Movie Nation

Here’s a drab little romance about a guy who might not be ready to “get back out there” because his late wife’s still in his head. Literally. He starts seeing her ghost.

And Sarah (Yael Stone) took those vows seriously, the ones that end with “As Long as We Both Shall Live.” Shouldn’t Malcolm (Josh Helman) do the same?

There are two ways you’d guess this would go. One is sad but silly, with Sarah tormenting the guy about “moving on,” or Malcolm being too reluctant to “let go.” The other is she haunts him, terrorizes the cute barmaid Nya (Jennifer Allcott), maybe even KILLS her.

That’s the Blumhouse version.

What director and co-writer Ali Askari goes for here is far more bland, not particularly romantic, not that cute, not really all that disturbing.

Sarah went out for baking soda for a cake she was forcing loving hubby Malcolm to make. She never came home. A year later, her sister (Yvonne Cone) taunts him into “rejoining society.”

His boss and partner in the Utica, NY real-estate investment business that Malcolm’s dad co-founded is Jim (Paul Sorvino), a near-hysteric who sees bankruptcy around every corner and a stroke in every breath.

“We’re all gonna DIE.”

One prospective business deal and montage of blind-dates that Dee (Cone) sets up later, he stumbles into the cute bar wench Nya. Maybe life will get better and happiness will return. Maybe he’ll tell her he’s widowed. Maybe after she hits him with this.

“Why are you moping? Moping is for losers!”

And then, just as things turn “interesting” — in the traditional use of the word, not as it’s employed here — a scolding Sarah starts appearing to Malcolm and it could all come to pieces.

Aussie “Mad Max” supporting player Helman looks a bit like Chris Pratt, only not the least bit funny. Not that the script does him any favors. There’s little cute and charming to play, other than Malcolm’s habit of saying “M’lady” to Nya on their first date.

Allcott, of “Kate Can’t Swim,” filmed after this 2016 film (just now coming out), has a Parker Posey look and a hint of perky. But as Malcolm and Nya chat and carry on in the quietest bar in America, one strains for a laugh or a taste of romance and struggles to figure out what tone they’re going for and why they aren’t hitting it.

That “quietest bar” crack is a clue. There’s little to no background life to any scenes. Static business meetings where Malcolm distractedly tries to text this free spirit who’s just entered his life, dull arguments with the dead wife here and there, a party that doesn’t have the background action to seem like a party at all.

“As Long as We Both Shall Live” is underpopulated and lifeless, as stark as Nya’s stand-up comic pal’s act, and the anemic response to it.

It’s not bad so much as not all there, although I think I’ll go as far as calling this lifeless four-handed script not worth filming.

MPA Rating: unrated, profanity, sexual situations

Cast: Josh Helman, Yael Stone, Jennifer Allcott, Yvonne Cone and Paul Sorvino

Credits: Directed by Ali Askari, scripted by Ali Askari, Joe McKernan, Golan Ramraz and Adam C. Sherer. A Boom Pictures release.

Running time: 1:37

Film is still, a hundred years into “talkies,” a visual medium.

Few things fly more in the face of that than a movie whose screenplay is largely a long run of monologues. If a voice-over narration is your idea of how to adapt a novel, then you haven’t “adapted” it at all. Images and actions are the deft and most engrossing way to tell a story.

“Cherry” is a Russo Brothers film based on a Nico Walker novel. They throw a lot of visual flourishes in the mix, take us into combat in Iraq and drug addiction and bank robberies in Cleveland.

But they leave the storytelling to the endless narration of the title character, an Army medic who “pops his cherry” in love, then in combat, later with heroin and finally with how he has to finance that PTSD habit, bank robberies.

From “Sometimes, I wonder if life is wasted on me” to “Everything there was about dying,” Cherry (Tom Holland) goes on and on, restating the obvious, explaining the visuals, telling us what the character’s thinking or feeling when that’s the task of acting.

Voice-over is a way of cut and pasting novel, cramming more content-and-context into your movie. When you’re taking us from college, first love (Ciara Bravo) with that girl who has “a thing for weak guys,” through the break-up that prompts him to enlist (in 2003), into the make-up after the break-up, through basic-training, Iraq combat, homecoming, drugs and then back to the robbery we see in the opening moments, all that narration just drags the picture to a halt.

A somewhat familiar story arc turns tedious long before the second hour of “Cherry” begins. And it goes on well beyond that second hour, too.

