Grand Isle: The Latest Nic Cage Movie of the Week

In the movies, impending storms usually accompany simmering sexual tension, possibly laced with violence. That is true in spades for this soon-to-be water-logged Louisiana Barrier Island burg. Crazy Walter would rather bat down his handyman than batten down the hatches in Stephen S. Campanelli’s Grand Isle, which opens tomorrow in New York.

With tons of debt, a new born daughter, and a frail wife perhaps suffering from a mild form of postpartum depression, Buddy needs money, so takes an odd job fixing Walter’s fence. For some reason, the swaggering alcoholic insists he must complete the job that day or no dough, but the poor handyman cannot finish before the gale-force storm rolls in. (Seriously, it is only eight or ten white pickets.)

Reluctantly accepting the shelter Walter grudgingly offers, Buddy finds himself in the middle of a very dysfunctional marital dynamic. Before long, Walter’s Maggie-the-Cat-like wife Fancy starts coming on to Buddy in such an unsubtle manner, even Walter notices. Of course, that just makes him angrier and more unstable. Yet, he also has an offer to make Buddy. It is not exactly the “indecent” kind, but it will definitely be criminal. Regardless, Buddy will rue the day he walked into their home, especially during Detective Jones’ in media res interrogation sessions.

This is Nic Cage’s fifth film released in theaters this year, with another due January, so we have to admire his work ethic. He clearly has a keen affinity for Louisiana noir (after all, you can see his future pyramid-shaped crypt in St Louis Cemetery #1). As Walter, he snarls with all the wild abandon you would hope for. Nevertheless, it is still disappointing to see him help resurrect the hurtful stereotype of the crazy Vietnam veteran. In fact, screenwriters Iver William Jallah and Rich Ronat go out of their way to portray the Vietnam Vet as a monstrous caricature, setting the film in the year 1989, for no discernible reason except for making the raging Walter age-appropriate for his supposed service record.

I See You

Judging from recent films, Millennials have rather pronounced mommy issues. Add this one to the fraught mother-son relationships of Little Joe and In Fabric, as well as the similarly testy mother-daughter dynamics of Mary, The Gallows Act II, and Knives and Skin. As an added bonus this time around, there is a serial killer stalking a terrified small town in Ohio. Of course, nothing is as it seems in Adam Randall’s I See You, which opens tomorrow in New York.

Connor Harper can hardly stand talking to his mother Jackie after her infidelity was revealed. Her husband, Det. Greg Harper says he forgives her, but he is still sleeping on the coach. Granted, he has been coming home late ever since the killer’s latest victim disappeared. Still, he hasn’t made much of an effort as a peace-keeper, despite Connor’s sullen behavior. In fact, the surly kid’s passive aggression seems to be taking a more violent turn. Or maybe something supernatural is afoot, or maybe not. Meanwhile, the serial killer Det. Harper helped convict several years prior is using the presumed copycat as grounds for overturning his sentence.

I See You takes a legitimately surprising U-turn halfway through, making the film easily demarcated into the before and after portions. It is a twist that really truly changes everything. Unfortunately, the first part is deadly dull, including a lot of set-up material that doesn’t really pay off on the back nine.

It is frustrating, because you really have to admire the audacity with which Randall pulls off the big whiplash reversal. However, his feat of misdirection is largely undermined by the dullness and sourness of the main characters, especially Dr. Jackie and Millennial Connor. They just make it hard to care.

Peter Strickland’s In Fabric

In retrospect, Sheila Woodchapel should have just gone to Harrod’s, even though it might have been more expensive. There is a reason the king of all department stores still endures. Instead, she went to Dentley & Soper’s, lured by the promise of modern elegance at sale prices. The dress she buys turns out to be truly a killer in Peter Strickland’s In Fabric, which opens this Friday in New York.

Woodchapel is recently divorced and probably taking it even worse than her peevish millennial son Vince (is there any other kind of Millennial?). With considerable trepidation, she starts dating men through the newspaper classifieds (it is hard to pinpoint the exact time period, but a retro 1960s vibe deliberately permeates Fabric). Of course, she will need a new dress.

At Dentley & Soper’s, Woodchapel is tended to by the strange Cruella de Vil-esque Miss Luckmoore, who convinces her to take a fashionable red number that shouldn’t fit her, but somehow does. The new threads look fab on her, but ugly rashes breakout across her skin after she wears it for her first date. The sinister dress also seems to cause dangerous accidents around her flat. Soon, the red garment will have a similar effect on others.

