This November release repairs the “Man of Steel” Kent parents, Diane Lane and Kevin Costner, for a story of ranchers who set out to rescue a grandchild living “off the grid” (Survivalists? Cultists? Druggies?) in the Dakotas.
Anything starring two of my favorite actors is already on second base. This Focus Features “awards season” release looks good.
It happens often enough that it’s worth pointing out this neat bit of role-reversal in “The Unfamiliar.” Our heroine, Izzy Cormack, turns to her husband Ethan and says, “Stay here and call the police.” Or “Wait here, I’ll find” Emma or Tommy or Lily, whichever of their children is missing, taken by demonic spirits.
Izzy, played by Jemima West, is not just the protagonist here. She’s “wearing the pants” as we used to say — fixing their busted Mercedes, taking charge in a crisis, fighting back at whatever’s attacking her and her family, even if it’s all in her head.
Because Izzy is a British Army doctor, fresh back from Afghanistan. PTSD is very much on her mind as things go “bump,” her son Tommy (Harry McMillan-Hunt), husband (Christopher Dane) and teenage daughter (Rebecca Hanssen) act strange and all ANYbody can ask her is “Did you take your pills?”
The movie around this take-charge heroine is rubbish, with Hawaiian “spirits” stirring up stuff in a plot straight out of “The Brady Bunch.” There’s rarely a chill and only a scene or two in the third act that get across any sense of peril.
And you have to take off some of the points you give the script for making a woman the center of the action for laugh-out-loud moments of cultural appropriation. But aside from that…
Izzy comes home from a combat tour to a family that seems a little wrapped up in college-professor-husband Ethan’s latest project, either a non-fiction book on the Tiki gods and spirits of Hawaii, or “a children’s book,” complete with horrific illustrations, that uses those gods and monsters in a kid-friendly story.
Teen Emma (Hanssen) is still studying piano, but kind of remote. Son Tommy (McMillan-Hunt) is precociously tinkering with a short wave radio of his own design.
But the static out of that radio is sinister, Tommy keeps insisting he uses it to “talk to Dad when he’s asleep.”
Pictures fly off the walls, and Izzy is hallucinating deathly injuries her children incur. We see her visit a shrink, but don’t go into the session. Because there’s a fellow (Ben Lee) in the waiting room who seems to know her, reassures her that she’s “not mad,” and well, he has a BUSINESS card.
Why not bring him and his partner in for a seance?
Izzy’s efforts to “get to the bottom of this” include CCTV cameras, even though everybody knows demons don’t show up in HD. Ethan’s solution is a family holiday, back to Hawaii where his “research” began.
West never takes Izzy off the deep end — she is ENGLISH, after all. It’s a performance that shows us curiosity and concern, and the odd moment of shock. But Izzy isn’t given to panic, weeping or unalloyed terror.
That’s a justifiable approach to the character, but one that robs the movie of pathos and urgency. Because nobody else picks up the scream-in-fright slack.
What is the DEAL with these kids, this husband? So unconcerned. That mystery drives the story, and frankly isn’t enough to force the viewer engage with it.
The whole affair, with its posh accents, country house in England and absurdly roomie “jungle” rental in Hawaii, is entirely too prissy to scare anybody.
And the one good action beat — SOMEbody is allergic to bees, and is thus tormented by them by the demon — comes too late to make any difference.
MPAA Rating: Unrated, graphic violence, much of it involving children.
Cast: Jemima West, Christopher Dane, Harry McMillan-Hunt, Rachel Lin and Rebecca Hanssen.
Credits: Directed by Henk Pretorius, script by Henk Pretorius, Jennifer Nicole Stang. A Dark Star release.
Running time: 1:29
The most credible way for a story about Nigeria’s multi-billion-dollar Internet scamming industry to be told is by a Nigerian, from a Nigerian point of view. Only someone from the culture can speak freely to the attractions of this vast, illegal enterprise, and about the systemic corruption and moral decay that gave birth to it.
“Nigerian Prince” is a thriller that lays out the parameters of the “have-nots” preying on the “haves,” paints its anti-heroic “hero” into a corner and dares pass judgement on him, the “system” and maybe on us for falling for con artists.
First-time feature director Faraday Okoro has to contort this story to work an American into it, just to give the tale a victim and an outsider’s point of view, and that strain shows from beginning to end. But he’s still made a fascinating story of a dysfunctional country where everybody hustles, and all you can do is minimize the hustles pulled on you.
