Another look at 'Bonjour Tristesse'

  In 1958, director Otto Preminger released Bonjour Tristesse, a film starring Jean Seberg, Deborah Kerr, and David Niven. I never saw that movie, but I've read that it received a better reception in France than in the U.S. 

   Now, the Francoise Sagan novel that inspired Preminger's film has attracted the attention of writer/director Durga Chew-Bose, who again travels to the Côte d'Azur for a story that embeds sharp psycho-sexual undercurrents in an atmosphere of soothing summer softness.

    The story centers on Cecile (Lily McInerny), an 18-year-old who seems to be gliding along nicely until she feels the need to meddle in her widowed father's relationships. 

    Claes Bang (The Square) portrays Raymond, a father who's spending the summer with Cecile and his girlfriend (Nailia Harzoune). He allows Cecile to flounder and make mistakes. He prefers not to give advice. 

    The trio’s emotional balance destabilizes when Anne (Chloe Sevigny) turns up. An assertive long-time friend of Raymond's late wife, she tries to manage Cecile, who seems to need guidance.

     The movie's conflicts sharpen when Anne and Raymond abruptly decide to marry. Cecile, who has her first sexual experience with a young law student (Aliocha Schneider), objects and schemes to derail the impending nuptials.

     Although the screenplay builds toward a tragic and provocative conclusion, the movie remains surprisingly placid. A story that may have seemed daring in the 1950s seldom feels charged with the fresh urgency you'd expect from a movie about a vacation stuffed with so much psychological baggage.

      Note: Sagan, who died at the age of 69 in 2004, was 18 when the novel was published. Note: This edition of Bonjour Tristesse isn’t a period piece; it’s set in the present.

A disappointing second helping

   

       During the sequel, Another Simple Favor, Anna Kendrick's character, a stout-hearted supermom and online influencer, mentions Henri-Georges Clouzot's Les Diabolique (1958). Don't be misled. Another Simple Favor is no match for Clouzot's devious classic. Not that it needed to be.

    Kendrick, a gifted comic actress, and Blake Lively, fine here as a self-possessed schemer, generate the requisite love/hate sparks, but the movie goes too far in substituting acceptance of the preposterous for suspension of disbelief.   

   Complications begin to accumulate when Lively's Emily, newly released from prison, reenters the life of Kendrick's Stephanie, who was snared in Emily's web of deceit in first film and wrote a book about it.

    Stephanie, who should know better, agrees to serve as maid of honor at Emily's impending wedding. Apparently well rehabilitated from her time in prison, Emily is scheduled to marry a wealthy guy (Michele Morrone) who lives sumptuously in Capri. Turns out he’s a Mafia boss.

   Another Favor benefits from the Capri setting where the wedding occurs and where Stephanie and her literary agent (Alex Newell) are flown on a private jet full of hard-partying guests. Nothing like luxe surroundings to amp up escapist fare. There's a reason you can't imagine a season of The White Lotus in a budget motel on the Jersey shore.

  A heaping basket full of plot twists tends to mangle a talented supporting cast. Elena Sofia Ricci plays the mobster groom’s mom. Allison Janey portrays Emily's aunt, and Elizabeth Perkins earns chuckles as Emily's addled mom.

    Henry Golding briefly reprises his role as Emily's former husband, a character the screenplay contrives to bring to Capri along with his now teenage son Nicky (Ian Ho).

    Once again, a series of murders pushes Stephanie into amateur-sleuth mode, providing formulaic echoes of the movie's predecessor.

   If you haven't seen the first movie, you probably needn't bother with Another Favor, which has been directed by Paul Feig, who also directed the earlier effort. 

    I was traveling when the original opened and only caught up with it recently. Hardly a classic, the first Favor was better than I expected; the second, worse than I had hoped. 

    *Another Simple Favor is now streaming on Prime Video.

He's determined to surf

 

   In The Surfer, Nicolas Cage plays a character who tries to surf on a thug-ruled Australian beach. If you're expecting Beach Boys music and sunny California dreamin', look elsewhere.

   So what's Cage -- known only as The Surfer -- doing in Australia? The Surfer grew up in the town where the beach is located. He was 15 when his father died and his mother relocated to LA. Now,  he's back.

   A successful investment exec teetering on the cusp of divorce, The Surfer wants to surf the beach with his teenage son. He also wants to buy the house in which he spent his early years, a gesture that suggests he's hoping to rediscover lost hope and innocence; i.e., his youth.

