A writer inherits a very large dog

  When I first learned that the writing/directing team of David Siegel and Scott McGehee had adapted author Sigrid Nunez's novel, The Friend, for the screen, I reacted with a mild shudder. Smart, moving, and mired in grief, Nunez's novel seemed an unlikely candidate for a move.

   Fortunately, the filmmakers capture enough of Nunez's tone to elevate a slender story while avoiding the kind of cheap sentiment that could have trivialized Nunez's work, which, simply stated, focuses on the bond between a woman and a dog.

    The Friend revolves around Naomi Watts's portrayal of Iris, a college writing professor who's coping with the suicide of her mentor and one-time lover, a writer of some repute. Iris's grief begins to sharpen when she inherits the author's Great Dane, a 180-pound creature named Apollo.

    Like many New Yorkers, Iris lives in a tiny apartment that's ill-suited for a large canine companion, even one with a touching soulful gaze. Watching Iris walk a Great Dane makes for an arresting sight, even though the aging and arthritic Apollo hardly can be called rambunctious.

    Bill Murray portrays Walter, the author Iris regarded as an invaluable confidant. Walter forged the connections that led Apollo to Iris. His decision can be read as an ironic act of cruelty or as a jolt meant to shake Iris from the torpor that has stalled work on her second novel.

   The directors employ first-person narration from Iris to capture a bit of Nunez's spare prose as they work their way through a series of episodes. Iris fights with her landlord about a no-dogs-allowed policy. She meets with one of Walter's three ex-wives (Carla Gugino) and with his daughter Val (Sarah Pidgeon), a student who's working with Iris on an attempt to turn Walter's correspondence into a book.

    Watts skillfully portrays Iris's hesitant but growing attachment to Apollo. Though limited to brief flashbacks and a fantasy sequence, Murray proves convincing as an unapologetic womanizer who's keenly aware of his many flaws and betrayals.

   Ann Dowd helps rounds out the cast as Iris's neighbor, a woman who's allergic to dogs. Felix Solis portrays the super in Iris's building, a kindly fellow who’s tasked with delivering ultimatums from the landlord. 

    Late in the story, Tuesday (Constance Wu), the last of Walter's three wives, offers to take Apollo off Iris's hands. Iris quickly realizes that Tuesday won't tolerate an animal that can't respect her highly refined design choices in furniture. 

    Tom McCarthy plays the psychiatrist Iris consults in her increasingly desperate search for a solution to her Apollo problem.

  Though less precisely honed than Nunez's foray into the literary world, Siegel and McGehee's movie does a better job of translating her novel to the screen than Pedro Almodovar did with The Room Next Door, his adaptation of Nunez's What Are You Going Through -- at least that's how it struck me.

   You may never have wondered what it might be like to have a 180-pound dog dropped into your life, but The Friend will give you an idea of how much upheaval such a bulky intrusion can bring — both literally and metaphorically. 

    If I were looking for an alternate title for The Friend, I might consider this one: “Chamber Piece with Very Large Dog.”

A private concert on a lonely island

   Expanded from a short film, The Ballad of Wallis Island features its co-writer, Tim Key, as Charles, a two-time lottery winner who has settled on a Welsh island after touring the world. A widower, Charles has become a loner.

   Eccentric and nostalgic, Charles invites two members of a once popular band called McGwyer-Mortimer to give a concert on his island retreat. He offers to pay them well.

   Charles's plan seems ill-fated from the start. He fails to inform either McGwyer (Tom Basden) or Mortimer (Carey Mulligan) that they've both been invited. Former lovers, they haven't performed together for almost a decade.

   Initially, the movie focuses on Basden's Herb McGwyer, a musician who's annoyed to learn he won't be performing at a normal venue. He’s put off by the prospect of playing on a rocky beach for a minimal audience, but he needs the money to finance a long-stalled solo album. 

   As it turns out, Charles will be an audience of one in this slight but sufficiently diverting movie.

   Even though Mulligan's Mortimer shows up with her new husband (Akemnji Ndifornyen), we're primed for the romantic reunion McGwyer seems to want. The screenplay conveniently pushes  Ndifornyen's Michael out of the way. A birdwatcher, he's off to look for puffins.

   Slight and hampered by Mulligan's early departure from the movie, Wallis Island leans heavily on Key's performance while attempting to deal with the pain and loss McGwyer must learn to accept. 