Eze, who prefers to be called “Easy” back home in the States, is the teen son of divorced Nigerian-American parents who arrives in Lagos, and is promptly conned out of “bribe” money. Eze (Antonio J. Bell) doesn’t want to be here, but his mother has shipped him there “to learn who you are” and maybe straighten him out. Not living with his father, he’s losing his way, getting in fights at school.
That entire premise, that sending somebody to an albeit vibrant but dangerous Third World African country so that he’ll “straighten out,” be safe and grow up to be better educated and more focused as an adult seems dubious. And “Nigerian Prince” in no way makes that case.
Unless the idea is that Eze sees just what his parents fled, and what they’re going through to give him a better life. Aunt Grace (Tina Mba) may be a college professor, but she lives in a tiny apartment with a single bed. Hot water is in short supply, and power black-outs are a fact of life.
“That’s Nigeria for you,” Auntie sighs, hinting that “powerful” people and corruption are the reasons for every chronic shortage and inefficiency in the culture.
The boy can complain to mommy back home all he wants. He’s stuck there for a month, he’s been told. Learn to eat the food, mind your aunt and cope with the limited Internet access.
That isn’t a problem for Prius (Chinaza Uche). When we meet him, he’s hustling some hapless Indo-African car shopper into buying the same stolen car he’s sold and resold before. The whole “I need you to send me your account information so that I can launder my cash through your accounts, giving you a BIG payday” online scam is just one con of many he’s running at the same time.
Prius is a “419er,” as they call the scammers of Lagos. It’s the number of the law in Nigerian legal code for Internet fraud. And when he and Eze meet, after mistaken identity punches have been thrown, Eze learns Prius is Aunt Grace’s wayward son. They’re cousins.
“Nigerian Prince,” which is ostensibly following two story threads — complaining Eze’s ongoing feud with Grace and his folks back home, and Prius’ parade of scams — merges into one story as Eze, who’s had his laptop and his lip busted by the older man, decides Prius is his new role model.
That unlikely turn of events is handled in a most ungainly and abrupt way, but never mind. Eze is quickly sucked into schemes aimed at keeping Prius out of jail, where the police chief who has him roughed-up is threatening a far worse fate.
“You are far too stupid to ever make any money in this (scamming) business,” he is warned. And by the way? Give the chief a bribe or you’re dead by Friday.
Okoro’s script, co-written with Andrew Long, plays with the racism-classism ingrained into Nigerian life. All a white Australian passenger (Craig Matthew Stott) at the airport has to do to retrieve Eze’s lost “bribe” money is be white and threaten to call the authorities.
The scams covered run the gamut, from the car title hustle to selling useless reserved tickets for rice you’ve been selling at a discount to customers who got there “too late” to get stock you have on hand, to literal money “laundering.”
Prius is caught, chased, hunted and threatened, and Eze falls into the background of the film, whose title is a play on words that works under several interpretations.
Uche makes a magnetic, amoral hustler who knows “this is wrong, but I don’t care.…In Nigeria, all anybody cares about is ‘money money money money.'”
The street life is vividly captured, and the dialogue — in English, Igbo and Yoruba (with English subtitles) — is sharp and expository.
If the plot takes a few predictable and a few implausible turns, that’s a forgivable sin in an otherwise eye-opening and immersive story that only a Nigerian could properly tell.
MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence
Cast: Antonio J Bell, Chinaza Uche, Tina Mba
Credits: Directed by Faraday Okoro, script by Faraday Okoro, Andrew Long. A Vertical release on Netflix.
Running time: 1:44
“Epicentro” is a lovely new tone poem to Cuba, as it is now, the Cuba behind the propaganda from within and without.
Havana is shown in all its worn, grimy impoverished glory and the people in all their vibrant, increasingly outspoken and testy semi-isolation. Long abandoned sugar refineries that once supplied Coca-Cola and crumbling housing dating back to the Spanish American War, the Eisenhower era American cars and the Soviet era trains, famed in many a travelogue, blend into this impressionistic sketch of the island After Fidel.
European writer-director-narrator Hubert Sauper (“We Come as Friends,” “Darwin’s Nightmare”) uses the idea of “Cuba as the epicenter of three dystopian chapters in human history — slavery, colonialism and the global projection of power.”
And the film, although loosely organized and more concerned with capturing arresting images, pays lip service to each of those.
