Good Efficient Butchery

BABY DRIVER
(US/UK - 2017)

Written and directed by Edgar Wright. Cast: Ansel Elgort, Kevin Spacey, Jamie Foxx, Jon Hamm, Lily James, Eiza Gonzalez, Jon Bernthal, CJ Jones, Flea, Paul Williams, Sky Ferreira, Lance Palmer, Clay Donahue Fontenot, Richard Marcos Taylor, Brogan Hall. (R, 112 mins)

There's a lot to parse with Edgar Wright's BABY DRIVER that should keep film critics, hardcore movie nerds, vinyl hipsters, and jaded music bloggers with dog-eared thesauri who haven't liked any music recorded after 1980 busy with overly analytical and diarrhetically verbose thinkpieces until Labor Day at the earliest, but before they take the fun out of everything, the short answer is yes, it's the most dynamic, exhilarating, and flat-out enjoyable big-screen experience of the summer thus far. Best known for his dead-on genre spoofs in his "Cornetto Trilogy" with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost (2004's SHAUN OF THE DEAD, 2007's HOT FUZZ, and 2013's THE WORLD'S END), Wright branched out with 2010's SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD and was set to helm Marvel's ANT-MAN until creative differences sent him voluntarily packing during pre-production. THE WORLD'S END featured Wright's most multi-dimensional characterizations and demonstrated an all-around maturity and confidence as a filmmaker beyond a sense of smart, well-crafted homage, and BABY DRIVER is his most assured and ambitious statement yet. He's still making a loving homage to his DVD and Blu-ray collection, but infuses it with a manic, propulsive energy that makes BABY DRIVER a virtuoso display of cinematic mash-ups that uses its soundtrack as part of the action. When Focus' classic rock radio staple "Hocus Pocus" plays during a car chase and subsequent shootout, the gun blasts are in perfect sync with the riffs. When Jon Spencer Blues Explosion's "Bellbottoms" introduces title wheelman Baby (a star-making performance from Ansel Elgort from the pointless CARRIE remake and THE FAULT IN OUR STARS), it's timed to his own moves waiting for the crew he's driving as they're robbing a bank. When Bob & Earl's "Harlem Shuffle" plays as Baby walks down the street and around the corner on a coffee run, it becomes a production number of sorts as he dodges pedestrians and cars. There's the undeniable presence of wheelmen of heist films past constantly lurking over BABY DRIVER, whether it's 1978's THE DRIVER or 2011's DRIVE, but it's not a stretch to say that Wright's film has an infectious spirit that brings to mind LA LA LAND if directed by Walter Hill. It's the STREETS OF FIRE of its generation.

Adorned with earbuds and a fistful of iPods for different days and different moods, Baby is the regular wheelman for Atlanta criminal mastermind Doc (Kevin Spacey), who assembles a different crew for each job. The common denominator is Baby, who constantly plays music to drown out a lifelong case of tinnitus dating back to a childhood car accident that left him with a few facial scars and took the lives of both of his parents. Baby can maneuver his way out of any situation as long as he chooses the right playlist for the job ("Wait, stop...I gotta restart the song," he says after Doc's guys are delayed getting out of the car). He's working off a debt to Doc going back to a teenage incident where he stole his Mercedes, which enraged Doc but "the balls on this kid" earned the criminal's respect. After finishing his last job and wiping the slate clean, Baby is relieved that he's out and can care for his aging, deaf foster father Joseph (CJ Jones) and focus on a blossoming romance with shy diner waitress Debora (Lily James). Of course, Doc comes calling, demanding Baby's services even though the debt is paid off, but this time as a partner. The latest job is an elaborate yet foolhardy money order scam involving robbing a post office, a job for which Doc assembles a veritable supergroup of shitheads from jobs past: ex-Wall Street asshole and current junkie Buddy (Jon Hamm) and his ex-stripper girlfriend Darling (Eiza Gonzalez), and the menacing Bats (Jamie Foxx), an unstable psycho whose first response to anything is to start shooting.

Loaded with dynamite car chases and snappy, quotable dialogue ("This is Eddie No-Nose...formerly known as Eddie the Nose"), and tough guy repartee, BABY DRIVER is a big-screen mix tape where Wright uses the music as an integral part of the action, rather than just a meaningless soundtrack cue. Its characters are also fully developed with varying shades and unpredictable arcs. The biggest threats aren't who we think they are, and Wright isn't afraid to pull some surprises and give a big name an earlier-than-expected exit. Anything can happen at any time in BABY DRIVER, whether it's the ruthless Doc showing a little sympathy, Buddy not hesitating to turn on Baby, even after bonding with him over the mutual love of Queen's "Brighton Rock" from their 1975 album Sheer Heart Attack, or even a brief appearance by legendary songwriter and ubiquitous '70s pop culture figure Paul Williams as a feared gun dealer known as "The Butcher." Wright even turns Baby and Debora's laundromat date--accompanied by T.Rex's "Deborah"--into a visual feast with purposeful choreography, their movements around the washers accompanied by a colorful backdrop of a wall of dryers spinning like records. BABY DRIVER is candy for the eyes and ears, propelled by intense action, solid character turns by a cast of top-of-the-line pros in Spacey, Hamm, and Foxx, and at its core, the summer's most appealing couple in Elgort and James. The film's only stumble is that after 100 minutes of tightly-edited and perfectly-constructed control. Wright doesn't seem 100% sure of how to wrap it all up. It's a small hiccup that's hardly a deal-breaker, and it doesn't stop BABY DRIVER from being one of 2017's best and most entertaining films.

OKJA
(US/South Korea - 2017)

Directed by Bong Joon Ho. Written by Bong Joon Ho and Jon Ronson. Cast: Tilda Swinton, Jake Gyllenhaal, Paul Dano, An Seo Hyun, Giancarlo Esposito, Byun Heebong, Steven Yeun, Lily Collins, Yoon Je Moon, Shirley Henderson, Daniel Henshall, Devon Bostick, Woo Shik Choi, voice of Jungeun Lee. (Unrated, 120 mins)

Visionary South Korean auteur Bong Joon Ho (THE HOST) returns with the Netflix Original film OKJA, his first since 2014's word-of-mouth arthouse/VOD hit SNOWPIERCER. Like SNOWPIERCER, OJKA splits its time between English and subtitled Korean, but instead of a grim, dystopian class struggle among the last remnants of humanity aboard a perpetually-moving train, it's a freewheeling, go-for-broke satire on corporate America, genetically modified foods, and idiotic TV personalities, among everything else Bong throws at the wall to see what sticks. Normally, the kitchen sink mentality on display here is a recipe for disaster, and while some of it is far too forced and over-the-top, its barbs hit and hit hard. The wild tonal shifts are by design, but Bong could've tightened the leash on a couple of the film's bigger names. OKJA opens in 2007, as Lucy Mirando (Tilda Swinton, in her second film for the director after SNOWPIERCER) is installed as the CEO of Mirando, an agrochemical biotechnology corporation obviously modeled on Monsanto. Lucy's taken over the post, replacing her twin sister Nancy, a PR nightmare viewed as "too mean" to sell the Mirando brand to the public. Lucy immediately starts a goodwill campaign involving 26 "super pigs"--genetically modified pigs created in a Mirando lab under the guise of maximum profits with a minimal footprint. And, as Lucy also explains, "They need to taste fucking good."

26 piglets are sent to various Mirando branches all over the world for a ten-year contest where farmers from each region raise the piglet from infancy to see who has the best "super pig." It's all a PR stunt to improve Mirando's dubious reputation and unethical practices, but in the rural farmlands outside Seoul, 14-year-old Mija (An Seo Hyun) lives with her simple farmer grandfather Heebong (THE HOST's Byun Heebong) and has grown attached to Okja, the intelligent super pig that Heebong received as a piglet a decade ago and is now the size of a small elephant. Okja is orphaned Mija's only friend, and when a Mirando entourage--including hapless South Korea branch exec Mundo Park (Yoon Je Moon) and asshole TV personality and MAGICAL ANIMALS host Dr. Johnny Wilcox (an out-of-control Jake Gyllenhaal)--plan a visit to check on the pig's progress after ten years, she's unaware that their intent is to take Okja away to show her off at Mirando's "Best Super Pig Fest" in NYC before sending her straight to the slaughterhouse. Angry at her grandfather for not being truthful with her about Mirando's plans, Mija runs away to Seoul in an effort to rescue Okja. She ends up being aided by a coordinated crew of animal rights activists from the ALF-- Animal Liberation Front--led by fiercely devoted Jay (Paul Dano), whose soft-spoken demeanor clashes with his propensity for violence when need be ("I apologize for putting you in a choke-hold...I promise you it is a non-lethal choke-hold," he calmly tells a security guard he's incapacitating). Meanwhile, at Mirando headquarters in NYC, the media attention over the incidents in Seoul are a concern to the company's PR head Frank Dawson (Giancarlo Esposito), with Lucy's standing as CEO on such shaky ground that bitch-on-wheels Nancy is given her old job to get things back on track.

Co-produced by Brad Pitt's Plan B Entertainment, the $50 million OKJA is heavy-handed at times, but for the most part, it does a good job of balancing the very Spielbergian relationship between Mija and Okja with its desire to be the DR. STRANGELOVE of GMO takedowns (in lesser hands, this would probably be called OKJA AND ME). The targets are easy, but the jokes land and the jabs leave some bruising, whether it's the tacit dismissal of US consumers having any qualms about eating genetically modified food ("If it's cheap, they'll eat it," and "It's all edible except the squeal"), or the extreme level of conviction of some of the privileged ALF kids, like rail-thin Silver (Devon Bostick), who goes days without eating to minimize his footprint and chronically passes out (Jay: "I admire your conviction, Silver, but your pallid complexion concerns me"). There's also one laugh-out-loud moment in a Mirando situation room where everyone's watching the events unfold in Seoul and each person present in the room assumes the exact position of a counterpart in the famous shot of President Obama and others watching the raid that took out Bin Laden, complete with Swinton's Lucy with her hand over her mouth just like Hillary Clinton and madman Dr. Johnny taking the Joe Biden spot. There's no reason for it other than a quick sight gag, but it's the best visual joke of its kind since the one-sheet for THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE PART 2 copying THE BREAKFAST CLUB or the "everybody rips everybody else off" line in SWINGERS that's immediately followed by the cast recreating the RESERVOIR DOGS opening credits.

Sometimes Bong dampens the mood by going too dark, particularly in a horrifying and truly unsettling scene where a terrified Okja is subjected to a forced mating overseen by a drunk, cackling, rolling-around-on-the-floor Dr. Johnny. Gyllenhaal is clearly enjoying himself here, and his character's screechy, grating, whiny voice turning into Gyllenhaal's regular voice when Dr. Johnny goes in front of the camera is a amusing running gag, but the actor's performance might be a little too broad, frequently crossing the line into the grotesque, leaving zero room for any subtlety or nuance. Both of Swinton's characters are varying degrees of shrieking monsters (Nancy: "Fuck you, we're very proud of our accomplishments!" she yells in a warehouse full of genetically modified carcasses and pig parts, a blistering bit of absurdist humor that's as close as OKJA gets to "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!") that seem to spring from her Oscar-winning performance in MICHAEL CLAYTON, but she keeps it in check, even if there's no real reason she has to play twins other than Bong indulging his top-billed star who also has a producer credit on the film. Gyllenhaal, on the other hand, enters the film as Talk Show Robin Williams and just escalates it further from there. There's a couple of riveting action set pieces in Mija's pursuit of Okja, and indeed, the heart and soul of the film is young An, who has a strong resemblance to Bong's now grown-up HOST and SNOWPIERCER co-star Ko Asung. An turns in a remarkable performance as a lonely, sensitive girl willing to go to the ends of the earth to save her only friend. It helps that Okja herself is a convincingly CGI'd creation in a strange, uneven action/horror/comedy/monster movie/corporate satire that tries to be too many things at once, and while it does trip over itself and teeters on the verge of collapsing into a hot mess on a few occasions, it manages to pull pretty much all of them off.

INCONCEIVABLE
(US/UK - 2017)

Directed by Jonathan Baker. Written by Chloe King. Cast: Gina Gershon, Faye Dunaway, Nicolas Cage, Nicky Whelan, Natalie Eva Marie, Jonathan Baker, James Van Patten, Sienna Soho Baker, Harlow Bottarini, Ele Bardha, Corrie Danieley, Tyler Jon Olson. (R, 106 mins)

A de facto remake of the 2015 Will Ferrell/Kristen Wiig Lifetime thriller A DEADLY ADOPTION as well as 2016's WHEN THE BOUGH BREAKS, INCONCEIVABLE is the kind of glossy "(blank) from Hell" thriller that was a multiplex fixture back in the 1990s. INCONCEIVABLE had the chance to be trashy fun, especially with a script penned by Chloe King, daughter of softcore auteur Zalman King (writer of 9 1/2 WEEKS, director of TWO MOON JUNCTION), and a writer on her late dad's erotic Showtime series RED SHOE DIARIES, plus the presence of a couple of slumming Oscar winners, but it takes itself far too seriously. It's the feature directing debut of Jonathan Baker, an L.A. entrepreneur with deep ties to the entertainment industry and, well, don't take it from me. Take it from Baker's IMDb bio that was in no way written by Jonathan Baker:

"On the surface, Jonathan Baker is an eclectic personality, Upon closer examination, however, it comes to light that for years his every endeavor and adventure have all been achieved with the same goal in mind: entertaining people by making their dreams come true. His close involvement with the entertainment industry, as well as his ownership of the #1 rated day spa in the country both served as evidence of that love for realizing dreams."

Yes, it was his love of realizing dreams that led to Baker's defining moment: berating and shoving his then-wife, former Playboy Playmate Victoria Fuller, when they came in second in a race on a 2004 episode of THE AMAZING RACE, an incident that immediately put him in the elite company of universally loathed reality show assholes like THE REAL WORLD's Puck, THE APPRENTICE's Omarosa, and, more recently, the guy on SURVIVOR who outed a transgender contestant. But we're not here to judge Baker's past. We're here to talk about INCONCEIVABLE, and Baker is about as good a director as he is a sport about coming in second.

A thriller that couldn't be any sillier if Wallace Shawn periodically popped up to blurt the title at every ludicrous plot reveal, INCONCEIVABLE focuses on affluent husband-and-wife doctors Brian (Nicolas Cage) and Angela Morgan (Gina Gershon), who have the perfect life in an impossibly huge mansion with five-year-old daughter Cora (Harlow Bottarini), conceived with a donor egg after the couple endured four miscarriages. Angela's friend Linda (Natalie Eva Maria) introduces her to Katie (Nicky Whelan, Cage's co-star in LEFT BEHIND and DOG EAT DOG), a single mom of four-year-old Maddie (Sienna Soho Baker, the director's daughter). The kids become instant best friends, as do the moms, but no one knows Katie's secret (well, one of them anyway), revealed in a prologue: she murdered her abusive husband when Maddie was a baby, and has been living under an alias, moving from town to town since. Angela and Katie are fast friends, with Angela asking Katie to move into the guest house and be Maddie's nanny, but Brian's meddling mother Donna (Faye Dunaway), who lives in another guest house on the property, has a bad feeling about her, and of course, she's right. Brian and Angela decide to have another baby, this time with a surrogate, using the second donor egg harvested from the first pregnancy with Cora, and they ask Linda to carry it. This upsets Katie, with whom Linda is having a secret fling. Katie reveals that her finding Brian and Angela was no coincidence, as she provided the anonymous donor egg for Cora and that she wants to take her and raise her as Maddie's sister. And she also wants to carry the other egg she donated, which means being in a position to step in as the surrogate mother, which necessitates drowning Linda and passing it off as a boating accident. This was not a boat accident!

INCONCEIVABLE is terrible but take the small victories where you can: it actually remembers "I before E except after C." It's is so indebted to the "(blank) from Hell" concept that it's both a Nanny-from-Hell and a Surrogate Mother-from-Hell thriller, but there's no suspense because Baker has no idea how to present an interesting plot reveal. He constantly shows his cards too soon and can't stop tripping over his own leaden feet. Characters constantly drop exposition into casual conversation that feels stilted and awkward (Angela's miscarriages, her past Xanax abuse), and the plot moves in a completely unreal way with characters doing stupid things, as when Brian demands a urine sample to see if Angela's clean after Katie accuses her of pill-popping, and Angela gives the sample to Katie to take to the lab?! Linda's drowning is immediately followed by Angela and Donna having breakfast and Angela saying "Katie was great when Linda was killed in that boating accident." Wait, you mean the drowning that we just saw? Exactly how much time has passed? I'm surprised they didn't get up from the table and have Angela say "Remember when we had breakfast and talked about how great Katie was?" When Katie announces she's moving to Colorado for a job, Angela immediately blurts "You can't just leave! Why don't you move into our guest house? You could also be our part-time nanny," with Brian nodding "Absolutely." People don't talk or make important decisions like this. The characters rely on suppositions and assumptions (Angela's phone call to the egg donor facility is a howler), and of course, Brian's younger brother Barry works in a DNA lab and comes through in the end with a key piece of evidence to save the day. It should go without saying that Barry is played by...you guessed it...Jonathan Baker.

