Movie Nation

“Saving Zoë” deserves praise for the business savvy of its stars and producers, Vanessa Marano and her younger sister Laura Marano.

They had the foresight to get the rights to an Alyson Noel novel about a younger sibling trying to figure out what happened to her dead sister. Even if they were years away from graduating from kiddie TV — “Austin & Ally” and Netflix’s “The Perfect Date” for Laura, “Boys are Stupid: Girls are Mean,” “Switched at Birth” and “The Dead Girls Detective Agency” for Vanessa — this R-rated project had the potential to help them move on from kids’ roles into more adult fare.

And if it doesn’t quite achieve “moving,” even if they’re not quite up to carrying it, TV acting habits being hard to break and all, even if they’re upstaged by the actress with the showiest role — Giorgia Whigham plays a broken, guilt-ridden party girl and friend of the deceased — “Saving Zoë” has a hint of the risk they figured was worth taking with it.

Younger sister Echo (Laura Marano) is the one left behind, no big sister to guide her through that first day at Lincoln/Carter High in suburban Ohio (actually, Augusta, Georgia).

But actually, big sister is, assuring her “Everything’s going to be OK” as they share a makeup mirror.

Mom (Whitney Goin) is a wreck on her “zombie meds.” Dad’s practically living at the office.

And everybody on the bus hits Echo with that pinched embarrassed “You poor thing” look, as if she’s just punched them.

It doesn’t matter that she sees big sis is on the bus a few rows in front of her, or striding confidently down the halls with her. Nobody else sees Zoë, because she’s dead.

“I just want to say how sorry I am, about Zoe.”

As Echo tells her BFF (Annie Jacob), “There’s awkward, and then there’s this.”

Hearing that “Eventually, everybody’s going to move on,” is cold comfort.

Marc (Chris Tavarez), the dead girl’s boyfriend, was cleared of her murder. Even though  Zoë’s body was found in his car, even though he was the last one to see her alive.

The family shrink (Ken Jeong) isn’t helping Mom or Dad (Jason Davis), and his questions about how Echo felt “stuck in Zoë’s shadow” don’t do Echo any good at all.

The one classmate who treats her openly and emotionally is the dead sister’s friend, Carly (Whigham), who calls her “Baby Sister” when she’s not so plastered she confuses Echo for her sister. And when she’s confused, all she does is apologize to her.

Echo gets her hands on Zoë’s diary and cozies up to Carly, because whatever the trial of her confessed killer told her about her sister’s death, she’s starting to figure out she didn’t know her sister, and that Carly knows more than she told the cops.

Veteran TV camera operator turned director Jeffrey G. Hunt and the screenwriters tell this story in that conventional “dead girl tale” way. Vanessa Marano narrates Zoë’s last months of life, and acts out the romance, pitfalls, hopes and dreams of a pretty girl who expected her looks to take her far,  “modeling, or acting, anything to get me out of this dump.”

“Someday, everybody’s going to know my name!”

“Saving Zoë” lumbers through the narrative conventions of such stories, hitting the occasional lurid note — Echo’s first trip with “Molly,” Zoë’s sex life, and the dark sexual pitfalls she stumbled into in pursuit of “everybody’s going to know my name!”

But the picture has a stolid competence about it that it never rises above, with Netflix-ready teen titillation written all over it. Netflix is the Lifetime Network of teen sex comedies and dramas.

The sibling leads are professionals, but don’t have the chops to make us ache for Zoë’s fate or fear for Echo’s.

Only Whigham, bleary-eyed and lurching from high-to-grief-stricken, makes much of an impression. She’s good enough to make you wish she had a younger sister (she’s the daughter of top drawer character actor Shea Whigham) to pair up with for this.

MPAA Rating: R for disturbing violence/rape, nudity, language, drug use, drinking, and brief sexuality – all involving teens

Cast: Laura Marano, Giorgia Whigham, Vanessa Marano, Ken Jeong

Credits: Directed by Jeffrey G. Hunt, script by Brian J. Adams and LeeAnne H. Adams, based on the Alyson Noel novel.  A Blue Fox Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:35

“Lying and Stealing” is a caper comedy that works.

It’s just clever enough, passably witty, with a very cinematic milieu — high end “gray market” art theft — and ably carried off by Theo James, Emily Ratajkowski, Isiah Whitlock Jr. and Fred Melamed.

