The “tell” in this trailer is Scott Eastwood’s presence, front and center, in a thriller that pits two Oscar winners on opposite sides of a…revolution?
Leguizamo and Rita Ora also star in this, which supposedly got a limited release in May and hits Amazon Prime any minute now.
Brad Fuhrman directed “The Lincoln Lawyer” and “The Infiltrator” and “City of Lies,” so maybe it’s not as bad as the warning signs slapped on it. Or maybe it’s worse.
You can see, hear and feel the strain in the Brazilian comedy “Cheers to Life (Vida a Vida),” the great effort expended to achieve “cute.”
It’s sweet enough, and sweetly sentimental. But for a “finding your (living) roots” story that takes a couple of cousins to Israel to meet a granny they never knew, that’s never quite enough.
So we’ve got to trick granddad Benjamin, whom they’ve never met, lie to him and drug him for a “Weekend at Benjamins” bit. They’ve got to debate whether they’re kissing/copulating cousins, and be as dainty about that as possible. And they’ve got to see the historic sights — the Wailing Wall, Dead Sea, King Solomon’s Mines, etc. — on a Holy Land tour with cute nuns, other tourists and a comically flamboyant Portuguese speaking tour guide.
It’s a competently made film, with flashbacks from the distant past setting up a somewhat cloying story. But the laughs and delights are few and the sentimental finale is contrived and clumsy.
It’s about three heirloom “pendants”(lockets) that “only the bravest women in this family” wear. Decades after she was given one by her mother, who died young, orphaned Jessica (irrepressible Thati Lopes) stumbles across one to match the one her mother gave her.
That’s how she tracks down the “cousin,” Gabriel (Rodrigo Simas), a photographer in the process of being kicked out of his model-girlfriend’s (Aline Dias) apartment. He was selling jewelry, heirlooms included.
They didn’t know they were related, that they have a shared ancestor who fled an arranged marriage and ran off to Israel with her true love. But as both are broke — Jessica is broke enough to “borrow” and pawn jewelry from the antiques store where she works for plane fare — they’ll jet off to meet the mysterious Hava (Regina Braga) and her husband Ben, Brazilian-born tour business owner Ben (Jonas Bloch).
“They’ll think I came here for the money,” Jessica whines. As Jessica and Gabriel have haggled over “inheritance” percentages, “But you came here for the money” (in Portuguese, or dubbed into English) is the only response to that.
They will be fish out of water, trapped with tourists on a “Grandpa Ben” tour, guided by Ramirez Ramirez (Diego Martins), doing everything they can think of to draw the old man owner into the tour so that they can meet him, tell him who they are and meet grandma.
Nude bathing on a no nudity beach in Tel Aviv should do the trick. Ben has to show up to bail them out. But Jessica can’t bring herself to fessing up. Ben is sad. Hava? She’s left boring, trapped in routine Ben.
There’s nothing for it but to “help” Ben find Hava in Jaffa, Jerusalem, Eitat, the Dead Sea or wherever Ben figures she might be.
Lopes gets most of the funny lines — comforting a woman recovering in a hospital with “My dream is to get old and have as many plastic surgeries as you.” She’s a less-than-convincing saleswoman, selling articles in the antiques store by extolling “the nostalgia” of “the ’60s,” before admitting how that decade played out in Brazil.
“Set aside the dictatorship and the many being tortured and murdered” and it was a pretty stylish time, for sure.
There’s tentative chemistry between Lopes and Simas. But that requires us and them to get past the “cousins” thing, and to forget his previous lover was a model.
The movie peaks as Jessica finds herself getting the Bat Mitzvah she never had and learning that The Wailing Wall isn’t for weeping. It’s for “making requests.”
The picture blows the “fish out of water” element of this “journey of discovey,” with “a phony Jew” and a guy who only remembers the Hebrew he needed to get through his Bar Mitzvah finding Portuguese speakers every time they need one. And the travelogue part of the picture is pretty but over-familiar.
The best joke is the one “Palestinian” bit in the picture, the fear of being “sold to a sheikh” on camelback when they get lost near King Solomon’s Mines. But a few others pay off.
