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      The Origin of Evil review – classy comedy-thriller with shades of Succession and Knives Out

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Yesterday - 13:00 · 1 minute

    Call My Agent’s Laure Calamy stars as a scheming factory worker with designs on a mega-rich fortune in this classy feast of backstabbing, double cross and venal greed

    Succession meets Knives Out in this comedy-thriller directed by Sébastien Marnier in what is an extremely French comic style: tongue-in-cheek, a little frothy, tiptoeing close to camp. It stars Call My Agent’s brilliant Laure Calamy as a scheming factory worker who wheedles her way into a dysfunctional mega-rich family. Calamy is often cast as likable, relatable women but here she does a very convincing Isabelle Huppert (circa her Claude Chabrol years); there’s something a bit off about her character from the start, possibly even unhinged.

    Calamy is Stéphane – at least that’s what she calls herself. Bored of her job on the production line at a fish factory, and broke, out of the blue she calls her father, a self-made hotel and restaurant tycoon. (They’ve never met; she is the result of one of his many affairs.) This is Serge (Jacques Weber), an ageing lion of a man, with a mane of white hair, frail after a stroke but still dangerous. Some of the funniest scenes are at his villa, garishly filled with taxidermy and ghastly furniture. Serge introduces Stéphane to his wife Louise (Dominique Blanc), a frivolous compulsive shopper with a bitchy streak, and their glossy adult daughter George (Doria Tillier), who drops her mask of impassive disdain to shoot Stéphane dagger stares. In the double crossing and backstabbing that follows, no one is blameless. Serge is a monster of Logan Roy proportions. George is trying to seize control of the family business, and have her dad declared incompetent by a judge.

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      Wanted Man review – Dolph Lundgren goes south as racist cop on a mission in Mexico

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 2 days ago - 13:00 · 1 minute

    Lundgren directs and stars, alongside Kelsey Grammer, in an action movie about a Californian cop who clashes with a drug cartel while recovering from injury

    With seven films under his belt since 2000, Dolph Lundgren has quietly amassed a sizeable directorial portfolio of B-movie action flicks but this Mexico border jaunt is less fun than his 2021 buddy flick Castle Falls . It’s also an appalling advert for the Californian police force, with the Dolphster taking the role of Travis Johansen, a racist patrolman caught roughing up the Latino citizenry; an interesting decision by his boss, then, to send him to “fucking Mexico” on a diplomatic mission to repatriate a pair of prostitutes who are potential key witnesses in the murder of some undercover DEA agents.

    Things go south in all senses, and Johansen – laid up with a gut wound – has to convalesce with the family of Rosa (Christina Villa), one of his supposed charges who is now understandably nervous about the ability of America’s finest to protect her. Every time he reaches for his phone to try and contact old running buddy Brynner (a Hawaiian-shirted Kelsey Grammer, giving the impression Wanted Man is an Expendables spin-off), another wave of cartel members comes knocking. But, in another fail for the Five-O, Johansen never seems to twig – or anticipate a plot twist as visible as a tree on a desert skyline.

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      Restore Point review – Czech Blade Runner is a valiant attempt to satisfy cyber-noir cravings

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · 2 days ago - 07:00 · 1 minute

    Robert Hloz’s debut is a competent copy of Hollywood sci-fi, but it’s too heavily indebted to its influences to develop its own philosophy

    Apparently the first sci-fi film from the Czech Republic in 40 years, this so-called Czech Blade Runner is actually equally indebted to Minority Report (whose domestic futurism continues to be quietly influential). Like Tom Cruise’s character in Steven Spielberg’s film, detective Em Trochinowska (Andrea Mohylová) is a cop prone to brooding over clips of an absent loved one. Her concert pianist husband was murdered by members of the Rivers of Life terrorist group, who are outraged by the nature-flouting “restoration” technology that allows any recently snuffed person to be resurrected.

    Bad news for those who don’t clear out their inboxes regularly: the technology only works if you have bothered to upload your memories within the last 48 hours. Where Minority Report riffed on the notion of pre-crime, this is a post-crime insurance in a Mitteleuropean dystopia awash in violence. Trochinowska is called to investigate a double “absolute murder” of a couple who have been oddly remiss about backing up: restoration scientist David Kurlstat (Matěj Hádek) and his wife. Resident tech demigod Rohan (Karel Dobrý), who is head of the institute that invented it all and mindful of an upcoming privatisation, is unhelpful. So a strong whiff of corruption is emanating from those glittering brutalist towers.

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      Drive-Away Dolls review – Ethan Coen’s lesbian crime caper gets stuck in first gear

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Sunday, 17 March - 12:00 · 1 minute

    This gleefully trashy road movie from Coen, co-written with wife Tricia Cooke, veers too close to puerile for comfort

    Late 90s and early 00s cinema wasn’t all bad, but it was responsible for a crop of particularly dismal crime flicks. Including pictures such as the now notorious Rancid Aluminium , these were painfully contrived and agonisingly ironic winks to camera, made by film-makers who watched the movies of Tarantino and the Coen brothers and figured, how hard can it be? So it’s disappointing that Ethan Coen’s solo directorial outing (his brother Joel having already ventured out alone with the sombre, stylised The Tragedy of Macbeth ) is a 90s throwback that feels closer in tone and quality to his imitators than it does to the Coens’ original work, even at their most flippant and featherlight.

    An enthusiastically trashy lesbian road movie that Coen co-wrote and collaborated on extensively with his wife, Tricia Cooke, Drive-Away Dolls stars Margaret Qualley as free spirit Jamie, and Geraldine Viswanathan as her uptight friend Marian. The pair embark on a spontaneous road trip in a Dodge Aries that needs to be delivered to Tallahassee. But there’s something unsavoury hidden in the vehicle, and a couple of inept criminals on their tail. The film has a boisterous energy, but it’s puerile, phoney and frequently rather cringe.