It's nice to see Gershon getting a leading role, but she's better than this uninspired garbage. Academy Award-winner Dunaway, following her triumphant appearance in THE BYE BYE MAN, is thoroughly wasted and only has a few brief scenes, despite her second billing. And it's INCONCEIVABLE how Nic Cage got to here, exactly 20 years to the week that the classic FACE/OFF was unleashed in theaters: third-billed in a vanity project by an infamous reality show douchebag. Cage is an Oscar-winning actor who, at some point, made the conscious decision to play the thankless Matt McCoy role in a belated HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE ripoff 35 years into his career. Cage has one "Cage" moment near the end, but he's on total autopilot here, visibly not giving the slightest whiff of a shit playing the obligatory clueless husband who has no idea what's going on in his own mansion. It's also unclear what kind of a doctor he is, since he's never seen leaving the house or arriving home with a bag or any kind of files indicating that he's employed, and is almost always seen wearing jeans and a leather jacket. I'm willing to be that Baker wanted to play Brian, but someone, whether it was Lionsgate, Grindstone, Emmett/Furla, or any of the six production companies and 25 credited producers involved other than his own "Baker Entertainment Group," vetoed that and insisted on someone notable who could actually act, or once had acted. Baker is just dreadful in his scenes as Barry, and as a director, he's a great day spa owner. None of that stops the auteur from showing off the least humble production company logo ever, one that's shockingly not accompanied by an image of a smiling Baker with a "ting" gleaming off of his teeth. He also extends his personal gratitude to none other than Warren Beatty in the closing credits. And Warren thought the Best Picture debacle at the Oscars would be his biggest movie-related embarrassment of the year?

T2: TRAINSPOTTING
(US/UK -2017)

Based on Irvine Welsh's 1993 novel, Danny Boyle's 1996 classic TRAINSPOTTING is one of the key works that defined 1990s cinema, and since Welsh's sequel Porno was released in 2002, the chatter surrounding the possibility of Boyle directing a big-screen version was almost constant. Lots of things delayed it--coming up with a good script, everyone's availability, Boyle and star Ewan McGregor having a bit of a falling out--but the timing was right, everyone was available, and Boyle and McGregor hugged it out and put their grievances to rest, finally making the cumbersomely-titled T2: TRAINSPOTTING a reality. Despite the hype and Boyle's post-SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE Oscar clout, Sony only got T2 on 331 screens in the US at its widest release. There is the issue of "Why a sequel? And why now?" but for a while, T2 manages to coast on goodwill, a plethora of callbacks for fans, and the genuinely fun "Hey, the band's back together!" vibe that will put a smile on the face of any TRAINSPOTTING fan. The film opens with Renton (McGregor), having a mild heart attack in an Amsterdam gym, 20 years after fleeing Edinburgh with the money he made in a drug deal and screwing over his mates. Divorced and facing his own mortality, Renton decides to visit Edinburgh, where his buddies are still a sorry lot: Spud (Ewen Bremner) can't hold down a job, was left by wife Gail (Shirley Henderson), and is back on skag; Simon, aka "Sick Boy" (Jonny Lee Miller) is hooked up with Bulgarian prostitute Veronika (Anjela Nedyalkova) on sex tape blackmail plots where they lure prominent local figures to a cheap hotel to get them in compromising positions, usually involving Veronika wearing a strap-on; and the ever-volatile Begbie (Robert Carlyle) is in prison after taking the fall for the first film's climactic drug deal, and denied parole again after attacking his attorney during a jailhouse visit.

Renton manages to get Spud off heroin, and while Simon isn't happy to see him, they eventually make amends and are soon teamed up on a scam with Veronika to secure government funding via an EU business loan to turn Simon's failing bar, inherited from his aunt, into a "sauna" that will be a front for a brothel. Begbie, meanwhile, breaks out of a prison hospital and makes his way to Edinburgh. Simon runs interference, telling him Renton's in Amsterdam and stashing him away in a stolen merchandise warehouse until he can score a fake passport to get him out of town. It should be no surprise that Begbie eventually stumbles into Renton, and it's here where T2 starts losing its way. The camaraderie between Renton, Simon, Spud, and new addition Veronika drives the opening hour and while it never quite scales the heights of its predecessor, it's still nostalgic fun watching these actors play these characters 21 years later (one sequence where Renton and Simon crash a Protestant Sectarian lodge party to swipe ATM cards--all with 1690 as the PIN--and end up improvising a raucous drinking song called "No More Catholics Left" is one of the funniest scenes of the year). But Begbie's pursuit of Renton dominates the second hour, and the pace turns sluggish as T2 becomes a bland revenge thriller that TRAINSPOTTING never found necessary, and it comes about simply because Boyle and returning screenwriter John Hodge (not using much of Porno's story, by the way) have backed themselves into a corner and decided that a commercial revenge thriller is as good a way as any to wrap things up. It's nice seeing and hearing all the TRAINSPOTTING sights and sounds--Henderson, Kelly Macdonald, James Cosmo (as Renton's dad), and Welsh himself (as Mikey Forrester) all make brief return appearances, as does Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life"--but Renton's updated "Choose Life" monologue, now namedropping Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and reality TV, seems forced, phony, and too FIGHT CLUB-ish. And why aren't the police looking for Begbie? T2:TRAINSPOTTING is worth seeing and is by no means a bad movie, but Boyle's and Hodge's tired plot developments in the dull, draggy second half are all the proof one needs to determine that this is a sequel no one really needed. However, let that not be a deterrent to Carlyle and Miller trying to get a green light for PM2: PLUNKETT & MACLEANE. (R, 117 mins)

DIAMOND CARTEL
(Kazakhstan - 2017)

The most singularly depressing film experience of 2017 so far and quite possibly one of the ten worst movies I've ever seen, DIAMOND CARTEL is something that doesn't even seem real, even as it's unfolding before your eyes. Directed and co-written by Salamat Mukhammed-Ali, a music video vet in his Kazakhstan homeland as well as the former frontman for the Kazakh rock band Epoch, DIAMOND CARTEL makes Albert Pyun's landmark "Gangstas Wandering Around an Abandoned Warehouse" (© Nathan Rabin) trilogy look like the work of Akira Kurosawa by comparison. It tells a story that's incredibly convoluted at best and (more likely) utterly incoherent at worst, as Aliya (Karlygash Mukhamedzhanova), a table dealer at an Almaty casino, runs afoul of her boss Mussa (Armand Assante) after she's cleaned out by a high roller and the floor boss never intervened. Mussa, a former Soviet general-turned-ruthless Kazakh crime lord, forces Aliya to become a hit woman, taking out his enemies under the tutelage of Ruslan (Alexev Frandetti), one of his soldiers who's been in a love triangle with Aliya and her childhood sweetheart Arman (Nurlan Altayev) since they were kids. Mussa is also in a turf war with Hong Kong triad boss Khazar (Cary-Hiroyuka Tagawa), the kind of lunatic who keeps a guy in a cage, over a $30 million diamond, with additional power plays coming from Mussa associate Catastrophe (Serik Bimurzin) and his henchman Cube (Murat Bissenbin). This all leads to flashbacks, followed by flashbacks within flashbacks, entire scenes played out against some embarrassingly bush-league greenscreen, some crummy CGI that wouldn't cut the mustard in a 20-year-old video game, some really sappy melodrama between Aliya and Arman, and shootouts and cartoonishly over-the-top carnage that look like outtakes from THE MACHINE GIRL and TOKYO GORE POLICE.

If you think it's strange seeing established actors like Assante and Tagawa in something like this, then take a deep breath because it gets worse: shot from 2011 to 2013, the Kazakh-financed DIAMOND CARTEL began life as THE WHOLE WORLD AT OUR FEET before some tweaking, re-editing, and dubbing was done to transform it into its current state. The newly-christened DIAMOND CARTEL actually made it into a handful of US theaters in April 2017, courtesy of the Sony-owned indie The Orchard and goth record label Cleopatra. Former Francis Ford Coppola associate and current right-wing propagandist Gray Frederickson, who got an Oscar as one of the producers of THE GODFATHER PART II, was nominated for an Oscar for producing APOCALYPSE NOW, but most recently shepherded the faithsploitationer PERSECUTED and Dinesh D'Souza's AMERICA: IMAGINE THE WORLD WITHOUT HER, is listed among the producers. The supporting cast includes Michael Madsen and Tiny Lister as a pair of criminals fencing a diamond, and they get a bullet in the head about 45 seconds after they're introduced. There's also '90s B-movie martial arts icons Don "The Dragon" Wilson (BLOODFIST) and Olivier Gruner (NEMESIS), both badly dubbed even though they're speaking English, as well as erstwhile BLOODSPORT villain Bolo Yeung, cast as an assassin named "Bulo."

Peter O'Toole (1932-2013)

But what really makes DIAMOND CARTEL something special (and by "something special," I mean "a total shit show") and gives it the ghoulish feeling of slowing down to rubberneck a car crash, is the presence of a frail-looking and horrendously dubbed Peter O'Toole in what ended up being his final film, released four years after his death in 2013. O'Toole turns up about 70 minutes in as "Boatseer" (his character is called "Tugboat" in the credits, but hey, whatever), a crusty old sea salt who agrees to help Aliya and Arman flee Mussa, only to get his throat slashed by Ruslan for his trouble (this takes place offscreen, and there's a cut to an obvious O'Toole double lying face down). The eight-time Oscar nominee looks confused and his hands are tremoring, and the voice he's been given sounds like Pinhead in HELLRAISER. It's no surprise to see guys like Assante (who's embarrassingly bad) and Madsen (who hasn't given a shit in years) in something like this, but it's almost unbearably, soul-crushingly sad to observe an obviously ailing O'Toole suffering through this demeaning sendoff. Why was he here? Who let this happen? Never mind the fact that his appearance here looks less like a hired gun acting gig and more like caught-on-camera elder abuse, but seeing the LAWRENCE OF ARABIA legend in DIAMOND CARTEL is akin to Daniel Day-Lewis turning up in BIRDEMIC. O'Toole is only in this for five minutes, but it's the kind of posthumously-released cinematic swan song that belongs in the same class as a washed-up Errol Flynn co-starring with his 17-year-old girlfriend in the pro-Castro CUBAN REBEL GIRLS, Bela Lugosi in PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE, Boris Karloff in four Mexican horror films released two to three years after his death in 1969, and John Carradine in 1995's JACK-O, his appearance consisting of unused footage from another project inserted into a straight-to-video horror movie released seven (!) years after his passing in 1988. Though Wilson and Gruner (as well as all the Kazakh actors) are also dubbed with all the care and precision of a GODZILLA movie, the actual voices of Assante, Tagawa, Madsen, and Lister all remain intact, though it sounds like they've been run through some kind of reverb-heavy Zandor Vorkov voice modulator. DIAMOND CARTEL is the kind of half-assed, slipshod clusterfuck where even the English speaking actors' words don't match their lip movements. Hey, I get it...working actors have to work and maybe this was the best offer Assante had on the table at the time, and he and the others likely figured they'd get paid and nobody would ever see it (frankly, I'm more curious what Gray Frederickson's excuse is). But Peter O'Toole? Even the most devoted O'Toole completist superfan has nothing to gain by enduring this amateurish fiasco. Do yourself a favor and watch any Peter O'Toole movie but this one. (Unrated, unwatchable, 100 mins, also streaming on Netflix)

THE BEGUILED
(US - 2017)

Written and directed by Sofia Coppola. Cast: Colin Farrell, Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst, Elle Fanning, Oona Laurence, Angourie Rice, Addison Riecke, Emma Howard. (R, 93 mins)

Based on Thomas P. Cullinan's 1966 Civil War-set novel A Painted Devil, THE BEGUILED was previously made into a film in 1971 by director Don Siegel. A departure at the time for star Clint Eastwood, who would have DIRTY HARRY in theaters later that year, THE BEGUILED was a badly marketed box-office flop though its reputation has improved significantly over time. It's especially interesting in hindsight when viewing it as part of the entire Eastwood canon, as it's a fascinating look at a masculine, archetypal Eastwood character having the tables turned on him by a boarding school full of women he's manipulated and betrayed (though it also shares a common theme with the later and far more sordid and sleazy TIGHTROPE, where once again Eastwood is a character surrounded by women--in that case, prostitutes and other sex workers--throwing themselves at him and he's never once shown paying). Sofia Coppola's remake, also called THE BEGUILED, approaches the story more from the POV of the women, though it hasn't been without controversy: a slave character named Hallie (played by Mae Mercer in the 1971 film) has been dropped, her absence explained in an early bit of a dialogue where someone says "The slaves all left." In addition, the character of Edwina, played by Kirsten Dunst, was biracial in the novel, but it's never mentioned here, nor was "whitewashing" brought up in 1971 when Elizabeth Hartman played the same role, but perhaps critics and film enthusiasts had more pressing issues to bitch about in 1971. Neither the novel nor the 1971 film had any big salient points to make regarding race or slavery, because it's not what the story is about. Coppola explained her reasoning being that girls and young women tend to be drawn to her films (THE VIRGIN SUICIDES, THE BLING RING), and she didn't want a black female to be portrayed in any negative way that distracted from the story.

The central premise remains the same: in 1864 Virginia, Corporal John McBurney (Colin Farrell), a Union deserter, is found injured in the woods surrounding a sparsely-attended girls school. Young Amy (Oona Laurence of SOUTHPAW) is out picking mushrooms and helps him back to the school grounds, where he's taken in and his leg wound tended to by headmistress Miss Martha Farnsworth (Nicole Kidman). Agreeing to give him time to recover before turning him over to Confederate soldiers, Miss Martha keeps McBurney locked in the music room and informs the others--teacher Edwina (Dunst), rebellious teen Alicia (Elle Fanning), and younger girls Jane (Angourie Rice of THE NICE GUYS), Marie (Addison Riecke), and Marie (Emma Howard)--that McBurney's room is off limits. With his smoldering looks and his Irish brogue, the charming, Dublin-born McBurney slowly endears himself to the women and the girls, who begin showing off by dressing in their best clothes, breaking out the jewelry ("You haven't worn that pendant since the Christmas party!" two different people mention to Edwina), and constantly finding excuses to go into his room. McBurney revels in the attention and it isn't long before the choking atmosphere of repression simmers into overpowering sexual tension as McBurney declares his love for Edwina while seducing Alicia and very nearly getting the prim, proper Miss Martha into his bed. Hell hath no fury like several women scorned, and things go south very quickly for McBurney.

A Southern Gothic that was as close as Eastwood ever came to starring in a horror movie, the 1971 BEGUILED took its time to let things boil over and when they did, it got seriously dark and unsettling. Coppola doesn't replicate that feeling here because her version seems to rush through the story (the closing credits roll before the 90-minute mark). Farrell's McBurney tells Edwina he loves her much too quickly, and whether Coppola's breezing past the details or it's intentional to show how lonely and desperate Edwina is for an escape from her dreary existence, it doesn't work. This new interpretation shows more gore in the surgical scenes and blood splattered all over Miss Martha's white dress as she emphatically orders someone to "Go to the smokehouse, bring me the saw!" before performing an impromptu offscreen leg amputation--a horrifying moment in the original film--but it's tame in other respects. Gone is the subplot about Miss Martha's past incestuous relationship with her brother (which led to one of Eastwood's best lines in the 1971 version) as well as any sense of tension and suspense at all. The shocking scenes where Eastwood's McBurney kills Amy's beloved turtle, and when he wakes up to find one of his legs missing are both ineffectively handled here to the point of being bungled. The subsequent psychotic rampage by Farrell's McBurney threatens to turn Coppola's BEGUILED into a Civil War-set "Houseguest from Hell" thriller, while the climactic dinner sequence loses all of its momentum thanks to Coppola's bizarre decision to have Edwina decline a helping of mushrooms. Farrell, Kidman, and the supporting cast are fine, but Kidman isn't given nearly as meaty and complex a Miss Martha as Geraldine Page got to play in 1971, and the only real improvement Coppola makes is with her Kubrick-like use of natural lighting throughout. Shot by cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd (THE GRANDMASTER) in a 1.66 aspect ratio--unusual for today's movies--THE BEGUILED '17 looks great. There's a dreamlike haze to the proceedings--not surprising to anyone who's seen THE VIRGIN SUICIDES--and you can feel the sweltering humidity, and with the BARRY LYNDON-like natural lighting, whether it's sunlight during the day or candles providing scant illumination at night, accompanied by the constant background noise of war and cannon fire and the sight of smoke from battle that's too close to the school for comfort, you really do feel transported back to 1864. But elsewhere, this BEGUILED doesn't seem to show much purpose since Coppola seems to have gone out of her way to render it as dramatically inert as possible. It looks stunning, but what exactly was the point of remaking this?

SONG TO SONG
(US - 2017)

After taking 20 years off between 1978's DAYS OF HEAVEN and 1998's THE THIN RED LINE, Terrence Malick's directorial output in the 2010s is coming at a furious pace that rivals Woody Allen and Clint Eastwood. Counting the 40-minute IMAX film VOYAGE OF TIME, SONG TO SONG is his sixth movie of this decade, and the final part of a loose trilogy that began with 2013's TO THE WONDER and 2016's KNIGHT OF CUPS. Shot back-to-back with KNIGHT OF CUPS way back in 2012 and endlessly tinkered with by its maker, SONG TO SONG takes the first-world ennui of CUPS' self-absorbed Los Angeles navel-gazers and moves them to the hipster mecca of Austin, TX for maximum insufferability. Any hopes of Malick turning this into his own version of NASHVILLE are dashed the moment the film begins and it's the same kind of pained, whispered, emo journal entry voiceover by a dull ensemble of ciphers played by actors who, for some reason, still want to say they were in a Malick movie. If there's a central character--none of them are referred to by name--it's Faye (Rooney Mara), a waify aspiring musician who's seen onstage with a band a couple of times and seems to be friends with Patti Smith (as herself), but we never really see her working on music or practicing with the rest of the band. Faye's involved with Cook (Michael Fassbender), who's some kind of music industry A&R asshole (I guess), and BV (Ryan Gosling), another aspiring musician who doesn't seem to do much playing or songwriting and, like everyone in this film, appears to have significant disposable income. Faye drifts between both men, and during some downtime, the psychologically abusive Cook hooks up with teacher-turned-diner waitress Rhonda (Natalie Portman), and even coerces Rhonda and Faye to join him in a threesome. Faye also gets involved with Parisian transplant Zoey (Berenice Marlohe) and BV with Amanda (Cate Blanchett), while almost everyone gets their turn at center stage for some of Malick's signature vacuous ruminations of the privileged and aimless. To wit:

"I thought we could roll and tumble. Live from song to song. Kiss to kiss."