It’s still not much of a movie, because really, how many versions of “Hava Nagila” do we need to hear in 100 minutes?
Rating: TV-14, sexual situations, profanity
Cast: Thati Lopes, Rodrigo Simas, Diego Martins, Aline Dias, Regina Braga and Jonas Bloch.
Credits: Directed by Cris D’Amato, scripted by Natalia Klein. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:40
Vicky Krieps and Dacre Montgomery star in this New Zealand-set thriller, playing two mourning souls haunted by the ghost of his mother/her wife.
It premiered last fall, and now it’s heading for release/streaming, etc. in the rest of the world, including here.
Uh, Mel Brooks — who turns 99 June 28th — announcing a new “Spaceballs” movie…in 2027?
No sense waiting around, I guess.
A script? A Rick Moranis appearance? Bill Pullman? (Yes and yes, apparently). Mel himself? (Of course). He’s also announced Wild Child Keke Palmer is on board.
Otherwise, all we really know is that Mel will be back and that the wheels are in motion. Not sure how much demand there is for a 38 year old spoof sequel. But the crawl has a few smirks in it.
The “original” film felt kind of dated when it came out ten years after “Star Wars.” So? Sure. It could happen. There’s a lot more sci-fi cinema and streaming targets to poke fun at this time.
Meg Eloise-Clarke stars as a sister who figures out going camping in search of her (Cult joining/dead?) brother just isn’t a good idea in this one.
Brainstorm landed this title, not seeing a release date as of the moment.
There’s a bracing cynicism to “Materialists,” the latest anti-rom-com from the writer-director of “Past Lives,” Celine Song.
“Dating is a risk,” her heroine, the professional matchmaker Lucy declares. And marriage?
“Marriage is a business deal. And it always has been.”
Jane Austen couldn’t have said it better, although she never quite put it this bluntly.
But this very modern, very Manhattan slap of “reality” about the nature of coupling has a few things going against it that make far less satisfying than Song’s previous wistful statement on “love.”
For starters, it’s not romantic. It toys with rom-com conventions, throwing in a “meet cute” and a production designed wedding or two. It’s got the “poor” but oh-so-pretty guy our heroine left for being “broke,” and the chic, handsome and “Tribeca penthouse” rich charmer who “checks all the boxes” as a rival.
But blasts of realistic but clumsily handled melodrama stop us short of connecting with all this. The insurance actuarial table treatment of male/female “types” that might make a good match, and the medical solutions to adding to a man’s “market value” would make Aristotle Onassis and generations of Hollywood power-broker dwarves chuckle.
And then there’s Song’s choice of romantic ideal. Whatever canny reason for having our cynical, pragmatic marriage broker deliver her smiling pronouncements in a flat, kittenish whisper behind the less than wholly expressive face of Dakota Johnson, that so lowers the stakes that it’s hard to care.
Will lonely matchmaker Lucy end up with “It” leading man of the moment Pedro Pascal, or perma-tossled, still-boyish Chris Evans?
Lucy is a failed actress pulling down $80K a year who has turned her head-turning beauty into a recruiting tool for Adore, the matchmaking agency for the rich-and-near-rich she works for. She is celebrated by her all-female-staff colleagues and her boss (Marin Ireland, just seen in “Dope Thief”) for her success rate. She makes “friends” with her female clients.
She should be celebrated for being so well turned-out every day, and being able to dress that well and live in Manhattan on $80,000 a year.
A simple walk down the street gets a little eye contact from just the right sort of client, and a proferred business card when he thinks she’s returning his flirt.
Lucy has just gotten her ninth female client to the altar, and the film’s funniest business has a parade of bridesmaids and others encircling her at that wedding, ready to take the plunge because they’re thin, educated and polished New York career women desperate to couple up and who have a specific set of criteria they figure they “deserve.” And Lucy has the magic touch.
Jokes among the lovelorn — “”You’re not ugly. It’s just that you don’t have money.” — and montages of darkly comical client interviews and not-comical-at-all phone chats with unsatisfied men and women underscore the entitlement one and all feel.
