Ana Lily Amirpour’s Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon

New Orleans is the perfect city for Mona “Lisa” Lee to escape to, because when you’re there, it is tricky answering a question like “have you seen anything unusual?” Her powers make her dangerous and her innocence makes her vulnerable to exploitation. Most of all, she is unpredictable, even if the film she appears in sort of is. Regardless, Lee will start to learn something about people in Ana Lily Amirpour’s Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon, which releases Tuesday on BluRay.

There is a blood moon out tonight, making it a fitting time for Lee to escape from her high security mental hospital. Given her powers of mind control, it seems weird she hasn’t made a break for it sooner. After inducing a few relatively mild cases of self-harm, she makes her way to the Big Easy, but the grittier, less touristy part. After forcing Officer Harold to shoot himself in the leg, she saves Bonnie Hunt (a fictional stripper and not David Letterman’s crony) from a violent woman on a jealousy bender.

Seeing Lee’s powers at work, Hunt takes her home and starts hatching schemes to harness those uncanny abilities for her own benefit. After a few days of mind-controlling ATM-withdrawers and Hunt’s strip club customers, Lee starts to suspect Hunt is maybe doesn’t deserve her help, but the stripper’s shy son Charlie does.

Mona Lisa is a dramatic improvement over Amirpour’s disappointing sophomore slump, The Bad Batch, but it will inevitably draw unfortunate comparisons with the Kimiko “The Girl” Miyashiro character in The Boys. Their powers are different but their personalities and demeanors are similar. Intriguingly, we are told in passing Lee’s family defected from North Korea, but Amirpour never develops this potentially significant tidbit into anything.

Nevertheless, Jeon Jong-seo is excellent as Lee, vividly expressing her innocence and her anger. Kate Hudson nicely plays against type as the convincingly trashy Hunt. However, Ed Skrein turns out to be the surprise scene-stealer as the not-as-sleazy as he looks “Fuzz” (don’t call him a drug-dealer).

In Darkness: Murder She Heard

There are a fair number of pianists to be found in classic giallos. Most likely, it is because of the genre’s obsession with hands—often donning patent leather gloves and wrapped around a woman’s throat. For a while, it seems like this film will paying homage to the J&B whiskey-guzzling Italian tradition. It even opens with the blind pianist scoring a neo-retro-giallo. Alas, the screenplay then gets “topical,” throttling the good vibes of Anthony Byrne’s In Darkness (trailer here), co-written and co-produced with his fiancé and star, Natalie Dormer, which opens this Friday in New York.

Sofia is light-sensitive, but legally blind. Nevertheless, she gets around London just fine on her own. She knows her upstairs neighbor Veronique by the smell of her perfume. At least, she did until the disturbed young woman took a header out the window. However, the scuffle she overheard suggests homicide rather than suicide. It turns out, the hot mess neighbor had a notorious father—alleged Bosnian Serb war criminal Zoran Radic.

The bad news is the killer got a good look at her. Fortunately, he also knows she is blind. In fact, Marc, the brooding murderer will keep an eye out for Sofia as she gets swept up in the aftermath. It turns out Veronique had an incriminating flash-drive, loaded with dirt on Daddy Dearest. However, before the film settles into a one-set, three-act thriller in the tradition of Wait Until Dark, we start to learn Sofia also has her own Balkan connections.

The first half-hour or so of In Darkness is not bad, because it largely employs old school stage-thriller techniques, including the home invading murderer slowly skulking around the oblivious Sofia. Frustratingly, the more it reveals of its exploitative back story, the less effective it becomes. To make matters worse, Byrne and Dormer frequently lay some pretty patchy groundwork to establish their future revelations.

Still, Dormer has some nifty noir thriller chemistry with her Game of Thrones co-star Ed Skrein, as the conflicted killer. Ben Wheatley-regular Neil Maskell nicely plays against type as the shlubby but doggedly honest DI Oscar Mills. However, the highlight of the film is Joely Richardson’s flamboyant scenery chewing as Alex, Marc’s sharp-tongued and sharp-clawed sister and security consultant boss. Plus, with the appearance of James Cosmos, dependably weathered, as Sofia old comrade, In Darkness scores the GoT hattrick.

In the case of In Darkness, less probably would have been much more. Frankly, its political intrigue does not make much sense and bears little relation to reality. The notion the British government is sheltering Radic from the Russians is particularly dubious, considering how war-time Serbia and Srpska have tilted towards Putin. Frankly, the West fiddled while Sarajevo burned, but we have pretty diligent about apprehending and extraditing Bosnian Serb war criminals, because closing the barn door after the fact is what we do best.

There are some sparks between Dormer and Skrein, but ultimately, they are undermined by a messy narrative and questionable character reveals. Cinematographer Si Bell gives it all a stylish, tantalizingly-close-to-giallo look, but that just makes us pine for the delicious lunacy of Peter Strickland’s retro giallo freak-out, Berberian Sound Studio. We wish we could send it back to the editing bay, but as it stands, In Darkness is too inconsistent to recommend when it opens this Friday (5/25) in New York, at the Cinema Village.

