A high school teen tries to cope with the death of her sister.
The fact that “He was the last person to see her alive,” and there’s uncertainty about how she died, that eats at her.
“You didn’t know my sister. My parents didn’t know my sister. I BARELY knew my sister!”
Seeing Zoe’s shrink? (Ken Jeoung, not in the IMDb credits)
Sister Echo (Laura Marano) is looking for answers, even if she wasn’t capable of “Saving Zoe.”
VOD in July.
They’re both as pretty as they can be, and the camera just loves Yara Shahidi and Charles Melton, so lots of swooning close-ups.
They play characters with inner conflict and drama built in to their “Meet Cute” moment, with a clock ticking towards a deadline that could break them up before they get started.
But if you’re waiting for that heartbeat-skipping moment that big screen romances have to deliver to come off, don’t bother your cardiologist. “The Sun is Also a Star” can’t deliver one.
Not with the luminous Shahidi of “Black-ish” paired up with Melton, of “American Horror Story” and “Riverdale.” You don’t have to deliver “You had me at ‘Hello,'” but if you’re doing that magical “We just have tonight/today” “Before Sunrise” thing, you’ve got to come up with something, ANYthing that makes us root for these two crazy kids.
If you look at director Ry-Russo Young’s credits, you can see why she was hired. “Before I Fall” was a genuinely touching “re-live your last day over and over again” teen drama/romance, the movie that made a star out of Zoey Deutsch.
But Nicola Yoon’s novel foils her and screenwriter Tracy Oliver (“Girls Trip”), pigeon-holing them into a not-quite-insipid romance about an immigrant about to be “self-deported” and a son of immigrants trying to be a poet and a romantic when his parents just want to get him into Dartmouth and into surgeon’s scrubs.
“Not quite insipid” doesn’t rule out insipid touches, like having our heroine, Natasha (Shahidi) narrate her love of “a city filled with humanity,” which she cannot bear to leave.
She’s been in the U.S. for nine years, has no trace of her parents’ Jamaican accent (a pity) and is a high school junior hoping she can find a reprieve her parents did not on this, the day before the family must go back where they came from.
“Accept destiny,” her dad (Gbenga Akinnagbe ) orders. “We g’wine home!”
Maybe a compassionate INS agent, perhaps a helpful lawyer?
It’s a big day for Daniel (Melton), too. He has his alumni interview, talking to a Dartmouth grad who will question him about why he must simply MUST go there and why he was born to be a doctor.
His Korean immigrant parents run an African American hair care store, and pin all their hopes on him and not his tattooed punk older brother (Jake Choi).
Daniel is obsessed with kismet, serendipity, destiny or fate — whatever it is that will change the course of his life. He’s looking for a deus ex machina, a miraculous coincidence to “save” him from a future he doesn’t embrace.
Seeing a very pretty girl on the street with “Deus ex Machina” embroidered on her jacket is exactly that. He stalks her until that moment when a Beemer almost runs her over at a crosswalk, and their fates are joined.
He’s ready for “their” destiny. She’s busy.
“I don’t believe in love,” she huffs. She’s all about chemistry, biology and “the scientific method.”
He wants a day to make her fall in love with him, she gives him…minutes.
The story that follows is meant to reinforce his insistence that “fate is real,” or at least get the aspiring astronomer Natasha to accept that there’s a multiverse where their lives and futures are intertwined.
As the camera lovingly closes in on Natasha’s flawless makeup and sexy haircut, we get it.
The movie, though, doesn’t. The distractions of their long day of missed appointments, “my favorite place” misadventures, etc., does nothing to create a real spark between these two or between them and the audience.
Coincidences alone do not a romance make. No, there’s virtually nothing funny here, so calling this a “romantic comedy” would be an even bigger mistake.
The most interesting scenes are flashbacks to how their parents met and then came to the United States, and Daniel’s clever explanation of how Koreans came to be such reliable makers and sellers of African American wigs and hair-care products.
The subtext of “The Sun is Also a Star,” brought to the fore as Natasha fights for the right to stay in the U.S., is out in the open but given the soft sell. Shahidi never gets across the desperation that would help Natasha make her case that America “these days” (Trumpism) isn’t treating people like her fairly.
The parent-child conflicts have a little crackle, NYC looks lovely and the leads are pleasant enough to spend time with.
But that “X-factor,” which Daniel throws in to his calculus about whether they should be together? The thing he insists, “Trust me, we have it” to Natasha?
