Ferzan Özpetek, director of “Loose Cannons” and the recent Netflix romance “Nuovo Olimpo” rounded up a lot of famous Italian actresses for this movie about movie making — making a ’70s period piece and obsessing about what the ladies will be wearing.
Film at Lincoln Center has this one in early June. It’s set for wide release this fall.
Kazuya Shiraishi’s “11 Rebels” is an often entertaining Samurai thriller that wallows in the conventions and tropes of the genre.
The conventions of Samurai thrillers and American Westerns cross-polinated so long ago that it’s hard to remember which culture’s action pictures invented what. “Rebels” has noble sacrifice and “official” treachery, a motley collection of outcasts battling impossible odds via swordplay and gunplay and that hoariest of cliches, “Let’s solve our problems with explosives.”
Hell, if it worked in “Rio Bravo” and scores of lesser American “horse operas,” which not in feudal Japan?
The tale is loosely inspired by events of the Boshin War, the brief 19th century conflict in which the Emperor asserted primacy over a coalition of isolationist shogunates and Japan joined the more modern West by virtue of a conflict that featured breech loading artillery, Gatling guns and samurai swords.
If you’re a Western filmgoer who thinks “Last Samurai” era, you’re not far off.
Imperial troops are menacing assorted domains, among them the Shibata clan, struggling to “pick the winning horse” in the conflict between Emperor and “The Coalition.”
A plan emerges to defend a mountain pass with a bridge long enough for negotiations to pick a side to ally with, and thus save the capital city of the Shibata from assault. As they’ll be conscripting troops to lend to whichever side demands them in the meantime, that pass will have to be defended by a few samurai, and some convicted murders.
The dashing Takayuki Yamada is Masa, a condemned man waiting for his head-sawn-off execution for stabbing the Shibata samurai who raped his wife.
The “Eleven” here include a defrocked priest, the madman Noro (Takara Sakumoto), a lad (Amane Okayama) charged with trying to flee to Russia to learn Western medicine, an Old Samurai (Chikara Motoyama), a prostitute (Kano Ichiki) and a hulking mass murderer (sumo-turned-actor Ryôta Oyanagi) who bellows out his rising body count as he slaughters.
A handful of samurai led by Irie (Shûhei Nomura) and Heishiro (Taiga Nakano) are put in charge of holding this pass and bridge until they get word that the town is safe or has switched sides or whatever.
If just one convict flees, they all lose the pardons they will be granted for undertaking this “suicide” mission. Guess which convict is most determined to run off? That would be the guy who killed a Shibata for raping his wife.
There are “Seven Samurai/Dirty Dozen” plot elements and sequences here, some of which are so over-familiar as to be merely mentioned or covered in a brief (fix up the ruined fort) montage.
The script includes intertitles to ID assorted shakers and movers among the real figures on the periphery of this “last stand.” But actual character names are passed on grudgingly, so apologies for leaving half the “11” out.
But the reason B-movies like this still play is the tried and true plot points that go down like comfort food to action fans. Characters get spotlight moments swinging their blades and trying to light their matchlocks (generations of firearms are featured) in the rain, living and perhaps even forming a brotherhood (with one sister) as they fate their fates.
The gimmicks of the plot take the form of somebody who used to work with the family fireworks business and somebody who recognizes what “black water” is and how it could aid the defense of the pass.
The fights are furious and bloody. Don’t get too attached to anybody. Or any body part.
The cliches and the character clutter — Who ARE the eleven and who are samurai? — dampen the fun as much as rain dampens gunpowder here. But “11 Rebels,” like “13 Ronin” or “Seven Samurai,” is an action pic that recognizes there’s safety in numbers. That way, not everybody has to make the “noble sacrifice.” Because we always want somebody around for the finale. .
Rating: unrated, graphic violence, dismemberments, beheadings, etc.
Cast: Takayuki Yamada, Taiga Nakano, Kano Ichiki, Shûhei Nomura, Riho Sayasi, Ukon Onowe, Yûya Matsuura, Chikara Motoyama, Takuma Otoo, Amane Okayama, Sadao Abe, Ryôta Oyanagi, Takara Sakumotoi and Shûhei Nomura.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Kazuya Shiraishi, scripted by Kazuo Kasahara and Jun’ya Ikegami. A Well Go USA release.