The men are downright hateful in their notion of “high quality women,” translated as much younger, beautiful, but educated and sophisticated and comfortable in a world awash in money. The women are just as shallow — about height, education and salary requirements.
“I’m trying to settle,” Lucy’s toughest client, the pushing-40 New York lawyer Sophie (Zoe Winters) complains. But nobody’s settling for her.
That opening wedding is where Pascal’s version of Matthew McConaughey rakishly overhears his way into Kate Hudson’s (Lucy’s) life. Harry’s brother is the matchmade groom at this wedding, and overhearing the flock of bridesmaids and Lucy’s “find the love of your life” pitch has Harry intrigued — not in her services, but in her.
Her task is to grab this tall, dark, rich and handsome “unicorn” as a prospect for one of her paying clients. Harry’s task is to sweep her off her feet.
But there’s a reminder of her youthful look for love past at the party. Catering waiter John (Evans) is a struggling, 40ish stage actor ex, the guy Lucy struggled with before recognizing she “can’t act” but she did know “a lot about dating,” and had a knack for setting couples up.
As they share an outdoor smoke and he admits that yes, he still has that beater Volvo and yes, he’s still sharing a flat with a couple of other slovenly actor guys at an age when that dream is past its expiration date.
Will Lucy land her “unicorn,” for herself or one of her paying customers? Will she flashback her way back into John’s arms, or simply remember she hated herself for hating him for “being broke?”
Johnson may “check off the boxes” in a role that requires beauty and allure with a whiff of box office “value.” But she isn’t the best at getting across the longing Lucy is trying to package in connecting people with “your nursing home partner and grave buddy,” “the love of your life.” Any number of 40ish romantic starlets would have done a better job at making that swooning sales pitch, or at selling the ache that must set in for having let yourself get this cynical.
Evans, clinging to “boyish” in this turn, and Pascal are so on-the-nose that it’s as if Song put as much imagination into casting as she did to character names. “Lucy,” “John” and um, Hispanic “Harry?” Really?
Ireland sets the brittle “all business” tone for a movie whose rare light moments are merely here to set up the conventions Song is mocking. And when Song takes a shot at making a statement on a grim risk all dating women face in the world of men, it’s so heavy-handed that it stops the picture cold.
“Materialists” is dry and ironic and “honest” while laying bare the hopes that we all cling to that love isn’t really as materialistic as she’s saying. But the rare air of the artificial, archetypal world she sets out to make her big statement in leaves the viewer grasping for not just a breath of fresh air, but hope.
And as perfect as Johnson might be as that elusive “ideal,” casting her is just another reminder that she’s a few shades shy of the alluring warmth her few attempts at rom-coms and romances have demanded of her. This is a sale she was never going to make.
Rating: R, sexual situations, profanity and smoking
Cast: Dakota Johnson, Chris Evans, Marin Ireland, Zoe Winters and Pedro Pascal.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Celia Song. An A24 release.
Running time: 1:54
Pierce Brosnan and Samuel L. Jackson seem delighted at the prospect of filming a B-Western together in “The Unholy Trinity,” a mediocre genre piece with the occasional entertaining sequence or moment.
Well, I’m pretty sure they share the frame together once or twice in this good-looking, handsomely mounted indie. The way these things work, often you can’t afford to have both stars on the set at the same time. As they’re sometimes joking with each other, and at other times threatening or shooting at one another, they both don’t have to have been there for those one-shots and close-up scenes to edit together.
It’s the sort of Western you get when two Aussies who perhaps enjoy the genre — one who directed the most recent underwhelming version of “Robert the Bruce,” the other a screenwriter with no credits that have crossed the Pacific to any sort of notice. The Montana locations, fights, gallops and shootouts look right. But there’s no “feel” for the story that makes sense.
Not everybody’s Tarantino and gets a pass for a Western that lets Samuel L. cut loose with assorted anachronistic”mutha” this and “my Black ass” that variations, after all.
A condemned man (Tim Daly, unrecognizable) makes his estranged son (Brandon Lessard) promise to “avenge” him for being “framed” by a dirty sheriff just as the priest (David Arquette) leads him to the gallows.
