Movie Nation

“The Sower” is a French parable (“Le semeur”) with hints of “The Beguiled” about it, with more romantic and less morbid intentions. A couple of compelling leads and an intriguing source of dramatic conflict help it come off.

Soldiers on horseback thunder into an Alpine village and round up every man in the place. The shouts of the men and the screams of the women fall on deaf ears.

“It’s a ‘state of emergency,’ madame,” the officer declares (in French with English subtitles). “We can do what we please.”

The women must band together to keep themselves alive– planting and harvesting, tending livestock, repairing buildings. A leaky roof in the granary could mean starvation, so they rally to patch it in a driving rain.

They manage. But in Marine Francen’s vivid period piece (based on Violette Ailhaud’s novel), this beautiful pastoral setting quickly feels like a trap to the younger women caught there.

The primitive isolation of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1851 France, the repression that followed his coup, means they have no idea what is going on or whether their menfolk will ever return. Those younger women, left without their beloveds or without ever having a beloved, have needs.

The older women, led by midwife/matriarch Blanche (Françoise Lebrun of “Julie & Julia” and “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly”) fret over their daughters’ plight. The younger ones, such as Rose (Iliana Zabeth) and the virginal Violette (Pauline Burlet , the young Edith Piaf in “La Vie en Rose”), get down to brass tacks.

They speculate. Might there be men in the valley below? Is every man in France dead or deported? What happens if, say, a peddler or journeyman farm worker passes through? They will have to “share” and share alike, they decide.

Violette dreams of a hunk “like Adam in the Garden (of Eden),” young, with “buttocks round like apples.” They’re all having such “dreams.” But wouldn’t you know it, that’s not exactly who shows up.

Enter the handsome traveling blacksmith. The entire village is so shocked, some to the point of alarmed — “We get by, we are armed” one blurts out at his suspicious questions — that they don’t tell him their men have gone and forget to interrogate him.

It’s the kids who do that. His name is Jean (Alban Lenoir of “Taken”), he’s 39. And he only has eyes for Violette. That can only mean trouble.

The grim gravitas of that mass arrest opening hangs over “The Sower,” anchoring it in the realm of tragic romance from the start. There’s romance, but none of this randy romping with a piper to pay later that “The Beguiled” delivered. In tone, think Terrence Malick’s “The Hidden Life,” or going back further, “The Horseman on the Roof.”

Jean has a backstory. Violette is naive, but her peers, and the older women — especially her mother (Géraldine Pailhas) — order her to cozy up to Jean. They have a shared love of books in common. Will she fall for him? Will she keep the pact the others bound her to?

Francen has made a film that revels in the gorgeous pastoral detail and the sheer loveliness of the leads, which compensates for a story (many hands adapted the novel) that lacks that heart-tugging oomph that carries good screen romances.

“The Sower,” now streaming on Film Movement+, Apple TV and elsewhere, still makes a diverting and picturesque romance that will have you dreaming of a French vacation and the lovely sights — human and otherwise — to be seen there.

MPAA Rating: unrated, sexual situations and nudity

Cast: Pauline Burlet, Géraldine Pailhas, Alban Lenoir, Iliana Zabeth and Françoise Lebrun

Credits: Directed by Marine Francen, script by Marine Francen, Jacqueline Surchat and Jacques Fieschi, based on a novel by Violette Ailhaud. A Film Movement release.

Running time: 1:38

If you’ve ever pondered what the label “Southern Gothic” means in cinematic terms, “Blood on Her Name” is the very epitome of the genre.

From its evocative title to the working poor milieu of family loyalty, trailer parks, garages, roadhouses, crime and grinding “just getting by” Southern lives, it’s Gothic in a nutshell, first scene to last.

That opener, in the screenplay by Don M. Thompson and director and co-writer Matthew Pope, drops us right smack in the middle of it all.

A battered woman (Bethany Anne Lind) stands, gasping, over a body that’s bleeding out at her feet. He’s a goner. The size of the crescent blooded wrench confirms that.

