Siblings struggle with life crises

 
   

       The Millers aren't a happy lot.

       One of the Miller sisters (Julianna Marguiles) writes novels that sell but she's frustrated by her husband's inertia. A once-successful author (Campbell Scott), he's currently unable to write. 

   Another Miller sister (Gretchen Mol) abandoned her career as a rising rock guitarist to raise her children and support the career of her rock musician husband (Patrick Wilson), a guitarist who spends most of his time on tour and who drinks too much.

    Andy Miller (Edward Burns), the third Miller sibling, recently was dumped by his wife (Morena Baccarin). An artist by trade, Andy is trying to find his footing in a relationship with a friend (Minnie Driver) of his soon to be ex-wife.

   Written and directed by Burns and featuring a strong ensemble cast, Millers in Marriage piles a lot on its plate, so much so that it often seems as if it's working through a checklist of 50something problems.

  Although he includes flashbacks to various pivotal points in the characters' lives, Burns doesn't do much to make the family background of three siblings part of the story. And putting each character at a major turning point feels a little too pat.

    Each sister looks beyond her marriage. 

Marguiles's Maggie has her eye on a local handyman (Brian D'Arcy James). Mol's Eve is tempted by a charming rock journalist (Benjamin Bratt).

    Despite a reasonable amount of conflict, the movie seldom catches fire, and its settings lean toward comforting affluence. Nothing wrong with that but it's almost as if Millers in Marriage is afraid to muss its hair. Too bad. More mess might have been what the movie needed. 

      

 

'The Monkey': Gore with a comic twist

 

Director Osgood Perkins won over horror fans (I wasn't one of them) with Longlegs, a 2024 movie that featured another unmoored performance from Nicolas Cage. Now Perkins returns with The Monkey, an adaptation of a 1980 short story by Stephen King. 

   Slickly realized and gurgling with blood-soaked humor, The Monkey focuses on twin brothers (both played by Theo James) who are tormented by a large toy monkey with a terrifying grin. When wound up, the monkey begins drumming ominously. Guess what? Someone is about to die. 

   Attempts to find laughter amid the gore meet with intermittent success; these include swarming hornets, a cobra that springs out of a hole on a golf course, and stampeding horses that turn a man's insides to mush. That's where we are, I guess. Inventive violence has become a measure of creativity. The fun -- if it's your cup of gore -- stems from the variety of ways Osgood and his team devise for characters to meet their ends.

   The Monkey reaches its finale when one brother (James's Hal) reunites with the teenage son (Colin O'Brien) he hasn't seen for years. Long divorced, Hal has kept his son at a distance to protect the kid from the monkey curse. 

  Despite antipathy between the two brothers and the burden of guilt one them carries, the movie can feel as if its marking time, offering bits of story until it's ready to serve up another piece of cleverly contrived gore.

   A final joke struck me as tastelessly cruel, but audiences can decide for themselves how far over-the-top they want to go with Osgood. I laughed some, but when I reflected on the movie, a lyric from an old Chuck Berry tune began to run through my mind. "Too much monkey business for me."

    

   

A disarming look at Iranians in Canada

 

    In his new movie, Universal Language, director Matthew Rankin, a Canadian with Iranian roots, turns the ordinary into a weirdly amusing norm as he transplants fragments of Persian culture into a frozen Canadian city.

   Rankin sets most of his movie in Winnipeg, which -- in the movie -- becomes an Iranian enclave resembling an arctic outpost. Beige, brown and grey apartment and office buildings create an impersonal  backdrop for a tapestry of storylines that appear, disappear, and ultimately converge.

     I've never been to Winnipeg. If you have, you may not recognize the city Rankin invents. The characters speak Persian -- with dashes of French adding fillips of cultural collision. Street signs are written in Persian, an ironic expression considering that Iranians make up less than one percent of Canada's population.

     A feeling of chilled sadness sometimes settles over the  proceedings, which are presented in such a matter-of-fact way, we’re knocked off our moorings. Rankins's characters, both children and adults, never act as if anything might be amiss; they don't rebel against the world in which they find themselves: They live in it.

