Movie Nation

This is going to be a VERY slow holiday weekend for Hollywood, as the only wide (ish) new release is hitting less than 1,000 screens.

Blumhouse is lowballing expectations for “Don’t Let Go,” their African American headliner driven supernatural thriller.

I say it’ll manage more than the $4 million they’re expecting. Reviews are mixed. I call it a good bad movie, well acted, keeps you engrossed. Or maybe that was just me. Might it manage $6?

“Angel has Fallen” will win it all with a take in the $13-15 day.

“Overcomer” added screens and may not $5-6.

Not enough to crack the top 2, but found money for a low budget faith based drama.

If “Don’t Let Go” managed $4 or $5, it will knock “Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood” out of the top ten.

But again, crowds will be light. If you’ve missed it, catch it now. No waiting.

https://www.boxofficemojo.com/news/?id=4541&p=.htm

Recovering from injuries, becoming the greatest, strongest athletes or fighters — historical evidence, Schwarzenegger, the whole nine yards.

Every argument, in short, that suggests “meat builds strength” is “just marketing,” as Ahhnuld says.

Here’s a counter-argument to “Beef, it’s what’s for dinner” and “MAN food” etc.

“The Game Changers” opens in New York and LA in late Sept.

Classes on “JK Living, y’all! Grades are on the ‘Awright awright awright’ scale.

“Matthew McConaughey joins University of Texas as faculty professor”

https://t.co/Aa5Uk95JE9 https://twitter.com/HoustonChron/status/1166770659126599680?s=17

Deaf kid befriends a fugitive in frigid North Dakota.

I used to live in North Dakota. This sort of “Great Expectations” thing happens all the time up there. The deaf twist offers interesting dramatic possibilities.

“The Parts You Lose” opens in theaters and VOD on Oct. 4.

A tale of Panama financial chicanery, with Streep as a widow investigating insurance fraud for personal reasons, and Oldman/Banderas as the rascals up to no good. A mid-Oct. release.  In theaters, and on Netflix.

Did I mention Steven Soderbergh directed it?

“Spider in the Web” is a well-crafted, reasonably cunning spy thriller starring Ben Kingsley as an aged Israeli agent on the hunt for proof of a company’s complicity in helping arm Syria with chemical and biological weapons.

It hangs on the urbane, wily charms of its star, on Kingsley’s ability to sell a warm anecdote, to look at home in any sophisticated setting, to play the man who knows a good Cohiba, a good cognac and a good intel “asset” when he sees one.

As he’s played such men, of varying degrees of cunning, since “Pascali’s Island,” it comes as no surprise that he pulls off this Antwerp antiques dealer-by-day, master spy-by-night chap with his usual aplomb.

A tale “inspired by true events,” this Israeli production is set during the period of the Syrian civil war when President for Life Assad was bombing his own people with chemical weapons.

Simon Bell, the cover name for Avram (Kingsley), is working his favorite source, an expat Syrian general. When the source says “The woman will lead you to it,” Avram/Simon takes it seriously.

“Forty years on the job, I don’t go looking for sense any more.”

His boss (Itzik Cohen) figures “It’s time to call it a day,” meaning Mossad has lost trust in the old spook’s sources and skills. But sending an escort, Daniel (Itay Tiran) to fetch him, at gunpoint, only shows how sharp Avram’s spycraft still is.

He sniffs out a hostile on a train with just a conversation over a John LeCarre novel, and dispatches him. He can still jump off a moving coach (the most far-fetched thing in the film), still flag down a farmer for a ride, and so knows the lay of the land he remembers a cozy hotel nearby.

Daniel, the son of a former colleague, watches as Avram works the desk clerk for a room, and listens to how one can tell if the restaurant’s chef’s food is up to snuff.

“You should be able to stand your spoon upright in a good pea soup!”

Turns out the owner (Hilde Van Mieghem) is an old source, too.

As Avram gives Daniel a tour of Belgium’s dining and spying hot spots, he is also working Daniel — seducing him — just as he works his latest contact, a doctor with ViRobe, the company the Israelis are investigating. Angela (Monica Bellucci) is not immune to the old master’s charms.

“You make love like you live life.”

“How’s that?”

“In despair!”

That’s your touchstone moment in “Spider in the Web.” Either you cringe at that corny old line and figure, “I’ll pass,” or you buy in. Sure, it’s dated. But so is most of the cast, the genre, the whole nuts-and-bolts of espionage on the big screen.

Even the plot device driving the story is WWI vintage — chemical warfare. It’s no surprise that Avram is a WWI era history buff. That late German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian and Ottoman Empire era was also the setting for “Pascali’s Island,” by the way.

This Eran Riklis (“Lemon Tree,” “Syrian Bride,” both worth Netflixing) film is a tale of tinkling cognac glasses, savored cigars, of squealing BMW tires, the “thunk-snap” of rounds being chambered, the “p-tiff, p-tiff” of pistols with silencers silencing this rival, that “traitor.”

