Movie Nation

“The Keeping Room” is a self-consciously gritty and minimalist female empowerment thriller that could have just been three pretty actresses getting down and Scarlett O’Hara dirty in the waning days of the Civil War.
But those three players transcend this picture’s arty trappings and deliver a taut (somewhat) and violent period piece not afraid to punch the viewer in the gut.
In South Carolina, in the last months of the war, Augusta (Brit Marling), her sister Louise (Hailee Steinfeld of “True Grit”) and their maid Mad (Muna Otaru of “Lions for Lambs”) struggle to eek out subsistence on the farm. The land has been emptied of healthy men, and women are starving or worse all around them. The isolation means they have no one to turn to for help. The lack of news makes them wonder how far beyond the horizon their horror extends.
“What if it’s the end of the world, and we’re the last one’s left?”
Louise is young and somewhat simple. Mad has an inkling that the old order has overturned. And even if it hasn’t, in this desperate situation, the mistress-slave relationship is finished.
Every man is a threat, especially the two murderous Yankee deserters (Sam Worthington and Kyle Soller) we’ve met in the opening scenes. Anarchy has set in, and when they get wind of these women and their plight, the worst is on its way.
“It’s our home,” Augusta drawls, knowing that “We” means her, and with luck, Mad. “We gon’ have to fight.”
For a story politically out-of-step in post-Confederate Flag America, “Keeping Room” is surprisingly affecting.
Marling’s runway-ready beauty is rawboned here, and she gets across an impressively hard-won competence as Augusta. She may have had her “Fiddle dee dee” years, but the war has forced her to take on every job a man had to do there. Marling (“The East”, “Arbitrage”) is becoming a brand-name that you look for in the credits of any indie drama you hope might be worth watching.
Steinfeld’s Louise is also a “type,” but Otaru’s Mad is harder to read — a woman whose loyalty is being tested daily, who may be wondering if she has any choice about staying or fleeing.
Director Daniel Barber, who made the similarly lean and mean “Harry Brown” with Michael Caine, stages the confrontation with the marauders with blood, and without much pity. Worthington suggests menace with a hint of humanity, but Soller is pure brown-teeth evil playing a man war has turned into a murderous opportunist, without compassionate cell in his body.
The “Survivor” elements which drive the middle of the film — the mundane tasks that women with little livestock and little experience in farming must accomplish to feed themselves — drag a bit. But the finale Barber and actress-turned-screenwriter Julia Hart deliver is righteously, remorselessly satisfying.

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence including a sexual assault

Cast: Brit Marling, Muna Otaru, Sam Worthington, Hailee Steinfeld,
Credits: Directed by Daniel Barber, script by Julia Hart.

A Drafthouse release.

Running time: 1:35

Let’s parse these Tomatometer numbers on “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.,” an August thriller (as in, not good enough to land an audience in the more competitive May-July window) if ever there was one.

I mean, it’s blandly amusing, here and there. But 66% positive reviews? WTHey?

My theory? The British critics have tilted this one into positive territory. There are pans from The Daily Mail and Radio Times, but endorsements from The Daily Telegraph, Empire Magazine, Independent, The London Times, The BBC, assorted others. Overwhelmingly positive reviews from Guy Ritchie, Henry Cavill, Hugh Grant and Jared Harris’ countrymen.

The wankers.
There are Toronto Sun and a Toronto Globe & Mail endorsements. Canadians wish they were Brits.  And the usual collection of Aussie raves. Fox, owned by an Aussie, typically opens its movies there — reliable, Fosters Drunk lapdogs, their critics are. In the bag for the Warner Brothers Brit-pix, too. Apparently.

Nobody’s a bigger Anglophile than me. Love that ’60s vibe and design. IN THE TV COMMERCIALS. The movie doesn’t do much to deliver that. Different songs, slower pacing (naturally), not enough vintage cars from that Cold War era. Miscast in several regards. Will anybody see it?

As usual, Metacritic betters that imbalance by design. A more select group sampling, a lower score. Leave out the Brits, Canucks and Bruces and Sheilas, get to the meat of the matter.The “Straight Outta Compton” endorsements are easier to understand. It’s too long and more conventional than artistic. But it’s a good example of the bio-pic form, inferior to “Notorious” or “Walk the Line,” on a par with “Get on Up.”

Everybody loves Greta Gerwig, so “Mistress America,” her teaming with beau Noah Baumbach, scores.

http://www.mrqe.com “People Places Things,” A slight rom-com with him playing a forlorn comic book author, earns a pass from film reviewers, far and wide. Yeah, the Kiwis went for him, but there aren’t enough of them to tilt reviews into positive territory.

