A deep bow of respect is due to Ms. Joey King, who used her newly emerging star clout (“Fargo,” “Kissing Booth,” “Slender Man,” “Summer ’03”) to get “Radium Girls” on the screen.
It’s a well-acted, smartly-reported and heartfelt if somewhat malnourished period piece about the heroic women of U.S. Radium Corp’s New Jersey watch-dial factory. In the mid-1920s, they realized they were being poisoned, painting luminous radioactive numbers on watchfaces, and took the callous corporation to court, exposing a cover-up that changed American labor and workplace safety.
Reminding people of the Radium Girls‘ sacrifice and struggle at a time when worker rights and worker safety are under open assault is a gutsy move and does a great credit to King and co-star Abby Quinn (“Little Women,” TV’s new “Mad About You”).
Filmmakers Lydia Dean Pilcher, Ginnhy Mohler and (co-writer) Brittany Shaw tell a compelling, old-fashioned story in a somewhat stolid (corny, even) style. But the leads, playing sisters employed at the factory, make us care and break our hearts in this classic tale of Big Business lowballing the value of human life and sacrificing worker safety in the process.
Bess (King) is a 17 year-old who dreams of silent screen fame, like her idol, Rudolph Valentino. Older sister Josephine (Quinn) is the smart one, and the industrious one. She turns out many more dials per day, because like the other workers at American Radium, she licks her brush to keep its point fine enough to paint the glow-in-the-dark numbers onto the watch faces.
The women employed in this work weren’t just exposed to radiation on the job. Win the “most watches painted in a month” prize and American Radium would give you a bottle of Radithor, a radium-based patent medicine.
Bess frets over the “aftertaste” and doesn’t indulge in glow-in-the-dark makeup parties with her colleagues.
“Stop being a worrywart,” everybody says.
And then one sister gets sick, and she’s not the first. Getting straight answers out of “the company doctor” (Neil Huff) is impossible. It isn’t until the communist photographer (Collin Kelly Sordelet) Bess has taken a shine to suggests that they visit this crusading outfit called The Consumer’s League that they get their first dose of The Truth.
Doctors working for companies like this diagnose “syphilis” to shame the victim and the family into not talking about what’s made them sick. They’ve been hearing from other girls and women. What they need is proof, a corpse that shows that the cause of death might be something nobody knew about at the time, radiation poisoning.
“Radium Girls” uses a carnival barker pitching “radium water,” the “miracle elixir of the age,” and lots of advertising for “radium” products, as well as silent, black and white documentary film footage to lend authenticity to their fictionalized version of this banner moment in U.S. labor history.
A conceit of the film is introducing a sympathetic African American documentary filmmaker (Susan Heyward) character, having her talk about “The Tulsa Massacre,” and the government’s involvement in it, and showing the value of alliances in effecting change.
Not enough is done with that, and the fictional trial, while moving and hopeful, tends to draw matters out.
But Quinn and King carry the emotional weight of the film, and they’re good enough to make “Radium Girls” worth remembering and checking out. They put a moving human face on a story that’s been told in PBS documentaries and books, which gave us the facts, but not the heart of the heroines or the dead souls of the fat cat villains.
MPAA Rating: unrated
Cast: Joey King, Abby Quinn, Cara Seymour, Scott Shepherd, Susan Heyward, Neil Huff and Collin Kelly-Sordelet
Credits: Directed by Lydia Dean Pilcher, Ginny Mohler, Script by Ginny Mohler and Brittany Shaw. A Juno release.
Sure, it’s still a bargain. And considering that Netflix looks to take a big piece of the Oscar nominations pie this year, you pretty much can’t get around subscribing.
Still, with their subscriber base, it’s hard to see how they’ve spent it all, or even a large portion of it, on content, no matter how much “Kill the Irishman,” “Roma” and “Da Five Bloods” cost.
Let’s remake “The Craft” and rub all its hard, cruel edges off.
It’ll be “woke” and tolerant, righteous in its inclusion and opposition to those against those values. It just won’t be scary or have the “now they’ve gone too far” arc from good, clean witchcraft fun to violent and vengeful, betrayal and death.
Actress turned writer-director Zoe Lister-Jones (“Life in Pieces”) revives the franchise with a somewhat toothless thriller titled “The Craft: Legacy,” a reboot/sequel with empowerment messaging and sisterhood bonding, and too little of the stuff that made “The Craft” a cult favorite of generations.