     Sadness and humor become soul mates. We meet a woman who works as a lacrymologist. She collects tears at the local cemetery. At home, she keeps jars full of tears on her living room shelves. Were they shed over a lost homeland? Lost loves? The pain of living? You fill in the blank.

    The town's Kleenex repository staffed by a man dressed in a formal white suit supports the idea that the town's residents cry a lot. Rows of open Kleenex boxes line the shelves of what seems to be a quasi-official location.

    Rankin takes us to a store that sells only turkeys; the store's proprietor is bereft over a special turkey that got lost in transit to him. His love for turkeys runs deep, as must the town's love of turkey dinners.

    Strands of silliness lace through the movie's fabric. At one point, a character mentions an agency known as the Winnipeg Earmuff Authority. Many characters wear outsized earmuffs, colorful exclamation points in a desaturated world.

    The movie plays a neat trick. Instead of the emigres feeling misplaced; we do. There's nothing antagonistic about Rankin's approach; he embeds odd touches into the quotidian rhythms of his characters' lives.

    In Winnipeg, a tour guide moves through the city pointing out sites of preposterous insignificance, notably a parking lot where the Great Parallel Parking Dispute of 1958 occurred.

    Rankin leaves it to us to sort through the movie’s jests and conceits: a kid who attends school dressed as Groucho Marx, an attempt to retrieve money that has been frozen under ice, a late-picture identity swap involving a character played by Rankin,  a former government worker who travels from Montreal to Winnipeg to visit his aging mother.

    Those more familiar with Canada than I probably will appreciate more of Rankin's wry but gentle humor. Know, though, that Universal Language is the work of an artist with a keen appreciation for the absurdities that accompany displacement, as well as for the absurdities of the strange environment his characters inhabit. 

    Critics have pointed out that Universal Language contains trace elements of the cinema of Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami and of Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki. True, but Universal Language speaks its own disarming language.

   So what's the universal language to which the title refers? It's neither Persian nor French. It can't be found on street signs or at the local Tom Hollands restaurant where tea is served from a samovar. It may be found in the ridiculousness lengths some of Rankins's characters go for others. Better to be absurdly kind than absurdly cruel.

    Not everyone will want to make this trip to Winnipeg,  but those who appreciate the quiet audacity of Rankin's vision will find a movie that amuses and enriches as it mingles laughter and tears.

     Toward the end of the movie, the brother of the man who owns the turkey store sings a mournful Persian love song. The Canadian group The Guess Who's Those Eyes follows on the soundtrack. 

     "These eyes cry every night for you.'' So goes the opening lyric of Those Eyes. Universal Language echoes that plaintive sentiment while never forgetting to smile at the unspoken heartbreak that may have prompted all those tears.

Failures of ‘The Gorge’ go deep

 Billed as an action/romance, The Gorge is set to bow on Apple TV+. I’ve been hesitant about reviewing movies released exclusively on streaming services. My reluctance doesn’t necessarily speak to the quality of such films, but a lingering prejudice about the superiority of theatrical releases has proven difficult to shake, at least for me.

  I nonetheless opted to watch The Gorge. Given the chaos of the moment, I craved a diversion that might contain vertiginous thrills — no matter how obviously delivered. 

   Here’s the premise. Miles Teller and Anya Taylor-Joy play two sharpshooters — one a former Marine, the other a servant of Russian overlords—who are assigned to remote posts in what appears to be an Eastern European wilderness. They are separated by a deep gorge that's home to an ominous threat. 

   Their job: Prevent the threat — dubbed The Hollow Men — from climbing out of the gorge, a task that requires ample amounts of ammunition.

   Don't get too excited. Sure, T.S. Eliot wrote a poem called The Hollow Men and the screenplay includes other erudite references but they play more like Post-it notes than deeply felt revelations.

    A simple story arc emerges. Independent sorts, the sharpshooters must bridge the physical gap that keeps them apart, join forces in a battle for survival, and, of course, fall in love.

   At first, I remained hopeful. Sigourney Weaver turns up as a no-nonsense official who sends Teller’s Levi on his mission. Of course, we don’t trust her; she’s too crisp, too smart to be straightforward. 

