SYNOPSIS: “Emilia Pérez,” a new Spanish-language musical crime drama starring Zoe Saldaña and Selena Gomez and now playing in theatres, is a subversive story about the search for happiness and affirmation of identity. Zoe Saldaña plays a burned-out Mexico City lawyer tired of defending drug related clients. When she is offered the biggest fee of her life by a fearsome cartel leader, who hires her to facilitate his “retirement” (i.e.: disappearance) and transition into an authentic self, she can’t say no. “What do I risk?” she asks. “Becoming rich, “replies the cartel leader.
CAST: Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez, Adriana Paz, Mark Ivanir, and Édgar Ramírez. Written and directed by Jacques Audiard.
REVIEW: “Emilia Pérez” mixes-and-matches Broadway style production numbers with telenovela melodrama and pulpy crime drama to create a genre-bending, emotionally authentic story about the possibility of erasing the past to create a new future.
A full-blown musical, with three lead performances—Saldaña, Selena Gomez and Karla Sofía Gascón—characters who burst into song and inventive and enthusiastic choreography, the story may seem overstuffed, but director Jacques Audiard’s pedal-the-the-metal staging ensures the various story threads weave together.
Gascón (the first openly trans actor to win a major prize at the Cannes Film Festival when she shared the Best Actress Award with her “Emilia Pérez” co-stars) provides the film’s heart. As Emilia, she is as benevolent as she was vicious when she was a cartel boss. On her path she not only learns to love herself, but also the people around her, and in return, be worthy of love. The scenes with her kids—particularly a song in which her young son, who thinks his dad is dead, remembers his father—are tender and coloured with a bittersweet quality.
If all the action revolves around the title character, it is Saldaña, in a career best performance, who takes command. She has sung and danced on screen before—in “Vivo” and “Center Stage”—but never with this kind of passion, ferocity and fearlessness. Her character Rita is the audience surrogate, a guide through the increasing labyrinthine story.
She is aided by composers Clément Ducol and Camille Dalmais whose score and show tunes provide the emotional underpinnings of scene after scene, but also forward the story with songs that jump styles as often as the movie cycles through genre.
Gomez is given less to do but delivers the film’s strongest vocals and hands in a fine dramatic performance.
Ultimately, Emilia’s journey to happiness begs the question, Can the sins of the past be remedied by the actions of the present? Audiard, who also wrote the script, clearly has ideas on the subject, but no spoilers here. Suffice to say, the film’s dramatic final third keeps with Audiard’s penchant for envelope pushing.
“Emilia Pérez” is quite simply, unlike any other film that will be released this year. Is it a musical, a cartel story, a musical soap opera or a eulogy to those lost to cartel violence? The truth is it is all those things, banged together in a form that feels fresh and exciting.
SYNOPSIS: “Borderlands,” a new sci fi action comedy based on the video game series of the same name, prompted me to write words you don’t often see in the same sentence: Cate Blanchett, action star. The two-time Academy Award winner plays ruthless bounty hunter Lilith in a post-apocalyptic world, hired by the powerful president of a giant corporation (Edgar Ramírez) to track down his kidnapped daughter Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt). The search leads her to the planet of Pandora, a wasteland at the edge of human civilization, home to monsters, “psychos” and a treasure trove of valuable alien technology.
CAST: Cate Blanchett, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, Edgar Ramírez, Ariana Greenblatt, Bobby Lee, Florian Munteanu, Gina Gershon, Jamie Lee Curtis. Directed by Eli Roth.
REVIEW: It’s hard to know exactly who “Borderlands” is aimed at. It shares the bright and bold aesthetic from the video games that inspired it, but the tone is radically different. The lewd and crude video game, rated M for mature audiences, features mature humor, strong language, gushes of blood and decapitation. The PG13 rated movie, directed by Eli Roth, maker of splatter movies like “Cabin Fever” and “Hostel,” smooths down the video game’s rough edges, leaving behind a movie that is neither fan service or something new.
Of course, Blanchett pulls off the action hero role. She’s Cate Blanchett and can do anything. She could play a doorknob and it would be the greatest doorknob in cinema history. It’s just too bad the script requires her to spout recycled action movie platitudes.