In simpler terms, she’s giggly-girlied it up and sucked all the life out of it.
But this “Legacy” has a promising start. Three high school girls (Zoey Luna, Lovie Simone, Gideon Adlon) have discovered their “power,” and have taken a dive into the occult, via candlelit ceremonies and incantations delivered in a circle.
But this “magic circle” is like a compass rose. It lacks a “west.” They find her when Lily (Cailee Spaeny of “On the Basis of Sex” and “Bad Times at the El Royale”) becomes the New Girl in School.
Pixie-haired Lily may wear a witchy necklace and see a snake walking up to the house of her mom’s (Michelle Monaghan) new love. But she’s got no clue as to what’s she’s capable of.
She starts to find out when Frankie, Lou and Lisa offer their support after a teenage girl’s mid-class menstrual moment becomes the bullies’ excuse to shame her.
This is Lister-Jones’ best scene, a moment of hurt and embarrassment turned into a rite of “sisterhood.” When they realize that Lily’s “special,” they invite her in, and she accepts in a flash — the new friends, the rituals, the super-naturalism.
She must have seen “Charmed” reruns or something.
The early bonding scenes, with the girls going on about the “stages” of witchcraft mastery that they have to go through, with Frankie (Adlon) enthusing about shape-shifting into “K-Stew” from “Twilight,” play as giddy, jokey fun.
“You shouldn’t run from your power,” Lily is advised, somberly. “NONE of us should.”
But let’s “take our coven for a TEST drive!”
The girls “reform” (neuter) via a curse, the school bully (Nicholas Galitzine) and avail themselves of their powers in class and in the cafeteria. But nothing really gets out of hand. Any “infighting” seems pre-ordained by a screenwriting formula, not organic or a natural product of the changing power dynamics of the coven.
One interesting conflict is set up. Lily’s new “dad” is some sort of Men’s Movement thinker/author. Casting David Duchovny as a sort of rival “cult” leader, with his three teen sons amounting to the lab rats in his experiment in “Hallowed Masculinity” is clever, but doesn’t pay off on the screen as well as its reads on the page.
Lister-Jones loses herself in high school romance, teen clique dynamics and riffing on high school “types” and rites of passage. The biggest laugh in the picture might mean the Sex Ed film the kids sit through, to hoots and catcalls from the obnoxious and immature boys.
“‘Yes’ and only ‘yes’ means ‘yes!'”
Lister-Jones hasn’t utterly ruined “The Craft,” and thanks mostly to the cast and the chemistry they build via weary “makeover” and “circle in the woods” scenes, it has its charms.
But stripping it of its cruelty, sense of grievance and teen-impulsive passion for violent revenge rubs off too much of what made the first film work from this “sequel.” And no cameo from the first film can atone for that.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for thematic elements, crude and sexual content, language and brief drug material
Cast: Cailee Spaeny, Zoey Luna, Lovie Simone, Gideon Adlon, Nicholas Galitzine, Michelle Monaghan and David Duchovny
Credits: Written and directed by Zoe Lister-Jones, based on Peter Filardi’s script “The Craft.” A Sony release.
We meet Darryl Gant in his car, driving through the dark, ruined streets of Camden, New Jersey.
Philly guys on the radio compare the place to “Robocop’s Detroit” and “I Am Legend,” a ghost town since its Campbell’s Soup, RCA records glory days.
And Darryl? “I’m doing what I always do.” “What,” a friend wants to know, “chasing her around?”
Hasan Oswald’s sad, infuriating and compelling “Higher Love” is about Darryl’s search for his girlfriend of seven years. Nani is a crack addict, for starters. “There’s not any drug Nani won’t do,” Darryl admits. But he loves her. She’s pregnant. And she’s with her “get high buddies.” Can she be saved?
Oswald follows the search from two points of view — Darryl’s and Nani’s. Darryl questions junkies on the pitch-black streets, amid the tumbledown factories of a city whose heyday passed long before Sinatra did. Nani, dolled up and sporting a stoned, Kardashian vocal fry, whines about the names Darryl calls her when she’s on a bender, selling herself for drug money.
“You told me ‘Never give up’ on you,” he says when he finally tracks her down. And he hasn’t. Yet. But even he can see that “I don’t think there will be a happy ending.”
Oswald keeps his camera docu-drama close, capturing Darryl’s concern and Nani’s perpetual daze. He has a decent job and she can’t understand why he won’t finance her addiction. She listens to talk of “vitamins” for the baby she’s carrying and rehab for herself.