   After providing some background about Taylor-Joy’s character, director Scott Derrickson lands the two assassins at their outposts, towers flanking both sides of the wide gorge. They’ve been instructed  to communicate with each other, but Taylor-Joy’s Drassa makes signs for Teller's Levi to read through his high-powered binoculars. She invites him to help her celebrate her birthday.

    Derrickson doesn’t waste time revealing the danger,  mutant creatures that look as though they’ve been assembled from sticks, leaves, slime, and animal parts. 

     Joy-Taylor's boldness gives the movie one of its few highlights carrying us to the moment when the two killers wind up in the gorge. There, Derrickson and his team build a world shrouded in fog and populated by weird creatures.

   Considering that both characters are deadly shots at long distances, it's odd that the movie forces them into so much close-quarters combat, slathering the action with gook and gore.

    When our heroes find an abandoned laboratory, we learn how the creatures were spawned, another letdown. A film made by a long-gone scientist explains the whole movie, but not without a heavy reliance on devices that the scientist and her colleagues conveniently left behind.

   You'll have little trouble finding your own examples of contrivance, so I'll conclude by saying that The Gorge returned me unrewarded to the world I'd been trying to escape. 

A new Captain America hits the screen

 

  I'd like to talk about the ending of Captain America: Brave New World. It's borderline crazy, gratuitously overblown, willfully preposterous, and, perhaps, the most enjoyable thing about this latest edition to the MCU canon. 

  I laughed a lot as the movie smashed its way toward a Washington D.C.-based conclusion. The late-picture bombast struck me as amusing, although I'm not sure that was the reaction the creators were hoping for.

   Only the fear of spoilers keeps me from saying more. So on with the review: 

    Captain America: Brave New World spends much of its 118-minute runtime watching Sam Wilson (Anthony Mackie) justify his ascendance to the role of Captain America, a job once filled by Steve Rogers (Chris Evans). Although Mackie often appears in nicely tailored suits, he dons his uniform when it counts. Mackie earns his shield, which he tosses around like a lethal Frisbee.

   Director Julius Onah balances comic-book bravado and elements that sometimes resemble a conventional hunk of intrigue about how power should be wielded.

   In this outing, Harrison Ford takes over a role previously played by the late William Hurt. Ford portrays Thadeous Ross, a ruthless US president who wants to change his image from warrior to peacemaker. 

  To accomplish his lofty goal, Ross must arrange a treaty under which the world's powers will  agree to share adamantium, a much-desired substance that .... well ... who cares what it does?

   Looking older than he ever has on film, Ford appears throughout the movie; he seems committed to serving the story's serious side while not diminishing its comic-book clout.

    In the early going, President Ross invites Wilson to the White House in hopes that the new Captain America will bring the Avengers back to life. 

   Before an Avengers rebirth can occur, an aggrieved super soldier (Carl Lumbly) -- one of Wilson's warrior pals and a wrongly imprisoned victim of his own government -- takes a shot at the president. 

   The assassination attempt fails, but we're quickly assured that Lumbly's Isaiah Bradley is no revenge-seeking villain; mysteriously, he's being manipulated. Wilson pledges to clear his friend's name.

    Thematically, Brave New World touches on genetic engineering and mind control while making room for an aerial battle over the Indian Ocean when the US tries to prevent Japan from seizing control of the world's adamantium supply. 

    Plenty of well-played additional characters turn up. Shira Haas portrays a former Mossad agent who works as the president's top security aide. Giancarlo Esposito plays Sidewinder, a bad guy for hire. Danny Ramirez adds a welcome light touch as Falcon.

     Tim Blake Nelson does major bad-guy duty as Samuel Sterns, a biology genius with a grudge against the president and the need for a wig. Stern's hair has been replaced by the brain that grows outside his head. 

      The action sequences aren't exactly groundbreaking, and at times, the screenplay slows its roll so that various characters can deliver chunks of exposition.

      I have no idea how much of a splash Brave New World will make, but the movie flirts with topicality as it tries to keep the Marvel torch burning. Yes, the flame sometimes sputters, but like Mackie, Brave New World ultimately holds its own.

'Anora' earns Critics Choice best picture

 

   No single movie dominated the 30th Critics Choice Awards. Wicked, Emilia Pérez, and The Substance led the pack with three awards each. Anora won best picture, but earned no other awards. 