"I love the pain. It feels like life."

"I'm low. I'm like the mud."

"Foolish me. Devil."

"I was once like you. To think what I once was. What I am now."

"I played with the flame of life."

"I feel like we're so...connected. I can't really understand. It's like..."

"The world built a fence around you. How do you get through? Connect?"

"You burn me. Who are you?"

"I need to go back and start over."

Malick should've taken that last sentiment to heart. Like KNIGHT OF CUPS, SONG TO SONG shows the revered filmmaker continuing his ongoing descent into self-parody. This does not look like the work of a 73-year-old auteur who's been making movies for 45 years. If this same movie was presented by a film school student, it would be dismissed as self-indulgent, adolescent drivel. But Malick's defenders continue to give him a pass and insist that his detractors--a contingent of former acolytes that's growing with each new Malick journey up his own ass--just can't grasp the level of genius that's being gifted to them. Bullshit. Malick was poised to stake his claim as the Greatest American Filmmaker when Stanley Kubrick died, and brilliant films like 2005's THE NEW WORLD and 2011's THE TREE OF LIFE certainly made a strong case for his inheriting the title. But over the course of TO THE WONDER, KNIGHT OF CUPS, and now SONG TO SONG, Malick has offered enough evidence to suggest that the emperor has no clothes, and rather than the new Kubrick, he's really just the American Jean-Luc Godard, another filmmaking legend for whom any negative criticism is strictly verboten. Malick goes into these films with no clear vision, instead hoping it comes together in post with the help of eight (!) credited editors. And, as was the case with WONDER and CUPS, a ton of name actors got cut out of the film when Malick decided they weren't needed, among them Christian Bale, Benicio del Toro, Haley Bennett (THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN), Boyd Holbrook (LOGAN), and Angela Bettis (MAY), along with artists Iron & Wine, Fleet Foxes, and Arcade Fire (when asked about this film in a 2013 interview after shooting wrapped, even Fassbender said he wasn't sure if he'd end up being in it). Iggy Pop and John Lydon turn up in SONG TO SONG, along with Smith, who gives the film one of its few legitimately worthwhile dramatic moments when she fondly speaks of her late husband, MC5 guitarist Fred "Sonic" Smith. Alternating between wide-angle and fish-eye lenses and often using GoPro cameras to maximize the faux-experimental aura, Malick and renowned cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki did some extensive shooting at the 2012 Austin City Limits and Fun Fun Fun fests, which gave Fassbender a chance to wrestle with Red Hot Chili Peppers' Flea and let Malick waste some screen time on that. For all the impact that the Austin events brought to the film, Malick may as well have shot scenes at that year's Gathering of the Juggalos. Holly Hunter turns up briefly as Rhonda's mom and Val Kilmer does a walk-through as a wildman rock star, onstage with the Black Lips at the Fun Fun Fun fest, cutting off clumps of his hair with a Bowie knife and chainsawing an amp during a live show while yelling "I got some uranium!" Malick would've had a significantly more entertaining movie if he'd just followed Kilmer around and filmed him being weird for two hours.

It's also nice to see Malick has entered his "pervy old man" phase, with lingering, leering shots of Mara and Marlohe caressing each other, Zoey kissing Faye's hand while she masturbates, and Cook in bed with two nude escorts in what looks like an outtake from the harrowing Fassbender sex addiction drama SHAME. It's easy to assume from his last few films that Malick has forgotten how people really communicate and interact and maybe doesn't get out much anymore, and from the looks of some of the more sordid scenes in SONG TO SONG, he's apparently just discovered Cinemax. It's possible that Malick is putting a stop to this myopic nonsense with his next film, the German-set WWII drama RADEGUND, due out later this year. It stars August Diehl, Matthias Schoenaerts, Bruno Ganz, and the late Michael Nyqvist, and by all accounts, it's actually Malick doing a commercial film with a straightforward narrative. It's about time, because SONG TO SONG is a fucking embarrassment. (R, 129 mins)

SALT AND FIRE
(Germany/US/Mexico/France/UK - 2017)

A companion piece of sorts to his 2016 Netflix documentary INTO THE INFERNO (which was shot second but released first), SALT AND FIRE provides further evidence that, much like his 1970s New German Cinema contemporary Wim Wenders, Werner Herzog's strengths no longer lie in narrative filmmaking. A visionary German auteur and one of cinema's most beloved eccentric raconteurs, Herzog is a tireless workaholic whose curiosity of all subjects has led him to create some of the most captivating documentaries of the modern era, including 2005's GRIZZLY MAN, 2007's ENCOUNTERS AT THE END OF THE WORLD, and 2010's CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS. He once made brilliant, groundbreaking dramas like 1972's AGUIRRE: THE WRATH OF GOD and 1982's FITZCARRALDO, but after his superb 2006 Vietnam POW drama RESCUE DAWN, his gonzo 2009 reimagining of BAD LIEUTENANT, and his experimental 2010 misfire (though it has its admirers) MY SON, MY SON, WHAT HAVE YE DONE?, Herzog's most recent forays into scripted cinema have fallen flat: his Nicole Kidman-headlined historical epic QUEEN OF THE DESERT took four years to get released in the US in April 2017, the same day as the shot-in-2015 SALT AND FIRE. MY SON, MY SON was bad, but SALT AND FIRE is easily the worst Herzog film I've seen, a deadening, ponderous slog with muddled, ham-fisted admonishments about environmental issues and filled with characters who never once speak like human beings who know how to interact with one another. Much of the dialogue sounds like stuff Herzog would've written for himself to narrate in a documentary and honestly, it would play significantly better coming out of his mouth instead of a monotone, somnambulant Michael Shannon, one of the great character actors around but who's having a really off day here. Imagine the curiously soothing tone of Herzog uttering such musings as "Truth is the only daughter of time,""Here lies a monster on the verge of waking," or "The noblest place for a man to die is the place he dies the deadest," and you've got a movie. But when those same lines are mumbled by Shannon, they sound like the pretentious ramblings of the world's most depressed Bond villain.

As SALT AND FIRE opens, scientist Dr. Laura Sommerfeld (Veronica Ferres) is on a UN fact-finding mission in South America with two colleagues--horndog Italian Dr. Fabio Cavani (Gael Garcia Bernal) and stoical German Dr. Arnold Meier (Volker Zack Michalowski)--to look into an impending ecological disaster at the Diablo Blanco salt flats (played by Bolivia's Salar de Uyuni). They're left at an abandoned airport and abducted by armed, masked men and taken to an undisclosed location where Sommerfeld is granted an audience with mastermind Matt Riley (Shannon), the CEO of a mysterious corporation known as "The Consortium." While Cavani and Meier are sidelined in the shitter for the rest of the film after secretly being given a powerful laxative (one of the film's several ill-advised attempts at levity; c'mon, Herzog...you're better than poop jokes), Riley and his chief associate Krauss (theoretical physicist Jonathan Krauss as himself) take Sommerfeld into the middle of the Diablo Blanco, where Riley informs her that a lake that was there just a few decades ago is gone and that expanding Diablo Blanco threatens to reactivate a long-dormant volcano that could obliterate mankind ("It could be 20,000 years or it could be 20...but it will happen"). After confessing that it was his company's unethical, careless practices that brought this certain disaster on the world, he abandons her in the desert with two blind children, for whom she quickly adapts to the situation to be a protective mother figure while trying to ascertain the exact of Riley's actions. Ferres and Shannon aren't given characters to play but rather, talking points to recite, with Shannon's Riley coming off as particularly hectoring in a way that borders on mansplaining, considering Ferres' Sommerfeld is the top ecology expert in her field. Popular German actress Ferres delivers her lines in a stilted, halting way that sounds like she looped them in post-production, while Shannon comes off as so lifeless that you might think Herzog pulled a HEART OF GLASS on him. SALT AND FIRE is anti-entertainment of the highest order, a film that opens as a straightforward hostage drama and flirts with becoming a disaster movie before turning into an overbearing, finger-wagging lecture, and finally, an examination of a career woman finding her true inner self when, like the volcano, her long-dormant maternal instincts are reawakened (it's mentioned that Sommerfeld has a estranged daughter who's in the custody of her ex), along with signs of a budding romance with her kidnapper. It speaks to how random and disjointed SALT AND FIRE is that it's no less than three movies before it finally settles on being a fourth with a clumsy attempt to link motherhood with nurturing Mother Earth, a metaphor that's so ineptly handled by Herzog that it comes off as a passive-aggressive, context-free rebuking of the life choices of a world-renowned science professor that also has her succumbing to the charms (?) of her creepy, morose abductor. Herzog's rarely been as wrong-headed as he is here--he should've just made a documentary about the Salar de Uyuni salt flat and everything would've turned out better for everyone. (Unrated, 98 mins, also streaming on Netflix)

THEIR FINEST
(UK/Sweden - 2017)

It's overlong, mostly predictable and hampered somewhat by a third act plot development that rivals 47 METERS DOWN in terms of unnecessary cruelty, but THEIR FINEST is an enjoyably old-fashioned "war at home" WWII saga that became a small word-of-mouth art house hit in the spring. In London in 1940, Catrin Cole (Gemma Arterton) thinks she's getting a secretarial job with the Ministry of Information's film division. With most of the men called up as the war escalates, she's actually been hired as a screenwriter after department head Roger Swain (Richard E. Grant) was impressed with some comics she wrote for a newspaper in the absence of the regular writers who were off fighting. Teaming with in-house scribe Tom Buckley (Sam Claflin), Catrin's job is to come up with inspiring scripts for movies to keep the British citizens' spirits lifted amidst constant air raids and concerns, as Swain puts it, "that there won't even be any theaters left to show them." Catrin is drawn to the story of twin sisters Lily and Rose Starling (Lily and Francesca Knight) who have found a certain degree of local fame for taking their father's boat, the Nancy Starling, to rescue soldiers at Dunkirk. The sisters have embellished the story significantly, as the Ministry eventually discovers that they tried to go to Dunkirk, but their engine broke down and they were towed back before they even left British waters. It's got too much crowd-pleasing potential to dismiss, so Catrin and Tom are instructed to fictionalize it, and to also add an authoritative male figure--a drunk uncle played by aging thespian Ambrose Hilliard (Bill Nighy)--because no one will believe that two young women took a boat to Dunkirk.

Directed by Lone Scherfig (AN EDUCATION) and adapted from Lissa Evans' 2009 novel Their Finest Hour and a Half by veteran British TV writer Gaby Chiappe (HOLBY CITY, EASTENDERS, LARK RISE TO CANDLEFORD), THEIR FINEST is definitely a "they don't make 'em like they used to" kind of movie, at times playing like one of Woody Allen's period comedies, mostly pleasant and anchored by an appealing performance from Arterton. THEIR FINEST does a nice job of presenting a woman's struggle in a male-dominated job market (of course, she makes less money than her male colleagues), and her duties inevitably lead to the expected resentment of her artist husband Ellis (Jack Huston), who has no money coming in and can no longer serve because of a leg injury sustained in the Spanish Civil War a few years earlier. There's also some timeless jabs at the eternal struggle between artists and the powers that be, with the filmmakers forced by the Secretary of War (Jeremy Irons) to cast American soldier and Eagle Squadron hero Carl Lundbeck (Jake Lacy) to appeal to the US, even though he can't act and there were no Americans at Dunkirk. It's Arterton's film, but the scene-stealer is the always-outstanding Nighy, whose Hilliard is a pompous, past-his-prime egotist humbled by the sacrifices made by those around him and eager to do his part by helping Lundbeck hone his acting chops, even talking his agent down from demanding more money and better accommodations because the plucky, can-do spirit of those around him have inspired him to such a degree. It's a warm and at times touching performance that again demonstrates why Nighy is one of our great character actors. THEIR FINEST is a film that's impossible to dislike even if it's rather slight when it's all said and done, and that late-film story development is jarring but in a way that somewhat negatively impacts the film as it sets it up for some ham-fisted sentimentality near the end. (R, 117 mins)

DRONE
(US/Canada - 2017)

A potentially interesting, politically-driven thriller, DRONE gets derailed when the filmmakers decide to make it overwrought and polemical, with its antagonist basically wearing a light that flashes "MESSAGE!" In Renton, WA, Neil Westin (Sean Bean) claims to be an IT troubleshooter for a software corporation. Unbeknownst to his wife Ellen (Mary McCormack) and 16-year-old son Shane (Maxwell Haynes), he's actually a CIA contractor who's part of a secret program that employs civilian drone pilots to drop bombs on suspected terrorists in the Middle East from the cozy confines of suburban Seattle, but a recent security leak threatens to expose the entire operation. Meanwhile, Imir Shaw (Patrick Sabongui) has arrived from Pakistan and leaves at least one dead body in his wake in his surveillance of the Westin family, including trailing an adulterous Ellen to a motel with a younger co-worker (Bradley Stryker) who wants to take their fling to a more serious level. Neil's also dealing with the recent passing of his Alzheimer's stricken father and can't find the words to write his eulogy when Imir shows up in his driveway under the guise of buying Neil's father's sailboat. Neil invites him in and as they discuss the boat and get to know each other, Ellen arrives home and they ask Imir to stay for dinner. As Imir starts slowly doling out his backstory, culminating in the revelation that it's the one-year anniversary of his wife and daughter being collateral damage in a US drone strike, it finally dawns on Neil that his dinner guest knows his real job and intends to avenge the death of his family by destroying Neil's.

Director/co-writer Jason Bourque, a veteran of numerous Lifetime movies, takes entirely too long to generate any suspense with DRONE. Imir doesn't even make his intent known to the Westins until the last 15 minutes, and the bulk of the film feels like a long dinner sequence in a play. The film shows its cards too soon in establishing Imir as a threat and doesn't really explore the moral complexities of Neil's job. He doesn't seem to feel one way or another about it, though his decidedly non-PC colleague Gary (Joel David Moore) serves as a mouthpiece for intolerance with his labeling drone casualties as "dune coons." Subtlety is a foreign concept to DRONE, and it's not helped by an ineffective, mannered performance by Bean, who's usually a sure thing but here, he's using a forced, overdone American accent that completely undermines anything he might've been able to do with this character. A subplot about Neil's distance from his late father and Shane getting close to his grandfather in his final days adds nothing, due in large part because Haynes is a terrible actor. McCormack and Sabongui do what they can with paper-thin characters, and even when it finally gets going at the very end, Bourque still can't resist tacking on a final scene of clunky political commentary. DRONE isn't nearly as obnoxious in its pontificating as say, THE CRASH, another thriller from earlier this year that got tripped up in political preaching and also featured McCormack, but it's still not really worth anyone's time. (Unrated, 90 mins)

TO THE BONE
(Italy/US - 2017)

Written and directed by Marti Noxon. Cast: Lily Collins, Keanu Reeves, Carrie Preston, Lili Taylor, Alex Sharp, Liana Liberato, Brooke Smith, Leslie Bibb, Kathryn Prescott, Ciara Quinn Bravo, Maya Eshet, Lindsey McDowell, Retta, Joanna Sanchez, Alanna Ubach. (Unrated, 107 mins)

Anyone who's known someone suffering from anorexia nervosa will instantly recognize Ellen, the pale, gaunt, 20-year-old woman played by Lily Collins in the Netflix Original film TO THE BONE. You'll spot the body language, the posture, the hiding under oversized, baggy clothing, the way she moves her food around her plate rather than eating it. You've heard all the things Ellen says to those concerned about her: "I'm maintaining.""Nothing bad's gonna happen.""I've got it under control." And in your struggle to comprehend just what this person you care about is doing to themselves, you'll recognize the frustration of Ellen's younger half-sister Kelly (Liana Liberato) when she bluntly says "I don't really get it, you know? Just...eat!" because you've said those same words. The makers of TO THE BONE come from that place: Collins (Phil's daughter) battled an eating disorder in her teens, and writer/director Marti Noxon (a veteran TV writer and producer best known for her work on BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER, ANGEL, GLEE, and most recently, CODE BLACK) spent most of her teens and 20s in and out of hospitals being treated for anorexia (when she was 17, Noxon weighed 70 lbs and was cast as Jennifer Jason Leigh's body double in the 1981 made-for-TV anorexia drama THE BEST LITTLE GIRL IN THE WORLD. Noxon based a lot of TO THE BONE on her own experiences and in partnership with Collins, the the film really nails the psychology, the struggle, the frustration and the anger felt by all parties and the effect it has on family relationships and friendships.

In terms of Ellen and her psyche, TO THE BONE walks the walk--Noxon doesn't shy away from unpleasantries, whether it's her bruised spine from her obsessive, excessive sit-ups, the fact that she can't remember when she last menstruated, or the fur-like hair sprouting in unusual places as her emaciated body goes in defense mode and begins eating muscle in an effort to maintain itself. But almost everywhere else, it's a by-the-numbers melodrama that's just about on the level of a disease-of-the-week TV-movie that these days would air on Lifetime. The supporting characters are a predictable collection of superficially diverse caricatures, whether it's Ellen's harping stepmother Susan (Carrie Preston), who constantly makes excuses for the perpetual absence of her father, who's often-mentioned but never seen; her rustic, luddite mother Judy (Lili Taylor), who suffered from post-partum depression before outing herself and leaving her husband when Ellen was young (Moxon took this directly from her own bio); the girls in a group home in which she's committed to a six-week treatment program, including pregnant bulimic Megan (Leslie Bibb), whose miscarriage will be called by any seasoned moviegoer the moment she's introduced; the lone male in the therapy program, British ballet dancer Luke (Alex Sharp, who won a Tony for the 2015 Broadway production of THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME), who's combating anorexia and the possibility of his career ending over a knee injury, but whose most notable traits seem to be his wacky eccentricity and that he's extremely British.

