We see Stiller and (ugh) Nick Swardson, Margaret Qualley and Sandler spawn and Sandler hangers’on and a lot of pro golfers in this trailer to a sequel to one of Adam Sandler’s most popular comedies ever.
Good thing they brought Julie Bowen and Christopher McDonald back. Dammit.
July 25 on Netflix.
The scene, like the movie it dominates, was infamous before anybody outside of the production had seen it.
The movie was stilted, strange, shocking and controversial, even in the hypersexualized “art cinema” of the ’70s. And the title, “Last Tango in Paris,” has been a cultural touchstone, punchline and “pornographic” dividing line ever since.
“Being Maria” is a film that tries and mostly succeeds in immersing us in the experience of the French actress Maria Schneider, cast and almost certainly abused and exploited in a movie that would both make her name, and ruin it, to say nothing of the psychological damage it probably left her with.
Based on a biographical memoir by Schneider’s journalist-cousin Vanessa Schneider, Jessica Palud’s film hinges on “that scene,” and exacts a form of revenge on director Bernardo Bertolucci and “Tango” as she does. She makes him cruel and pretentious and his film more inane and indulgent than most critics treated it at the time.
Anamaria Vartolomei — she was “Kai” in “Mickey 17” and Haydee in the most recent “Count of Monte-Cristo” — portrays Schneider from her teen introduction to film and through the trauma of making “Last Tango,” suggesting the lasting damage and hurt it caused as she struggled to overcome it, professionally and psychologically.
Maria’s single mom Marie (Marie Gillain) raised her alone and flies into a fury when her schoolgirl daughter gets stars in her eyes when she spends time with her estranged father, the famous French film actor Daniel Gélin (Yvan Attal). Gélin, who worked with Ophuls and Hitchcock, had an affair with her mother and didn’t leave his wife for her and wasn’t a part of Maria’s life.
Until, that is, she hit her teens, reconnected with him, spent time on sets and used her gorgeous looks and nepo baby connections to sign with his agent. But she was still a complete unknown when the director of “The Conformist” and “The Spider’s Stratagem” cast her in the movie that her father insisted would “make” her.
Casting the handsome Giuseppe Maggio of Italian romcoms like Netflix’s “Out of My League” and “Four to Dinner” is another way our director takes a shot at the late Bernado Bertolucci.
“On my films,” Maggio’s Bernardo pretentiously intones, “there are no actors, no actresses. Only characters!“
The very young and inexperienced Schneider adapts to the “intensity” Bertolucci wants his players to bring to his talkative chance encounter May-October affair film about sex and “love” and boundaries in an age of ennui. And she gets over her awe of her co-star, 47 years old and “fat,” but still dashing and still the greatest screen actor of his generation.
Matt Dillon gives us just a hint of Marlon Brando’s voice, letting the years, the hair and the presence get across the essence of a bored film actor interested in being challenged by a tyro Italian filmmaker, but also so comfortable in the power imbalance in this industry, on this set making this male-wish-fulfillment fantasy with an inexperienced teen treated as if any “surprise” the men in charge pull on her to get her to register shock is fair game.
“It’s only a film,” he purrs, in French, after the infamous “butter” scene, which leaves Schneider in tears.
“There’s no such thing as ‘bad press,'” her movie star dad assures her when the notoriety of that moment spreads long before the film’s release.
But Maria, in this film account of her reaction anyway, knows better than to let Bertolucci’s “Good, very good” after yelling “cut” pass.
“No, NO Bernardo,” she says (in French with English subtitles). “That was NOT good!”
The film leaves Bertolucci as a sketched-in villain, one of the giants of the cinema of his day reduced to crude manipulations, ganging up with his star on the ingenue in his care on his set. Having met and interviewed him when his not-nearly-as-exploitative but still kind of icky “Stealing Beauty” came out, that seems a fair shot. Liv Tyler, the young starlet of “Stealing Beauty,” got off easy.
Brando is likewise something of a cypher here, more a “character” or “figure” than an actor who flatters and flirts and tries to reassure but fails utterly to protect his powerless, naive and much younger co-star.
And there’s a familiarity to Maria’s life after “Last Tango” that leaves her new interest in clubbing, random pick-ups and needle drug addiction depressing if not wholly surprising.
She appeared in other iconic films — Antonioni’s “The Passenger,” a well-regarded ’90s “Jane Eyre.” But as Palud and co-screenwriter Laurette Polmanss show us, her career was for decades a series of awkward public encounters with people who hated “Last Tango,” which got banned in some countries, and asked or unasked questions from the press about her most infamous movie.
