Paul Reubens, aka Pee Wee Herman, tells his story from beyond the grave in this two-part documentary, finished after his death/
Reubens jokes, stares death in the face, recalls the “drugs” etc. Does he share the glory of creation with Phil Hartman, who helped him invent the character, his “playhouse” and PeeWeeVerse? That’s what I’m curious about.
May 23 on HBO Max, does Pee Wee turn magnanimous? Post mortem? HBO is giving him three and a half hours of screentime to say his goodbyes and all.
This indie about a theatrical stage manager who has to school cast and crew about Gay Abe as they disrepect that stage manager’s pronouns during the run of a Lincoln bio-play.
“Lavender Men” makes an interesting follow-up to last fall’s doc “Lover of Men,” which took a shot at making the scholarly case for The Original Log Cabin Republican’s on-the-spectrum sexuality.
May 2, we get a theatrical, fictional riff on what that might mean to someone embracing this history today.
Hollywood won the race to get a drama about the Allied invasion of North Africa into theaters largely due to luck. Warner Brothers bought the rights to an unproduced play written in 1940 that just happened to be set in a bar in a city that would make headlines when American, British and Free French troops stormed ashore in Algeria, Oran and Morocco in early Nov. of 1942.
“Casablanca,” as it was titled, had its premiere moved up to November 26, 1942 to take advantage of the triumphant war news headlines, and came to be regarded as one of the greatest films ever made, certainly the high water of Hollywood’s studio system.
But the Brits, who’d been fighting in North Africa since the summer of 1940, were not to be left out.
“Candlelight in Algieria” may not have had the punchy title “Casablanca.” But it’s got a rogueish romantic hero, played by James Mason, on his way to becoming Britain’s biggest box office star. He’s paired-up with plucky Canadian actress Clara Lehmann , playing a not-so-neutral “American” caught up in intrigues. It’s got espionage, shooting, a car chase, Vichy “patriots” under the thumb of urbane, ruthless Nazis, a fancy night club where love songs are sung in French and you’d never know there was a war on, thanks to the way the French, German and other Europeon swells there dress.
And it’s got a place for a spy on the lam to lay low, “the Casbah, home to vice, lair to criminals and the hideout of every thief and murderer in Algiers!”
“Candlelight” is a rakish, flippant thriller about a spy enlisting an American sculptress into stealing a camera with a photo of a map that gives away the location to a meeting between French, American and British military men.
It was inspired by a real event in WWII lore, the “lonely house” meeting of Allied and Vichy officers that fixed the landing points in Morocco for the invasion of North Africa.
Lehmann plays a “not interested in politics” Kansas artist who wakes up in an Algerian hospital just as the victory parades are wrapping up (documentary footage) in 1943. She tells a nurse nun her story about her role in the victory just achieved.
A supposed escape POW pilot (Mason) tries to burgle the Biskra house where Susan Ann Foster is staying. She gets the drop on him, so he tells her this fantastic story.
Mistrust or not, soon Alan Thurston has entangled Susan in his scheme to nab this camera from the actress (Enid Stamp-Taylor) where the ladies’ man “operative” stashed it. As that actress has the romantic attentions of a German officer (Raymond Lovell) and the camera is being pursued by the sinister German intelligence agent and Armistice Commission enforcer Dr. Muller (Walter Rilla), this is going to be tricky.
But a few feminine wiles and clumsy plot contrivances later and Susan has the camera and is on the hunt for Thurston, questioning women like the fetching waitress Yvette (Pamela Stirling) because, as she soon figures out, our proto-James Bond is a ladies’ ‘man.
Through it all, the takes are high even if the romantic banter between “Kansas” and “Mister Stiff Upper Lip” or “Old School Tie” never lets us fear for their safety.
Lehmann isn’t the most convincing “American,” thanks to a script that has the Kansas gal refer to “Britishers” and use entirely too many Britishisms to “pass.” But Lehmann embodies the cliched “American pluck” the Brits were so sold on, a smart alec who never tires to telling this fake “escaped” POW to lose his facial hair.
“The only job a man can do that a woman can’t is grow a mustache, like that one!”
Mason makes a dashing rogue of a leading man, a status he’d only recently attained. Lehmann has more scenes and more agency in the plot, making our brave hero something of a delegator when it comes to dangerous spywork.