Trust me. They don’t.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some suggestive content and language
Cast: Yara Shahidi, Charles Melton, Gbenga Akinnagbe, Cathy Shim and John Leguizamo
Credits: Directed by Ry Russo-Young, script by Tracy Oliver, based on the novel by Nicola Yoon. A Warner Brothers/MGM release.
Running time: 1:40
“John Wick, Chapter 3: Parabellum” raises the bar on “relentless.”
The third film in this Keanu the Killer franchise is all fights, all chases, slaughter and mayhem and dollops of drollery delivered by a cast with a few new faces and one that’s wearing a perpetually scraggly beard to hide his middle age jowls.
Action-packed and production designed to death, ducking and parrying through an arcane hitman/hitwoman universe of its own creation, a world of “fealty” and “service” both “under the table” and from “The High Table.”
No kidding, who needs more “Matrix” when Keanu & Co., Laurence Fishburne included, are giving more than fair value in these stunt-man spectacles?
“Parabellum” — it’s Latin and it’s explained in the picture — takes place at the end of “John Wick Chapter 2,” and chases our “ex communicado” killer from the sanctuary of New York’s Hotel Continental, where he broke the rules and killed a foe under its consecrated roof, to Casablanca.
John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is pummeled, stabbed, shot at, kicked through glass and knocked off a roof.
“Over a dog? A car?”
That’s what all his foes want to know. And if you remember the first film, yeah, it’s like that and it was over a dog. He leaves the new pit bull he acquired in the last film to seek help from a Russian gypsy mobster who is a ruthlessly bloody ballet director (Oscar winner Anjelica Huston), and an old colleague whose secret weapons are attack dogs (Oscar winner Halle Berry).
Wick seeks some relief, a “parlay” perhaps, a negotiation out of this jam he was pulled into, murderously and reluctantly.
But hey, even the villains are, you know, fans. Especially the sushi chef and martial arts teacher/gang leader named “Zero,” a dazzling fighter given great charisma, wit and malice by Mark Dacascos (the new Wo Fat on the “new” “Hawaii Five-O”).
He’s my favorite new character, although Berry’s Sofia kicks major butt in her fights and shootouts. And if we learned nothing from John Wick himself, it’s don’t mess with an assassin’s dog(s).
Of course, the manager of the Continental (Ian McShane) is drolly following John’s exploits with perfunctory “Jonathan, Jonathan, where ARE you going?” for much of the movie.
In this game of assassin’s tag, with every hitman in New York chasing the $14 million+ now on Wick’s head, The Continental is “home base” and safe harbor. John may have to avail himself of it, and the peerless discrete assistance of the concierge Charon, turned into maybe the coolest character in the series by the steely and stoic Lance Reddick.
I nominate Charon for the character best-suited for a spin-off.
The script is all “Your ticket will be paid in blood!” and “Never seen a man fight so hard to wind up back where he started!”
Nothing like joking about the circular, repetitive nature of the “plots” of these shoot-em-up martial arts video game movies in the dialogue.
Martial artist and stuntman turned director Chad Stahelski always makes the fights in these films memorable, and does a decent job of keeping “Chapter 3” leaning into the frame, hurtling forward. There are pauses, which don’t so much allow us to catch our breath any more than they allay the weariness the endless mayhem creates.
There’s no hiding the stunt doubles in scenes shot in video-walled glass rooms with glass floors and glass display cases, any more than you can’t NOT see the padding Reeves himself wears for these epic fights, which grow more impressive as the picture goes on.
But back to that “raises the bar” business. During lulls I kept thinking of all the action movies this one bests, at least in its fights and chases (on motorcycles, on horseback). the next “Mission: Impossible” has its work cut out for it, James Bond may have his license revoked and the “bullet time” from “The Matrix” is nothing compared to what a bullet from a silenced automatic weapon does under water.
Reeves hasn’t really discovered Eastwood’s secret, that his best work is done without talking. He’s still a bit of a stiff, and God knows the wear and tear shows in Wick’s wounded sprints in “Chapter 3.” He runs like a middle aged man, which he is.
But “John Wick, Chapter 3: Parabellum” still gets a bloody job done, and still merits all the fan-murderer adulation our anti-hero gets every time he meets a new hunter hoping to cash in that reward money.
“Over a dog? A car? Really?”
MPAA Rating: R for pervasive strong violence, and some language
Cast: Keanu Reeves, Halle Berry, Anjelica Huston, Ian McShane, Laurence Fishburne, Asia Kate Dillon and Lance Reddick
Credits: Directed by Chad Stahelski, script by Derek Kolstad, Shay Hatten, Chris Collins and Marc Abrams. A Summit/Lionsgate release.