  Surprisingly, Jon M. Cho won best director for Wicked, beating directors I saw as frontrunners: Jacques Audiard (Emilia Pérez), Sean Baker (Anora), and Brady Corbet (The Brutalist). 

   The acting awards seemed to follow a more predictable arc with Adrien Brody (The Brutalist) and Demi Moore (The Substance) winning best actor and actress awards. Kiren Culkin (A Real Pain) and Zoe Saldaña (Emilia Pérez) scored victories in the supporting-actor category.

   The Critics Choice Awards sometimes have served as a bellwether for the Academy Awards. This year's awards may help you with Oscar predictions -- but not in the best-director category. Chu (Wicked) won the Critics Choice award for best director. Oscar snubbed him in its best-director category.

   I'll note that I'm a member of the Critics Choice Association and leave you to peruse the list:

Best Picture

Winner: Anora

The Brutalist

Conclave

Dune: Part Two

Emilia Perez

Nickel Boys

Sing Sing

The Substance

Wicked

Best Actor

Winner: Adrien Brody, The Brutalist

Timothee Chalamet, A Complete Unknown

Colman Domingo, Sing Sing

Daniel Craig, Queer

Ralph Fiennes, Conclave

Hugh Grant, Heretic

Best Actress

Winner: Demi Moore, The Substance

Cynthia Erivo, Wicked

Karla Sofia Gascon, Emilia Perez

Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Hard Truths

Angelina Jolie, Maria

Mickey Madison, Anora

Best Supporting Actor

Winner: Kieren Culkin, A Real Pain

Yura Borisov, Anora

Clarence Maclin, Sing Sing

Edward Norton, A Complete Unknown

Guy Pearce, The Brutalist

Denzel Washington, Gladiator II

Best Supporting Actress

Winner: Zoe Saldana, Emilia Perez

Danielle Deadwyler, The Piano Lesson

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Nickel Boys

Ariana Grande, Wicked

Margaret Qualley, The Substance

Isabella Rossellini, Conclave

Best Director

Winner: Jon M. Chu, Wicked

Jacques Audiard, Emilia Perez

Sean Baker, Anora

Edward Berger, Conclave

Brady Corbet, The Brutalist

Coralie Fargeat, The Substance

RaMell Ross, Nickel Boys

Denis Villeneuve, Dune: Part Two

Best Original Screenplay

Winner: Caralie Fargeat, The Substance

Sean Baker, Anora

Brady Corbet, Mona Fastvoid, The Brutalist

Moritz Binder, Tim Fehlbaum, Alex David, September 5

Jesse Eisenberg, A Real Pain

Justin Kuritzkes, Challengers

Best Adapted Screenplay

Winner: Peter Straughan, Conclave

Jacques Audiard, Emilia Perez

Winnie Holzman, Dana Fox, Wicked

Greg Kwedar, Clint Bentley, Sing Sing

RaMell Ross & Joslyn Barnes, Nickel Boys

Denis Villeneuve, Jon Spaihts, Dune: Part Two

Best Cinematography

Winner: Jarin Blaschke, Nosferatu

Alice Brooks, Wicked

Lol Crawley, The Brutalist

Stephane Fontaine, Conclave

Greig Fraser, Dune: Part Two

Jomo Fray, Nickel Boys

Best Production Design

Winner: Wicked

The Brutalist

Conclave

Nosferatu

Gladiator II

Dune: Part Two

Best Editing

Winner: Challengers

Anora

Conclave

The Brutalist

Dune: Part Two

September 5

Best Costume Design

Winner: Wicked

Conclave

Nosferatu

Maria

Dune: Part Two

Gladiator II

Best Hair and Makeup

Winner: The Substance

A Different Man

Beetle Juice Beetle Juice 

Gladiator II

Wicked

Dune: Part Two

Best Visual Effects

Winner: Dune: Part Two

Gladiator II

Better Man

The Substance

Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

Wicked 

Best Animated Feature

Winner: The Wild Robot

Flow

Inside Out 2

Memoir of a Snail

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl

 