The main focus is children, as we see Cubanschoolkids study dance and entertained by a silent film lecture/magic show that packs in the prehistoric landmarks of cinema — “The Kiss,” Melies “A Trip to the Moon” — and the earliest American “propaganda” films, about the destruction of the U.S.S. Maine and American intervention/invasion that chased out the Spanish colonizers.
The lesson? That history and media can be “faked.” And by the way, the “norteamericanos” “liberated Cuba,” no matter what happened between the two cultures in the 120 years since, no matter what you’ve been taught in school.
“Lies! All lies!” the little children shout, in Spanish with English subtitles.
Sauper follows European tourists into swank hotels and bars, and around town on a tour bu. And he visits apartments one could only call hovels. The gulf between “tourist” Havana and the real city is underlined when he stages an attempt to have a guest play the “daddy” of two adorable, neatly turned-out but dark-skinned kids so that they can swim in the four-star hotel’s pool.
“Not allowed, not allowed” the staff insist. With a camera present, they lose that argument. Racism, a vestige of slavery, is as evident there as anywhere else.
And Sauper spends a lot of time in conversation with women who seem to be sex workers, but who are outspoken critics of both U.S./Cuba relations, and of the limits of the lives in a country too poor to thrive without their former Soviet underwriters, and still under an American embargo on trade.
As “impressionistic” implies, it’s more a movie of impressions, quick sketches of street scenes — a photographer intruding on poor, private lives, captured by a cinematographer watching him do it, an old woman, singing along to “Bohemian Rhapsody” on her cell-phone in a back-alley bar so battered and timeworn that Columbus’s crew could have knocked back drinks there.
The children are given the screen time to recite long discourses on Cuban history and what they still don’t know about the outside world, just as isolated as their parents and grandparents were.
There’s just enough obesity, skin disease and bad teeth to make you question the marvels of the country’s famed socialized medicine. But the longer they’re kept from tourism and industrial investment and the further the Soviet subsidies drift into the past, that’s probably breaking down, too.
But whatever happens in the future, and there’s always a hint of “Cuba before it’s ruined by the US” to such films, Sauper has captured the island in the last days of Castroism (Fidel’s death is reported on TV) — lovely, crumbling, defiant and myopic, a “paradise” that has been tormented by the worst human history has had to offer.
MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity, alcohol
Credits: Written, directed and narrated by Hubert Sauper. A Kino Lorber release.
Running time: 1:48
Oh you have GOT to see this. Seriously. Who doesn’t love to gawk?
Somehow Salma Hayek and Alec Baldwin took the title roles as “Drunk Parents,” drinking and flailing and spiraling down the affluence ladder — and trying like Hell to keep all this from their daughter (Michelle Veintimilla) in college.
Joe Mangeniello plays a family friend, a tough guy, always in camo, relentlessly abused by his foul-mouthed tweenage sons. “Douche” is the nicest nickname they offer.
Jim Gaffigan plays a new neighbor whom they rent the house next door to, WITHOUT permission from the owner Nigel (Aasif Mandvi), who is out of the country on a pilgrimage to Nepal.
New neighbor Carl? “Registered sex offender.”
Treat Williams is a guy with money they need to impress to get themselves out from under a tsunami of debt and debt collectors.
And then Will Ferrell and Colin Quinn show up as two winos who keep setting themselves on fire as they try to siphon gas out of the “moving” truck that some lowlife filled with Nigel’s furniture.
Oh, it’s a scene, man. But hey, you sign on to a movie co-written and directed by the guy nominated for a Razzie for the heinous script to “Grown Ups 2,” you take your chances.
I’m not going to say much about “Drunk Parents.” Just that it needs more drinking. Baldwin plays a dismissive, unfiltered and rude drunk. “Type casting,” amIright?
But Hayek? You want to PARTY with her, an out-of-control, shame-spiraling bombshell MILF who is convinced that everything they do to try to keep up appearances is illegal. Because it is.
“I’m going to YALE,” she keeps shouting. “And when I say ‘YAIL,’ I mean PRISON!”
There’s no getting around the fact that this is a middling movie, misshapen and wildly uneven. However, the “names” are funny, the pratfalls work. Hayek’s drunken tirades score. The best laughs here are gut-busters.