Kevin Hart inspires a sense of déjà vu in his portrayal of warrior Roland. He’s likable, and earns some of the film’s few laughs, but his performance here is interchangeable with almost every other character he’s ever played on screen.
Fan favorite CL4P-TP, better known as Claptrap, the chatty, uni-wheeled cycloptic robot featured in the video games, is part of the gang of characters. Voiced by Jack Black, he’s like an annoying little brother who never knows when to shut up, and, who poops bullets.
“Borderlands” aims to be a good time at the movies, but by trying to appeal to a wider audience it betrays the source material, and falls flat.
Richard makes a Painkiller, the perfect cocktail to enjoy while watching the new Emily Blunt, Dwayne Johnson action-adventure “Jungle Book.” It’s the Rock on the rocks! Have a drink and a think about “Jungle Cruise” with me!
“Jungle Cruise,” now playing in theatres and on Disney+ with premium access, is a new adventure story that reaches back into Hollywood history for inspiration. The Emily Blunt and Dwayne Johnson movie is based on the 65-year-old Disneyland riverboat cruise theme park ride, which, in turn, was inspired by the Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn’s antics in the 1951 film “The African Queen.” Add to that a hint of “Indiana Jones” and “Romancing the Stone,” and you have a family friendly film that simultaneously feels brand spankin’ new and old fashioned.
Blunt is the eccentric botanist Dr. Lily Houghton, an English adventurer in search of the Tree of Life, a mythical Amazonian tree whose “Tears of the Moon” blossoms are said to have healing properties. If she can find it and harness its powers, she believes it will be the beginning of a scientific revolution.
Travelling from London to the Amazon, she meets steamboat captain “Skipper” Frank Wolff (Johnson), a fast-talking cynic who reluctantly agrees to take her and her assistant, brother MacGregor (Jack Whitehall), on his ramshackle boat into the heart of darkness. “If you believe in legends,” Frank says, “you should believe in curses too. It’s not a fun vacation.”
On the voyage up river they contend with slithery supernatural beings and the rival Prince Joachim (Jesse Plemons), a Hapsburg aristocrat determined to use brute force to reach the Tree of Life before Houghton, on a dangerous race against time.
Movies based on theme park rides have a checkered history. For every “Pirate of the Caribbean” that becomes a hit and spawns signals, there is a “The Haunted Mansion” or “Tomorrowland” gathering dust in a delete bin somewhere.
“Jungle Cruise” seems likely to avoid that fate. A classic adventure, it is an action-packed journey fuelled by the chemistry between the leads, Blunt and Johnson.
The opening half-hour actually feels like the theme park ride. It takes off like a rocket with one elaborately staged action scene after another. That sets the frenetic pace the movie keeps up for most of the running time, right up to a drawn-out ending that threatens to overstay its welcome, but doesn’t, courtesy of the actors.
Blunt and Johnson have great chemistry, verbally jousting throughout. It’s the “Romancing the Stone” template; they’re an odd couple who roast one another while dodging life-threatening situations and ultimately reveal their true feelings. The comic timing works and adds much charm to the action sequences.
Threatening to steal the show is Plemons, who reveals his rarely used comedic side. As the power-mad Prince Joachim, the actor embraces the cartoon aspects of the character, creating one of the best family-friendly villains in recent memory.
“Jungle Cruise” is much more fun than you might imagine a movie based on a theme park ride will be. There’s some dodgy CGI and a slightly over-inflated running time but it’s an old-fashioned adventure, updated with one character’s coming-out scene (no spoilers here) and a reversal of the theme park’s treatment of its Indigenous characters, that delivers action, humour and chemistry.
Giving over the joystick to the young’uns for a day sounds like a every child’s dream but will the parents enjoy it at all? That’s the question asked by “Yes Day,” a new family comedy now on Netflix, that sees strict parents lighten up and give control to the kids.