The premise of Fabric sounds ludicrous, but in Strickland’s hands, it becomes an ultra-chic descent into madness. There is no question he is one of the most distinctive stylists creating genre cinema today. Arguably, Fabric is even more eye-popping than Berberian Sound Studio, but his earlier Gialo homage was a more disorienting head-spinner.

Regardless, the visual compositions and juxtapositions in Fabric are darkly dazzling. It is also cool to see Marianne Jean-Baptiste, the character thesp recognizable from Without a Trace and several hundred other film and TV credits, get to step out as the lead (more or less). She is terrific as Woodchapel, making us care (despite her human failings) and fear for the worst. She also has some unexpectedly realistic and appealing chemistry with Barry Adamson (former member of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds), as her more agreeable personals date.

Veredas: Necropolis Symphony

It is a fundamental law of cinema that any attempt to disturb the rest of the dead will lead to bad karma. It is also a fundamental real-life law of urban living that real estate is scarce, so any under-utilized plots should be scooped up and exploited. The conflict between these two laws leads to serious trouble for an apprentice grave-digger in Juliana Rojas’s Necropolis Symphony, which screens during the new film series, Veredas: a Generation of Brazilian Filmmakers.

Thanks to fleeting mortality, grave-digging is steady work, but poor Deodato probably isn’t cut out for it. His elevated capacity for empathy constantly overwhelms him at grave sites, causing him to pass out. The director hired him as a favor to his Uncle Jaca, a longtime cemetery employee, but he is losing patience. Fortunately for Deodato, the boss has a job requiring the full-time services of an employee, whose day-to-day productivity won’t be missed.

Deodato will assist Jaqueline, a hot-shot trouble-shooter from the Funerary Board, who will be re-organizing the layout of the storied old graveyard. They need more spaces to put bodies—bodies with funeral-paying survivors. Families behind on the upkeep of their plots will be encouraged to move their loved ones to a drawer in the prospective new mausoleum. Jaqueline does not want to say it in so many words, but remains that are forgotten and abandoned will probably just end up in a bag. Despite his hopeless schoolboy crush, this just doesn’t seem right to Deodato. He’s not the only one who feels that way.

By the way, Necropolis Symphony is also a musical, with supernatural elements. In fact, many of the musical-numbers are laugh-out loud funny for those who are somewhat familiar with Brazilian popular song of the last twenty-years or so. For the unhip, the blend of music, bittersweet romance, and the undead is still ridiculously charming (and the songs are still pretty catchy). Compared to Anna and the Apocalypse, Necropolis is much more low-key, but the two films would still make an appealing double feature.

That Pärt Feeling: The Universe of Arvo Pärt

After long struggling with Soviet censorship and mandated state aesthetics, Arvo Pärt immigrated to the West in 1980, but he returned to his native Estonia after the fall of Communism. He is widely considered to be the living composer most frequently performed in live concert and is arguably the most important (with all due respect to Adams and Glass). His compositions are not traditional crowd pleasers, but they have a distinctive power that is immediately audible. Receptive audiences can hear it for themselves when Paul Hegeman’s insightful documentary That Pärt Feeling: The Universe of Arvo Pärt releases today on DVD.

Pärt’s compositions are much more harmonically advanced than many pop listeners will be accustomed to, but that does not mean his music is inaccessible. Instead of hummable melodies, his compositions are more about the totality of the listening experience and the transportive and transformative effect they have on listeners. Several musicians eloquently describe the challenges of playing Pärt. It is not the notes are prohibitively difficult. The trick is finding the right rhythms and timbres. That is what they say, but the stormy violin passage we hear from Tabula Rasa: I. Ludus certainly looks and sounds like quite a test of the musicians’ dexterity and endurance.

Although Hegeman only includes about a thimble full of biography, he clearly establishes how Pärt’s music was forged during the period of Communist oppression and continues to be inspired by his profound Christian Orthodox faith. Pärt has a reputation for being something of an ascetic recluse, but the man we see in Hegeman’s film is very much engaged in the world and has a knack for working with musicians.

