A loopy, discombobulated 'Kraven'

 

   I'd never heard of Sergei Kravinoff until I looked at the credits for Kraven the Hunter, the latest Sony Marvel movie to reach the screen.

  Still confused, I sought more information. Better known as Kraven the Hunter, Kravinoff, I read, is an arch-enemy of Spider-Man. That didn't help, either. Spider-Man didn't appear in the credits or, as I later found out, in the movie.

  Seeing this standalone helping of lethal action resulted in only mild clarification. Marked by R-rated violence, director J.C. Chandors's scattered origin story plays like a darkly-hued Russian thriller that occasionally stops to remember its comic-book origins.

    The story kicks off in earnest when Sergei (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) flees his corrupt father (Russell Crowe) and sensitive brother (Fred Hechinger). He’s off to the woods, where he builds a yurt-like home and communes with wildlife

   Sergei, who'll become Kraven, holds a grudge against Crowe's Nikolai Kravinoff, a big-time drug dealer who drove Sergei's mom to suicide. Dad divides the world's inhabitants into two categories: Weak and strong. Mom was weak. 

  Two villains appear. Alessandro Nivola plays Rhino, a psycho nut job whose skin can turn into rhino hide when he needs protection. The transformation is painful, requiring the insertion of a tube into a portal that links to Rhino's gut, pumping him full of whatever turns sadists into rhinos.

   Christopher Abbott plays Foreigner, a villain who can vanish in one place and reappear in another, although it's unclear how he manages this trick.

  Perhaps to keep Kraven from drowning in testosterone, the screenplay introduces Calypso (Ariana DeBose), a lawyer who allies herself with Kraven; she helps him locate the miscreants he pursues. He has a list.

   Kraven has an advantage over his foes. He possesses the keenly developed senses of a hunter who forms bonds with animals. You may not get him, but four-legged creatures view him as a friend.

   Employing a Russian accent, Crowe delivers his sparse lines with fortune cookie terseness. "Man who kill legend becomes legend,'' he tells his then teenage sons during a hunting trip to Ghana in the movie's early going.

   At one point, Demitri, Kraven's sensitive brother, opens a piano bar and lounge. Listening to his son sing, Dad delivers the movie's most unabashedly irrelevant line. He announces that he trusts no man who doesn't like Tony Bennett. 

   Enough. Chandor (Margin Call, All is Lost) tries to corral a heap of disparate characters and ingredients: a Russian drug lord who groves on Tony Bennett, a potion that brings Sergei back from the dead, action scenes in which Kraven climbs walls and scampers on all fours, and a thundering herds of CGI yaks among them.

  Oh well, as Crowe's character might describe the resulting discombobulation, "No sense in screenplay makes nonsense on screen."

Two centuries before 'The Hobbit'

 

Director Kenji Kamiyama (Blade Runner: Black Lotus, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex) brings well-honed anime chops to Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, a story set two centuries before the Lord of the Rings saga most viewers know. Mostly for Lord of the Rings fans, War of Rohirrim pits the kingdom of Rohan and their leader Helm Hammerhand (voice by Brian Cox) against Wulf (Luke Pasqualino), the revenge-hungry son of Freca (Shaun Dooley), a warrior killed by Helm early in the proceedings. Helm's daughter Hera (Gaia Wise)  becomes the central figure in a long-running revenge saga dotted with a few references to what will follow. Kamiyama keeps a dense story moving, tying it together with a narration provided by Miranda Otto, who played Eowyn in director Peter Jackson's films. It's difficult to imagine a crop of Rings newbies flocking to Rohirrim, although the movie qualifies as a stand-alone production. Strong visual work proves admirable, and, although it fails to generate big-time excitement, the movie serves as a suitable fix for those who can't get enough Lord of the Rings related entertainment. Put a different way: It's not great, but better than I expected.

An FBI hunt for white supremacists

  The Silent Brotherhood, a foray into the ranks of right-wing extremism, was written by reporters Kevin Flynn and Gary Gerhardt. I remember the book’s 1990 publication because its authors were then co-workers of mine at The Rocky Mountain News, a now defunct Denver daily.

