thriller

on TV: ASHES AND DIAMONDS: a killer wants to stop

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Photo caption: Zbigniew Cybulski in ASHES AND DIAMONDS

Coming up November 15 on Turner Classic Movies, a masterful director and his charismatic star ignite the war-end thriller Ashes and Diamonds, set amidst war-end treachery. It’s one of my Overlooked Noir.

It’s the end of WW II and the Red Army has almost completely liberated Poland from the Nazis. The future governance of Poland is now up in the air, and the Polish resistance can now stop killing Germans and start wrestling for control. Maciek (Zbigniew Cybulski) is a young but experienced soldier in the Resistance. His commanders assign him to assassinate a communist leader.

Maciek is very good at targeted killing, but he’s weary of it. As he wants out, he finds love. But his commander is insisting on this one last hit.

This is Zbigniew Cybulski’s movie. Often compared to James Dean, Cybulski emanates electricity and unpredictability, Unusual for a leading man, he often wore glasses in his screen roles. He had only been screen acting for four years when he made Ashes and Diamonds. Cybulski died nine years later when hit by a train at age forty,

Zbigniew Cybulski in ASHES AND DIAMONDS

Andrzej Wajda fills the movie with striking visuals, such as viewing Maciek’s love interest, the waitress Krystyna (Ewa Krzyzewska), alone amidst the detritus of last night’s party, through billows of cigarette smoke. Wajda’s triumphant signature is, literally, fireworks at the climax; the juxtaposition of the celebratory fireworks with Maciek’s emotional crisis is unforgettable.

Ewa Krzyzewska in ASHES AND DIAMONDS

Wajda adapted a famous 1948 Polish novel into this 1958 movie. In the adaptation, the filmmaker changed the emphasis from one character to another.

Ashes and Diamonds was the third feature for Andrzej Wajda, who became a seminal Polish filmmaker and received an honorary Oscar. US audiences may remember his 1983 art house hit Danton with Gerard Depardieu.

Ashes and Diamonds can be streamed from Amazon and AppleTV. It was featured at the 2020 Noir City film festival.

Zbigniew Cybulski in ASHES AND DIAMONDS

THE GRAY MAN: an action movie highlight show

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Ryan Gosling in THE GRAY MAN. Courtesy of Netflix.

Ryan Gosling stars in the kickoff of a Netflix espionage thriller franchise, in The Gray Man. It’s a top rate action film directed by the Russo brothers, Anthony and Joe (Arrested Development, The Avengers and Captain America) .

Gosling plays a highly skilled covert operative with a back story thatreally doesn’t matter – just think of him as a renegade American James Bond.

There are six, count ’em, SIX, amazing action set pieces , at least as good as in any James Bond film. The effect is like watching an all-highlight show like ESPN’s Sportscenter, where every football clip is an amazing TD catch and every baseball clip is a walk-off home run. No need for much dialogue or character development in between, That’s okay – The Gray Man isn’t trying to be more than it is – glossy entertainment.

There’s a reason that Ryan Gosling is a Movie Star in the best sense of the phrase. He has a special charisma before the camera, and we are driven to watch him and to sympathize with him. Of course, he’s a remarkably versatile actor who can be heroic, stolid, sexy, dangerous, funny, lovelorn and even musical. Gosling has brought whatever was needed to excellent cinema like La La Land, Drive, The Ides of March, The Big Short, The Place Beyond the Pines and Crazy, Stupid Love, and even to crap like Gangster Squad, First Man and the execrable Only God Forgives. Gosling is a perfect choice to lead a franchise like The Gray Man, and his acting chops are not challenged here.

Netflix’s bankroll provides the Russos with an impressive cast. Chris Evans is a worthy villain to match up with Gosling, and Ana de Armas is a glamorous sidekick. The great Alfre Woodard, along with Billy Bob Thornton, show up in key roles. There’s a very brief flashback to a rotten father figure, close to a non-speaking part, and the Russos were able to utilize the always memorable Shea Whigham in this tiny part.