And Leigh is gulping air and grasping at what to do next. Grabbing the plastic sheeting tells us she has some notion of what to do with the body.

“Blood on Her Name” is about what she considers, the steps she takes to cover her tracks and what she DOESN’T end up doing with the man she killed in the family car repair shop.

Leigh wears this life-and-death experience in the cuts on her face. And with the complicated life she leads, that’s a problem.

Explain it to her son Ryan’s (Jared Ivers) no-nonsense probation officer (Tony Vaughn). He doesn’t want to hear her “good kid” protests.

“I’ve been doin’ this a long time, Miz Tiller. ‘Good kids’ don’t end up here.”

Come up with something to tell her mechanic (Jimmy Gonzales).

Explain it away to her high-mileage sheriff’s deputy Dad (the wonderful Will Paxton).

“Livin’ with something like this is a son-of-a-bitch. But it’s livin’.”

And let her face be her prescription for her pill-peddling drug dealer.

“How much should I take?”

“How much trouble d’you want to get off your back?”

The dialogue is hard-bitten. The characters are worn down by worry, risk and bad choices. And the new bad choices take on baggage and a “code” that Gothic titans like Faulkner and Dickey and Flannery O. and ol’Tennessee Williams would recognize.

Kin and “closure” matter. Doing the minimal “decent” thing after doing the wrong thing is the least you can manage.

“Jesus kid, I’ve seen priests less hung up on old sins.”

Lind, of Hulu’s “Reprisal,” makes a gritty anti-heroine, somebody who has been through all the rough stuff this small town has to offer. Her ex is in prison, her Dad’s a cop, she runs a garage. Grabbing a grope at the honky-tonk is not advised.

Paxton is so on-the-nose as her redneck deputy dad that you can hear him and picture him without even seeing the movie.

And earthy Elisabeth Röhm, recently seen in “Bombshell,” makes a formidable good ol’gal whose man was the one Leigh “got dead.”

It’s not “Blood Simple” or “Cape Fear,” but “Blood on Her Name” makes a short, blunt and brutal addition to the Southern Gothic canon, a tasty and testy short story that spits out great lines and spills a lot of blood before all is said and done.

This is “Southern Gothic” that lives up to its name.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, profanity

Cast: Bethany Anne Lind, Will Paxton, Elisabeth Röhm, Jared Ivers, Jimmy Gonzales.

Credits: Directed by Matthew Pope, script by Don M. Thompson and Matthew Pope. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:23

A little Munchausen by Proxy horror for Mother’s Day?

A24 has quickly developed a “house style.” Disparate filmmakers, differing subject matter, but man — look at a trailer and in a heartbeat you can tell this studio was behind it.

Dev Patel is the ruler who must face his greatest fear, “The Green Knight.”

Alicia Vikander and Joel Edgerton also star in this May 20 release, from the director of “A Ghost Story,” “The Old Man and the Gun,” “Ain’t them Bodies Saints” and, um, “Pete’s Dragon.”

Here’s the tally from Exhibitor Relations.

1. SONIC THE HEDGEHOG ($26M)
2. THE CALL OF THE WILD ($24M)
3. BIRDS OF PREY ($7M)
4. BRAHMS: BOY II ($5.9M)
5. BAD BOYS FOR LIFE ($5.8M)

“Emma” made staggering money on just five screens, “Impractical Jokers” did well for a junk prank “reality TV” movie on 350 or so screens. In the millions.

“Bad Boys” cleared the $200 million mark in North America.

In conspiracy buff terms, the 1960s were the “Rush to Judgment”decade.

Major figures in American political life were assassinated, and the FBI, the courts, the Warren Commission and local criminal justice systems seemed awfully anxious to wrap their cases up, nice and neat, and convince the American public that there was “nothing to see here.”

The Feb. 1965 assassination of Black Muslim civil rights leader Malcolm X, in a public speaking event with hundreds of witnesses, is the one murder that screams “COVER-UP” the loudest.

