The English, on Prime

Our cousins in the UK love to sniff disapprovingly at the violence in America, but these Brits brought plenty of it across the pond. The native population bears the brunt of it, but they won’t spare anyone. Cornelia Locke is the exception. She only wants to kill a very specific fellow countryman, but she might have to cut down many more to get to him in writer-director Hugo Blick’s six-episode The English, which premieres tomorrow on Prime.

Instead of the man who shot her Pa, Locke is looking for the villain responsible for her son’s death, the circumstances of which will remain murky for the time-being. Unfortunately, it does not look like she will get far. Richard Watts, a racist saloon keeper and fellow British countrymen intends to kill Locke for the considerable cash she is carrying and then frame Eli Whipp, a former Pawnee U.S. Army scout he trussed up for being uppity.

Of course, a warrior like Whipp (that would be his assimilated name) is hard to kill. Rather reluctantly at first, he will ally himself with Locke. He can tell she has some bad business to conduct, so he would rather make his way to Nebraska, where he hopes to file a homesteading claim (which he could have legally, since he was no longer affiliated with a tribe). Yet, he and Locke can’t help saving each other from the various predators roaming the plains. David Melmont, the man Locke intends to kill is definitely one of them.

Melmont has generated a lot of bad karma, beyond Locke. He was one of the worst perpetrators of a notorious native massacre that still haunts the town of Hoxem, Wyoming. In fact, the atrocity indirectly poisoned nearly every character, in ways that will not be immediately obvious.

As revisionist westerns go, The English makes Heaven’s Gate look like a John Wayne crowd-pleaser. The tragic sweep of Blick’s story is quite powerful, but its relentless historical social criticism gets to be exhausting. The sins of the past just won’t stay buried, which is how it usually works. The first episode is also a darned good traditional western that could almost entirely standalone.

However, Brock gets bogged down in a number of extended flashbacks that greatly slow the momentum of the next two episodes. Locke and Whipp’s ambiguous relationship is the best thing about The English, but they disappear for long stretches of time.

Both Emily Blunt and Chaske Spencer are terrific as Locke and Whipp. In fact, Whipp is such a richly complex character, whom Spencer does full justice to, The English could make the thesp (and his Morgan Freeman baritone) a household name. As usual, the always dependable Stephen Rea provides understated but memorable support as the decent Sheriff Robert Marshall.

Long Story Short

This is a film Andrew Marvell and Robert Herrick would approve of—or so we assume. Honestly, all anyone ever remembers of them are “time’s winged chariot” and “gather ye rosebuds while ye may.” A procrastinator like Teddy isn’t very good at seizing the day, but he will learn his lesson through drastic fantastical intercession in screenwriter-director-co-star Josh Lawson’s Long Story Short, which releases this Friday on VOD.

When Teddy met Leanne, it was certainly eventful. It took him forever to finally pop the question, but even after he did, he only agreed to set a date because of a mysterious stranger’s meddling. Weirdly, she also gave them a strange, mystical tin can that holds the uncanny and inconvenient power of flashing Teddy forward one year, every ten or fifteen minutes or so.

Much to his alarm, Teddy finds himself skipping over Leanne’s pregnancy, the birth of their daughter, and the increasing tensions threatening their marriage. He also finds himself forgetting their anniversary, over and over. With the help of his ever-loyal best friend Sam, Teddy tries to fix his life and stop the fast-forwarding phenomenon, naturally using Harold Ramis’s Groundhog Day as a model.

Long Story Short is a bit like the dark and downbeat Adam Sandler vehicle Click, but it is funnier, more optimistic, and generally more pleasant to spend time with. Even when things look really bad, Lawson retains the possibility Teddy can still fix things, or at least improve them.

The Ritual: The Horrors of Hiking

The Kungleden or “King’s Trail” is a picturesque but challenging hiking trail in northern Sweden. One character likens it to the Appalachia Trail, but with “more history and less hillbillies.” It turns out, they would probably be profoundly relieved to see a hillbilly on this lads’ outing. Something is stalking these four old college friends and it probably isn’t entirely human in David Bruckner’s The Ritual (trailer here), which premieres this Friday on Netflix.

Luke has not forgiven himself for drunkenly cowering in the back of a convenience store while junkie thugs bludgeoned his friend Robert to death. It is not at all clear whether Phil, Hutch, and Dom have forgiven him either, but he still accompanies them on the hike across the Kungleden Robert always wanted to make. It was supposed to be a tribute to their late friend, but it quickly turns into a serious struggle for survival.

