This has the feel of a “Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry” on-the-lam hunted by cops tale with a powerful racial profiling component.
“The Hate U Give” as a road picture, “Thelma & Louise” with an African American couple. And yes, it looks good.
“Queen & Slim” opens Nov. 27.
We met him on the evening news, or if we were particularly unlucky, on the Internet. A hooded terrorist with a dispassionate London accent, and a very long knife — introducing hostages to the world, getting out his ISIS message.
And then he’d use that knife, beheading his bound, helpless victims on camera after making them recite a statement renouncing whatever Western country they’d come from, many of them journalists — drawn to a part of the world in humanitarian crisis, murdered by the monsters creating it.
“Jihadi John” the global press named him, and curiosity spread far and wide as to the true identity of this well-spoken, obviously educated young man who hated like few people we’d ever seen hate before, at least on TV.
What was so chilling, says one expert interviewed in “Unmasking Jihadi John: Anatomy of a Terrorist,” was that polish, that accent. “He was from us, and knew us instinctively.”
Veteran British documentarian Anthony Wonke (“Ronaldom” “The Battle for Marjah”) tells us the story of Mohammed Emwazi from childhood through his radicalization and on to the efforts to identify him and then hunt him down.
“Unmasking” finds old school videos where a shy Kuwaiti-born British teen constantly covers his mouth because he gets teased about his breath, plays tapes of him relating his experiences with police and then the videos that made him famous — mercifully stopping short of showing the heinous crimes the world saw him commit.
It’s a movie with a legion of talking heads, a flurry of unidentified voices and faces photographed in small pools of light in a darkened studio, passing on facts, impressions, opinions and conjecture about someone they knew as a student, a quarry or — in a couple of cases — a captor.
We’re given the context, the world that the Islamic State exploded into, and reasonably detailed portraits of the braintrust that created it and saw it blow up and evolve and grow in ways they never could have imagined.
And we meet cops and intelligence officers, who started keeping an eye on this fellow after he began the process of changing from a college kid who loved Manchester United, partying, booze and weed into a radicalized Muslim, recruited by online videos and by charismatic peers — given purpose, the sense of the larger-than-himself cause in the various humanitarian disasters in the roiled Islamic Middle East by this new passion in his life.
He did the things one did to fall under police suspicion — traveling to hot spots in the region — and bristled when intelligence officers brought him in for questioning.
The film shows some of those officers wondering aloud what they could have done differently. No doubt interrogations in Tanzania and elsewhere weren’t as civil rights-conscious as the ones Emwazi was subjected to in Amsterdam or London.
Did they want to scare him out of making the leap? They certainly wanted him to inform on others whom he knew were already raising money for terrorist groups, making overseas trips and allying with radicals at home and abroad.
“You have to give an individual an opportunity to NOT go down that path”
It’s a fascinating overview, with sociologists and military leaders, American and British, onetime radicals (heard, not seen) relating their experiences in that world, relatives of those murdered in those infamous videos, survivors of Emwazi’s captivity all pitching in to paint the picture.
I could have done with, you know, a few of them being named with on-screen titles, explaining their connection/expertise, etc. I’m watching the movie differently from the average viewer, but I dare say we’d all like to know how much credibility to give to those telling us the story. It renders the film’s soundtrack into something of a vocal drone, overloading us with data.
And truth be told, “unmasked” or not, there’s no real explanation for why he turned out the way he did. Leaving parents and others who were closest out — they probably didn’t want to talk — leaves us with the same mystery that the film opens with.
That doesn’t utterly ruin “Unmasking Jihadi John’s” impact, which is chilling in the ways it recalls how truly barbaric ISIS was at its peak, the shock that hit us all when this “Medieval” group — which murdered prisoners and enslaved women –burst on the scene.
And as interesting as the sketchy early life might have been, seeing who this fellow was to those who can talk about those years (a few white Brits, not his family or peers), the film works best in the tense third act. That’s when Emwazi is identified and hunted and when the film wrestles with what comes after ISIS as it fragments and scatters all over the region which most of its members came from.