But half a century has passed. And while there have been revelations and moments where you’d think we’d demand more details, more damning “Who pulled the strings of those who pulled the triggers?” investigations, nothing has come of it.

But a lone Washington D.C. Muslim, whose day job is tour guide at Arlington National Cemetery, has made it his obsession and his life’s work to get at the truth. Abdur-Rahman Muhammad was drawn to Malcolm’s persona and his religion as a young man. And having ties to the African American Islamic community and the Nation of Islam has allowed him to open doors and get answers where others might not be so much as heard out.

But “Who Killed Malcolm X?” shows us how those questions haven’t been asked before because the police didn’t know or want to know. It points to the wrong men being railroaded into prison for the crime. And it levels its gaze at those who almost certainly were responsible, and the reasons they were able to avoid justice back in 1965.

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Garrow is here to attest to the bonafides of Muhammad as the world’s foremost Malcolm X murder expert, to verify Muhammad’s assertion that “the police did not take that seriously” either the threats to Malcolm’s life that week of his death, or the investigation afterward.

Other historians, experts on the movement and actual members of the Nation of Islam and alumni of its paramilitary arm, “Fruit of Islam,” either fume at police unwillingness to get to the truth, or more damningly, urge Muhammad to “Leave him alone, leave him alone” as he gets close to a long-hidden trigger-man.

The prosecutor, Herbert Stern, turns intimidating and testy with a filmmaker when asked why this witness, that cop informant, wasn’t questioned or why when the one man caught red-handed as he fled New York’s Audubon Ballroom insisted that the other two brought to trial for the crime and convicted were innocent, that he wasn’t listened to.

The surviving convicted killer, noting the strong Nation of Islam presence in his prison, allows that the inmates there let him live for a reason.

“If they’d thought I was guilty, I’d have been dead.”

The six part Netflix series takes a lot of tricks from teasing news magazine storytelling and reality TV’s pursuit of “cliffhangers,” which make one question just how close they came to interviewing this key figure or when exactly this major political name’s association with one of the accused is known.

But that drag-the-mystery-out (very “Dateline N.B.C.”) element allows for a lot of terrific historical background — Malcolm’s life, the career of Nation of Islam “Messenger” Elijah Muhammad, whom Malcolm broke with, and the context of that pre-CSI era in criminal detection.

We take trips to the NYPD archives to view color crime scene photos, and sample the incriminating collection of on-the-day TV news film, hunting for clues.

A clip that seared into my mind — Malcolm’s widow Betty Shabazz, who’d survived a firebombing at their house a week before and who has just seen her husband gunned down, glowering at questions from a white TV reporter.

The conspiracy theories erupted the moment the smoke cleared in that ballroom — police involvement, a white establishment (including the media) that didn’t want to know “the truth,” the Nation of Islam hastily circling the wagons to protect the real killers.

In this case, the conspiracy-minded were onto something, which Abdur-Rahman Muhammad is very close to completely unraveling in this series.

As retired cop Tony Bouza puts it at one point, “If you got the shooter, you better get the guy who sent him.”

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, scenes of violence

Cast: Abdur-Rahman Muhammad, Akbar Muhammad,Muhammad A. Aziz, David Garrow, Tony Bouza

Credits: Directed by Phil Bertelsen, Rachel Dretzin A Netflix Original

Running time: 6 episodes @:42 each

“Over the Rainbow” is a mesmerizing, diffuse and scattered movie about odd beliefs, deeply-held convictions and Scientology.

It’s kind of a mess as it starts out more about the first two — specifically how people who believe they’ve been abducted by aliens REALLY believe it, and show clinical responses to this “experience” that match victims of rape and other violent trauma — and then backs into the third.

A genuine Harvard psychologist, Dr. Susan Clancy marvels how people talk about alleged alien abduction as both the trauma of their lives, and as the most “positive” thing that they’ve ever experienced.

“Their perspective changes.”