Lesser films opening today include “Big Sky,” a watchaby predictable B-movie (thriller), “Amnesiac,” a failed teaming between Kate Bosworth and her man, one of the directing Polish brothers.

The deadpan charms of Kiwi comic Jemaine Clements are the chief recommendation of “People Places Things,” a droll New York romantic comedy that feels like 240 indie rom-coms that preceded it.
Not that it doesn’t have its novelties. OK, novelty. That would be Clement, and his character — Will Henry.
Will’s a failing graphic novelist. OK, as he admits, “comic book” writer-illustrator, thus settling that semantic dodge once and for all.
He walks in on his blame-him-for-everything girlfriend (Stephanie Allynne) having sex at their twin daughters’ fifth birthday party.
“You pushed me into this!”
That inspires Will’s epiphany.
“Happiness is not really a sustainable condition.”
A year later, he’s splitting custody of the kids while the ex plans her future with the unscrupulous lump (Michael Chernus of “Orange is the New Black”) she was in flagrante delicto  with back at the birthday party.
Will is depressed, not that his “How to Create a Graphic Novel” class has a lot of sympathy. They’re scratching their heads over his “Why Does Life Suck So Hard?” on the blackboard, his lack of enthusiasm for…everything.
“I’m OK. Just having a hard life. It’ll all be over…eventually.”
But a student (Jessica Williams of “The Daily Show”) takes pity and tries to fix him up with her mom (Regina Hall of the “Think Like a Man” movies). A big problem? Mom teaches REAL literature at Columbia, a REAL university. She’s not sold on what her daughter wants to do for a living, and what Will dares to compare to the fiction she teaches. That makes for a testy first and possibly last date.
But it’s a romantic comedy, so we know they’ll figure out someway past their failed “meet cute” moments.

If you ever wonder why so many indie romances are set in New York in the summer, “People Places Things” lays it all out for you. Mostly TV actors, in New York, on hiatus between seasons of their shows, people this movie and scads like it. Not that this is a failing, but it’s the easiest sort of movie to sell an actor on making in a short period of time between bread-and-butter jobs.

Writer-director James C. Strouse (“Grace is Gone”) fills in the 85 minutes around that conventional plotline with some clever and informative stuff about visual storytelling in comic book — sorry, “Graphic Novel” — form. Clement pulls off these classroom scenes — the students are a grab bag of comic book nerd cliches, with a few hotties thrown in — and makes us buy into the worthiness of the conventions of comic book writing.
That helps, because Diane (Hall) seems to abandon her closely-held principles about what constitutes “literature” rather abruptly. And it ain’t because the guy is dashing, clever, clean-shaven and rich. Will is none of these.
But he’s a wonderful dad and an empathetic soul, too sensitive for the ex who keeps pushing him around and controlling his future. He gives her way too much credit in the breakup.
“She just stopped talking, and I enjoyed the silent too much.”
Clement, of “Flight of the Conchords” and “Dinner for Schmucks,” dials the daffy down for a performance that is more vulnerable than hilarious. But he holds this slight comedy together — the women in it, from the kids to the paramours, are here to just make him credible — and makes it worth watching.

MPAA Rating: R for language including some sexual references, and brief nudity

Cast: Jemaine Clement, Regina Hall, Stephanie Allynne, Jessica Williams
Credits: Written and directed by James C. Strouse. A Film Arcade release.