The Russos give us their take on basic training, with Cherry narrating “There was a lot of yelling,” helpful to those who haven’t noticed the drill sergeants doing just that. Really helpful to that rare bird who’s never seen a movie that depicts basic training.

They take us into combat, the tragedy of making friends in a combat zone, of letting yourself care when the Army promotes the most unquestioning cogs in the machine to Sergeant, where they assume authority equates with infallibility.

Then come the night terrors and shakes of PTSD back home, with your wife traumatized by proxy. That’s why Cherry gets into drugs and plunges into bank robbing to pay off his dealer, “Pills & Coke” (Jack Reynor) and Pills’ mostly-unseen and supposedly much-scarier boss, Black (Daniel R. Hill).

The Russos, who handled the last years of the Marvel/”Avengers-Captain America” run, try to whizbang their way through all this, leaving us with a relationship that lacks warmth, a tsunami of peripheral characters who barely register and a hero who talks and talks and talks and never lets us get inside his skin. They show that hero in situations — from combat to addiction to robbing banks — that have been better-blocked, staged and filmed by legions of filmmakers who came before them.

The only “jokes” here are the names of the banks our young vet robs — “Capitalist One,” “Sh—ybank” among them.

A true adaptation would have thinned every chapter of this film down, eliminated characters. This reminds me of the Chris Columbus “Harry Potter” movies, filmmakers afraid to leave out a single damned page of the book.

They don’t flinch at showing us the gruesome side of combat. But it’s like they’re at a loss about what to do with real people, real situations, real traumas or emotions without comic book men and women in tights and lots and lots of effects.

Well, at least they got a relative a screenwriting credit and another relative in the cast. Us? We got this grind of a movie to sit through.

MPA Rating: R for graphic drug abuse, disturbing and violent images, pervasive language, and sexual content 

Cast: Tom Holland, Ciara Bravo, Jack Reynor. Jeff Wahlberg, Michael Rispoli, Ann Russo, Daniel R. Hill and Theo Barklem-Biggs

Credits: Directed by Anthony Russo and Joe Russo. Script by Angela Russo-Ostot and Jessica Goldeberg, based on a novel by Nico Walker. An Apple TV+ release.

Running time: 2:20

The English scientist Michael Faraday is worth quoting as Gospel while taking in “‘Til Kingdom Come,” a new Israeli-made documentary.

“There’s nothing quite as frightening as someone who knows they are right.”

The film is about the unsettling alliance between that country’s far right, its West Bank “settler” movement and their dear leader, Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, and American evangelical Christians –conservative, mostly-rural, largely Southern “fundamentalists.”

As director/interviewer Maya Zinshtein travels and talks with pastors, lobbyists, Trump “evangelical advisory board” folk and assorted right wing Israelis lobbying Washington or fund-raising for The Fellowship of Christians and Jews, you never heard so many dead-certain-they-are-right zealots in all your life.

When Pastor Boyd Bingham IV sits down with a Palestinian Christian Pastor Naim Khoury of First Baptist Church in Bethlehem, he hears concerns like “When evangelicals look at the West Bank, they look at the land as ’empty.’ They simply ignore the continuing occupation of the Palestinian people.”

After leaving Pastor Khoury’s church Bingham — in line to inherit the family business the way his daddy inherited Binghamton Baptist from his daddy — spits out “There’s no such thing as a ‘Palestinian.'”

He’s sure of it. Biblically sure. We’ve already seen him out in the woods, taking target practice with his assault rifle. We’ve heard that “Trump spoke to people like me,” rural people who “felt looked down on” by America at large. And we’ve listened in during his “indoctrination (his word)” of Sunday school kids at his daddy’s church, where they learn of Israel’s importance and that “Their people, the Jews, are better than all of us. And you need to accept that.”

And at that moment, with an Evangelical pastor of a Baptist church in the city where Jesus was born, reaching out and trying to turn a heart towards tolerance and light, we see the scale of the problem Zinshtein is pointing out.

Armed New Testament literalists have allied themselves with the most fascist government in Israel’s history, and are spending money they don’t have — judging by the intense poverty of Middlesboro and Bell County, Kentucky — to support that government and its increasingly belligerent policies. They’re doing this by donating to the The Fellowship of Christians and Jews, another quasi-religious/totally political “family business” recently passed down from its founder, Rabbi Yehiel Eckstein, to his daughter Yael.

