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.

'Black Bag': a tense tale about trust

  

   Director Steven Soderbergh's Black Bag uses the threatened meltdown of a nuclear plant to add an element of global peril to a movie that, despite such ominous stakes, plays an intriguing game of small ball. 

  Collaborating with screenwriter David Koepp, Soderbergh focuses on the increasingly tense relationships between a group of British intelligence agents, one of whom plans to sell the meltdown malware that could trigger mass casualties and which the British have deemed too dangerous to employ.

  Playing married spies, Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett lead a strong cast that keeps the movie percolating. Everyone's behavior becomes suspect.

   The set-up immediately raises the personal stakes for Fassbender's George. Early on, George learns that his wife's name has appeared on a list of five agents who might be traitors. If she's the culprit, he's going to have to kill her. Will George be more loyal to his wife than to his job? We're not sure. Maybe he's not sure either.

    Blanchett's Katherine seems cagey and intelligent, and it's clear that she and George have carefully worked out the calculus that allows their marriage to continue, even though they sometimes have to reply to each other’s questions by saying "black bag." That means the answer is too secret to divulge.

     Fassbender makes George into a tightly wound professional who keeps us off balance.  To begin his investigation, George stages a dinner party at which the suspected agents (Regé-Jean Page, Tom Burke, and Marisa Abela) and a member of the agency's psych team (Naomie Harris) wind up spilling tea on one another. They reveal enough to bring out festering animosities, but not enough to allow George to identify the culprit. 

    Pierce Brosnan has a nice turn as the head of the agency. He and the rest of the cast embody a drama that bristles with small and large betrayals.

   At times, the movie's many intricate turns get ahead of the audience, but it's not necessary to follow the characters into every cranny Soderbergh explores. A smart screenplay encourages confidence that a satisfying conclusion will be reached. 

    Black Bag includes a skillfully edited polygraph scene that reminds us that truth is difficult to come by in an environment where nearly every one lies. How can they not? It's part of the job.

   

'Mickey 17' fails to stick a landing

    Korean director Bong Joon Ho finds his way to Hollywood for Mickey 17,  a teeming, cockeyed adaptation of a novel by Edward Ashton. Ashton titled his novel Mickey7. 

    I don't know whether Bong has upped the ante by adding more Mickeys. I haven’t read Ashton’s book. I did, however, approach Mickey 17 with high hopes. Bong, after all, has directed some of my favorite movies. The list includes The Host (2006), Snowpiercer (2013), and Okja (2017). He also directed Parasite (2019), which won him best-picture and best director Oscars.

   Given my expectations, I’d say Mickey 17 registers as a disappointment. Although the movie can be funny and audacious, its many tonal shifts (from serious sci-fi to blatant slapstick to broadly expressed satire) never cohere into a satisfying whole.

   Bong again deals with class divisions and the human tendency to destroy anything regarded as alien, but Mickey 17 lacks the controlled brilliance with which Parasite vaulted over the top.

   The casting  features a variety of acting styles. A groggy- looking Robert Pattinson plays Mickey, a desperate young man who signs on for a space voyage to escape a vindictive loan shark on Earth. 

   Aboard the ship, Mickey becomes a human guinea pig, a so-called “Expendable.” He’s exposed to lethally extreme conditions so that the vessel’s scientists can develop vaccines to protect the crew when the ship concludes its four-and-a-half year journey to the distant planet of Niflheim, which evidently lacks an atmosphere conducive to human life.

   Thanks to advances in cloning, Mickey's body is replicated after each of his deaths, but Mickey isn’t entirely obliterated. A memory storage brick allows the proliferating Mickeys to retain the same basic identity. Mickey remembers his many deaths.

   As the story's dystopian future unfolds, Mickey 17 survives one of his dangerous forays, a situation that prompts the authorities — who think he has died — to print another Mickey. Also played by Pattinson, he's Mickey 18. Bold and crass, Mickey 18 —known as a “Multiple” -- begins to figure into an already crowded plot.

   Two women enter Mickey’s life. Naomi Ackie plays Nasha, a security officer on the ship who falls for this schlub of an everyman. Anamaria Vartolomei portrays Kai, a woman rising in the ship’s rigid hierarchy. 

   Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo in a clownish hunk of exaggerated performing) presides over the ship with his devious wife Yilfa (Toni Collette). A former congressman, Marshall is followed by enthusiasts who wear red hats. (Draw your own conclusions.)

   Steven Yeun plays Timo, the guy who got poor Mickey into the trouble that caused both of them to flee Earth. In space, the shrewd Timo fares better than Mickey. He becomes a pilot.