   Gerhardt passed away in 2015, and Flynn went to become a Denver City Council member after the News’s demise. 

  I don't know when I first heard that The Silent Brotherhood would be adapted for the screen and that it would star Jude Law, but the movie based on Flynn and Gerhardt's book -- now called The Order -- finally is reaching the nation’s theaters.

    The Order tells a story triggered by the murder of outspoken Denver talk show host Alan Berg (Marc Maron in a brief performance). I didn’t know Berg well, but I’d met him and had been on his show a couple of times, talking movies, I guess.

   Berg was gunned down in front of his Denver condo in 1984, a crime that, in The Order, becomes the catalyst for a penetrating look at the criminal activities of violent neo-Nazis operating in the Pacific Northwest during the 1980s, often supporting themselves by robbing banks.

  Australian director Justin Kurzel takes a no-frills approach to a true crime story with frightening political implications, providing insight into people attracted to the furthest corners of the American far right. 

  Law plays Terry Husk, an FBI agent who’s drawn into the investigation when he’s assigned to an office in a remote corner of Washington state. He’s had big cases in New York and elsewhere, but seems to be on the downside of his career.

  Law creates a character who's worn, dogged, and sad. But he perseveres.

  Tye Sheridan plays Jamie Bowden, a local cop who knows some of the gang members from when they were kids. Bowden serves as a guide for Husk; in return, he's schooled by Husk in the ways of cops who know the ropes.

   Jurnee Smollett joins the cast as another FBI agent who contributes to the investigation, a fraught task for a Black woman working to bring white supremacists to justice.

  Set during the 1980s, The Order finds its principal outlaw in neo-Nazi Bob Matthews, played with charisma by Nicholas Hoult, soon to be seen in Nosferatu. 

   Matthews, who founded a group called The Order, relies on his likability and persuasiveness to attract others to his foul cause. He creates a sense of belonging among his followers, a brotherhood of the disaffected united by bonds of hatred for the federal government and anyone who isn't white.

   Bombings, an armored truck heist, and other violent incidents light the movie’s action spark; they're part of The Order's disruptive tactics, some motivated by their obsession with The Turner Diaries, a 1978 novel and white supremacist influencer.

   Not every supremacist believes in Matthews's approach. At one point, Richard Butler (Victor Slezak), the head of the Aryan Nations, tries to control Bowden, who he views as a dangerous rogue. Butler comes off as a neo-Nazi institutionalist who’s willing to bide his time.

  The Order has been classified as a crime thriller. Heaven knows, we've seen plenty of them. But in a divided, fearful country, The Order acquires renewed  urgency. It has been 40 years since Matthews died in a fiery confrontation with the FBI. I wish his story felt more like a footnote than a precursor. 

Lies, deceits and a final reckoning

   With the movie Oh, Canada, director Paul Schrader adapts Foregone, a novel by Russell Banks, who also wrote Affliction, which Schrader turned into another of his movies in 1997. Schrader's latest movies (First Reformed, The Card Counter, and Master Gardener)  have had a strange stillness, as if the director has moved beyond storytelling into a near meditative state. 

  Full of fraught memories and soul-wrenching torments, this meditative state isn't marked by calm or clarity. It's full of reckonings.

   Richard Gere, who starred in Schrader's American Gigolo (1980), reunites with the director to play Leo Fife, an American-born documentary filmmaker who fled to Canada during the Vietnam War. 

  Riddled with cancer, the aging Fife has agreed to allow two of his former students (Michael Imperiole and Victoria Hill) to make a documentary about his life and work. Fife insists that the interview -- really an extended deathbed confession -- be conducted in the presence of his wife Emma (Uma Thurman).

   Gere has been made to look gaunt and wasted. Cancer devours Leo's body, but lies and deceits eat away at his soul. He hopes to set the record straight. But Schrader has too much integrity to turn the story into a tale of last-minute redemption.

  Schrader fragments the story so that we see Gere playing Fife at various stages of his life. For the most part, though, a younger Fife is played by Jacob Elordi. Gere and Elordi create an account of Fife's life that may be distorted by memory but nonetheless makes a mockery of the director's reputation as a filmmaker of courage and conviction.