Zinshtein takes us from Middlesboro to Jerusalem, the Dead Sea to D.C. and a Beverly Hills gala for the Friends of Israel Defense Forces, one of the beneficiaries of this “fellowship” between right wing Christians and Israelis willing to take their money and use their political clout.

We see the endless parade of Fellowship of Christians and Jews commercials, and a TV sampling of sometimes-incendiary “end times” and “Rapture” rhetoric from Southern pulpits, especially that of Texas Pastor John Hagee. We sit in on Trump era lobbying efforts by displace-the-Palestinians-with-more-‘Settlements activists like Yossi Dagan.

Pat Robertson happily sits down for a chat about his role in providing the seed money for The Fellowship of Christians and Jews via his televised “700 Club” in the 1980s, because despite asking sometimes tough questions about “hypocrisy” in this alliance, Zinshtein is unfailingly polite.

And in occasional candid moments, Yael Eckstein admits being conflicted by aligning Israel with people who, as we see repeatedly, are watching world news to “translate geopolitical reality through the lens of prophecy,” and sound eager for the End Times to arrive.

“God is watching every missile!” as one Hellfire and brimstone preacher bellows.

“Is there an elephant in the room?” Eckstein wonders. “Yeah.”

If Jews are in for “seven years of torment” and slaughter according to fundamentalist interpretations of The Book of Revelations, and evangelicals are hellbent on bringing that about, maybe pushing to get Trump to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem won’t just lead to Palestinians deaths (58 in the days right after that embassy opened in 2018).

If a corner of Christianity that only recently shed open, braying anti-Semitism says it’s your friend, coopts your menorah and Star of David and insists it knows what’s best for you, perhaps taking a step back from the brink is the smart play.

There’s too little push-back provided here, a few Palestinians, former U.S. official Lara Friedman of the Foundation for Middle East Peace saying “I don’t think Israelis appreciate the bargain they’ve made.”

But Zinshtein covers enough of the bases and gives all those she interviews the screen time to speak their truth. And if they’re a gun nut, grievance-wielding pastor who is sure he’s not the crackpot he comes off as here, merely “right,” we all ought to be worried. Dogmatic cranks shouldn’t be setting dark, confrontational policies when their fondest hope is that they’re self-fulfilling.

Cast: Yael Eckstein, Pat Robertson, Pastor John Hagee, Lara Friedman, Rev. Johnnie Moore, Yossi Dagan, Pastor Boyd Bingham IV

Credits: Directed by Maya Zinshtein, script by Mark Monroe. An Abramorama release.

Running time: 1:17

Michael Winterbottom, one of my favorite directors, leaves behind Coogan and Bryson “Trip” comedies and gets back to the political thrillers he’s best at with this upcoming film.

He did “Welcome to Sarejevo,” “The Road to Guantanamo” and “A Mighty Heart” before Coogan, Brydon and he did “Tristram Shandy” and all those “Trip” movies — “Greed.”

Damn, Sir Ken is a DEAD ringer for ol’ BJ, wot wot?

“This Sceptered Isle,” a scheduled British TV series, is about the unlikely turn that brought Britain to Brexit and the journalist, provocateur, politician and TV guest “clown” on many a show, including “Top Gear,” Boris Johnson’s rise to prime minister.

There are few things more maddening than sitting through a thriller that should work, that has the requisite elements in place, and just doesn’t.

“The Stylist” is about a lonely, awkward and murderous hair dresser who drugs and scalps her victims, wearing their hair and play-acting their voices like Buffalo Bob in “Silence of the Lambs.” Tell me that isn’t a killer (ahem) concept.

Running with the “People tell their stylist the most intimate things” idea is a great hook, a “reason” for envy, resentment and revenge, at least according to murderous redhead Claire (Najarra Townsend) seems like it can’t miss. Director and co-writer Jill Gevargizian does miss. Why?

Pace. It always comes down to that in thrillers. You think you’re adding suspense by slow-walking us through scenes, slo-motioning the hair-styling montages. You’re not. You’re losing us.

With thrillers in general and horror in particular, once you’ve established the dread, it’s time to TCB.

We “get it.” Now “get ON with it.”

Once it’s established that Claire’s primary victim will be the frazzled but smart, professional and thoughtful bride-to-be Olivia (Brea Grant), the throw-down is set up. .

Bowl cuts for the bitchy bridesmaids? A little lethal snip-snip-snip at the rehearsal dinner? A grisly grooming of the groom? The possibilities are laid out, ripe for the picking.