No, none of them are household names — save for Ratajkowski, who is not known for her acting. But they share the load and make this “Thomas Crown Affair Lite” a pleasant ride.

James, of the “Divergent” series, shows off tall, cool handsome elegance thing he brings to your movie with good effect as Ivan, an art-savvy art thief who can pull off the five day stubble with a tuxedo look that makes him look like he “belongs.”

Fits right in with the gay art collecting couple’s cocktail party in honor of their favorite poet, in other words. Ivan makes his living “robbing the wealthy — cavalier, entitled and unsuspecting.”

We see him unplugging security cameras downstairs, swiping from the hosts’ (LA) wine cellar and pass it off as his “gift” to the party that he plainly was invited to. Only not.

Wait, there’s a Jeff Koons stainless steel rabbit statue! Out come the gloves, the inflatable rabbit replacement, and “Russell” gets to work.

That’s one of the minor glories of director/co-writer Matt Aselton’s film. He gets the heists right. And they’re always of “name” artists — “The Nose” by Alberto Giacometti is considered, Modigliani is left on the wall, Egon Schiele is just too, too tempting. But portable?

Smart thrillers always reward the viewer who knows a little something about the subject area they’re immersed in.

But that’s the party where Russell, as he calls himself, runs into Marguerite (Ratajkowski). They “meet cute”  (not really).

“Is that your real name?”

“Of course.”

“Really?”

“Noooo.”

She’s sexy, salty, “an actress” given to asking a lot of questions and showing just enough skin. She’s sizing him up, but he and we are in the dark as to what her deal is.

Ivan has a Mr. Big, Dmitri, who commissions the thefts and explains his relationship with Ivan in a single sentence.

“Your father was into me for quite a bit.”

Melamed, used to great effect in comedies such as “A Serious Man,” “Hail, Caesar!” and “In a World…” brings a warm, urbane touch to this obese, sophisticated thug.

“You have to make hay while the sun shines!” Pity they made him Greek, as he’s the perfect actor (a voice-over veteran) to recite the Yiddish proverb that opens “Lying and Stealing.”

“When a thief kisses you, count your teeth.”

Isiah Whitlock Jr. is an amusing “shaking farts out of sheets” deadpan F.B.I. agent sniffing around these thefts, and Ebon Moss-Brachrach plays Ivan’s bipolar/addict brother, perhaps one character/plot-device too many, but he has his function here.

“Lying” is mostly watching Ivan pose as limo drivers, “art consulants” and “boyfriends” as he scoots around High End LA, and into the Sierra Nevadas and Santa Anita racetrack in his ’80s Buick Grand National (black, of course), planning or carrying out his next burglary.

We and Ivan puzzle out Elyse (Ratajkowski) and what game she’s up to, popping on a new wig, primping for the next party where she’ll stumble into Ivan as they rub shoulders with the folks he’s about to rob.

Ivan doesn’t see Elyse taking pains to hide the price tag on the new party dress inside the zipper, with the camera ogling her form — in slow motion — as she checks out her appearance and slips into the ancient diesel Mercedes she drives to these soirees.

Yeah, filmmakers can be a bit sexist that way. But give the people what they want, right?

The banter waxes and wanes a tad more than I’d like. And yes, “Lying and Stealing,” being a genre picture, is the 14,764th “one last job” movie.

But somewhere around the time Ivan shows us how to spirit a Philip Guston painting off the security-alarmed wall, out of its frame and into the lining of his tux jacket, I just went with it.

I think you will, too.

MPAA Rating:R for language, some sexual content/nudity, violence and drug use

Cast: Theo James, Emily Ratajkowski, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Fred Melamed

Credits: Directed by Matt Aselton, script by Matt Aselton and Adam Nagata. A Vertical Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:40

“Desolate” describes the setting, an American Southwest even drier and more lawless than it is today.

“Desolate” is what we get when climate change has killed off farming, chased away those with options and left only the desperate, law-unto-themselves clans and criminals in the vast arid vistas.

And “Desolate” is a lean thriller set in that apocalyptic not-that-distant future, a world where, as our narrator/hero Billy (Will Brittain) intones, it didn’t take long “for us to turn on each other. Oh how we did.”

“Around here, people either get erased or forgotten.”

This Hell, of blood feuds, violence, sex trafficking and despair?

“We did this to ourselves,” Billy says, farm country ruined by those who farmed it and the politicians who convinced them there was no such thing as climate change.