And, in an odd abrupt shift in tone, everybody, from the Teagartens, whose medical device breakthrough gamble fell just short, to other mighty-have-fallen types all around them, to the freaking SEX offender next door, has a “story.” Judging people, the way Frank Teagarten does the wheelchair-bound Office Depot assistant manager (Ben Platt) who fancies their daughter? Not smart.
“Enjoy the ride!”
Baldwin and Hayek knock back highballs and wine and whine that their lives of conspicuous consumption are over, belt out “The Sun’ll Come Out, Tomorrow” in Spanish and throw themselves at this as if it’s “As You Like It.”
No. The co-writer/director was a Razzie Nominee for a reason.
Ferrell and Quinn show up (uncredited) and riff until they find something hilarious to say even as awful things are happening to their two homeless wino characters.
So, yes, “Drunk Parents” is a road accident. But if there’s a busload of talent on board, admit it. You’re gonna gawk.
MPAA Rating: R for language throughout and crude sexual references
Cast: Alec Baldwin, Salma Hayek, Joe Manganiello, Jim Gaffigan, Michelle Veintimilla, Will Ferrell and Colin Quinn.
Credits: Directed by Fred Wolf, script by Fred Wolf, Peter Gaulke. A Vertical release on Netflix.
Running time: 1:37
And Sophie Okenedo and Armor Hammer and Russell Brand. Good clean old-fashioned whodunit fun?
It’s a ploy we’re seeing a lot of these days. “Here’s the pilot, subscribe to our cable/streaming/etc service to the see the rest.”
I like it.
Youtube is where HBO has parked its opening episode of “Lovecraft Country,” the cerebral horror series from Jordan Peele and Misha Green.
Here it is.
“Train to Busan,” the best zombie movie in years, hurled us into a human-caused Korean pandemic and taught us to never ever get too attached to any would-be survivor for long.
It had gut-punching pathos blended in with the endless assaults by the zombie horde, not all of whom could be gunned down, video game shoot-em-up fashion.
Sang-ho Yeon’s sequel, “Peninsula,” is a zombie movie riff on “The Road Warrior” with bits of “Escape from New York” splashed on top. It’s a more conventional, more predictable and more wearing thriller that relies entirely too much on late night CGI car and truck chases through a sea of Walking Dead flooding the ruined streets of post-apocalyptic Seoul.
There’s pathos. Some deaths still surprise us. But this film, featuring a few scenes in English, with a scattering of American and Chinese characters, plays as “You liked that? We’ll give you more” pandering.
Dong-Won Gang plays the “hero,” a Korean Army captain we meet as he’s taking the back roads, trying to get his sister and her family out “the last boat” off the Korean peninsula.
The only one Jung Seok saves, aside from himself, is his brother-in-law Chul-min (Do-Yoon Kim). Both men are haunted by this, and the other horror they’ve seen.
Four years later, the pandemic has destroyed Korea, but remained confined there. An audience watching that in 2020 will find that funny. I did.
Jung Seok and Chul-min are stateless refugees in Hong Kong, relying on the HK underworld to survive. They’re picked for a dangerous mission. Four people will be put ashore at Incheon to finish some cash and gold looting the gang had set up, but which zombies foiled.
Once they’re ashore, the four quickly become two. Because zombies aren’t the only bipeds out to kill them or at least foil their plans.
Kids in an SUV rescue Jung Seok. Chul-min? He’s taken, with the cash truck, by members of Unit 631, a commando force abandoned there. Left on their own, they’ve gone rogue and gone mad. “Wild Dog Hunts” the crazed Sgt. Hwang (Min-Jae Kim) call their search for other survivors. They turn their captives into live sport in a sort of Thunderdome Meet 60 Seconds in Heaven.
Survive two minutes, and you live to eat uncooked Ramen another day.
As a third party, Captain Seo (Kyo-hwan Koo) has his hands on the cash and their sat-phone, getting everybody out, with the cash, is going to be dicey.
Can Jung Seok count on a widow (Jung-hyun Lee), her two little girls (Re Lee, Ye-Won Lee) and their crazed grandfather (Hae-hyo Kwon) in a pinch?
“Peninsula” is basically a digital effects dumbing-down of “Train to Busan.”
Snippets of a cheesy American TV interview bring us “up to date” on the Peninsula and its history (“Reunification” is mentioned). Yank-splaining?
The new “rules” for coping with this version of “Zombieland” are repeated for those not paying close attention the first time.
“Don’t forget, the zombies are blind at night, but sensitive to SOUND.”