The supporting roles of Jessica Henwick (Nymeria Sand in Game of Thrones) and Tamil superstar Dhanush set them up for key roles in future chapters of the Gray Man franchise.

The Gray Man streams on Netflix.

DON’T WORRY, DARLING: misfire (but with Huell Howser’s cool house)

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Don't Worry Darling (2022) - IMDb
Photo caption: Florence Pugh and Harry Styles in DON’T WORRY, DARLING. Courtesy of Warner Brothers.

Don’t Worry, Darling is a paranoid thriller that, most unfortunately, stops thrilling halfway through.  We’re in the late 1950s, and Alice (Florence Pugh) is a housewife married to Jack (pop star Harry Styles), an engineer.  They live in a company town, an idyllic, color-saturated suburb improbably planted in the remotest corner of the Mojave Desert.  All the men work on a highly secret R&D project, and no one is to leave the company’s property, “where it’s safe.”

Everyone is going full Mad Men with cocktails and cigarettes, Alice and Jack are gloriously oversexed, and Don’t Worry, Darling sports a delightful period soundtrack.  It’s a much better Stepford Wives, only really hedonistic.  So far, so good.  

But Alice sees some things that are disturbing.  Is she hallucinating?  Or has she stumbled upon the company’s evil secret? During this Am I Going Crazy part of the movie, I started to think that this is taking way too long.  And then it got less and less interesting.

Part of the problem is heavy-handedness, with an unnecessarily overt Order vs Chaos message.  Poor Alice even utters the words, “you’re gaslighting me.” In case we don’t get it, I guess.
And there are (I think two) brief scenes with Alice and Jack at their same ages, but set in the present, where they are having a lot less fun.  These bits are confusing and superfluous.
None of this is the fault of Pugh or Styles.  It’s all in the increasingly less gripping and less coherent story.

Don’t Worry, Darling especially disappointed me because director Olivia Wilde and screenwriter Kate Silberman had previously collaborated on the smart and sweet Booksmart.

Olivia Wilde the actress is very good as the pack leader who wrangles the other wives.  Nick Kroll shines as her husband, a good timer who has drunk the Kool-Aid.  I always love seeing Chris Pine, and he’s predictably good here as the corporate leader admired by the other men to a cult-like degree.  Timothy Simons (Veep) is perfect as the company physician/enforcer.

My friend Keith that he was distracted from the story when he recognized the building that stands in for the evil corporation’s secret headquarters.  It turns out that it is a home in Twentynine Palms, California, owned by the late Huell Howser, the relentlessly affable host of California Gold, where each week he would discover another a-MAZ-ing roadside attraction.

All I’ll say about the film’s off-screen controversy is that no one would raise much fuss about a male movie director dating a much  younger female star, which has been going on since the birth of cinema.

Don’t Worry, Darling is in theaters.

WHAT WE DO NEXT: searing performances, as the dominoes fall

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Corey Stoll in WHAT WE DO NEXT. Courtesy of Magano Movies and Media.

Writer-director Stephen Belber’s taut drama What We Do Next featured the best acting ensemble at Cinequest, with searing performances by Karen Pittman, Michelle Veintimilla and Corey Stoll.

I was familiar with Corey Stoll’s work since his turns in House of Cards and Homeland, but Karen Pittman (The Morning Show, Yellowstone) and Michelle Veintimilla (Seven Seconds, Gotham) were revelations.

The story unfolds in seven segments over a a span of years. It opens with Sandy (Pittman) compassionately counseling a teenage Elsa (Veintimilla) to survive abuse from Elsa’s father. Years later, the lawyer Paul (Stoll) reconnects with Sandy, now a rising NYC politician; the two game out how an innocent miscalculation years before could erupt into a career-killing political scandal today. Each of the characters becomes more entangled by the choices of the others, and the dominoes fall.