The Stones are among the holdouts, and when one of their number is murdered by the neighboring Turners, the patriarch (James Russo) has one order for the surviving Stone Brothers (Brittain, Bill Tangradi, Tyson Ritter and actor/screenwriter Jonathan Rosenthal).

“You ride off tomorrow, and you don’t come back here until every Turner’s dead.”

Since this is an Old West turned New West, hurtling towards that “Road Warrior” Armageddon, the boys roll off on dirt bikes.

You ride as far as the little gas that’s left will take you. Vengeance is as quick as fingers can pull triggers. But the Stones stumble across what Turners were up to, kidnapping women, selling them into sex slavery, stashing the cash in “stash houses” and brothels.

The boys decide that revenge is not enough. Since greenbacks are “the last green thing we’re every gonna see in this field,” they set out to get the cash they need to escape.

But Billy has his girl (Natasha Bassett) to get back to, and the deepest grudge of all against the old man. We’ve seen him punished by their sadistic hardcase of a father, who figures if you spare the branding iron, you spoil the child. He’s not all-in on this quest.

And when he’s shot by the (Asian stereotype) sex slavers, the others leave him to his fate.

The opening quest should be more interesting than it is, and the ensuing huntdown — by the heavily-armed traffickers — is repeatedly interrupted for bits of brother-on-brother betrayal and little tastes of this future Wild West where a shootout with a blitzed “Meth Cooker” who quotes “Carlito’s Way” because “I based my life on that movie” is just another way station on The Hero’s Journey.

Screenwriters. Can’t make a movie without’em, can’t shake sense into’em to save your life.

There are kidnappings and firearm “accidents,” hardscrabble transactions over cars, women, etc. and a hero’s helper (veteran character actor Callan Mulvey) with mysterious motives.

Director and co-writer Frederick Cipoletti has cooked up a gritty B-movie with lots of incidents, action and characters, that spills a lot of blood in the dust of the land where it no longer rains.

For all the hitches and starts in the narrative, I found it reasonably entertaining — with solid motivations for characters, even if those characters, to a one, lack urgency, and well-staged shootouts and chases and such.

Brittain, of “Everybody Wants Some” and the recent “Neanderthal Boy” drama “William,” isn’t given scenes that create a full arc — pacifist brother to crazed avenger hunting for his kidnapped girlfriend — for the character. Mulvey is much better at doing a lot with a little, as far as the written form of his character goes.

“Desolate” is about two plot twists too complicated for its own good. And really, why cling to the Asian Sex Trafficker movie stereotype, when the only people crazy enough to stay behind in a land where nothing grows are those tied to the land?

Still, there’s talent here, and style. Cipoletti, a producer and sometime actor turned director, creates a world and fills it with visceral violence and keeps his characters on the move and fast on the trigger.

He ensures that “Desolate” holds our attention up until a finale that is pretty much its undoing.

MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, drug abuse, sexual situations

Cast: Will Brittain, Callan Mulvey, Tyson Ritter, Natasha Bassett, James Russo, Bill Tangradi

Credits: Frederick Cipoletti, script by Frederick Cipoletti, Jonathan Rosenthal.  An Uncork’d Entertainment release.

Running time: 1:28

Yeah, he did the drugs, yeah he rubbed everybody he ever worked with the wrong way.

Musician, master of close vocal harmony, egomaniac, jerk, lucky by association, Hall of Famer.

If David Cosby can own up to the insufferable a-hole he’s been at times, what is Neil Young’s excuse? I mean, Jonathan Demme did half a dozen Neil docs and never got at the prick everybody says he is.

Espionage, betrayal, mistrust all around in this tale of an Israeli Mossad recruit from the director of “Bethlehem.”

She voiced the singing swimmer in the Disney animated classic “The Little Mermaid,” based on the fairy tale by Hans Christian Anderson. And she’s perfectly cool with casting a young singing sensation and great beauty in the role. Halle Bailey is black? So what? Be like Jodi.

And if Rob Marshall REALLY wants to mess with expectations, he should cast a Jonas Brother as Sebastian. And keep the character’s Jamaican accent.
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It’s a big budget heist picture that Universal was going to produce, but Netflix dinged its bottom line for it.

Doesn’t seem like a natural fit for Netflix. They do well with intimate pictures, rom coms and more modest budgeted pieces. This has “Spectacle” about it. Too big?