Instead we linger over Claire’s tortured loneliness. We waste screen time on a succession of needy text messages, all this AFTER we’ve taken forever to set up our monster and her pivotal victim.

Townsend is a mainstay of B-horror and was in the short film this is based on. She’s an arresting presence without much to chew on here. Claire is more wounded than tortured, more brooding than psychotic. It’s an uninteresting performance which might not have mattered so much had this picture clipped by.

It doesn’t. So much was dispensed with — how Claire disposes of bodies and covers up her crimes, her mastery of breaking and entering. Why not cut the far less interesting stuff, the dead seconds after the payoff moment in most every scene?

There might be a solid 80 minute thriller tucked into the 104 minute dawdle. As I said, we get it. Get on with it.

Gevargizian never does.

MPA Rating:unrated, graphic bloody violence

Cast: Najarra Townsend, Brea Grant, Jennifer Seward

Credits:Directed by Jill Gevargizian, script by Jill Gevargizian, Eric Havens and Eric Stolze. An Arrow release.

Running time: 1:44

Long before this little “Thank you for your support” package was even dreamed up, I was swooning over this American Classic about houselessness not “homelessness.” They live on wheels on the road, the American migrants, the new “Okies,” in perpetual “Nomadland.”

Granted, I live on a sailboat, not in an RV. But I see these people, this “tribe” everywhere.

Maybe I’ll pass on the dashboard sunscreen to some Queen of the Road I run across. The license plate? VW bound.

Thanks Searchlight Pictures, and good luck with the Oscar nominations.

See “Nomadland,” the best American pic of 2020.

Uneven performances and a dawdling, clunky script mute the impact of “Fatima,” the latest attempt to tell the story of “Our Lady of Fatima” in a way that doesn’t insult the faithful or earn ridicule from everybody else.

This modern era Catholic “miracle” long ago crossed into myth, a story kept alive by various means and in many media over the century since it happened.

Marco Pontecorvo’s film uses a standard historical picture device — the “interview” with a principal that takes us back to the late WWI visions seen by three Portuguese children, shepherds who claimed to have been visited by the Virgin Mary, “Our Lady of the Rosary,” who delivered a message of hope for them to pass on to a troubled world.

Sônia Braga is Sister Lucia, last surviving direct link to the visions, now an old woman who speaks to a researcher (Harvey Keitel) writing a book about “mass delusions” and “seers,” and a man who has already written that “all seers are ‘de facto’ unstable.”

Sister Lucia, reminiscing about what happened to her at age 10, isn’t trying to convince this professor. “I can only give my testimony,” she confesses. “It doesn’t look like the world has heeded the message of heavenly peace” that “our lady” passed on.

Her flashbacks take us to the horrors of World War I Portugal, a new republic struggling to make its place in the Europe by contributing to the Allied war effort in France. Little Lucia (Stephanie Gil) has a brother in the trenches in France and a devout mother (Lúcia Moniz) who figures prayers and fervent belief will bring her boy Manuel home safe and sound.

The script suggests that Lucia’s heavy burden of faith is put on her shoulders by her mother, whose prayers involved bargaining with God, promising this and that if Manuel came home. Slip up, lose faith or fail to walk a pious path, Mom preaches, and Lucia could seal Manuel’s fate.

Maybe that’s why she started seeing a woman in white, first in a cave where she drew on the walls while tending their sheep, then on a hillside with two young shepherd friends (Alejandra Howard, Jorge Lamelas). Lucia is shown horrors, including Manuel’s possible fate, “a war worse than this one,” a papal assassination attempt, during these visions, which she was ordered to keep “secret.”

But a visitation from the Virgin Mary is not something you hide from the superstitious Catholics of 1917 Portugal. The priest (Joaquim de Almeida) thinks “someone is playing a prank on you” or “the Devil is trying to trick you.” The mayor (Goran Visnjic) is aggravated at this “stupid superstition” among his constituents.

But through disbelief and threats, and the overwhelming attention by thousands of the faithful who flock to the city of Fátima to behold a miracle, be healed or ask for the save return of loved ones.

The script veers from corny credulity to some very nicely-conceived arguments raised by the skeptical professor to the old but still a firm-believer nun. The many logical fallacies common to such miracles are introduced, chief among them the notion that “Jesus had chosen” the children for this message, putting a terrible burden on the very young, who endure intense questioning, skeptical neighbors and official scorn.

Showing them Hell, and saying that two of the three would “soon be joining me” (in heaven) isn’t something a beneficent deity would do to little kids.

