A little Poe, a bit of Agatha Christie Rod Serling and a touch of Pirandello? Six characters in search of an…escape.”
Trapped, threatened with near certain death, reason it out, find the “clues” and get out of “Escape Room.”
This one opens in the Oscar-contender wasteland of early January (Jan. 4).
The model/”Blurred Lines” stripped object of desire is making her way through the B-movie ranks, and Aaron Paul is re-starting his leading man career about a few Big Studio fizzles, and taking a paid Italian vacation while he does it in “Welcome Home,” a Vertical Releasing thriller about a broken couple hoping to mend fences in Italy.
Their landlord has different ideas.
Limited release, Nov 16.
You’re not going to confuse “Solis” with “Solaris” or “Sunshine,” but its effects are at least as good as in most of the space epics that involve somebody in some spaceship or other getting too close to the sun.
And the story — sole survivor of an asteroid mining accident struggles to stay alive until a rescue ship shows up — has promise.
But that absolute bottom-line must-have element to make your thriller work is somewhat lacking in writer-director Carl Strathie’s sci-fi tale — urgency. Everything else depends on that, and even though we hear the sounds of ticking (how analog) periodically on the soundtrack, this “time is running out” saga never picks up speed beyond “dawdling.”
Steven Ogg, best known as a voice-over and motion capture actor for video games like “Grand Theft Auto V,” is the star of this “one-hander.” His Troy Holloway is the only guy in the shot, first scene to last, in “Solis.”
No, we’re not counting the corpse of a colleague strapped in next to him.
He’s in a tiny pod in the vastness of space, has a black eye and wakes up with a headache and the realization that surviving the accident that put him in this escape pod might not have been the best thing to happen today.
“This is Troy Holloway, in the blind. Does anyone copy? Harris is dead…Milton…”
Drifting in a capsule with flickering lights, steam, occasional showers of sparks, alarms going off here and there, with limited power and no control, he’s a goner.
Wait! Help is on the way and on the radio. She’s got a British accent (Alice Lowe). She’s filling in for “the commander,” and she’s not good at calming an irate and profanely panic-stricken Holloway down.
What are your coordinates?
“I don’t HAVE any coordinates!”
Tell me what you see.
“SPACE!”
Commander Roberts declares, “My orders are to keep you alive! Are you concussed? Yes or no? Do you feel nauseous?”
“No more than usual.”
Forget about the agony of burning up in the sun, which Holloway is drifting towards.
“The pain and comfort will get worse. You will be dead from hypothermia in no time. We’re coming from you. 75 minutes!”
And she means it. The clock is ticking down, even if the movie feels as if everything’s on pause until the BIG FINISH.
First-time feature director Strathie ensures that the ship has lived-in, functional looking interiors and a plausible outer shell. The digital sun here is most impressive, but his movie’s best effects might be the simplest — canting or tilting the camera in what filmmakers call “Dutch Angles,” disorienting the viewer with Holloway upside down.
Ogg has to play this guy as a man resigned to his fate, which really lessens that “urgency” thing. He’s got to be talked into taking every step to possibly save his neck.
There’s self-surgery and of course an EVA (spacewalk) and a lot of arguing with Commander Roberts on the radio.
The dramatic possibilities are severely limited. No “Gravity” flashbacks, just a somewhat murky series of motivations for living provided in confessional moments and bursts of repetitive action are all that drive “Solis.”
Like the pod Holloway is trapped in, the movie’s mostly just adrift — limited power, with time running out. Not fast enough, it turns out.
MPAA Rating: unrated, bloody injuries, profanity
Cast: Steven Ogg, Alice Lowe
Credits: Written and directed by Carl Strathie. A Blue Fox release.
Running time: 1:30
It’s the screen actors who pursue the quixotic that I find the most interesting.
And nobody is more all-over-the-road than Stephen Dorff, the rugged, brooding star of half a dozen movies nobody sees in a given year, with just enough high profile work (“Somewhere,” “The Iceman,” “Leatherface”) to keep him in the public eye as “the younger Kiefer Sutherland.”
“Don’t Go” is an Irish ghost story, more moody than spooky, starring Dorff as a blocked American writer grieving for the daughter he lost months before.