But the dialogue, juiced up by actor and sometime writer John Clements crackles.
“Do you know, I think I believe you?”
“That’s decent of you.”
Shot on soundstages (save for the car chase) in wartime Britain, “Candlelight” is more impressive as “Casablanca” in its gritty look, and dusty lived-in desert town feel, making art director Norman G. Arnold one of the true stars of this black and white classic.
No, it’s not “Casablanca.” The romance is perfunctory, as is the way the script disposes of Thurston’s other paramours. The nightclub is limited to one scene and the songs heard never became iconic. There’s more suspense, a little more action. But the cast is a little thin on big name character actor support — Lovell’s amusingly inept German, Leslie Bradley’s swooning-over-Susan French officer barely suffice.
That doesn’t mean this barely historical lark isn’t fun. Making a light action thriller in the middle of a world war was no mean feat. And in its way, the Brit film endures, unburdened by the label “masterpiece” and playing more lightly than some other classic of the era we can think of “as time goes by.”
Rating: “approved,” violence
Cast: Carla Lehman, James Mason, Walter Rilla, Pamela Stirling, Enid Stamp-Taylor, Leslie Bradley and Raymond Lovell.
Credits: Directed by George King, scripted by Brock Clements, Katherine Strueby and John Clements. A British Lion/20th Century Fox release on Tubi, other streamers
Running time: 1:26
An ever-so-British dinner party goes ever-so-wrong in ever so many British ways in “The Trouble with Jessica,” a dark but twee comedy of manners.
The “dark” comes from the suicide of a narcissistic, newly-published author who crashes a gathering of old friends to flirt with the married men, insult the women and kill herself as her final act as a troubled and trouble-making attention whore.
And the “twee” spins out of the event itself, friends-since-college who gather for dinner and the host’s famed “clafoutis,” and reactions of the guests — to Jessica’s presence, to Jessica’s ill-mannered man-hunting and to Jessica’s body when she hangs herself in the garden. Those reactions range from shock and grief to self-serving to self-pitying as it seems Jessica has thrown a spanner in the works of a pending and much-needed sale of the posh semi-detached town home where all this takes place.
It’s all feather light and fussy and dash-it-all droll.
Alan Tudyck (“Tucker and Dale vs. Evil,” “Death at a Funeral”) is architect Tom, who preps the meal with wife Sarah (Shirley Henderson of “Greed” and “Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day”) as audience and sounding board.
They’re having over their oldest friends for one last dinner, finished off with clafoutis, before they sell this lovely, roomy, tony neighborhood/high-priced home.
They met domestic violence counselor Beth — Olivia Williams, “The Father” and Camilla in “The Crown” — and barrister Richard (Rufus Sewell, now in Netflix’s “The Diplomat”) in university.
That’s also where they all met Jessica (Indira Varma of “Rome,””Game of Thrones”), the uninvited guest who tags along with Beth and Richard, much to Sarah’s chagrin. The vaping ex-newspaper columnist Jessica may be enjoying great success, thanks to a sexy memoir just published. But to Sarah, she’s a “narcissicist” who’s “led this life of zero responsibility.” And she always comes-on to Sarah’s husband Tom.
The night will start out testy and go downhill from there, with unfiltered Jessica getting under everyone’s skin, especially Sarah’s, as she holds true to form — flirting with Tom, insulting everybody else by labeling them.
“Charming amoralist” Richard,” “po-faced do-gooder” Beth, “pathological dreamer” Tom and “grown up” Sarah will tolerate only so much from the self-described “f–k-up” Jessica before tempers flare.
And when they do, Jessica skips out to kill herself.
The reactions to this “dilemma” are panicked and exasperated. Only Beth really seems to grieve as the remaining members of the quartet debate the merits of “We’d better call someone” and only Sarah is angry enough at Jessica to consider what this will do to their urgent impending high-value home sale.
The rich “new buyers” (Amber Rose Revah and Sylvester Groth) show up and must be kept in the dark, as will the cops and the fangirl neighbor. The comedy comes from those interlopers and the increasingly edge-of-manic responses by our reserved and out of their depth foursome as they face this “tragedy of the North London elite.”
It’s all utterly predictable, of course — the “What will we do with the body?” debates, obligations and blackmail considerations trotted out, flashbacks to who Jessica was.