Running time: 2:00
A creepy missing son indie thriller that Paramount/Republic picked up, this one rolls out June 20.
She’s “mad,” quite mad — articulate, but unfiltered, with few acquired life skills and few options and “Taming of the Shrew” furious over that.
He’s the village or neighborhood “idiot,” who “got turned down” by every possible bride he asked, other than her. Or her family, which was sure to be relieved in getting rid of her.
With the simplest tasks like meal prep, sobriety, marital consummation and managing a budget beyond them, can this marriage be saved? Or, when the stop-motion-animated zombie goats and birds arrive, can it even be survived?
“Sister Midnight” is a gleefully dark and twisted Indian domestic comedy, a deadpan absurdist farce with witchcraft whisked in to the domestic disharmony of it all, a Mumbai story set to the music of Howlin’ Wolf, Buddy Holly, The Stooges and…Marty Robbins?
Radhika Apte (“Mrs. Undercover”) is Uma, who rides the train into the city with the husband she hasn’t seen since they were eight, seemingly resigned to her fate living in a street-level one-room hovel and an arranged marriage that might have been the best either her family, or Gopal’s (Ashok Pathak) could manage.
But when disrobes and he bolts, only to return drunk much later, she ducks out herself.
Uma is not your average Indian bride. She smokes like a chimney and curses like Robert Carlyle in “Trainspotting.”
She can’t cook, so her neighbor (Chhaya Kadam) gives her a lesson and one hard and fast rule.
“Throw in enough chili and salt and they’ll eat anything,” (in Hindu with English subtitles).
She can’t manage money and can’t hold her tongue when her new husband — who would rather drink than consummate the marriage — is dismayed at all she cannot do.
“I can’t figure out if you’re just dumb, or just that selfish!”
But as she storms out for a smoke or an idea, she wanders far enough to get a job at a shipping company across town. Can she at least clean the offices, after hours?
“Oh sure. I’m a domestic GODDESS.”
With the help of that neighbor, Sheetal, who becomes her co-conspirator, and of the older and helpful but inscrutable elevator operator (Subhash Chandra) at work, perhaps Uma can make a go of this adult life/married living thing.
But that’s the thing about madness in the movies. It comes and goes, but never really “goes.”
The edgiest Indian cinema has always been filmed by expats, and the London-based Karan Kadhari seasons his debut feature with the sorts of things Indian cinema avoids — nudity, sex, dismemberment and profanity included.
This working poor world is something you survive and resign yourself to. Financial or social advancement never cross anyone’s mind.
A running gag — strangers on the street and even prostitutes stop Uma and ask her for her “whitening” regimen (Snow Queen Whitening Cream, she never ever tells them). But in Uma’s deranged mind, there may be other reasons she’s “Twilight” pale.
Apte is an amusing fury in this role, occasionally even inviting sympathy as she struggles to fit in to a world more tolerant of her fairer skin than her mental state and personal struggles.
Kandhari’s script makes her an untameable “shrew” whose madness can only be managed in a marriage that can only be endured unless coming to an “understanding,” or fate intervenes.
“Sister Midnight” is barely characterizable as a dark farce, challenging to get into until you learn to surf its loopy “Just go with it” vibe. But the deadpan laughs land, from Uma’s endless dismay at her plight to every wholly unexpected needle drop on the score — from The Band to T-Rex. And Apte is the riveting center of it all, making sense out of nonsense, and when she can’t, just bluffing and bullying her unfiltered way towards enlightenment, or something just short of it.
Rating: unrated, violence, sex, nudity, smoking
Cast: Radhika Apte, Ashok Pathak, Subhash Chandra and Chhaya Kadam
Credits: Scripted and directed by Karan Kandhari. A Magnolia/Magnet release.
Running time: 1:47
Brit ventriloquist Nina Conti directed and stars — in the fuzzy monkey suit — this dark rom com about grief and connection.
“Presented by Christopher Guest” carries some weight, as this feels twee and so far off the wall as to be in the next county.