   An early episode illustrates the point. Fife, then married to his pregnant wife (Kristine Froseth), agrees to run the family business of his wealthy father-in-law, abandoning dreams of teaching and writing. He soon employs his modus operandi concerning women, he flees.

   Because Fife makes films, it's tempting to look for spiritual kinship between Fife and Schrader, but such speculations can be dicey. Leo Fife built a reputation by being a good filmmaker, but he has no laurels on which to rest. The scaffolding that upholds his vaunted stature has been subject to rot. Exposing it doesn't make it a less bitter pill to swallow.

Motherhood is no picnic in ‘Nightbitch’

  Judging by its title, you’d half expect Nightbitch to revolve around a woman gangster who terrorizes her male counterparts with cunning and fury. 

  Director Marielle Heller takes a different tack, directing Amy Adams in what seems intended as an archly comic  look at a woman who realizes that four years of unrelieved motherhood is pinching the life out of her.  

   Her career as an artist? Lost? Sleep? Gone. Sanity? Almost drained. Help from her husband? There's not much of that either. 

  Scoot McNairy plays the clueless husband who travels a lot for business. He's not an ogre, just an average guy who has no idea about the amount of work it takes to be a mom. Additionally, he deludes himself about how much he shares the load.

   As part of her numbing routine, Adam's character also meets with other suburban moms (Zoe Chao, Archana Rajan, and Mary Holland). They gather for story hours for toddlers at the local library. Adams’s character initially disdains what she views as their mindless child-centered lives, but she eventually learns that her compatriots share similar frustrations.

   Is there a way out of this trap? Known only as "Mother,'' Adams' character asks the local librarian (Jessica Harper) to recommend books about magical transformations. Mother's request is prompted by her belief that she's transforming into a dog, a four-legged creature that runs free at night in the company of other dogs.

    And, yes, the movie takes this metaphor literally. Mother's physical transformation begins roughly midway through. Mother notices whiskers and fur growing on her body. Her full dip into doghood requires an effects boost.

    As Mother discovers her inner animal, she also remembers her relationship with her mother, a preview of coming attractions when viewed in retrospect. 

    Based on a novel by Rachel Yoder, Nightbitch isn't subtle -- no need for that when dealing with simmering rage, but the set-up is amusing, and Adams, who put on weight and shed make-up for the role, givers her performance some bite.

    Too bad the movie concludes with a copout that comes close to undermining the story that precedes it. Before her movie's done, Heller files away the movie's sharpest edges, sending us out of the theater disappointed rather than stimulated by the story's satirical sting.

A boxer's search for redemption

 

At times while watching director Jack Huston's Day of the Fight, I felt as though I were watching an advanced acting class. You can almost feel actors digging to wring every bit of flavor out of every scene. Shot in black-and-white, Day of the Fight tells the story of a one-time middleweight champion trying to pull his life together after being released from prison. Michael C. Pitt plays Michael Flannigan, a boxer we follow on the day of his comeback fight at Madison Square Garden. Mike spends the day trying to mend fences with some of the major people in his life, notably his former wife (Nicolette Robinson) and teenage daughter. He also meets with his trainer Ron Perlman, an uncle (Steve Buscemi) who has been a major influence in his life, and a friend (John Magaro) from the old neighborhood who has become a priest.  Mike also visits the father (Joe Pesci) who tormented him as a kid but now is a demented old man staring out the window of the nursing home where he lives. Flannigan also makes a major bet on himself to win his bout. Huston's gritty New York story aims at the heart, but its beat is slowed by the extra weight of genre familiarity.

A daring 'Queer' doesn't quite payoff

 

 
   Much has been made about Daniel Craig's appearance in Queer, an adaptation of a 1985 novella by William S. Burroughs, the Beat writer best known for Naked Lunch. A movie titled Queer marks an obvious departure for Craig, the actor who starred in five James Bond movies.

    Queer takes Craig as far away from Bond as possible, giving him the role of a gay, heroin-addicted writer living in Mexico City during the 1950s, a decade that, at least in cliche, was rooted in conformity, repression, and exaltation of the mainstream.