    The locals -- led by Scally (Julian McMahon) -- humiliate The Surfer in front of his son (Finn Little) and suggest he'd be wise to leave town and abandon his dream of home ownership.

   Not to be deterred, The Surfer endures a series of torments administered by the surfers, who behave like a cult members. These bros have created the ultimate gated community --only they're the gate. Their families sometimes join them for beachside barbecues.

   A beach bum who lives in his decrepit car (Nicholas Cassim) seems to be one of the sole townies who survives outside the surfing tribe. He blames the surfers for killing his dog. They probably had something to do with his son's death.

   Gradually deprived of his possessions (including his Lexus, cell phone, clothing, watch, and wallet), The Surfer begins to look like a vagrant who's relegated to using the beach's filthy public restroom. Forced to scrounge for food, he contemplates eating a dead rat and swallows bugs for nourishment.  

    One question underlies the tense proceedings: How much humiliation can one man stand? 

   When The Surfer finally strikes back, director Lorcan Finnegan plays his hole card, concentrating on warped notions about manhood that underlie the violent behavior of the surfers.

   Rather than deepening the movie, late-picture revelations turn the story into a kind of perverted frat-boy drama about the need, according to the surfers, to degrade those who seek their acceptance.

   Nothing wounds a movie faster than reasonable questions. It was never clear to me, for example, why The Surfer -- a supposedly savvy businessman -- didn't pursue legal recourse beyond asking a corrupted local cop for help. Hasn’t this guy ever heard of lawyers?

   For me, this undertow of disbelief kept the movie from gaining maximum impact, even when Finnegan self-consciously stirs things up with a signature line. "Eat the rat."

   Having said all that, it should be noted that The Surfer is watchable enough, less a failure than an attempt to draw from the well of fury Cage can unleash but which he does  here with moderation -- at least for him.

'Thunderbolts*' stakes out its own turf

 

   An aggressively bountiful stream of Marvel movies has created a specialized kind of viewer. Loyal fans and aficionados have become astute at parsing the intricacies that connect the numerous characters that populate the Marvel Cinematic Universe. 

   An essential question raised by every new Marvel movie, then, revolves around whether its appeal extends beyond those who have submitted Marvel dominance.

   Thunderbolts* leans toward the middle when considering its appeal for the uninitiated.  It's difficult for me to call it must viewing, but I enjoyed the movie more than most recent Marvel fare, primarily because of a solid ensemble, a few memorable comic moments, and a commitment to the idea that six misfits are equal to one superhero.

    Here's the deal: A dejected group of MCU characters has been exploited by CIA director Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus). If the Congress learns about these assassins, de Fontaine won't survive an already contentious impeachment hearing. 

    Fearing exposure, de Fontaine contrives to gather these Marvel losers in one place and eliminate them.

    A freshman congressman named Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan) wants to topple de Fontaine. In addition to his Congressional day job, Bucky is trying to forget his life as Winter Soldier, an assassin with a prosthetic arm that, at one point, he pulls out of his dishwasher. Nice touch.

    Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) becomes the standout character among those de Fontaine wants to terminate. Raised to be a deadly killer, Yelena, a.k.a. Black Widow, sees her life as empty, a meaningless blip in the encompassing void of an indifferent universe -- or some such.

    John Walker (Wyatt Russell), a bargain-basement Captain America, helps round out the group. Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) and Ghost (Hanna John-Kamen) also join the gang.

     All of these characters have Marvel backgrounds but you don't need to know much more about them than you'll learn from watching Thunderbolts*. 

    Know, though, that each Thunderbolt acknowledges a personal history that includes many bad deeds and a fair measure of regret.

    It takes time for director Jake Schreier to distinguish between each of the movie's non-superheroes and, more importantly, to get them to function as a team.

    When the characters meet at the underground facility to which de Fontaine has directed them, the movie introduces an oddball character named Bob (Lewis Pullman). Bob doesn't know how he arrived in the high-tech bunker, but it soon becomes clear that he's been the subject of secret biological experiments arranged by de Fontaine.

      Pullman delivers the film's pivotal performance as a character for whom the internal battle between good and evil becomes literal. Bob, whose name becomes the subject of the movie's best joke, also must learn about the temptations of possessing extreme power. 