Rogue Warfare: Fighting Terror with Oppressive Regimes

How does China “fight terrorism?” By condemning hundreds of thousands of innocent Uyghurs from East Turkestan to concentration camps. As for Russia, they do their utmost to prop up terrorist-sponsoring states, like Syria and Iran. Yet, both have permanent seats on the UN Security council, so both are part of a decidedly fictional 5-nation anti-terrorism military force. Credibility takes a backseat to courting the Chinese and Russian box offices throughout Mike Gunther’s Rogue Warfare, which releases today on DVD.

As the film opens, the unnamed POTUS puts his John Hancock on the “Rogue” military pact with the UK, France, Russia, and China. He harkens back to the day when all five nations aligned to fight the Axis powers (declining to mention Russia initially sided with Hitler—ask Poland about that). They are tasked with fighting extreme Islamist terrorist, but Gunther’s screenplay doesn’t even have the guts to call out Daesh or Al-Qaeda. Instead, they will be tracking a “rogue” terrorist organization known as the Black Masks.

Still, watching the free and not-the-least-bit free worlds take on generic Islamist terror could still be entertaining, but the inter-team dynamics seem to be carefully calibrated to kill any joy that could come from this film. Naturally, the Brit is a trigger-happy jerk who has utter contempt for teamwork, while Chinese and Russian members always play well with others.

Even more problematic, at least half the film feels like it is devoted the terrorists’ “Supreme Leader” as he airs his grievances and screeds. Frankly, this film starts to feel like recruiting propaganda for anti-Western terrorist groups. It would be offensive, if it weren’t so dull.

Hausner’s Little Joe

It could almost be a cousin of Audrey II, but it is subtler and more insidious in its pursuit of world domination. It still represents a plant-based peril, but it is man-made this time around, rather than extraterrestrial. Genre film lovers get a serious, auteurist take on a flower of evil in Jessica Hausner’s Little Joe, which opens this Friday in New York.

Alice Woodard is a bit guilty she lets her dedication to experimental botany take so much time away from her son Joe, yet she refuses to change her ways or concede more custody time to his father. As some sort of consolation, she names her revolutionary genetically engineered flower, “Little Joe” in his honor and sneaks him a potted sample, in violation of every company rule and protocol.

The whole point of Little Joe is its mood-transforming effect. Its pollen stimulates parts of the brain that release feelings of happiness. However, it might do other things too. One of Woodard’s colleagues is convinced her dog’s personality was profoundly altered by exposure to Little Joe. Her age and disappointing career trajectory make it easy for others to dismiss her warnings, but Woodard starts to suspect there might be something to what she says when her research partner (and frustrated suitor) Chris also starts acting strangely different.

Although Little Joe contains surface similarities to the classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers, it comes at the material in a sharply contemporary, medicated-to-live-your-best-life kind of way. The science is also provocative. It even echoes Jurassic Park in an unexpected twist. Woodard has deliberately engineered Little Joe to be sterile, but she fears this may have perversely kicked in its survival imperative. “Life will find a way,” Ian Malcolm always says.

For some, Little Joe might be too cool and cerebral for its own good. Hausner largely drains out the emotion from her story (co-written by Gerardine Bajard), in favor of cold, hard rational analysis and guarded paranoia. Essentially, Hausner maintains a tone that is a lot like Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster, but it is more realistic and human-like. The comparison is particularly apt since Ben Whishaw appears in both films.

Submitted by Singapore: A Land Imagined

The sand is from Malaysia, Indonesia, and Cambodian. The workers are from Bangladesh and China. However, the crime and the film are definitely Singaporean. This season, all Netflix awards buzz focuses on The Irishman, but they are also carrying all of Singapore’s Oscar hopes and dreams. The local construction industry might not have been overly thrilled about it, but Singapore opted for Yeo Siew Hua’s A Land Imagined as its official international feature film submission for the upcoming Academy Awards.

Lok is a massively jaded cop, who is almost as surprised by his efforts to find missing Chinese migrant worker Wang Bi-cheng, as the dodgy land reclamation company that employed him. Frankly, they think they did well by Wang when they kept him on as a driver at half-pay when his arm was injured in an industrial accident. It was during that time Wang befriended Ajit, one of the Bangladeshi workers, who also mysteriously disappeared.

As we see in flashbacks, Lok’s investigation of Wang’s disappearance retraces the steps the Chinese worker’s efforts to find his Bangladeshi friend. In fact, Lok starts to feel an affinity for Wang, due to their mutual insomnia. Clearly, the company is up to its neck in shading dealings, but Mindy, the goth femme fatale managing the neighboring internet parlor is decidedly no angel either.

