New Releases for the Week of September 18, 2020

THE NEST

(IFC) Jude Law, Carrie Coon, Anne Reid, Charlie Shotwell, Adeel Akhtar, Tattiawna Jones, Oona Roche, Michael Culkin, James Nelson-Joyce. Directed by Sean Durkin

An English entrepreneur in the 1980s who has found some success in the United States, moves his family back home to a country manor. His American wife is unconvinced this is the right move, but her husband is adamant. Soon, things begin to turn dark and twisted as the family begins to unravel.

See the trailer here
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Genre: Thriller
Now Playing: Enzian Theater
Rating: R (for some sexuality/nudity, language throughout and teen partying)

A Chef’s Voyage

(First Run) David Kinch, Jean-André Charial, Glenn Viel, Alain Soliveres. An American chef with a three-Michelin starred restaurant and his team head to France to work with three extraordinary chefs in their restaurants in Provence, Paris and Marseilles.

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Genre: Documentary
Now Playing: Enzian On-Demand
Rating: NR

Alone

(Magnet) Jules Wilcox, Marc Menchaca, Anthony Heald, Jonathan Rosenthal. A widow is captured by a serial killer and kept in his cabin in the Pacific Northwest. When she escapes, a deadly hunt through the dense forest ensues.

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For more on the movie this is the website  
Genre: Horror
Now Playing: Fashion Square Premiere Cinema
Rating: R (for violent content and language)

Blackbird

(Screen Media) Kate Winslet, Susan Sarandon, Mia Wasikowska, Sam Neill. A family gathers at the beach house of an aging couple to say goodbye to their mother, who is going to commit suicide as her battle with ALS is hitting its final stages. However, unresolved issues between her daughters threaten to turn her final goodbye into a free-for-all.

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For more on the movie this is the website  
Genre: Drama
Now Playing: Cinematique Theater Daytona Beach
Rating: R (for brief sexual material, some drug use and language)

Infidel

(Cloudburst/American Cinema International) Jim Caviezel, Claudia Karvan, Hal Ozsan, Stello Savante. After her husband is kidnapped and put on trial for espionage in Iran, a desperate woman goes to every length she can to save him.

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For more on the movie this is the website  
Genre: Thriller
Now Playing: Wide Release
Rating: R (for violence and language)

No Escape

(Vertical) Keegan Allen, Holland Roden, Denzel Whitaker, Ronen Rubenstein. A social media influencer and his friends enter a personalized escape room in Moscow, only to realize that the fun and games may turn out to be deadly for them.

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For more on the movie this is the website  
Genre: Horror
Now Playing: Enzian On-Demand
Rating: R (for pervasive language, bloody violence, grisly images, brief drug use and some graphic nudity)

Red, White and Wasted

(Dark Star) Sam B. Jones, Andrei Bowden Schwartz. A group of mudding enthusiasts (the sport of driving four-wheel drive vehicles through muddy terrain) from Orlando find themselves at loose ends when their favorite venue is bought by a private investor. However, as good country folk do, they refuse to give up without a fight.

See the trailer here
For more on the movie this is the website  
Genre: Documentary
Now Playing: Enzian On-Demand
Rating: NR

SCHEDULED FOR REVIEW:

Blackbird

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No Escape

Owen Wilson and Lake Bell carry the movie.

(2015) Action (Weinstein) Owen Wilson, Lake Bell, Pierce Brosnan, Sahajak Boonthanakit, Claire Geare, Sterling Jenns, Stacy Chbosky, Tanapol Chuksrida, Jon Goldney, Nophand Boonyai, Thanawut Kasro, Kanaprat Phintiang, Bonnie Jo Hutchison, Danai Tung Thiengtham, Vuthichard Photphurin, Manfred Iig, Bonnie Zellerbach, Karen Gemma Dodgson. Directed by John Erick Dowdle

It is one thing to be in a situation in which you are in mortal danger. It is quite another when your entire family is in that same situation with you. The entire dynamic is changed; you may fight for your own life but when it comes to your family…

Jack Dwyer (Wilson) is an engineer whose business has gone belly up. Forced to take a job to take care of his family, he goes to work for the multinational Cardiff Corporation, going to a Southeastern Asia country to work on cleaning up their water supply. He is going to be there for some time, so he brings his family – wife Annie (Bell), daughters Lucy (Jenns) and Beeze (Geare). The girls are a bit on the spoiled side – Lucy, a pre-teen, acts out constantly while the younger Beeze has a maniacal attachment to a stuffed teddy bear named Bob.

