Dormer is Dr. Audrey Evans, who attacked childhood cancer in conventional and unventional ways, including pioneering opening the first Ronald McDonald’s House in 1969.
Clancy Brown’s the veteran doctor trying to rein her in, with Brandon Michael Hall and Jimmi Simpson among the supportive colleagues.
Blue Harbor is releasing this Mar. 28.
Bacon gets to play a little music, drive a ’70 Chevelle and corral or kill demons on behalf of Old Scratch.
Jolene Purdy, Damon Harriman and Beth Grant also star in this eight episode series, which may have enough ideas to fill an 85 minute B-movie.
Ultraviolent horrific fun, if this red band trailer is any indicator. This series comes to Amazon Prime April 3.
A “Downton Abbey” alumna pops up in this trailer, too. See if you spot her.
Is this a “spinoff from ‘Ray Donovan?'” Never watched that.
“MOBLAND”– Paramount/Ritchie INSIST on ALL CAPS for the title — premieres on Paramount + March 30.
One of the more disillusioning aspects of the Golden Age of Content is the way Netflix repurposes intellectual property and remakes films for different markets.
Spanish films get almost pointless Mexican or Argentine remakes, and vice versa. And it all comes home to roost when they share these Around the World with Netflix variations on the same platform — North American Netflix, for instance — at the same time.
Right now, you can choose between the new Norwegian (dubbed or subtitled) rom-com “På villspor” (“The Wrong Track”) or the original Swedish film, “Ur spår (“Off the Rails”).
Not sure why the Norwegians would remake a Swedish skiing comedy that came out just a couple of years back, but that’s Netflix for you. They’re different, with a lot of charm of the first version of this story about finding purpose via the Scandinavian version of a winter marathon — a long cross-country ski race — wrung out of the Norwegian version.
But with its rural scenery and Nordic Olympic (Lillehammer and environs) locations, “Wrong Track” can claim the edge in that regard.
The set-up — a screwup, “never finishes anything” single mom who quits jobs and bungles mothering enough that she’s about to lose custody — is coerced into taking up cross country skiing by her seemingly-has-it-all-together older brother.
As Emilie (Ada Eide) struggles with the training and the reckoning this take-stock quest of skiing The Birken imposes on her life, will she finally get purpose and maybe find love along the way? As we learn that focused, motivated, Volvo driving yuppie brother Gjermond (Trond Fausa) has his own struggles — with a marriage (Marie Blokhus plays Silje) suffering from their inability to procreate, what will this “test” teach him?
One of the cutest elements of the original film, how odd it is for a Scandivanian to not know even the basics of skiing, is missed here.
The sex and romance elements are more abrupt, perfunctory and charmless in this take. But they go for the same upbeat, heartwarming feel in the finale, which plays about the same.
I’d suggest you skip “Wrong Track” and watch the Swedish original, since you sure as shooting don’t want to sit through two and the Norwegian “Tracks” feels more clumsily manipulative.
But both flirt with that “watchable” threshold thanks to scenery, engaging actors and people who have learned to do more than just put up with having too much snow for their own good.
Rating: TV-MA, sex, nudity, public urination gags, profanity
Cast: Ada Eide, Trond Fausa, Christian Rubeck, Idun Daae Alstad, Deniz Kaya and Marie Blokhus.
Credits: Directed by Hallvar Witzø, scripted by Lars Gudmestad and Vilde Klohs, based on the script for the Swedish film, “Ur spår” by Maria Karlsson A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:34
The trailers hint that there might be laughs, that the tone of “Riff Raff” — a dark and bloody comedy about hit men, family, and how those two only exist together in the movies — could very well come off.
Jennifer Coolidge and Bill Murray rarely do us wrong. Ed Harris brings gravitas and reality to every role he plays. And Gabrielle Union is here to class up the joint.
Pete Davidson? Well, it’s a hit man comedy, so there’s a chance he’ll get popped. Remember how we all laughed and laughed when that happened in “Bodies Bodies Bodies?”
But then there’s the moment in the opening credits, when you’re walking in on a small distributor’s comedy and you see the “Directed by Dito Montiel” on the screen. And there’s nothing for it but to mutter Gordon Ramsay’s favorite expletive.
“F— me.”
Directors aren’t wholly responsible for whether a film comes off. Casting a movie well does wonders. But if a script has a scrap of promise to its premise, the director of “Man Down,” “Boulevard,” “”A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints” and “The Clapper” is your best bet to turn it into a Golden Raspberry Awards contender.
“Riff Raff” lives down to its title, a trashy movie with a gilded cast — a cast a tad tarnished thanks to the addition of this to their resumes.