Jennifer Garner is Allison, a former free spirit who found Carlos (Edgar Ramirez), her “partner in yes,” while travelling the world. “Yes,” she says, “was the theme of our relationship.” They said yes to bungee jumping, wild adventures and, ultimately, marriage. Burt when the kids came along no became the new yes. Saying no to misbehaving kids is “called parenting,” Allison says. Carlos is a softer touch. “I’m a bad guy all day at work… but when I come home, the kids actually smile when they see me.”
When daughter Katie (Jenna Ortega) writes a haiku for English class describing herself as a caged bird and her mother as a captor, and son Nando (Julian Lerner) makes a video about mom’s oppression—”It’s like 1984 in this house, Mother is always watching!”—they hit on the idea of a Yes day, twenty-four hours where they say yes to everything their kids want. The rules are simple, says yes to everything except murder and anything in the future.
Liberated form the word no and phones and laptops, Allison, Carlos and kids, including six-year-old Ellie (Everly Carganilla), embark on an adventure. Complete with an ice cream eating challenge, water balloons, angry birds (and not the video game kind) and a sopping wet carwash their day is every kid’s wildest fantasy.
But this movie isn’t just about kid chaos. Teachable moments abound and the family is brought together with a new sense of self-confidence and the understanding that sometimes it’s OK for parents to say no.
Based on the children’s book of the same name by Amy Krouse Rosenthal and Tom Lichtenheld, “Yes Day” is kind of a “Liar Liar” for kids. A silly, one joke premise, it’s about as engaging as Dolli Dimples, Chuck E. Cheese’s piano playing hippopotamus. That is to say, fun for a minute but as soon as you begin to question the entertainment value of the hippo, the game is up. Same with “Yes Day.” The action leading up to the inevitable moral is kept afloat by likable, peppy performances from Garner (who also produced) and Ramirez, but nonetheless feels contrived and too safe, even for a kid’s flick.
Matthew McConaughey must have a thing for bullion. “Gold,” a new film directed by Stephen Gaghan, is his third movie after “Sahara” and “Fool’s Gold” to use the search for the elusive ore as a story device. Who can blame him? The bright metal is the stuff of dreams, but remember, all that glitters is not gold.
McConaughey, with a receding hairline and carrying fifty extra pounds, is Kenny Wells a third generation prospector. His grandfather scratched the company out of the side of a Nevada mountain before his father (Craig T. Nelson) turned it into a multimillion-dollar concern. Kenny hasn’t been as lucky. Unable to strike gold—literally and figuratively—he is reduced to setting up office in a bar where the liquor and bad ideas flow freely.
Down to his last dollar, he pawns his wife’s last piece of decent jewellery to buy a plane ticket to Indonesia to meet gold miner Michael Acosta (Edgar Ramírez). Acosta has a lead on a mine located in the jungle but doesn’t have the capital to set up the operation. Kenny jumps in, raises the money and after a slow start they hit a vein. “It’s amazing how gold dust can change everything,” he says, “and for better and for worse the ride had begun.”
The “ride” isn’t just the riches to rags to riches story, but also a wild tale of avarice, hubris and dreams.
McConaughey is digging for gold and chewing the scenery in his latest movie. Wells is a larger-than-life character who leaves behind a larger-than-life mess and McConaughey wastes no opportunity to go big. He grins and grimaces throughout, filling the screen with Wellsian personality.
It’s a good thing too, because the by-the-book script doesn’t offer up much in the way of anything that feels real. It’s “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” without the exploration of human weakness or the conscience. It’s a potboiler on low simmer. It’s the kind of movie where people say things like, “You gotta plan?” while someone else (usually McConaughey) nods knowingly.
“Gold” looks pretty—the scenes in the Indonesian jungle are gorgeous—and does have a nice a nice subtext about the power of belief—What is a prospector? “Someone who believes it is out there.”—but has too much of a boiler plate plot to truly glitter.
The first time most of us noticed Emily Blunt she was “’on-the-edge of sickness thin.” To play Emily Chalton, the prickly first assistant to the editor in The Devil Wears Prada, Blunt dropped pounds from her already slight frame. “It wasn’t like doughnuts were snatched out of my hand,” laughs the 5’ 7½’’ actress, but she was encouraged to slim down. So much so she would occasionally cry from hunger during the shoot. Luckily, though rake thin, she still had the energy to steal the movie from her more seasoned co-stars, Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci.
