Movie Nation

A kidnapping’s viral infection of an extended family through its intertwined history, gossip and the secrets “Everybody Knows” is the focus of Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi’s latest drama.

It’s an intimate melodrama of tightly wound performances depicting conflicted relationships between people traumatized by shock, but too wrapped-up in old grudges to not have their suspicions.

The director of “The Salesman” and “The Past” takes his time unraveling the mystery that drives the plot. But that allows a stellar cast headed by husband-and-wife Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem, and the terrific Argentinian Ricardo Darín and dazzling and new-to-most-of-us Spaniard Bárbara Lennie to simmer, suffer, lash out and explode under the pressure that this harrowing situation puts them all in.

Laura (Cruz) has returned to the town (Torrelaguna, north of Madrid) of her youth for a cousin’s wedding. She’s brought her little boy and teenage daughter, Irene, with her from Argentina, where they now live.

We see Irene (Carla Campra) take on a little “wild child cut loose” behavior, hurtling helmetless on cousin Felipe’s moped, drinking and smoking, letting him steal a kiss in clock tower of the village’s ancient church.

Just like her parents, Felipe (Sergio Castellanos) says, pointing out the carved initials of her mother’s name and that of her adolescent love, Paco. It’s one of those secrets in town that “todos lo saben” — “Everybody Knows.”

The power goes out, mid-revel, on the night of the wedding. And that’s when Irene is taken, by kidnappers who have taken the time to deposit clippings of a previous kidnapping that didn’t end well as a warning.

Laura falls apart, wailing in the streets.

“Do something,” she cries (in Spanish, with English subtitles). “I beg of you!”

Paco (Bardem) springs into action. But he is out of his depth, and following the “Don’t tell the police or else” edict of the kidnappers, he doesn’t know what to do.

Nor does anybody else. So they all start asking questions, accusing first Paco’s vineyard workers, then his wife Bea’s “last chance” tech school students.

Why didn’t Laura’s husband, Alejandro (Darín) make the trip with her?

And then, there’s the tortured history of Paco’s “estate,” the vineyard he bought from Laura’s family, on the cheap, long ago. Old grudges die hard, memories of bad business deals die harder.

Farhadi keeps the focus on the two families — Laura’s, where her helpful uncle (Eduard Fernández) finds an ex-cop (José Ángel Egido) they can confide in, who opens several cans of worms; and Paco and his wife Bea (Lennie, fierce), who asks even tougher questions and suggests conspiracies at every turn.

The grace notes of the picture are the sunbaked Spanish locations and the characters wholly inhabiting them. Bardem plays Paco as “the fun uncle,” a man with a huge laugh, a ready smile for the ladies and the life of the wedding party when he’s in his (wine) cups.

He’s a Zorba-sized bon vivant, at times, and that’s a hint. If you ever remake “Zorba the Greek,” Bardem is your man.

Cruz’s Laura suffers and comes to pieces in the most realistic ways. Watch her fall utterly apart phoning Alejandro with the news.

Darín, of “The Secret in Their Eyes,” holds his own in this illustrious, Oscar winning company, playing a man suspected by others and humiliated at the parts of his life that it turns out, “Everybody Knows.”

Ransom demands, the amateur “investigation” that Paco and Fernando try to mount, all that is mere window dressing for a movie that is more interested in the fissures that this horror has opened old wounds made fresh by the stress, fractures in family and friends as most everybody starts to suspect “inside job.”

Farhadi breaks his self-imposed format of confining the film to the family, letting us know only what they know, in the third act. But he never abandons the mostly static shots that capture simmering stillness of the acting, with only a little drone-footage of the wedding reception enlivening the visuals.

Frankly, “Everybody Knows” plays like the smartest, subtlest Spanish soap opera ever and could have done with a little more sizzle — more attention to the mystery, maybe a brisker pace.

It’s still a fine showcase for great acting, a great setting and a pretty good, if not great yarn unraveling the social fabric of a family, its history and the ugly secrets “Everybody Knows” but nobody has talked about — until now.

MPAA Rating: R for some language

Cast: Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Ricardo Darín, Bárbara Lennie, Carla Campra

Credits: Written and directed by Asghar Farhadi. A Focus Features release.