What We Do Next explores the difficulty that those traumatized and ill-equipped by upbringing have navigating the legal system and making constructive choices.

I am not unfamiliar with political crisis management, and most segments of the story rang true.

I attended What We Do Next’s world premiere at Cinequest, with Stephen Berber in attendance. After four days rehearsal in the producer’s backyard, What We Do Next was shot in six days – in a COVID bubble in Louisville. I’ll let you know when What We Do Next is released theatrically or on demand.

THE OUTFIT: no one is just what they seem to be

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Photo caption: Mark Rylance in THE OUTFIT. Courtesy of Focus Features.

The Outfit is a satisfying period crime thriller with some big surprises. We’re in 1956 Chicago, and the accomplished actor Mark Rylance plays a very proper British maker of bespoke men’s suits, who allows local gangsters to have a secret drop box in the back of his modest shop. He and his assistant (Zoey Deutch), a young woman from the neighborhood, ask no questions.

Astonishingly polite, he does insist that everyone knows that he has been a Savile Row cutter, the more skilled artisan who cuts the fabric for men’s suits, not a tailor, who sews on the buttons.

The gangsters who own the drop box, however, come under a triple threat – the FBI, a competing mob and an inside rat. There’s an incriminating audiotape out there somewhere, which becomes the Macguffin in this story. Circumstances converge to trap our hero and his young assistant in the shop, where murderous gangsters are certain to do them in.

But, no one is just what they seem to be, and major plot twists tumble forth.

This is the directing debut for co-writer Graham Moore, who won a screenwriting Oscar for The Imitation Game, which starred Benedict Cumberbatch as mathematical genius Kenneth Turing. This time, Moore sets the entire film, every single shot, inside the same interior location; that makes for economic filmmaking, and the claustrophobia heightens the tension.

Mark Rylance is perfect as the very contained and ever civil craftsman plunged. into a desperate situation. Rylance, one of Britain’s seemingly endless stream of superb actors, came to broad attention (and to mine) in 2015 with the Thomas Cromwell historical series Wolf Hall and Bridge of Spies wth Tom Hanks. Since then, he’s starred in Dunkirk, The Trial of the Chicago 7 and Don’t Look Up.

Zoey Deutch is likewise excellent as the saucy shopgirl with her own secrets. She was the best thing in the raucous comedy Zombieland: Double Tap, in which she practically reinvents the Dumb Blonde.

The rest of the cast is good, too. Simon Russell Beale, known for playing erudite Englishmen, gets to play a mid-century Chicago hood.

Don’t confuse this film with the 1974 neo-noir The Outfit with Robert Duvall, Linda Black and Joe Don Baker (which is also good). The 2022 The Outfit is streaming on Amazon, AppleTV, Vudu, YouTube and redbox.

on TV: ASHES AND DIAMONDS: a killer wants to stop

by
Photo caption: Zbigniew Cybulski in ASHES AND DIAMONDS

Coming up tomorrow night on Turner Classic Movies, a masterful director and his charismatic star ignite the war-end thriller Ashes and Diamonds, set amidst war-end treachery. It’s one of my Overlooked Noir.

It’s the end of WW II and the Red Army has almost completely liberated Poland from the Nazis. The future governance of Poland is now up in the air, and the Polish resistance can now stop killing Germans and start wrestling for control. Maciek (Zbigniew Cybulski) is a young but experienced soldier in the Resistance. His commanders assign him to assassinate a communist leader.

Maciek is very good at targeted killing, but he’s weary of it. As he wants out, he finds love. But his commander is insisting on this one last hit.

This is Zbigniew Cybulski’s movie. Often compared to James Dean, Cybulski emanates electricity and unpredictability, Unusual for a leading man, he often wore glasses in his screen roles. He had only been screen acting for four years when he made Ashes and Diamonds. Cybulski died nine years later when hit by a train at age forty,

Zbigniew Cybulski in ASHES AND DIAMONDS

Andrzej Wajda fills the movie with striking visuals, such as viewing Maciek’s love interest, the waitress Krystyna (Ewa Krzyzewska), alone amidst the detritus of last night’s party, through billows of cigarette smoke. Wajda’s triumphant signature is, literally, fireworks at the climax; the juxtaposition of the celebratory fireworks with Maciek’s emotional crisis is unforgettable.