MPAA rating: unrated, violence
Credits: Directed by Anthony Wonke, script by Richard Kerbaj. An HBO Films release.
Running time: 1:37
“Perception” is a supernatural mystery/thriller that plays it too safe for its own good. Mild-mannered, slow of foot and a picture that keeps the stakes low even as its trying to raise them, it all but invites brainstormed suggestions of “better places to take this story.”
Wes Ramsey of TV’s “General Hospital” plays a go-getter at a development company anxious to knock down an office/business strip where a palm reader resides.
When a silent little boy stows away in his SUV on one of his visits to the site, he meets that palm reader, the kid’s mother. Nina (Meera Rohit Kumbhani of the indie delight, “Dave Made a Maze”) invites him in.
“Let me give you a reading. On the house.”
Daniel is “impulsive,” she says. “Alone. No family.”
Her eyes open wider the longer she touches his hands (She’s not actually “reading” them).
“You have a spirit following you…You’ve suffered a great loss. She, you…keep her very close. Your wife!”
Daniel becomes agitated at the idea of getting this woman with “the gift” to put him in touch with his late love. Nina is reluctant. She explains the rules, that “Maggie” (Caitlin Mehner of “The Best of Enemies” and TV’s “Proven Innocent”) is “in charge.” She shows Daniel the memories she wants him to see, and “not all memories are pleasant.”
Meanwhile, silent Hugo is struggling at school, acting out and obsessively drawing Daniel’s SUV, car accidents and the like. Nina’s mother (Vee Kumari) also has “the gift.” And she keeps saying “That’s NOT Hugo!”
Nina finds herself on ethical quicksand, and Daniel’s obsession with making contact grows. And soon co-writer/director Ilana Rein’s movie is drifting from sexy flashbacks to how Daniel and Maggie met, to PG-13 love scenes from those days.
It’s when Nina loses control of her body to Maggie that the sex scenes, in the present, turn R-rated, and problematic.
Either Nina’s allowed prostitution to creep into her “healing,” or she’s really into the guy with the Paul Walker stubble, hair and jawline.
The menacing “spirit” of Maggie isn’t handled in any way that could generate frights, and the mundane unraveling of a development project is daytime TV-dull.
Kumbhani is an exotic, sympathetic presence but does little to make this character interesting or compellingly conflicted. Maybe turning her into more of a hustler i the fashion of Whoopie Goldberg in “Ghost” would have helped.
Ramsey gives it the old college try, but he doesn’t generate alarm, sympathy or fear as we watch him spiral through his own lapses and towards the nervous breakdown that precedes the “big reveal” that we’ve seen coming for an hour.
It’s a flat performance in a film that can ill afford one from its leading man, even if he does look a lot like Paul Walker.
MPAA rating: unrated, violence, sexual situations
Cast: Wes Ramsey, Meera Rohit Kumbhani, Caitlin Mehner
Credits: Directed by Ilana Rein, script by Ilana Rein, Brian Smith. A Gravitas Ventures release.
Running time: 1:42
There is no “final draft” of films any more. Let’s back engineer it to make it go with the sequel we’re releasing.
Chapter One will now slot into and set up Chapter Two.
https://t.co/f7mA7GXhbW https://twitter.com/EW/status/1156606163095629825?s=17
“Hobbs & Shaw” is an action comedy that pulls out ALL the stops. And then some.
It flollops along, cheerfully riding on the sparkling chemistry between its leads, a well-cast villain who is the epitome of “heavy,” impressive fight choreography and polished “Bourne Identity” editing, never forgetting for one second that it’s all just violent, dumb fun.
Man is it dumb. And boy, does it go on and on, lurching to a stop for the odd moment of sentiment, zinging by only when it turns the each-other’s-equal leads — Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham — loose on each other for braying trash-talk tirades.
Overlong it may be, shoehorning more of that “Fast & Furious” “family” and “home” sentimentality into an epilogue that turns into a third act AFTER the third act. It can be dull for stretches during that excessive length. But the picture rarely bores.