First off, Dom twists or sprains something, which slows them down tremendously. Then Hutch convinces everyone to go off trail by cutting through the forest. Of course, any regular horror movie viewer knows this is a profoundly bad idea, but they do it anyway, despite Luke’s nagging misgivings. Soon they stumble across some Blair Witch-like rune markings—and things quickly go downhill from there.

To a large extent, The Ritual is exactly the film Adam Wingard’s Blair Witch sequel/reboot should have been. It is wickedly atmospheric and overwhelmingly creepy in those woods. Indeed, it is really scary watching the malevolent force toy with the four lads, especially because it is unclear for most of the film whether it is human, animal, or supernatural in nature. Eventually, it takes us somewhere pretty crazy, but because of Bruckner’s solid ground work, we continue to buy in.

Rafe Spall is terrific as the highly defensive and moderately self-loathing Luke. In fact, all four dudes are quite well-delineated, especially alpha dog Hutch, who really keeps us off-balance, thanks to Robert James-Collier, taking a radical departure from Thomas Barrow, the scheming footman in Downton Abbey. As a result, it is easy to believe these bickering and bantering fellows go way back together.

Ritual does not develop any new bump-in-the-night innovations, but it executes its genre elements at a very high level. It is also unusually well-acted for a lost-in-the-woods film. Enthusiastically recommended for horror fans, The Ritual starts streaming this Friday (2/9) on Netflix.

A Brilliant Young Mind: Mathematics & Love

G.H. Hardy said mathematics is a young man’s game and the world still believes him. This should therefore be Nathan Ellis’s time to shine. However, the young math whiz will always feel out of place in the world, even if he lands a spot on the UK International Mathematics Olympiad (IMO) team in Morgan Matthews’ A Brilliant Young Mind (trailer here), which opens this Friday in New York.

Ellis is “on the spectrum” to use the film’s preferred term for autism. He has a savant like talent for recognizing patterns, but human relationships are almost beyond his grasp. His father Michael was the only one the lad ever opened up to. Unfortunately, he was killed well before his time in an auto accident (it kind of looks like it was his fault, if that mitigates the tragedy for you). Regardless, his grieving mother Julie is now stuck raising a temperamental son, who refuses to let her touch him.

Despite the cold shoulder he is oblivious of, Julie Ellis devotes herself to Nathan and his math-based obsessive compulsions. She finally gets a break when Martin Humphreys agrees to tutor Ellis, with an eye towards the IMO. He too once competed at the Olympiad, but was undone by his self-sabotage and the onset of his MS. Somehow, Humphreys maybe gets through to Ellis just a little bit. There is also a burgeoning attraction between him and Julie Ellis, but he does not feel he can pursue it. Eventually, Ellis will join the other prospective UK team members to train in Taipei with other national teams. It is there that he will meet the charming young Zhang Mei from the Chinese team, who will get past even more of his defenses, much to his arrested adolescent confusion.

A Brilliant Young Mind is inspired by Matthews’ IMO documentary Beautiful Young Minds, which explicitly invokes the Oscar winning A Beautiful Mind. Clearly, title originality was not a priority. Regardless, there is plenty of room for another film that takes maths (as they say in Britain) seriously.

Yet, building a film around a confoundedly reserved character like Ellis is a challenge Matthews never fully licks. Asa Butterfield (a.k.a. Ender Wiggins, who arguably might be a tad on the spectrum himself) is actually quite convincing as Ellis, but it is mostly a one-note give-you-nothing performance. That’s a reality the film scrupulously observes, but it makes it feel wildly unbalanced, because everyone around him is so much more interesting.

Jo Yang is wonderfully smart and sensitive as Zhang Mei, somehow developing chemistry with someone who hasn’t any of his own. However, Rafe Spall really lowers the emotional boom during the scenes in which he wrestles with the indignities of his progressively worsening condition. Sally Hawkins also makes you ache for Julie Ellis, to the point that you would forgive her for resorting to a murder-suicide pact. Eddie Marsan also does his thing as the slightly obnoxious, but rather shrewd UK coach.

There are some truly fine performances in ABYM, but James Graham’s screenplay trots out way too many clichés. Let’s be honest, everyone is doing great if we can believe Zhang Mei is interested in Ellis. Adding another jealous UK team member is really pushing it, but it presents an easy way to advance the action. Still, the scenes in Taipei look great and take Ellis out of his comfort zone in a way that we can believe will be healthy for him. Mostly recommended for those who appreciate watching a cast of fine British character actors, A Brilliant Young Mind opens this Friday (9/11) in New York, at the Angelika Film Center.