The script gives Kingsley scene after raconteur scene, telling Daniel stories of his late father, the no-mistakes-allowed politics of Mossad, which can be fatal for non-Jews like Avram. He plays the “instinct” scenes like an old master, keeping a bottle handy for any security guard he sizes up as a Foreign Legionnaire, reciting the Legionnaire’s creed like the old comrade he can pretend to be.

If you love Kingsley, and you should, these moments are to be treated the way he treats that Cuban cigar — savored.

It’s a story too reliant on those moments, too dependent on coincidences and overfilled with examples of Avram’s hunches, instincts, back-engineered canniness and double-dealing. It all gets a bit murky by the third act.

But Sir Ben sells it and faithfully maintains our interest in what happens, and what happens to Avram, from first scene to last, a spy in his element, a “Spider in the Web.”

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Ben Kingsley, Monica Belluci, Itay Tiran, Itzik Cohen

Credits: Directed by Eran Riklis, script by Gidon Maron, Emmanuel Naccache. A Vertical release.

Running time: 1:53

Creepy and funny.

Fascinating.

October.

Say what you will about the time-bending, stop-a-murder-before-it-happens poppycock of “Don’t Let Go,” the damned contraption holds your attention.

Well-cast, but built on the hoariest movie murder mystery conventions, confusingly, inconsistently-plotted yet engrossing and almost moving, it reminded me of John Cho’s missing-daughter mystery of last year — “Searching.”

Because even though this one has a supernatural element, even though the “missing” person is, in fact, merely a few days in the past and perfectly reachable by cell (“Can you hear me now?”), and is a niece, not a daughter, “Don’t Let Go” has the same narrative drive and urgency and pushes a lot of the same emotional buttons.

It’s more of a “good bad  movie,” but dumped on the last weekend of August, I’ll take it.

David Oyelowo of “Selma” stars at “oh so honest Jack Radcliffe, an LAPD detective who is tight with his young teenage niece, Ashley (Storm Reid of “A Wrinkle in Time”). As his brother, her dad, isn’t the most dependable, Jack has given Ashley a cell phone and his number.

So she calls and asks for rides, calls to complain about her dad and calls just to do what teenage girls do with phones — prattle on and on.

Writer-director Jacob Estes (“Mean Creek”) establishes their relation in five brisk opening minutes. And then Jack gets a call with what sounds like panic in Ashley’s static-hidden voice. That leads him to their house, and that’s when he finds the bodies.

Jack barely has time to consider how much time to take off to grieve when his phone rings again, days later. Caller ID? “Ashley.” He refuses to answer, and when he calls the number back, he gets that “disconnected or no longer in service” message.

And then she calls again. Jack answers, and registers the only shock the script will allow him to over this unlikely turn of events.

They talk, cover the same ground they did on an earlier conversation. Jack starts testing hypotheses and quizzing Ashley. She might have information that could lead him to their killers. She might be speaking to him from an earlier period in time.

And a quick glance at a calendar tells him he might be able to “save her” this time. But he’s got to keep this cell connection from his old buddy on the force (Mykelti Williamson of “Forrest Gump”), and from his chief (Alfred Molina of every movie made since “Raiders of the Lost Ark”).

And he’s got to keep Ashley in the dark, too, for reasons less clear. Eventually, as he gives her assignments, we start to see things from her point of view as well as his. She’s digging where he tells her to look, he’s looking where she suggests he dig.

The “You’ve just got to go with this” moments in “Don’t Let Go” are many, some of which may convince you “Nope, not happening.”

For me, a tipping point was a test — chew some gum at their favorite diner, leave it under the table.

“This chewed up piece of gum,” he pleads, “you can un-CHEW it!”

Great actors commit, even if the script tempts them to roll their eyes so’s we know they realize it’s a goof, as we’re certain to catch on ourselves. Oleyowo sells this thing.

Drive-shootings that he barely survives, bleeding out in the evidence room where his colleagues let him statgger, figuring things out he could not possibly know (but not figuring out the killer, which standard Thriller LEGO construction ordains, right in the first act) — it’s all a tad much.

But it’s as much fun as a dumb time-travel murder mystery/cop thriller has any right to be. Just don’t let it keep you up at night sorting through it all, again, the way the folks who take notes (critics) have to. It’ll spoil it.

MPAA Rating: R for violence, bloody images, and language

Cast: David Oyelowo, Storm Reid, Mykelti Williamson, Alfred Molina

Credits: Written and Jacob Estes. A BH Tilt/OTL release.

Running time: 1:42

“Mom! That ‘Girl with the Dragon Tattoo’ is staring through the gate again!”

Words NOBODY wants to hear. Even if you’re a fan of the original “Girl,” Noomi Rapace, being a bit afraid of her, in or out of character as Lisbeth Salander, is part of the bargain.

In “Angel of Mine,” Rapace stars as another “Lisbeth.” Only this Lisbeth is called “Lizzy,” she’s Australian and she’s mad in the saddest way you can imagine.

It’s all going wrong for her. Newly-divorced, losing custody of her 12 year-old son (Finn Little), low woman in the pecking order at the makeup store in the mall, it never ends.