First time feature director and co-writer (with James Handel) Matt Winn cast this dinner party with care and leans into the movie’s simple, claustrophobic theatrical structure and assorted twee running gags to make this work.
The repeated phrase “Who DOES that?” applies to killing oneself at a friend’s dinner party, demanding to see a house you’re buying in the middle of the night, etc. The film is divided into cutesie “chapters” including “The Trouble with Neighbors,” “The Trouble with Friends” and “The Trouble with Rich People.”
And nobody involved is neutral on the subject of that overdue dessert, the claofoutis.
As cute and predictable as this all is, the cast hurls itself at this slight farce and makes it play. Tudyck and Henderson, better known as in-demand voice actors these days, are crisply credible as a long-married couple. And Williams and Sewell bring real fire to their fighting each other and Sarah over “the right thing to do” vs. the expedient thing.
Faced with “losing everything,” flipping out and flying into a fury is but one option. The harder one is asking “What kind of people ARE we?” and “Who DOES that?”
Rating: unrated, suicide, profanity
Cast: Shirley Henderson, Rufus Sewell, Olivia Williams, Indira Varma and Alan Tudyck
Credits: Directed by Matt Winn, scripted by James Handel and Matt Winn. A Music Box release.
Running time: 1:29
“The Dad Quest,” titled “Los Mejor del Mundo” (“The Best in the World”) in Spanish, is a Mexican remake of an Argentinian made-for-Netflix melodrama. That was titled “Hoy se arregla el mundo” (“Today We Fix the World”) and was sentimental and sweet and perfectly watchable, if a tad on the long side.
The two films’ shared story is about a distracted, loner reality TV producer who learns that the kid he’s been supporting for ten years, a Dad who’s “barely” there for the boy, isn’t his son. The dad finds out he’s not the father from the mother just before she dies in an accident.
So there’s nothing for it but for not-his-real-father to help the lad track down the real father via Mom’s phone contacts and text messages, the more suggestive the better.
The big difference between the films is the Mexican remake is played as more of a straight-up comedy, with a scatttering of big names in the cast. Director Salvador Espinosa may not have the most inviting resume (“You’ve Got This” was his). But he at least knows that comedy is supposed to be quick.
Argentine hunk Michel Brown, just seen in “With You in the Future,” is Gallo, producer of reality TV’s “Los Mejor del Mundo,” a shameless reality TV/studio audience chat show that features scandalous behavior, hypnotists and the like.
He’s on decent terms with his ex, Alicia (Fernanda Castillo) even though he’s married to his career, distracted by a big pitch he’s making to TV moguls in Miami. He can’t be bothered to help their son Benito (Martino Leonardi) with homework or personal life issues, or to indulge the kid’s desire for pizza when Gallo prefers sushi and nothing but.
The shocking news that he isn’t Beni’s father comes just as Alicia is fleeing a restaurant where they were meeting. She is promptly hit and killed by a car.
Gallo waits until after the funeral, at least, to break the news to the kid. He warns the boy that “This will hurt,” which it plainly does as he blurts it out.
The boy’s “That didn’t hurt. You’ve never been a father to me (in Spanish, or dubbed into English)” hurts more.
That guilts Gallo into agreeing to help when the child asks for help finding “my real Dad.”
Some of the candidates are funnier — Arath de la Torre plays an artist who used Alicia as a model — than others.
Alicia’s no-nonsense friend Diana (Mayra Hermosillo), who tutors Beni, joins the quest and gives it a nice comic kick. Brown makes a nice reactor to the assorted dad-candidates they meet.
If you’ve seen “Today We Fix the World” you know what works here, the sentimental stuff about a man learning the void he’s got in his life might be filled by taking more interest in the boy he’s raised as his son.
I think the remake hits the comic highlights harder. But if you’ve seen “Fix the World,” there’s no reason to bother with “Dad Quest.” If you haven’t seen the original film, “Quest” is at least a decently acted, occasionally amusing and somewhat quick “summary” of the superior film it’s based on.
Rating: TV-14, suggestive subject matter, mild profanity
Cast: Michel Brown, Martino Leonardi, Mayra Hermosillo, Fernanda Castillo,
Arath de la Torre and Erik Rubín as himself.
Credits: Directed by Salvador Espinosa, scripted by Tato Alexander, based on the script to “Today We Fix the World” by Mariano Vera. A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:24
Hamish Linklater and Stephen Lang also star in this story of a child’s death, a father’s deranged response and a Senator’s son who winds up caught in the crosshairs.