Eventually, the film takes a rather Robbe-Grillet-like turn, as the personas of the cop and the subject of his investigation start to blend together. Yet, in many ways Land Imagined is a noir in the B. Traven tradition. The only thing more dangerous than the crooked system for the trapped laborers are their own character failings.

Stay Home: Ai Weiwei Document’s Ximei’s Life & Activism

Recent revelations of toxic tear gas dispersed throughout Hong Kong and the network of concentration camps imprisoning hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs from East Turkistan prove the Chinese Communist Party is dangerous to human health. AIDS activist Liu Ximei knew that years ago. She was one of the thousands of Henan peasants who contracted the disease through tainted transfusion blood. However, she was not willing to meekly accept the substandard treatment grudgingly provided by state clinics. She organized patients, but that consequently made her a target, as viewers can see in Ai Weiwei’s Stay Home (written, lensed, and edited by Chen Shuo), which predates Andy Cohen & Gaylen Ross’s more complete documentary Ximei, but it still nicely compliments their film, which opens today in New York.

Hip New Yorkers may have already seen Stay Home, because the 2013 film played on a loop during Teacher Ai’s retrospective at the Brooklyn Museum. It is also readily available on YouTube and Vimeo, if you do not live on the Chinese side of the CCP’s Great Firewall.

Stay Home is somewhat less structured and more fly-on-the-wall in the manner it documents the day-to-day health challenges Liu must endure. It also covers a shorter time-span, ending before she becomes a legit couple with her roommate, a fellow AIDS patient. We also witness worse acts of harassment in the newer documentary, because the Henan cadres had the good sense to be on their best behavior when Ai Weiwei showed up with a camera crew. In contrast, Cohen and company do their best to stay undercover. Nevertheless, the apparatchiks’ hostility and resentment for Liu still comes through clearly.

Ximei: Profile in Courage

Liu Ximei is continuing proof of one of Mainland China’s dirtiest secrets (and the Communist Party certainly has a lot to choose from). In the 1990s, peasants in hardscrabble Henan province were encouraged to supplement their subsistence income selling blood. Tragically, unsafe sanitary practices led to widespread AIDS infection among both donors and recipients. Naturally, the Party tried to sweep it under the rug, because that is what they do. However, one brave young woman emerged as a leader for the rural AIDS patients, after she contracted the disease through a transfusion. Viewers will meet her and witness the powerful opposition she faces in Andy Cohen & Gaylen Ross’s Ximei, which opens tomorrow in New York.

Liu might be familiar to some viewers, because she was the subject of Ai Weiwei’s documentary, Stay Home. Those who have seen it will be reassured by Teacher Ai’s involvement as an executive producer of Cohen & Ross’s doc. We get to know her better as a flesh-and-blood person through their lens—and to know Liu is to admire her.

Many of Liu’s experiences are somewhat universal, with respect to her search for companionship and her eventual romance with a fellow Henan patient. However, her activism and humanitarianism often put her at odds with the police and health services bureaucracy. Believing in the efficacy of patient solidarity and support, Liu opened “Ximei’s Home for Mutual Help,” a shelter and resource for patients who cannot afford to regularly commute from their rural homes to the urban clinics. Of course, even when they show up, the doctors and nurses often refuse to see them in a timely manner, prompting Liu to lodge rather pointed complaints on their behalf. Frustratingly, but not so surprisingly, the police have regularly forced Liu to relocate her shelter.

Although Ximei is a more personal profile than Ai Weiwei’s film, it still covers sufficiently sensitive topics to get Cohen and his crew rousted by the police at least once. This is definitely gutsy, truth-to-power filmmaking, but the subject and star is truly courageous.

Knives Out: Daniel Craig Investigates Famous Suspects

If a suspicious character is not played by someone famous, chances are that person is not the murderer. That is why Agatha Christie movies used to have little pictures of the cast running along the bottom of their lobby posters. It showed off how many suspects there were. Winking homage is paid to those films in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out, which opens today nationwide.