You’d think a lot of distributors wouldn’t dare open their film against the last Tom Cruise “Mission: Impossible” outing this weekend.
You’d be right. But “The Last Rodeo” is opening as counter programming. And our friends at Magnolia are offering up this Subcontinental comedy May 23.
Looks cute and edgy, liberating and fun.
“Breathless” didn’t start the cinema and world pop culture’s youth movement. It didn’t launch the French “New Wave” that brought Jean-Luc Godard, Truffaut and others to fame and glory as they upended cinema conventions back in 1959.
But Richard Linklater (“Boyhood, ” “Dazed and Confused”) remembers all that it did, and here’s his version of that scene, the making of “Breathless,” and the impact American actress Jean Seberg (Zoey Deutch) had with that performance in that film.
Doing it mostly in French? Un bisou de chef, non?”
Sony is handling this A24 release in some territories, a bloody tale of a disturbed, grieving foster mother (Sally Hawkins) who needs foster kids to help her revive a dead child.
Icky?
May 30 in North America, released over the course of the summer elsewhere.
The first time I pondered the “coincidence” of a classic film turning up on my TV at a particular moment in history was coming home from school in the ’70s and seeing the Cold War era gem “Seven Days in May” showing on a local CBS affiliate.
This was in the mid-70s, during the debate over one of the SALT treaties — Strategic Arms Limitations Talks. It can’t have been a coincidence that John Frankenheimer’s Kirk Douglas/Burt Lancaster/Ava Gardner and Fredric March 1964 thriller, about an attempted military coup staged when a president dared to propose such a treaty, was airing on WFMY-TV at this precise moment in time.
It wasn’t until years later, when I was making newspaper-sponsored movie review appearances on that same station, that I pondered what message a right-wing-owned-and-leaning TV affiliate in North Carolina was sending by dropping that movie in that time slot at that moment in history.
Since Jan. 20 of this year, BBC America has been slapping 1984’s America-taken-over-by-communists thriller “Red Dawn” in its lineup on a regular basis. Nudge nudge, wink wink.
And then the little-seen WWII classic “The Mortal Storm” turned up on Turner Classic Movies the other night. Showing that movie now is, again, no coincidence.
An MGM film that pretty much pulled off the gloves and bluntly called-out Germany, Naziism and what was going on there over a year before America entered the war, I remember being gobsmacked by its outspoken anti-fascism during a university film society screening in grad school.
You go to film history classes and read all that was written about Hollywood in the run-up to war, with Warner Brothers films the first and most prominent to call out fascism and big, heavily-invested-in-Germany-and-Occupied Europe markets MGM’s timidity on the subject. And then Mr. Mayer’s studio went and made the one film they’d avoided making, an all-star thriller calling blasting Nazi Germany and contrasting fascism with American values in the most direct terms imaginable.
It was MGM’s only anti-Nazi movie before the war. But it’s a doozy.
The courage and urgency that the studio lacked wasn’t reflected by the career of Oscar-winning director Frank Borzage. He’d already made “Little Man, What Now?” and “It Happened Here,” films with similar themes, settings and warnings.
The film’s infamous avoidance of using the word “Jew” as it depicts the early days of the Hitler regime, with its assaults on academics and ethnic minorities, may be the one cowardly thing about it. But much of what is in this adaptation of a novel by the wife of a British diplomat, who viewed this history from postings in Austria and Germany during that period, still stings.
The film was banned by Hitler. Because big conservative and sentimental MGM lands some political punches, for once.
” I think peace is better than war. A man’s right to think as he believes is as good for him as food and drink.”
“We should be intolerant, of anyone who opposes the will of our leader!”
“Tell him peasants HAVE no politics, they keep cows!”
“They want to KEEP their cows, they’d better have the RIGHT politics!”
“May we not believe as we choose and allow others to do the same?
University science professor Viktor Roth (Frank Morgan) turns 60 and is feted by his admiring family and colleagues, and is treated to a verse of the university song (“Guadeamus igitur”) by his adoring students.
But on this Jan. 30, 1933, it’s not his birthday that’s big news in town. Adolf Hitler is named Chancellor of Germany, and smart academics, civil rights watchers and Europe’s Jews appreciate what that means, even if a lot of young people and the Roth family’s Hitler-loving maid do not.