   A literary exile of sorts, Craig's William Lee spends more time drinking than writing in the seedy digs he rents. Dissolute and needy, Lee never leaves his small apartment without a pistol strapped to his side. Meant for protection, the gun also becomes emblematic of an hombre image, a man willing to go the violent distance if necessary. He offers a reasonable approximation of what might be called the William Burroughs look.

    Although he has little trouble finding sex, Lee stumbles when it comes to deeper relationships. He sees an opportunity for more than a fling when he meets Eugene (Drew Starkey), a handsome young photographer who we know will frustrate Lee's desires. Eugene quickly makes it clear that he has little interest in emotionally connected relationships. 

   Persistent to the point of obsession, Lee clings to Eugene, who seems untethered from nearly everything.

    Eventually, Lee persuades Eugene to accompany him on an Ecuadorian adventure. Lee plans to take a drug he's heard can make people telepathic. He hopes a psychedelic will enable him to bond with Eugene, assuming Eugene will reciprocate. Seen from the outside, the idea that they might become soul mates becomes the delusional denouement of an exotic travelogue.

   Working from a screenplay by Justin Kuritzkes, director Luca Guadagnino uses the last third of his movie to conjure images of psychedelic tripping; he adds a touch of surrealism to the proceedings, a disorienting arrival considering the carefully studied grit of its Mexico City scenes. (Much of Queer was shot in studios.)

    Guadagnino has built a reputation for “art” movies with gay content, Call Me by Your Name being a prime example. The sex scenes in Queer are more graphic than anything Guadagnino included in Call Me by Your Name.

     A small supporting cast relieves the movie's thematic claustrophobia. Lesley Manville appears as an eccentric botanist who has been studying South American psychedelics, notably a drug called Yage. A resident of the jungle wilds, she's gone a bit bonkers. 

      In what might be his most interesting work to date, Jason Schwartzman plays Joe Guidry, a gay friend of Lee's who lives in Mexico City and who seems to enjoy rambling on about his many trysts. Joe's comfortable with himself in ways Lee can't be.

     Unfolding during a sometimes fatiguing two hours and 15 minutes, Queer slogs its way through three chapters and an epilogue, providing Craig with a platform from which to take a deep dive into alienation, self-abasement, and existential loneliness.

     But Queer has a dated quality. Burroughs wrote Queer in the late 1940s, when everything about it -- including its title -- might have seemed startling; for some. the novel became an immersive wallow in the defiance associated with living on the cheap, prowling dirty streets and sleeping on dirty sheets.

   To the extent that Queer can be seen as a thinly disguised memoir, it might generate interest among Burroughs enthusiasts or those who want to remind themselves that Craig, who has appeared in some 40 movies, successfully has escaped the Bond prison.

     Queer gives Craig plenty with which to work, but the movie -- part endurance test and part curiosity -- never coheres into the bold, challenging work that must have been intended. 

     I'd call it a missed opportunity, but I'm not sure for what.

   

Looking for light in Mumbai

 

   Prabha (Kani Kusruti), a nurse, lives in the bustling city of Mumbai. She's married, but her husband, who traveled to Germany seeking work, gradually vanished from her life. The phone calls have stopped coming. 

   Prabha shares her apartment with Anu (Divya Prabha), a young woman who works at the same hospital as Prabha. Devoted to her work, Prabha is an empathetic nurse, but work and routine take their toll on her spirit. 

    Lively and impetuous, Anu seems open to having a good time. She's secretly dating Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), a relationship that challenges long-standing antagonism between Mumbai's Muslim and Hindi-speaking populations.

   In All We Imagine as Light,  director Payal Kapadia makes Mumbai a part of the story; her camera explores the city’s streets, buses, and cramped apartments. Kapadia understands how feelings of disconnection arise in a city where almost 22 million people reside, many uprooted from smaller communities where they seldom encountered strangers.

     An independent woman, Prabha still trusts in her marriage. We suspect she may be deluding herself. At one point, her husband sends her a pressure cooker, not the most romantic of gestures. He doesn't include an explanatory note or greeting. He's become anonymous.