The family befriends scruffy Hammond (Brosnan), a British ex-pat, on the flight over and when the car that Cardiff was supposed to send around to fetch them doesn’t arrive, Hammond and his local buddy Kenny Rogers (Boonthanakit), who runs a taxi service and is freakishly devoted to the singer in question that everyone knows him by that name, offers to give the exhausted family a lift to the hotel. Once there, the phones, television and internet aren’t working. Jack heads down to the concierge (Boonyai) to complain about the situation and ends up spending some time with the womanizing drunken Hammond at the bar.

What Jack doesn’t know is that the country’s prime minister (Photphurin) has been assassinated and a rebel coup has begun. The rebels, easily identified by their red bandannas, are virulently anti-foreigner and what Jack also doesn’t know is that they’re particularly pissed off at his company who have taken over their country’s water supply.

While out to fetch a newspaper the next morning, Jack runs smack into a confrontation between rebels and riot police and is caught in the middle. As he runs back to the hotel, he soon finds to his dismay that the rebels not only have numerical superiority but the upper hand; they are well-armed and are completely overrunning government forces. They are also executing foreigners on sight. Jack, realizing the situation is out of hand, goes to collect his family including the willful Lucy who has gone AWOL to the hotel swimming pool. Once he collects his family, he takes them on the advice of Hammond to the hotel roof, which turns out to be not as safe as he would have thought when a rescue helicopter turns out to be anything but. In order to escape he is forced to throw his screaming reluctant children to the roof of an adjacent office building and hide them there after the inhabitants are butchered by the rebels. They try to head for the American embassy, but even though it is only a few blocks away it might as well be on the moon, considering how dangerous the streets are.

Dowdle, who co-wrote the movie with his brother Drew, has done some fairly high-profile genre work in the past, including Devil, Quarantine and As Above, So Below. This is less a genre film and more of an action thriller, broken down to almost a primal level – a man trying to protect his family, doesn’t get any more primal than that.

Wilson and Bell aren’t the first choices I’d make to cast an action movie, but they do credible jobs here, even if Bell is given little to do but be menaced by rebels and to try and calm down her hysterical children. What I like about the roles is that neither Wilson or Bell are ex-Navy SEALs or kickboxing champions. They are ordinary people thrust into an extraordinary situation and from time to time they freak out, understandably.

The kids though are another matter. They are whiny, bratty and basically are there to put the entire family in jeopardy at every inopportune moment. I don’t mind that happening from time to time in the movie but it seemed like every ten or fifteen minutes in a kid would cry, disobey their parents or snivel to the point where they got noticed by angry rebels. I know the kids are part of the motivation for Jack but they needed to be less involved in the action.

Some have criticized the film for making the rebels faceless, but that’s an invalid criticism. Of course the rebels are going to be mostly faceless; this is an action movie. At one point, Hammond comments that the rebels are trying to protect his family just as Jack is. The real villain here is the faceless corporation; nobody complained that the executives of Cardiff were faceless. Political correctness, once again taken to ridiculous lengths.

The action sequences are the film’s highlights; Dowdle directs these deftly, making sure the tension is extremely high throughout. Those action fans who love that kind of thing should flock to this movie; Die Hard it isn’t but it does action right, and that’s not nearly as easy as it sounds., The cinematography isn’t bad, although the urban scenes, mostly filmed in Thailand, are a little bit scruffy. It’s the night filming which is when most of the movie takes place that looks more thrilling.

This is nice entertainment, transitioning from the late summer doldrums into the early fall doldrums and let’s face it, is about as good a movie as we’re going to get until November for the most part. There are a few plot points here that are a bit dicey but if you are willing to overlook them, this is a fairly fun action thriller that does exactly what an action thriller is supposed to do.

REASONS TO GO: Pretty harrowing in places. Wilson, Bell and Brosnan are always worth seeing.
REASONS TO STAY: The kids are far too annoying. Here’s to almost.
FAMILY VALUES: Plenty of violence (some of it graphic) and foul language.
TRIVIAL PURSUIT: Michelle Monahan was originally cast as Annie Dwyer but when production was delayed, she got pregnant and was forced to drop out of the role. Lake Bell took over the role.
CRITICAL MASS: As of 9/7/15: Rotten Tomatoes: 42% positive reviews. Metacritic: 38/100.
COMPARISON SHOPPING: Southern Comfort
FINAL RATING: 6/10
NEXT: Can’t Stand Losing You: Surviving The Police