     Comic relief and bonhomie arrive courtesy of the bearish Alexei Shostakov (David Harbour); Alexei operates a limo service and refers to himself as Red Guardian. 

     Alexei, who once served as a father figure for Yelena, becomes a cheerleader for group activities. He likes the name, Thunderbolts, which was taken from Yelena's losing childhood soccer team. The others consider it "meh."

    Existential concerns aside, there's plenty of action, the best of it set in New York City, which at one point is shrouded in a creeping dark shadow that looks as if it might have been at home in a Cecil B. DeMille Bible epic. 

    It takes time for the movie to settle in and scenes in which the characters flashback to their formative days aren't always elegantly handled, but the actors -- especially Pugh and Pullman -- find some depth and a few scenes evoke real emotion.

    You'll note the movie's title contains an * (asterisk). You'll have to see Thunderbolts* to discover why, but as Marvel movies go this one entertains and isn't afraid to be corny when it needs to be.

     What do I mean? When was the last time a Marvel movie resolved a major problem with a group hug? It happens here.

   

      

A wan drama fails to spark

 

    Set in post-Korean War America, On Swift Horses wrings much of the life out of a story about two characters trying to find their places during a sexually repressive American moment.

    The movie begins with Lee (Will Poulter) visiting his girlfriend (Daisy Edgar-Jones) in Kansas while on leave from the Korean War. Lee hopes to return from the war before settling down with Edgar-Jones's Muriel, who agrees to marry him.

     Chances for a successful marriage seem doomed from the start, partly because Muriel ignites more sparks with Lee's brother Julius (Jacob Elordi), who also served in Korea but isn't returning to the Army.

    Director Daniel Minahan creates expectations for a tale about a love triangle but soon shifts gears, alternately following Julius and Muriel as a way of exploring gay issues against a 1950s backdrop.

    When the story moves to San Diego, Lee -- now home from battle -- tries to realize his middle-class dreams and Muriel begins suffocating under the strictures of a life she doesn't want.

    Sexual identity forms the basis of the connection between Julius and Muriel. Julius knows he's gay; he senses Muriel is attracted to women, even though she has yet to act on her desires. For a time, Muriel tries to maintain her image as a typical married woman but soon begins an affair with Sandra (Sasha Calle), a woman who lives nearby. 

    Sometimes playing hooky from her job as a waitress, Muriel also spends time at the track, socking away her winnings, presumably for the marital split she (and we) know will culminate when she begins dipping her toes into the gay world, circa 1950.

      For his part, Julius heads to Las Vegas instead of joining Lee and Muriel in San Diego as he initially had promised. Skilled at poker, he lands a job identifying cheats at a gambling joint. He also begins a romance with a co-worker (Diego Calva), a young Mexican man with more ambition than Lee and a willingness to cut corners. Danger lurks.

     Elordi doesn't seem to have shed the Elvis vibe he brought to Sofia Coppola's Priscilla (2023); his performance -- or so it struck me -- sometimes plays as if it were culled from poses of the 1950s. Edgar-Jones convinces as Muriel wobbles her way into a new life.

    Credit Poulter, whose character is stuck in a factory worker's life, for bringing depth to a role that plays second fiddle to the two main characters.

   Burdened by a structure that shifts between Muriel and Julius, a slow-moving story benefits from the supporting work of Calva and Calle. Either of their characters might have given the movie a more compelling center.

    Adapted from a novel by Shannon Pufahi, On Slow Horses struck me as a wan version of a Todd Haynes  journey into '50s sexuality (see Carol). Minahan pushes a big pile of dramatic chips onto the table but can't cash enough of them in. For a movie fueled by repression, social pressure, and awakening desire, it's a bit of a slog.

     