There's also Keanu Reeves, who's starting to look completely lost in any movie whose title doesn't contain the words "John" and/or "Wick," as Dr. William Beckham, the kind of renegade, patchy-bearded, outside-the-box therapist that only exists in movies, with his edgy propensity for bluntly telling it like it is largely limited to his saying "fuck" a lot. TO THE BONE is sympathetic to its heroine while in no way glamorizing her or her condition in a world where impressionable young girls watching might get the wrong idea. But at the same time, TO THE BONE doesn't go far enough. This should be a harrowing, disturbing film that's hard to watch but far too often, it settles for being a quirky, YA indie about eating disorders that never misses an opportunity to play to convention and character tropes, from Ellen's tentative romance with Luke all the way to its vague yet assumed happy ending. Never is that quirkiness spotlighted more than in an already much-discussed scene late in the film that Noxon draws from a real-life experience that was obviously powerful for her but it just doesn't play onscreen. Collins, who did lose weight under medical supervision but was assisted in her performance by some effective makeup and occasional obvious insert shots from body doubles, really sells the state of Ellen's (rechristened "Eli" in therapy, as part of forming a new identity) condition, and for viewers of a certain younger age, TO THE BONE could very well become a classic for its generation and the kind of movie that will likely be shown in schools for years to come. And to give them the credit due, Noxon and Collins completely captured--with almost frightening accuracy--everything about a close friend I lost to an on-again/off-again, 25-year battle with anorexia that took finally took its toll in April 2017. I saw her in Collins' portrayal and in regards to just the depiction of Ellen, it's a degree of realism so high that anyone who has lived it--either as someone with an ED or someone close to them--will immediately "get" it. It's everything else about TO THE BONE that's just not up to that level.

WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES
(US - 2017)

Directed by Matt Reeves. Written by Mark Bomback and Matt Reeves. Cast: Andy Serkis, Woody Harrelson, Steve Zahn, Karin Konoval, Terry Notary, Toby Kebbell, Judy Greer, Michael Adamthwaite, Amiah Miller, Aleks Paunovic, Sara Canning, Ty Olsson, Max Lloyd-Jones, Devyn Dalton, Gabriel Chavarria, Lauro Chartrand. (PG-13, 140 mins)

Following 2011's RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES and 2014's DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, the rebooted series reaches its pinnacle with WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES, and it's the best genre trilogy to come down the pike since Christopher Nolan's DARK KNIGHT saga. It's really hard to convey what a stunning achievement WAR is in terms of Weta's CGI and motion capture work on star Andy Serkis and the rest of the actors playing apes. It was impressive in RISE, better in DAWN, and now it looks so natural that you forget they're visual effects. It helps that Serkis, the king of motion capture (LORD OF THE RINGS, KING KONG), has been able to create a well-drawn and very "human" character in terms of his performance as ape leader Caesar, which runs the gamut of emotions throughout WAR and regardless of the CGI work, it is Serkis acting and it's a performance so good that it may be a game-changer as far as motion capture performances getting some award recognition. The same creative personnel from DAWN returns here--director/co-writer Matt Reeves (CLOVERFIELD) and co-writer Mark Bomback--and though the new trilogy works beautifully on its own, much effort is made to put the three new films, particularly WAR, in the circular context of the original franchise that lasted from 1968 to 1973, from Caesar's young son Cornelius to the name given to a mute supporting character to some locations replicated from 1970's BENEATH THE PLANET OF THE APES (1970) and 1973's BATTLE FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES. The Serkis trilogy can stand on its own but for APES fans, it's very much a part of the classic series that began with the Charlton Heston-starring 1968 original, even if it's not a completely perfect fit.

Set 15 years after the "Simian Flu" of RISE and three years after DAWN ape revolt led by the vengeful Koba (Toby Kebbell), WAR opens in medias res as battle between ape and human armies is ongoing, with Caesar's tribe set up in the woods and under constant threat by the armed forces of Col. McCullough (Woody Harrelson), who employs what left of the late Koba's faction of traitorous apes--dubbed "donkeys"--to assist in the hunt for Caesar. When Caesar captures some of McCullough's soldiers and shows mercy by sending them back with a plea to simply leave the apes alone in the woods and there will be no more fighting, McCullough responds by launching a raid and killing Caesar's wife Cornelia (Judy Greer) and eldest son Blue Eyes (Max Lloyd-Jones). Sending the rest of his ape tribe off through the desert to find a new, safe settlement, Caesar goes off on his own to find and kill McCullough, but is followed and eventually joined, despite his protestations, by his voice of reason and orangutan consigliere Maurice (Karin Konoval), gorilla Luca (Michael Adamthwaite), and chimpanzee Rocket (Terry Notary). They're eventually joined by a mute, orphaned human girl (Amiah Miller) and comic relief zoo escapee Bad Ape (Steve Zahn), pick up McCullough's trail and find some of his dead soldiers left behind, apparently shot and killed by their commander for unknown reasons. Caesar and the others find McCullough's camp, where the rest of Caesar's tribe is being held captive, captured by the colonel's men en route to their new home. Seething with rage and warned by Maurice that he's starting to act and sound just like Koba, Caesar ends up being taken prisoner by McCullough, a despot who's gone full Col. Kurtz against the US military, worshiped by his renegade followers and forcing the apes to function as slave labor to build a wall around the camp in fear of a virus that's causing humanity to regress to an inarticulate, animal-like state while apes continue to evolve and grow more intelligent.

Reeves and Bomback structure WAR in a way that initially reminds you of LOGAN, with its use of western tropes and motifs in a completely different genre. As Caesar and the other venture on horseback through the wilderness in search of McCullough, it's hard not to imagine you're in a classic western. But the tyranny of McCullough and his God complex also brings to mind APOCALYPSE NOW, with Harrelson's shaved head and a couple of shots that mimic Marlon Brando lounging around in Kurtz's shadowy, sweaty lair (there's also some graffiti in an underground tunnel that reads "Ape-pocalypse Now!"). And by the final act, it turns into a de facto jailbreak movie, with Caesar leading a revolt from within McCullough's prison camp with help from the motley crew of companions led by Maurice, who have patiently been waiting from a distance for the right time to strike. While Harrelson's colonel is a monster, there's efforts made to humanize him and show how and why he's become what he is, and for a few brief moments, the audience, and even Caesar, might sympathize with him. There's certainly parallels to be drawn with both figures (fortunately, we're spared a McCullough "We're not so different...you and I" speech), especially with Caesar's tunnelvision focus on revenge putting his entire ape clan in jeopardy, and indeed, their cold response to him when he gets thrown into the prison camp is proof that they blame their predicament on his abandoning them. But this is Serkis' show from start to finish. It's a masterful, commanding performance that takes the actor through every conceivable state of mind, complete with a devastating yet necessary end result. It's a beautifully made film, with stunning imagery that owes a debt to the surreal journey upriver in APOCALYPSE NOW to the one-way journey to madness of AGUIRRE: THE WRATH OF GOD. WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES is proof that summer blockbuster sequels can still be intelligent, imaginative, moving, and slyly subversive (I doubt the presence of a power-mad, dictatorial, would-be king ordering the building of a wall is coincidental) and that CGI imagery can indeed look completely natural with some care and attention. It's just about as great a PLANET OF THE APES movie as the 1968 original and maybe even better than 1972's CONQUEST OF THE PLANET OF THE APES, and it's the new standard-bearer of what the possibilities can be with CGI and motion capture. An instant classic and one of 2017's best.

Before-and-after motion capture of Karin Konoval as Maurice,
Terry Notary as Rocket, Andy Serkis as Caesar,
and MichaelAdamthwaite as Luca

STAR CRYSTAL
(US - 1986)

Written and directed by Lance Lindsay. Cast: C. Jutson Campbell, Faye Bolt, John Smith, Taylor Kingsley, Marcia Linn, Emily Longstreth, Eric Moseng, Lance Bruckner, Charles Linza, voice of The Gling. (R, 94 mins)

There was no shortage of blatant ALIEN ripoffs throughout the 1980s--GALAXY OF TERROR, FORBIDDEN WORLD, and HORROR PLANET are but a few--but none were quite as bizarre as STAR CRYSTAL, released by the second, post-Roger Corman incarnation of New World Pictures in the spring of 1986. Inexplicably shown in multiplexes and first-run theaters, STAR CRYSTAL looks like a student film that somehow got picked up for nationwide distribution. Perhaps New World thought they had another DARK STAR on their hands. In the early '70s, USC students John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon got funding to expand their student film project to feature length, and when it was released in 1974, the sci-fi spoof became a cult classic that put both filmmakers on the map. That was decidedly not the case with STAR CRYSTAL, which was just released on Blu-ray (!) by Kino Lorber. The only extra is a trailer, but STAR CRYSTAL's backstory is likely an interesting one that probably warranted telling, because for better or worse--mostly worse--there's never been anything quite like it.

Little is known about the driving forces behind STAR CRYSTAL: writer/director Lance Lindsay and producer/editor/ special effects makeup artist/second unit director Eric Woster, who also shares story credit with Lindsay. Born in 1958, Woster broke into the business in the early '80s as part of the Cheech & Chong crew (he's credited as Tommy Chong's assistant on CHEECH & CHONG'S NICE DREAMS, THINGS ARE TOUGH ALL OVER, and STILL SMOKIN') and would eventually serve as the cinematographer on Chong's 1990 solo comedy FAR OUT MAN. After that, writer-director-star Woster began work on a horror film called SANDMAN which featured an unusual cast including Chong's wife Shelby, Stuart Whitman, Robert Wuhl, Dedee Pfeiffer, Gailard Sartain, Rose Marie, and Morey Amsterdam. On the last day of shooting on February 15, 1992, Woster died suddenly at the age of 33. Google searches reveal internet gossip suggesting suicide but those who knew him said he was born with a heart condition and his heart simply stopped beating. SANDMAN--not to be confused with J.R. Bookwalter's 1995 film THE SANDMAN or anything related to Neil Gaiman--is listed as a 1993 film on IMDb but doesn't appear to have ever been officially released, though IMDb and Letterboxd reviews magically exist. Lindsay's career is even more of a footnote: after debuting with STAR CRYSTAL, he wrote and directed the low-budget, straight-to-video 1990 thriller REAL BULLETS, which featured one-and-done would-be action star John Gazarian and several STAR CRYSTAL alumni, as well as a real actor in Martin Landau, coming off of two consecutive Oscar nominations for Francis Ford Coppola's TUCKER: THE MAN AND HIS DREAM (1988) and Woody Allen's CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS (1989) and yet still somehow reduced to appearing in a film by the director of STAR CRYSTAL. Lindsay has yet to make another film after REAL BULLETS and other than a supporting role in QUIET FIRE, a straight-to-video 1991 obscurity directed by and starring Lawrence Hilton-Jacobs (best known as WELCOME BACK KOTTER's Freddie "Boom Boom" Washington), he completely fell off the face of the earth.

That leaves STAR CRYSTAL as the sole testament to the lunatic vision of Lance Lindsay and Eric Woster. Because so little is known about them and that, with one exception, the cast either went on to REAL BULLETS or nothing else at all, the famous crack from the MST3K skewering of MANOS: THE HANDS OF FATE may also apply here: every frame of this movie looks like someone's last known photograph. The only cast member who had any semblance of a career post-STAR CRYSTAL is Emily Longstreth, and even hers didn't last long: the same year as STAR CRYSTAL, she had a supporting role in PRETTY IN PINK and the lead in the post-nuke sci-fi outing WIRED TO KILL, but she's best-known for co-starring as Kevin Bacon's girlfriend in Christopher Guest's 1989 comedy THE BIG PICTURE. Despite the film's critical acclaim, Columbia buried it, generating zero momentum for the appealing Longstreth, and she was out of movies by 1991 (her last credit is 1994's CONFESSIONS OF A HITMAN, which was shelved for three years). It goes without saying that nobody's career was advanced in any way by STAR CRYSTAL, which kicks off with an incredibly clunky opening as some space explorers on Mars find an egg and bring it aboard their ship. It hatches, revealing some strange crystal formation with some kind of lifeform inside. The tiny creature kills several crew members and the rest die when oxygen supply depletes. Their shuttle returns to its base, a space station that's destroyed in some kind of cataclysmic event, but not before five people manage to escape on the shuttle that just returned, embarking on an 18-month trip back to Earth and unaware that there's an alien stowaway onboard.

That cumbersome set-up takes up nearly 20 minutes, with Lindsay padding the running time and dawdling by establishing several characters (including a scientist played by Longstreth) only to kill them off almost instantly. The next 50 or so minutes are your standard ALIEN knockoff, with the quintet of irritating crew members--all of them awful actors--slaughtered one by one by the growing creature, which has somehow hacked into the ship's computer (named "Bernice") and is not only controlling the shuttle, but absorbing all of the information from the hard drive. To describe STAR CRYSTAL's plot is an exercise in futility, and for about 75 of its 93 minutes, it's amateurish, embarrassing, and borderline unwatchable. The story makes no sense, the acting is painfully bad, the logistical design of the ship is a Kafka-esque nightmare of inconvenience (the crew needs to crawl on their hands and knees through some narrow, tube-like shaft to get anywhere), the interior of the space station looks a hotel, visible text on computer screens are riddled with typos (some gems include "Artic" for Arctic and "Judisum" for Judaism), and there's several ill-advised attempts at humor, like hero Roger Campbell (played by one C. Jutson Campbell) making Campbell's soup and using a grating, faux-Jimmy Durante voice to tell colleague and disinterested love interest Dr. Adrian Kimberly (Faye Bolt) a story about his great-grandfather founding the legendary soup company.

All of this is periodically interrupted by shots of a crystal housing a shapeless, one-eyed lifeform that oozes goo and wheezes like the Blob with a bad chest cold. But this creature grows, and when it reaches full maturity, suddenly resembles E.T. crossed with a gelatinous turtle, creating the illusion of an extraterrestrial Mitch McConnell, albeit slightly more likable. It's here that STAR CRYSTAL decides to carve its own path in the crowded ALIEN ripoff scene, and the people who most likely walked out of the theater before the final act really deprived themselves of some joy. No spoilers here, but with its sudden empathy for humanity and the understanding that's reached between the two surviving crew members and the alien--named "Gar"--STAR CRYSTAL establishes itself as the MAC AND ME of ALIEN knockoffs, almost resembling some kind of bizarre MR. SHOW sketch, which makes it a must-see. Unfortunately, that means enduring the first 75 minutes, but part of me thinks this whole movie is some kind of elaborate, Andy Kaufman-esque prank on the part of everyone involved (the closing credits boast "Filmed entirely in space"). You'll also have the closing credits song "Crystal of a Star"--performed by Stefani Christopherson, best known for being the voice of Daphne on the first season of SCOOBY-DOO back in 1970--stuck in your head for a week. It's too bad Kino didn't track down any of the film's surviving cast and crew because STAR CRYSTAL is the kind of WTF? bad movie classic in the vein of recent DVD/Blu-ray unearthings like NIGHTMARE WEEKEND, THE EXECUTIONER PART II and R.O.T.O.R. that's ready-made for a midnight movie resurrection. And that Gar is just adorable.

STAR CRYSTAL opening in Toledo, OH on 5/23/1986, for some reason

FIRST KILL
(US/UK - 2017)

Directed by Steven C. Miller. Written by Nick Gordon. Cast: Hayden Christensen, Bruce Willis, Gethin Anthony, Megan Leonard, Tyler Jon Olson, Shea Buckner, Ty Shelton, Will Demeo, Deb Girdley, Magi Avila, Christine Dye. (R, 101 mins)

The latest installment in Lionsgate/Grindstone's landmark "Bruce Willis Phones In His Performance From His Hotel Room" series offers a bit of a stretch for Bruno. He's out and about in this one, sitting in a police cruiser, strolling through town while some extras gawk at him, and walking through the woods, but on several occasions, the former actor demonstrates his seething contempt for both his craft and his colleagues, going full Seagal by being clumsily doubled for shots in which he simply couldn't be bothered to stick around. For instance, in a scene where he's seated in a diner and he's joined by someone, it's Willis in the close-ups, but when there's a cut to an over-the-shoulder shot of the actor who's in the booth across from him, Willis is doubled from the back by a bald stand-in with a narrower head and ears that stick out, almost as if director Steven C. Miller (who previously tolerated Willis' lack of commitment to EXTRACTION and MARAUDERS) is passive-aggressively calling out the star's laziness. It gets even worse later on, when Willis is holding a gun on someone, threatening to shoot them, and in close-up, moves to point the gun down and to his left. Cut to the person he's about to shoot, and Willis' Fake Shemp is pointing the gun at the person from behind and to the right, his face obscured by a tree trunk. Is Miller even trying to match these shots after Willis leaves? There's even a few shots of the back of the double's head with dialogue and it's not even Willis' voice. There's no way Willis spends more than a day or two on these VOD trifles, but they can't even Facetime him or get him on speaker and have him say a couple of rewritten lines after he's gone?