“You haven’t been doing so great,” is all the ex (Luke Hemsworth) can say. He’s not rubbing it in. Their son “feels your darkness, Lizzy!”

No wonder she’s shaking prescription pills out of the bottle when we first see her.

Lizzy is carrying a terrible burden, one which has taken over her life, ended her marriage and threatens her tenuous relationship with her boy. It’s when she takes the kid to a birthday party at a friend’s house that the mystery starts to unravel.

She fixates on a beautiful little girl there, and Lola (Annika Whiteley) becomes the driving obsession of her life.

Rapace gives Lizzy an offhand caginess that serves her well as she lies to the child’s mother, Claire (Yvonne Strahovski) about being interested in buying their house, about being still married, about being manager of that makeup store.

Every time Claire’s back is turned, Lizzy is with Lola. “We look alike!”

Her ex is over it, her son complains of her “crying all the time…You never get anything done.”

But Lizzy has something she WILL get done, in the “Hand that Rocks the Cradle” tradition.

Director Kim Farrant (Nicole Kidman and Joseph Fiennes’ “Strangerland” was hers) tries to maintain suspense, and when there’s a little girl in perceived jeopardy, that shouldn’t be hard to do.

But Rapace has this brittle vulnerability that comes through, even when you’re scared of her. We pity Lizzy, hope against hope she won’t cross yet ANOTHER line with this family she’s stalking, wait for an intervention, expect her to get help.

I found myself rooting for her not to get yelled at, not to be found out in her furtive surveillance (stalking). She is, after all, the Girl/Woman with the Dragon You-Know-What — scary, and sympathetic.

The only real twists to this tale are ridiculously easy to predict, as they seem as recycled as the rest of the movie. They take a turn towards “Let’s surprise them, even if it’s the most gutless direction to take the movie in.”

Rapace is always good, in big budget features or films of more modest budget and ambitions, like this Australian production. She and Strahovski pair up as rivals so well that you say a silent prayer that the picture doesn’t lose its nerve.

But of course, it does.

MPAA Rating: R for language, some sexuality and brief nudity

Credits: Noomi Rapace, Luke Hemsworth, Yvonne Strahovski, Annika Whiteley

Credits: Directed by Kim Farrant, script by Luke Davies, David Regal. A Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:37

Director and co-writer Scott A. Hamilton makes a big deal out of his debut feature, “What Death Leaves Behind” being an example of “non-linear” storytelling.

Such movies employ tricky timelines, sometimes employ the rare “flash forward” along with that hoary cinematic device, the flashback.

But Hamilton — no, he’s not the figure skater — oversells the gimmick in this interesting, somber but slower-than-slow fantasy-thriller. He even defines it in an opening title.

It’s just that it’s not that “tricky,” and the trick adds little to the proceedings. He’d have been better served amping up the suspense, peppering in more action, getting characters to speak and interact with a lot more heat.

I like the title, and I guess the working title — “The Kidney” — was a bit too “Spoiler Alert.”

Screen newcomer Khalil McMillan is our protagonist, a man we meet as he leaves he little girl behind in a convenience store to go outside and pummel a seeming stranger.

Flashback? Or a flash-forward?

In the movie’s fictive present, Jake Warren (McMillan) is a quiet, unassuming married man who is slow to move, slow to do most anything. It’s the source of what we take to be comic friction with his wife (Shaira Barton).

“I didn’t ask for help!”

But Jake’s not slothful, just a man conserving his energy. He has kidney failure, and stays on the books at his uncle’s HVAC business, working in the office, so that he has insurance and can have dialysis.

A very long set-up shows us this life, of treatments, arguments over money, support group meetings. Jake’s on the waiting list. Then Jake is off it. He has a kidney.

That’s when his troubles really begin.

Jake has dreams where he’s sitting in a pool of light watching this heated, violent argument between a heavily tattooed man and just as tattooed woman.

The nightmares open up, and Jake starts digging into what’s going on. Might it be “cellular memory?”Could the kidney donor’s life and death be unfolding in his dreams?

And how does this tie in with the constant flow of news reports, a serial killer on the loose in their corner of Pennsylvania?  

Those connections become clearer in the drip-drip-drip script that drives what we call the “action” of the picture, which has entirely too little of that to recommend it.

There have been horror movies on this subject before. “The Eye” was one, and “Body Parts” and “Tell Tale” and so on. None were told with “non-linear” stories.

So what we’re left with is an intriguing concept for a story, so slackly told that it feels as enervated as Jake is pre-transplant.

There’s not much in the way of action to draw us in. Supporting characters are thinly drawn, the killings — when we start to see them and not just see them reported on “the news” — are dull.

“What Death Leaves Behind” isn’t much of anything we’ll remember it for.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Khalil McMillan, Christopher Mann, Vincent Young, Erin O’Brien, Alexandra Tydings

Credits: Scott A. Hamilton, script by Chad Morton, Rachel K. Ofori, Scott A. Hamilton and Nico Giampietro. A, Artists’ Rights release.

Running time: 1:27