Right right, we got it — in Korean, Chinese and English, with English subtitles.
The endless digital truck chases are more wearying than impressive, and as to the plot, there are twists at the end but pretty much only at the end. Even the dialogue feels recycled from many other sci-fi thrillers.
“Get in if you want to live!”
Yes, I’d still rather watch this than “The Walking Dead,” but that’s mainly because this packs a lot of mayhem into 110 minutes, and then has the good sense to END.
MPAA Rating: unrated, gun violence, grisly zombie violence,
Cast: Dong-Won Gang, Jung-hyun Lee, Re Lee, Hae-hyo Kwon, Min-Jae Kim, Do-Yoon Kim
Credits: Directed by, script by Sang-ho Yeon, Joo-Suk Park, Sang-ho Yeon A Shudder/Well Go Entertainment release.
Running time: 1:55
“The Fantastiks” hung around American life for decades, lingering like The Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey Circus. You knew it was there, and it seemed it always has been and always would be — even if you never got around to seeing it yourself.
The longest running musical ever, it inhabited its corner of Off-Broadway from 1960-2002, with the odd revival here and there, attempts at getting it a foothold abroad. And its simplicity, adorability and durability made it a favorite of regional and community theaters far and wide.
I know I’ve seen it once or twice on the stage. And I never ceased to be amazed by the actors and singers who got their start in it and affectionately brought it up. Jerry Orbach finally shows America he was a singer, and not a cop, all along with Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast.” Yeah, he told me. It’s not like anybody outside of New York caught him on “42nd Street,” or saw him originate the colorful El Gallo in “Fantastiks” way back in 1960.
Glenn Close and Robert Goulet, Elliott Gould and John Davidson (actor, game show host and Broadway vet, touring with an “Oklahoma!” revival at the time) all mentioned it with love in interviews.
Broadway legend Joel Grey and former New Kid on the Block Joe McIntyre lamented the film’s fate in interviews in the late ’90s — Grey because the 1995 film looked like his last chance at a big screen musical, McIntyre because his movie career was stillborn, waiting for the movie to finally come out in 2000.
But here it, as most everybody missed it in theaters, ignored it on cable or failed to bother tracking down the DVD, the last movie in director Michael Ritchie’s uneven but star-kissed (“Bad News Bears,” “Fletch,” “Golden Child,” “Smile”) career.
And we talk about the show’s history and think of it as we watch because, whatever charms the movie captures in the leap from stage to screen are thin. All its mashed-up stage genres and conventions — commedia del arte, American musical theater, whiffs of this and that — was always going to seem quaint on camera. Ritchie’s sturdy, pedestrian direction and the hit-and-miss casting doom it.
Not that it doesn’t trick us into thinking, “This just might work” early on.
There’s a sparkling love duet sung in front of a silent film, one of the many entertainments The Congress of the World’s Strangest People and Attractions” offers when it stops in a small town in the 1920 Midwest.
The film’s El Gallo, hustler, con-man, rake and master of ceremonies (Jonathan Morris) never had a break-out film career. But he channels just enough Kevin Kline swagger to delight.
“There is a curious paradox that no one can explain: who understands the secrets of the reaping of the grain? Who understands why spring is born out of winter’s laboring pain, or why we all must die a bit before we grow again?”
Those grand old hoofers Grey, Barnard Hughes (“Doc Hollywood”) and Brad Sullivan (“Slap Shot”) give it their all.
The romantic leads are cute enough, with Jean Louisa Kelly (as Luisa) having a fine voice, and McIntyre never less than an adequate one.
But the movie, bathed in period piece Americana and a goofy plot about two “feuding” fathers (Grey and Sullivan) staging that feud to lure their kids (Kelly and McIntyre) into falling in love, a scheme assisted (at a price) by El Gallo and the Congress players, just lies there.
A few passably forgettable songs and one enduring classic (“Try to Remember”) later, it’s over and fans of the play puzzle over “What just didn’t happen here?”
My first thought was that Ritchie, a set-the-camera-up-and-let-the-actors-do-it filmmaker, was just wrong for this decades-delayed project. Somebody with a more fanciful take, a Julie Taymor/Terry Gilliam of some sort, would have razzle-dazzled it up, or at least given us more of that early “magic” of a traveling tent show.
Hughes, teamed with the silent magician-comic Teller, serves up a little of that “Old Actor” Shakespearean excess, and Morris cuts loose in the few scenes where that’s called for.