When he’s not staring at the blank screen on his laptop, he’s drunkenly dozing on the beach below the Irish boutique hotel he and wife Hazel (Melissa George) are renovating. There’s this recurring dream he has there, a day when they built a sandcastle with wee Molly (Grace Farrell). He’s sure it means something.
Hearing the words “Seize the day” when he awakens cinches it.
Ben Slater had one well-received book, “The Reality Delusion,” but they moved to Western Ireland, Hazel’s birthplace, to move into her family hotel and bring it back to life. He’ll teach, she’ll supervise the renovation.
It’s a big, old seaside hostel named “Carrig’s View House,” with halls that echo and views that give you Ireland’s coast in all its grey, overcast glory. And even though everybody says “Moving back home, then?” and “Surely you’ll not be staying here, after what happened in THAT house” at Molly’s funeral, that’s just what they do.
The locals are friendly enough, barmen, colleagues at the Catholic school (Simon Delaney plays the garrulous Father Sean), even contractors.
“A writer? Have I ever heard of ya?”
“Nope. That’s why I teach, now.”
But their dog knows something is up. And Ben, donning his writer’s uniform (turtleneck, tweed blazer) for his classes at Sacred Heart, starts to pick up on it himself.
That recurrent dream presages other clues –in the oddly ordered arrangement of magazine titles, the words scratched in the sand after a seaside nap. It wasn’t “Seize the Day” he heard, it was “Seas the Day.”
Ben instantly assumes these clues are from Molly, because she wasn’t much of a speller, and that there’s a reality where she still lives if only he can reason out the mystery.
Which deepens. Hazel has history here, old beaus. Her college pal, the messed up Serena (Aoibhinn McGinnity) shows up, drunk.
And don’t expect Father Sean to be much psychological help. He’s not allowed to do exorcisms either, he jokes.
“I’m a contrary bollocks. So was He. That’s why they put Him on a cross.”
Limerick native co-writer/director David Gleeson (“Cowboys & Angels”) ensures we get lots of local color in the people, the scenery and the school and Irish pub life in this story.
And Dorff wears Ben’s grief and guilt like a tailor-made suit. He broods wonderfully, but he lets us see Ben break down as he starts to sense he can change the past and obsesses about how to manage it.
No, he never shaves — not for comedies, villainous turns or grieving fathers. It’s almost always the right look for the part. He landed next year’s “True Detective,” so his profile is about to blow up again.
The performances and setting combine to pull off “Don’t Go,” a film that eschews frights in favor of remorse, that never hurries even as Ben is realizing that the pun or “child’s spelling” of “seas the day” doesn’t change what he’s being asked to do.
MPAA Rating: unrated, sex, alcohol abuse, pot, profanity
Cast: Stephen Dorff, Melissa George, Aoibhinn McGinnity, Grace Farrell
Credits:Directed by David Gleeson, script by Ronan Blaney, David Gleeson. An IFC Films release.
Running time: 1:32
Here’s a little Warner Brothers bait and switch.
La Llorona is a Mexican ghost, a spectral menace from South of the Border.
This movie, starring Linda Cardellini, Patricia Velasquez, Raymond Cruz, with Marisol Ramirez as “La Llorona,” doesn’t appear to have anything to do with that.
Spooky looking enough in trailer form. “The Curse of La Llorona” comes out April 19.
“Mid90s'” captures a people and a place with the ring of the authentic, a grimly realistic depiction of skateboard culture in the working class LA where it blew up in the “Dogtown and Z-Boys” era.
Jonah Hill’s writing and directing debut documents transgressing kids at their underage drinking, smoking, trespassing peak in a story that is random and predictable, biting and yet predictably conventional.
It’s a period piece mainly in the sense that Hill, who made his name in foul-mouthed youth comedies like “Superbad,” gives himself permission to use the outdated, sexist, homophobic argot of dead-enders in that specific place and time.
Sunny Suljic (“The House with a Clock in Its Walls”) is Stevie, who admires his older brother Ian (Lucas Hedges of “Manchester by the Sea”) when he should probably be fearing him. Our introduction to the siblings sees Ian hurling Stevie against the wall and beating him black and blue. The heightened sound of the pummeling pushes you back in your seat.
The teen is furious at the tween for constantly coming into his room, messing with his carefully organized team jerseys, baseball caps, CDs and mix tapes. Ian is…neat.