But “It sucks to love somebody who don’t love themselves.”
Oswald’s film captures America’s opioid epidemic in its more urban form. White and black addicts and dealers talk about methadone and rehab and let us hear and see how that’s all it may ever be — talk. Darryl eyes the big picture of Camden when he disparages efforts at reviving the city that don’t start with addressing this healthcare crisis first.
“The people have to choose” to turn themselves around before Camden can come back.
The story arc here could confirm or contradict Darryl’s forlorn prediction of no “happy ending.” But as the baby is born the struggle continues anew, Darryl stoically notes that “He didn’t choose his mother, I did,” and that has to guide his thinking from here on out.
As for Camden, the low-level dealer Iman sizes the place up on a snowy afternoon at a local cemetery.
“I know who killed him,” he says, pointing to one tombstone, and then another. It’s a profoundly sad moment in a downbeat documentary that doesn’t have answers, just broken people unable to “choose” what’s best for them and the city whose ruin is both their trap and their responsibility.
MPAA Rating: Unrated, drug abuse, sex work discussions, drinking, smoking, profanity
Cast: Darryl Gant, Nani, Iman, Nikki and Raymond
Credits: Written and directed by Hasan Oswald. A Gravitas Ventures release.
So, Netflix’s first “holiday” romantic comedy is all about vulgar people, alcohol and substance abuse, crude hook-ups, bodily functions, bodily fluids and generous helpings of the f-bomb?
Charmlessly scripted and acted, “Holidate” is as amusing as a hand-job, and about as intimate.
Emma Roberts of “American Horror Story” is Sloane, dumped and not moving on from the vodka and chocolate binges post-breakup. Luke Bracey (“Point Break,” “Little Fires Everywhere”) is Jackson, Aussie golf pro and not particularly “attracted” to Sloane.
But Sloane’s libidinous Aunt (Kristin Chenoweth) has this gimmick that gets her through the holidays. The “no-expectations,” no consequences “Holidate” can be handy, as Jackson says, because women “go mental over the holidays.”
Frances Fisher plays Sloane’s blunt, nagging mother, the one who wants her daughter to find “someone who is legally bound to be there during chemo.”
Happy thought. Better than Mom’s judgement of her own sister, Susan.
“She’s gonna die alone, in a wheelchair and a diaper!”
Roberts is a veteran of the late Garry Marshall’s “holiday” romances, so she no doubt recognized this even-more-coarse holiday Romantic Hits package.
Sloane and Jackson “meet cute” (ish) post-Christmas and “Holidate” through New Year’s (a let-down), Valentine’s Day (worse), St. Patrick’s Day and a family Easter Egg hunt set to Ludacris singing “Move, Bitch (Get out the Way).”
The central premise, that you need to couple up to avoid that “wheelchair/diaper” analogy, is what’s ludicrous here. A rom-com as pathetic as this reminds us that we do indeed die alone.
Cinco de Mayo, a July Fourth fireworks mishap, Sloane and Jackson stumble and on and on through the calendar year. When will these crazy, mismatched kids find love?
Not before a frank talk about “slutty” Halloween costumes in front of a couple of seven year-old girls, who figure out a life’s goal from overhearing their mom (Jessica Capshaw) and Sloane, her sister.
“I wanna be a whore!”
Roberts and Bracey are cute enough, but don’t have the chemistry to wash away the bad taste “Holidate” leaves in your mouth.
We all feel a little dirtier after sitting through this.
MPAA Rating: TV-MA, substance abuse, profanity, sexual situations and profanity
Cast: Emma Roberts, Luke Bracey, Kristin Chenoweth, King Bach, Frances Fisher.
Credits: Directed by John Whitesell, script by Tiffany Paulson. A Netflix release.
Our narrator tells the sad story of the Dominican Republic, “battleground island” of the Caribbean, a place where starting with “the Italian, Columbus” “outsiders” have always come in and exploited and bossed around the people.
Spanish conquistadors to British and French pirates, to say nothing of the gringos from the north, all have “taken from us.” And now, it’s the Colombian and Mexican drug cartels who are “our new foreign masters.”
Doggone it, why can’t the D-R have its own home-grown cartel?
That’s the premise of “Narco Soldiers,” a dull, derivative B-movie (in English) that sets up the Big Game of the Caribbean — playing drug cartels off against one another, getting seed money to go into business on their own, taking out the last of their rivals on their own.