New Releases for the Week of August 28, 2015

WE ARE YOUR FRIENDS

(Warner Brothers) Zac Efron, Wes Bentley, Emily Ratajkowski, Jonny Weston, Shiloh Fernandez, Alex Shaffer, Jon Bernthal, Alicia Coppola. Directed by Max Joseph

An ambitious Valley Boy dreams of making it out of the suburban Hell of the San Fernando Valley and becoming a world class DJ. An older, damaged DJ takes the young man under his wing, showing him a world of decadent Hollywood parties and star-studded night clubs. Things get complicated when the younger man falls for his mentor’s much younger girlfriend, and his friends begin to see the changes in him. With everything he ever cared about unraveling in the face of achieving his dream, he has to choose between loyalty and ambition.

See the trailer, clips and a featurette here.
For more on the movie this is the website.
Release Formats: Standard (opens Thursday)
Genre: Drama/Musical
Now Playing: Wide Release
Rating: R (for language throughout, drug use, sexual content and some nudity)

The Diary of a Teenage Girl

(Sony Classics) Bel Powley, Kristen Wiig, Alexander Skarsgard, Christopher Meloni. Amid the transition from counterculture to Me Generation in San Francisco in the mid-70s, a young girl experiences a sexual awakening and a coming of age as she develops an intimate relationship with her hard-partying mother’s boyfriend. Based on the highly acclaimed, slightly disturbing, sometimes shockingly graphic and beautifully poignant graphic novel by Phoebe Gloeckner.

See the trailer, clips and an interview here.
For more on the movie this is the website.
Release Formats: Standard
Genre: Dramedy
Now Playing: AMC Downtown Disney, Epic Theaters of Clermont, Regal Oviedo Marketplace, Regal Pointe Orlando, Regal Waterford Lakes, Regal Winter Park Village, UA Seminole Towne Center
Rating: R  (for strong sexual content including dialogue, graphic nudity, drug use, language and drinking – all involving teens)

Frank the Bastard

(Paladin) Rachel Miner, Andy Comeau, Chris Sarandon, William Sadler. A young woman, who fled her small Maine home town with her father after the mysterious death of her mother, has lived in New York City ever since. Now, she is returning to find out what happened so long ago, what caused her father to flee and what really happened to her mother. Through her nosing into events of the past she discovers indelible links to events of the present, links that make certain people uncomfortable and put this young woman into mortal jeopardy.

See the trailer here.
For more on the movie this is the website.
Release Formats: Standard
Genre: Thriller
Now Playing: Fashion Square Premiere Cinema
Rating: NR

No Escape

(Weinstein) Owen Wilson, Lake Bell, Pierce Brosnan, Thanawut Kasro. An American businessman relocates his family to Southeast Asia, despite the reluctance of his children. At first, things seem pretty idyllic there and his family eventually relaxes and begin to enjoy life in their new home. However, a violent political uprising throws the country into turmoil and the lives of foreigners are especially at risk. He must get his family to the American embassy to find a safe refuge but first he must travel across a war-torn city to do it.

See the trailer, clips, interviews and B-roll video here.
For more on the movie this is the website.
Release Formats: Standard (opened Wednesday)
Genre: Action
Now Playing: Wide Release
Rating: R (for strong violence throughout, and for language)

Unsullied

(Dreamline) Rusty Joiner, Murray Gray, James Gaudioso, Erin Boyes. A beautiful young African-American track star is abducted by a pair of sociopaths. From there it is a game of cat and mouse to see if she can get away and outrun her two tormentors.

See the trailer here.
For more on the movie this is the website.
Release Formats: Standard
Genre: Thriller
Now Playing: Regal Winter Park Village
Rating: R (for violence including a rape, language and brief drug use)

War Room

(Tri-Star) Priscilla C. Shirer, T.C. Stallings, Karen Abercrombie, Beth Moore. On the surface, the Jordan family is happy with a middle class family with great jobs, a beautiful daughter, a dream home. However appearances can be deceiving; in reality the marriage is a war zone with mother and father fighting tooth and nail and the daughter is the collateral damage. With the aid of an older, wiser woman, the two discover the power of prayer can cure about anything, no matter how impossible it seems.

See the trailer, clips and a featurette here.
For more on the movie this is the website.
Release Formats: Standard (opens Thursday)
Genre: Faith-Based Drama
Now Playing: Wide Release
Rating: PG (for thematic elements throughout)