But in this film account based on a memoir by her cousin, we take comfort in how “Last Tango” hardened Maria Schneider, toughened her up and made her “difficult” by reputation. She stands up against the typecast demands that she take her shirt.
She walked off the infamous “Caligula” and a role that had to be recast when she refused to appear nude in it. Smart.
Did the devotion of a loyal lover (Céleste Brunnquell) save her from her “Tango” entangled demons? Even if that never happened, “Being Maria” allows us the comfort of hoping so.
Rating: unrated, sexual violence, drug abuse, nudity, profanity
Cast: Anamaria Vartolomei, Giuseppe Maggio, Céleste Brunnquell, Yvan Attal, Marie Gillain and Matt Dillon.
Credits: Directed by Jessica Palud, scripted by Laurette Polmanss and Jessica Palud, based on a memoir by Vanessa Schneider. A Kino Lorber release.
Running time: 1:43
A 1984 scandal that not many remember is the subject of this thriller featuring Walton Goggins, Haley Bennett, David Strathairn, Shamier Anderson and Johnny Knoxville.
Paul Walter Hauser is pretty damned good at suggesting “sketchy,” I must say. Even if the character’s legit, him playing the guy makes you wonder. “Richard Jewell,” “BlackKklansman,” “I, Tonya,” the guy’s a born “weakest link” in a criminal conspiracy.
A less scary Walton Goggins? Goggins leaves no doubt when it comes to sketchy. Hauser does.
April 4.
That’s the drill every March 17, isn’t it?
Listen to a spot of this.
Watch an Irish film or two. “The Late Rite,” I’d suggest. Or Roddy Doyle’s “The Snapper,” “The Van” or “The Commitments,” maybe Gabriel Byrne’s “Into the West,” or perhaps “Circle of Friends” or the more obscure early efforts of Liam Neeson.
Relish the grand Irish actor, Ciaran Hinds, who so aptly defined this music and the Irish cinema he and Colm Meaney and Cillian Murphy and Saorise Ronan prop up every chance they get.
And plan your own trip to the cinematic Ireland, the homey, music-filled pubs, the lush green countryside, the seaside cliffs and the quaint villages where movies like “The Quiet Man” were filmed.
I’ve visited a few locations used by “Braveheart,” “The Quiet Man” and lesser and greater films around Dublin, Trim, Galway, Cong, Athenry etc. Lovely place to take in during the fall or spring, although I can’t imagine it ever looking grim, even in the dank and chilly winter.
It’s easy to dismiss the picaresque action comedy “Fool’s Parade” as an “old man movie,” because that was kind of the idea back when it was made.
James Stewart was 63 in 1971, when it came out, with a bunch of 50ish co-stars and a 50something director whose best years were behind him. That was “old” in 1971, before “60 is the new 40” got any traction.
And Stewart, his fellow Oscar winners George Kennedy and Anne Baxter (“All About Eve”), William Windom and Strother Martin had been fixtures on the screen for decades upon decades when they filmed this 1930s period piece.
This tale of a convict trying to cash his big, fat, prison labor money check when he gets out in the middle of the Great Depression is emblematic of the Hollywood of 1971. The studios leaned on older stars and their older filmgoer fans because they didn’t know what to put on screen that would pull in new generations. The Youth Movement that ushered in both the glorious, artisistic high water mark films and also the business-redefining blockbusters of the ’70s were a couple of years from taking over.
So studios leaned on old reliables like John Wayne, Stewart and others of that generation, even if their fans no longer went to the movies. Newman, Redford, Streisand and Poitier and Garner and McQueen could only manage a film a year. And Elvis was finished.
What’s surprising, dipping into this lightly-regarded, timeworn and formulaic Depression Era “Western” in a different setting is how funny it still plays. Sure, it creaks and wheezes and groans like a Ford Model A on a backwater dirt road. But reliable players who remembered the sentiments, mores and attitudes of that bygone era and who knew where the laughs were deliver, time and again.
The sight of Martin, Kennedy and Windom sweating, grimacing and grinning, and Stewart scrambling, ducking and rowing, sputtering and fuming for the last time in a star vehicle can be a nostalgic delight.
Stewart plays aged Mattie Appleyard, one of three convicts released from the state penitentiary in Glory, W.Va. the same day in 1935. Lee (Martin) was a bank robber, and Johnny (Kurt Russell) a local kid convicted of sexual assault. Appleyard did the most time — 40 years — for killing a couple of men.
It is his paycheck from his years of barely-paid prison labor that they’re all relying on to open a general store somewhere. The $25,428.32 Mattie has coming to him will set them all up.