Running time: 1:27

Greta Gerwig has the title role in the manic and maniacally funny “Mistress America,” a chatty, shrewdly observant comedy about a New York/social media “type” anybody with a cell phone will recognize.
Tracy (Lola Kirke of “Gone Girl”) certainly has. She’s a frustrated writer-wannabe who hasn’t cracked the literary circles of elite Barnard College. But her mother (Kathryn Erbe) is about to marry a guy with a 30 year-old daughter living in New York. That’s how Tracy meets Brooke (Gerwig).
Brooke is a blonde whirlwind of positivity, a self-educated self-described polymath. She coaches a spin class, tutors middle school kids, gets up on stage and sings with a band and is well on her way to launching a conceptual restaurant she will call “Moms’, possessive.”
She flits from passion to passing fancy, never quite following through but supremely confident in all she does. Her special skill? Drawing a crowd.
“I keep the hearth. That’s a word, right? Hearth?”
Tracy is “Baby Tracy,” to Brooke. And the lonely but cute coed is utterly smitten with this Holly Golightly she’d love to have breakfast at Tiffany’s with. Brooke isn’t just a cool older-sister-to-be. She’s material, fodder for a writer.
“Her youth had died,” she narrates into a short story, “and she was dragging around the rotting carcass.”
In 80 or so brisk minutes, Brooke consults her spirit advisor, gets locked out of her “zoned commercial” Times Square apartment, faces the end of her dreams and hilariously confronts a nemesis (Heather Lind) she insists stole her cats, her future husband and her first big business idea from her.
Gerwig, who helped invent the talk-and-nothing-but “mumblecore” genre, has become the muse to director Noah Baumbach (“While We’re Young”), and this film is a fusion of their styles. Brooke is a fascinating, exhausting character with a dizzy patter, which she’s happy to share with Tracy and her college freshman peers.
“There is no ‘cheating’ when you’re 18! You should all be touching each other all the time!”
With all its Baumbach and Gerwig mumblecore underpinnings, “Mistress America” is Baumbach’s version of a Wes Anderson comedy. Strip away the gaudy colors, snippets of animation and earnest loopiness and you get lots of witty banter, breathlessly delivered by an engaging cast of believable and unbelievably glib characters.
And Brooke? We don’t have to know her to “know” her. There she is on Gawker or Wonkette or Perez Hilton’s websites, flighty, attention-grabbing and cute. For just as long as she can drag that carcass of her youth around with her.

MPAA Rating: R for language including some sexual references

Cast: Greta Gerwig, Lola Kirke, Kathryn Erbe
Credits: Directed by Noah Baumbach, script by Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach. A Fox Searchlight release.

Running time: 1:26

You’re gut shot, left alone to bleed out and die in the desert.
And the only person who can save you is your teenage daughter, who suffers from agoraphobia so crippling she’s barely been out of doors in her entire life.
That’s the killer set-up for “Big Sky,” a well-cast but alternately loopy and overly-predictable thriller starring Kyra Sedgwick (“The Closer”) as the mother and Bella Thorne (“The DUFF,””Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day”) is the daughter in Jorge Michel Grau’s film.
They’re on their way to a sanitarium when two hijackers/hit-men dressed as cops (Frank Grillo and Aaron Tveit) ambush them.
Hazel (Thorne) was cowering, covered up in the enclosed luggage bay of the van, only hearing the violence that errupts when her fierce mama almost gets the drop on the weak link in the bad guy chain. That would be “Pru” (Tveit), who seems as mentally off as Hazel. Others in the van are killed.
The mayhem ends, Mom is left to die, and Hazel must hold back the crazy long enough to hike out and get help, to separate those who can really help them from other loons in the desert.
Grau, working from a seemingly compartmentalized script by Evan M. Wiener, skips back and forth in time and in points of view, half-explaining why Hazel and mother Dee were on their way into the desert and why the murderous brothers were lying in wait for them.
The direction is flashier than the writing, something you might expect from a filmmaker most famous for doing a sequence from the omnibus horror film “The ABCs of Death.”
Thorne plays the difficult, fearful and over-ripe teen with ease, and Sedgwick does what she can with her few decent scenes.
But thanks in part to that very promising set-up, “Big Sky” ends up going pretty much where you expect. That’s very B-movie, and somewhat satisfying in its own way. But this thing is one rewrite away from being something we’d remember.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Bella Thorne, Kyra Sedgwick, Frank Grillo, Aaron Tveit
Credits: Directed by Jorge Michel Grau, script by Evan M. Wiener.

An eOne release.