Ewa Krzyzewska in ASHES AND DIAMONDS

Wajda adapted a famous 1948 Polish novel into this 1958 movie. In the adaptation, the filmmaker changed the emphasis from one character to another.

Ashes and Diamonds was the third feature for Andrzej Wajda, who became a seminal Polish filmmaker and received an honorary Oscar. US audiences may remember his 1983 art house hit Danton with Gerard Depardieu.

Ashes and Diamonds can be streamed from Amazon and AppleTV. It was featured at the 2020 Noir City film festival.

Zbigniew Cybulski in ASHES AND DIAMONDS

MAMA WEED: it’s always fun when Huppert gets outrageous

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Photo caption: Isabelle Huppert in MAMA WEED. Photo courtesy of Music Box Films, ©Photo Credit Guy Ferrandis

In the French comic thriller Mama Weed, Isabelle Huppert plays Patience, a woman beset by money troubles stemming from the care of her aged mother.  She embraces an increasingly bizarre and risky solution.  Mama Weed starts out droll and blossoms into madcap.

Patience, having been born in colonial Algeria, is fluent in Arabic.  Her day job is as the translator for a French police unit that wiretaps Arabic-speaking drug dealers.  She learns that the cop are about to take down the son of her mom’s beloved caregiver, and she tips the kid off. That results in her gaining the possession of a ton and a half of somebody else’s hashish.  Patience disguises herself, enlists some dimwitted street dealers and seeks to monetize her haul.   Did I mention that she is dating her boss on the Narc Squad?

Her own employers are now throwing all their resources toward catching this mysterious new dealer, whom they don’t know is sitting in their midst.  The original owners of the hash, a murderous lot, are also hunting her down.

She’s more and more at risk, but the story gets commensurately funnier.  She adopts a retired drug-detecting police dog.  One of her client drug dealers is ravaged by the Munchies in a kabob shop.   Much of the humor is centered on the experience of Arabs and Chinese in contemporary France.  One central theme is the cynical principle that money makes world go round.

Mama Weed also recognizes how we value the caregivers who take loving care of our elderly parents; those folks can become more dear than family.

I’ll watch anything with Huppert in it, although it’s hard to top her electrifying performance in Elle. Of course she’s a great actress, having been nominated 16 times for an acting César (France’s Oscar).  But here’s her sweet spot – no other actor can portray such outrageous behavior with such implacability as Huppert.  She is probably the least hysterical actor in cinema. 

Mama Weed opens in theaters in July 16 and on digital on July 23.

ECHOES OF VIOLENCE: turnabout is fair play

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Michaella Russell in ECHOES OF VIOLENCE. Photo courtesy of Cinequest.

In the well-crafted revenge thriller Echoes of Violence, a woman (Michaella Russell) entangles an Everyman (Heston Horwin) to help her escape a series of deadly hit men (the first one is played by Chase Cargill). Loyalties change and lethal new skills (and a novelty weapon) are revealed as her position pivots from defense to offense.

The woman has been done a very evil wrong, and she’s clawed herself to some degree of safety, she launches a campaign of vengeance. Michaella Russell is a compelling enough screen presence to drive the story.

Russell is South African and, in real life, found navigating the US immigration system to be fraught with frustration. That experience (not as horrific as in the movie) inspired Nicholas Wood to make the villain an immigration attorney.

The venerable Frank Oz is effective in a turn as the main villain’s even more monstrous father.

Echoes of Violence is the second feature for writer-director Nicholas Wood and demonstrates that he can bring originality to a genre film.