If you’re looking for a film that makes its case that Lucia, as the oldest, the ringleader and the sole survivor around when a shrine was built at the site of the visions, “Fatima” isn’t it. The vague nature of the prophecies doesn’t close the deal.

The film itself is a mixed bag, some decent performances — Keitel, young Gil and Moniz stand out — struggling with a script that wants to have it both ways and yet neither debunks the stories nor makes the case for the canonizations of the kids.

The crowd scenes, with a sea of extras convincingly desperate to believe, are the heart of the picture and the only moments that really come close to “moving.” “Fatima” finds its emotional core here, a miracle placed in its context, but limited in ways that don’t bear up to any application of logic.

The skeptics and cynics are drawn as cartoons, people who can be won over by whatever happened there back in 1917.

It’d take a Hail Mary better than anything we see here to lift “Fatima” into the realm of faith-based films that change hearts and minds.

MPA Rating: PG-13 for some strong violence and disturbing images

Cast: Stephanie Gil, Joana Ribeiro, Joaquim de Almeida, Goran Visnjic, Stephanie Gil, Joana Ribeiro, Lúcia Moniz, Harvey Keitel and Sônia Braga.

Credits: Directed by Marco Pontecorvo, script by Valerio D’Annunzio, Barbara Nicolosi and Marco Pontecorvo. A Picturehouse film on Netflix.

Running time: 1:52

“Dementer” is a horror tale of demonic possession and a cult survivor’s struggles to prevent it.

But that simple narrative is taken somewhere unique by filmmaker Chad Crawford Kinkle. This low budget Satanic story is set in the world of special needs caregiving. Blending a few actors with a largely nonprofessional cast, keeping everything cryptic and telling his story with sound effects and montage — a perfectly coherent blur of edits — Kinkle has conjured up a minimalist tale almost guaranteed to give you the creeps.

Katie (Katie Groshong) is 40ish and job hunting. What she owns is still stuffed into her car when she lands a job with Skills Development Services, a company that provides in-house and in-group-home care to special needs adults in a rural Tennessee county. Katie is personable, outgoing with the clients.

But she’s hearing voices. We hear them too, hissed and whispered, sometimes speaking backwards, sometimes as plain as day.

“For a life is given, a devil is born!”

She has flashbacks, sees blood and tries not to let whatever she’s been through slip out in front of her supervisor (Brandy Edmiston) or favorite client, Stephanie (Stephanie Kinkle, the director’s sister).

But we’ve seen the scars on her back, rituals she witnessed by bonfire light. We catch her in weeping, quivering fear when she knows nobody else can see.

And when Stephanie gets sick, Katie figures it’s all connected to what she knows, what she went through and what she represents.

“I’m NOT going to let them get you, too!”

Writer-director Kinkle immerses us in a documentary-real milieu and cast — nurses, patients — and layers in the horror via flashbacks and recurring images. A blood-covered floor, a nude, bloodied woman fleeing into the darkness, bonfire rituals and incantations, instructions and warnings from that voice.

The butcher she visits to collect a cow’s heart (a talisman) doesn’t blink an eye as he takes us into the freezer in a slaughterhouse of horrors.

The film is cheap-looking as a matter of style — whiteboard scrawled opening credits, grainy night vision footage, handheld camera chases and close-ups of a Satanic symbol, painted in blood or forged in steel.

And it’s mysterious. There’s no more to the “story” than that summary above — a woman with a whole collection of dreamcatchers hanging from her rear-view mirror, the echoey incantations in her head, a dark past and a fraught present.

I wanted a little more out of the script, some further explanation, at least a few of the loose ends wrapped up. But what’s here is a near triumph of mood and tone over “story,” and certainly creepy enough to recommend.

MPA Rating: unrated, violence, nudity

Cast: Katie Groshong, Brandy Edmiston, Stephanie Kinkle and Larry Fessenden

Credits: Scripted and directed by Chad Crawford Kinkle. A Dark Star release (March 2).

Running time: 1:20

A long doc charting the rise and glory days of a pop queen, directed by a legitimate star doc maker (“The September Issue”).

I think the embargo on reviewing this is Thursday, so watch for that then.

Love, and a terminal diagnosis. Andrea Bræin Hovig and Stellan Skarsgård co-star as “artist partners” put to the relationship test when she is diagnosed with cancer.

“Hope” is a shortlisted Oscar contender, so a nomination would ensure it’d get some distribution in the US. Looks intriguing.