Running time: 2:10
Long title, longish movie. Hoping for the best.
I can’t recall ever truly hating a Johnny Depp star vehicle, and I’m not going to start with “The Professor.”
But I’m tempted.
It flirts with being offensive, but falls short. It’s not entirely maudlin, not wholly misogynistic, but close enough.
And he’s mildly diverting in the part, playing a coasting-on-tenure/drifting through marriage college English professor who gets a cancer diagnosis in the opening scene and takes the same attitude towards his life that he abruptly hurls at his class.
“From here on out, we’re going to be doing things differently.”
Professor Richard Brown is going to drink. He’s going to womanize, when practical. He probably ran out of you-know-whats to give sometime before. But getting that news on the same day his wife (Rosemarie DeWitt) tells him she’s having an affair with the college president, a “nutless sack” (Ron Livingston), was kind of the last straw.
And he’s only starting with muttering the f-bomb at faculty meetings (Danny Huston is the department chair and his best friend), later wading into the duck pond bellowing that same word at the heavens.
No. Routine won’t do.
Richard’s journey is tracked through cutesy interludes — “Chapter I: I have something to say,” “Chapter IV: It’s really starting to kick in.”
He weeds his class of drones, slackers, future “government workers,” “corporate whores” and the like. The few left are to pick one book they haven’t read, a classic, analyze and do an oral report on it. But first, Richard must make time for “an emotional bender for 72 hours.”
He doesn’t tell his unfaithful wife and college-age daughter (Odessa Young of “High Life”), because each is caught up in her own thing. Daughter Olivia has picked this very moment to come out. Mom dismisses it as just a phase, but Dad is the very picture of seen-the-light/concerned-supportive parent.
And his class teeters on the edge of degenerating into chaos, as he asks them to procure weed for him and he takes them out drinking, all part of a flailing last ditch attempt to “reach into our lives and try to extract some sort of wisdom” from it all.
Richard is a fairly tedious character — sexist, intolerant of feminist/lesbian lit and that one feminist student whose “co-op lifestyle” his assignment is shaking up.
He has little more to confide to this best friend other than “I’m only mildly disappointed in myself…Just let me die alone. Let me die in peace, ride this thing out.”
Depp, who has finally taken to showing up for roles appropriately groomed, cuts a fine figure as a college prof on a Life’s End bender. He’s had far too much practice playing drunks for this to be a strain.
But Richard is singularly undeveloped and uninteresting. Why would a coed like the one played by the sassy starlet Zoey Deutsch remain in his class, much less pursue his company and/or guidance after hours?
His dictum that they all remember that “each and every moment, we are composing the story of our lives” and are thus obligated to “make it an amiable read, or at least an interesting one” is not advice he’s ever followed or ever will.
The women are singularly dull in this contrivance by the director of “Katie Says Goodbye” (which starred Olivia Cooke). Sculptor-cheater wife, female students as objects of scorn, shallow wives and harridan colleagues (Siobhan Fallon Hogan), they’re a sorry lot in writer-director Wayne Roberts’ eyes.
Depp’s charming way with Richard taking his leave to “explore a smidgen of infidelity” doesn’t go far enough (having sex with a barmaid in the bathroom) toward making him loathsome. Because that, at least, would be more intriguing, given the character and the movie more edge. He never quite achieves that.
The few one-liners that land are a pallid assemblage, too.
“I have cancer. It’s all right. Everyone my age has cancer.”
“We’re well-to-do middle-aged WASPs, we can get prescriptions for anything.”
Writer-director Wayne Roberts shows little imagination in any character, any situation, any academic cliche. He has Richard drive a 1980 Mercedes diesel because, I guess, nobody thinks college professors drive Saabs any more.
At least Roberts didn’t get his way in titling “The Professor.” The director of “Katie Says Goodbye” was sure he’d get to call this “Richard Says Goodbye” (the print I saw was so-titled). That’s enough to make anybody plunge into a duck pond and hurl a few f-bombs at the heavens.
MPAA Rating: R for language, sexual content and some drug use
Cast: Johnny Depp, Rosemarie DeWitt, Zoey Deutch, Danny Huston, Siobhan Fallon Hogan
Credits: Written and directed by Wayne Roberts. A Saban Films release.