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      Fast Charlie review – Pierce Brosnan in 90s-style thriller, complete with exploding doughnut

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Thursday, 14 March - 16:31 · 1 minute

    This brisk romp doesn’t outstay its welcome, with Brosnan as a hitman and Godfather star James Caan in his last screen appearance

    Back in the early 90s, the emergence of Quentin Tarantino sparked a mini-boom in crime thrillers, some good (Natural Born Killers), some less so (The Boondock Saints). Based on the novel Gun Monkeys, this new Pierce Brosnan vehicle is a throwback to that era in almost every way possible – and that’s largely at the root of what’s both good and bad about it.

    We open with a flash-forward to a motor-vehicle graveyard in Florida where Brosnan, AKA hitman Charlie Swift, is hanging about looking shifty. An unseen antagonist orders him to put his hands in the air and take his shirt off. He complies, and then voiceover from Brosnan essentially follows the format of the record scratch meme (that intones “Yep, that’s me. You’re probably wondering how I got into this situation …”). You’ll spend the next 90 minutes finding out, and for the most part that’s a brisk and painless journey that romps merrily along, powered by its own cliches and memories of better movies, in a way that’s more comfortingly familiar than wearisome.

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      Wicked Little Letters review – a depressing, obvious, clunky waste of a stellar cast

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Thursday, 22 February - 07:00

    Any wider comment on the strange, sad nature of the scandal this film is based on is sidestepped in favour of broad laughs and superficiality

    Unconvincing, unfunny and bafflingly heavy-handed, this shrill non-comedy fails to say anything entertaining or historically insightful about the true story of the Littlehampton poison-pen scandal of 1923 . It’s a terrible waste of a stellar cast, headed by Olivia Colman, although the simple aggregation of everyone’s acting talent does raise the film a bit.

    Colman plays Edith Swan, a prim-and-proper spinster in the curtain-twitching world of 1920s Littlehampton, always congratulating herself on her Christian rectitude; she lives with grumpy elderly dad (Timothy Spall) and glowering mum (Gemma Jones). Edith has a problem neighbour with whom she’s fallen out after initial friendship: this is Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley), a woman from Ireland who cheerfully likes drinking and swearing. So when Edith starts getting bizarre, obscene unsigned letters through the letterbox – and then more and more people start getting them, too – Rose is in the frame, the outsider that all these xenophobes dislike anyway. But policewoman Gladys Moss (Anjana Vasan) thinks there’s more to it.

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      Drive-Away Dolls review – Ethan Coen sets off in a wild new direction

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Wednesday, 21 February - 18:00

    The writer-director splits from his brother and joins wife Tricia Cooke for a bawdy and brilliant road trip caper about two lesbian friends caught up in crime

    During their time as a film-making team, Joel and Ethan Coen developed a reputation for uncanny synchronization, said by their collaborators to always give the same answer to any question even if asked separately. The brothers came to be called “the two-headed director”, but their respective features apart suggest a surgical detachment less than a single brain split in twain.

    A study in contrasts, the works produced during their brief hiatus – they’re rumored to already be back together, hard at work on their first foray into the horror genre – have given the impression of a single sensibility divided up evenly between them. Joel’s austere, atmospheric take on Macbeth ridded itself of all levity along with its color, and now, Ethan’s road comedy Drive-Away Dolls barrels into their shared oeuvre as its goofiest, loosest entry. Joel’s solo project mined the history of American experimental theater for a bold, charcoal-sketched revision of the Bard’s canon; Ethan’s sexploitation send-up revolves around a handful of pilfered dildos.

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      American Star review – Ian McShane is a killer with time on his hands in the Canaries

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Wednesday, 21 February - 07:00

    The feline octogenarian brings brooding star power and presence to Fuerteventura-set thriller

    As fans of highbrow cult TV (Deadwood), schlock but addictive TV (Lovejoy), and connoisseurs of great character portrayal will attest, Ian McShane is a superb actor, one of his generation’s finest. Now 81 but a silver fox who moves with feline fluidity, and in possession of a fortune-generating rumble of a voice, he’s seldom out of work for long. But it’s rare to see him cast in a leading role; he’s usually the heavy, the antagonist, the sly puppeteer who’s been pulling the strings all along.

    American Star is therefore a bit of a treat because it gives McShane fans the maximum amount of McShane time, casting him as yet another heavy but one with something of a soul. (He takes a producer credit here, so maybe that’s what it took to put him in the centre of the story for a change.)

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      The Moon Thieves review – absurd boyband heist movie is fiendishly watchable

      news.movim.eu / TheGuardian · Tuesday, 20 February - 09:00

    Three members of Hong Kong Cantopop band Mirror feature in this fiendishly watchable crime caper which steals much from Ocean’s Eleven and, oddly, ASMR videos

    Here is a very silly and yet fiendishly watchable heist thriller that features three members – Edan Lui, Anson Lo and Keung To – of the Hong Kong Cantopop boyband Mirror in major roles. That’s worth knowing not because they break into song at any point, but because that explains the film’s prepackaged feel and why at least one of the actors, Keung To, feels so weirdly miscast as a ruthless gangster. But as with much of the plot mechanics in this film, it’s best not to think too much and just roll with punches.

    The obscure objects of desire here are vintage watches: specifically a trio of timepieces owned at one point by Pablo Picasso and a fourth watch alleged to have been the first watch on the moon, worn by Buzz Aldrin. (Turns out Neil Armstrong left his watch on the spacecraft when he took those first small steps.)

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