Running time: 2:12

An Oscar winner or two in there.
https://t.co/3jPbmO1dWM

An old guys” action comedy, this one has the “Is Netflix making this?”feel. Older audiences haven’t been showing up for these guys in so called “geezer comedies.” Via The Hollywood Reporter
“The action comedy ‘The Comeback Trail’ – starring #RobertDeNiro, Morgan Freeman and Tommy Lee Jones – had just added another star to its cast”

https://t.co/0neGdqTkBJ https://t.co/EtkdFV7NZa https://twitter.com/THR/status/1142352548252266496?s=17

Heady projections from Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and even Disney itself that “Toy Story 4” would rewrite the animated movie opening weekend records appear to have been exaggerated.

“Blowing away the ‘Incredibles 2’ opening weekend record” is all but gone with the um, wind.

Keeping in mind Deadline.com’s notorious under estimating of Saturday grosses for kid films, it’s on track now — after a $51 million Friday with $12 million Thursday night paid previews — to fall short of the low end of expectations. As in $136 million, not $140, $150 or $200 million.

It could still clear Disney’s reported tracking of $140 million with a great Sat. And Sunday. But maybe another sequel is set to underwhelm…at least in terms of what was hoped for.

I have seen some rapturous reviews for it among the “98 percent fresh” listed on Rottentomatoes.

But asking around among critic friends and scanning the more selective (established critics) and nuanced Metacritic, I’m seeing more reviews closer to my own “anticlimactic” take. They finished this series nine years ago and should have let it be.

“Child’s Play” has been rebooted with an eye toward making evil doll Chucky more of an allegory about the dangers of artificial intelligence.

Great. They just left out suspense and laughs. Weak reviews won’t kill a horror franchise, but $15 is less than the projected $18 it was supposed to open with.

“Men in Black” is fading as fast as “Godzilla” and the other busts of summer.

Luc Besson’s latest variation of his “La Femme Nikita” and “Leon:The Professional” plot “Anna” is a flop. Under $4. #LucToo had something to do with it.

That WAS Bryan Singer. Now here’s the new one. From the LA Times…
“The long-delayed ‘Red Sonja’ reboot will be written and directed by “Transparent” showrunner Jill Soloway, who will replace Bryan Singer on the project.”
https://t.co/QyET3ekL8k https://twitter.com/latimes/status/1142180406311231490?s=17

There’s warmth and a delightfully prickly edge every time James Caan and Tom Hollander square off in the Holy Land in the dramedy “Holy Lands.”

Harry (Caan) is a salty New York Jew who has relocated to Israel to raise pigs. Moshe (Hollander) is an Orthodox rabbi, teacher and Harry’s neighbor, and deeply offended by this.

They have exchanged unpleasant letters — “degenerate” to self-righteous religious crank. Moshe tried to yell at Harry in person, but can’t even let himself ring the man’s doorbell (He uses his jacketed elbow), trips on his property and harangues his wife, “Scrub scrub…(We’re) never going to get this pig off me.”

And then they meet.

Moshe — “Nice to meet you.”

Harry — “I’m not here to be nice.”

Moshe — “Why don’t you cleanse yourself and stop humiliating us all with your DISGUSTING animals?”

Harry — “Cleanse MYself? Get rid of the stupid beard and the (bleeping) hat and the coat when it’s 98 degrees in the shade!”

Harry could have “played golf like everybody else” in his retirement, as his son (Jonathan Rhys-Myers) writes. But no.

And writer-director Amanda Sthers could have kept the focus on this conflict, with pigs and people and religion in conflict with the religious and the secular.

Harry runs the only pig farm in Israel, for obvious reasons, and “Israeli Jews are gorging themselves on bacon, and I am the man providing it!”

But Sthers gets lost in the playwright-son’s story. He’s turning the letters to and from his father into plays. Sthers gives us a heavy dose of the daughter’s dilemma, refusing to grow up. And she throws in melodrama with the ex-wife.

None of which are interesting enough to leave Israel and Harry and Moshe for. Harry’s also run afoul of a local Christian sect, and as he’s had to hand-feed a piglet who becomes a pet, the pig becomes a magnet for Moshe’s critter-loving youngest kid.

He’s come here to stick a finger in the eye of the Palestinian conflict, where as he points out to Moshe, Israeli Jews were putting bags of blood on buses to keep Islamic suicide bombers from blowing them up (All of the victims would be “unclean.”).