I screened Echoes of Violence for its world premiere at Cinequest, and it made made my Best of Cinequest 2021; you can stream it during the festival for only $3.99 at Cinequest’s online Cinejoy.

CARVER: will he be undone by a woman? or by his own obsession?

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Victor Rivas (center) in CARVER. World premiere t Cinequest. Photo courtesy of Select Films.

In the neo-noirish Spanish thriller Carver, a guy named Ernesto takes on the alter ego of Carver in the wee hours. Carver strides through Ernesto’s gritty urban neighborhood in dressed in a ridiculous, homemade superhero costume. He has no super powers, but is driven to make things right, vigilante-style. A sexy, stoned woman of uncertain reliability engages his interest. Will she bring him down?

Ernesto (Victor Rivas) seems otherwise a normal, salt-of-the-earth guy . He lives a quotidian existence, monitoring a supermarket’s security cameras by day and presiding over his family’s evening meals. But when his wife and kids are ready for bed (and this is Spain, so it is LATE), he heads out on the streets, to his wife’s increasing displeasure.

Why? He’s not a wannabe hanging judge; he’s pretty merciful to the shoplifters that he catches at his day job. But he has this need to personally patrol the streets to keep kids and single women safe. It’s odd behavior, and he does so with an almost child-like naivete; we wonder what emotional trauma might have damaged him.

At first, as he fails to spot her manipultiveness Victor is no match for the femme fatale Alicia (Mar Del Corral) , who is channelling Brigid O’Shaughnessy. Then he begins to appreciate just how unhunged she may be.

This is the first feature for writer-director Evgeny Yablokov, and this character-driven thriller is an impressive calling card.

There are many film actors named Victor Rivas. The star of Carver is not one of the more famous one, but a mournful-faced stage actor in Madrid, who has played Kierkegaard.

Not everybody will be satisfied with the ending of Carver, but I thought it was perfect.

I screened Carver for its world premiere at Cinequest, and it made my Best of Cinequest 2021. You can stream it during the festival for only $3.99 at Cinequest’s online Cinejoy.

CINEJOY LAST SUNRISE: racing into darkness

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LAST SUNRISE

In the gripping Chinese sci-fi thriller Last Sunrise, we’re in a super-hi tech future, powered almost totally by solar energy – which doesn’t look as blissful as it sounds.  As befits a dystopian story, there’s a disaster, and this one is just about the worst one conceivable – the death of our Sun.

Wang Sun (Zhang Jue) is very serious astronomy nerd with no apparent non-scientific interests.   He doesn’t really know Wu Chen (Zhang Yue), although she lives in a neighboring apartment, and it doesn’t appear that she’s ever thought about anything profound.  When the catastrophe happens, the two are forced on the road together in a race for their lives.

Last Sunrise is real science fiction about a plausible (and inevitable) future occurrence, and it’s about real ideas.  This isn’t just blowing stuff up in space, which too often passes for sci-fi today.

Losing the sun is pretty bad – it gets dark, the temperature is plunging and humans are running out of oxygen.  There may be refuges, but there’s little remaining battery power to fuel people’s escapes.  Of course, it doesn’t take long for social order to break down.  Last Sunrise becomes a ticking bomb thriller as the couple tries to find a refuge in time.

Of course, with no sun lighting the earth and moon, it is very dark and many more stars are visible.  The f/x of the starry skies in Last Sunrise are glorious.

The two leads are appealing,  especially Zhang Yue, whose Wu Chen is revealed more and more as film goes on.

The life-and-death thriller is leavened by witty comments on the consumerist, hyper connected culture (pre-disaster).  There are very funny ongoing references to instant noodles.  And Wang Sun, who is a bit of a hermit, doesn’t appreciate how devoted he is to his digital assistant ILSA (not Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, just ILSA).

This is the first feature, an impressive debut, for director and co-writer Wen Ren.  Cinequest hosted the North American premiere of Last Sunrise, the sci-fi highlight of the festival and is streaming Small Time in CINEJOY through October 14.