I will mention its ridiculous full title — “Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbes & Shaw” — just this once. Over-the-top in title, action beats and performances, you can’t exactly call it “good.” The pace, the absurd plot, the endless pauses for fan-pandering (shockingly big-name cameos) wipe that idea right out of one’s head.
But hell, it’s funnier than all the “Fast & Furious” movies preceding it, put together.
The plot involves a stolen virus that could thin the Earth’s “herd” of “weak” humans, if unleashed. A British agent (Vanessa Kirby of the last “Mission: Impossible”) kept it from the supervillain Brixton (Idris Elba), but thanks to Brixton’s media manipulating minions, the world thinks she’s the bad guy.
We need America’s best, Hobbs (Johnson), and Britain’s next-best-thing-to-Bond, Shaw (Statham) to bring her in, foil Brixton and save the world.
Pity they hate each other’s guts. Put them in a room and let the trash talk begin.
It’s “She-Hulk” this and “Mr. Arson” that, “sumbitch” versus “wanker” and a LOT more, with stuntman turned director David Leitch (“Deadpool 2”) giving us full-face/full fury close-ups of the “Wanker” and the “Sumbitch,” two near-hairless action heroes who have mastered the beady-eyed squint and the tough-guy growl as they piled up the miles, scars and wrinkles in the genre over these past 20 years.
Whatever else one thinks of the movie, you’ve got to relish this pairing.
Elba may never get to play James Bond, but when his character declares, “I’m the Black Superman,” he makes us believe it. Johnson and Statham sell the idea that, fearless as Hobbs and Shaw may be, they believe it, too.
“We’re being chased by The Terminator!”
Eddie Marsan is perfectly cast as the meek not-quite-mad scientist who is but a pawn in all this testosterony testiness.
Every cameo — I’ll only mention two to save the surprises — scores laughs. The great Helen Mirren plays somebody’s “Mum,” and the great Cliff Curtis plays somebody’s “brudda.”
Leitch knows how to stage and shoot fights, and Christian Wagner and Elisabet Rónaldsdóttir edited them into balletic brawls of the Hong Kong action style.
It all gets to be a entirely too much, and as it does it just goes on and on — stopping for the odd uncomfortable pause, piling on the put-downs, loading up on Easter Eggs tying this film to other Universal releases outside the “Furious” universe, servicing the fans and then servicing them some more. I didn’t think it would ever end.
But through all the excess, the schmaltz, the digitally-augmented fights and the practically all-digital car chases and stunts, the marvelous cast keep “Hobbs & Shaw” from totally stalling out. Call it a bad movie you can’t help but laugh at, and with, and get the extra large popcorn. You’re going to need it.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for prolonged sequences of action and violence, suggestive material and some strong language
Cast: Dwayne Johnson, Jason Statham, Idris Elba, Vanessa Kirby, Helen Mirren, Cliff Curtis
Credits: Directed by David Leich, script by Chris Morgan and Drew Pearce. A Universal release.
Running time: 2:15
Co-stars in this film about a hitman who might have been involved in taking out Jimmy Hoffa include Anna Paquin, Harvey Keitel, Bobby Cannavale and Ray Romano?
“The Irishman” feels a little “old men playing young toughs,” but maybe the gravitas these Scorsese vets bring will compensate for that. Coming to select theaters, and then Netflix, this fall.
Let’s start with a couple of givens. Any time I channel surf by “Jackie Brown” I stop. It is Tarantino’s best film. Still.
I enjoyed the suspenseful interrogations of “Basterds,” and little else, the minimalism and edge of “Reservoir Dogs.” Hated “Hateful” and “Django.”
And I always enjoy those trademark pop culture riffing monologues and dialogues, “your father’s watch” and “Royale with cheese,” the Tim Roth/Amanda Plummer open in “Pulp.” “Sicilians” in “”True Romance.”
So, not a hater and I didn’t “hate” “Once Upon a Time…”
But there is a lot to irritate and make you roll your eyes at and grind your teeth about if you’re not swooning over the recreation of 1969 LA like too many critics to count. Nostalgia is overrated.
Things I hated?