It probably took me longer to write the above paragraph than it did for Willis to shoot his scenes for FIRST KILL. As far as forgettable VOD thrillers go, it's hardly the worst of its kind, but that's far from an endorsement. Miller seemed to be heading in the right direction with the surprisingly OK MARAUDERS, which was good despite the presence of Coast Hard. MARAUDERS had an inspired performance by Christopher Meloni to help it rise above the norm for these things, but all FIRST KILL has is Hayden Christensen, whose bland, blank persona has worked in his favor in SHATTERED GLASS and nothing else. Christensen is Will Beeman, a Wall Street broker who decides to get away for some bonding time with wife Laura (Megan Leonard) and bullied 11-year-old son Danny (Ty Shelton). Heading back to his rural hometown of Granville, OH (where this was shot, about 30 miles outside of Columbus) to stay with his Aunt Dottie (Deb Girdler), Will thinks teaching Danny how to use a rifle and taking him on a deer hunt will toughen him up. All's going well until they witness an argument between two men about the location of a bag of money that ends up with one being shot. The other sees Danny and starts shooting, prompting Will to kill him in self defense. The first man is still breathing, so Will takes him back to the cabin where nurse (conveniently enough) Laura removes the bullet and stitches him up. The injured man--wanted bank robber Levi Barrett (Gethin Anthony, best known as Renly Baratheon on GAME OF THRONES and as Charles Manson on AQUARIUS)--is so grateful that he takes Danny hostage, instigating a chain of events that finds Will playing along and helping Levi recover the money if it means keeping Danny safe, all under the watchful eye of Granville police chief Howell (Willis), who, per the script and presumably Willis' contract, exists on the periphery of the story most of the way, appearing periodically to remind the viewer of two things: 1) that Howell has a personal stake in recovering the money that goes beyond the duties of his job, and 2) that Bruce Willis is still in the movie.

FIRST KILL owes a bit to Bruce Beresford's THE CONTRACT, a 2007 Bulgaria-shot DTV thriller where John Cusack and his son are camping and end up tangling with a government-contracted killer played by a slumming Morgan Freeman. But its primary influence seems to be Clint Eastwood's 1993 drama A PERFECT WORLD, where Clint played a sheriff pursuing fugitive Kevin Costner, who bonds with a little boy he's taken hostage. Much effort is made to show that Levi is not a bad guy--after all, he's using the money to pay for medical care for his girlfriend's terminally ill mother. He also lets Danny play violent video games that his parents won't allow, and the shy, introverted child feels more at ease around Levi than he does living up to the expectations of his well-meaning but hard-driving dad. Christensen doesn't exactly sell it well when he's shown as the top power player at a bustling Wall Street office where he's barking orders at underlings and asking "Was the meeting with the Saudis today?" FIRST KILL doesn't offer any surprises as far as plot developments go--it's shown too early that Willis' Howell is up to something when he quietly tells his deputy "We may have a problem," though that's hard to tell if it's related to the script or if Miller caught Willis telling an actor whose name he likely never bothered to learn that he's upset about still being on the set. FIRST KILL is never dull and it isn't awful, but it's dumb (nice convenient placement of the four-wheelers for the chase scene) and the very definition of perfunctory, and it's brought down a notch by Willis' utter disinterest. You've crossed the line into Seagal territory when your double is laughably obvious. The only time that's acceptable is if an actor died during production and it's out of tragic necessity to complete the movie and pay respect to the late actor. Here, it's just done to keep Willis from being inconvenienced. The climax involves an emboldened Danny pointing a gun at Howell. It's tough to stage a face-off when one of the actors isn't even there, but I guess young Ty Shelton learned something about dealing with the demands of spoiled actors on his first movie. Hey kid, maybe someday you'll actually meet Bruce Willis and you can remind him you were in a movie together.

DUNKIRK
(US - 2017)

Written and directed by Christopher Nolan. Cast: Fionn Whitehead, Tom Hardy, Kenneth Branagh, Cillian Murphy, Mark Rylance, Tom Glynn-Carney, Jack Lowden, Harry Styles, Aneurin Barnard, James D'Arcy, Barry Keoghan, Joachim ten Haaf, Matthew Marsh, Damien Bonnard, Will Attenborough, Bill Milner, voice of Michael Caine. (PG-13, 106 mins)

Christopher Nolan's painstakingly-constructed DUNKIRK brings a harrowing you-are-there immediacy to the 1940 evacuation of Dunkirk with an intensity that plays like a feature-length version of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN's opening sequence at Normandy. At 106 minutes, it's Nolan's shortest film since his 1998 pre-MEMENTO debut FOLLOWING, but it never feels less than epic in its presentation and its ambition. One of the few true purists left among A-list filmmakers, Nolan uses the barest minimum of CGI in DUNKIRK, instead going the classic route, shooting on film--mostly with IMAX cameras--with real extras, real locations, real ships, and real planes. For those who don't spend a lot of time watching old movies where such things were more commonplace, the difference is immediately, staggeringly obvious. There's a tangible sense of reality to the aerial shots and the long/wide shots up and down the beach, filled with thousands of extras as British soldiers waiting to be rescued that would've been compromised if done digitally. Nolan's approach to the film stands as proof that no matter how far CGI has progressed (WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES is the current standard-bearer as far as fantasy cinema goes), when it comes to recreations of historical events such as this WWII story, the old ways remain the most effective.

There's a scene very late in the 1980 gangster classic THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY where British mob boss Bob Hoskins, trying to sever his ties with gangland past, chews out his New York Mafia partners for backing out of a business deal over fears that his criminal empire will interfere with their legit interests. "Us British," he explains, "We're used to a bit more vitality, imagination, touch of the Dunkirk spirit, know what I mean?" The Dunkirk spirit is present throughout, as Nolan presents three intercut narratives over the course of DUNKIRK: "The Mole," takes place one week before the evacuation; "The Sea" takes place one day before; and "The Air" one hour before. Of course, all three eventually come together, and while it may seem gimmicky, it's in line with Nolan's recurrent motif of playing with time elements (so important to MEMENTO, INCEPTION, and INTERSTELLAR). It works beautifully, with imagery in one tying into and complementing something going on in another, and with occasional characters popping up in other sections as the threads begin to overlap. It's not confusing at all, and it's becoming one of the things that make Christopher Nolan films so unique. "The Mole" focuses on young soldiers Tommy (newcomer Fionn Whitehead) and Gibson (Aneurin Barnard), and later, Alex (One Direction's Harry Styles, who's surprisingly solid in his dramatic acting debut) at Dunkirk, where 400,000 mostly British soldiers are waiting to be evacuated after German forces have pushed them to the edge of the town, making them sitting ducks for German air raids. "The Sea" follows mild-mannered Dawson (BRIDGE OF SPIES Oscar-winner Mark Rylance), his son Peter (Tom Glynn-Carney) and Peter's shy, introverted friend George (Barry Keoghan) as they take Dawson's boat out to sea, joining other civilians and Navy-commandeered private vessels on a dangerous mission to Dunkirk to rescue their officers. "The Air" centers on two Spitfire pilots--Farrier (Tom Hardy) and Collins (Jack Lowden)--left on their own after the squad leader is shot down, heading to Dunkirk to take out German planes, with Collins forced to land on the water and Farrier playing guessing games with his fuel after his gauge is damaged in a skirmish.

Nolan presents the stories in a clinical, matter-of-fact fashion. There's very little in the way of personal backstories of the characters (one emotional bit involving Dawson's reasons for partaking int he rescue are mentioned almost as an afterthought), with everything taking place in the moment. While it's debatable whether this leaves a cold chilliness to the human element, it works in the context of DUNKIRK because nothing matters but the evacuation. That doesn't mean there aren't powerful moments for some of the characters, whether it's outcast George going along in order to feel good about contributing to the war effort; or a shell-shocked sole survivor of a U-Boat attack (Cillian Murphy) picked up by Dawson; or the sympathetic Commander Bolton (Kenneth Branagh) demonstrating true leadership in making sure every last soldier is evacuated from the beach. Nolan doesn't engage in jingoism or over-the-top chest-thumping here. The word "Nazi" is never said and German officers are never seen, and if this were made back in the '60s, it would be one of the very few WWII movies with no role for Karl-Otto Alberty. This is a nuts-and-bolts chronicle of the triumph of the human spirit, of a nation pulling together to do what it needs to do, even if it means civilians putting their lives at risk. With very little in the way of dialogue--Nolan's script was only 76 pages long--the film relies on visuals and sound design to tell its story, whether it's the constant, repetitive Hans Zimmer cues with a subtle clock ticking audible in the mix almost constantly, Hoyte van Hotema's cinematography showcasing the vast forever of the sea and the beach, and the terrifying, deafening shriek of German planes as they fly overhead, DUNKIRK transports the audience to another time and place. It also exists in a less divisive time when everyone did their part, and it's only fitting that it's made in such an old-school fashion. A defiant and very welcome "they don't make 'em like they used to anymore" exercise, DUNKIRK establishes Nolan as arguably the best commercial filmmaker working today, at this point boasting an almost Kubrick-ian track record of consistent high quality (the exception being the Nolan-produced sci-fi dud TRANSCENDENCE, which he had the sense to turn over to cinematographer-turned-debuting director Wally Pfister) and one of the few auteurs of his caliber doing everything humanly possible to preserve the classical notion of cinema as it's always been known.

VALERIAN AND THE
CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS
(France/China/Germany/
UAE/US/Belgium - 2017)

Written and directed by Luc Besson. Cast: Dane DeHaan, Cara Delavingne, Clive Owen, Rihanna, Rutger Hauer, Ethan Hawke, Herbie Hancock, Kris Wu, Sam Spruell, Alain Chabot, Peter Hudson, Xavier Giannoli, Ola Rapace, Matthieu Kassovitz, Louis Leterrier, Olivier Megaton, voices of John Goodman, Elizabeth Debicki. (PG-13, 137 mins)

A long-planned pet project of legendary French auteur Luc Besson, VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS is an adaptation Valerian and Laureline, a sci-fi comic book series by Pierre Christin and Jean-Claude Mezieres that began way back in 1967 and ran until 2010. Filled with eye-popping artwork, the comics became a clear influence on other films, ranging from old-school animated classics like FANTASTIC PLANET and HEAVY METAL to STAR WARS and TOTAL RECALL and CGI-era films like AVATAR and JOHN CARTER. Mezieres also did some conceptual artwork during pre-production on Besson's 1997 favorite THE FIFTH ELEMENT, which now looks like a test run for VALERIAN, a $210 million, six-country co-production that currently stands as the most expensive independent film ever made. It's a film that manages to succeed entirely on being deliriously imaginative eye candy. The story on the other hand, inadvertently suffers from so many of its ideas and plot points already being utilized by films that came one to five decades before it. Among other things, there's a giant virtual reality shopping mall, some space battles straight out of STAR WARS, an alien baddie--voiced by John Goodman--who looks like Jabba the Hutt's younger brother, and a race of alien beings that not only seem to have wandered in from AVATAR outtakes but also have a FANTASTIC PLANET look about them, living on a planet that looks like a Roger Dean wet dream.

Set in the 2700s, VALERIAN deals with intrigue aboard a massive space station called Alpha, which was created in 1975 and spent the next eight centuries growing as it became a giant, peaceful utopian city floating through the galaxy, with hundreds of species from a thousand planets living and working together in harmony. That harmony is disrupted by a radioactive presence somewhere deep within the core of Alpha. Major Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and his partner Sgt. Laureline (Cara Delavingne) are law enforcement agents assigned to protect Cmdr. Fillit (Clive Owen) to an Alpha summit where he plans to inform them that the radiation pocket is growing and could threaten the existence of Alpha in a matter of weeks. The summit is crashed by a group of Na'vi-looking beings who kidnap Fillit. These beings were also seen by Valerian in a dream. They're from the planet Mul, which was destroyed 30 years earlier for reasons classified to Valerian and even to Fillit's second-in-command Gen. Okto-Bar (Sam Spruell). The Defense Minister (Herbie Hancock?!) sends Valerian and Laureline on a mission to the outer reaches of the space to find and rescue Fillit, while at the same timeValerian attempts to get to the bottom of what his dreams mean and what these renegade beings from Mul are trying to tell him via the psychic connection they've established.

There's an overabundance of dazzling style, wall-to-wall visual effects, and other wild eccentricities in every frame of VALERIAN (the cute Melo the Converter, a tiny, Mul creature that can replicate any object it ingests would make a must-have toy for kids if this ended up being a hit). No expense was spared, and it's indeed one of the best-looking films of the year, making THE FIFTH ELEMENT look almost quaintly old-fashioned by comparison. But VALERIAN isn't on the level of THE FIFTH ELEMENT, and while it's never less than stunning just to watch it, the story is lacking, partially due to the familiarity of it being co-opted so much over the years, but also because Besson's characters aren't very interesting. Owen, Rihanna (as an imprisoned, shape-shifting alien princess), Ethan Hawke (as Jolly the Pimp, a loud but less flamboyant incarnation of Chris Tucker's Ruby Rhod from THE FIFTH ELEMENT), and Rutger Hauer (who has less than a minute of screen time during the opening credits as the President of the World Federation) have little to do, and the stunt casting of jazz legend Hancock--seen mostly as a hologram--is utterly pointless aside from Besson simply wanting to hang out with Herbie Hancock. At least Rihanna gets to sing and dance.

Delavingne is OK, but it's a good thing VALERIAN can get by on its visuals, because there's a massive black hole at the center of it thanks to the almost deal-breaking miscasting of DeHaan, an actor that Hollywood is hellbent on making a thing no matter how many times audiences flatly reject them (see also "Courtney, Jai"). The decision to cast him as a sarcastic, womanizing, hot-dogging Han Solo-esque space jockey is a miscalculation that stops VALERIAN cold every time he smirks and/or opens his mouth. DeHaan is trying to go for Harrison Ford's bad boy charm but can only convey "smug twerp." In the form of DeHaan, it's impossible to buy Valerian's plethora of sexual conquests--his "playlist," as Laureline calls it--or that Laureline is even the slightest bit won over by anyone with DeHaan's shit-eating grin. Try not to Picard Facepalm hen he pours his heart out with "You're the only one I want on my playlist." DeHaan can work in the right role--he's fine in THE PLACE BEYOND THE PINES and A CURE FOR WELLNESS--but casting him as Valerian is a decision that comes from an alternate universe 1977 where George Lucas wanted to cast someone from AMERICAN GRAFFITI as Han Solo but sent Harrison Ford home and gave the part to Charles Martin Smith instead. Lest it sound like I'm piling on DeHaan, Besson's dumb script doesn't help, as shown in one scene where Valerian mumbles something about "I'm a soldier! I follow orders!" 30 seconds after he just cold-cocked his commanding officer. VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS is entertaining and endlessly watchable pulp sci-fi, but it's just too bad that Besson spent so much time envisioning this incredibly ambitious and expensive movie in his head and kinda blew it to an extent by making such a terrible decision for his lead actor that it ends up having a profoundly negative effect on the movie.

THE LAST OF THE FINEST
(US - 1990)

Directed by John Mackenzie. Written by Jere Cunningham, Thomas Lee Wright and George Armitage. Cast: Brian Dennehy, Joe Pantoliano, Jeff Fahey, Bill Paxton, Deborra-Lee Furness, Guy Boyd, Henry Darrow, Lisa Jane Persky, Michael C. Gwynne, Henry Stolow, John Finnegan, J. Kenneth Campbell, Xander Berkeley, Pamela Gidley, Michelle Little, Burke Byrnes, Patricia Clipper, Ron Canada, Tom Nolan. (R, 106 mins)

"Oh, don't give me that 'patriot' shit! Every time you assholes fuck around with the Constitution, you call it 'patriotism.'"

Barely released by Orion in the spring of 1990, THE LAST OF THE FINEST tries really hard to be a Joel Silver production of the era. With its ballbusting banter among buddy cops who play by their own rules, irate captains chewing them out before suspending them, and a drum machine-heavy soundtrack filled with bluesy licks by a famous British guitarist--instead of Eric Clapton, they got former Rolling Stone Mick Taylor--THE LAST OF THE FINEST plays like THE UNTOUCHABLES re-imagined as a post-LETHAL WEAPON cop thriller. It's a lot more overtly political than most, but as we're likely to continue seeing with many films of the last 20-30 years, it takes on new layers of subtext when viewed through the distorted prism of 2017 America and the years that got us to this point. For the most part, THE LAST OF THE FINEST is a routine and by-the-numbers affair, but it makes some pretty angry and cynical points that remain prescient and give this generally forgotten and relatively obscure film some unexpected relevance three decades later.

In a rare big-screen lead, Character Actor Hall of Famer Brian Dennehy stars as Frank Daly, the head of an elite squad of LAPD badasses assigned with busting up the city's drug trade. Daly and his guys work hard and play harder, as evidenced by their regular flag football games with a team of DEA stooges. Joining Frank are brainy, bespectacled smartass Wayne Gross (Joe Pantoliano), straight-from-the-barrio-by-way-of-adoption Ricky Rodriguez (Jeff Fahey), and easygoing Howard Jones, aka "Hojo" (Bill Paxton), and they're convinced local drug kingpin Anthony Reece (Michael C. Gwynne) is running a narcotics distribution ring out of a meat-packing plant but, as per genre rules, they have no proof. Daly is read the riot act and suspended by his captain Torres (Henry Darrow) and warned that he's "close to the edge," to which Daly replies "That's where we live! We're cops, remember?" Daly and his crew's pursuit of Reece ends up getting informant/pimp Fast Eddie (Xander Berkeley) and hooker Haley (Pamela Gidley) murdered, and after a chase, Hojo is killed by a psycho hit man (Henry Stolow) in Reece's employ. Torres isn't interested in hearing about Reece's operation or his ties to wealthy, right-wing businessman R.J. Norringer (Guy Boyd as J.T. Walsh), so Daly, Gross, and Rodriguez turn in their badges in disgust, resort to raiding local drug lords themselves and using the money to launch their own war on Norringer and Reece. Things get really personal when Norringer tries to have Boyd's wife (Australian actress and future Mrs. Hugh Jackman Deborra-Lee Furness, really struggling to hide her accent) and family killed. This ultimately leads to a showdown at a baseball diamond (the nearest abandoned warehouse must've been hosting another shootout that night) after they steal $22 million in Norringer's laundered drug money, which he's been secretly funneling to Central American freedom fighters with the help of shady government operative Calvert (J. Kenneth Campbell). Any resemblance to the Reagan Administration's Iran-Contra scandal is 100% intentional.