Then the movie settles into Scientology, speaking to true believers, church employees and one woman in particular who fled and whose awful experience there is verified when we overhear a threatening, double-talk phone call from her DEEP-in-the-cult Dad that she puts on speaker phone so that she can be filmed in mid-argument with him.

But even then, filmmaker Jeffrey Peixoto wanders off topic, if indeed he ever had one. Academics speak of “new” religions in what appears to be an effort to normalize the science fiction author L. Ron Hubbard’s invented belief system, church status and authoritarian church hierarchy. All “new” religions are easily questioned, but “when you’re in it, it becomes your reality.”

True believers say “LRH would create an island of sanity” in an unhappy, confused world. He “came here to reverse the downward spiral” of humanity.

He came here to get rich and get out of paying taxes, kids. But never mind.

There are the Thomas Kincade “painting” sellers who demonstrate E-Meter “audits,” the pseudo-scientific gadget that records your unfiltered responses to probing questions about morality, ethics and your past lives. If Peixoto aims to show how gullible and “sentimental” Scientologists are, that they think this overtly “sentimental” tripe is art, well-played.

We visit The Ranch School and the New Horizons Academy where teachers talk of the goals such places have and where they fit in Scientology’s lifelong learning (with that “billion year contract” you sign with the church) promoted there.

And Lara Anderson, the woman who left, recounts the abuse she suffered, the “punishment” meted out to her father — for years — in the church’s “rehabilitation project.” Did Peixoto stumble into her, mid-project, and not have the nerve to make his movie about her and lose all the “abduction” stuff that opens it?

An archivist is inexplicably here, showing us the U.C. Santa Barbara American religious documents archive.

Peixoto fixates on odd images — this homemade Boston terrier painting on a table next to Barrett Brown, a journalist who simply considers a pioneering “technology driven religion,” and that “If the Ganges is appropriate for worship” then the river of information that is the Internet is, as well.

And we get just a glimpse of Clearwater, Florida, the Gulf Coast town the church basically bought out and took over, where Scientologists are kept so busy that they can’t even entertain the idea of going to the beach.

There are much better, more pointed and damning documentaries about Scientology, and no doubt there are church-sponsored “explainers” that trumpet its virtues.

Peixota has made a spacey film that is almost neutral on its subject, a soft-spoken pastel-colored meditation on Scientology that never wrestles it into the larger thesis of the psychology of “belief” he might have been aiming for.

MPAA Rating: unrated, some profanity, disturbing accounts of violence

Credits: Directed by Jeffrey Peixoto.  A 1091 release.

Running time: 1:13

With the investment in time involved, how long do you give a series — broadcast or streaming, limited or open-ended — before deciding it’s not worth your time?

Pilot episode? One or two beyond it? On and on because “maybe it’ll get better?” Here’s a tip. They rarely, if ever, do.

Perhaps the time is right for a comic bookish Jewish “Hunters” tracking and killing Nazi war criminals series. Parking Al Pacino at its center, a “Bruce Wayne-rich” financier of Nazi hunting, is a coup. Logan Lerman as “the kid” given entre to this underworld team of avengers? Well, OK.

Setting it in the lurid, grimy Earth-tony and crime-ridden 1970s? Perfect.

But that’s all the slack to be cut this Amazon extravaganza, a long slow slog through a Tarantino-ish cartoon of glibly served-up gore and goofy, over-the-top touches attempting to hide the tedium.

I gritted my teeth through the pilot, which begins with a slaughter when a Nazi State Dept. insider in the Carter White House (Dylan Baker — Vorst Nazi ach-sent effa!) is outed at a pool party and shoots everybody there.

The unheralded blunt rookie FBI agent (Jerrika Hinton) given to making threats while digging into the Nazi past of a NASA scientist is on one story thread. Will she figure out who is offing Hitler’s minions?

Because that’s what the millionaire Jewish leader of the pack assembled that pack to do.

“You know vat iz the best revenge? REVENGE!”

Lerman is established as a bullied lightweight pot peddler who can’t defend himself, much less his Auschwitz survivor safta (grandmother, played by Jeannie Berlin) when a killer comes to their Brooklyn door.