A familiar tale in an exotic setting

The Legend of Ochi struck me as a small film straining to be a much bigger one. The movie focuses on the relationship between a teenage girl and a mythical creature that lives on the fictional island of Carpathia. Director Isaiah Saxon builds his story around the clash between the island's residents and the Ochi, creatures that have fierce teeth but look a bit like other movie creations, something of a cross between monkeys and a squirrel with Yoda-like ears and winsome eyes. An undernourished story centers on the developing relationship between Yuri (Helena Zengel) and a baby Ochi who's separated from its mother during a hunt conducted by Yuri's vengeful father (Willem Dafoe). Dafoe's Maxim recruits young men from his village to hunt the Ochi, a species he blames for killing  humans and animals. Yuri rescues a baby Ochi and begins a relationship that turns the movie into a display of well-realized puppetry and CGI. Emily Watson appears as Yuri's mom, the woman who left Maxim for a solitary mountain existence.Yuri and Ochi search for connections with their mothers, who represent home, the preferred destination of many fantasy movies. Yuri learns she can communicate with Ochi and the story (accompanied by an aggressive use of David Longworth's score) boils down to familiar movie tropes. Saxon celebrates the mystery of the landscapes but the storytelling can seem hurried. You may admire Dafoe for pushing his portrayal of Maxim over the top or you may wonder (as I did) what attracted him to this role in the first place. Parents should be aware that from opening scenes of hunting to various shots featuring gore and a darkly forbidding tone, Legend of Ochi might be too much for younger kids but not enough for adults.

A vibrant 'Sinners' makes its mark

 

  I don't want to refer to director Ryan Coogler's Sinners as a genre-bending work, although the term might be applicable.  I prefer to think of Sinners -- a story set in the Mississippi Delta during the 1930s -- as a movie in which Coogler employs an expansive film vocabulary to create a boldly exciting foray into the Deep South.

  Described in the broadest terms, Sinners is a horror movie. Coogler, who also wrote the screenplay, introduces vampires and builds toward a violent finale that takes the movie to near frenzied levels. At the same time, Sinners marks another vibrant Cooger entry into a filmography that includes Fruitvale Station, Creed, Black Panther, and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.

   Shock. gore and vampires aside, Sinners is the kind of horror movie that doesn't come along often, one that's culturally expressive and populated by vividly drawn characters -- horror with plenty of heart and soul.

    Set during the repressive days of Jim Crowe, the drama centers on identical twins, both beautifully played by Michael B. Jordan. Known as Smoke and Stack, the twins return to their Mississippi Delta hometown in 1932. Having accumulated funds in Chicago, they plan to open a juke joint. Independence awaits -- or so they hope.

  A young guitarist named Sammie (Miles Caton) enters the story as an aspiring bluesman who has taken possession of a guitar that may be connected to evil spirits, an evocation of some of the folkloric stories surrounding guitarist Robert Johnson.

   A preacher's son, Sammie becomes an eager mentee of Smoke and Stack, his older and savvier cousins.

   An early bit of narration tells us that certain musicians are so extraordinary that their music can pierce the veil between life and death, an idea evidently drawn from African cultures with traces of Irish and Mississippi Choctaw lore added. 

   All of these many influences become part of the cultural gumbo that Coogler serves with a visual clarity that gives the movie a bracing sharpness.

   Early on, Sinners plays like a period piece about young Sammie's foray into the world of juke joints. Sammie's choices evolve against a homegrown backdrop of religion and sin. Sammie's preacher father tells him that if he's foolish enough to dance with the devil, the devil may one day follow him home.

    Although thematically expansive, the movie takes place during the single day in which the brothers hurry to open their club.

   Smoke contracts with the owner of the town's grocery (Yao) and his wife Grace (Ji Jun Li) to provide food for the juke joint. Stack convinces a harmonica-playing alcoholic (a magnetic Delroy Lindo) to provide entertainment. 

    Each of the brothers also connects with a love interest from the past. Mary (Hailee Steinfeld) is a light-skinned woman who's perceived by some as white. Stack left her  because he thought outsiders would ruin Mary's life for taking up with a Black man.

   Smoke renews his relationship with Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), a woman with whom he shares a tragic past and who knows her way around Afro-influenced spiritual practices. Jordan and Mosaku create memorable chemistry as the second helping of their relationship develops.

    Not to be sidelined, Sammie crushes on Pearline (Jayme Lawson), a woman who refuses to be confined by an unfulfilling marriage.

    At times, Sinners takes the shape of a musical with production numbers staged in the abandoned mill in which the brothers open their juke joint. These episodes operate on a surreal cultural continuum, mixing characters from different time periods, adding an anachronistic deejay, as well as African dancers and local revelers. All become part of a raucous explosion of energy.

   Jordan, who has appeared in all of Coogler's movies,  creates two characters who differ but share plenty of history. More adamant than Smoke, Stack is not one to be messed with. But both brothers have plenty of grit. Jordan makes them a dynamic duo, commanding the screen as men who've done their share of living.

    Oh yes, the vampires.