But everything about the sinister guard, Capt. Council (Kennedy) tells them they won’t live to collect that cash. He may croon “Shall We Gather at the River,” like the Sunday school teacher that he is as he escorts them to town. But the threats about the train they’d damned well better board and the return to Glory they’d best not even think about give us, and the soon-to-be-ex-convicts, the willies.
Council’s “See you before tomorrow’s sunrise” is a straight-up threat.
Because “all that money leaving town” vexes the broke locals. The smirking fat cat banker (David Huddleston) is the only one who doesn’t seem concerned. He knows what’s coming. He arranged it.
The threats seem to come from every corner on that short train ride, as Lee is given to over-sharing their business and finances and one tipsy passenger (Windom) seems entirely too interested. But threats or not, “fear of God” Council be damned, they have to get back to Glory.
The narrative staggers into and out of town as cagey Mattie strains to find a way to cash that check that won’t get them robbed, killed or locked back up. A handy hooker (Baxter) may intervene. When the guys after you have guns, sometimes only dynamite will get their attention.
And wouldn’t you know it, the kid’s best friend “inside” — the prison’s bloodhound — is forever tripping them up as they try to just be regular, returned-to-society citizens attempting to cash a check that will secure their futures in the middle of a Depression.
Running gags include the sad-eyed but persistent hound, Mattie’s “all seeing” prophetic glass eye and the general sweatiness of old men on the run or in the chase.
Hunting them to rob and kill the three is OK, so long as they’re not church goers.
“You’uns is aetheists?”
Director McLaglen, no stranger to “old guys” action pics (“Hellfighters,” “Th Undefeated,” “The Wild Geese”) uses Moundsville, West Virginia locations to good effect in this shaggy (hound) dog comedy. His lone special effect? The cast.
Russell more or less holds his own, midway between his Disney years and the adult career that really took off after a late ’70s TV movie turn playing Elvis. Baxter vamps it up and seems to enjoy herself in the process — caked with makeup, weighed down with extra large eyelashes.
Character actor typecasting ensures Windom and Martin get their predictable moments and chuckles.
Kennedy squints and sweats and shows off stained, metal-braced teeth as Council dirties one pair of spotless white sneakers after another in his pursuit, a man of twisted theology and a ready, philosophical excuse when things don’t go according to play.
“Who can foresee the unforseen?”
But Stewart sets the tone, by turns playful and mischievous, twinkly and ornery as this righteous and just plain muleheaded sage. He gets to utter the script’s pithiest line, an aphorism for the anti-fat-cat/”Religion is the opiate of the masses” 1930s that resonated in ’71 and rings even truer today.
“God uses the good ones,” Mattie intones. “The bad ones use God.”
Rating: PG, violence, mild profanity
Cast: James Stewart, George Kennedy, Anne Baxter, Kurt Russell, David Huddleston, William Windom and Strother Martin.
Credits: Directed by Andrew V. McLaglen, scripted by James Lee Barrett, based on a novel by Davis Grubb. A Columbia Pictures release on Tubi, other streamers.
Running time: 1:38
If it takes the bottomless checkbook of Netflix to finally make the fangirls and fanboys recognize what merde merchants the filmmaking Russo brothers are, so be it.
Famed for making the expensive trains run on time in effects heavy Marvel “event” movies, and for turning the last Avengers, Captain America included, into lucrative but joyless dreck, it was only when Netflix got into the indulge-the-Russos business (“The Gray Man”) that the teeming movie-loving masses finally caught on. Whatever their producing “content” skills, these two have the worst taste.
Netflix confirms our suspicions with their latest, the bloated bore “The Electric State.” The streamer gave the Russos access to Netflix’s first bonafide “star,” Millie Bobby Brown of “Stranger Things.” And if you thought the dog “Damsel” was a warning sign about the starlet’s future, sister, have I got a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
“The Electric State” is based on a graphic novel by Swedish comic book artist, designer (And writer?) Simon Stålenhag (“Tales from the Loop”). As a film, it’s a cutesie retro-futuristic/alt history sci-fi action comedy that utterly misreads the moment.
With a world roiled by legitimate AI, robot and computer fears driven by amoral tech bros and their inhumane incel minions, here’s a picture that pitches robot “rights” as its thesis.
Hey, when they’re designed as varying shades of Wall-E adorable, with even Mr. Peanut (paid product placement/endorsement, “brought to you by”) on board, and voiced by a drawling Woody Harrelson, the comic pixie Jenny Slate and singing, hamming Scot Brian Cox, who wouldn’t want to let them run our world and our lives?