Although the character fell directly into the love-to-hate-her category, audiences found Blunt irresistible. Her mix of vulnerability and fork-tongued charm—crowned by crystal clear blue eyes and a face anchored with a cleft chin that would make Kirk Douglas envious—earned the title Best Female Scene-Stealer from Entertainment Weekly and nominations for everything from a Teen Choice Award to a Golden Globe.
This weekend she plays a much different character in the much-anticipated thriller The Girl on the Train. Based on the Paula Hawkins bestseller—11 million copies sold and counting—it’s a dark cinematic journey into a missing person’s case. The thirty-three year old actress says playing an alcoholic divorcée who witnesses a crime from a train window, “the most challenging thing I’ve ever done.”
Early reviews are strong. Variety raved she “excels as the broken-down heroine.” Those kind of kudos are an echo of her much-admired, though lesser seen work, in the UK.
After dabbling in drama at age 12 to help conquer a stutter she jumped to the small screen with praised performances in British television period pieces. It was, however, only when she left the lace-bonnets behind and took on a role in the critically-acclaimed My Summer of Love that she really made a splash. The story of a teenage infatuation between Mona (Nathalie Press) and the manipulative and cynical Tamsin (Blunt) earned both Press and Blunt equal shares in an Evening Standard British Film Award for Most Promising Newcomer.
Since then we’ve seen her as an oversexed young women opposite Tom Hanks in Charlie Wilson’s War, warbling Stephen Sondheim’s rich Into the Woods score, riding a polar bear in The Huntsman: Winter’s War and dressed as Princess Diana in the quirky rom com Five-Year Engagement.
She’s done action in both Sicario and Edge of Tomorrow (later renamed Live. Die. Repeat. for home release). Big budget blockbusters don’t usually make room for female characters unless they are sidekicks or girlfriends. In Edge of Tomorrow Blunt avoids being objectified and is as strong, if not stronger than co-star Tom Cruise.
In Sicario she’s part of an elite task force stemming the flow of drugs between Mexico and the US. A multifarious mix of vulnerability, stone cold confidence and outrage, she delivered the most interesting female action star since Mad Max: Fury Road’s Imperator Furiosa.
Next up her diverse career is the lead in Mary Poppins Returns. She says she’s nervous because the flying nanny is “such an important character in people’s childhood,” but has been given the thumbs up by the original Mary, Julie Andrews. “It was lovely to get her stamp of approval. That took the edge off it, for sure.”
In recent years we’ve seen Emily Blunt warbling Stephen Sondheim’s rich “Into the Woods” score, riding a polar bear in “The Huntsman: Winter’s War” and dressed as Princess Diana in the quirky rom com “Five-Year Engagement.” She’s done big budget action, sci fi, period dramas and now she adds Hitchcockian thriller to her list of conquered genres.
In the much-anticipated thriller “The Girl on the Train” she is Rachel a woman whose life has taken a downward dive since her divorce from Tom (Justin Theroux). Alcoholic, unemployed and despondent, she obsesses about Tom, Anna (Rebecca Ferguson), his new girlfriend—and former mistress—and their new baby.
To pass the time on her extended Lost Weekend she drinks vodka and rides a commuter train from the suburbs into Manhattan, even though she lost her high paying PR jobs ages before. Sitting in the third car from the front affords her the perfect view of her favourite house. It’s the home of Megan and Scott Hipwell (Haley Bennett and Luke Evans), a good looking couple with a seemingly perfect life to match their optimistic last name. “She’s everything I want to be,” says Rachel of Megan.
One afternoon as Rachel looks out the train window at the Hipwells she is enraged what she sees. A blur of booze later, she wakes up the next day, hungover and foggy, covered in bruises, to discover Megan has gone missing. Brain beating, blocking memories of the night before, she tries to piece together the events of the night before. Enter Mr. Hitchcock.