   A terrific Jack O'Connell portrays Remmick, the chief vampire who turns two farmers (Peter Dreimanis and Lola Kirke) into vampires, enlisting them in his efforts to convert (i.e., bite) every reveler at the juke joint. 

    Charming, insightful, and menacing in equal measure, Remmick offers his victims a deathless future that he portrays as utopian. Money never will give Smoke and Stack enough protection to realize their dreams of independence, he argues. 

    Perhaps to broaden the movie's palette, Remmick and his vampires sing a haunting Irish tune that contrasts with the music of the juke joint, yet seems entirely appropriate.

    The supporting performances bristle and come alive, and Coogler gives all the players stand-out moments during a day tinged with dread and desire.

    I'm sure all reviewers will advise audiences to remain through the end credits. Be sure to listen to them. Stay put and let the movie sit with you for a minute -- and allow Coogler to offer one last word.

      

     

    

Cronenberg tackles grief -- in his way

 -- A blind date in a trendy restaurant hardly seems odd, until you realize the restaurant sits in the middle of a  cemetery.

--  In the same cemetery, tombstones are equipped with video screens that allow relatives to observe the deteriorating bodies of their loved ones.

   You probably won't be surprised to learn that The Shrouds -- the movie in which this cemetery serves as a major backdrop -- was directed by David Cronenberg. 

   Cronenberg made his feature debut in 1970 with Crimes of the Future, a title he used again for an entirely different movie in 2022. 

  Known for movies such as Eastern Promises, Spider, A History of Violence, Naked Lunch, The Fly, Videodrome, and Scanners, Cronenberg has become a  recognized master of body horror, an artist who transforms ordinary realities into dreamscapes rich with bizarre possibilities.

   I was late seeing Cronenberg's second Crimes of the Future. I never reviewed the movie but reacted negatively to a work in which Viggo Mortensen played a performance artist whose body grew strange new organs that became part of an art exhibit. 

   In The Shrouds, Cronenberg employs three principal actors for a chilly exploration in which grief and technology make strained connections. 

    Vincent Cassel plays Karsh, an entrepreneur who owns a cemetery that boasts his technological innovations.  Karsh, we learn, abandoned his career making industrial videos, opening the cemetery after his wife died of cancer. He couldn't bear to part with her. Ergo, the cemetery where he could visit her corpse by using an app that, on command, peeked into the high-tech shroud that encased her decomposing body.

  Diane Kruger does triple duty as Karsh's wife (seen in flashbacks), as his sister-in-law Terry, and as the voice of Hunny, the Avatar who serves as Karsh’s secretary.

  A disheveled-looking Guy Pierce turns up as Maury, Karsh's tech-savvy brother-in-law; he helped design the movie's futuristic cemetery.

   Oh yeah, I forgot Sandrine Holt, who plays Son-Min, the cucumber-cool wife of a dying Hungarian industrialist who wants Karsh to open one of his signature graveyards in Budapest.

   If you've ever seen Cronenberg, you can't help but notice how much Cassel has been made to look like the director whose wife died in 2017. Similarities aside, Cronenberg doesn't deserve to have his film seen only through a personal lens, even if the movie began -- as he has said -- with his reaction to his wife's death.

    Both Kruger and Pierce bring energy to their roles. Cassel, on the other hand, creates a character whose subdued demeanor plays against an inner life mired in grief and obsession.

     As I watched The Shrouds, I weighed what I was seeing against horror notions about the body. Forget the soul, we’re nothing but accumulated flesh, bone, and blood -- or so the argument goes.

     When Karsh says he misses his wife's body, it's as if he's saying that her physicality encompassed the totality of her being, thought and emotions included. Don't take this as a sexist expression: In the body-horror canon, men are subject to the same existential condition. 

      All of this has a sexual component: Mired in desire, the body craves other bodies, and gives their loss the force of an addiction that can't be shaken.

     Of course, The Shrouds can't entirely be measured by any theory, partly because the movie extends a variety of other thematic tentacles: paranoia-inducing political theories, issues involving ecology and techno-tyranny (Karsh sometimes puts his Tesla into self-driving mode), and social taboos: A sexual scene between Karsh and Terry, his late wife's sister, brims with libidinal hunger.

     All of this begins when Karsh's high-tech graveyard is vandalized. The mystery behind the vandalization runs throughout the movie, but generates little intrigue, and a mostly chilly tone can make it difficult to tell when Cronenberg is serious or mocking the genre in which he's working. Maybe both are happening simultaneously. In any case, feel free to laugh.