1) Where IS that signature Tarantino dialogue/monologue? It’s not the dizzy Pitt/Dern duologue (talking at cross purposes). The TV director Sam Wanamaker-Rick Dalton pep talks were good, but nothing you will ever quote aside from “You’re better than that.” It’s not in the Pacino/Pitt/DiCaprio scene. Little of the dialogue in this picture can hold a tune, much less “sing.”
2) The voice-over narration. Kurt Russell reading it or not, it plays like a “We need to make sense of the narrative, need to excuse the lame third act leap forward in time.” It’s crap, lazy filmmaking to boot.
3) The Sharon Tate as “The Marion Davies of Her Day,” an underrated comedienne, thesis. Davies was the comic actress and Hearst mistress slandered by Orson Welles in “Citizen Kane.” As the scenes from “The Wrecking Crew” sampled here show, Tate was an awkward and obvious actress — not quite amateurish, not exactly skilled at even the basics. Tarantino had already inserted Rick Dalton into “The Great Escape.” He might have sold his Tate thesis had he parked Robbie in “The Wrecking Crew.” She can act. And like Tarantino, I liked Dean Martin Matt Helm movies…when I was 8. They’re garbage. Tate didn’t deserve her fate, but her savviest career move was marrying that creep Polanski. Which accidentally sealed her fate.
4) Pointless jump cuts. How very “French New Wave/Nouvelle Vague” of him.
5) Women’s feet, the dirtier the better.
6) Endless, overlong driving shots. In his mythic La La Land, LA had no smog and none of the traffic that created it. Just vintage cars weaving in and out of the sparse other vintage motors at their unhurried leisure. It sets the pace of the picture, which is funereal.
7) Slurping. Everybody slurps. And don’t get me started on the endless throat-clearing. Excusing your own gaucherie, QT?
8) Shortchanging The Spaghetti Western experience that Rick dives into. A third act afterthought? Oh yeah. That’ll be in the FOUR hour cut of the picture.
9) Over-accuracy in recreating the mass production junk that was the Golden Age of TV Westerns. Close your eyes and just listen to “Lancer” scenes as they are performed. I did when I dropped back in on an hour or so of the film, hearing it anew on second viewing. This is dreadful, tin-eared horse opera scribbling. Luke Perry, BTW? Rest in peace, but God, he looks uncomfortable and sounds out of place here, an actor in the “pilot” who’d be recast if the show is picked up?
10) Slandering the memory of Bruce Lee. He wasn’t the saint portrayed in Rob Cohen’s “Dragon,” but I’ve never run across any suggestion he was a late 60s Hollywood douche. Having old white guy stunt conservative Cliff Booth “teach him a lesson” is laughable, reactionary and maybe a little racist. Conservative fans of the picture eat that up, along with the harsh treatment of women and “hippies.”
Tarantino, breaking with the rest of Hollywood, which is kowtowing to the Chinese market and Chinese money? Is that why he did it?
That “ending” is worth its own “ten things I hated” all by itself, but I’ll leave that where it is. I dare say a BIG chunk of the audience seeing “Once Upon a Time…” won’t know much about the Manson Family (putting Lena Dunham in there seems so…apt) and Tate-LaBianca murders, and won’t be curious enough to learn the truth. Hollywood has always bastardized history, but I am NOT a fan of “Inglourious Basterdized” history. At all. In an era of fake news, burlesque fake history like this not quite the assault on the facts as proven that say “J.F.K.” was. But it doesn’t help.
People calling this the director’s “masterpiece” have probably been saying this for movie after movie since “Jackie Brown.” “Jackie Brown” is the one picture that still plays, and still deserves that label.
Emma Roberts, Amy Madigan, Betty Gilpin and nine others wake up in the woods, ready to be hunted. Or not ready.
A taste of “The Most Dangerous Game?” Sept.27, we will find out.
I can’t help but notice that a lot of movies that either make no noise in theaters or don’t even warrant a theatrical release find fresh “new” titles when they make their way to Netflix.
Thus, “#SquadGoals” evolves into “Deadly Scholars” on the streaming service.