Johnson’s screenplay is all about its twists, so some caginess is in order, to prevent spoilers. It is safe to say Harlan Thrombey, a celebrated mystery novelist and patriarch of a wildly dysfunctional and elitist family is about to die a premature death. Marta Cabrera, his private nurse is probably the only one who truly mourns him. The cops assume it is an open-and-shut case, but Benoit Blanc, an eccentric Southern gentleman private detective has reason to suspect otherwise. An unknown client hired his services to investigate, which is rather suspicious in itself.

Much to her surprise, Cabrera finds herself pressed into service as Blanc’s Watson. Of course, it becomes increasingly awkward for her, because she harbors her own secrets. Needless to say, everything is not as it seems.

There is quite a bit of clever misdirection going on throughout the film. It would be no fair telling, but rest assured the big reveals are all quite satisfying. The knowing humor is also mostly rather sly, but there are times when the scoldy class warfare messaging should have been throttled down. This is supposed to be larky fun, not a Theodore Dreiser adaptation.

Fortunately, Daniel Craig always keeps things snappy when he is on-screen, delighting viewers with Blanc’s impossibly lazy drawl. Honestly, that accent deserves some kind of award. It is also great fun watching him effortless shift from genteel charm to gleeful cunning.

Frankly, it is rather impressive that Ana de Armas can keep up Craig and the rest of the colorful ensemble as the almost fatally nice Cabrera. Of course, only Blanc can withstand the withering attitude Jamie Lee Curtis projects as the tartly cynical eldest daughter, Linda Drysdale. She is a totally believable chip off the block that is Christopher Plummer’s uber-yankee Thrombey (and really ought to have more screen time, but she makes the most of what she gets). Likewise, Plummer has the appropriate lordly presence, but he has some surprisingly engaging humanizing moments with De Armas.

Yet, Don Johnson might just score the biggest laughs as the venal and pretentious son-in-law, Richard Drysdale. Honestly, Johnson has yet to get the credit he deserves for his comedic chops (check out his razor-sharp cornpone turn in Cold in July, if you doubt it).

Mark Dacascos is the Driver

Maybe you think electric cars are more environmentally friendly, but fossil fuels have one big advantage. They still burn after the zombie apocalypse wipes out human civilization. Driving is our protag’s’ job for his rag-tag community of survivors—and you will not find him behind the wheel of a Prius. Try BMW. He will have to do what he does best when human and zombie attacks threaten his daughter’s safety in Wych Kaosayananda’s The Driver, which releases today on DVD.

The community is a little peeved at the Driver, because he and his dirtbag partner Joe followed orders and drove a popular but larcenous thief to his death. Thanks to Joe, it was an ugly case of execution by zombie. Unfortunately, Joe has more jerkheel behavior in store from the Driver, when he sells out the community to a violent gang of marauders. Naturally, all the commotion attracts the zombies, who quickly overrun both sides of the fight. The Driver barely escapes with his car and his daughter Bree, but sadly, he is not unscathed.

With the clock ticking, The Driver gives Bree a crash course on survival skills. They desperately speed towards “Haven,” a rumored strong-post of civilization up north, even though he is not sure it truly exists. Along the way, they will have to deal with plenty of zombies and human scum.

Dacascos will always be known to many as “The Chairman” on Iron Chef, but after his recent high-profile turns in Wu Assassins and John Wick 3, he is primed for a career renaissance as an action star. Alas, it won’t start with The Driver, but it is not a total dead-loss. As the titular Driver, Dacascos shows much more range most critics and viewers probably expect from him, especially in his tender parental scenes with Bree, played by his likable real-life daughter Noelani. Plus, his action chops remain undiminished. Like his fellow 1990’s action star, Gary Daniels, Dacascos always had screen charisma and is still in terrific shape. Frankly, both of them should have been bigger stars during their peaks.

Mary: Gary Oldman Skippers Her as Best He Can

On paper, this evil boat should be way scarier than Christine, because her passengers will be stranded by the open water. They can’t try to dive out a window and run for a narrow alleyway. They must remain on the high seas until they reach port. Unfortunately, that does not seem likely to happen for everyone, judging from the if-I-had-but-known in media res prologue to Michael Goi’s Mary, which releases today on DVD.

David is tired of sailing other people’s charter boats. He longs to be his own skipper, but he cannot afford a tourist-worthy boat—or so he thought until he spied the Mary, an old but seaworthy German sail boat, with a rather evil looking masthead, now up for auction after the Coast Guard found her abandoned. With the help of his sidekick-first mate Mike, they will refurbish her and go into business for themselves. David’s wife Sarah is a bit skeptical, but she does not have much standing to argue since her husband forgave her infidelity.