Grey and Sullivan vamp through their frenemies duet, but most of their scenes play flat. The intimate musical’s energy and heart is lost when it is “opened up” and exposed to the elements.
That seems to be the crux of the problem. You can’t open up something this delicate, dainty and dated for the screen. The reasons it took so very long to become a movie and such a malnourished one at that was that generations of film folk with adaptation expertise recognized “The Fantastiks” as slight, a gossamer musical that would die outside the theater. No amount of cash can compensate for that, although a more charismatic cast might have helped.
It is what it has long seemed on the stage, “quaint.” And quaint doesn’t translate to the screen.
MPAA Rating: PG for some bawdy carnival humor
Cast: Jean Louisa Kelly, Joe McIntyre, Jonathan Morris, Teller, Brad Sullivan, Barnard Hughes and Joel Grey
Credits: Directed by Michael Ritchie, script by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt, adapted from their stage musical. An MGM release on Amazon, Tubi etc.
Running time: 1:26
“Lingua Franca” is a subtle and sensual story of two very different people struggling with secrets, trying to find common ground or even a common language to talk about what’s happening to them and between them.
Filipina-American writer-director Isabel Sandoval (“Apparition,” not the horror film) didn’t just find the perfect title for this New York story. She’s written and starred in a story ripped straight from the zeitgeist, about people soldiering through problems, looking for solutions and connections, seeking love and keeping secrets. And if it’s not wholly satisfying, at least their story human in its, and their, shortcomings.
Olivia (Sandoval) is an in-home caregiver to an elderly Russian-American (Lynn Cohen) in Brighton Beach. Olga is having forgetful spells and difficult moments, but Olivia, an Filipina immigrant whose visa has expired, treats her with calm and compassion.
Olivia supports family back home, but has to spend a big chunk of her money saving to pay off Matthew. The only permanent solution to her dilemma, which she is bombarded with in constant “Trump/immigrants/ICE” news updates, is marriage, like others in her plight. Matthew has agreed to marry her for her Green Card. Until he changes his mind.
That’s just the moment Olga’s grandson Alex (Eamon Farren) comes back to town. He’s been working on “a farm” somewhere in the Midwest. His uncle hooks him up with a job at an abattoir, a slaughterhouse/meat wholesaler. He reconnects with the family and with old friends. But his reluctance to drink suggests he wants to avoid old habits.
He moves in to grandma’s house with the idea that he’s going to take up some of the slack there.
Alex and Olivia move from him learning Olga’s routine — “The schedule is there to help you, not control you” — to something closer. He takes an interest in her culture as he helps her run errands to the Ditmas Park Filipino neighborhood. He asks about her language — Tagalog.
But as they connect, each keeps things from the other. They share intimacy and find their “lingua franca.” It’s what they don’t say that’s going to be an obstacle.
Sandoval goes for a subtle, words-unspoken thing here that is only obvious when she punches a point home with the obvious. Olivia doesn’t want just a paid-off marriage of convenience. She wants love, romance and sex.
Putting “Lady Chatterly’s Lover” on her dresser gets that across. But heck, let’s whip out the vibrator to underscore that point.
The chemistry in the relationship isn’t perfect. She talks a lot more than him, and her big problem dominates that conversation. There’s a disparity between their secrets, at least in conventional terms. Each is the stuff of “deal breakers,” but one is downright mundane and the other as current as the cultural dustup over pronouns.
Sandoval is an understated actress, and the director in her lets the simple framing of Olivia alone in a crowded, bustling and sometimes dangerous city get across her isolation and her brave stoicism.
Farren, of “Winchester” and the “Twin Peaks” revival, doesn’t give us much in the way of Alex’s attraction, confusion, neediness and anger. The fact that the guy is stuck working at a slaughterhouse, and accepts that, tells us that he’s bottling up something — a lot of somethings.
I didn’t wholly buy into them or “him” in “Lingua Franca.” There’s too much left out for that sale to be made.
But Sandoval has made a film with cultural currency and the rich texture of a New York setting for a story as immediate as today’s headlines, and just as sad.
MPAA Rating: unrated, sex, nudity, alcohol abuse
Cast: Isabel Sandoval, Eamon Farren, Lynn Cohen and Ivory Aquino
Credits: Written and directed by Isabel Sandoval. An Array release.
Running time: 1:29
Movie Nation 