Danny (Rafael Amaya) is the one who’s worked his way up Don Toribio’s (Ricardo Chavira) ladder, who learned the business — who to trust, what to do with those he doesn’t trust — in Miami and Puerto Rico, studying under The Sarge (Roger Cross). His buddy Teo (Octavio Pizano) is “the strategist,” the one who could make Don Toribio the Kingpin of Santo Domingo.
But remember that narrator. It is Teo’s “yacht club” girlfriend, the bombshell Marisela (Carolina Guerra) who is the real brains of this outfit — the one with cutthroat ambition and a thing about national pride that drives her, and them, to take over “instead of just being the middle men” in a very lucrative, if illegal, lethal and socially-destructive business.
It’s a tale of a love triangle, double-crosses, threats and bribes and bullet-riddled ambushes, extravagant villains and amoral “heroes.” And through it all, Marisela tells us how it’s all going to go down.
“How to start an international gang war in three easy steps,” Ms. Exposition explains.
And there’s nothing here we’ve seen before done better, a “Scarface” saga with leads and a director who can’t do anything fresh with the violence and bring little heat to their performances in the clinches, or delivering pro forma dialogue.
“Do NOT let me down again!”
Three screenwriters took a pass at this, and they got all wrapped up in exposition — upping the ante in the shootouts (yawn), the “How to’s” of the drug trade, stuff we’ve seen (and heard) in scores of earlier films. “Blow” was a favorite of mine, similarly-narrated, only much better.
“What determines the price of a drug? Location, location LOCATION.”
One thing that would have made a big difference in this nationalistic Dominican Republic drug trade picture would have been to film it in Spanish. That wouldn’t help the generic story and stock characters, but it would have given it an authenticity it lacks, first line to last.
Those old mates, collaborators and comic foils Nick Frost and Simon Pegg go once more to the well that produced “Spaced,” “Shaun of the Dead,” and so forth for “Truth Seekers,” a comic thriller series about ghost hunting in the UK.
And if it’s not as funny as their best efforts, and truthfully not the most original idea ever to pop out of them, it’s still worth a look and good for a few laughs.
It’s a Frost (“Cuban Fury”) vehicle, and he’s well-cast as Gus Roberts, veteran cable/wifi wizard for Smyle, a British telecom service. He’s so good at installations and trouble-shooting that his boss (Pegg) needs him to “train up” a new guy.
That would be “some clueless millennial mouth breather greenhorn.” That would be Elton John, or so his “greenhorn” trainee (Samson Kayo of several British TV series, “Youngers” and “Famalam” among them) calls himself.
Elton’s ride-alongs are how he learns about Gus’s side hustle. He has his own Youtube channel as “The Truth Seeker.” Because going into all these old houses, hotels, “Britain’s second most haunted rectory” and the like means he runs into The Unexplained.
Gus isn’t shy about snooping around and explaining, or at least documenting “the supernatural” wherever he finds it. Now that he’s got a “newb” in younger Elton’s parlance, that means Elton’s roped into these ghost hunts.
Not to worry, “You’re never really alone with a walkie talkie.” That demon-haunted hitchhiker (Emma D’Arcy) they pick up along the way?
“Relax. I’ve got Holy Water in the screen (windscreen/windshield) wash!”
The episodes begin with some supernatural occurrence — a soldier electrocuted into the early warning communications system for The Battle of Britain, the author of a 17th century book of black magic arrested by the Puritan inquisition, the origins of Astrid’s (D’Arcy) terrors. What follows folds today’s house call in with that “occurrence,” and that in turn weaves into the larger story.
The haunting refrain of “The Lincolnshire Poacher” accompanies one story thread, but there’s more going on than the lads at first realize, with a running gag being that things happen just as they walk, backs-turned, to the service van, or miss in the shadows, just out of sight.
Gus’s colorfully cranky dad (Malcolm McDowell, funny) and Elton’s make-up and cos-play obsessed agoraphobic sister Helen (Susan Sokoma), a mysterious secret official (Kelly MacDonald) and others turn up, a few DIY gadgets are trotted out (“electroplasmic spectrometer,” aka “a ghost detector”). And assorted spooks, specters and odd events appear, pointing to some sort of migration of souls (ghostly possession) theory.
The central comic premise is ghost-savvy Gus never letting Elton see him non-plussed, no matter how surprising much of what they encounter might be. Elton? He’s the one whose eyes pop.