The restoration is quick and uneventful in movie time, so David and family logical decide to celebrate with a maiden voyage through the Bermuda Triangle. Good call. Of course, as soon as they are far enough out in international waters, Mary starts messing with their heads, especially that of their youngest, ominously also named Mary.

Goi has a terrific cast at his disposal, but he uses them just enough to keep diehard horror fans from walking out, switching the channel, or falling asleep. Weirdly, it is rather interesting to watch Gary Oldman play an average, everyday guy. He and Emily Mortimer are pretty believable as the loving couple under extraordinary stress. Manuel Garcia-Rulfo also goes crazy pretty convincingly as Mike. However, Jennifer Esposito is just hopelessly wasted as Det. Clarkson, who conducts the framing interrogation with a complete lack of intuition.

Agatha and the Truth of Murder: Christie’s 11-Day Mystery

Agatha Christie remains so beloved by her public, we still can’t help wondering where she got off to during her mysterious eleven-day disappearance. It served as the inspiration for the 1979 film Agatha that suggested Dame Agatha was researching methods to kill her unfaithful husband’s other woman. That was not so satisfying for fans, especially since she was played by Vanessa Redgrave, an outspoken supporter of the anti-Semitic PLO terrorist syndicate. This is take #2. This time around, Ms. Christie slips away from her personal drama to solve a murder mystery in Terry Loane’s Agatha and the Truth of Murder, which is scheduled to release on iTunes today.

It is relatively early on in Agatha Christie’s celebrated career, but she is already feeling pressure to keep surprising her readers. She even seeks out the advice from her crusty old colleague, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (yes, their professional careers really did overlap). However, the old blowhard isn’t much help. Frankly, her creative problems are really rooted in her marital problems, which Col. Christie wants to solve with a divorce. Of course, the wronged writer has no intention of giving him such an easy out. She also still thinks she loves him.

The future Dame is not very gracious when retired nurse Mabel Rogers comes seeking her assistance to solve the six-years-cold murder of her best friend, Florence Nightingale Shore, who really was the god daughter of Florence Nightingale and was very definitely bludgeoned to death on a train bound from London to Brighton. Despite her own domestic turmoil, Christie becomes fascinated with the crime and eventually agrees to apply her deductive talents to it.

Fittingly, she hatches a risky scheme, in which the five leading suspects will be summoned to a remote country estate on the pretext of a potential inheritance, allowing the great mystery writer to examine them while pretending to be an agent of the estate solicitor. Alas, her plan starts to implode when one of the suspects turns into a victim.

Screenwriter Tom Dalton cleverly fuses together the two historical mysteries of Christie’s disappearance and the murder of Nightingale Shore. The problem is the first act is downright pokey, wasting a lot of time on awkward character development that is already established for most mystery fans. On the other hand, the country manor business stays pretty true to the spirit of Christie’s books.

The Romanians: The Earth’s Most Beloved Son

By and large, agents of the Securitate, Communist Romania’s secret police, had no sense of humor. Nobody understands this better than Victor Petrini. The philosophy professor will be sentenced to ten years in a political prison camp thanks to the deliberate and willful misinterpretation of a joke. His story was first told in Marin Preda’s novel, but it was withdrawn from circulation shortly after publication. Preda’s own death soon followed, stoking the suspicions of many. The release of the film adaptation was therefore quite a significant milestone, after the fall of Ceausescu. Serban Marinescu never sugar-coats any of the pain or humiliations of life under the Communist regime in The Earth’s Most Beloved Son, which screens as part of Film Forum’s The Romanians: 30 Years of Cinema Revolution.

For about ten seconds, Petrini has it all: a comfortable flat, the respect of his peers, and young trophy-ish wife. Then there comes a knock at the door—and poof, all gone. Naturally, his arrest involves violent manhandling, but the first interrogator takes a “good cop” approach. The surveillance apparatus intercepted a letter to Petrini from a colleague abroad and out of favor with the regime, which includes a reference to the catch-phrase from their old collegiate comedy act. Needless to say, the Securitate does not get it. Petrini refuses to confess and he has no names to name, so the interrogator’s superior unceremoniously condemns him to a gulag.