Running time: 1:30
This is the July 3 horror tale from the director of “Hereditary,” Ari Aster.
A little “Wicker Man,” a little “The Witch,” a bit of Scandinavia isn’t all that inviting, eh?
You need to see “The Biggest Little Farm,” and not because that many of us have the energy, gumption and chutzpah to emulate what we see here.
Everybody needs to see this lovely little documentary because of its optimism, a bracing island of hope in a tidal wave of news about the slow motion environmental disaster unfolding around us.
Here’s a movie about the pursuit of balance in nature, the infallibility of biodiversity and the glories of compost.
What cameraman and filmmaker John Chester and chef, blogger and “eat local” advocate Molly Chester did was restore a barren, neglected farm in Moorpark, California, leading by example as they launched an experiment in biology, labor and market-driven farm-to-table capitalism.
And what Chester did was document that with his camera, explaining the changes, reveling in the learning curve and marveling at how land, nature, animals and people can be healed by getting back to the farming we used to know how to do, almost by instinct.
He’s made an informative, inspiring film, joyous in its intimacy, fraught in its various crises, one filled with love, adorable critters, challenges, tragedy and triumph.
In more ways than a mere review can recount, it is the most American movie of 2019, wearing its optimism in every gilded, rain-speckled, sun-flecked frame.
The Chesters were plugging along in their personal and professional lives until the day this rescue dog they took in got them evicted from their Santa Monica apartment.
Their plans to “build a life of purpose together” changed, and Molly led the way. Her “infectious” enthusiasm for food, raised with love and care, and her idealistic notion of a farm, “like something out of a children’s book,” pulled them towards rounding up investors and setting out to launch Apricot Lane Farm, 200 acres that would be tended “in harmony with nature, like a traditional farm from the past.”
Farming has radically changed in the past 150 years, and that created skeptics all around them (quoted, but rarely seen) as the couple took on a foreclosed, arid and dead orchard, with a house on property, surrounded by factory farms.
“Biggest Little Farm” recounts the years it took them to turn it into something that worked. They did some homework, but more importantly, they found themselves a sensei, a guru in this “farming the way it was” ethos.
John narrates the film and his skepticism about this eccentric hippy “back to nature” prophet, Alan York, is evident and repeated, time and again.
York’s “It’ll take care of itself,” like “a flywheel” — self-sustaining so that “it’ll be like surfing” once the place it on its feet, seem delusional, pie-in-the-sky pollyanna-ism.
“Diversify! Diversify! Diversify!” York preaches. There’s “never enough time to do it right, but always enough time to do it over,” if they get something wrong or nature provides unhappy surprises.
But Molly’s all about this sunny York, and John buys in. They put in scores of stone-fruit trees, from peaches to cherries, endless varieties.
They plant “cover crops,” grass and clover, to heal the soil around the trees.
They buy chickens and cows, goats and sheep, to produce revenue but more importantly, to poop.
“Compost was our gold!”
The idea, as pitched by York, was to “emulate how natural ecosystems work,” to let nature find its equilibrium in a farm with a pond for ducks, a house for hens and sheep and cattle grazing amidst the orchards, rebuilding dead soil into something rich and productive.
Worm farming for “compost tea,” putting catfish in their pond, adding herding dogs to help, it all fits together.
Until the predators and “pests” start showing up. The Chesters are tested by snails and starlings, maggots and gophers and worst of all — coyotes, the spree killers of many a henhouse or duck colony.
Chester uses animation and gorgeous natural photography to capture nature returning to this near-desert corner of Southern California. The bees swarm in, and soon all creatures great and small gravitate to their tiny Garden of Eden — gophers to marmots, badgers to bobcats.
There’s a rich tradition, perhaps unique to the United States, in books on this sort of transformation, all harking back to Aldo Leopold’s “A Sand County Almanac.”
Every generation, it seems, has to be re-introduced to this lesson of “letting nature heal” our scarred land, because every generation needs it. Farming has turned industrial, monocultural and chemically dependent.
Maybe the swelling population of the country and the planet demands this scale and efficiency. But maybe there’s another way, “Biggest Little Farm” says.
Granted, not everybody will find the dogged work, sometimes solitary lifestyle and grimmer aspects of dealing with food on such close, life-and-death terms appealing.
And I’d love to see the ledger books on this place, from the investors who got them started to the labor force the Chesters recruit online (“Learn to farm” interns? Volunteers?), which makes one wonder about their actual bottom line.