And Stevie cannot resist. Every time Ian leaves in a torrent of profane threats, Stevie crosses the threshold and notes what he should be doing to be “cooler,” acting older than his age — attire, music, interests.
Then the fatherless boy finds Big Brothers who aren’t inclined to beat him. They’re skating slackers, teens running a skate shop but mainly just hanging out, showing off with their peers, a whole subculture that Stevie can fit into if only he can trade to get Ian’s old board and master it.
Writer-director Hill loses himself in the funny-gross banter, disgusting off-the-wall “Would you rather” games the boys play and the oddball culture clash questions the cool black skater Ray (Na-Kel Smith) asks the white “Fourth Grade” (Ryder McLaughlin).
“Why do white people love their PETS so much?”
Fourth Grade, named because of his verbal communication skills, is just as tactless.
“Can black people get sunburned?”
Stevie, coached by the one guy close to him in age if not size, Ruben (Gio Galicia) to avoid apologizing or saying “Thank you,” as it paints you as “gay” or the uglier slurs associated with that, gets suckered into that discussion and finds himself welcomed — and with a new nickname — “Sunburn.”
Sunburn seeks acceptance through mimicry and idiotic bravado. He’s not very good on a board, but he takes his spills like a little man — blood and head trauma included.
As the kids climb fences onto school grounds, ride their boards down the middle of busy LA streets, pee in public and provoke any adult authority figure who comes into view including Stevie’s too-young single-mom (Katie Waterston of “Fantastic Beasts” and “Logan Lucky”), Stevie/Sunburn has his first drink, his first drugs, his first taste of sex and his introduction to raging youth rebellion.
Hill makes the quartet Sunburn is initiated into interesting “types.” Fourth Grade is labeled “dumb,” but he’s the one with the camcorder, documenting their exploits. Ray doesn’t know black guys “don’t skate,” but takes what he’s doing as seriously as any other sport that might lift him out of his situation.
The multi-racial punk whose nickname is a combo of his two favorite swear words (F—S–t), played by Olan Prenatt, is the one with the car, the 17 year-old who comes from money, whose future he is sure consists of “Just livin’ life,” avoiding “all that tryin’ hard s–t.” He’s a mouthy pretty boy who attracts girls he uses with extreme prejudice and has access to too many drugs and too much booze for his own good.
Ruben is the member of the pack we know, by rote, Stevie/Sunburn will displace.
Stevie is raising himself, like a lot of kids in his situation. And his new “family” isn’t really a substitute for a real one, though every time he gets hurt, they look after him and encourage him.
Hill doesn’t really give the characters arcs. He just sets up conflicts — Stevie and Ian, Stevie and his Mom, Stevie and Ruben — and resolves them in ways we can see coming the moment we meet the characters.
He goes for a “Kids/thirteen” level of explicitness, jamming a McLovin’ load of taboo underage activities into a film that doesn’t treat them as laughs.
“Mid90s'” becomes, in full flower, a movie with characters more interesting or unusual than its very conventional story and setting, not a bad film so much as an incomplete one.
MPAA Rating: R for pervasive language, sexual content, drug and alcohol use, some violent behavior/disturbing images – all involving minors
Cast: Sunny Suljic, Lucas Hedges, Katie Waterston,Na-kel Smith, Olan Prenatt , Ryder McLaughlin, Gio Galicia
Credits:Written and directed by Jonah Hill. An A24 release.
Running time: 1:24
You’d swear that Oscar winner Sissy Spacek is injuring herself, as big as her grin is and as long as she holds it.
Danny Glover and Tom Waits may be old pros playing ex-cons, but there’s something just tickled about their performances in group moments.
Brooding Oscar winner Casey Affleck may be playing a morose burnout case, but his eyes give away genuine delight in his scenes with the titular “The Old Man & a Gun.”
That would be Robert Redford, 82, playing a 61 year-old who only breaks out of prison so he can rob some more banks. He’s been got caught time and again, only to get out, get the itch, break out his police scanner and stopwatch, put on a suit, a hat and a fake mustache and charm some poor teller or bank manager out of all the cash on hand.
“I wouldn’t want you to get hurt,” he’ll purr, “because I like you.”
It’s like Mister Rogers has a drawl and a yen for stickups.