Best Foreign Language Film

Winner: Emilia Perez

All We Imagine as Light

Flow

I'm Still Here

Kneecap

The Seed of the Sacred Fig

Best Song

Winner: El Mai, Emilia Perez

Beautiful That Way, The Last Showgirl

Compress/Repress, Challengers

Harper and Will Go West, Will & Harper

Kiss the Sky, The Wild Robot

Mi Camino, Emilia Perez

Best Score

Winner: Challengers

Conclave

The Brutalist

The Wild Robot

Emilia Perez

Dune: Part Two

Best Comedy Film

Tied Winners: A Real Pain, Deadpool & Wolverine

Hit Man

My Old Ass

Saturday Night

Thelma

Best Young Actor/Actress

Winner: Maisy Stella, My Old Ass

Elliott Heffernan, Blitz

Izaac Wang, Didi

Alisha Weir, Abigail

Zoe Ziegler, Janet Planet

Best Acting Ensemble

Winner: Conclave

Anora

Emilia Perez

Saturday Night

Sing Sing

Wicked

A searing West Bank documentary

  This is either the worst time or the best time for releasing the documentary No Other Land. It's the worst time if you're sympathetic to Israel's attempts to push Hamas out of Gaza, and the best, if you view Israel as an oppressive power dedicated to keeping Palestinians under control.  

    Filmed over three years beginning in 2019, No Other Land doesn't take place in Gaza and most of the movie was filmed before October 7 when Israel suffered a brutal terrorist attack, but it likely will feed the already widespread outrage about the ensuing war.

   No Other Land deals with Israeli attempts to clear Masafer Yatta, a community consisting of 20 villages that are home to about 1,000 Palestinians. The battle over Masafer Yatta and its inhabitants has been raging for years with Israel claiming the area as an IDF training ground. 

  The Israeli decision, supported by Israeli courts after decades of wrangling, has led to the eviction of Masafer Yatta's residents from their homes and the destruction of many of those same dwellings. 

  The disturbing sight of bulldozers destroying the modest homes of Palestinians makes you think that there must be a better way to resolve a land dispute than forcing the newly homeless to take up residence in caves.

   The film, it should be noted, is the work of a collective composed of two Palestinians and two Israelis.

   The movie focuses on Basel Adra, a Palestinian activist who opposes Israeli attempts to clear an area the Palestinians view as their long-standing home. Israeli operations include the demolition of houses and, late in the documentary, the even more disturbing destruction of a school built by Palestinians.

    During the movie, we also meet Yuval Abraham, an Israeli journalist trying to draw attention to the Palestinian story. He hasn't had much success.

  The movie involves provocative discussions about the divisions that separate the two men despite their shared convictions. Abraham, who speaks Arabic and whose politics are clear, is free to move around Israel and the West Bank while Adra's movements are restricted. 

   Questions arise about whether the imbalance ever can be overcome.

   Violence, of course, proves terrifying and costly. A Palestinian man is paralyzed after being shot while trying to prevent IDF soldiers from seizing the generator that powers his home.

     Equally unsettling are scenes of Israeli settlers -- civilians not IDF soldiers -- attacking Palestinians in what looks like wanton vigilantism. 

     For the record: Masafer Yatta is part of Area C which came under Israeli military and civil control as part of the Oslo Accords of 1993. Israel, however, has been in the territory since the six-day war of 1967.  Palestinians argue that their families have lived in Masafer Yatta for generations.

     Some would argue that the onscreen events speak for themselves and that no further elaboration was needed. I'd say that some broader context would have helped, as would have the addition of a few more Israeli voices. 

   A cautionary note: I wouldn't take the film as a blanket explanation for what's happening in Israel today or for the long-standing enmity between Palestinians and Israelis,  but there’s no denying the movie's power.

   No Other Land, by the way, has been nominated for an Academy Award in the best-documentary category. For the record: The film has been available for free viewing in Israel. No American distributor has acquired the film, which is being self-distributed and thus far, has been seen in film festivals and in smaller venues.

A kickless dud of an action comedy

 

Ariana DeBose's portrayal of Anita in West Side Story earned her an Oscar for best supporting actress in 2022.  Ke Huy Quan won an  Oscar for best supporting actor in 2023, playing a character who vaulted through multiple universes in Everything Everywhere All at Once.