But “The Biggest Little Farm” is so touching it’ll make you cry, so inviting it’ll make you yearn for something in your life as fulfilling as the healing power of making the barren green, from tiny plots of backyard to a warming and drying planet.
MPAA Rating: PG for mild thematic elements.
Cast: John Chester, Molly Chester
Credits: Directed by John Chester, script by John Chester and Mark Munroe. A Neon release.
Running time: 1:31
“Wild Nights with Emily” is a makeover of the image of legendarily “sad,” “loveless,” “reclusive” “spinster” poet Emily Dickinson.
It’s “Drunk History” without the alcohol. It re-examines the “legend,” and tears holes in it with laughs based on rock solid scholarship.
Have I mentioned how much I love “Drunk History?” It can come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the Comedy Central show seeing this movie that writer-director Madeleine Olnek (“Countertransference”) has cited the comic “History” as a big influence on this queer reclamation of Dickinson’s reputation from the erasures of a presumptuous dunderhead who established the “myth” of “The Belle of Amherst” that has endured despite a rising mountain of evidence debunking it.
“Wild Nights” has Molly Shannon as the adult Emily, a frustrated poet who has a devil of a time getting her hundreds upon hundreds of poems published in her lifetime.
“They don’t rhyme!”
Yes, one and all agree, especially Atlantic Monthly publisher and literary critic Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Brett Gelman of TV’s “Another Period”). “The rhymes are a bit…off. She could…work on them, perhaps?”
Two myths die hard in that meeting, that Dickinson was a longtime recluse and that she was obsessed with “posthumous recognition” for her 1800 or so poems. She got poems published, and she tried, all her life, to get more published. She met publishers in order to accomplish that.
The other myth that “Wild Nights with Emily” concerns itself with is her sexuality. She wasn’t some repressed, loveless spinster who missed her chance at “happiness,” thus inspiring the sadness of much of her writing.
Emily was in love, from her teens onward, with her friend and later sister-in-law Susan (veteran character actress Susan Ziegler of “Hello, My Name is Doris” and many, many TV roles).
We’re shown how that romance flowered when they were teens — Dana Melanie plays the curious Emily, crushing on Susan Huntington Gilbert (Sasha Frolova), who eventually reciprocates.
We hear from Susan’s daughter, who wrote and spoke of this love which her teenage self could see with her own eyes as she passed thousands of notes between the women, who lived next door to each other in Amherst. We hear and see (every poem is subtitled to make the words and meter stand out) the poems and passionate letters that buttress this view of Dickinson as America’s most famous lesbian poetess.
That we haven’t known this about her until recently is explained, too.
As narrator, giving a “women’s club” talk about “Emily,” whom she never actually met, we meet the woman who literally ERASED Susan’s name from poems and those letters. Mabel Loomis Todd is given a smiling, dopey certitude by Amy Seimetz (“Alien: Covenant,” “Stranger Things”) who plays her as delusional about her intelligence and the validity of her interpretation of “Emily,” and villainous in a self-righteous way one often sees in lady TV preachers.
She’s right, because, well, she just is!
Imagine having this fraudulent expert, even though she was plainly a fan, in charge of Dickinson’s legacy.
Susan married Emily’s brother Austin (Kevin Seal), had two children by him and insisted they build a house next door to Emily and her dotty sister Lavinia (Jackie Monahan) because her true love dwelt there.
Seal’s Austin is a complex blend of indulgent sibling and husband, and clueless cad. He had a years-long affair with Todd that mirrored his wife’s romance with his sister.
Olnek doesn’t have much in the line of kinky fun with the sordid goings on in Amherst. The picture reaches for a jokey tone in its casting, the odd situation or one liner.
“Your sideburns are in my eye!”
There’s a light mockery of other figures of the day, including some of her contemporaries in poetry — the mumbling Emerson, etc.
But the poems, many of which are sampled here, deflate most of the film’s efforts at deadpan lightness.
Because I could not stop for Death – He kindly stopped for me –
And even though the film is period-perfect, using actual locations and accurate costumes (hoop skirts are good for a laugh), “Wild Nights” suffers from a cell-phone video flatness in its cinematography, a little too “Drunk History” for its own good in that regard.
Shannon’s Dickinson is sharp and smart and a little exhausting (those her knew her vouch for that), Ziegler’s Susan devoted, aware of what’s going on if not entirely sure of how to characterize it and Seimetz’s Todd daffy in her wrongheadedness.