“A gentleman,” the ladies and gents he robs tell the cops. Courtly, well-mannered, with eyes that dance a little, they might add.
Redford plays this guy with all the bemused goodwill his decades in the movies will allow, and we eat it up because of that residual goodwill and good humor. It couldn’t have hurt to remember, before each take, that this real life bank robber shared the name of a famous comic character actor — Forrest Tucker.
Writer-director and frequent Casey Affleck collaborator David Lowery (“A Ghost Story,” “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints”) gives this breezy “mostly true story” nicely spaced moments of whimsy and a touch of romance in between the bank jobs and getaways.
Because this Tucker stumbles into a widowed horse rancher (Spacek) on one of his getaways. Her car trouble gives him a passenger when the cops are looking for a fellow by himself. And her smile lights him up and makes him over-share. Yeah, he robs banks. Nooooo, he’s just kidding.
“What’d be worse, that I’m lying about this, or that I’m not.?
Whatever the motives of his accomplices (Glover and singer/actor Waits), this Tucker fellow only feels he’s really living when he’s doing something daring, dangerous and that requires skill, nerve and cunning to pull off. All those earlier arrests? That was different.
“I know what I’m doing now.”
“The Old Man & the Gun” ambles across half the country, pulling off heists, getting away more or less clean, wooing the Texan with the horses in between jobs. His laid-back, sway-backed zest for life is infectious. He’s got things he wants to do before he dies.
The one guy who could stand to catch what he’s spreading around is John Hunt, a just-turned-40 Dallas robbery detective who has a beautiful wife (Tika Sumpter) and two little kids, but no will to go on.
“I need to start trying a lot harder, or quit,” he says. When he has his kids with him on the day Tucker robs a Dallas bank, right under his nose without him having a clue it’s happening, it really is, as they say in Texas, “Go big or go home” time.
His colleagues (Keith Carradine plays his boss) will never let him hear the end of this if he doesn’t make this “Over the Hill Gang” case. “I’ve already got the AARP on it,” one wag teases.
It’s Redford’s show, and he lays on the genteel charm, even when the fact that he’s got a gun and is robbing a poor clerk on her first day makes her cry. Who wouldn’t wipe away her tears in the face of that kindly grin?
His scenes with Spacek have a simpatico snap to them. He’s swapping lines with a peer, and their matching reddish hair and similar accents (Tucker grew up in Florida) makes them seem just right together. He’s made better movies, but never one more charming.
Lowery never quite takes this into “Elegy for Old Age/All is Lost” territory, even with the epilogue that plays far more sober and downbeat than the lighter half-speed action comedy that precedes it.
Deciding how much of the story to tell (the man’s escapes were a hoot, and allow the filmmaker the chance to recycle young Bob’s turn in the 1966 thriller “The Chase,” in which he played an escaped convict) is a bit of an issue. Short as it is, that epilogue makes “Old Man” feel it’s going on past its curtain call.
But Redford never lets us tire of Forrest Tucker’s presence, never makes him larger than life when life-sized is enough and never allows us to fret too much that somebody’s going to get hurt in this real-life “Going in Style.”
Like Forrest Tucker himself, who figured experience was a good thing even if he’s not nearly as fast or quick to react as he used to be, Redford knows what to let us see and what we can just sense from his familiar, engaging presence.
“I know what I’m doing now.”
MPAA Rating:PG-13 for brief strong language
Cast: Robert Redford, Sissy Spacek, Casey Affleck
Credits:Directed by David Lowery, script by David Lowery based on a magazine article by David Grann . A Fox Searchlight release.
Running time: 1:33
Film fans revere Charlie Chaplin, but they — we — LOVE Buster Keaton.
He was the embodiment of comic stoicism, an often hapless but never rattled “Great Stone Face” who never let on how funny he was or how hilarious his precarious predicaments could be.
Peter Bogdanovich, the film scholar turned filmmaker (“Paper Moon”) has loved Keaton forever, and his documentary “The Great Buster: A Celebration” establishes those bonafides right in the opening moments. He and director Frank Capra chatted at length on “The Dick Cavett Show” in the early ’70s about this then-forgotten genius of the silent cinema.