In an alternate version of the ‘recent past, society has embraced — thanks to Walt Disney in the ’50s — robots as a vital part of the labor force and of life on Earth. But by the Clinton Administration ’90s, robots have grown sentient enough to see their exploitation. They don’t just go on strike. They revolt, a revolt that erupts into war.
When humanity finally gets the upper hand, robotic spokesmodel Mr. Peanut (Woody Harrelson) negotiates a robotic exile to “The Exclusion Zone,” the American southwest, where no humans may intrude and robots run their own affairs. “Freedom from servitude” at last!
That’s the world siblings Michelle (Brown) and her super smart younger brother Christopher (Woody Norman) are growing up in. Until, that is, the “accident.” Michelle survives. Her sibling doesn’t.
But a robot version of their favorite canceled kiddie TV show Cosmo shows up. And for all the catchphrases this retro “Robots” style robot sputters in the voice of Alan Tudyck — “The Earth is in danger!” “The solar system’s gone haywire!” — Michelle picks up on who’s actually controlling this robot.
Her brother isn’t “dead” at all! He’s being held by Big Science somewhere, he doesn’t know where, and his only hope of escape is sending this kitschy corner of their past to his sister, who must track him down.
With a little help from that robot and from smuggler Keats (Chris Pratt) and his robotic sidekick Herman (Anthony Mackie) and the “misunderstood” robots out there in the Exclusion Zone, maybe they’ll foil the evil scientist (Stanley Tucci) and his military, VR robot inhabiting muscle (Giancarlo Esposito, like Mackie, fresh off of “Captain America: Brave New World”).
Aimed at kids who’ll giggle at the adorably retro robots and snicker at the profanity, “Electric State” creates cringes you didn’t know you’d cringe about.
Robot/human sing-alongs to “I Fought the Law and the Law Won,” Brian Cox’s baseball-promoting robot bellowing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” stupid “Don’t Stop Believing” and “I Will Survive” needle-drops on the soundtrack, groaning abandoned mall jokes (where the food court’s “no expiration date” foodstock is clumsily mocked), it’s all here.
So are Cox, Slate and Mackie, among many others, all voicing the collectibly cute robots with some of the most insipid voice casting/acting since Slim Pickens was brought in for Disney’s “The Black Hole” 40 plus years ago.
At least Mackie is spared, with his voice autotuned/helium pitched into unrecognizability.
“Clapper” — the gadget that let you clap-on-/clap-off the lights in your home — is the “highlight” of not-distant-past references meant to play as jokes.
Pratt gives his all, more or less. Tucci and Esposito hire out their professionalism one more time. Ke Hey Quan, playing a cutesie scientist and a cutesier “P.C.” workstation, is the most embarassed Oscar winner here. Holly Hunter collects a check as a TV interviewer.
And the Russos? They pile it up high and deep, five shovelfulls at a time.
There’s barely a laugh or an entertaining moment in all of this. And as they’re the ones in charge of bringing “The Avengers” back with films in 2026-27, abandon hope, all ye faboys/girls who enter here.
Rating: PG-13, violence, profanity
Cast: Millie Bobby Brown, Chris Pratt, Giancarlo Esposito, Jason Alexander, Ke Huy Quan and Stanley Tucci, the voices of Woody Harrelson, Jenny Slate, Alan Tudyck, Brian Cox, many others
Credits: Directed by Anthony Russo and Joe Russo, scripted by Christopher Marcus and Stephen McFeely, based on a novel by Simon Stålenhag. A Netflix release.
Running time: 2:08
There was a time when zombies were slow and the movies about them were quick.
The walking dead would lurch into sight and characters would have to go out of their way to trip or somehow be trapped by the stumbling undead.
And George A. Romero or his “Night of the Living Dead” filmmaking offspring would introduce a zombie outbreak, a shocked public’s reaction and an intrepid survivor or two who would fail or prevail in a whiplash-quick movie of 90-96 minutes.
In “Silent Zone,” the feature filmmaking debut of director Peter Deak, the zombies show up at a sprint, which has been all the rage in zombie movies since before “28 Days Later.” But the tried and trite story about surviving the post-zombie-apocalypse wasteland (Victor Orban’s Hungary) passes by at a snail’s crawl.
It’s a crushing bore and a C-movie, start to finish. From the parade of Hungarian-accented newscasters and the like who talk through the tale’s opening “news” montage through every slow-footed sequence of fight choreography fumbling its way towards a big explosion/bigger letdown ending, “Silent Zone” reminds us how exhausted this genre — beaten to death by TV’s “Walking Dead” — truly is.
It’s enough to make you fear for how “28 Years Later” turned out.