    Director James Griffiths uses songs from Basden to add a folksy quality, and Basden and Mulligan recall the chemistry their characters once shared with a nice number called Lover Please Stay.

   If after seeing the movie, you're tempted to hurry to an atlas to locate Wallis Island, I'll save you the trouble. It doesn't exist. The Ballad of Wallis Island was filmed on the coast of Wales and at a Welsh nature preserve on Ramsey Island. A Google search discovered a real Wallis Island in the Polynesian Pacific.

     Ah, the magic of movies.

Monstrous unicorns seek vengeance

    Death of a Unicorn combines gore, comedy, satire and, mythology in ways that never feel novel enough to merit much attention. For a movie about supposedly unique creatures, this one feels awfully familiar.

  Director Alex Scharfman builds his story around a widowed father (Paul Rudd) and his balky college-age daughter (Jenna Ortega). 

  Early on, the two travel to the isolated home of Odell Leopold (Richard Grant), a dying pharmaceutical mogul who's considering whether Rudd's Elliot should head the company's operations. Dollar signs flash in Elliot's head. Ortega's Ridley couldn't care less. 

   En route to the Leopold mansion, a distracted Elliot runs over (wait for it) a unicorn. Afraid to offend fat-cat hosts who profess an interest in animal life, he beats the wounded unicorn to death with a tire iron and stuffs the body inside his rented van.

   But wait. The unicorn's horn contains curative powers that save Leopold from a certain cancer death; the powders also cure acne and allergies, and could bring a bright and profitable future to Leopold's company. 

   The supporting cast includes Anthony Carrigan as a servant and Will Poulter as Leopold's obnoxious, know-it-all son. Tia Leone plays Leopold's wife.

   As it turns out, the stricken unicorn is a baby. Mom and dad soon will arrive to take vengeance on the greedy humans. These unicorns aren’t fanciful, hardly the sort of creatures you might find on whimsical wallpaper in a baby’s room. They’re large, monstrous, and boast teeth reminiscent of those bared in a variety of Alien movies.

   Fortunately for Ridley, the unicorns form a bond with her. She consults tapestries and learns that it's a bad idea to fool with unicorns, which we know to be true from the outset. 

  Death of a Unicorn ultimately sheds its horror aspirations and turns uni-corny, offering a supposedly emotional coda that, for some, may excuse an ample helping of gore, bodies flung this way or ripped apart.

  Rudd plays an ineffectual father who's blinded by ambition. Ortega does her best to be a "normal" college student, and the rest of the cast works at the edges of overstated parody.

   For me, Death of Unicorn had little appeal. This genre mashup struck me a series of hackneyed notes from a familiar song played out of tune. 

The scene that haunted a life

  The prurient use of butter in Last Tango in Paris resulted in one the most notorious scenes in cinema history. Released amid great controversy in 1972, Last Tango teamed Marlon Brando, 48 at the time of filming, with Maria Schneider, who was 19.  

    Schneider wasn't informed about the "butter," which would become part of a depiction of anal rape in a movie that focused on a sustained sexual encounter. Schneider later said she felt as if she had been raped by both Brando and director Bernardo Bertolucci, who was 30 when he made Last Tango.

   That scene and how it impacted Schneider's life is at the core of Being Maria, a sketchy portrait of Schneider's rise to fame and her awakening to what she regarded as an act of exploitation that continued to color how audiences perceived her.

   Directed by Jessica Palud, Being Maria stars Anamaria Vartolomei as Schneider. I mentioned age in the early part of this review because the movie's issues of power imbalance -- related to both age and fame -- remain relevant.

    Palud smartly recreates the events leading up to Last Tango and shows the movie's filming with Matt Dillon doing a credible Brando, although it's difficult to watch him without being aware of how he captures Brando's intonations and facial expressions. Still, it's a gutsy thing for an actor to attempt and Dillon pulls it off.

  As Bertolucci, Guiseppe Maggio conveys the director's manipulative approach. He wanted to capture raw emotion, which is why he didn't tell Schneider that butter would be used in a scene that left her feeling crushed and humiliated. 

  The story begins when Maria's mother (Marie Gillain) throws Maria out of her house for meeting with her father, actor Daniel Gelin (Yvan Attal). Until that meeting, Gelin had played almost no role in Maria's life. Her volatile mother was furious about her daughter's interest in a father whose last name she didn't even use.