It’s 1888, the year before Montana became a state. And here’s the young man, who bears an unfortunate resemblence to longtime “Drunk History” host Derek Waters, trekking across the territory to a town called Trinity with a small pistol and a brass urn with his father’s ashes.
Montana was ahead of the curve in that choice for burials, at least in this Aussie version of Western America history.
The kid gets the drop on the sheriff in the Trinity church. But the aged Irishman behind the badge (Brosnan) is sage and cagey and the WRONG sheriff. A cleverly-staged standoff eventually straightens that out.
But the kid gets into real trouble when he gets between a “dance hall girl (Katrina Bowden) and her regular, roughneck miner-customer. Three people wind up dead, and with surviving members of the miner’s family and a Scots-born Georgian (Gianni Capaldi) baying for blood and already frustrated that Sheriff Gabriel Dove isn’t charging or pursuing a Blackfoot woman (Q’rianka Kilcher of “A New World”) for another killing, there’s lynch mob trouble on the horizon.
Another newcomer in town who refers to himself as “Saint Christopher” (Jackson) was present at the hanging across the territory at the prison, and has some connection to the dead man and by extension his son. He’s hellbent on setting the locals against one another.
Throw in more “dance hall” girls, an “actor” pretending to be a member of another ancient profession, posses and stand-offs and you’ve got yourself a reasonable facsimile of a Western.
There’s a tiny smidgen of humor, much of it provided by Jackson and a wee bit of it coming from Brosnan’s Sheriff Lucky Charms.
“The Priest?”
“I don’t think he’s a REAL priest!”
“Ah, like a Lutheran?”
Kilcher gives the picture credibility that extends beyond it’s Old West boom-town (new construction) look, and the weathered stagecoach, muddy streets and snow-dusted hills behind the action.
The shootouts are first rate, and the stuntwork does a nice job of hiding the well-past-AARP status of our Big Names.
The script may be surprisingly convoluted, with hidden Confederate gold, assorted alliances and double-crosses and a town that seems to wholly have the sheriff’s back — until they don’t.
But a bit of entertainment creeps in, much of it provided by Jackson and Brosnan, even if it turns out they weren’t one the set together for more than a day or two.
Rating: Rated R for violence, language and some sexual material.
Cast: Pierce Brosnan, Samuel L. Jackson, Brandon Lessard, Veronica Ferres, Tim Daly, Stephanie Hernandez, Katrina Bowden, David Arquette and Q’orianka Kilcher.
Credits: Directed by Richard Gray, scripted by Lee Zachariah. A Roadside Attractions/Saban Films release.
Running time:1:33
Giovanni Tortorici’s “Diciannove” is a dreamy, drifting odyssey into a time in youth when one discovers the meaning of “the world’s your oyster.”
It’s about a young Italian with choices at an age when you know it all and you know nothing and you follow your impusles, figuring everything out on the way — 19.
That’s what the movie’s title means, and that’s the year we float through with our middle class Italian anti-hero, Leonardo (Manfred Marini). He will wander from Palermo to London, Siena to Turin, changing majors and colleges, getting pass-out drunk with friends and family, debating professors and reading 14th century Italian writers.
He will start writing himself, experiment with solitude and sexuality and ponder suicide and perhaps becoming a rent boy to make ends meet.
Yeah. “Nineteen.”
We meet him as his mother is the first to label him a disorganized, doesn’t-sweat-details “moron,” on his way to join his sister (Vittoria Planeta) in her shared apartment in London. A few days of drunken clubbing, getting chewed-out for not helping around the house, eating others’ food and the like and that London university degree in “business” goes out the window like the dream it was.
He applies online to a university in Siena, sets off to study literature, buys books and fails to avoid coming off as a standoffish loner.
“I want to commit suicide,” he writes and recites (in Italian with English subtitles). “I want to kill myself…I want to die…I want to croak…Snuff it…Pass away.”
Writers and their “mantras.”