Survival there is a rough business. In fact, Marinescu depicts the realities of Socialist prison life in such a brutal, in-your-face manner, Beloved Son created a mini-firestorm of controversy in Romania when it was first released. Let’s just say Petrini’s experiences are akin to the roughest stuff in Oz and Sleepers, but he eventually fights back. The philosophy professor gets tough because he must be to survive, even after he is released.

Probably over half the film is dedicated to Petrini’s post-prison life. As a former political prisoner, he is at the mercy of hostile apparatchiks and plagued by venomous informers. His family and now ex-wife Matilda are definitely not there for him, but he will still try to find some grace in life.

Beloved Son would make an excellent pairing with Lucian Pintille’s The Oak. Both were produced in the early 1990s and present an emotionally devastating critique of the Communist system, but where The Oak is a hallucinatory Grand Guignol, Beloved is painfully grounded. Yet, it also has epic sweep, spanning decades of oppression.

21 Bridges: Boseman Protects and Serves

In this street-smart New York manhunt thriller, the cops deeply resent the grandstanding mayor, who has often thrown them under the bus. Yes, you can definitely say it is “ripped from the headlines”—recent headlines. We soon suspect a cabal of dirty cops could be the ultimate cause of all the trouble, so it is also ripped from 1970’s Serpico era headlines as well. Det. Andre Davis has a reputation for unholstering his firearm, making him the perfect point-man to track down two desperate cop-killers, but he turns out to be more of a loose cannon than anyone bargained for in Brian Kirk’s 21 Bridges, which opens today nationwide.

Ray Jackson and Michael Trujillo thought they had been recruited to steal 30 kilos of cocaine, but they find 300 kilos instead. For them, that is way too much of a “good thing.” Almost immediately thereafter, a firefight ensues with four Brooklyn cops, who did not arrive responding to any calls, before getting blown away by the better armed criminals. Subsequently, they fatally shoot four more officers legitimately dispatched to the scene, fleeing into Manhattan, in search of a buyer and a money-launderer. It is a mess that the local precinct captain and the deputy chief want Davis to clean up—permanently.

Given the considerable quantity of uncut coke recovered, local drug squad detective Frankie Burns will ride shotgun with Davis, whether he likes it or not. She seems tough enough, but many of her trigger-happy colleagues keep getting in his way. Nevertheless, Davis steadily closes in on his targets, thanks to his strategy the useless mayor agrees to implement. Every tunnel, train, ferry, and bridge (yes, all 21 of them) providing access out of Manhattan will be locked-down from 1:00 to 5:00 (so as not to interrupt the financial markets).

Basically, screenwriters Adam Mervis and Matthew Michael Carnahan want the audience to hate cops. However, their propaganda campaign is sabotaged by the steely but charismatic performance of their star, Chadwick Boseman. His intense screen presence is still acutely human, winning over viewer’s sympathy and largely carrying the film. Boseman and Sienna Miller, as Burns, nicely play good cop-bad cop together, but it is debatable which is which.

Kamler at Anthology: Chronopolis

One of the ironies of science fiction is the braininess of the genre’s most speculative work is often difficult to translate on screen, so we get cheesy laser battles instead. Imagine trying to write a screenplay based on Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Man. Piotr Kamler might have been the man to do it. The Parisian-based Polish animator specialized in abstract animation, but his only feature film was a work of science fiction—sort of. Focus on the visuals and try not to worry about imposing narrative order on Kamler’s Chronopolis, which screens during the Kamler retrospective now underway at Anthology Film Archives.

In some ways, Chronopolis shares a kinship with that other “polis,” Metropolis. This is definitely an imposing futuristic city, but the power dynamics are a little different. The ancient immortals lounge around their luxury palaces in the sky, creating living forms out of clay and pining for some drama to shake up their omnipotent existences. A pair of intrepid humans scaling their ivory towers just might do that. Or something like that.

BiTS ’19: Dead D*cks

Richie is not a vampire, but he is the sort of real-life monster who can suck the life out of the people around him. His little sister Becca has been his primary victim and enabler. She has put her life on hold to deal with his mental health and substance abuse issues. Just when she thinks her brother can’t shock her anymore, she finds herself face-to-face with two versions of Richie—one naked and alive, the other dead and clothed. She is in for an even more chaotic night than usual in Chris Bavota & Lee Paula Springer’s Dead D*cks, which screens during this year’s Blood in the Snow Film Festival.