   Schneider's career continued after Last Tango, but she became addicted to heroin and never seemed to recover from the storm created by Last Tango. A judgmental portion of the public didn't always separate the fiction of Last Tango from reality, and Schneider suffered as a result.

   The movie's last act focuses on Schneider's relationship with Noor (Celeste Brunnquell), a young woman who meets Schneider while doing a dissertation on the actress. The relationship becomes sexual and taxing as Schneider falls into a cycle of drug abuse and rehabilitation.

 Though handled a little too didactically, the movie's issues still resonate, but Being Maria slows once the Last Tango filming wraps, perhaps because Schneider's bouts with heroin follow a familiar pattern. Star rises. Star is too young to handle notoriety. Star falls into a self-destructive spiral.

 Palud, who worked with Bertolucci, and Vartolomei capture the sometimes impassive way a tumultuous life seems to be happening to Schneider, as she slowly learns to assert herself.

  Being Maria may best be viewed as a semi-biopic. The film concludes in 1980 with Schneider doing publicity for Jacques Rivette's Merry-Go-Round. Schneider never quite faded into a washed-up world. She was praised for her work in Michelangelo Antonioni's The Passenger (1975) and appeared in a variety of other movies until 2008. She died of breast cancer in 2011 at the age of 58.

   Mostly, though, Schneider remains known for Last Tango, which makes for the most intriguing part of Being Maria, a film that can't help but lose steam when it's most intriguing chapter passes, leaving only bad vibes in its wake.

Heart, politics mix in 'Penguin Lessons'

  The Penguin Lessons, a movie about a lovable penguin that helps awaken the conscience of a jaded expat English teacher, takes place in Buenos Aires during the military oppression that gripped Argentina after a 1976 military coup.

   Played by Steve Coogan, Tom Mitchell reluctantly acquires the penguin while taking a break from school in nearby Uruguay. Not much of a nature lover, Mitchell was trying to impress an environmentally concerned woman who wanted to rescue the penguin from an oil slick that left the bird beached. 

  Based on a real-life story, the mostly pleasant Penguin Lessons tries to balance its heart-warming aspects with an acknowledgement of the horrors of life in a country where people suddenly were being "disappeared."

   Director Peter Cattaneo (The Full Monty) can't quite find the compatibility between such oppositional strands, but at its best, The Penguin Lessons benefits from Coogan's witty work and from the presence of a waddling Magellan penguin that gives an endearing performance, presuming penguins can be said to act.

  The harshest aspects of military oppression aren't fully explored, but the regime's intentions become clear when the rebellious granddaughter (Alfonsina Carrocio) of one of the school's maids (Vivian El Jaber) is seized. Present when the young woman was taken, Mitchell only stood by and watched.

   The school's supporting cast includes an image-conscous headmaster (Jonathan Pryce) and a Finnish math teacher (Bjorn Gustafsson) who becomes a good-natured foil for Mitchell’s jokes. 

   For much of the movie, Mitchell hides the penguin -- eventually named Juan Salvador -- in the apartment the school provides for faculty. We know that the bird will help file the rough edges off his bitterness. It's a bit of a compromise, though not an unexpected one, to make the movie about the awakening of Mitchell's dormant conscience amid so much political terror.

   Penguin Lessons notwithstanding, it's unlikely that the introduction of penguins into classrooms will transform the world of international pedagogy -- unless, of course, already pressured schools want to invest in large supplies of fish.

Two De Niro roles yield mixed results

   

   

  Robert De Niro plays two roles in The Alto Knights, a movie about a 1950s power struggle between two New York mobsters. The double dose of De Niro doesn't mean that The Alto Knights, directed by Barry Levinson and written by mob maven Nicholas Pileggi, is twice as good as every other cinematic foray into Mafia world. 

   Put succinctly, The Alto Knights serves up a reasonably engaging slice of real mob history but lacks the thematic impact that makes a mob movie great.

   Appearing as gangsters Vito Genovese and Frank Castello, De Niro uses glasses and a prosthetic nose to differentiate between two men who grew up together in New York's Little Italy. De Niro's performances represent different sides of the same gangster coin, one impetuous and violent (Genovese); the other more discreet (Costello).

   Genovese and Costello eventually found themselves at loggerheads. After returning to the U.S. from a period of exile in Italy during World War II, Genovese wanted to regain control of the crime family Costello had taken over, an ambition that generated plenty of tabloid headlines. 