Of course, it’s all a phase as this poster child for the arrogance of bourgeois youth takes exams without attending lectures, composes a jeremiad against his professor, but chickens out of distributing it, begs mom for money and gets chewed out by his dad as he walks the streets of the old city, buying books and thinking and just generally “figuring it out.”
It’s a mesmerizing movie, in its way, a chronological stream-of-consciousness dissection of a very specific “type” — Western, indulged, pretty enough to attract attention, careless with how he uses it, too removed from his contemporaries to care or commit.
Semi-autobiographical or not, our writer-director has picked his target and hit it in delivering a portrait of youth that tries everything before settling on one thing to make the “fanatical” focus of one’s life. Realizing “We’re not as interesting as we think we are at 19” is just a bonus.
Rating: unrated, nudity, sexual situations, teen alcohol abuse, smoking
Cast: Manfredi Marini, Vittoria Planeta, Luca Lazzareschi and
Zackari Delmas
Cfedits: Scripted and directed by Giovanni Tortorici. An Oscilloscope Labs release.
Running time: 1:48
There’s cold comfort for American and international audiences taking in “Prime Minister,” a new documentary about New Zealand’s first female prime minister, the woman who led the country through a horrific mass shooting hate crime, a volcanic erruption, COVID and the blowback lockdowns and mask and vaccine mandates generated.
Oh. Gullible, belligerently violent morons aren’t solely an America/British et al phenomenon.
The Kiwi country that greeted Jacinda Ardern‘s rise to power with sexist skepticism and found itself impressed with her leadership qualities and her humanity, celebrated the world over for her compassion, forward thinking and problem solving decisiveness — Nobody handled COVID better. Nobody. — found itself roiled by violent, misinformed, media-dominating protests by a noisy minority that couldn’t even spell her bloody name right. Or, as I realized researching this review, her partner and later husband’s (Clarke Gayford) name.
The Sundance award winning “Prime Minister” is an intimate portrait, an oral history of Ardern’s unexpected elevation to leadership of the Labour Party at age 37, her realization that she was pregnant while finishing up Labour’s winning campaign in 2017, having a baby in office and everything she had to contend with on the job — often bringing baby Neve into cabinet meetings and even the U.N. General Assembly.
And the film is a reflection back on her work, the challenges she faced and how she handled crisis after crisis with compassion, intelligence — getting the best scientific advice available and taking it — and decisiveness.
New Zealand’s worst-ever mass shooting, a hate crime against Muslims committed by an Australian radicalized by Trump-worshipping American online hate sites and Rupert Murdoch’s global right wing smear-o-sphere was met with efforts to comfort the Muslim community in New Zealand, a call for unity, and a sweeping ban on assault weapons and military firearms in civilian hands.
The country went along with her “kindness” ethos. The right wing punditocracy and conspiracy buffs freaked completely out.
Ardern remembers that shooting and “the longest week of my life” as she sits down for short interviews for an as-it-happens oral history project the she agreed to participate in. Her partner, Gayford, was a popular New Zealand TV presenter (“Fish of the Day“), something not mentioned here. He videoed her, questioned her and captured footage of their home life with a new baby and outside crises competing for attention.
“Crises make governments and they break governments,” she opines.
“Be really nice to see you sometime,” baby-daddy and caregiver Gayford cracks from behind the camera.
We see Ardern begin her term with a shaky coalition including an anti-immigrant fringe party, and see her decisions and determination to be open, to “tell people what you know, even when it’s not” pleasant or what they want to hear style win her a sweeping new mandate.
There’s her landmark appearance at the UN with her baby, a day when a sea of world leaders openly laughed at Donald Trump’s bragging lies about “accomplishments. And then there was her ever-so-diplomatic handling of talk show host Stephen Colbert’s questions about that expression of international mockery for the blustery Trump.
Ardern’s open progressivism and “internationalism,” eschewing “isolationism, protectionism and racism” was and is defiantly out of step with much of the electorate in the world’s democracies. That explains why she’s not in power now (We see her lecturing at Harvard.), and that the old adage she repeats about “crises make governments” doesn’t work in a media landscape dominated by lies and bad actors — Russians and Rupert — spreading them.