      You can sense the presence of a complex intelligence at work in The Shrouds, but the movie suggests more than it delivers.  Cronenberg plays with many ideas that don't seem fully imagined, and the movie's many tangents sometimes obscure the unbearable grief that puts Karsh into an emotional shroud he can't seem to escape. 

      Someday, I may look at The Shrouds again. For now, I take it as the faltering work of a director I admire. 

           

     

     

     

Deneuve charms as a president's wife

 

For me, The President's Wife, a movie about the wife of French president Jacques Chirac, has less to do with recent French history than with the presence of Catherine Deneuve. The movie belongs to Deneuve, who's now 81, and director Léa Domenach wisely lets her claim it. Together, Deneuve and Domenach tell the story of a woman who steps out from behind her husband's shadow to establish herself as a prominent figure in French political and social life. As portrayed by Michel Vuillermoz, Chirac -- a conservative who held the presidency from 1995 to 2007 -- doesn’t welcome his wife's attempts to chart her own course. Bernadette decides she’s deferred to her philandering husband long enough when his affair with an Italian actress generates embarrassing headlines. With help from her PR adviser (Denis Podalydès), Bernadette becomes recognizable and respected on her own. Sara Giraudeu plays Claude, the Chirac daughter who serves as one of her father's principal advisers. Maud Wylerportrays Laurence, the daughter who suffers from an eating disorder and largely is kept out of view -- until her mother decides to talk publicly about her problem.  As a female empowerment tale, The President’s Wife proves predictable, yet the tone remains light and Deneuve charms as a woman of wit, spine, and intelligence. An early title card warns against taking everything in the story as factual. I don't know enough about Bernadette Chirac to know where fact yields to fiction, but The President's Wife proved amusing enough to keep me from fretting too much about questions of pin-point accuracy.

A movie that brings war close

  In 2006, a platoon of Navy SEALs entered a two-story apartment building in Ramadi, Iraq. One apartment was still occupied.

  Through an interpreter, the SEALs informed the civilians that they wouldn't be hurt. The SEALs then  set up a post from which they observed the street, possibly preparing for trouble. They weren't sure what awaited them.

  In the new movie Warfare, the SEALs begin their mission after whooping it up in manic fashion while watching an exercise video featuring women in skimpy outfits. Like everything else in the movie, which chronicles a real incident, the scene is based on the accounts of SEALs who fought in the Iraq war.

   It doesn't take long for macho ritual, if that's what we're seeing, to give way to a forceful portrayal of relentless combat during the course of a single day.

    Director Alex Garland (Civil War) and co-director Ray Mendoza, who served as a Navy SEAL and advised Garland on the battle sequences in Civil War, team for a movie that eventually concentrates on SEAL efforts to evacuate the platoon from the besieged house, and more importantly, to save the lives of  two badly wounded SEALs.

    We don't know these men as fully developed characters, but as part of a team. Garland resists further elaboration. Early on, the dialogue consists mostly of military information related to the job. 

    The SEALs are well-equipped and have high-tech gear at their disposal. Yet, Garland makes us aware that beneath helmets and body armor, these men are made of flesh that can be torn apart and blood that can be spilled.

   Garland often allows the action to unfold in real-time, and sound designer Glenn Freemantle recreates the shock of explosions and their impact on woozy SEALS.  At one point, the SEALs request what's called "a show of force," and a jet buzzes the street with ear-shattering intensity. It's meant to distract the enemy.

    When one of the SEALs (Cosmo Jarvis) is severely wounded, his sustained screams are chilling. Another wounded SEAL (Joseph Quinn) begs for morphine.

    For most of the film, Garland almost makes us forget that innocent civilians, including children, remain in the house.  Maybe that's the point: The SEALs don't want the building's occupants to be hurt but they're busy fighting for their lives, tending to the wounded, and communicating with the SEALs who ultimately will come to their aid. They continue to function.

   Garland, Mendoza, and a cast that includes D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai and Charles Melton bring considerable skill to the task of making us feel the desperate urgency of a combat situation.

   So what to make of all this?

   I'm not sure how to process the movie beyond acknowledging its experiential power. Warfare isn't concerned with the rights or wrongs of the Iraq War. It's not about the policy decisions that led to the SEALs to combat; it operates on a narrower gauge, immersing us in a specific and dangerous moment in the Iraq War.