Directed by British journeyman John Mackenzie (THE LONG GOOD FRIDAY, THE FOURTH PROTOCOL) and written by Jere Cunningham (JUDGMENT NIGHT), Thomas Lee Wright (NEW JACK CITY), and George Armitage (MIAMI BLUES, GROSSE POINTE BLANK), THE LAST OF THE FINEST leaves no cop movie cliche untouched, and a scene where they visit retired cop Tommy Grogan (John Finnegan), who busts out his unparalleled lip-reading skills for a silent surveillance video, is ready-made for MST3K mockery. Nevertheless, it gets a lot of mileage from a commanding performance by Dennehy and the enjoyable camaraderie between the actors, even though Paxton is killed off 30 minutes in. Initial villain Reece eventually becomes a non-factor as the investigation turns to Norringer, a villain cut from the same cloth as Cliff Robertson's megalomaniacal Charles Delaney from MALONE, another unjustly neglected Orion actioner from the same era. Norringer goes on and on about patriotism and how the means justify the end, but he's really just a right-wing fanatic who would probably be holding a key position in the government or hosting a Fox News show if this was made today. There's little subtlety in anything this film does, from Dennehy's barrel-chested bombast ("You just made a fatal fucking mistake!" he yells as he backhands Norringer) to Boyd's snarling villain, and nothing hammers the point home like a climactic explosion of a playground septic tank that's storing Norringer's $22 million, leaving most of the cast standing in a downpour of dirty money and human feces, culminating in the crash of Norringer's getaway chopper because the pilot can't see out of the shit-covered windows. Perhaps skittish about the film's criticism of Reagan-era policies and its direct invocation of Iran-Contra, Orion dumped it in 400 theaters with no publicity at all, grossing just over $1 million. Just out on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber (because physical media is dead), THE LAST OF THE FINEST is hardly an unheralded classic, but it deserved more of a shot than it got at the time and seems to play better now than it did then.

ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING
(UK - 2015; US release 2017)

As far as unofficial entries in the Monty Python canon go, ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING is so bad that it makes YELLOWBEARD look like MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL. The first film to unite the five surviving members of the legendary comedy troupe since 1983's MONTY PYTHON'S THE MEANING OF LIFE (John Cleese, Eric Idle, Michael Palin, Terry Gilliam, and Terry Jones; Graham Chapman died in 1989), ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING was directed and co-written by Jones, who had the script stashed away since the early '90s and it shows. Jones almost got it going around 2003 but decided to put it on the backburner after the release of the Jim Carrey hit BRUCE ALMIGHTY, which has an almost identical concept but Jones' script has a Douglas Adams/Terry Pratchett twist. Instead of being granted powers by God, ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING's everyman hero Neil's (Simon Pegg) are granted courtesy of a crew of aliens--whose instantly recognizable voices are provided by the Python guys--who have happened upon Earth in their galactic journey and are deciding whether it's a planet worth saving. Picked at random by lead alien Death Dealing Darkness Bringer (voiced by Cleese), Neil is used as a guinea pig to gauge what a normal human will do with unlimited power. With a flick of his hand, Neil is able to make sweeping changes that he often has to walk back due to lack of specification (for example, after he causes an alien attack at a school that kills 40 people, his command to "Bring back everyone who died," ends up creating a brief zombie apocalypse). He tries to use his new ability to make his downstairs neighbor Catherine (Kate Beckinsale) fall for him while avoiding her psycho ex (a grating Rob Riggle), turns his best friend (Sanjeev Bhaskar) into a sausage, and, of course, makes his dick bigger. He also gets his dog Dennis to talk with the voice of the late Robin Williams, which should give you an idea of how long this thing sat around waiting for a US distributor. Shot in early 2014, ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING was dumped into a handful of US theaters in May 2017 by the rinky-dink Atlas Distribution, a company whose only noteworthy--and I use the term "noteworthy" loosely--accomplishment was releasing all three ATLAS SHRUGGED movies. Pretty much every joke lands with a thud in this flat and almost completely laughless fiasco that's made even more depressing by the fact that it was Williams' last performance and the last comedy we'll get from Jones, who was diagnosed with dementia shortly after shooting wrapped, prompting his retirement from public life in 2016. (R, 85 mins)

BLACK BUTTERFLY
(Spain/US - 2017)

A remake of a 2008 French film with the same title, BLACK BUTTERFLY was set to roll in 2011 with Nicolas Cage starring and Rod Lurie (THE CONTENDER) producing, but the project fell apart during pre-production. Director Brian Goodman, an actor whose only previous credit behind the camera was the little-seen 2008 crime drama WHAT DOESN'T KILL YOU, remained attached, and by the time filming began, Cage was replaced by Antonio Banderas, and the film was now a Spanish co-production, shot in Italy with a mostly Italian crew (Mario Bava's grandson Roy Bava served as assistant director), and set in an isolated area of Colorado. Banderas is Paul, a washed-up novelist once anointed the Next Big Thing, but now in his fourth year of writer's block, drinking heavily, feeling sorry for himself after his wife left him, and holed up in a remote cabin failing to deliver an overdue film script that he hasn't even started writing. He's trying to sell his cabin out of financial necessity, and his real estate agent Laura (Piper Perabo) has yet to find any takers. After a road rage incident with a belligerent trucker continues at the local diner, Paul's ass is saved by Jack (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a glowering drifter looking for a place to stay. Out of gratitude, Paul offers Jack his guest room for the night, but Jack decides to stick around, doing some much-needed handyman work around the cabin and showing an intense interest in getting Paul off the bottle and writing again. Jack's demeanor gets more threatening and controlling and Paul, and eventually Laura, find themselves being held captive by the deranged Jack, who Paul is now convinced is a serial killer responsible for a string of murders in the region that date back several years.

BLACK BUTTERFLY is merely dull and nonsensical for most of its duration, with all the talk about writing, plot, and characters threatening to spill over into a trite exercise in meta storytelling. It doesn't even do anything interesting with the unexpected casting of legendary cult director Abel Ferrara (KING OF NEW YORK, BAD LIEUTENANT) as the manager of the town's tiny carryout, and anyone else would've asked Paul to leave after the first night, but then there'd be no movie. A third act twist requires some significant suspension of disbelief but livens things up in a vaguely giallo-like way portended by the title (I was briefly reminded of AMUCK and Dario Argento's TENEBRE as things started to fall into place), putting things in a different perspective and making it appear that the film is well on its way to maybe not quite completely redeeming itself but at least finishing big in a way that makes it a reasonably entertaining time-killer. But then Goodman and writers Marc Frydman (Lurie's longtime producing partner) and Justin Stanley shit the bed by adding one last twist that represents arguably the hoariest of all thriller genre cliches, one so ancient and played out that it almost qualifies as some kind of sick practical joke that it's being used seriously in 2017. Really, guys? That's how you decided to wrap this up? It couldn't be any more infuriating if Goodman, Frydman, and Stanley appeared on camera and said "You just watched this for 90 minutes. Dumbass." (R, 93 mins)

WILSON
(US - 2017)

Adapted by Daniel Clowes from his 2010 graphic novel of the same name, WILSON doesn't continue the success of two previous big screen Clowes adaptations, 2001's GHOST WORLD and 2006's ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL. Both directed by Zwigoff, GHOST WORLD and ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL succeeded where WILSON fails. That's probably not the fault of WILSON director Craig Johnson (THE SKELETON TWINS), but rather from Clowes watering down his own source material and not having the right person in the lead. Woody Harrelson is one of our finest actors, but he's all wrong as Wilson, taking the kind of grumpy misanthrope that's similar to Steve Buscemi's Seymour in GHOST WORLD and the kind of character that was owned by Paul Giamatti a decade or so ago in AMERICAN SPLENDOR and SIDEWAYS, but playing it as an inconsistent mixture of Asperger's and unbalanced psycho. A bitter curmudgeon whose only friend is his Miniature Schnauzer Pepper, Wilson is the kind of guy who rails against everything that's wrong in the world, smugly spouting off about all of the world's ills without provocation. He's the kind of guy who will sit down next to someone on an otherwise empty bus or invite himself to share a table with someone in an empty coffee shop and make pushy small talk. There will be five available urinals and he'll take the one right next to the one being used and strike up a conversation, of course excusing himself with "Nice cock, by the way." Wilson is supposed to be an fearless guy who doesn't play by society's norms and conventions but he's really just an abrasive, irredeemable prick, and when Harrelson plays him cackling and with wild eyes, you realize how much this needs a Buscemi or a Giamatti, or maybe even a Kevin Spacey to really convey the tone of Clowes' work. You'll want to get away from this movie the same way everyone else tries to back away from Wilson.

Even if having Harrelson play it this way was the intent, the film just never catches fire, lurching lugubriously from one DOA set piece to the next as almost every joke gets chirping crickets in response. WILSON feels like a film made by people who don't understand the material, which is inexplicable considering Clowes wrote the script himself (or, at least, he's the only credited writer). Tired of his angry routine, Wilson searches for a new purpose in his life after his father dies. He seeks out his ex-wife Pippi (Laura Dern) who left him 18 years earlier, aborting their child and getting involved with drugs and prostitution. She's cleaned up her act and turned her life around, and she reveals to Wilson that she actually had the baby and put it up for adoption. Ecstatic about being a father, Wilson finds the girl, Claire (Isabella Amara), an overweight, 17-year-old outcast, and he and Pippi try to establish a relationship with her. What follows is one improbable plot development after another, including an ill-fated trip to visit Pippi's bitchy sister Polly (Cheryl Hines), and Wilson being arrested on kidnapping charges. Sequences just seem to exist in a vacuum in WILSON--there's little forward momentum, either comedic or dramatic, and no one seems to exist in the real world. Clowes really nailed the psychology of his characters in GHOST WORLD, one of the best films of its decade, but this just feels like watered-down GHOST WORLD outtakes, right down to the very Enid-like Claire. There's one legitimately funny scene where Wilson intentionally rear-ends a woman's car just so he can ask her out on a date, and instead attracts a large crowd of witnesses, and Judy Greer is as charming as ever as a dog-sitter who somehow finds something worthwhile about Wilson, but in the end, it just goes nowhere and says nothing, and never gets around the obstacle of a great actor being badly miscast. Fox apparently knew they had a dud on their hands, releasing this on just 300 screens for a total gross of $650,000. (R, 94 mins)

TWO EVIL EYES
(Italy - 1990; US release 1991)

Directed by Dario Argento and George Romero. Written by George Romero, Dario Argento and Franco Ferrini. Cast: Harvey Keitel, Adrienne Barbeau, Ramy Zada, Sally Kirkland, Martin Balsam, E.G. Marshall, John Amos, Kim Hunter, Madeleine Potter, Bingo O'Malley, Tom Atkins, Jeff Howell, Holter Ford Graham, Julie Benz, Christine Forrest, Chuck Aber, Anthony DiLeo Jr., Tom Savini. (R, 120 mins)

In its earliest stages of development, TWO EVIL EYES was intended by producer Dario Argento to be a four-part anthology horror film celebrating the work of Edgar Allan Poe, with the Italian master of horror joined by fellow genre legends George A. Romero, Wes Craven, and John Carpenter. By the time production began in Pittsburgh in the summer of 1989, Craven and Carpenter bowed out, leaving Argento and Romero as the remaining participants, each helming a present-day Poe segment running approximately one hour in length. TWO EVIL EYES was supposed to be timed with the ill-fated Poesploitation craze of 1989, which primarily saw rival producers Roger Corman and Harry Alan Towers cranking out a series of Poe adaptations in honor of the 140th anniversary of the writer's death (this included two competing versions of THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH). Most of these films weren't released until 1990 or 1991, thereby making the anniversary element pointless, and that went for TWO EVIL EYES as well. While it debuted in Europe in January 1990, it wouldn't hit US theaters until much later in October 1991, courtesy of Taurus Entertainment, who gave it a limited release on just 150 screens. Though an Italian production and Argento's baby, both segments of TWO EVIL EYES were shot in Romero's Pittsburgh stomping grounds, with the beloved NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD auteur providing his usual behind-the-scenes crew for Argento to use, including production designer Cletus Anderson, editor Pasquale Buba, and makeup effects maestro Tom Savini. Though he did some location work in Central Park for 1980's INFERNO, TWO EVIL EYES marked the first time Argento shot an entire project in the US, and he would return to the States for 1993's TRAUMA, which found him unable to create much of a stylish giallo atmosphere in exotic Minneapolis.

Romero kicks things off with "The Facts in the Case of Mr. Valdemar," previously filmed by Roger Corman as the closing segment in 1962's TALES OF TERROR and best remembered for Vincent Price waking from the dead and melting into ooze over scheming hypnotist Basil Rathbone. Wealthy Ernest Valdemar (Bingo O'Malley) is in a coma induced by his physician and amateur hypnotist Dr. Robert Hoffman (Ramy Zada). Hoffman is having an affair with Jessica (Adrienne Barbeau), a former flight attendant who became an aging Valdemar's trophy wife years ago and is anxious to reap the benefits of his impending passing ("I let him use me," she explains. "For pleasure and for show...and I intend to be paid for my services"). Hoffman puts Valdemar under hypnosis to ease the pain but that's also the time that he can control the old man's mind, getting him to repeat things over the phone to his suspicious attorney Pike (E.G. Marshall) and signing documents transferring untold amounts of cash over to Jessica. They need to keep Valdemar alive for three weeks before the estate transfers to Jessica, but he dies while under hypnosis, putting him in a purgatory where he remains "alive" and part of our world and "the next," with the ominous "the others" attempting to use him to cross over. Romero takes some significant liberties with the story, his attempt to wedge in some social commentary about the greed of the wealthy doesn't really work (nor does the shot of blood dripping on money--Romero wasn't usually so ham-fisted in his societal critiques), and it's flatly shot in a way that makes it resemble a gorier-than-usual episode of TALES FROM THE DARKSIDE, but "Valdemar" has some effective moments that make it better than its reputation. It's certainly a lesser work in the Romero canon, trying but not quite succeeding in re-establishing that CREEPSHOW mood--with Barbeau as another bitchy harridan, plus the presence of Marshall and O'Malley, not to mention Romero's then-wife Christine Forrest, playing a mean nurse just like she did in 1988's MONKEY SHINES--but it just looks bland and Romero doesn't feel as engaged as he might've been if this project was his idea rather than him being the only guest who showed up to Argento's party thinking Craven and Carpenter would be there as well.

Argento's "The Black Cat" is almost universally regarded as the superior half of TWO EVIL EYES, and while it's got some signature Argento style and, like Romero's "Valdemar," is a reasonably entertaining horror piece, it's too uneven in its approach to be a complete success. A lot of the problems with "The Black Cat" stem from a miscast Harvey Keitel, caught just before his spectacular early '90s resurgence thanks to films like BUGSY (his only Oscar nomination to date), THELMA & LOUISE, RESERVOIR DOGS, and BAD LIEUTENANT. Though he was occasionally appearing in prestigious offerings like THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST and THE TWO JAKES around this same time, he was also making ends meet by taking a lot of hired gun gigs in instantly obscure European films that nobody saw. As anyone who's seen the FROM DUSK TILL DAWN documentary FULL TILT BOOGIE will recall, Keitel has been known to be a needy method actor who requires extensive one-on-one time with his directors, and if there's one thing for which Argento has zero patience, going back to his combative working relationship with Tony Musante on 1970's THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE, it's actors who pester him with questions about character motivation. Argento's been bitching about Musante for 47 years, and while little has been said about his experiences with Keitel, the actor doesn't really look happy to be there, almost like he's intentionally shutting down and withdrawing inside himself when his character is going crazy and he should be a little more animated.

"The Black Cat," written by Argento and frequent collaborator Franco Ferrini, is a mash-up of several Poe stories, filled with characters named after Poe protagonists. Keitel is Rod Usher, a Pittsburgh crime scene photographer who's working on compiling his shots of murder and death into a morbid coffee table book called Metropolitan Horrors. His dark side seems to be known to his younger girlfriend Annabel Lee (Madeleine Potter), a new age-y violinist who adopts a black cat, much to Usher's disapproval. While she's away on a short tour, Usher gets drunk and kills the cat. Of course he denies it, though Annabel isn't buying it, especially when he buys her a new cat--from a sultry barmaid named Eleonora, played by Sally Kirkland--and she catches him trying to murder that one as well. In a violent rage, Usher kills Annabel and walls her up in a closet, while her students (among them a young Julie Benz), nosy neighbors Mr. and Mrs. Pym (Martin Balsam and Kim Hunter), and dogged detective Legrand (John Amos) keep bothering him with questions about her disappearance, clearly not buying his story that she left him. All the while, Usher is tormented incessantly by a ringing phone a la "The Tell-Tale Heart," along with a persistent meowing coming from somewhere in the house.