Based on the Paula Hawkins bestseller—11 million copies sold and counting—“The Girl on the Train” is not so much a psychological drama as much as it is a boozological one. Rachel is hammered for much of the first half of the film, making her an extremely unreliable narrator. What’s true and what’s not? That would involve giving away plot details that are best left unspoiled, but suffice to say that while there are ups and downs, they are more red herrings and misremembered clues filtered through a haze of booze. There are no “Gone Girl” flourishes here, just straightforward thriller elements banged together to point to an inevitable conclusion.
“Girl on the Train” has some elegant moments, and aspires to be an art house thriller/morality tale—no action, lots of internal dialogue—but to properly tell the story of infidelity and murder it should have embraced its down-and-dirty summertime beach reading origins.
Rising above the languid pacing and uneventful storyline is Blunt whose gut-wrenching, vanity-free performance carries the movie through its slow patches. She’s a raw nerve and if the movie had followed her lead and been just a bit more bleary eyed and blotchy, it may have been a more effective thriller.
Jennifer Lawrence continues her unbeaten streak (OK, I’m choosing to ignore “Serena”) with her regular dream team of director David O. Russell and co-stars Bradley Cooper and Robert De Niro. “Joy” is slight but succeeds because we want her to succeed.
“Joy” is a real life female empowerment story that plays like a fairy tale. When we first meet Joy Mangano (Lawrence) she’s a young girl making a fairy tale kingdom out of bits of paper. When she’s told a prince would complete the picture she says, “I don’t need a prince,” suggesting that Joy may be headed for her own happily ever after, but will do it on her own terms.
As an adult she’s a single mom struggling to make ends meet. Her ex-husband (Edgar Ramirez) lives in the basement, her mother (Virginia Madsen) hasn’t left her bedroom in an alarmingly long time, her passive aggressive sister Peggy (Elisabeth Rohm) is more aggressive than passive and now it looks like her pig-headed father Rudy (Robert De Niro) needs a place to crash. Only grandma Mimi (Diane Ladd) provides unconditional love. “My whole life is like some sort of tragic soap opera,” she says.
When Rudy becomes involved with a wealthy widow named Trudy (Isabella Rossellini) a random incident leads to opportunity for Joy to reinvent herself. A red wine spill gives Joy the idea for a new kind of mop, a durable cleaning tool with a head made from a continuous loop of 300 feet of cotton that can be easily wrung out without getting the user’s hands wet. She called it the Miracle Mop and with a sizable loan from Trudy tries to bring her invention to market. She meets with slammed doors until the mop becomes a hit on the home shopping network QVC. Still, even with sales in the tens of thousands she has problems wringing a profit out of her mops.
“Joy” is a thoroughly enjoyable movie elevated by the strength of its performances. The film itself feels a bit sloppy—maybe that’s because there are four credited editors—but Lawrence and cast mop up the mess with top-notch performances.
De Niro often get accused of taking paycheques roles these days but his work in “Joy” proves he’s not on permanent cruise control. As Rudy he’s the worst kind of dim bulb, a hard-headed old-timer with too much confidence. It’s a complex comedic performance that will make you wish De Niro made more movies with Russell and fewer with everyone else (except maybe for Scorsese).
Bradley Cooper makes the most of a small role as the fast-talking QVC executive but it is the third part of Russell’s Golden Acting Triad—Jennifer Lawrence—who brings the joy to “Joy.”
For the second time this year, following “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 2,” Lawrence dominates a big movie by sheer talent and strength of will. As Mangano she’s gritty, funny and completely genuine in a role that should earn her another Best Actress Oscar nomination.
“Joy” is a success story whose fast-paced joyfulness in performance and pacing makes up for the bumpy execution.
SYNOPSIS: “Emilia Pérez,” a new Spanish-language musical crime drama starring Zoe Saldaña and Selena Gomez and now playing in theatres, is a subversive story about the search for happiness and affirmation of identity. Zoe Saldaña plays a burned-out Mexico City lawyer tired of defending drug related clients. When she is offered the biggest fee of her life by a fearsome cartel leader, who hires her to facilitate his “retirement” (i.e.: disappearance) and transition into an authentic self, she can’t say no. “What do I risk?” she asks. “Becoming rich, “replies the cartel leader.