Career bit-player Matt Devere is Cassius, our hero, an armed-to-the-teeth warrior who rescues a little girl whose mother and little brother have just been bitten as the outbreak begins.
He rescues her by shooting them.
Cassius raises Abigail (Luca Papp) to shoot and fight and slice like he does. So ten years later, it’s no surprise that she’s as tactical geared-up as he is as they horseback ride through empty Soviet style housing blocks and a depopulated countryside.
Same assault rifle, same pistol. Same samurai sword, too. Because sometimes “we don’t have a bullet to spare.”
Abigail isn’t quite the crack shot Cassius is, and her mistake fails to save a member of a crew trying to get pregnant Megan (Nikolett Barabas) and David (Declan Hannigan) through Zombieland to “The Colony” and safety.
Naturally, Abigail talks Cassius into undertaking that quest.
They will trek slowly-so-slowly, fend off zombies and meet a somewhat mad scientist (Alexis Latham) along the way. As Abigail’s father used to be a pilot, she’ll be in the cockpit when they commandeer a ten-years-parked and broken down propeller plane to speed up their trek.
The dialogue is off-the-shelf dull of the “If we stop, we DIE” variety. Cassius, named either for the guy who plotted to kill Caesar or the boxer who liked to rhyme, has moments of reflection in between all the half-speed brawls and “double tap” shootouts.
“I sometimes feel I don’t have the space for all the faces in my brain.”
There’s no subtext to any of this, no commentary on culture, society or politics, government, anti-vax cranks or human failings. And thanks to Viktor Csák and Krisztián Illés, who scripted this, there’s not much of a “text” either.
Rating: R, bloody, graphic violence, profanity
Cast: Matt Devere, Luca Papp, Nikolett Barabas, Declan Hannigan and Alexis Latham.
Credits: Directed by Peter Deak, scripted by Viktor Csák and Krisztián Illés. A Saban Films release.
Running time: 1:59
You crowd source your funding to get your idea for a comedy about wrestling, obsessive fans and the midlife crisis none of us want to face filmed.
You talk Paula Adbul, Eddie Griffin and “Star Trek” alumnus Walter Koenig in it to add “names” to its appeal.
You premiere the finished film at fanboy central — the SXSW film, music and media festival in the Free State of Austin.
And it turns out the way “Raging Midlife” turned out and you’re never seen or heard from again.
This deathly unfunny farce is about a tank top t-shirt tossed to two pals at a pro wreslting event back in ’88, one that was snatched from them at their moment of triumph.
Here is it “40 years” later (one admits) or “thirty years” another lies. And Alex (Nic Costa) and Mark (Matt Zak) are still determined to have that Rage O Mania tank top that Ragin’ Abraham Lincoln (Motch O Mann) hurled their way as he transitioned from role model of the ring to villain of the circuit.
It’s what Mary Todd (Get it?), Ragin’ Abraham’s wife (Paula Adbul) wanted, right?
This ill-conceived, poorly-organized and shambolic comedy has the odd amusing character and performance. Emily Sweet brings a foaming-at-the-mouth fury to Mindy, the older sister who sabotaged brother Alex’s big moment, way back when, someone who’s hellbent on repeating that now. And Motch O Mann, a wrestler Randy Savage impersonator, also hits the right tone. Co-star Zak flails and sputters to get the energy up to generate a laugh.
“Time, you little slut!…I want my 40 years back!”
But collectively they’re no compensation for putting charisma-starved co-stars and co-writers Costa and Rob Taylor (he also directed) on the screen in roles that needed serious workshopping before this ever went before a camera.
Wrestling, the wrestling underworld and the sorts of folks obsessed with it was a promising setting. The premise feels familiar enough to have worked, in some form.
Not this one, though. Kids, I want my 93 minutes back.
Rating: unrated, (comic) bloody violence, profanity
Cast: Nic Costa, Matt Zak, Bryna Smith, Rob Taylor, Eddie Griffin, Emily Sweet, Walter Koenig, Motch O Mann and Paula Abdul.
Credits: Directed by Rob Taylor, scripted by Nic Costa and Rob Taylor. A Level 33 release.
Running time: 1:33
Britt Lower and John Magaro star in this comic thriller about a writer offered the chance to be “advised” by a “retired” serial killer for his next book.
Buscemi’s that retiree, and when cornered, he can pass for a marriage counselor, if need be.
August 8, a blast from your past set to the music of Chappell Roan.
Bravo to Oscar winner Curtis for keeping her sense of humor and taking on this. Let’s see if Lohan lives up to her big screen comeback, served on a platter.
Movie Nation 