A child of vaudeville, trained to take a punch and a fall from infancy, named “Buster” by no less than Harry Houdini, a giant of the silent cinema, creator of some of the most enduring and repeated-to-this-day sight gags in film history, director of “The Boat,” “Seven Ages” and the greatest epic of silent comedy, “The General,” Keaton undergoes a revival every decade or so simply because his antiquated black and white/silent movies remain hilarious to this day.
“Great Buster” turns Bogdanovich’s lifelong appreciation into cinematic adoration, using generous clips of Keaton’s short films, features and late-life TV appearances to remind us that, as Johnny Knoxville says in the movie, “he was funny then, he’s funny now and he’ll be funny 100 years from now.”
Stuntman/actor Knoxville is one of the legions of Keaton fans Bogdanovich rounded up to give testimonials, with Knoxville most admiring that the man did his own deathly-dangerous (and funny) stunts right up to the end. Actor James Karen was a friend, Paul Dooley (“Breaking Away/Popeye”) was such a fan he fought to get into a TV commercial Keaton did for Ford Econoline vans in the 1950s (He’s one of the “Keystone Cops” in this spot).
Dick Van Dyke knew Keaton, learned how to take pratfalls from him and admits, “I stole as many moves from him as I could…He was like a ballet dancer, incredible control of his body.”
The clown Bill Irwin gushes at Keaton’s single-take brilliance in a classic “Candid Camera” bit, admirer Richard Lewis befriended Keaton’s widow and treasures a porkpie hat she made him just like the one that was Keaton’s trademark.
Quentin Tarantino, Mel Brooks and “Spider-Man: Homecoming” director Jon Watts use Keaton as a filmmaking reference and inspiration.
“He always had that quiet tragedy which is very, very funny,” Werner Herzog says. And about Keaton’s role as a founding father of motion pictures, “He is the essence of cinema.”
Cybill Shepherd vouches for his acting, Keaton’s mime-face realization that “Acting’s all in the eyes.”
Bogdanovich shows us a sequence, the facade of a house falling over Keaton or him grabbing a passing car to make his getaway in “Cops,” and Carl Reiner, Bill Hadar and others marvel at “How’d he DO that?”
Comic actor Nick Kroll dissects the deadpan Keaton persona with this spot-on take — “In these heightened comic scenarios, playing them incredibly seriously raises the stakes of every scene he plays.”
And Bogdanovich as narrator relates Keaton anecdotes, describes the arc of his personal life — triumph to tragedy, to revival — and analyzes scenes, Keaton’s penchant for long takes allowing an entire gag to develop without tricks or cuts, what film critic Leonard Maltin means when he says “The best special effect in a Buster Keaton movie is Buster himself.”
Back in 1987, PBS filmmakers David Gill and Kevin Brownlow presented a three part “American Masters” tribute titled “Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow.” Narrated by the great British director Lindsay Anderson, it was thorough, sweeping and at close to three hours in length, pretty much the definitive Keaton biographical documentary.
It was itself a hard act to follow as Bogdanovich’s film covers the same ground in much the same way. But Bogdanovich found different scenes from Keaton’s movies, fresher TV commercials from Keaton’s later years and lots of funny people to marvel over their idol in this fresh, lively and thoroughly entertaining remembrance of a great clown, a “Great Stone Face” and a brilliant filmmaker.
MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity
Cast: Buster Keaton, Peter Bogdanovich, Mel Brooks, Werner Herzog, Bill Hader, Nick Kroll, Carl Reiner, Cybill Shepherd, Richard Lewis
Credits: Written and directed by Peter Bogdanovich. A Cohen Media Group release.
Running time: 1:42
A child sitting with a psychotherapist (Colm Feore), hypnotized by the sound of his voice and the metronome he uses to put patients under.
Not saying this trailer is particularly scary, but the concept is killer and it is most certainly chilling.
Jackson Robert Scott of the “It” remake has the title role. Taylor Schilling and Brittany Allen also star in “The Prodigy,” which opens Feb. 8.
This Nov. 16 thriller has a hint of Jekyll and Hyde about it.
Ansel Elgort plays two brothers trapped inside the same body, living separate, contradictory lives. Elgort was just cast as “Tony” in the Spielberg “West Side Story” remake.
“Jonathan” also stars Patricia Clarkson as the shrink trying to help him “manage” this situation, and Suki Waterhouse (“Assassination Nation”) and Matt Bomer.