And maybe his move was a symbolic rending of his garments in the ancient tradition, estranged from his gay playwright son, almost estranged from his ex-wife (Rosanna Arquette) and powerless to fix whatever’s gone wrong with his 34 year-old photographer/daughter (Efrat Dor) who never got over a trauma in her past, and never matured into a life of work and marriage.

“Holy Lands” works when Harry and Moshe are bickering, and doesn’t quite work anytime they’re not on the screen. From daughter Annabelle’s debate over Israeli “wall” politics with a female soldier to her chance romantic encounter with a stranger in an air raid shelter to son David’s vague struggles to Monica the ex-wife’s trials, they’re all peripheral characters in scenes that are inferior entertainment to what Caan and Hollander deliver.

And then there’s the offensive content. The country’s Muslim population is discussed but never seen. Moshe gets to give a succinct defense for not eating pork, but later the rabbi has the temerity to claim “The Palestinians are a proud people, but they seek to recover something that is long dead —  the past.”

Oh? How is there an Israel today where there wasn’t one 100 years ago, and more importantly “Why” is there an Israel today when there wasn’t one 100 years ago? A “proud people” seeking to “recover…the past,” you think?

Don’t get me started on how the film treats the Christian sect, whose humorless priest gets his back up after refusing a drink, which Harry says lets him “defy the (drunken priest) stereotype.”

“You amuse yourself by mocking your religion?”

Yeah, Moshe cracking “Stay away from the church. They’re try to crucify you…or CONVERT you!” is funny.

But making the Christians and their assertion that “God…has asked you to leave” the fanatics, doesn’t seem cricket. In an Apartheid state riven by conflict and age-old hatred, terrorism and reprisals it is the Christians who are the unreasonable and violent ones?

We’ve never had much of a chance to see Caan in an overtly Jewish role (he is Jewish), so give me more “COME to Shabbat dinner!” And “Shabbat THIS!”

Let the feuding neighbors bond over reggae, as the rest of the world does (“Many Rivers to Cross”) in a car ride sing-along.

Leave in the ex wife’s “You are the Larry Flynt of the Middle East..a pig pornographer.”

But most of what we see in New York and Brussels (where daughter Annabelle is burning through Daddy’s cash) is wasted screen time.

If you don’t have time enough to show everybody offended by the idea of a pig farm in Israel (a Muslim doesn’t want his phone line crossing the farm), a deliciously promising direction to take the story, you don’t have time for Central Park filler.

MPAA Rating: unrated, profanity and some violence

Cast: James Caan, Tom Hollander, Rosanna Arquette, Efrat Dor and Jonathan Rhys-Meyers.

Credits: Written and directed by Amanda Sthers. A Cinedigm release.

Running time: 1:40

And so the filmed letters to cities and lovers in those cities that began with “Paris, je t’aime,” ambled into “New York, I Love You” and ventured to “Rio, Eu Te Amo” finds its way to Deutschland with — wait for it — “Berlin, I Love You.”

They’re short films sharing a city, a theme and (apparently) a production designer, lovely travelogues that tie together with differing degrees of success.

I’ve never wanted to go to Berlin, but this “pounding heartbeat of a divided muscle” kind of wins one over in a wildly-uneven series of vignettes directed by the likes of actor-turned-director Til Schweiger (he was in “Inglorious Basterds,” none of his directing jobs have made a dent in the U.S.), Massy Tadjedin (“The Jacket”), Peter Chelsom (“Serendipity,” “Hector and the Search for Happiness”) and “Glee!” actress and director Dianna Agron.

Let’s pause for a moment and scan to the bottom of this review. Yeah, a lot of people “directed” bits of this, and even more had hands in scripting it (IMdb lists several, and just gave up after a while).

What they all came up with was a lot of scenic settings romantically “experienced” by mostly Western, mostly American or British and pretty much entirely white actors.

Basically, a lot of very pretty people — and Mickey Rourke — find something resembling love in the once-divided capital city of Germany.

That tortured last century of Berlin history is covered in a brisk, animated montage in the film’s opening credits.

We drop into the connecting story — an Israeli singer/busker Sara (Rafaëlle Cohen) meets and tangles with German mime in angel wings Damiel (Robert Stadlober). Their connection drifts in and out of the narrative as we run into first Jim Sturgess as a lovelorn man who “came to Berlin to die…Seemed like a literary place to drink myself to death.”