“The Mortal Storm” is about the conflicts and moral stances taken under the roof of the Roth household, with adopted sons donning the swastika and a pushy student with a closet full of brown shirts, Fritz (Robert Young) insisting that daughter Freya (Margaret Sullavan) say “Yes” to his enthusiastic proposal even though she’s merely pondering the question.
Freya has another option. Martin (James Stewart) is savvy enough to know what the Nazis will do and what it means to peace, and to “freedom” for Germans in Germany. Martin stands up for Professor Roth in front of Nazi bullies, and for others similarly threatened.
That doesn’t mark him. Not right away. But as Professor Roth and others are rounded up and sent to camps where they wear “J” badges, the gauntlet is thrown. Martin must join or face consequences and Freya and family had best take the next train out.
The Nazis don’t say “Not so fast.” But as every move they make is aimed at obliterating independent thought, burning books and banning the teaching of Einstein and other scientists with the wrong surname, we and the characters know what’s coming.
One thing that impresses about this classic 85 years since its release is the fervent commitment of the cast to their parts in this anti-fascist passion play.
Stewart is fiery and fiesty as the unbending humanist and anti-fascist. Morgan, the one and only Wizard of Oz, is properly saintly and martryed. And Sullavan manages to seem confused, despairing and put-out, sometimes all at once.
A Nazi’s assuming she’ll marry him as her dad is among the first rounded up? The nerve!
But it is the actors playing Nazis who stand out in the “fervor” department.
Young has no trace of his future as “Father Knows Best” and “Marcus Welby, M.D.” He’s gleefully hateful. Robert Stack’s clipped, efficious cruelty is a few years shy of leading “The Untouchables.” Dan Dailey‘s future as a song and dance man (“There’s No Business Like Show Business,” “Give My Regards to Broadway,” “My Blue Heaven”) is nowhere to be glimpsed in the wide-eyed fanatic he portrays in his MGM debut.
Ward Bond? Considering his later coming-out in far right politics and Hollywood “Blacklist” mania, he slips into his Nazi guise the most easily.
Character actors were the backbone of every studio in Hollywood’s Golden Age. But it’s still jarrring when the familiar, cracking whine of the busybody neighbor commenting on George Bailey’s inept courting of Mary in “It’s a Wonderful Life” and the future mayor of Mayberry, Dick Elliott, demanding to see “Your PAPERS” as a Nazi passport clerk.
Borzage won two Best Director Oscars, including the very first one ever handed out — for “Seventh Heaven” (1929). “The Mortal Storm” isn’t his or screenwriters Claudine West, Hans Rameau or George Froeschel’s subtlest work.
But in 1940, that was very much the point. Europe was in flames and seven years after Hitler’s ascendency as Chancellor, there could be no doubt of the threat he represented to democracy, personal freedoms and Western Civilization itself. Subtlety and “both sidesing” were out of fashion.
And there’s little subtle about showing “Red Dawn” or “The Mortal Storm” to American viewers in 2025, either, for very much the same reasons. This 1940 film is a stark reminder of when we had a surer sense of our values and the common sense to act on them when faced with a man and a movement antithetical to them.
Pointing out that ignorant totalitarians and their violent minions always go after academics, learning and books first is always a welcome first step, even if it’s a belated one.
Rating: “approved, TV-PG, violence
Cast: James Stewart, Margaret Sullavan, Robert Young, Dan Dailey, Anita Granville, Robert Stack, Irene Rich, Maria Ouspenskaya, Ward Bond and Frank Morgan.
Credits: Directed by Frank Borzage, scripted by based on a novel by Phyllis Bottome. An MGM release on Youtube, Roku TV, TCM’s Amazon Channel, etc.
Running time: 1:40
Yes, this trailer to the June 13 Apple TV+ release pretty much gives away the whole show. It’s an 83 minute long thriller, guys. TOO MUCH PLOT is spoiler alerted in this.
Domhnall Gleeson, Fiona Shaw and Kyle MacLachlan join the Oscar winner and the “It” girl of the moment for this thriller from the director of “Beast.”
Movie Nation 