Actor-turned-screenwriter John Polono (“Stronger”) cooked up a story of a mobster who’s buried his past, remarried and made a better life, two mobsters hunting him down via his unfortunate son and alcoholic ex, and a trio of varying-degrees-of-“innocent” bystanders, starting with the mobster’s adopted, Dartmouth-bound teenaged son.
Murray is the old trigger man they call “Lefty,” bluff and blunt and bullying around his amoral protege, Lonnie (Davidson). Something puts Lefty and Lonnie on the trail of an old acquaintance.
That would be Vincent (Harris), doting stepdad to smarty-pants D.J. (Miles J. Harvey), worshipful husband of too-classy-for-him Sandy (Union).
The intrusion of Vincent’s son from an earlier marriage, Rocco (Lewis Pullman), Roccos’s very pregnant Italian girlfriend Marina (Emanuela Postacchini) and Vincent’s blackout drunk ex-wife (Coolidge) is Vincent’s first clue that something awful is up.
“What’d you do this time?” is how he greets his adult son. “You sure cuss a lot when Rocco’s around” is the Dartmouth-bound smart kid’s astute observation. Seeing as how his dad is compulsive model boat carver forever giving him “Don’t ever settle” lectures on a girl who just used and rejected D.J., that should be a tell for D.J. and his mom.
Ruth, the boozy, unfiltered ex who gets “horny when I’m scared,” cuts to the chase.
“You don’t know him (Vincent) at all!”
The disparate characters are destined to collide in a country house high on a woody hillside in Maine. The tale of how they all got there and what the bad blood here is about is told out of order via flashback “revelations,” rendering it a style we’d call Tarantinoesque. We’d call the callous, amoral and seriously unfunny violence Tarantinoesque, too. But why drag a good if perhaps overpraised filmmaker into this?
From the first spilling of blood, “Riff Raff” grates and goes grimly wrong. Blundering hit men use each other’s names in front of a farm produce store owner, a scene that ends with “A History of Violence” slaughter. It’s repeated later with victims we could describe as “annoying” and overly-helpful.
Neither Davidson nor Murray can make these scenes, or later jokes about “torture” and reasons for wanting to do it pay off. The violence is random, awful and way out of proportion to what sets it off.
There are interesting twists to the plot, but the finale’s a fiasco followed by the clumsiest anti-climax of the new year. And too much of what precedes it is packed with simplistic attempts to let Murray/Coolidge/Davidson and Union do what they’ve done in other movies and TV series.
Davidson’s Lonnie is “a twitchy weasel?” Hardly a stretch.
Union is very good at playing prim, proper and PO’d with just her flashing eyes and a testy line.
“Can I get a word?”
Coolidge is the only one of the lot who manages a laugh, running her “MILF” based career second act through another wringer, struggling to score a giggle here and there at how vulgar, coarse and lowdown one oversexed drunk can be.
“White Lotus” reminds us she can be better than this, as indeed most everybody else here has demonstrated via their earlier credits.
Their director? Not so much.
Rating: R, violence, sexual content, drug use, nudity, profanity
Cast: Bill Murray, Jennifer Coolidge, Gabrielle Union, Pete Davidson, Miles J. Harvey,
Lewis Pullman, Emanuela Postacchini, Michael Angelo Covino and Ed Harris.
Credits: Directed by Dito Montiel, scripted by John Polono. A Roadside Attractions release.
Running time: 1:43
Not the fangirls and fanboys who grew up watching her embellish or flat out carry her share of sci-fi franchises — “Star Trek,” “Avatar” and “Guardians of the Galaxy” among them.
Not pre-“fanboy” fans who realized what she brought to the table beyond the ability to master fight choreography, firearms and general badass personae, something first exhibited in the first film I ever interviewed her about, “Colombiana.”
Not the Latin community, which earns Oscar recognition again in the same category Rita Moreno broke through in over half a century ago.
But there’s been pushback against the somewhat overpraised Netflix film “Emilia Perez.” More than a little. Some of it warranted.
Can’t please everybody, I guess. She’s great in the part and a “career” Oscar is certainly her due. A gracious, emotional speech, and recognition for all she’s done for the movies by being a part of more than her share of blockbusters.
Plainly, they’re going to have to find ways to give Tom Cruise and Samuel L. Jackson Oscars as well.
Sure. Right. Yeah. But come on.
A tale of Russian oligarchs and a first-gen immigrant sex worker’s tangle with them — the exploited and the exploiters switching roles, if only briefly — is a movie of the moment, of this dark American moment?
For my money, “The Substance” had more to say to women than our Best Actress/Best Picture etc. winner. And for damned sure Demi Moore gave a better performance playing the hell out of a more fascinating character than Oscar’s Best Actress winner.
Sean Baker’s obsession with sex workers and that exploited and increasingly threatened corner of American life has paid off with a dominant night at the Oscars. But “The Florida Project” was his best film, one that had more to say, and “Tangerine” had more edge and a lot more laughs.