   When the ship reaches the snowy planet of Niflheifm, the crew encounters Creepers, creatures that look like a cross between insects and armadillos. Fascistic and racist, Commander Marshall wants to kill the planet’s inhabitants and seize it for those humans he deems as genetically superior.

   All of this builds toward an epic battle in which the two Mickeys try to save Zoko, a baby Creeper that has been kidnapped by Marshall. What worse crime could occur than threatening to drop a wiggling hunk of Creeper cuteness into a flaming shipboard incinerator?

    A messy overreach of a movie, Mickey 17 may not satisfy sci-fi fans or those looking for satirical rigor. Thematically, Mickey 17 digs no deeper than the average Star Trek episode.

    Sure, Bong’s darkly hued comic inclinations ensure that parts of the movie succeed and some of its images compel, but, for me, Mickey 17 emerged as an intermittently amusing smorgasbord of scenes rather than the masterful directorial performance I expected.

'The Empire:' A satire that fizzles

Light sabers and aliens appear in French director Bruno Dumont's The Empire, but this off-kilter comedy fails as either a parody of big-time space operas or as an amusing helping of unabashed silliness. A French coastal village becomes the scene of a battle in which two alien forces -- they're called Zeros and Ones -- compete for control the planet. The aliens occupy human bodies and turn them into warriors in a battle for supremacy. Who knows? Maybe the aliens saw Invasion of the Body Snatchers on their way to Earth. Two principal characters emerge. Jony (Brandon Vlieghe), a fisherman, has been taken over by the Zeros and charged with protecting a baby called The Wain. The Wain will grow up and lead the malevolent Zeros to triumph -- or some such. On the other side, Jane (Anamaria Vartolomei) has been tagged by the Ones to stop the Zero onslaught. Setting a cosmic battle in an otherwise insignificant French village seems part of a topsy-turvy attempt to inject high-stakes drama into a low-stakes environment. Some of the visuals are imaginative -- a cathedral-like structure mounted on the top of a spaceship -- but neither the Zeros nor the Ones provide enough laughs as the movie strains to be outrageous. This Empire strikes out.

Horror among the elderly

 

If The Rule of Jenny Pen, a horror movie set in a nursing home, accomplishes anything, it's to convince us that John Lithgow can play an evil, sadistic villain. A tortured fellow who wanders through an elder care facility with a doll puppet on his right arm, Lithgow’s Dave turns the doll head into an ominous threat that might come crashing down on a vulnerable head. Director James Ashcroft focuses Dave’s cruel psychopathic tendencies on Stefan Mortensen (Geoffrey Rush), a judge who has been severely debilitated by a stroke. Arrogant and accustomed to getting his way, Stefan has difficulty accepting his new life in a wheelchair and limited use of his hands. He's been stripped of his power and doesn't like it. Ashcroft doesn't skimp when it comes to Dave's sadism; he pulls the catheter out of Stefan's roommate's body. He steals food from other residents and eats like a hog who hadn't found a place at the trough for years. Both Lithgow and Rush meet the story's challenges, but committed performances can't alleviate the feeling that the movie indulges in what can look like serial abuse of the elderly. And, yes, it's difficult to believe that the home's staff believes Stefan is fabricating. Ashcroft skillfully mounts some of the movie's wince-inducing bits, but when the movie reached its conclusion, I had little on which to reflect other than the sour aftertaste so much cruelty left.

Indie winds blow through Oscars

     Thank goodness it's over.

      Thanks to fire delays in Los Angeles, the 2025 awards season seemed interminable, but Oscar finally has spoken.

      Hollywood's big night marked a  strange evening for mainstream movies, if such things still exists. Anora, an independent film took best picture, best director, best actress, best original screenplay, and best editing. A $6 million production stomped big-ticket items such as Wicked and Dune: Part II.

       The irony emerged early on. The show opened with Ariana Grande singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow, a bow to Hollywood's fabled status as the nation's Dream Factory. But Academy voters this year had less interest in Oz than in Anora's immersion in Brighton Beach, a slice of New York where the dreams of a sex worker crashed on the shores of reality.

     I was mildly surprised that a poised 25-year-old Madison took best actress for her work in Anora. Some speculated that a late surge for Fernanda Torres of I'm Still Here cost frontrunner Demi Moore votes. Say this, though, Madison's victory gave the show a welcome jolt.

     Adrien Brody, this year's frontrunner for his work in The Brutalist, snagged an Oscar for best actor and refused to be played off the stage before he finished his acceptance speech. Good for him.

     When Sean Baker won best director for Anora, he made a plea for the importance of viewing movies in theaters. Baker said more than 1,000 theaters bit the dust during the pandemic, but it's difficult to think Baker's pitch will stem the tide.