Becca had been thrilled by her acceptance into a graduate nursing program, but she was unsure how to break the news to Richie. Then she walked into this mess. As Richie semi-coherently explains, he kind-of, sort-of died by misadventure, but returned via the awkwardly shaped portal that mysteriously appeared in his bedroom. In fact, he quite irresponsibly repeated the process a few times—just to see. That leaves several dead bodies for Becca to clean up before Matt, the irate downstairs neighbor, calls the cops and the landlord.

Dead D*cks is a thoroughly original genre film, but the terrible title is totally misleading. This is not some kind of beer-swilling lad comedy with clones. There is a fair amount of black humor, but it is deadly serious in the way it presents the impact of mental illness and addiction on close family members. Yet, there is no suggestion any of this is the product of symbolism-heavy delusion. The fantastical stuff is very real in-world and it becomes steadily more real as the full truth is revealed.

BiTS ’19: She Never Died

Unless you are a vampire, immortality usually isn’t much fun in movies. Lacey is a case in point. Initially, she appears to lead a feral, animal-like existence, but she applies a strict moral code to determine who she will kill and feed off. Lacey will find plenty of evil-doers who deserve to have their marrow consumed in Audrey Cummings’ She Never Died, the companion-sequel to Jason Krawczyk’s He Never Died, scripted by Krawczyk himself, which screens at this year’s Blood in the Snow Film Festival.

Blessed with immortality and Wolverine-like healing powers, “Lacey” subsists on bone marrow rather than blood. That is why she often removes the fingers of her prey (you could call it finger-food). Of course, such distinctive corpses are likely to draw attention, but in this mid-sized post-industrial Midwest burg, only Charlie Godfrey, a disillusioned but fundamentally decent detective on the verge of retirement, does any serious police work. 

Lacey’s bodies definitely catch his interest, but he is even more concerned about the Remender Siblings’ human trafficking and sicko dark web video enterprise. Lacey has been staking out the Remenders too, so when she crosses paths with Godfrey, he suggests an unlikely alliance.

She Never Died is brutally violent, but enormously effective. There is nothing left to the imagination regarding what goes on inside these warehouse dungeons, so shrinking violets should consider themselves warned. However, the film has a real sense of morality and offers up some serious cathartic payback. Weirdly, it also opens a huge window into the wider mythology of the world in the final minutes, teasing some cosmic cataclysms to come in potential future films.

Regardless, Olunike Adeliyi is not mucking about as Lacey. If you want to see a female-led genre film, She Never Died puts Charlie’s Angels (any of them) to ignoble, humiliated shame. In fact, Meredith Remender is a much more formidable villain than her knuckle-headed brother Terrance. Yet, the irony is most of Lacey’s audience are likely to be red meat-gnawing men.

The Divine Move 2: The Wrathful

Go might look like a board game, but it can be a full-contact sport in Korea. It has a lot to do with the wagering. Sometimes the stakes are even life and death. That suits a mysterious young Go prodigy just fine. He intends to serve up some revenge as cold and hard as Go stones in Lee Khan’s “spin-off” sequel, The Divine Move 2: The Wrathful, which opens this Friday in New York.

Young Gui-su showed an early aptitude for Go and an early thirst for vengeance after Go master Hwang Duk-yong takes advantage of his naïve older sister, driving her to suicide. All alone in the world, Gui-su has the mostly good fortune to fall in with Hur Il-do, a Go teacher and hustler, somewhat like Fast Eddie Felsen in The Color of Money. They start making the rounds, but the thuggish Busan Weed turns out to be a very poor loser. That leads to more grievances for Gui-su to settle later.

After several years of secluded study, the twentysomething Gui-su emerges for his payback. The main event will be Hwang, but Gui-su will warm up on everyone who ever wronged Hur. He will also make a little money in the process with the help of “Mr. Turd,” his bankroller and comic relief. Meanwhile, the mysterious “Loner” stalks Gui-su, hoping to extract his own vengeance for sins Gui-su committed with Hur.

In a way, The Divine Move franchise is like the Tazza series for the game of Go, right down to the supposedly-in-the-same-world-but-really-only-thematically-related sequels. The Wrathful is also like the latest Tazza film in that it is surprisingly violent and hard-bitten, especially for a film revolving around such a cerebral game. Regardless, it is as gripping as a shark bite and nearly as lethal.