“Here we go. You ready?” “NO!” “Come on, you big blouse!”
Frost, as the leading man, plays a toned-down version of his usual amped-up sidekicks, and earns grins for the ways he folds his hands high up his chest over his quite rotund belly. Sight gags — “levitating” dad via one of those stairlift gadgets — are much like the rest of the comedy, hit or miss.
Movie references riddle the scripts. A false wall hiding the entry to a hidden “study?”
“Shawshank!”
And the Big Picture story has a “Heaven’s Gate” connection, the cult, not the movie. Not much of a payoff to that.
Violence and attempted frights aside, “Truth Seekers” isn’t unpleasant to sit through. But for those longing for the snappy repartee and manic energy of early Frost and Pegg (he’s barely in most episodes) collaborations, this is a let down, all sheet and few ghosts, a chuckle here and there, rarely a real laugh.
MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, some profanity
Cast: Nick Frost, Samson Kayo, Emma D’Arcy, Susan Sokoma, Julian Barratt, Malcolm McDowell and Simon Pegg.
Credits: Created by Nick Frost and Simon Pegg, Nat Saunders and James Serafinowicz, directed by Jim Field Smith. An Amazon Prime release.
Alex Winter, the first half of “Bill & Ted,” has become an accomplished documentary filmmaker, and I’ve been looking forward this one since he first started talking it up last year.
Raja is a teen, with a jerk for a little brother and a grandmother who barely looks after them. Her father is long gone, and her mother fled some while back.
But Raja (Elina Vaska) has some sense of her worth, even if she never lets us see where it came from. Boys may pay her little mind in her rural Latvian high school, but she is indifferent. She’s looked in the mirror, and she has that confidence of the beautiful, that Whit Stillman’s characters kvetch about in “Metropolitan.”
There’s an English language competition coming up, and in her magical teen thinking, it’s the answer to all her problems. Stop cutting classes, convince her teacher (Edgars Samitis), master English, win the contest, fly to London, and find the mother that deserted her and her brother (Andzejs Lilientals) to their fate.
“Mellow Mud” is a thoroughly engrossing portrait of Raja’s life, the bane of her existence and what she longs to escape from, if only to fetch her mother. Living on a remote apple orchard farm that the callous Olga (Ruta Birgere) is scheming to sell out from under them, raising the tweenage Robis, whose acting-out is even more pronounced than hers, she needs to change her fate. This contest is her only hope.
Writer-director Renars Vimba’s debut feature stays with his star, focuses all our attention on this child’s quiet desperation, which she hides behind a maturing young woman’s self-confidence. Raja makes every mistake in the book, because that’s what kids do, with or without adult guidance.
And her master plan goes off the rails the moment Olga dies. She doesn’t have to say why she dials the phone, and then puts it down. Reporting that would foil her plan to win a prize, fly to London and drag her mother “home.” The authorities would put her and Robis into foster care, and any hope for a “normal” future based on an idealized (probably false) past would vanish.
No, they’ll live off Olga’s pension, brush off the social worker (Zane Jancevska), “no more skipping school,” she orders, in Latvian with English subtitles. Raja knows she can no longer be “impossible to deal with. She’s smart enough to be able to catch up on all her schoolwork, and self-confident enough to curry favor with the young English teacher who can tutor her so that they can get their mother back.
Vimba’s film, titled “Es esmu seit” in Latvian, throws many an obstacle in Raja’s way, some you’d hope she (and her writer/director) would avoid.
We get no sense that Raja’s mastered English. Only one scene suggests she has a superficial command of it. We get little hint of her impact on boys, and we’re hoping her teacher is above that. The film takes “problematic” turns in ways far too easy to predict, and queasy to accept.
But Vaska, a wonderfully understated actress to be this young, lets us sense Raja’s native cunning, her feminine sophistication and the limits of each. The impulsive teen in Raja pokes through just often enough to make us fear what will happen when all the balls she’s juggling hit the clay-covered farmhouse floor.
The portrait of rural poverty and its impact on children feels real and more universal than Latvian. The kids make mistakes and exercise poor judgement at every turn. “Mellow Mud” makes us fearful for them and dread what is headed their way, because we can see that even if they can’t.
MPAA Rating: unrated, with sex, smoking and drinking, all involving an under-age teen.
Cast: Elina Vaska, Andzejs Lilientals, Edgars Samitis
Credits: Written and directed by Renars Vimba. A Corinth Films release.
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