Where Romero's segment had almost no visual flair at all, Argento goes full throttle, with some arresting camera work, dazzling Steadicam moves throughout Usher's massive three-story house, and some uniquely Argento-ish touches like a premonition of death in the form of a noose-shaped white marking on the cat's otherwise black hair. It ends in an abrupt fashion, which would typify a lot of Argento's films in the coming years, where he often starts the closing credits while the final scene is still playing out (I'm thinking specifically of 2001's SLEEPLESS), and breaks the cardinal rule of horror anthologies that the end segment has be an ace closer to send the audience out buzzing (though Pino Donaggio's closing credits score sorta helps). Regardless of its flaws, Romero's "Valdemar" has the more relatively crowd-pleasing ending, but "The Black Cat" never gets around Keitel being completely wrong for the part. He's a weirdo from the start and it's hard to grasp why Annabel is even interested in this creep, but Keitel makes the mistake of overplaying it early and underplaying it later. He's screaming "I didn't do anything!" immediately after murdering the first cat in a way that only a guilty person would, but later on, when he's being driven batty by the phone and all of the meddling interlopers, he suddenly seems half-asleep, mumbling and morose. It's a strange, mannered performance that never finds the right tone, and it's all the more perplexing because Keitel is one of our great actors, though given the track record of both of them, it's not hard to imagine Keitel and Argento not getting along. Horror fans would've gone to see TWO EVIL EYES in theaters had it been playing anywhere near them. Romero was in his commercial Hollywood phase at the time, between MONKEY SHINES and the Stephen King adaptation THE DARK HALF, and Argento's notoriety among American horror enthusiasts was significant even though much of his work was still difficult to see in the pre-DVD era (his 1987 film OPERA had finally been given a straight-to-video release just a month earlier in September 1991, retitled TERROR AT THE OPERA), with his post-1990 output showing some wild inconsistency that morphed into a precipitous decline from the late '90s onward that continues to this day. TWO EVIL EYES opened the same weekend as HOUSE PARTY 2 and CURLY SUE, but landed in 17th place and was out of theaters a week later, leaving most Argento and Romero fans to discover it in video stores. It doesn't represent either filmmaker at their pinnacle--for that we'd have to go back to 1979 when SUSPIRIA-era Argento helped finance DAWN OF THE DEAD, got Goblin onboard for the score, and recut the film as ZOMBI for European audiences--but it's entertaining enough to make it required viewing for superfans and completists.

George A. Romero and Dario Argento on the set of TWO EVIL EYES

ATOMIC BLONDE
(US - 2017)

Directed by David Leitch. Written by Kurt Johnstad. Cast: Charlize Theron, James McAvoy, John Goodman, Toby Jones, Eddie Marsan, Til Schweiger, James Faulkner, Sofia Boutella, Bill Skarsgard, Roland Moller, Barbara Sukowa, Johannes Hauker Johannessen, Sam Hargrave, Lili Gessler, Sara Natasa Szonda. (R, 115 mins)

A Cold War espionage actioner that's an endlessly stylish exercise in retro late '80s cool, ATOMIC BLONDE is adapted from the 2012 graphic novel The Coldest City and it's a vehicle custom-engineered for Charlize Theron. Set in the final days before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, ATOMIC BLONDE has several extended action sequences that are stunning on their own, playing out in long and seemingly single-cut fashion that was new and exciting back in 2006 with CHILDREN OF MEN. But these sorts of set pieces--yes, blood hits the camera--have been done many times since, and the illusion loses a little something when one has seen enough of them to spot the editors' trickery and see exactly where the cuts are. That doesn't mean they aren't brilliantly choreographed and convincingly done--Theron is a force of nature when she's kicking ass--but the style in which they're executed by director David Leitch, making his "official" debut as a director even though he co-directed JOHN WICK as a team with Chad Stahelski but had to go uncredited due to a snafu with the DGA, sticks out as too present-day amidst the almost obsessive, TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY-level attention to period detail. ATOMIC BLONDE's interior production design and location work in Budapest and Berlin nails that pervasive sense of gloom and gray that screams "John Le Carre," along with some '80s tunes that are used very effectively--Theron strutting through a West Berlin bar drenched in red neon to the tune of After the Fire's "Der Kommissar" is just perfect--but the two distinct aesthetics never quite coalesce.

A framing device has MI-6 agent Lorraine Broughton (Theron) being debriefed by her boss Eric Gray (Toby Jones), who's accompanied by CIA agent Kurzfeld (John Goodman) as all are watched from behind the glass by MI-6 chief "C" (James Faulkner). Broughton was assigned to West Berlin to retrieve a list conveniently termed "The List," which named all British operatives deployed to the Soviet Union and fell into the KGB's hands after Broughton's fellow agent and lover James Gasciogne (Sam Hargrave) was murdered. The List was given to Gasciogne by a meek East German Stasi officer known as "Spyglass" (Eddie Marsan) who was working with agents from the west and hoping to use it as leverage to defect with his wife and daughter. Broughton was set to meet MI-6 agent David Percival (James McAvoy) in West Berlin, but as she explains, "I was made before my feet hit the ground." She's abducted by KGB goons and manages to kill them before finally meeting Percival, a loose cannon who's completely undercover in the Berlin underground, selling stolen merchandise with his specialty being the hugely-popular-in-the-East Jordache jeans. Broughton has several irons in the fire on her assignment: she must retrieve The List, deal with cowboy Percival, work on a plan to get Spyglass into West Berlin, and figure out the identity of "Satchel," a double agent who's working for MI-6 but providing intel to the KGB. She also finds time for a torrid fling with novice French agent Delphine Lasalle (THE MUMMY's Sofia Boutella) and endures constant bruising and battering but always emerging victorious in some truly nasty and brutal fight scenes.

I realize mileage may vary for some and ATOMIC BLONDE isn't supposed to be the second coming of THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE COLD, but it's is so hypnotically captivating in its non-action sequences that, for me, the spell was broken and I was taken out of the film somewhat with the CGI-abetted action sequences and digital splatter started taking over. This is in no way a deal-breaker and most likely won't even be an issue on a second viewing, but I'm a sucker for gray, overcast, and dreary espionage and that, coupled with some striking locations and imaginative ideas like staging a brawl between Broughton and some Russian spies at a packed screening of Andrei Tarkovsky's STALKER, is enough to make hardcore cinephiles giddy. Leitch uses period pop music brilliantly, and whether it's a violent, bonebreaking fight scene set to George Michael's "Father Figure" (that's right up there with the "Ordinary World"beatdown in LAYER CAKE) or KGB operative Bakhtin (Johannes Hauker Johanessen) beating a breakdancing Berlin kid to death to the tune of Nena's "99 Luftballoons," the music choices are spot-on. That's something a lot of these present-day Cold War period pieces nail perfectly, whether it's Julio Iglesias'"La Mer" for the montage at the end of TINKER TAILOR SOLDIER SPY or Joe Jackson's "Stepping Out" and Pink Floyd's "Run Like Hell" in 2009's little-seen FAREWELL, and both FAREWELL and ATOMIC BLONDE prominently feature Queen and David Bowie's "Under Pressure."

But this is really The Charlize Theron Show first and foremost, and the Oscar-winning actress got a serious boost among action fans for her work as Imperator Furiosa in MAD MAX: FURY ROAD and she continued on that new career path with THE FATE OF THE FURIOUS and now ATOMIC BLONDE. She's nothing short of perfect here, and Theron kicking ass manages to supersede any issues I may have with the more modern style of the action and visual effects techniques breaking the spell the filmmakers cast as they so vividly capture the look and feel of the final days and hours before the fall of the Berlin Wall. They even go out of their way to make the it look like it was made in 1989, complete with old-fashioned and slightly blurry subtitles and location work in Budapest and some parts of Berlin that have remained largely unchanged over the last 30 years. It's in these scenes that ATOMIC BLONDE looks so convincing that you'd swear it's what might've happened if Wim Wenders followed 1987's WINGS OF DESIRE with a mainstream spy movie. ATOMIC BLONDE also gets bonus points for providing a small role for Rainer Werner Fassbinder regular Barbara Sukowa, further establishing its old-school bona fides.

CORRUPT
aka ORDER OF DEATH
aka COPKILLER
(Italy - 1983; US release 1984)

Directed by Roberto Faenza. Written by Ennio de Concini, Hugh Fleetwood and Roberto Faenza. Cast: Harvey Keitel, John Lydon, Nicole Garcia, Leonard Mann, Sylvia Sidney, Carla Romanelli. (R, 101 mins)

You can't exactly say the psychological thriller CORRUPT has fallen into obscurity over the years, but it's a small miracle that it's now available in quality Blu-ray release in 2017. A staple on countless sketchy, public domain DVD sets and on YouTube for years, in crummy VHS quality transfers and often under different titles--the most dubious being CORRUPT LIEUTENANT in reference to another iconic role for star Harvey Keitel--with a myriad of truncated running times, CORRUPT was based on the 1977 novel The Order of Death by British writer Hugh Fleetwood, who co-wrote the script with director Roberto Faenza and veteran screenwriter Ennio de Concini (THE RED TENT, SALON KITTY, CHINA 9 LIBERTY 37). It was released in the UK in 1983 as ORDER OF DEATH, the rest of Europe that same year as COPKILLER, and in the US in 1984 as CORRUPT, by New Line Cinema, the B-movie and genre fare outfit that had been around for years but was about to have a breakout smash with Wes Craven's A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET. Code Red recently released CORRUPT--in its 101-minute US cut, a bit shorter than the 113-minute European version--on Blu-ray and it's the first time it's been in a watchable condition since the old Thorn/EMI VHS tape that was in every video store in America in the 1980s. The film has maintained a certain degree of cult notoriety for the last 30-plus years, thanks primarily to the presence of John Lydon--then the frontman for Public Image Ltd but still best known for his days as the Sex Pistols' Johnny Rotten--in the first of only three acting roles he's tackled over his career, and he more than holds his own against the powerhouse intensity of Keitel, with long stretches of the film focused on their two characters engaging in psychological warfare in the increasingly claustrophobic confines of a nearly empty luxury apartment. There were plans to take advantage of Lydon's day job: Public Image Ltd were set to do some music for the film, but the producers ultimately opted to go with a score by Ennio Morricone instead. Some of the material that Lydon and PiL recorded ended up on the band's 1984 album This is What You Want...This is What You Get, including "The Order of Death," which would've been great in CORRUPT but had to wait several years to find a cinematic home when it was prominently featured in Richard Stanley's 1990 cult classic HARDWARE, and more recently on the Syfy series MR. ROBOT.

NYPD narcotics Lt. Fred O'Connor (Keitel) has a full plate with a serial killer slashing the throats of corrupt cops in his division. He seeks escape and relaxation from the everyday grind by pretending he's a wealthy man named Stevens and lounging with fine cigars and a comfy robe and slippers at a nearly empty $400,000 apartment overlooking Central Park. Fred went 50/50 on it with his friend and colleague Bob Corvo (Leonard Mann)--a purchase funded by their sideline activities as drug dealing cops. Troubled by the deaths of several fellow officers, Corvo is feeling guilt over their off-duty criminal activities. Meanwhile, O'Connor realizes he's being followed by a stranger (Lydon) who shows up at the secret apartment and introduces himself as Fred Mason, confessing to the cop killer slayings and saying he's been following O'Connor for six months. O'Connor doesn't believe him, but frets because he knows about the apartment, so he reacts in a calm and rational way by boarding up the bathroom window and keeping Mason bound and handcuffed in the bathtub, periodically torturing him and giving him food in a dog dish. But Mason is really Leo Smith, a young man from an extremely wealthy Rhinecliff family who was raised by his grandmother (Sylvia Sidney) after his parents died. Leo, the kind of bored rich kid with too much time on his hands and too many toys who fills his bedroom with camcorders and TVs and makes videotapes of himself sleeping, has a history of confessing to crimes he didn't commit, ostensibly for attention but, as O'Connor finds out when he visits the grandmother after she files a missing persons report, because he's into S&M imagery and enjoys punishment. What follows are some often twisted and grueling cat-and-mouse head games, with O'Connor accidentally killing Corvo and trying to pin it on Leo, to Leo being set free by his captor but voluntarily returning to the secret apartment, turning the tables on his nemesis by insidiously taking over O'Connor's life and slowly wearing him down psychologically, methodically manipulating the dirty cop over his corruption and guilt to serve his own agenda that will become clear by the devastating finale.

UK poster under the film's original title.

CORRUPT is a strange film that, speaking in terms of pure plot synopsis, doesn't make much logical sense. Even the British ORDER OF DEATH trailer above doesn't seem to have any idea how to sell it. Of all the things that two corrupt cops could spend their money on, a secret apartment where they don't really do anything seems like a waste ("I looked at this as an investment," says Corvo after informing O'Connor that he wants to sell his share). Fleetwood's novel made overtures to O'Connor and Corvo being closeted gay lovers and that's subtly alluded to here, with O'Connor's seemingly disapproving reaction to Corvo shaving his beard (Nicole Garcia plays Corvo's wife Lenore, who rejected O'Connor's advances years earlier prior to her marriage) and that Corvo's excuse of the apartment as an "investment" seems like a lie he's repeatedly told himself until he believes it. Its "imprisonment and torture of a suspect" element prefigures Denis Villeneuve's PRISONERS by 30 years, but the Italian-made CORRUPT often demonstrates the logic and style of a giallo, which it may partially be classified as considering the throat-slashing nature of the cop killings along with Morricone's score, mainly a pulsating minimalist synth with asides that make it sound like a strange mix-tape hybrid of his entire career, from a spaghetti western banjo to some of his cacophonous early '70s free jazz freakouts (there's some BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE trumpet here) to a recurring piano cue (about 1:12 into this clip) that attentive viewers will spot from the Maestro's work on both Umberto Lenzi's ALMOST HUMAN (1974) and Brian De Palma's THE UNTOUCHABLES (1987). It can also be seen a more grounded, less surreal homage to PERFORMANCE, not just in the casting of a famous music personality but also in the way the protagonists (James Fox and Mick Jagger in PERFORMANCE) have dual identities and become distorted mirror images of one another as the film goes on. Even "cop killer" ends up with a reflecting flip side with "killer cop." It's also an effective, grimy NYC movie of the era done in the unique way that only Italians could, with some extensive location shooting for the exteriors (interiors were filmed at Cinecitta in Rome) and some vintage 42nd Street shots, including Keitel on a bus that passes the Lyric, then showing an incredible double bill of DOCTOR BUTCHER M.D. and SLITHIS, which would put CORRUPT's NYC shoot somewhere in the vicinity of May 1982. It's too bad Faenza didn't snag any footage of the Butchermobile cruising around.

But CORRUPT is really propelled by the performances of Keitel and Lydon, exact opposites in terms of approach and experience but making it work beautifully, almost like they're starring in the world's most dysfunctional, demented remake of THE ODD COUPLE. There's an undeniable nerve-wracking edginess to a lot of their scene, the violence they inflict on one another looks convincingly real and they're deeply in the zone throughout. Watch one great bit where Keitel slams Lydon's face into a table, grabbing him by his hair and knocking over a glass of milk, breaking it with the milk splattering all over--it obviously wasn't planned and Keitel is visibly startled by the glass shattering, but neither actor breaks character. It's a "real" moment that Faenza wisely left in the finished film. Keitel brings a lot of his standard persona to the table, including the sense of guilt carried over by his MEAN STREETS character (as dishonest as O'Connor is, he still drinks milk and dutifully drops a quarter in the slot when he ends up on a bus chasing a suspect) along with the moral and ethical implosion that we'd see him play a decade later in Abel Ferrara's BAD LIEUTENANT (unfortunately, O'Connor never completely breaks down, depriving us of the unique Keitel Cry). Keitel gets a long monologue about corruption that would fit right into a Scorsese or Ferrara film. O'Connor is a total sadist in his treatment of Leo, whether he's feeding him out of a dog dish, threatening to burn him with a cigar, or stuffing his head into an oven.

And as played by a wild-eyed Lydon, Leo seems to welcome the mistreatment, even if it's all part of a ruse. The punk icon is a revelation here, and it's a shame he didn't pursue more acting roles. He's a perfect foil for Keitel, who's pure simmering rage waiting to boil over, while Lydon is more sarcastic and mocking, as Leo knows exactly what buttons to push, whether he's maniacally grinning at the idea of a cigar being put out on his cheek or taunting O'Connor with "You're falling to pieces" as he mic-drops what's left of a handheld radio that O'Connor just smashed in one of his numerous meltdowns. Faenza and the writers even pull a bait and switch on the audience, seeming to put the "cop killer" thread of the story on the backburner for much of the running time. All the while, the filmmakers slyly tighten the screws, as O'Connor's vast apartment becomes suffocatingly claustrophobic and Morricone's throbbing, repetitive synth score plays in a way that's pure Carpenterian in its droning, tension-escalating persistence. CORRUPT has been neglected for so long that it's easy to see why it's either completely forgotten or thoroughly despised by those who have only seen a really shitty presentation of it. While Code Red's Blu-ray represents the truncated American cut, it's unquestionably the best this film has looked since New Line released it 33 years ago (apparently just in NYC, as The New York Times' Janet Maslin appears to be the only major American critic who reviewed it at the time), and even for fans who are familiar with it, this is like seeing it for the first time. CORRUPT is a hard film to pin down--maybe think of it as what might happen if Sidney Lumet ever made a giallo--but it's endlessly fascinating, one of the great unknown films of the 1980s, and a must-see for fans of Lydon, as well as Keitel, who turns in one of his absolutely essential performances.

CORRUPT finally rescued from the indignity of

decades as a public domain title. You get what you pay for.

This looks legit, from the shot of Keitel from what may be
be COP LAND to the flashy cars to "John Lyndon."

