy from an earlier relationship, but she’s pretty and the locals seem to take to her. But check out the look on Khalid’s face when his best man Rais (Tony Eusoff) serenades the newlyweds with a song that seems to mean something to Khalid, and maybe to Rais.

And the dirty look he casts towards the stage presages what happens later. Rais has a car accident, gets out to check the damage, and is gutted by something that also attacks his date.

When new bride Siti sees Rais next, his bled-out corpse is hanging from a very tall tree overlooking their classy village bungalow on stilts. Of course she screams.

But the locals instantly wonder what curse Siti has brought upon them. The local imam (Namron) who has shaman qualities (he touches people and sees montages of what’s happened to them) shares a prophecy, and a warning.

“Darkness has descended upon this village!” he intones. “CLEAN YOUR HOUSE!”

He’s not just lecturing Siti, who has all this blood on the porch. It’s the whole village that must “clean.” And as seizures and sickness start striking locals, they amp up the superstition and point their fingers at the outsider, this “demon woman.”

But we, being sophisticated horror viewers, know better. That look Khalid and Rais shared had meaning.

And others know their secret.

The frights are fairly routine, up until the finale, which has blood and fury and meaning and comeuppance.

I liked the look and the tone of Glen Goei and Gavin Yap’s picture, the foliage of the rainforest framing the world they’re showing up, beautiful people in exotic clothing dealing with problems any vampire film fan (or “Ghost Story” fan) will recognize.

A long flashback gives away the mystery, which we’ve already guessed if we read the opening credit, that a “Pontianak” is a woman who dies in childbirth but who isn’t given a proper funeral. A “Pontianak” she is called.

And who is bringing a child into this marriage?

It’s all a trifle murky and underscripted (for foreign, not Malaysian audiences) to follow, but if you watch a lot of horror, you’ve seen worse. The acting is solid all up and down the line with Namron, as the seer or whatever his real title is (he dresses like a Malaysian Imam, and the Muslim call to prayer is heard in one scene), the stand out.

It’s not a hidden gem or anything like that, just another culture’s take on plot points and themes Hollywood has beaten into the ground. Just interesting enough to wish all involved “Better luck next film.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, bloody violence, sexual situations

Cast: Nur Fazura, Remy Ishak, Hisyam Hamid, Shenty Felizaina, Tony Eusoff and Namron.

Credits: Written and directed by Glen Goei, Gavin Yap.  A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:32

You can see why Edward Norton held onto the rights to make “Motherless Brooklyn” for years and years before he finally got his chance to film it. It’s his shot at making a “Chinatown,” a film noir about the brute force that created New York the way forces beyond Jake Gittes’ control shaped modern Los Angeles.

And Norton, who made characters with tics and afflictions, or who were affecting afflictions, a mainstay of his early repertoire, would play a detective with Tourette’s.

But one can appreciate the ambition, the scope the actor was going for, while acknowledging the material isn’t “Chinatown” and the actor/director’s reach exceeds his grasp when it comes to realizing it.

In mid-50s New York, Lionel (Norton) doesn’t call his tendency to blurt out sounds, words, phrases and profanity Tourette’s Syndrome. It’s “like having glass in your head,” he narrates, the implication being that the glass is broken and keeping your thoughts to yourself cuts and hurts too much to manage it.

Being asked “How’d she take it?” might get a “Tim-buck-TAKE it” response, and a lot more blurted words to boot.

He’s obsessive compulsive, too, worrying a sweater thread until he ruins it, opening and closing doors, repeatedly patting someone on the shoulder after initially making that gesture out of compassion.

And for the love of God don’t ask him to light your cigarette.

Lionel works in a small private eye agency that doubles as a car service. He lives with a cat his tics and blurts scare, and copes with gum (at work) or marijuana (to sleep), anything to occupy or dull his mind.

And aside from his off-putting condition, which everybody he meets excuses with “That’s OK” (New York is very tolerant, in this way, in the movie), Lionel’s got a fine mind. It’s why Frank Minna (Bruce Willis) employs him. Lionel, nicknamed “Freak Show” by his colleagues (Dallas Roberts and Bobby Cannavalle and Willis), has one of those total recall/video-rewind memories that only appear in the movies.

In 1954, Frank relies on Lionel to listen to a meeting where he’s left a phone off the hook so that Lionel can “record” it, at least in his mind.

And that’s important, because this meeting, a bit of finagling and working the angles with mobsters and connected “types,” is what gets Frank killed.

We know what that means in private eye tales (Jonathan Lethem wrote the novel this is based on). You solve the case “cuz he’d have done it for us.” Ignore the not-grieving-enough widow (Leslie Mann, the perfect blonde shrew), and figure out why Frank was following this “colored girl,” who turns out to work for a housing agency and advocacy group for the working poor.

Gugu Mbatha-Raw is Laura, and even she doesn’t know how she fits into whatever’s really going on here. Like her boss (Cherry Jones), she knows “What happens to poor people in this city wasn’t news yesterday and it won’t be news tomorrow.”