   The two Oscar-winning actors are teamed in Love Hurts, a skimpy action comedy in which Quan gets most of the attention. Director Jonathan Eusebio lands a few bloody high shots (the view through a hole that has been blown in a man's head) but seldom connects when it comes to laughs.

    Love Hurts' major accomplishment involves brevity: It's 83 minutes long.

    The story begins with a cliched premise: Marvin Gable, a ludicrously joyful real estate agent, is drawn back into the assassin's life he believed he had abandoned.

     A poor excuse of a plot kicks off on Valentine's Day after Knuckles (Daniel Wu), Marvin's crime czar brother, tries to punish DeBose's character for taking mob money.

    Marvin, who once did his brother's bidding, had been ordered to kill DeBose's Rose. He didn't follow through. Now, she's back.

    Quan seems to be working way too hard. DeBose has too little to do, and the pair generates little by way of the rom-com chemistry that's supposed to provide heart.

    A gaggle of uninteresting thugs -- one played by Marshawn "Beastmode" Lynch -- doesn't add much either. 

   Some scenes simply don't pay off. Ashley (Lio Tipton) plays Gable's assistant at the real estate office. She falls for the brutal Raven (Mustafa Shakir), who wins her over with his sensitive, if unexpected, poetry. Sean Astin has a nice turn as Marvin's boss. 

   A duo of uninteresting thugs -- Marshawn "Beastmode" Lynch and André Eriksen-- doesn't add much either. 

   Might as well follow the movie's lead and keep things short. Cartoonish and forgettable, Love Hurts  proves a kick less dud.

A muddled debut and a school conflict

   Lineage doesn't necessarily matter when it comes to filmmaking, but it's difficult to begin a review of Armand, a stylistically muddled Norwegian thriller from director Halfdan Ullmann Tondel, without mentioning Ullmann Tondel's grandparents, director Ingmar Bergman and actress Liv Ullmann. 

   Safe to say Tondel doesn't seem intimidated by his family's achievements. Mixing straightforward storytelling with surreal touches, Tondel latches onto a subject that's rich with possibility, a clash between parents at a grade school where six-year-old Armand (never seen) has been accused by Jon, another unseen student, of bullying and sexual abuse. 

   Wisely, Tondel focuses on parents not children. The school's publicity-shy principal (Oystein Roger) insists that Armand's mother (Renate Reinsve) meet with Jon's parents (Ellen Dorrit Petersen and Endre Hellestveit). Reasonable adult behavior is supposed to follow. Sure.

   Sounds intriguing, but the movie plays as if Tondel hadn't sorted through the screenplay's thickening web of issues and subtext; he veers away from the story's psychological and social dynamics to  perplexing effect, even including a couple of dance numbers.

    It may not ignite, but Tondel has the necessary kindling to stoke plenty of dramatic fire. 

   An actress by trade, Elizabeth has had a prior relationship with Jon's parents. Turns out Jon's mother was the sister of Elizabeth's late husband, who -- we're told  -- committed suicide.

   Perhaps to add satirical garnish, Tondel also deals with the school's timidity. The principal puts a novice teacher (Thea Lambrechts Vaulen) in charge of the pivotal meeting between parents. She's supposed to smooth things over.

   Eventually, the principal and another administrator (Vera Veljovic-Jovanovic) join the conference, which gets nowhere and is disrupted by the administrator's frequent nosebleeds, a bizarre intrusion that, like much else about the movie, leaves you wondering what Tondel had in mind. 

   It's difficult to fault Tondel for being too cautious; he includes a surprising scene in which Elizabeth goes on an uncontrolled and extended laughing jag. Perhaps she's nervous or maybe she glimpses an inherent absurdity in the idea of a six-year-old boy being capable of sexual abuse. 

   Whatever's happening, Reinsve (The Worst Person in the World and A Different Man) bravely goes along for the ride.

   I lost hope when, late in the picture, Elizabeth and the school's custodian begin to dance. The best I can say about Tondel's effort is that it's interesting watching him try to hit all manner of notes. The resultant head-scratcher of a movie makes you hope Tondel eventually hits his stride.