      Still, when a well-intentioned doctor (Azees Nedumangad) tries for a deeper connection with Prabha, she balks. She's stuck, bound by tradition and her own reserve.

    After watching All We Imagine as Light, you can  look back and realize how much you've learned while watching two women navigating life in an environment that breeds loneliness.

   Prabha and Anu, who have their disagreements, eventually travel to a seaside village to escort a genial co-worker (Chhaya Kadam) back to her hometown.  Developers are on the verge of evicting Kadam's Parvaty from her apartment. She's had enough of Mumbai.

    An important scene in the village -- perhaps the movie's most important -- needn't be taken literally. I can’t say more without spoilers, but I suggest allowing the scene to throw you off track. Go with it as Kapadia begins to resolve the stasis of Prabha's life and the ambiguities of Anu's romance.

     All We Imagine as Light ends as gently as a sigh. Credit Kapadia for reminding us that it's possible for a film to say a great deal without raising its voice.

'Maria' needed some operatic heft

 

  When Maria Callas died in 1977 at the age of 53, the New York Times obituary called her "the most exciting opera singer of her time." 

 Director Pablo Larrain's Maria presents Callas at her height only in flashbacks when the singer recalls previous triumphs. Known for Jackie and Spencer, the Chilean-born Larrain tends to focus his biographical efforts on well-known women at low points in their lives. In this case, Callas faces an artist's worst nightmare: diminishing powers.

   Larrain's abbreviated biopic hits few high notes as it chronicles the final days of an artist who already has begun to fade; tormented by inexorable decline, both Callas and the movie lose spark.

   In Maria, Angelina Jolie plays Callas, who's living in Paris, where she occasionally meets with a pianist in hopes of regaining her voice. The pianist (Stephen Ashfield) refuses to coddle her. He knows she's done. She knows she's done, but our emotions aren't summoned by the magnitude of Callas's loss.

    By this time, Callas was popping pills and ignoring the physician who told her that if she kept pushing to regain her vocal prowess, she'd kill herself. She disregarded her doctor’s advice and suffered a fatal attack. Larrain opens his movie with Callas dead on the floor of her apartment, her body mostly hidden by a sofa. 

    There are two stars of Larrain's film: Jolie's Callas and Callas's lavish apartment, the Paris abode where she lives with her housemaid and cook (Alba Rohrwacher) and her loyal butler (Pierfranceso Favino). Favino's Ferruccio cares for Callas despite her sometimes excessive demands. He may evoke memories of Erich von Stroheim in Sunset Boulevard.

    Jolie brings regal aloofness to the role of a woman whose life began in poverty and ascended to the upper levels of celebrity, wealth, and artistic recognition. She was known for being “temperamental,” but some of the more publicized turmoil in her life (getting fired from the Met, for example) are omitted in this telling.

        Several of Larrain's flashbacks depict Callas's relationship with Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer), the shipping magnate who eventually dumped Callas for Jaqueline Kennedy.

       We see scenes of Callas's difficult girlhood. The mother she grew to hate made Callas and her sister (briefly played as an adult by Valeria Golina) provide diversion for German invaders during the Nazi occupation of Greece. Thankfully, the movie refrains from showing us how carnal these diversions may have gotten.

       Larrain makes structural mistakes, the worst of which involves having Callas interviewed by a TV journalist (Kodi Smith-McPhee) who's making a film about the great singer. Really? Haven't we seen enough of this worn out conceit?

       I’m not saying Maria isn’t watchable. Mixing black-and-white and color footage, cinematographer Ed Lachman creates a somber beauty of a movie, and the musical selections, some of which reportedly blend Jolie's voice with Callas's, create moments of majesty.

       Clips of Callas singing on YouTube make it clear that she performed with a heightened level of passion few could match. Larrain's film could have used some of the singer’s operatic sweep, a sense that it’s riding a tragic wave as it hurtles toward its inevitable crash. 

         And one more thing: Given its subject, the movie might better have been titled Callas. There are many Marias, but there was only one Callas. No offense to anyone who goes through life with that same surname.