There’s an all-powerful city planner with his fingers in various “authorities” and commissions that made things go in the days when the Dodgers were in Brooklyn. He’s plainly based on the megalomaniacal “visionary” Robert Moses, who steamrolled people and neighborhoods reshaping the city in that era, and he’s played by the menacing and mesmerizing Alec Baldwin.

Michael Kenneth Williams plays a scarred, scary jazz man with a sweet side, based on Miles Davis.

And Willem Dafoe is Mr. Exposition, the gadfly who knows how “things get done in this city,” the wild-eyed one who fills Lionel in on the sorts of stuff that’s about to happen that the dead Frank might have been wise to, which is how he became Dead Frank.

Norton makes the most out of his classic gumshoe with a tic, and plays those blurted insults, confessions or profanities for laughs. It’s not the most sensitive portrayal, but he never lets Lionel’s condition render him less than competent. And nobody under-estimates him because of it.

It’s a movie that lingers over its clues, and lets Lionel’s total recall reset them and slowly and deliberately figure this puzzle out.

That “slowly” business is a hindrance, because the picture follows the noir “Chinatown” template to a fault. That makes it predictable. That makes it play SLOW.

Lionel gets beaten up, repeatedly. Bad guys are always getting the drop on him. But even with Frank dead, they let Lionel live.

Scenes that don’t drive the action dress up the city in its post war grime and slums. The narration is borderline incessant, the sax-flavored jazz score de rigeur.

And the payoff seems almost quaint as it reaches for “Chinatown” shock value and scandal.

The upshot of all this, two hours and 24 minutes of vintage car chases, fire escape chases, punch-outs and puzzling over clues? “It’s NOT ‘Chinatown,’ Jake.”

MPAA Rating: R for language throughout including some sexual references, brief drug use, and violence

Cast: Edward Norton, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Bruce Willis, Willem Dafoe, Bobby Cannavale, Cherry Jones and Alec Baldwin

Credits: Written and directed by Edward Norton, based on the Jonathan Lethem novel. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 2:24

The really bad ones you stare at, slack-jacked, like a grisly road accident that so distracts you it’s a wonder you don’t wind up in the ditch yourself.

“Eminence Hill” is like that, a Western so ugly, inept and endless that you marvel at the number of people who had to sign off on thinking, “This could be pretty good,” and “That fellow who made ‘Redemption?’ He knows what he’s doing.”

The whole picture can be summed up in a bit of torture, where a hammer is used to break a gunfighter’s hand. Knowing where to put the camera so that the hammer-swinger can take a full whack, and where to edit so that we believe a hand has just been crushed, is first year film school stuff.

Robert Conway slept late that day. Apparently.

It’s a meandering sagebrush saga that begins with a quartet of rogues hunting down the jury that hang the brother of the gang’s leader (Clint James). He talks a farmer’s ear off before he guns him and his wife down as he was the last juror.

Their daughter (Anna Harr)? “Unspoiled” and thus, sellable to “the savages.”

A lawman (Owen Conway, sibling to Robert, co-writer of the script) might look like a city dandy, but he’s awfully handy with a gun, and notorious. He takes a horse thief (Charlie Motley) out of jail to track down the outlaws.

And the outlaws? After run ins with Apaches and a snake oil salesmen, they stumble into the hidden town of the film’s title, a cult that dresses like Quakers and tortures like the Marquis de Sade.

Grizzled veterans of the screen Barry Corbin, in Westerns from “Lonesome Dove” to “No Country for Old Men,” and Lance Henriksen, whose first screen credit was the Western “Emperor of the North” back in the ’70s (better known for “Alien 3″”and “The Quick and the Dead”), are top billed. But that’s just to get our interest up and lend legitimacy, as they aren’t the stars and are blameless.

Dominique Swain shows where you end up when you start your career making a sordid “Lolita” for Adrian Lyne. Nude scenes pushing 40, out in the Arizona desert in the dead of night. Roughing it.

The rest of the players you won’t know unless you spend your Netflix time perusing the C-Westerns of recent vintage.

There are endless stumblings across other folks gathered round a campfire out on the trail, which begin with “We don’t want no trouble” begging for coffee, maybe, and “a simple passage of words.”

Almost all of these leaden, cement-footed scenes talk us to death before they resolve themselves in bloodshed.
The talking reaches a sort of peak with Henricksen’s cameo, showing up in a worn Confederate sergeant’s uniform, recognizing the “marshal” as “a child killer.”

“Some things need to be said,” he speechifies, in the manner of pretty much everybody else in this thing. “In a hundred years, only a time or two has Hell has spat out such a man as this.”

Well. OK.

The picture waddles here and there, spills lots of blood, reaches its climax, and then goes on and on past it.

Too much of a good thing? Don’t be ridiculous.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, sex, profanity, drinking, spitting

Cast: Clint James, Anna Harr, Owen Conway,  Charlie Motley, Dominque Swain, Barry Corbin and Lance Henriksen

Credits: Directed by Robert Conway, written by Robert Conway and Owen Conway. An Uncork’d release.

Running time: 1:40