He’s just had an unhappy love affair. But his decision to pick up a late model BMW 850 with the vocal GPS “assistant” Vanessa, which ventures from “Where are we going today, Jared?” to intervening in his attempted suicide.

“Take me to the nearest bridge” doesn’t work out. Perky, grumpy French neighbor Charlotte LeBon does.

That piece by Chelsom is feather-light and just the right length. If the rest of the movie had been as pleasant…well.

“Berlin” has been Anglicized and Hollywood-ized for your protection — scenes where a big budget filmmaker (Luke Wilson) is smitten by a park-busking puppetmistress (Agron, who also directed), a post-breakup “Sunday Morning” riverside encounter between a drag queen (Diego Luna) and a liberal minded young man, a feminist “Me Three” laundromat where women bond over bad experiences with men — and take a little revenge.

“Under Our Feet” has Keira Knightly playing a refugee aid worker who takes in a Middle Eastern boy “just for tonight,” much to the disapproval of her visiting Mum (Helen Mirren).

And in the glossiest sequence, Jenna Dewan is swept into a serenely sophisticated cafe society night club evening of dance and Big Band jazz.

Schweiger’s piece of the film is an off-putting bit of melodrama — perils-of-plastic-surgery case Mickey Rourke hitting on a prickly but surprisingly compliant young beauty (Toni Garrn) in a Berlin bar is just…icky.

Others tumble even deeper into melodrama, or run out of things to say (a couple of pieces try to address “the world today” with its anti-immigrant mania) even if they still find parks and Gothic nightclubs aplenty.

Wildly uneven, as I said earlier. But at least some good character actors got a nice German vacation out of it, and “Berlin, I Love You” is pretty enough to make you plan your own.

Just avoid the bars, brothels and laundromats and you’ll be fine.

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

Cast: Keira Knightly, Helen Mirren, Diego Luna, Luke Wilson, Mickey Rourke, Dianna Agron, Charlotte Le Bon, Jenna Dewan and Jim Sturgess

Credits: Directed by Til Schweiger, Dianna Agron, Peter Chelsom, Gabriela Tscherniak , Claus Clausen, Massy Tadjedin, Fernando Eimbcke, Stephanie Martin, Dani Levy, Dennis Gansel, Daniel Lwowski , Justin Franklin, Josef Rusnak, scripts by Massy Tadjedin, Gabriela Tscherniak , Justin Franklin, Neil Labute, Fernando Eimbcke, Dani Levy, Dennis Gansel, Alison Kathleen Kelly David Vernon, A Saban Films release.

Running time: 1:58

Tiffany Haddish is the big name in this “pranks with a hint of plot” comedy of the “Jackass” variety.

A little dressing down and acting cray cray makes one turn down a kiss from Tiff? I laughed.

“Child’s Play” and “Chucky” so permeated our consciousness as to become cultural punchlines that outlived his 20 year run in horror films, beginning in 1988.

We know what to expect when we hear about a reboot and clap our hands in glee at the slaughter to come — the creative ways this evil, cunning doll finds to kill.

So the creators of this reboot can be forgiven for having no patience for little inconveniences like tension, fear and suspense. They want what they figure their audience wants. Let’s commence to slaughtering!

But while some might be inclined to ignore those thriller prerequisites because, well the beloved Mark Hamill is voicing the demon doll this time and the fanboy fave Aubrey Plaza plays the mom menaced by the toy she gives her kid, I won’t.

“Child’s Play” is perfunctory. The script spends far more time making this “AI” enabled doll plausible, and far too little setting up cloud-connected Chucky’s choice of victims and means of dispatching those who would stand between him and his “Best buddy,” Andy (Gabriel Bateman).

The “Buddi” doll has become a toy store sensation, an interactive companion who “learns” and “imprints” on his child owner, singing that the kid is “more than a buddy. You’re my best friend…You are my buddy until the END!”

Skip past the terminal, threatening “I will NEVER let you go” messaging there and imagine Mark Hamill singing. Love the guy, but hey, replacing Pierce Brosnan in the “Mama Mia” franchise isn’t in the cards.