   Pileggi, who co-wrote the screenplays for Goodfellas and Casino with Martin Scorsese and who authored the books on which those movies were based, touches many signature Mafia events: the failed hit Genovese ordered on Costello; Costello's testimony before the Kefauver Committee that shed light on organized crime in 1951; and the ill-fated convention of Mafia bigwigs in Apalachin, New York in 1957.

   The rift between the two men centered on conflicting ideas about the role crime played in society and in their lives. Genovese reveled in the gangster life; Costello began to see himself as a businessman who could navigate the political and social settings that gave him a public profile. 

  Unlike Michael Corleone -- who kept his personal life and mob dealings separate -- both Genovese and Costello are candid with their wives. A terrific Kathrine Narducci portrays Anna Genovese, a fiery woman who operated drag and gay clubs in Manhattan and who stood up to Genovese's bullying.

  Debra Messing also scores in a quieter role. She portrays Costello's wife as a woman who seemed to enjoy the perks of prominence.

   A large supporting cast includes a couple of standouts. Cosmo Jarvis appears as Vincent "Chin" Gigante, the mobster who attempted to kill Costello. Michael Rispoli has a nice turn as Albert Anastasia, a Costello ally who in 1957 was gunned down in the barber shop of New York City's Park Central Hotel. 

   If you were alive in the 1950s, you may be familiar with headlines generated by mobsters with bold-faced profiles. For others, these characters may seem a bit remote. 

   Using news footage and some narration by Costello, Levinson  provides context for a story in which it's difficult to find a rooting interest, although our sympathies lean toward Costello. 

   The Alto Knights, by the way, is the name of the "social" club where Genovese and his subordinates gathered and where they watched Costello overplay his hand at the Kefauver hearings. It's fair to think of The Alto Knights as a hunk of inside mob baseball, a movie to be seen, even if it leaves us wanting something more.

They escaped from Chelmno

The World Will Tremble, a film from director Lior Geller,  focuses on a 1942 escape from Chelmno, the first death camp created by the German army in Poland. Two of the escapees are credited with bringing first-hand accounts of the mass murder of Jews to the outside world. Prior to the escape, we meet Jewish men who've been pressed into horrible labors at Chelmno: digging mass graves and hauling bodies out of trucks after gassing. Cruelty abides. A German officer assures new victims they'll be treated better than they were in crowded ghettos. Instead, all of them are murdered. After introducing life in the camp, the movie follows two escapees (Oliver Jackson-Cohen and Jeremy Neumark Jones) through Polish forests as they attempt to elude German pursuit. A late-picture scene brings the men to a village, not yet liquidated, where the local rabbi has difficulty accepting their account. I wish that The World will Tremble had felt more developed, but Geller succeeds in calling attention to a story that's not well known. You may want to think of what's depicted at Chelmno as an Auschwitz prequel. You'll see Michal Podchlebnik, one of the real escapees, in an epilogue. For the record, Podchlebnik, who died in 1985 the age of 78, appeared in Claude Lanzmann's Shoah. He also testified in 1961 at the trail of Adolf Eichmann.

The lingering impact of sexual abuse

 

   Director Rungano Nyoni's On Becoming a Guinea Fowl brings a fresh and culturally astute perspective to a story about sexual abuse in one Zambian family. 

   All we know at the outset is that we're looking at the face of a woman in a parked car. Her eyes remain hidden behind sunglasses. Her outfit suggests she may have been driving home from a party. 

    Nyoni hints at mystery when we see a body lying on the side of the darkened road where the driver has parked. We'll learn that the body belongs to the driver's uncle, a habitual abuser of the young women in his family.

     As the film's issues begin to clarify, Nyoni (I Am Not a Witch) parcels out the story in gradual but assured fashion, depicting the toll sexual abuse has taken on several young women while exposing the family dynamics that allowed the abuse to happen.

    The uncle's funeral provides a setting for Nyoni to explore the secrecy and unacknowledged pain generated by a patriarchal, tradition-bound society. The women defer to the men, cater to their demands for food, and, in one instance, wash the feet of an elder.

    In lesser hands, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl could have been preachy and obvious. But Nyoni's style feels casual and unforced; her characters aren't writing feminist position papers. They're living in a fully realized environment. Nyoni feels no need to italicize their pain.