      Netflix, the force behind Emilia Pérez, probably shed tears because the movie, which led the field with 13 nominations, won only two awards, one for an emotional Zoe Saldaña as best supporting actress and another for El Mal, which took best song. 

     Emilia Pérez couldn't even win best foreign film. That honor went to Brazil's I'm Still Here.

      So what about the rest of the show? Host Conan O'Brien's emergence from Demi Moore's body in a parodic reference to The Substance was imaginative. O'Brien has a mild-mannered delivery but hit hard with a joke about Karla Sofía Gascón, the transgender actress nominated for best actress for her work in Emilia Pérez.

     O'Brien said that Anora contained 479-uses of the "F''' word, four more than were uttered by Gascon's publicist, an imagined response to disparaging social-media posts by Gascon that probably halted Emilia Perez's Oscar march.

     Aside from speeches by the winning Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers for the best documentary, No Other Land, the evening was light on politics.  O'Brien did add some bite when he joked about Anora's triumphant night.

     "Americans are excited to see somebody finally stand up to a powerful Russian," he said. (See the movie to get the joke.)

      In what felt like a Grammys moment, Lisa, Doja Cat, and Raye sang themes from Bond movies in a tribute to Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, the duo that's ceding creative control of the franchise to Amazon MGM Studios. 

     Old rockers -- or at least one of them -- had their moment, as well. Mick Jagger presented the award for best song after telling the audience that Bob Dylan had declined the job because he thought he was too old. 

       Maybe Dylan made the right decision. A Complete Unknown, a film about Dylan's 1960s transition from folk to rock, went home empty-handed after earning three nominations, including best picture.

       To catch all of this year's fashion statements, you would have had to watch the pre-Oscar red carpet telecast. One outfit, did, however, stand out for me. In a yellow suit with what I read described as a "cropped" jacket, best-actor nominee Timothee Chalamet looked like he was auditioning to play a bell hop in a Wes Anderson film.

      But, hey, I'm no fashion expert. I am, however, a Gene Hackman fan and was glad to see Morgan Freeman introduce this year's In Memoriam section with a measured tribute to the recently departed actor. A little dignity at the Oscars never hurts.

      

           

Oscar predictions 2025

      Predicting Oscar winners can be dicey. Prognosticators usually consider all the previous year-end awards: Critics Choice, Golden Globes, the British Academy Film Awards,  and -- more importantly -- the professional guild awards: producers, directors, actors, writers, etc. 

   Then there's the precarious art of anticipating the inclinations of the 9,375 voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. To further complicate matters, voting for best picture involves a preferential voting system that kicks in if no picture receives more than 50 percent of the votes in the first count.

       There may be surprises this year. Some Oscar observers think Conclave will win best picture because it's the most well-regarded movie among the so-called serious contenders. At one point, The Brutalist was considered a frontrunner. Not anymore. 

        Anora remains a favorite but not by a mile. Sean Baker won top director honors from the Directors Guild of America. A victory at the Directors Guild often signals that the director's film -- in this case, Anora -- will take best picture. The Producers Guild of America also awarded Anora its top prize. The last professional guild to weigh in -- The Screen Actors Guild of America -- bucked the trend and picked Conclave as its best picture.

        Here's the weirdest possibility: Emilia Pérez, which led the field of nominations with 13, could end up with only two Oscars, Zoe Saldana's for best supporting actress and El Mal's for best song.

      Much-admired, Emilia Perez took a hit when one of its stars, Oscar-nominated Karla Sofia Gascon, was tagged for old social media posts that were deemed racist and Islamophobic.

        So where does that leave us? I'd be lying if I said I knew what will happen when awards are handed out on March 2.

       Whatever transpires, the Oscars remain an important event for a tattered film industry, for the nominees and winners, for those devotes who participate in Oscar pools or have personal rooting interests, and for seasoned movie fans who, even if skeptical about Oscar, can't turn away.

       I approach Oscar predictions with a mixture of resignation and trepidation. It's an habitual critical exercise, but one that involves plenty of guesswork, informed I hope.

      In cases where I've named a movie that could win, it's because that particular race may be hovering close to a toss-up.

       So here are my predictions in the major categories:

Best Picture: Anora

Could win: Conclave. 