Screen scrolling The Morning After the Oscars has produced a “generational” disconnect for the five time Oscar winner, with one some of the most salient points being made on Gen Z Central, Reddit.
“We must be rich while we’re young or what’s the point of life?”
It’s a slippery, sex-lubed saga (the damned thing was too long, too) to try and get a handle on in terms of its appeal. The story is simple to the point of simplistic, and the “improvised” dialogue is nothing to quote on a T-shirt, or quote period.
Films gather a “cachet,” and one can point to “The Brutalist,” the Best Animated Feature winner “Flow” and “Anora” as having that this year, the movies eating up a lot of major media outlet conversation. Most years, that cachet carries the day. But is anybody still talking about “The Artist” or “The Shape of Water?”
An editor I had early in my career used to quote her grandmother whenever given evidence of a further slide into depravity by the culture, as evidenced in film, media or politics.
“Fall of Rome,” she’d mutter. “Fall of Rome.”
So here we are, another Oscars where the “message” Hollywood is sending is a sort of futile shout into the void and against the grain, and not against a nation sliding into Russian oligarchical fascism.
Our only champion here is a sex worker determined to land her whale or at least get her cut. That’s “Golly, we really ARE doomed” dark.
Not every actor’s all that picky about her or his wardrobe. But the great ones are.
Glenn Ford didn’t find a character until he picked out just the right hat. Piper Laurie would fuss over what purse somebody she was playing would carry.
The late Gene Hackman? Hats and ties would tell the story.
So a movie about a CIA agent dodging “the Russians” and “The Company” in post-Berlin Wall Berlin might demand a trench coat. But Hackman always gave his characters with working class origins a tie tied entirely too short. And the hats were something you might see on your average New York cabbie of the day.
When he played high priced lawyers, presidents and such, the tie was normal length. But for a Popeye Doyle (“The French Connection” movies) or ex-CIA agent Sam Boyd in “Company Business,” the tie was short and the cap was baldspot-hiding working class.
The film, a serio-comic cat-and-mouse chase through Berlin and Paris, probably seemed a safe bet in 1990-91. Nicholas Meyer, who scripted “Time after Time” and whose light writing and directing touch saved the early “Star Trek” movies, cooked up a sort of “Hopscotch” comic thriller/working vacation in Europe for the Oscar-winning Hackman, paired up with Russian dancer/sex symbol turned actor Mikhail Baryshnikov.
But even if the film gave Hollywood the sense that veteran villain Kurtwood Smith (“Robocop”) could pull off perpetually PO’d in comic strokes, setting him up for “Hearts and Souls,” “To Die For,” TV’s “Big Wave Dave’s” and eventually “That ’70s Show,” “Company Business” barely manages a chuckle.
The set pieces are cleverly handled, the action beats play and the picture moves along at a nice clip. And Hackman — 61 when this caem out — is in fine form, giving better than the whole enterprise probably deserved. But if this is one of the forgotten titles of Hackman’s last decade on screen, there’s a reason.
We meet “old guy” Sam as he’s pulling a documents heist the Old School way — busting into headquarters in black mask and jumpsuit, dodging the guards, rappelling down a wall from an upper story of the glass-encased promontory to make his getaway.
The next day’s visit to his handlers gives away the game. He was stealing industrial secrets — cosmetics formulas. And a nerd in the lobby, also waiting to see the corporate types coveting this cache, got the same info simply by “hacking,” with the old guy tricking the kid to save face and his payment for the job.
When his former employers summon him to Langley with their old “Who do you like in the Fifth?” (a horse racing cliche) phone call, Sam’s first question is the only one that matters.
“Why take the battleship Missouri out of mothballs?”
Sam’s a Cold Warrior, and the Cold War is over. The Berlin Wall’s down. And we’ve already heard the CIA brain trust (Kurtwood Smith, Terry O’Quinn and others) gripe that they “HATE old guys” like Sam.
But there’s one more “exchange,” a long-imprisoned U2 pilot they can get for a chunk of cash and a Russian spy they’ve held for seven years. Post Iran-Contra, this bit of spookwork has to be off-the-books, as they’re using a Colombian drug lord’s cash and they don’t want Congress coming after them and Sam, who’d be an “Oliver North without all the medals” if caught.
Sam dutifully accepts the cash, fetches the Russian Pyotr Grushenko (Baryshnikov) and gets him to Berlin.
The banter is mostly dull and ill-considered, as the eagle-eyed and memory like a steel-trap Sam can’t recall the name of the vodka that the Russian keeps recommending.
Berlin’s sex district would make a great hide-out when things go haywire, and Meyer tries to find some fun in that. A transgender bar with a version of Marlene Dietrich singing “See What the Boys in the Backroom Will Have” (from “Destry Rides Again”) is about as funny as all the gay references get.