Running time: 1:30

There’s nothing inherently wrong with treating that semi-campy 1960s TV spy series “The Man from U.N.C.L.E” as a lark, and the two agents in it as the original “Ambigiously Gay Duo.”
But Guy “Sherlock Holmes” Ritchie doesn’t have the touch in this miscast, comically thin and cutesie spy caper comedy.
It’s filled with a Who’s Who of “Not Quite Made Its,” from Henry Cavill (a middling Superman) to Armie Hammer (funnier here than as The Lone Ranger). The wonderful Alicia Vikander (“Ex Machina,” “Testament of Youth”) shows no flair for comedy as “the love interest, and no credibility as a tough cookie.
And not a dime was spent on villains, leaving a gaping chasm in the middle of this slow-footed romp through ’60s spy games.
Cavill is American thief turned spy Napoleon Solo, forced to join forces with his Soviet counterpart, Ilya Kuryakin, to foil some ex-Nazis trying to get their hands on The Bomb.
First, they have to “meet cute,” though. Solo must help the daughter of a scientist (Vikander) escape from East Berlin, with Kuryakin, referred to as “a giant” by his peers, “The Red Peril” by Solo, trying to stop them.
It’s 1963, post-Missile Crisis, a time of hats and trench coats and the finest clunker cars the former Soviet bloc could muster.
Kuryakin must pose as Gaby, the girl’s, fiance, and hide his mad dog fighting skills. Or “skeels.”
“Ees not the Russian way,” he purrs, avoiding fights as the conspirators “test” him to make sure he is who he says he is — “Soviet architect.”
Solo, given a nice perfectly coiffed deadpan by Cavill, is nicknamed “Cowboy,” but has little funny to say — save for the scattered bits of sexual innuendo.
“I’ll take the top!”
“I’ll be the BOTTOM!”
Elizabeth Debicki is the female second tier mastermind for the Forces of Evil, and like Vikander, is supermodel thin and yet supposed to be tough and scary.
A torture scene comes off well, Hugh Grant is on-the-nose as the Brit who intervenes in all this Russo-American cooperation. Jared Harris (a feeble Moriarty in Ritchie’s “Sherlock Holmes”) is the CIA boss whose Cold Warrior ethos he sums up in a sentence.
“Inside every Kraut is an AMERICAN tryin’ to get out!”
But the laughs are too few and the tone just a tad off. Ritchie tries to cover the dead spots by filling the soundtrack with obscure ’60s Europop and a point-missing cover of Gene McDaniels’ scalding jazz protest tune, “Compared to What?” Ritchie’s narrow field of view is exacerbated by his all-British (save for Hammer, Vikander) casting.
It’s not so much bad as dull and ill-conceived. It doesn’t so much end as sputter out.
And dropped in the dead zone of August, “U.N.C.L.E” doesn’t harken a new franchise either. We say “Uncle” long before Ritchie does.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for action violence, some suggestive content, and partial nudity | See all certifications

Cast: Henry Cavill, Alicia Vikander, Armie Hammer, Hugh Grant,Elizabeth Debicki
Credits: Directed by Guy Ritchie, script by Guy Ritchie and Lionel Wigram. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 1:56

The once-promising Michael Polish of the once-promising Polish Brothers (“North Fork”) directed his wife, Kate Bosworth, in “Amnesiac.” And the only memorable thing about this middling thriller is its resemblance to its betters, from “Misery” to “Before I Go to Sleep.”
The pretty but almost-always monotonous Bosworth stars as a woman caring for a man who has just come out of a coma.
That’s what we call her, “Woman.” And him (Wes Bentley)? “Man.”
There was a car accident, and judging from the car, it happened in the pre-seatbelt ’60s. A daughter (Olivia Rose Keegan) was involved. Was she killed?
The man awakens in a hospital bed in what looks like a darkened, empty ballroom. And there’s this woman standing over him. Who is she?
“I’m your wife, and I’m gonna make you all better!”
He’s got “temporary memory loss,” she tells him. Not that he remembers that. Or the memories she flings at him, “kissing me by the creek. You don’t remember?”
“I want to.”
Hey, she’s Kate Bosworth. We get it. Who wouldn’t want to remember that?
There are flickers of old home movies, and clues litter the setting and his mind. Is she who she says she is, or is this something more sinister? Hint, she keeps sedating him. Another hint, check out that studio-provided still photo. There’s little mystery to the spoiler alerts here.
The look is hazy, a film shot in the washed-out colors and gauzy light of eight millimeter filmed home movies. But “Amnesiac” takes a good 30 minutes to get past a dull, quiet and forlorn prologue to set us up for what it might deliver, but pretty much doesn’t. Bentley has morphed into a version of Jake Gyllenhaal who doesn’t elicit excitement or empathy. He works a lot in this corner of no-budget filmdom, and generally the films don’t do him any favors, or vice versa. Bosworth doesn’t have far to go in dialing down the emotions for this character, and that’s been the story of her career, for the most part. Where’s that supporting role on a cable series that she might be suited for?
Most people would give up on it if they stumbled across it on Netflix, and the payoff certainly justifies that abandonment. If you’ve read this far, you probably didn’t, and more’s the pity.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence

Cast: Kate Bosworth, Wes Bentley, Olivia Rose Keegan, Shashawnee Hall
Credits: Directed by Michael Polish, script by Amy Kolquist, Mike Le. An XLRator Media release.

Running time: 1:30