The Model: Glossy and Shallow

Believe it or not, some men working in the fashion industry are looking to exploit young models. Equally shocking, some aspiring models try to sexually manipulate men to further their careers. Seriously, its all true. These are the sort of blockbuster revelations that are luridly illustrated in Mads Matthiesen’s trashy drama The Model (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Gangly young Emma Whatever has come to Paris to make it as a model. She has a slimy but legit agency and a mean waif image that always seems to have its champions. Unfortunately, her first shoot ends in disaster when she cannot act sexy enough for moving-and-shaking fashion photographer Shane White. However, she manages to act plenty sexy when they later hook-up at an in nightclub. From there, they quickly become an item and her career takes a dramatic upswing.

Of course, nothing is really that easy. First she crushes the spirit of her high school sweetheart, Frederik. Soon jealousies lead to betrayals and before you know it, Emma is wailing: “Shane, come back.” Okay, not really. Instead she deceptively fools him into a temporary rapprochement. Yet, this is perfectly representative of the film’s flaws. Frankly, Emma is so vacuous and morally pliable right from the start, there isn’t much of a curve to her downward spiral. It is just incident after incident of models and fashion professionals acting reprehensibly.

Occasionally, the film approaches a provocative issue, but Matthiesen and his co-screenwriters Martin Zandvliet and Anders Frithiof August always manage to nimbly skirt around them. This specifically includes the nature of Emma’s beauty. Real life model Maria Palm has her best moments explaining how her spindly look was often mocked in Denmark but is coveted in the Paris fashion world. Could it be that beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder? Maybe, but it still seems like Claire Tran (who plays White’s assistant) is more attractive than the emaciated, sunken-eyed models her boss shoots.

Speaking of pronounced skull structures, Ed Skrein still immediately brings to mind Skeletor from the Masters of the Universe. Regardless, we can certainly buy him as the soulless, predatory White. To her credit, Maria Palm craters quite effectively. As Frederik, Marco Ilsø looks like Zac Efron, but he lacks the equivalent presence and talent level. However, Charlotte Tomaszewska (also a real life model) regularly upstages everyone as Emma’s live-in frienemy, Zofia.

We’ve seen all this so many times before. If anything distinguishes the slick but predictable Model, it is the extent Matthiesen revels in Emma’s downfall. Yet, that is precisely why it is such as jarring disappointment as the follow-up to his deeply humane Teddy Bear. Not recommended, The Model opens this Friday (8/12) in New York, at the Cinema Village.

The Transporter Refueled: Frank Martin Rises Again

They look like they stepped out of a Robert Palmer video. Frank Martin’s latest clients are highly synchronized and they need a driver. They will repeatedly break his rules, but their desperation makes them quite persuasive. Of course, Martin always keeps his cool in the latest re-configuration of Luc Besson’s strangely resilient franchise. Deliveries will be made in Camille Delamarre’s The Transporter Refueled (trailer here), which opens today nationwide.

Clearly, Martin got his keenness for punctuality from his chop-busting father, who has just retired from an ambiguous government career that came with a cover job as a salesman for Evian (it’s “naïve” spelled backwards). He ought to be a little more resourceful, but somehow Frank Senior allows himself to be taken hostage by four women trafficked into prostitution by a Russian vice lord. Anna, Gina, Maria, and Qiao know they cannot simply run away from Arkady Karasov. They will have to hit his network where it counts—in the wallet. Thus, Martin reluctantly serves as their wheelman for a series of clever heists, while his father jolly well enjoys being a hostage.

When it comes to films set in Monaco, Refueled beats the stuffing out of the justly infamous Grace of Monaco. Delamarre understands what Transporter movies are supposed to be and executes accordingly. There are at least two action sequences that are ludicrously over the top, but what of it? It is not like the film slows down long enough for us to analyze the aerodynamics of any given scene. Cinematographer Christophe Collette also makes the Principality backdrops sparkle quite alluringly.

Ed Skrein has a strange look. It’s like you can see the exact shape of his skull because there is only a thin layer of skin stretched over it. He also has an odd screen presence, coming across as intense, but somehow simultaneously disdainfully disinterested in everything around him. Yet, that sort of works for Frank Junior. He has all kinds of cred in the fight scenes, but Ray Stevenson gets all the laughs as his cooler, funnier dad. His shameless scenery chewing is a major reason why the film is such deliriously guilty pleasure.

Loan Chabanol, who attracted notice with her short but memorable appearance in Fading Gigolo, can’t project the same élan as Anna, but it is hard to compete with all the black Audis flying through the air. It is also a shame former Miss World Yu Wenxia does not have more screen time, because she seems to have a bit of a spark, but most of the time Anna’s three amigos just strut about in the background, to raise our awareness of human trafficking. What did you expect, really? Frankly, the film’s real shortcoming is its interchangeably generic villain. We have seen plenty of cats like Radivoje Bukvic’s Karasov done before and done better (Michael Nyqvist in John Wick springs readily to mind).

Refueled does not want to hear any whining about messages or characterization. It is a self-aware meathead movie that delights in its own shallowness. Style and energy are all that matter in a Besson-produced action joint, but Delamarre brings more than enough to keep the boss happy. Sort of a weird early 2000’s nostalgia trip for franchise fans that will also resonate for the original MTV generation, The Transporter Refueled is recommended for those who want a shiny object to distract them. It opens across the country today (9/4), including the AMC Empire in New York.