It’s a tricky-enough but drably executed serial-killer-in-high-school thriller that flirts with issues of press freedom, official coverups, police indifference and callous classmates on its way to resolution it only half earns.
“#SquadGoals” is the name of a blog enterprising teen reporter Samantha (Kennedy Lea Slocum of TV’s “The Kids are Alright” and “The Real O’Neals”) runs at Westbrook High. It’s all about the seniors, as is her effort to interview every single “squad” member for the yearbook before graduation.
She’s a bit of a budding theater critic, too. She and snarky photographer friend Nate (Corey Fogelmanis of “Ma”) are all set to enjoy — or talk smack about — the school’s “Romeo & Juliet.”
“Angela IS Juliet! She plays comatose really well!”
But that retching that dreamy Romeo does after taking the same poison that brought down his love? That’s not acting. Dude dies right there on the stage.
It’s the first “mysterious” death at the charter school. And the red alert control-freakout Principal Pope (Sherri Saum) goes into afterwards — “No one is to talk to the media” — convinces Sam that even if the cops aren’t suspicious, maybe she should be.
“That’s something you say when you’re trying to cover something up…My Spidey sense is tingling.”
“Twin Peaks” alumna Sheryl Lee plays Sam’s mom, the school’s mental health (grief) counselor, ineffectual, and constantly bullied by the “I want to know FIRST” damage controlling principal.
Sam, Nate and pal Rudy (Peyton Clark), smart kids all up for the same big scholarship, decide to dig into things on their own.
Because the first death in the “squad” isn’t the last.
There’s mystery without a lot of suspense, as we’re tipped far too obviously and far too early as to what might be playing out. The script doesn’t play fair in a few cringe-worthy ways, the “surprises” feel random.
How can you tell a movie is malnourished in production money? Cheerleaders’ cheers that don’t seem choreographed. Or rehearsed. A psychology teacher who doesn’t know how to pronounce “grandiosity” and doesn’t get a second take to get it right.
Because nobody else on the set does, either. Actors.
The whole enterprise is more “Murder She Wrote” rerun than bonafied “dead teenager movie.” The deaths, save for Romeo’s, are poorly handled and barely set up at all.
Nobody really “has it coming.” t
And the budding teen romance is undone by the hints that maybe the guy character we’re pairing with the girl character is more into other guys.
I’ve seen worse, but then, I see everything. Maybe this is one you want to skip.
MPAA Rating: TV-14
Cast: Sheryl Lee, Paris Berelc, Kennedy Lea Slocum, Alexa Mansour, Eric Stanton Betts, Corey Fogelmanis , Sherri Saum
Credits” Directed by Danny J. Boyle, script by Caron Tschampion. A Marvista/Netflix release.
Running time: 1:27
“Cold Case Hammarskjöld” is a documentary that invites the viewer down another rabbit hole with the quixotic Danish filmmaker Mads Brügger.
His “Red Chapel” was a playful plunge behind the bamboo curtain in North Korea, with Brügger and an accomplice posing as two Danish comedians on a cultural exchange mission, rooking the Koreans into letting them see what their isolated, repressive state was really like.
Here, Brügger plays an investigative journalist. He tags along for six years in the quest of an amateur sleuth as they try to discover what really happened when crusading do-gooder U.N. Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld‘s plane went down on the border of Congo and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in September of 1961.
The two hour+ film Brügger carved out of this detours into vast conspiracies and stony official silences that reek of “cover-up,” of the Africa of Angola and assassination, AIDS genocide and white supremacy, Mozambique and mining corporation-backed murders — at the highest level.
Early on, he shows us the gear he and Göran Björkdahl, the son of a man who collected a piece of Hammarskjöld’s plane that he passed on to him, are packing to take to Ndola, the remote airport where Hammarskjöld’s plane crashed. Two shovels, two white pith helmets “to protect our pale Scandinavian skin” from the African sun, and two Cuban cigars for when they “celebrate” digging up the plane and finding the “smoking gun” that makes their case.