So it’s the players and the historical rewrite that recommend “Wild Nights with Emily,” not the wildness, not the nights nor the days, all of which are shot so flatly as to resemble a local PBS station’s production of “The Belle of Amherst,” circa 1985.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for sexual content
Cast: Molly Shannon, Susan Ziegler, Amy Seimetz, Kevin Seal, Brett Gelman
Credits : Written and directed by Madeleine Olnek. A Greenwich Entertainment release.
Running tine: 1:24
There isn’t a whole lot to “A Violent Separation,” a B-movie that reaches for “thriller” and never quite shakes “melodrama” in the process.
But it has tension and mild suspense built into its bones, and a topicality that you wonder if co-directors Michael and Kevin Goetz or screenwriter Michael Arkoff wholly appreciated.
It’s predicated on a set of anecdotal evidence truisms that a lot of us carry around with us. The first is that rural America’s gun culture consists of a lot of careless people, something that every weekend’s “accidental shooting” count bears out. And the second is that if anybody knows what it takes to get away with something, it’s a cop.
Ray and Norman Young (Ben Robson and Brenton Thwaites) are rural Missouri siblings who remain close despite the fact that one’s a cop and the other has more than his share of scrapes with the law on his record.
Ray’s a drinker, a brawler and a womanizer, which Abbey Campbell (Claire Holt) has to shrug off, if she harbors any thoughts of permanent attachment. She had a child with another man, so Ray figures “cheating begets cheating” and all’s fair in honky tonk romances.
Norman’s a boyish sheriff’s deputy who can never quite get around to sparking Abbey’s sister Frances (Alycia Debnam-Carey). She makes a joke about his handcuffs, and he’s too clueless to catch on. It’s like that.
The sisters and Abbey’s son live with their sickly dad (Gerald McRaney), keeping him going through his emphysema.
Like Ray, they have no visible means of support.
Then, after a night of drinking and boot-scooting at the Whisperin’ Pig Roadhouse, Abbey distracts Ray from the barmaid he’s been carrying on with (an Eastwood daughter, Francesca) and the bar fight he’s just gotten into over insults aimed at Abbey.
“I want you to teach me to shoot!”
That’s how “the accident” happens. That’s how “the cover-up” begins.
Norman’s boss, the sheriff (the great Ted Levine of “Monk” and “Silence of the Lambs”) isn’t the sort you can easily pull one over on. But Norman, knowing what he knows, does.
He’s at the sheriff’s elbow as the “timeline” is established, Frances and her Dad answer questions and things point just enough towards Ray that the sheriff feels the need to ask his deputy, “You OK with this?” Eventually, even the sheriff figures out “You’re too close and this don’t look right.”
And as the trail goes cold, the seasons change and the words of “Old Bob” (Cotton Yancey) shift the narrative’s gears.
“Sometimes you just gotta let time do its thing.”
The Goetzes make good use of the Louisiana-subbing-for-Missouri locations, the “Miller’s Crossing” pines without the overcast and Coen Brothers guiding sensibility to help them.
The dialogue can be chicken fried or hard boiled, but it’s generally of the predictable “I f—-d up, f—-d up bad!” variety.
There’s not a lot of urgency here, little sense that the walls are closing in on the brothers even as the clues start to point their way and you know and I know and they suspect that the sheriff must know, Frances might know and her old man sure as hell knows.
But “A Violent Separation” almost sustains itself with the understated performances, especially by Robson (TV’s “Animal Kingdom”), Debnam-Carey (“Fear the Walking Dead”), Holt (“Pretty Little Liars”) and Levine, the rare American in this mostly Aussie and British cast.
And there are some nice moments of routine but skilled parallel constructions — the first interrogation begins and we see cut-aways of the tracking dogs, who figure this thing out before anybody else does; one brother engages in a little carnal escape, and the other likewise manages the same.
You get what the filmmakers were going for, even if they can’t quite bring themselves to trimming this down to the leaner, less cluttered neo noir it wants to be.
MPAA Rating: unrated, graphic violence, explicit sex, alcohol abuse, profanity.
Cast: Brenton Thwaites, Ben Robson, Alycia Debnam-Carey, Ted Levine, Gerald McRaney and Francesca Eastwood
Credits: Directed by Kevin Goetz and Michael Goetz, script by Michael Arkof A Screen Media release.
Running time: 1:48
This one-day romance, with an anti-“wall” American melting pot subtext, opens Friday.
Looks sweet. Or bittersweet. Depending on how it breaks.
“The Sun is Also a Star” opens Thursday night.
Movie Nation 