“Prime Minister” is thus an against the grain movie of its moment, out of step politically, and an intimate to the point of myopic doc that zeroes in on the personality it is profiling. But it’s still refreshing to see that violent, foul-mouthed right wing cranks are not simply a Northern Hemisphere problem, and to be reminded that eventually the adults in the room will stop listening to them no matter how many Murdochs, Musks and Zuckerbergs keep giving them a megaphone.
Rating: unrated, some profanity
Cast: Jacinda Ardern, Clarke Gayford, Donald Trump, Christiane Amanpour and Stephen Colbert.
Credits: Directed by Lindsay Utz and Michelle Waltshe. A CNN Films/Magnolia release.
Running time: 1:41
Time seems to stand still in the Mexican dramedy/romance “Our Times.” Lacking urgency and slow-footed in the extreme, its 90 minutes crawl by as it laboriously makes its points about the sweeping changes in relations between the sexes in culture and work over the past sixty years.
Two Mexico City university professors, Nora (Mexican TV star Lucero) and Hector (singer/actor Benny Ibarra) teach and put in the overtime as they try to test the limits of Einstein’s theories about space and time with this big, pricey gadget they’ve been working on.
It may look more like a Lunar Module than the device in the George Pal’s famous 1960 film of H.G. Wells’ most famous novel. But they’re both time machines.
The year is 1966 and Nora is something of a pioneer, a woman physics professor. She is patronized by all the men around her, with her department chair calling her “sweetheart” and deliveries of parts she ordered from the Soviet Union are thoughtlessly passed on to other men and eventually her husband.
A female student who idolizes her would love to be her first assistant. Fat chance of getting money for that.
But Nora and Hector are close, and with a little tinkering/rethinking they strap in wearing old leather helmets and goggles and give it one more try. Their “fifteen minutes into the future” trip turns out to have shot them 59 years ahead in time.
The plot is about them being “trapped” in this new time, fretting over a wormhole “portal” about to close as they attempt repairs. But the movie is about the different world Nora finds herself in, one with respect, opportunity and a chance to realize her loftiest ambitions.
That student who wanted to be her assistant? Julia (Ofelia Medina of “Frida,” “Before Night Falls” and “Colombiana”) is now the venerable department chair. Julia and the student granddaughter of Nora’s sister, Alonda (Renata Vaca of “Saw X”) are the only people who can know where she and Hector came from, and the place he’s most anxious to return to, “Nuestros Tiempos.”
They’re amazed that the planned Mexico City subway is now a reality, puzzled at such novel concepts as sexual identity and dismayed at the screens everybody stares into.
“A machine that hypnotizes them,” Hector wonders (in Spanish, or dubbed)?
There’s no smoking. “What do they have against smoking?” Fashions and the women who wear them are liberated.
And the university women — professors and students — don’t have time for any Hector “mansplaining” or assertions of the old gender heirarchy.
The script wanders into the seismic changes in attitudes, attire and the culture at large in all the most predictable ways. Hector is more resistant to “letting our eyes get used to this world” when the one he’s desperate to return to is dogmatically committed to holding Nora back.
That’s defensible messaging, and a few scenes of Hector’s out-of-control “mansplaining” play.
The performances pass muster.
But there’s no pace and zero urgency to this. The dated, tame sexual jokes don’t really land and the romantic twist is both touching and so old fashioned it wears cobwebs.
This hasn’t the wit of “Safety Not Guaranteed” or “Back to the Future” (a DeLorean is a rare sight gag), or the danger of “Primer” or the Spanish thriller “Time Crimes”( “Cronoscrimenes”).
And no one involved makes much effort to make the big romance at its heart play in a “Time Traveler’s Wife” or “Somewhere in Time” sense.
The good intentions are obvious, but the movie wrapped around them is a something of a bore.
Rating: TV-14, smoking, sexual situations
Cast: Lucero, Benny Ibarra, Renata Vaca and
Ofelia Medina
Credits: Directed by Chava Cartas, scripted by Juan Carlos Garzón and Angélica Gudiño. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:30
Movie Nation 