Baryshnikov wouldn’t show a lot of comic flair until his last significant role, a story arc on “Sex and the City,” later in the decade. Lines muttered about his reluctance to “go home” — “Who do you think I am, E.T.?” — fall flat.
Smith and O’Quinn take sturns sputtering “It’s no longer fashionable to ransom hostages with Colombian drug money!” and “What’re you trying to do, restart the COLD WAR?”
The American Sam may crack that “We still have Fidel,” when it comes to international boogeymen for the country to obsess over. Petulent Pyotr could still crack back “So do WE.”
Not a knee-slapper in the lot.
Screen icon Hackman’s workmanlike turn holds the picture together, as far as that goes. But in a movie that tries to work up a fine comic fury over Reagan/Bush crimes and criminality, and that proves to be an exercise in futility. Nobody was hearing that.
The next year, Bill Clinton would win the White House because the clueless patrician Republican Bush didn’t know the price of a gallon of milk.
And lines about how “The Japanese own your whole f—–g country” may be reminders of how long “The Japanese Century” lasted about ten years. But for a viewer today it just underscores that “The American Century” is certainly over and with half the country voting to emulate Russiam Cold War action comedies have lost any cachet they once had.
Rating: PG-13, bloody gunplay, nudity,
Cast: Gene Hackman, Mikhail Baryshnikov,
Géraldine Danon, Terry O’quinn, Oleg Rudnik, Daniel van Bargen and Kurtwood Smith
Credits: Scripted and directed by Nicholas Meyer. An MGM release on Tubi, other streamers.
Running time: 1:38
An elite Mexican commando unit battling cartels and corruption must shoot and fight its way north — to safety in Brownsville — in the chest-thumping shoot-em-up “Counterattack.”
Nothing is made of that irony, and that’s just one of many loose threads in this loose cannon B-movie from South of the Border.
Luis Alberti is Captain Guerrero, who finishes up an afternoon of drinking and gambling with a pal by intervening when two women (Mayra Batalla and Frida Jiser) trying to report a mass grave they’ve found are hassled by cartel goons and corrupt cops.
The captain is so celebrated and intimidating that he wins the stand-off with a legion of armed mob minions and local police, and gets to just walk away after having shot a couple of bad guys — including one with a badge.
That’s the logic here. Don’t judge “how they do things in Mexico” and don’t pay too much attention to how things transpire. Try not to get too far ahead of the utterly formulaic plot and don’t sweat the layers and layers of plot lapses and genre tropes and cliches.
When’s that next shootout, compadres?
Captain Guerrero is part of a unit called Murcielagos — “bats.” The cartel leader they’re hunting (Noé Hernández) and his brother (Israel Islas) have it in for these soldiers, blaming them for killing their father. That’s why they filled a ditch with dead soldiers, which the two women — one of them on her way for an abortion — find.
The villains ambush Guerrero and his closest subordinates — nicknamed Tanque, Pollo, Toro and Combo (Leonardo Alonso, Luis Curiel, Guillermo Nava, David Calderón León) — when they’re off duty, heading north for a U.S. shopping trip.
When the army men turn the tide and wipe out their ambushers, it’s game on as they’re on foot, the bad guys’ “dogs” are in pursuit (Ishbel Baustista plays their ace tracker) and the only hope for our heroes is a “safe” extraction either near the border, or across it in Texas.
The movie sets up several promising subtexts, and all but forgets almost every one of them as we lurch from shoot-out to shoot-out, with the Murcielagos battling long odds and never missing what they aim at — unless it’s a senior bad guy, whom they wound. So he can make a speech.
After every firefight that the five survive, they “report,” aka “sound off” — “Combo STANDING,” “Tanque STANDING…”
The shootouts are first-rate, in that “bad guys mostly miss, good guys never do” way.
Alberti is a most charismatic lead, and Hernández does what he can with the doting dad/ranting, raving and murderous drug lord at work stereotype. The willowy Bautista was an interesting choice to play the tough broad killer/tracker “Cobra.”
But nothing here is written or directed in a way to make it memorable beyond that moment when the credits start and Netflix is trying to convince you to begin watching something else without giving you the chance to say “Not so fast.”
Rating: TV-MA, graphic violence, drug abuse, profanity
Cast: Luis Alberti, Leonardo Alonso, Luis Curiel, Guillermo Nava, David Calderón León, Mayra Batalla, Frida Jiser, Ishbel Bautista, Israel Islas and Noé Hernández
Credits: Directed by Chava Cartas, scripted by Jose Ruben Escalante Mendez . A Netflix release.
Running time: 1:24
The Galapagos Islands, 1934, Germans get away to “Eden.” Things don’t work out the way they’d hoped.
This parable of human nature and class and the venality of man opens April 3.
Movie Nation 