But Jonah has an eye for patterns, clues and ciphers. He could be useful when he demands a place on Meyer Offerman’s Birds of Prey.

Jonah’ll complement the master of disguise (Josh Radnor of “How I Met Your Mother”), sassy black radical counterfeiter/forger (Tiffany Boone), torture-prone trigger-woman nun (Kate Mulvany), the Asian (Louis Ozawa) “forever soldier,” and the Holocaust survivor couple “gadget experts” (Carol Kane and Saul Rubinek).

The script is a cliched collage of Hebrew and Yiddish puns, anachronistic (remember, this season is set in 1977) slang and trash talk straight out of old WWII C-movies and bad war comic books.

“Juden cockroach!”

The violence in the Holocaust flashbacks is horror movie exploitive.

Pacino doesn’t need a huge screen to chew the scenery, but he’s more subtle here. Until he opens his mouth and this laughably arch script reveals its Oy-chilles Heel.

“As ze Talmud tells us…I zuppose I vatch too much ‘Kojak.’ A potato of the couch” is he.

“Vell, Scooby Dooby, zis is von monster who need not be unmasked.”

Every so often, there’s a horrific, over-the-top flashback to the savage sadism of the Nazis they’re hunting, cunning ghouls who were thrill killers always looking for new thrills such as using camp inmates as human chess pieces in to-the-death matches.

The chilling topper to that is Mr. Next Gen Nazi (Greg Austin), an overtly racist “cleaner” who has a swastika tattooed on his shoulder, intimidates Congressmen and tidies up messy situations involving the vast Master Race conspiracy that keeps all these fugitives from justice safe and thriving in America.

SOMEbody had to keep the flame alive and inspire tomorrow’s Proud Boys.

The flippant tone and eyes-averting violence make this a series for everybody who loved the finale of “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” or “Inglourious Basterds.”

But it is so…damned…slow. The drip drip of plot doesn’t keep the viewer from getting ahead of the story. And all the Hebrew hep cat patter or Nasty Nazi trash talk isn’t enough to sustain it.

As with too many limited series, they had a feature film’s supply of story and (comic book) wit, saddled it with far too many distracting and less interesting outside of the leads, and then slow-walked the entire affair to a genuinely inevitable conclusion.

But go ahead, watch the pilot (I invested more time on other episodes so you wouldn’t have to). If it’s not instantly irritating to you, carry on, mazeltov and all that.

Not everything Jordan Peele slaps his brand on is worth our time.

MPAA Rating: TV-MA, violence, nudity, profanity

Cast: Al Pacino, Logan Lerman, Jerrika Hinton, Tiffany Boone, Kate Mulvany, Josh Radnor, Saul Rubinek, Lena Olin, Dylan Baker, Carol Kane

Credits: Created by David Weil. An Amazon Original.

Running time: 10 episodes, 11 hours (1:30 pilot)

A little small town pluck is on display in this feel good “true story” from the UK.

The second weekend of the surprising smash hit video game adaptation is slightly more down to Earth as *Sonic the Hedgehog” is on a $26 million pace, after a $58 million opening.

Down over 50%, how far below 50% we won’t know until Sunday. It could hit $27 on its second weekend, and is already on track to clear the $100 million mark today or Sunday.

“Call of the Wild” is out performing expectations, with a $23 million and change weekend. The CGI dogs in the movie pushed its costs into the $130 million range, so that won’t be good enough to save it’s digital bacon.

“Brahms: The Boy II” is bombing, only managing a $5 million opening.

“Birds of Prey” is the third place movie of a very thin weekend, pulling in $7 million, enough to push it over $70 million, still a long way from $100.

“Bad Boys” are within reach of $200 million and could hit that mark with one more decent weekend in the top ten after this one.

https://deadline.com/2020/02/sonic-the-hedgehog-call-of-the-wild-barks-brahms-the-boy-ii-weekend-box-office-1202865381/