     In as much as the movie has a center, it’s filled by Shula (Susan Chardy) the young woman who discovered her uncle’s body during the picture’s eerie opening. We never get a definitive answer on what happened to the uncle, although we do know that his remains were found close to a nearby brothel.

   Shula's boisterous cousin Nsansa (Elizabeth Chisela) appears early on, mocking the uncle's attempts at sexual advances. Later, we'll meet Bupe (Esther Singini), a younger cousin — also abused — who has been hospitalized.

    Powerful scenes punctuate preparation for the uncle's funeral, revealing differing generational responses to the incidents of abuse about which the family remained silent.

   When the aunties of the family gather in a pantry with Shula and Nsansa, they confess their knowledge of the pain the abuse caused. They lament the powerlessness they felt at not being able to offer protection. But they've also upheld the order that has kept everyone from speaking about the past. 

    In a late-picture scene, the entire family gathers to discuss what should happen to the uncle's property. How will the abuser's widow (Norah Mwansa) be treated? Don't expect fairness.

   A director of Zambian/Welsh background, Nyoni eventually explains the movie's title, which feeds into an ending that serves both as a wake-up call and a cry of desperation. It's a fitting conclusion for a movie that never hectors or feels any need to clobber its audience with a message.

    Deeply embedded in the culture it depicts, On Becoming a Guinea Fowl stands as a fine and truthfully rendered work. And lest you think that its resonance is limited by some sort of parochial Africanism, it's worth remembering that there's no continent where shame, denial, and avoidance don't wield their repressive powers.

A battering shot of comic violence

   First off, it's worth mentioning that I saw a preview of the new action comedy Novocaine in a theater equipped with 4DX. I'd never been exposed to this method of viewing before and to make things clear from the start, I was less than thrilled. 

   4DX aims to provide "extreme sensory cinema." You may feel air blowing against your face when cars speed across the screen or you may feel as if you’re being slammed against a wall during a fight. So called motion seats can shake, rattle, and roll you in synch with the action.

   If you want to know more about this technology, you can  visit a theater that uses it.  My view is simple: What's on the screen should offer sufficient sensory stimulation. How much extra boost do we need?

    I'm not sure what my reaction to Novocaine would have been had I seen it a theater that didn’t help turn the movie into a kind of amusement park ride. In fairness, I should say that Novocaine doesn't seem to aspire to much more than becoming another cinematic thrill ride. It begins softly, then comes on like a battering ram.

    The movie involves a gimmick suggested by its title. Nate (Jack Quaid), an assistant bank manager, suffers from Congenital Insensitivity to Pain with Anhidrosis (CIPA). He doesn't feel pain. A loner, Nate was bullied as a boy. His classmates made fun of his malady by dubbing him "Novocaine."

    The premise is simple. Nate decides to pursue a trio of brutal thugs (Evan Hengst, Conrad Kemp, and Ray Nicholson) who kidnap the only woman who ever gave Nate a second look, a bank teller named Sherry (Amber Midthunder). Scenes in which she coaxes him out of his shell are sweet.

    As an old ad once aid about a line of watches, Mate takes a licking but keeps on ticking. Because he feels no pain, he's able to stick his hand into a bubbling deep frier to retrieve a gun that's been tossed into it. He feels nothing when an arrow goes through his leg in house that's been booby trapped. Torture him and he has to fake his screams.

    Two cops (Betty Gabriel and Matt Walsh) also pursue the robbers; they view Nate as a suspect. They don't know he's just a lonely guy who fell for Sherry after she convinced him that it's OK to experience pleasure.

   That's pretty much it for casting, except for Jacob Batalon, who makes a late-picture entrance. Batalon plays a video game enthusiast and online pal of Nate who reluctantly comes to Nate's rescue.

    Quaid, the son of Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid, does a good job playing a guy who's entirely out-of-place in the violent, kick-ass world Nate encounters. Nicholson, son of Jack Nicholson and Rebecca Broussard, leads the pack of villains with sadistic verve.

   Fair to say, too, that directors Dan Berk and Robert Olsen demonstrate a feel for comic violence. But as the movie unfolds, the set pieces can seem more repetitious than innovative. Moreover, laughs can curdle as the violent "jokes" become increasingly graphic.

    Oh well, I'll sum it up this way: I'm not a fan of amusement park rides -- off screen or on.