The Other Nominees:

The Brutalist

A Complete Unknown

Dune: Part Two

Emilia Perez

I'm Still Here

Nickel Boys

The Substance

Wicked

Best Director: Sean Baker, Anora

The Other Nominees:

Brady Corbet, The Brutalist

James Mangold, A Complete Unknown

Jacques Audiard, Emilia Perez

Best Actor: Adrien Brody, The Brutalist

The Other Nominees:

Timothee Chalamet, A Complete Unknown

Colman Domingo, Sing Sing

Ralph Fiennes, Conclave

Sebastian Stan, The Apprentice

Best Actress: Demi Moore, The Substance

Could win: Mikey Madison, Anora

The Other Nominees

Cynthia Erivo, Wicked

Karla Sofia Gascon, Emilia Perez

Fernanda Torres, I'm still Here*

*Dark horse, but not impossible

Best Supporting Actor: Kieran Culkin, A Real Pain

The Other Nominees:

Yura Borisov, Anora

Edward Norton, A Complete Unknown

Guy Pearce, The Brutalist

Jeremy Strong, The Apprentice

Best Supporting Actress: Zoe Saldana, Emilia Perez

The Other Nominees: 

Monica Barbaro, A Complete Unknown

Ariana Grande, Wicked

Felicity Jones, The Brutalist

Isabella Rossellini, Conclave

Best Adapted Screenplay: Conclave

The Other Nominees:

A Complete Unknown

Emilia Perez

Nickel Boys

Sing Sing

Best Original screenplay: Anora

Could win: A Real Pain

The Other Nominees:

The Brutalist    

September 5

The Substance.

Best Documentary Feature: No Other Land

The Other Nominees:

Black Box Diaries

Porcelain War

Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat

Sugarcane

Best Animated Feature: The Wild Robot

Could win: Flow

The Other Nominees: 

Inside Out 2

Memoir of a Snail

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Foul

 

Best International Feature: I'm Still Here

Could win: Emilia Perez

The other nominees:

The Seed of the Sacred Fig

Flow

The Girl With the Needle

    That's my take on the major categories: A few last, thoughts, though:  If Oscar wanted to endorse movies that meet its criteria for quality but also had broad appeal, Wicked and Dune: Part II would be the top contenders. 

   A bit of  Googling showed that to date, Wicked has grossed more than $727 million worldwide. Dune: Part II has grossed more than $714 million worldwide. By contrast, Anora has grossed around $37 million worldwide. Wicked’s budget was estimated at $145 million; the budget for Dune has been estimated at $165 million. Anora was made for $6 million.

     Gross receipts can be misleading, of course. Variables include the number of screens on which a movie is released; the amount spent on advertising; audience familiarity with the cast or with the movie’s source material; and possibly its rating.

     I'm not trying to equate money spent and money made with quality.  What I’m getting at is a way to estimate what moviegoers are watching and how it might align with the preferences of Oscar voters.

     I’d say that five of this year’s nominees (Anora, The Brutalist, Emilia Perez, I’m Still Here, and Nickel Boys) might be called “niche” movies with The Substance occupying a middle ground between niche movies and films with mass-market potential.

      It’s not a new idea, but one worth revisiting: Like most cultural preoccupations, movies have become fragmented, generating factional support. It’s difficult to imagine, for example, that Brady Corbet, the director of The Brutalist, thought his three hour plus movie would be a blockbuster.

     That doesn’t mean The Brutalist couldn’t be regarded as the best picture of 2024; rather it indicates that we’ve become an audience of segmented viewers with some crossover between what once was considered art house and mainstream fare.

      The results can be strange. I have friends who were open to experiencing what The Brutalist had to offer, but walked out of Wicked after the first 20 minutes. At a lunch with former co-workers, one expressed disdain for The Brutalist;  another thought it was the year’s best movie.

      Some filmmakers don't seem to be looking to make a box-office killing. Sean Baker (Tangerine, The Florida Project, Red Rocket, and Anora) has become an essential movie voice by looking at lives we often ignore: sex workers, uprooted kids being raised in motels, and Russian immigrants in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn.

       As Baker’s work suggests, strains of humanity — though sometimes as absurd as it is heartbreaking or inspiring — can be found in every subculture. 

       The point: We live in times when consensus is difficult to reach. That may be as true for the Academy’s voters as it is for the rest of us. That's why we should be careful about assigning too much meaning to Sunday’s awards. Maybe a pervasive lack of agreement is the meaning.

       The Academy doesn't disclose its Oscar vote count. But what would we conclude if we knew that Anora had surpassed the required 50 percent mark by beating Conclave with 500 or fewer votes. It might only mean that Anora won an Oscar for best picture and Conclave didn't. It wouldn't tell us whether anyone would be rewatching or discovering either picture 10 years from now.

       So, good luck in your Oscar pool, and let's hope that 2025 brims with stimulating, entertaining, and emotionally powerful movies -- whatever conclusions, if any, we'll be able to draw about the rest of the year.

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.