   If there's a conclusion to be drawn from all this, it may involve recognizing the stark gap between unseen policy makers and on-the-ground combatants. Who bothers with political thoughts when an IED delivers its shocking blow or when a friend and fellow SEAL is on the verge of bleeding out?

   Brutally effective, Warfare brings a vivid helping of Iraq war realism to the screen. Maybe that's enough of an accomplishment for a movie that reminds us that whatever else we might think about war, there's nothing abstract about it -- not for those who have to fight and possibly die.

'Drop' has some edgy kick

   

    Some movies practically demand not to be thought about. Such movies stretch their basic premise to the breaking point but still manage to hold attention and create suspense. Brimming with red herrings and creating one of cinema's most bizarre first dates, Drop qualifies as such a movie, an entertaining genre effort.

  The premise is simple: A widowed mother and victim of domestic abuse (Meghann Fahy) decides to dip her toe into social waters after making an online connection through a dating service. Fahy's Violet, a professional counselor for abused women, agrees to meet Brandon Sklenar's Henry, a photographer.

   The two arrange a date at an upscale Chicago restaurant located on the top floor of a skyscraper. Violet's sister (Violett Beane) agrees to babysit Violet's five-year-old son (Jacob Robinson). She also coaches Violet through first-date jitters.

   Once settled into the restaurant, Violet begins to receive what the movie dubs DigiDrops, ominous messages from a sender who knows her every move. From that point on, director Christopher Landon heightens the suspense because we learn that the sender of these hostile texts is in the same restaurant.

   The major threat: If Violet doesn't do the texter's bidding, he'll have her young son killed.  He's rigged cameras in Violet's home to show her that an intruder is ready to carry out his menacing orders.

   Violet's distracted response to her nice-guy date fuels Fahy's performance and leaves us wondering how much Henry will tolerate before deciding he's had enough.

   Landon effectively puts us in Violet's position as she surveys the room, hoping to identify her tormentor. Maybe the couple's aggressively cheerful waiter (Jeffrey Self) is responsible for the many alarming digital drops. Everyone becomes a suspect.

   The texter's messages appear on the screen as Violet attempts to carry on two conversations, one with Henry and the other with her antagonist. 

   No fair telling more or revealing what Violet has been ordered to do, but know that the movie remains involving -- at least it did for me -- until its ending goes too far over the top.

   Landon seems to bet that by the time the movie concludes, we'll be game for violent mayhem, having already forgiven the movie's implausibilities and contrivances. I'd have preferred a finale as clever as what preceded it, but sometimes you take what you can get: For much of its one hour and 40 minutes, Drop offers plenty of edgy kick.

 

A 'nerdy' spy goes rogue

 

  Watching Rami Malek play Charlie Heller, a grieving CIA intelligence expert in The Amateur, it's easy to forget that the actor won an Oscar for his portrayal of Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody (2019). 

   Malek sometimes seems to be a different movie than the rest of the cast. That could have been a calculated choice because Heller's CIA colleagues consistently underestimate his abilities. We're repeatedly told that Heller, who everyone refers to with the diminutive 'Charlie,' lacks a killer instinct. 

   Maybe Malek's performance seldom clicked for me, but that's not the only problem with director James Hawes's revenge saga. The Amateur strings a series of improbable events together as it hopscotches the world in search of excitement.

     The event that triggers all the commotion occurs when terrorists murder Charlie's wife (Rachel Brosnahan) while she's attending a work-related conference in London. Guilty about having declined an invitation to accompany his wife abroad, Charlie expects a full-throttle reaction from his CIA employer. 

  When his boss (Holt McCallany) dithers about why such a response won't be forthcoming, nerdy Charlie shocks his superiors by asking if he can be the one to kill his wife's murderers. He requests some hardcore training so he can hunt the antagonists responsible for his wife's death.

  The CIA grudgingly agrees, hoping Charlie's inadequacies will help quench his thirst for revenge. Enter Laurence Fishburne as the officer assigned to train Charlie in the agency's darker arts.

  As expected, Charlie proves ill-suited for a killer's role, but that doesn’t stop him from going rogue and taking off on his own. No longer willing to humor Charlie, the CIA sets out to stop him.

  A low-credibility affair, The Amateur might have saved itself had it been able to wink at its intermittent preposterousness while jumping to London, Paris, Marseilles, Istanbul, and Russia. 