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Labor activists and just plain working folks might look with envy overseas, to France, where work weeks are shorter and life can be better when unions battle management.

The truth, as recreated in the new film from Stéphane Brizé (“The Measure of a Man”), is grimmer and grittier, drawn-out. Where foreign news media might summarize the final score of a strike, who won and who lost, the battle itself is harrowing, fraying and exhausting.

That’s what the docudrama “En Guerre” (“At War”) captures. It’s a gripping and glum account of the ebb and flow of a strike in an era when all the power lies with management, and too much of the media sympathy lies with ownership — stockholders.

Vincent Lindon of “The Apparition” and “The Measure of a Man” stars as Laurent Amédéo, a working man and union rep fighting for his and the 1100 other jobs that will be lost when a German-owned auto-parts conglomerate closes their factory in high-unemployment Agen.

The 60ish Lindon has to get across the wearying nature of the struggle, the energy burned in combative union meetings, trying to keep the workers united, and in arduous negotiations with a company that will not be swayed from closing the factory by reason, economics, government pleading or the courts.

Le Perrin Industries is still making a profit, just not enough to prop up the big dividends that they keep handing out. Two years of labor concessions later, they’re pulling the plug.

Laurent and Mélanie Rover and their team go round and round with the plant’s manager (Jacques Borderie), trying to get them to honor their five year commitment, agreed to when concessions were given by labor.

No dice.

But Laurent has absorbed the words of the film’s opening title, (in French, with English subtitles) “Whoever fights, can lose. Whoever does not fight has already lost.”

“At War” follows this struggle for months, through losses of faith, fractures in the “united front” of workers, through scrums with riot police and factory takeovers and workers unloading on a government that always acts in the best interests of business.

Several players in the drama are not actors and use their real names, but that doesn’t lessen the impact of the crocodile tears that Borderie, actually an elected official, cries when he assures Laurent and Mélanie (actually a welder) and their team that “It’s not workers against bosses any more. We’re all in the same boat.”

Other “suits” declare, “”That grief that you feel, we managers feel it too.”

But Laurent and Melanie are testy and firm — “We kept our word,” she says. “You keep yours.”

They gave up millions in added labor and lost bonuses to allow the company to thrive, but that cash was paid out in stock dividends and management pay, or so the workers see it.

Their contract is binding only until the company decides to bail out of it, the French courts rule. And damned if the president doesn’t figure that getting involved “would be counter-productive.”

We never hear “Thoughts and prayers,” or see it in the subtitles. But you can feel it.

Brizé intercuts the bracing debates with TV report point-of-view footage of the workers marching, manning picket lines, taking over headquarters and bickering over strategy as the weeks become months and stout hearts waver.

A pulsing electronic score paces these scenes, and Brizé parks his camera halfway behind pillars or other figures, giving “At War” the feel of footage grabbed on the fly and on the sly, as this battle unfolds.

The union leaders try to correct violent extremes in each others’ behavior, but there’s desperation in every talking-over-each-other shouting match.

The factions that break out deride Laurent for “prancing on the evening news,” but when they start to cave in, he spits his own accusations and warnings back at them.

“You’ve got a shovel to dig your own grave!”

There’s energy and pace in this film, despite the fact that it’s mostly talk, conversations carried out at a shout.

Plodding along — despairing — as it does, “At War” wearies the viewer much as the activists themselves are worn down. But that’s the idea. We can talk the “Stay strong, stay together” talk all we want, but until you’ve been faced with ruin, a gutted future and a desperate present, you just won’t know.

When the inevitable eruption comes, we can only shake our heads and wonder if that kind of direct consequences for callous, mercenary corporate behavior, would have any impact in the U.S.

Maybe, “At War” dares us to consider, the “fight” is all we have left, even if the war itself is lost.

MPAA Rating: unrated, violence, profanity

Cast: Vincent Lindon, Melanie Rover, Jacques Borderie, David Rey, Olivier Lemaire

Credits: Directed by Stéphane Brizé, script by Stéphane Brizé, Olivier Gorce.

A Cinema Libre release.

Running time: 1:54

This French drama, from the director of “The Measure of a Man,” is about a strike — the breakdown in negotiations that lead to it — opens in limited release July 19 and 26.

A movie about working people struggling in an era when all power, political and economic, is in the hands of corporations and their stockholders.