Totally legit.

That's a mid '90s Keitel and it's not even his left hand.

MESSAGE FROM THE KING
(UK/France/Belgium - 2017)

Directed by Fabrice du Welz. Written by Stephen Cornwell and Oliver Butcher. Cast: Chadwick Boseman, Luke Evans, Alfred Molina, Teresa Palmer, Natalie Martinez, Tom Felton, Jake Weary, Chris Mulkey, Dale Dickey, Tom Wright, Lucan Melkonian, Arthur Darbinyan, Diego Josef, Sibongile Mlambo. (Unrated, 103 mins)

Belgian filmmaker Fabrice du Welz made his name with 2004's CALVAIRE, his contribution to the then-popular wave of "extreme" horror coming out of France, which included films like Alexandre Aja's HIGH TENSION, Xavier Gens' FRONTIER(S), Julien Maury and Alexander Bustillo's INSIDE, and Pascal Laugier's MARTYRS. It was several years before du Welz returned with the mostly English-language "trip upriver as metaphor for journey into madness" horror film VINYAN, which bombed internationally and ended up going straight-to-DVD in the US. Du Welz took another extended break, returning with 2014's ALLELUIA, a grim chronicle of the same spree killers whose story was the basis of both the 1969 cult classic THE HONEYMOON KILLERS as well as the little-seen 2006 noir throwback LONELY HEARTS, and the crime thriller COLT 45, the latter of which is still waiting for a US release. With the Netflix Original film MESSAGE FROM THE KING, du Welz is working in America for the first time. A mainstream revenge thriller with echoes of THE LIMEY and TAKEN, MESSAGE focuses on Jacob King (42 and GET ON UP's Chadwick Boseman, soon to headline Marvel's BLACK PANTHER), who's just arrived in L.A. from Cape Town, South Africa looking for his younger sister Bianca (Sibongile Mlambo) after an urgent, garbled message that she's "in trouble" and has "something they want." Grilled by customs and with only $600 on him ("That's not much for a vacation," he's told. "I'll make it last," he replies), King pounds the pavement, first heading to Bianca's address only to be told by her hard-partying neighbor Trish (Natalie Martinez) that she vanished after her husband split, leaving Bianca to care for his 11-year-old son. Looking through some belongings Bianca left with Trish, King pieces together enough information to send him to Zico (Lucan Melkonian), a flunky for Ducmajian (Arthur Darbinyan), an Eastern European crime boss operating in SoCal. Armed with just a bicycle chain, King beats the shit out of Zico and some other goons, eventually learning that Bianca had a serious drug problem and was likely working as a prostitute. He makes contact with--and bicycle-chains--Bianca's drug dealer Frankie (a nothing bit part for former Draco Malfoy Tom Felton), and, from paging through Bianca's appointment book, gets some info from sleazy Beverly Hills dentist Dr. Paul Wentworth (Luke Evans) before finally checking out the morgue and identifying Bianca's body from an identical tattoo they each have on their right arms. He tells the attendant that the body is not his sister's, so needless to say, King is going full vigilante and making the guilty parties pay on his own.

King's trek through the skeezy underbelly of L.A.--captured very effectively by cinematographer Monika Lenczewska--eventually directs him to blockbuster movie producer Mike Preston (Alfred Molina), a pederast with a never-ending supply of young boys, including Bianca's stepson Armand (Diego Josef), sold by a desperate Bianca, who was forced into prostitution in order to pay off her dead husband's debt to Ducmajian before someone had her killed. Things get even more complicated when King finds a flash drive stashed in pack of Bianca's Marlboros that has some very incriminating evidence tying together Bianca, Ducmajian, Preston, and mob-connected mayoral candidate Frank Leary (Chris Mulkey). Shitbag Wentworth decides to use the situation to bilk some extra money out of both Preston and Ducmajian, but King is constantly a step ahead of all of them, resorting to some vintage YOJIMBO tactics to play all the sides against the other, inevitably leading to a final showdown.

MESSAGE FROM THE KING is fairly formulaic stuff with little in the way of surprises, except for one final reveal that's unnecessary. The script by Stephen Cornwell and Oliver Butcher (they also wrote the Liam Neeson thriller UNKNOWN) relies far too much on contrivance and makes things way too easy for King, a guy who's never been to L.A. before but gets around rather effortlessly and has the good fortune to stumble upon just the info he needs at all times (for instance, visiting Wentworth on a mere hunch, of course he spots Zico walking out after having his jaw reset following his run-in with King's bike chain). A few plot strands are left dangling, and Du Welz has no idea what to do with his female characters, with Trish completely vanishing from the movie as King befriends the only-in-the-movies "hooker with a heart of gold" and single mom Kelly (Teresa Palmer), who emphatically states "I never fuck them," drawing the line at blowjobs, a PRETTY WOMAN-esque bit of sugarcoating that just doesn't seem like a plausible caveat that's available to a battered hooker in an unrelentingly ugly environment as harsh and brutal as the one presented in MESSAGE FROM THE KING. Both Trish and Kelly are underdeveloped characters that would've been better served and made stronger if they were combined into one, especially since Trish just disappears. The villains are stock Eastern European scumbags, Evans is appropriately reptilian and Molina is thoroughly repulsive, whether he's ogling his boy toys or being a racist asshole (with a gun pointed at King, he justifies his reasons for shooting him with "Breaking and entering...self-defense...plus you're black").

MESSAGE FROM THE KING drags in the meandering dialogue scenes with King and Kelly, but ultimately, it's Boseman's intense, ferocious performance that drives it along, carrying this thing on his shoulders with an enraged glare and a very convincing South African accent. Even when the by-the-numbers script is making things entirely too easy for King, Boseman keeps you engaged and rooting for him. Though the pace lags in the middle after a furiously fast-moving opening act, MESSAGE FROM THE KING is purely commercial revenge thriller fare that could've easily been a nationwide theatrical release, but Netflix picked it up at last year's Toronto Film Festival, and relatively speaking, it's one of their better recent "Netflix Original" offerings. Du Welz acquits himself well in this sort of mainstream surrounding, but the purists and CALVAIRE fans can also take heart in knowing that he does indulge in his "extreme horror" past with a few moments of some truly startling violence and splatter, thanks to mostly to the flesh-ripping abilities of King's trusty bicycle chain. Netflix is probably the best fit for this, but even with its many shortcomings, Boseman makes it worth seeing as a decent time-killer.

COLOSSAL
(US/South Korea/Spain/Canada/China/Luxembourg - 2017)

One of the most audacious and inventive films of the year, COLOSSAL is so offbeat and bizarre that its eccentricities are enough to carry it through its infrequent sections that don't work, like its uneven tone and its heavy-handed metaphors conveying its underlying themes. In a riff on her RACHEL GETTING MARRIED character, Anne Hathaway is Gloria, a hard-partying alcoholic who's been let go from a job at an online publication and has tested the patience of her boyfriend Tim (Dan Stevens) one too many times. He dumps her and kicks her out of his apartment, and she heads back home to the small midwestern town where she grew up. She gets reacquainted with childhood friend Oscar (Jason Sudeikis), who runs his late father's bar and clearly still nurses a lifelong crush on her. Gloria doesn't change her ways, working at Oscar's bar and staying up all hours with Oscar and his buddies Garth (Tim Blake Nelson) and Joel (Austin Stowell). After sleeping off a bender on a bench at a local playground, she gets online and is horrified by breaking news and terrifying footage of a giant, Godzilla-like reptilian creature appearing in Seoul. When she sees the creature mimicking some of her own gestures, Gloria realizes that if she stands in a certain spot on the playground at 8:05 am, the creature manifests itself in Seoul as her sort of kaiju avatar. If she dances, it dances half a world away. If she scratches her head, it scratches its head. She reveals the secret to Oscar and the guys and when Oscar steps in the spot, a giant robot appears next to the creature in Seoul. When they start playfully horsing around and Gloria falls, several hundred people are killed when the creature falls and crushes them in Seoul. When Gloria sleeps with Joel, Oscar quickly goes from hurt to angry, using their newfound powers over the events in Seoul to guilt her about the deaths she's caused and keep her under his control, especially when Tim arrives in town to try and patch things up now that Gloria has made serious attempts to get sober.

Written and directed by Spanish filmmaker Nacho Vigalondo (TIMECRIMES,
EXTRATERRESTRIAL, OPEN WINDOWS), COLOSSAL is like a Toho kaiju if conceived by Charlie Kaufman. It initially approaches the concept as an inspired black comedy, but things gradually turn serious as Oscar grows more angry, more possessive, and even physically abusive toward Gloria, taking out his rage over the perceived betrayal of sleeping with Joel and threatening to flatten Seoul and kill all of its citizens if she doesn't submit to his will. As a metaphor for pulling one out of destructive and self-destructive situation, it's rather large-scale, but the entire film has such a WTF? sense of originality about it that it helps get over some of the less graceful passages. There's an attempt at an explanation to it all--a flashback to a childhood incident in the park, a map that shows a straight latitudinal line drawn from their town and Seoul--but it's still a little foggy and nonsensical. But in the end, these issues matters less than they would have in less imaginative hands. Even with its flaws, COLOSSAL is a film that earns its cult cred the old-fashioned way, and the performances of Hathaway and especially Sudeikis, who's a revelation here, are quite impressive. A strange one, for sure, and unlike anything you've seen before. (R, 109 mins)

BOYKA: UNDISPUTED
(US - 2017)

Only in the world of DTV does a gritty 2002 Wesley Snipes/Ving Rhames boxing drama directed by Walter Hill and featuring a hilariously profane rant from Peter Falk morph over the course of 15 years into a Bulgaria-shot Nu Image franchise about a Russian MMA fighter who wasn't even in the original movie. The fourth entry in the UNDISPUTED series, and the first since 2010's UNDISPUTED III: REDEMPTION, BOYKA: UNDISPUTED continues the spiritual quest for redemption for hardened Russian convict Yuri Boyka (Scott Adkins). Boyka was introduced as the villain in 2007's UNDISPUTED II: LAST MAN STANDING but turned into a hero for the third film thanks to Adkins' colorful performance and powerhouse screen presence stealing the film from II star Michael Jai White. After emerging victorious in III's BLOODSPORT-style prison fighting tournament and escaping over the border into Georgia, Boyka has been living in Kiev, Ukraine, scraping by in underground MMA fights and using his extra cash to donate to a local church. He's now deeply religious and wants to prove himself a legitimate fighter and put his murderous past behind him for good. Consumed by guilt after killing opponent Viktor Gregov (Emilien De Falco) in the ring, Boyka gets a fake passport and crosses the border into Russia to give his fight earnings to Gregov's widow Alma (Teodora Duhovnikova) and ask for her forgiveness. Gregov owed money to Russian mob boss Zourab (Alon Aboutboul), who essentially enslaves Alma in order to pay back her late husband's debt. After several run-ins with Zourab's goons, Boyka reluctantly agrees to three fights in order to buy Alma's freedom. Of course, Zourab foolishly attempts to screw over Boyka, threatening to turn him in and have him sent back to maximum security Chornya Cholmi if he doesn't agree to a fourth fight with superhuman killing machine Koshmar the Nightmare (Martyn Ford).

UNDISPUTEDs II and III were directed by DTV action auteur Isaac Florentine, who gets a producer credit here but passes the torch to Syfy vet Todor Chapkanov (MIAMI MAGMA, CRYSTAL SKULLS), whose execution of the fight sequences does a mostly solid job of replicating Florentine's master touch, but the big showdown between Boyka and Koshmar is over way too quickly and isn't put together as well as it should be. Of his three turns as Boyka, this gives Adkins the most space to act, but his arc is a bit predictable and cliched and it's pretty dumb how the film has Boyka fighting for Zourab under his own name in public when he's a wanted man in Russia. Still, in an era when VOD/DTV action is defined by guys like Steven Seagal, Bruce Willis, and now Jean-Claude Van Damme coasting through doing as little as possible, the 41-year-old Adkins has genuine star quality, busts his ass time and again and has more than paid his dues over the years. He really should be headlining bigger movies by now (I seem to say this every time I review a new Scott Adkins movie), and while BOYKA: UNDISPUTED is a notch below the Florentine sequels (does anyone even remember the Hill movie anymore?), it's still way above average for this sort of thing. (R, 90 mins)

UNFORGETTABLE
(US - 2017)

A throwback to the '90s "(Blank)-from-Hell" thriller, UNFORGETTABLE marks the directing debut of veteran producer Denise Di Novi. Di Novi's career kicked off when she shepherded the 1989 cult classic HEATHERS and served as Tim Burton's producing partner during his 1990s glory years on the likes EDWARD SCISSORHANDS, BATMAN RETURNS, THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS, ED WOOD, and JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH. She went on to have a long association with Warner Bros., where she produced several Nicholas Sparks adaptations and both installments of THE SISTERHOOD OF THE TRAVELING PANTS. In other words, Di Novi is a pretty major player who's generated a ton of money in Hollywood, and the acknowledgment of that appears to be the only reason something as uninspired and thoroughly generic as UNFORGETTABLE managed to get a nationwide theatrical release from a major studio in 2017. Headlined by the best star teaming that 2008 had to offer, UNFORGETTABLE centers on online publishing editor Julia Banks (Rosario Dawson) moving to SoCal to live with her fiance David (Geoff Stults), who left his job at Merrill Lynch to open a craft brewery. Everything is going smoothly until the inevitable clash with David's uptight and unstable ex-wife Tessa (Katherine Heigl, in between her annual heavily-hyped new TV series that's inevitably cancelled after three episodes), who's convinced she and David are getting back together and is doing everything she can to turn their daughter Lily (Isabella Rice) against her future stepmother. Tessa starts by criticizing Julia's cooking, then escalates to stealing her phone and digging into her past, uncovering a restraining order against an abusive ex (Simon Kassianides) and luring him by pretending to be Julia online. Then she breaks into the house while Julia's taking a bath, stealing lingerie and sending it to the ex, giving him Julia's new address and inviting him to show up after sexting with him as Julia (Heigl's masturbation scene is hilariously intercut with Julia and David going down on each other in the men's room at a restaurant after Tessa tells Julia how much he used to like public sex, meaning that both women are basically obsessing over the other while they're getting off). Of course, things veer into mayhem and murder as the ex-wife-from-Hell stops at nothing to reclaim what she believes is hers.

Basically a Lifetime movie with a few F-bombs, some splatter, and a great view of Rosario Dawson's body double's butt (Di Novi doesn't even competently match the shots of Dawson and the double, whose presence would be painfully obvious even if she wasn't listed in the closing cast credits as "Rosario Dawson's body double"), UNFORGETTABLE is lethargically paced and never really cuts loose. Even the big catfight between Julia and Tessa seems to be over as soon as it starts. It hits every trope and cliche and the genre, it does nothing with Whitney Cummings as Julia's wisecracking best friend who helps her uncover dirt on Tessa (UNFORGETTABLE is so going-through-the-motions that it doesn't even bother killing off Cummings' pointless character), and it really only comes alive for a couple of scenes where Cheryl Ladd turns up as Tessa's chilly, perfectionist mother, who's even more of an ice-cold bitch who only speaks when she's got something negative to say to Tessa ("You didn't bake scones?" she scoffs at Tessa's store-bought pastries; "You're dragging your knife...and your silver needs polished!"), making it clear why Tessa is the way she is, almost generating a little sympathy for her in the process. But UNFORGETTABLE can't be bothered with multi-faceted character complexities. Dawson seems to know this is junk, the bland-to-the-point-of-transparency Stults looks like a third-string Peter Krause who's just biding his time until his perpetual stubble gets a little grayer and he can take over as the Trivago pitchman, and in the right hands, Heigl could've had some self-deprecating fun with the parallels between her character and her image as a difficult diva with a stick up her ass, but UNFORGETTABLE just coasts by doing the bare minimum. With the help of overqualified cinematographer Caleb Deschanel (THE BLACK STALLION, THE RIGHT STUFF, THE NATURAL, THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST), who likely wouldn't be involved with something this junky if not for Di Novi, UNFORGETTABLE at least looks polished and professional on the surface. It's marginally better than the INCONCEIVABLE, another recent "(Blank)-from-Hell"'90s throwback thriller, but all these glossy retro potboilers end up demonstrating is that these things were a lot more enjoyable 25 years ago. (R, 100 mins)

In Theaters: BABY DRIVER (2017)

On Netflix: OKJA (2017)

In Theaters/On VOD: INCONCEIVABLE (2017)

On DVD/Blu-ray: T2: TRAINSPOTTING (2017) and DIAMOND CARTEL (2017)

In Theaters: THE BEGUILED (2017)

On DVD/Blu-ray: SONG TO SONG (2017) and SALT AND FIRE (2017)

On DVD/Blu-ray: THEIR FINEST (2017) and DRONE (2017)

On Netflix: TO THE BONE (2017)

In Theaters: WAR FOR THE PLANET OF THE APES (2017)

Retro Review: STAR CRYSTAL (1986)

In Theaters/On VOD: FIRST KILL (2017)

In Theaters: DUNKIRK (2017)

In Theaters: VALERIAN AND THE CITY OF A THOUSAND PLANETS (2017)

Retro Review: THE LAST OF THE FINEST (1990)

On DVD/Blu-ray: ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING (2017); BLACK BUTTERFLY (2017); and WILSON (2017)

Retro Review: TWO EVIL EYES (1990)

In Theaters: ATOMIC BLONDE (2017)

Retro Review: CORRUPT (1983)

On Netflix: MESSAGE FROM THE KING (2017)

On DVD/Blu-ray: COLOSSAL (2017); BOYKA: UNDISPUTED (2017); and UNFORGETTABLE (2017)