  In adapting a 1981 novel by Robert Littell, the screenplay takes too little time establishing Charlie's technical brilliance, giving him too few opportunities to win the audience over. And for a movie that feels longer than its two-hour and three-minute run time, the story often feels more sketched than developed.

  Though undernourished, some of the supporting performances provide colorful touches. Jon Bernthal has a nice turn as a scruffy CIA agent who knows the ropes; Caitriona Balfe portrays the widow of a Russian KGB agent who helps Charlie; Julianne Nicholson signs on as head of the CIA, and Michael Stuhlbarg gives the finale some life as Charlie's chief adversary.

     And, yes, some of the action clicks, notably Charlie's confrontation with one of his targets in a glass-bottomed hotel swimming pool constructed between two skyscrapers.

   Overall, though, The Amateur unfolds like a potentially intriguing conversation to which you listen but don't fully connect. I half wondered whether the movie was leaping from one location to another in hopes of finding a much-needed spark.

John & Yoko meet the counterculture

  If popular culture were to make room for saints, John Lennon already would have been canonized. After his murder in 1980, Lennon's legacy expanded -- as a former Beatle, as a solo performer, as a rebel ("nothing to kill or die for"), and as a figure indelibly linked to a period of jarring social upheaval in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

  During this period, Lennon married conceptual artist Yoko Ono. John and Yoko became a thing, a two-person team sharing music, performance art, and unexpected appearances. In 1972, for example, they spent a week co-hosting Michael Douglas's popular daytime TV show. Guests ranged from Chuck Berry to Eldrige Cleaver.

  A new chapter in Lennon's life unfolded after he and Ono chose to live in New York's West Village instead of London. The couple eventually would move to Manhattan's Upper Westside, occupying an apartment in the Dakota, a building already ripe with celebrities: Judy Garland, Lauren Bacall, Leonard Bernstein, and Roberta Flack lived there. Not bad company.

   When I first started watching One to One: John & Oko,  director Kevin Macdonald's documentary, I was put off. Macdonald, it seemed, had assembled a jumbled collage of news footage, interviews, home movies, photos, and snippets of TV shows that Lennon watched. Nixon, George Wallace, and Charlie Chaplin were among those who hit TV screens with flashbulb pop. 

   But as Macdonald's film progresses, it begins to feel as if chaos might be its point. Macdonald deftly immerses us in the cultural splatter that marked the late '60s and early '70s. The Vietnam War still raged and countercultural figures -- Jerry Rubin turns up as someone Lennon and Ono admired -- suggested that the US was on the verge of a major social change, maybe even a revolution.

    The documentary derives its title from benefit concerts Lennon staged at Madison Square Garden in the summer of 1972 to raise money for mistreated children at Willowbrook, a New York facility for mentally disabled children. Wisely, Macdonald includes plenty of music, linking it to Lennon's growing social awareness. At one point, he organized a concert for John Sinclair, a poet and activist who was serving a 10-year sentence for a marijuana-related offense.

     Considering that Rubin, who died in 1994, eventually became a businessman, you may wonder whether Lennon and Ono weren't too quick to board the activist's hippie ship. But that's the thing, I suppose. In the early '70s, lots of folks were floundering, trying to determine what they believed and in whom they should or could believe.

   Perhaps that's why we see Lennon feeling his way through performance art (Lennon and Ono encamped in their bed), new musical directions, and personal issues (his relationship with his mother). That's not to say that the Beatles didn't produce art-worthy music before Lennon and Ono, but in teaming with Ono, Lennon began to see himself in more expansive ways.

   Snippets from phone calls made to Lennon and Ono crop up. Throughout the film, Ono's assistant tells her about his search for thousands of flies she needed for an art piece; Macdonald also touches on Ono's quest to reunite with the daughter who had been separated from her by her former husband, then a member of a Christian cult.

    Macdonald (One Day in September, The Last King of Scotland) skillfully creates a portrait that revolves around Lennon and Ono while holding up a mirror to the period in which their relationship blossomed.

  One to One can be wobbly, but some wobbles do more than shake you up, they recall a moment when the culture was forming, decomposing, searching, experimenting, finding moments of nobility, and, yes,  making a fool of itself. To quote another movie, everything was happening everywhere and all at once -- or so it seemed, and Lennon and Ono were part of it.

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 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.