We see that Mom (Plaza) is divorced and making a bad choice in her new town/new beau (David Lewis). We see there’s a testy cat named Rooney — Andy or Mickey? I forget.

Aaaaaaaand, we know what’s coming.

It comes so fast that Plaza has little chance to vamp her character into the perky promiscuity that’s become her screen trademark.

“Yes, I have a child. I had a very productive ‘Sweet Sixteen.'”

Making the kid far too old to want anything to do with a doll was a mistake. Hi-tech or no, once the tween has met other kids in the building, that thing should stay in the closet, never to be seen again.

Buddi, renamed “Chucky” by the doll himself, doesn’t LIKE the closet.

One of the kids Andy meets (Beatrice Kitsos) makes the second best joke here, pushing the picture’s sci-fi connections when she sees the doll “learning.”

“Can I just point out that this is how every Robot Apocalypse begins?”

Yes, you can. But that doesn’t alter what is essentially a slasher pic about a doll no human being other than Kim Jong Un would want in the house with them, killing and killing again, a doll who holds grudges and a doll who skips past “cuddly” and cuts straight to the cutting up.

MPAA Rating: R for bloody horror violence, and language throughout

Cast: Aubrey Plaza , Gabriel Bateman, Bryan Tyree Henry, Tim Matheson and the voice of Mark Hamill as “Chucky.”

Credits: Directed by Lars Klevberg,  script by Tyler Burton Smith. An Orion release.

Running time: 1:30

The spy/assassin thriller “Anna” opens in 1985, flashes forward “five years later,” then flashes back “three years before,” then forward months, backward “three months earlier,” back and forth repeatedly all the way to the damned closing credits.

It’s no wonder writer-director Luc Besson lost track, here and there, of where he was — which Mercedes SUV that crashes into a ancient Soviet Trabant wasn’t yet in production, when flip phones first went on the market, etc.

So there are a lot of irritants and clumsy touches to Besson’s latest, infuriatingly inferior version of “La Femme Nikita” that ruin it.

You don’t even have to know Besson, who always likes’em young (Remember how he presented Natalie Portman in “Leon/The Professional?”) and turns many of his leading ladies into versions of one of the young ones he married (Milla Jovovich), was accused of drugging and raping a starlet during the production to strike “Anna” off your “must see” list. “Insufficient evidence” there, insufficient movie here.

Sasha Luss is the latest Besson protege, a willowy slip of a model cast as a “honey trap” recruited to the KGB and turned into an assassin who can shoot, stab and brawl her way out rooms full of bodyguards and others not wanting to be assassinated by a platinum blonde or bewigged brunette.

“Never put your faith in men,” her handler (Luke Evans) purrs. “Put your faith in yourself.”

And thus she is “tested” by the boss (Helen Mirren), slaughtering her way through a fine dining establishment in the heady, lawless days just after the Berlin Wall fell.

If you’ve ever wondered how hard it is and how long it might take to kill somebody with a fork, well this is the movie for you.

Right from the start, she’s looking for an exit strategy, only to be told “Dere izz only von vay to leave KGB. You vant to find out vat it izz?”

The French, and their dog walkers (Besson hates French authority, and revels in showing “the good guys” are no better than the bad ones as far as the U.S. is concerned) the CIA are onto her pretty early on. Cillian Murphy is the silky smooth agent on her case, not immune to the allure of “Anna.”

Few are. A French model (Lera Abova) tumbles into an affair with her and everybody in Besson-world wants their sex with her to be of the rough and ready kind — another Besson male wish fulfillment fantasy trademark.

But even though Luss (she was also in Besson’s “Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets”) handles the action choreography with skill and emotes better than your average model turned actress, “Anna” left me cold.

The simple physics of the fights is more worthy of Bugs Bunny cartoons than reality.

And the pointless flashbacks over-explain the patently obvious.

Besson was smart to revisit one of the films that made him, and still can expertly shoot and cut a mean car chase (he produced “The Transporter” franchise). But whatever the verdict of the Polanski-tolerant French justice system, the critical verdict on “Anna” is that he’s outsmarted himself and made an inferior copy of “Nikita.”

MPAA Rating: R for strong violence, language, and some sexual content

Cast: Sasha Luss, Helen Mirren, Cillian Murphy, Luke Evans

Credits: Written and directed by Luc Besson. A Summit/Lionsgate release.

Running time: 1:59