It’s not a spoiler to say Brügger lights up the cigars. What the viewer has to do is decide if this dogged but credulous and easily sidetracked filmmaker should ever have struck the match.
“I know for a fact that the villain of this story, he only wore white,” he says by way of introduction. His conceit for how he presents his evidence, how he and Björkdahl feel confident in naming names and reaching conclusions, is by telling the story of the film in two hotel rooms.
In Cape Town, South Africa and Kinshasa, Congo, the director/narrator/provocateur dresses in white to emulate “the villain” and dictates his tale to a couple of African secretaries typing on old fashioned manual typewriters.
It is either “the world’s biggest murder mystery or the world’s most idiotic conspiracy theory,” he admits, addressing them, us and the wall he’s covered with a documentary filmmakers’ friend — Post-it notes.
He uses animation to recreate the crash and scenes his assorted witnesses describe. Brügger and Björkdahl travel over much of Southern Africa, interviewing surviving black African witnesses (who were ignored or discounted at the time), fleshing out the life’s work of Hammarskjöld, lauded as “The world’s first ‘public servant,'” at one memorial service.
Brügger notes the ways the U.N. and South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission have come out and said they’re pretty sure Hammarskjöld was assassinated. They gather names, lists, address books and documents from a shadowy enterprise called the South African Institute for Maritime Research.
And every so often, a secretary — Saphir or Kerryn — will stand up for the film and for the viewer with an interruption of this meandering, teased out tale.
“That’s a lot of names. I’m confused,” one woman will complain.
“Are you going to talk about the deeper story? About Apartheid” the South African Kerryn will ask.
At another point, Saphir leans back from the typewriter as if she’s solved a puzzle.
So that’s “why this became fiction,” she declares!
The frustrated Brügger mutters, “This is not fiction. This is a documentary
But is it? Really?
At several points, anybody with any experience of the law or journalism will see how credulous these two are in the ways they decide who is credible and who is “lying.”
Showing a key witness a hand-written “fictional” memoir by that named “villain” and saying, “This is his handwriting, right?” is laughable.
So is the lone phone chat they have with this American “Rambo” like figure who might be connected with what happened. “Go find out who killed Kennedy,” he jokes. “Do something important!”
Then there’s the Ndola airport official who says they can dig there for the buried plane wreckage. They want “all of it?”
“But…you only have two shovels!”
What isn’t funny is the fact that suddenly, permission is dig up that wreckage is yanked. It’s not funny that British Intelligence and the U.S. CIA won’t release information they have — transcripts of a fighter pilot’s chatter intercepted that night, etc.
And seeing Hammarskjöld’s bloodied body, with what looks like a playing card tucked under his collar (A CIA calling card?), recognizable when mysteriously every other body in the crash was burnt to a crisp, perhaps to hide bullet holes from a fighter jet?
The most credible witnesses who knew the Belgian mercenary fighter pilot in question, the pilot’s widow who blurts out, “Oh, not that Hammarskjöld nonsense again” when they ambush her?
Yes, we can believe that powerful people, rapacious capitalists and their Cold Warrior allies wanted this guardian of young African democracies silenced. The CIA was particularly assassination happy back then.
At some point, tumbling into the white supremacist subterfuge of Apartheid Era South Africa, Brügger loses the thread, or at least introduces too much information to himself and to the movie.
Sometimes, just a chapter heading will suffice — “Chapter XII, The Evil that White Men Do.”
In the end, perhaps it is less important that “Cold Case Hammarskjöld” finds or doesn’t find its “smoking gun,” or that it makes or doesn’t make its case beyond a reasonable doubt.
Even if he’s not a journalist — he’s playing one, much as he played a Libyan Ambassador to poke around in the “blood diamond” trade in “The Ambassador” — Brügger forces us to remember an almost-forgotten crusader and compells us to wonder just what is being kept from us by government agencies who know where the bodies are buried, and who — back then — provided the shovels.
MPAA Rating: unrated
Cast: Mads Brügger, Göran Björkdahl, Dag Hammarskjöld
Credits: Written and directed by Mads Brügger. A Magnolia release.
Running time: 2:04
Movie Nation 