Thanks to distributor Well Go USA we find out what really happened in “Barron’s Cove” on June 6.
Evan Jonigkeit has the title role, and Chris Bauer is in the supporting cast of this May 9 release.
Mamet has stepped into throughout his career, but his recent outspoken turns of phrase and thinking probably explain why this 2:25 feature film is being self-distributed.
I loved “Heist” like most everybody else, and “Spartan” more than most. He’s still a major figure in American theater. But at some point, you keep burning your bridges and you end up seeing Shia LaBeouf as your last ticket home. And then you have to distribute your movie yourself.
Almost all science fiction is in the business of world-building, creating a landscape, setting, period in time or even “universe” where the story takes place. Dystopias engage in world-destroying.
The Polish thriller “The Last Spark of Hope” manages to serve up an arresting, bleak and bitter setting for The End, and do it on a tiny budget — production design exquisitely manages to do more with less.
Throw in a very clever conceit — the limitations of Asimov’s “Laws of Robotics” and the trap of password-protected AI that can’t “prove that you’re not a robot” — and you’ve got the makings for a tight and downbeat “Twilight Zone” episode, or a drawn-out and just as downbeat feature film.
It’s a minimalist post-apocalyptic tale of life after Life on Earth has been canceled. The planet has been so polluted, disease-ridden, pillaged and climate-changed that the fat cats fled it in rockets and the list of those left behind survivors may be down to just this lone 20something in the middle of Poland.
“We were like the Titanic,” Eva narrates (dubbed into English). “Only we knew we were headed towards an iceberg…but nobody wanted to slow down.”
Her army commander father left Eva (Magdalena Wieczorek) on a mountain top, above the “contaminated zone” symbolized by the nuclear power plant in the valley below. It’s still functioning, even though there might be nobody around to use the electricity or pay the bill.
Eva reaches out via radio to “anyone” who might be out there, broadcasting the same thing she spray paints on buildings in the abandoned plant and town nearby — her GPS coordinates — “50 degrees, 8 minutes north, 18 degrees, 51 minutes east.” So far, nobody has made contact.
During The Climate War, Eva’s dad left her with an armed guardian robot named Arthur, who was designed and used as a deadly border defender against climate refugees. Arthur has his limits but can be engaged in wordplay puzzles. Eva jokes with it, even offers to “marry” Arthur, but to no avail.
“Don’t sweat it, Arthur.”
“Robots do not sweat.”
Eva’s solitary existence has her sleeping and working on a “base” consisting of shipping containers, with occasional gas-masked foraging in the nearby town, versions of which we’ve seen in decades of post-apocalyptic thrillers, from “The Omega Man” to “Zombieland” and beyond.
The twist here is the day Eva forgets there’s been a password change at base. Arthur politely demands a password when she returns. She doesn’t have it. He was placed here to protect Eva, but if she can’t give the password, she can’t return to base where safety, food, water and oxygen generators that allow her to tank up when she enters The Contamination Zone for more food are kept.
She can’t survive without that password, or without finding some way around the robot who demands it.
Writer-director Piotr Biedron’s feature filmmaking debut has Eva try compassion, logic and subterfuge to get past this password restriction. His script and his direction of it lacks urgency some of the time, and he could have used “The Martian” as his template for maintaining that and getting creative in Eva’s “work the problem” dilemma.
But the austere production design is so arid it’ll leave your mouth dry. My benchmark for dystopias that show us the ugliest future possible on a budget is 1990’s “Hardware,” and “The Last Spark of Hope” matches that in look and tone.
Wierczorek’s forlorn performance is augmented by an mournful electronic Lukasz Pieprzyk musical score that fits the mood perfectly. And Biedron announces himself as a movie-maker to watch with a solid sci-fi parable that measures up to “good” even if it doesn’t come close to “great.”
Rating: R, violence, profanity
Cast: Magdalena Wieczorek
Credits: Scripted and directed by Piotr Biedron. A Saban Films release.
Running time: 1:29
When it comes to action pictures, there’s “So bad that it’s good” and whatever the hell “G20” amounts to. So bad that it’s not godawful?
The idea of Oscar winner Viola Davis, aka “The Woman King,” as a two-fisted, combat vet “badass” president who can handle firearms and choke out a bad guy or snap the sumbitch’s neck isn’t far-fetched.
Sure, we’ve seen all those “Olympus has Fallen” movies and bought into Harrison Ford barking “Get OFF my plane!” in “Air Force One.”
But “G20” lurches between absurd and silly as a terrible, four-writer script ticks off pandering checkboxes even as it hits on a few scary truisms about life and politics in 2025.
Corrupted and treasonouns Secret Service agents in on a conspiracy? OK. Crypto-creeps ponzi scheming the global economy? Never saw that coming. Sexist Brits and brave, reliable South Koreans heads of state? There’s no stretch there.
Director Patricia Riggen earned her big break with “Under the Same Moon,” graduated to bigger budgeet fare with “The 33” and cut her teeth on action with “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan.” Here, she directs traffic, ensures the brawls have their payoffs and tries to maintain her dignity between one contrived twist, character revelation and bloody one-on-one throwdown after another.
Davis plays new President Danielle Sutton, someone who rode a famously photographed bit of Fallujah heroism into politics and the White House, about to face her first big G20 summit.
It’ll be held in a resort in South Africa, where she’ll make her pitch for a save-sub-Saharan Africa from starvation via financing from the world’s richest economies.
But she’s got this rebellious teen daughter (Marsai Martin) who keeps outsmarting her Secret Service detail, and whatever cajoling she’ll have to do with allies (Douglas Hodge plays the PM of the UK) and international rivals, keeping that 17 year-old under control will be a distraction for her, her First Man (Anthony Anderson) and the hostile press.
There’s something afoot in the security for this high-profile summit. Private contractors have been hired, and a murderous prologue showed us the head of the Pax Security operation (New Zealander Anthony Starr of “The Boys” and “Guy Ritchie’s The Covenent”) killing somebody over a huge crypto-currency transaction.
Are you ready for a planet-shaking international incident, an “inside job” involving the highest profile hostages, crypto and a murderous, technologically omnipotent mob of mercenaries?
Wife, mother and “badass” President Sutton will have to run, hide, shoot and fight her way through this gang of roided up crypto bro commandos to save herself, her fellow leaders, the world’s economy and save face with that impossible but cunning teenage daughter Serena, who gripes that “All you ever try to do is make yourself look good!”
The bad guys play AI “deep fake” games in twisting the words of the world leaders while Sutton and her trusty Secret Service bodyguard and trainer (Ramón Rodríguez) kicj, punch, stab, shoot and choke their way through a multinational mob of mercenaries.
“You get around, DON’T you girl?” the smirking Aussie Rutledge (Starr) cracks on the walkie talkies after Sutton has plunged into a body count that greatly changes the odds.
“I’ll get around to you, too,” says the tough broad POTUS.
Whatever nonsense the narrative serves up involving laundry shoots, an impossibly tech savvy teen and the like, the movie isn’t served by the lack of dramatic weight on the bad guy side. Hitchcock preached “Good villains make good thrillers,” but Starr is no Gary Oldman (“Air Force One”), or even a Rick Yune (“Olympus has Fallen”). He’s more of a Jason Clarke (“White House Down”) or Tim Black Nelson (“Angel has Fallen”).
That points to where the cash WASN’T spent on this actioner. Rodriguez (TV’s “Will Trent”) and Anderson and Clark Gregg (as the barely present vice president) are the other “names” in the cast. Perhaps Amazon/MGM never intended “G20” as a theatrical release, because that crew, surrounded by never lesser-knowns, screams “TV movie.”
But Davis delivers, the fights are visceral and even if the bigger “stunts” are laugh-out-loud riduculous, even if the four screenwriters deserved a WGA paddling over much of their scripted “problem solving” (A laundry shoot? Go figure.), “G20” isn’t bad to the point of awful even if it isn’t so bad it’s “good.”
Rating: R, bloody violence
Cast: Viola Davis, Anthony Starr, Marsai Martin, Ramón Rodríguez,
Sabrina Impacciatore, Douglas Hodge, Elizabeth Marvel, MeeWha Alana Lee, Clark Gregg and Anthony Anderson.
Credits: Directed by Patricia Riggen, scripted by Caitlin Parrish, Erica Weiss, Logan Miller and Noah Miller. An MGM release on Amazon Prime.
Running time: 1:51
Movie Nation 