On Blu-ray/DVD: CLIMAX (2019), THE KID (2019) and J.T. LEROY (2019)

CLIMAX
(France/Switzerland/Belgium/US - 2018; US release 2019)

Or, Gasper Noe's WHO SPIKED THE SANGRIA? An enfant terrible and provocateur of the highest order, Noe's films are the definition of "acquired taste." With its end-to-beginning structure and an agonizingly long sequence where Monica Bellucci is raped, 2002's IRREVERSIBLE has, for better or worse, set the Noe template for fucking with and antagonizing audiences. CLIMAX splits the difference between IRREVERSIBLE and 2009's ENTER THE VOID, eventually pummeling the viewer with shocking imagery, sensory overload, and a sense of utter disorientation as society breaks down within the walls of an abandoned school where a dance troupe is having a party before embarking on a tour of Europe and the US. Set in 1996 and inspired by an actual event (though Noe takes some liberties and runs with it, to say the least), the story is pretty thin: at the party, the students gossip, talk about future plans ("America is heaven on Earth," one of the French students enthusiastically muses), hook up, and engage in some recreational drug use before they all seem to realize at once that someone spiked the sangria with LSD. Paranoia, suppressed grudges, and hallucinations give way to madness, like FAME and A CHORUS LINE going straight to hell, with the second half of the film relentlessly tripping balls as Noe goes overboard to bombard the viewer with one transgressive set piece after another.

It would all be rather puerile if he wasn't such a master stylist, expertly mimicking Kubrick with long takes down seemingly endless corridors, turning the camera sideways and upside-down (it's another stellar showcase for cinematographer Benoit Debie), bombarding you with sound and color and so much screaming and shrieking. He wears his love of cinema on his sleeve, and he gives some shout-outs early on with some visible VHS copies of Lucio Fulci's ZOMBIE, Pier Paolo Pasolini's SALO, Andrzej Zulawski's POSSESSION, and Dario Argento's SUSPIRIA, with one character even referencing the 1981 German drug addiction drama CHRISTIANE F. All Noe films are an endurance test to some extent, and there's a certain Chuck Palahniuk vibe to his work in the sense that his fixation on shock value seems to be stuck in the same place it was when he was a younger man with his 1998 debut I STAND ALONE. But regardless of how off-putting he may be at times, he makes up for it with the presentation. There's two jaw-droppingly dazzling dance numbers here, one part of an uninterrupted 13-minute take (Noe shot the sequence 16 times and used the 15th take), and he tops himself later on with the acid kicks in and we watch the mayhem--assault, someone set on fire, someone pissing themselves, a pregnant woman stabbing herself in the stomach, a rage orgy, etc--unfold in one 42-minute (!) take that comprises nearly half of the running time. Noe also utilizes every attention-getting trick in his arsenal to throw you off balance, starting with the closing credits playing at the beginning, the production company logos rolling around ten minutes in, and the opening cast and crew credits at the 46-minute (!) mark. The cast--mostly dancers, models, and other artists with lead Sofia Boutella (THE MUMMY, ATOMIC BLONDE) being the only professional actor--acquits themselves well using mostly improvised dialogue. Decidedly not for everyone and so aggressive in its potential for audience alienation that it makes Darren Aronofsky's MOTHER! look like a pandering crowd-pleaser, CLIMAX is probably the ultimate A24 release, and even they knew not to roll this out nationwide. (R, 97 mins)



THE KID
(US - 2019)

Almost half of the main cast of the 2016 remake of THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN reconvenes in this earnest but unsuccessful retelling of the Billy the Kid saga. The title itself is a bit of misdirection, as the "kid" in question is not William Bonney, but rather, 14-year-old Rio Cutler (Jake Schur, son of Jordan Schur, one of a stagecoach full of producers). Rio is introduced killing his abusive, drunkard father, which sends him on the run with his older sister Sara (Leila George), with their vengeful, psychotic Uncle Grant (Chris Pratt) in hot pursuit. En route to Santa Fe, Rio and Sara stumble into a standoff between notorious celebrity outlaw Billy the Kid (Dane DeHaan) and a posse led by Pat Garrett (Ethan Hawke). Billy surrenders and is to be delivered to Santa Fe authorities, so the Cutler siblings hitch a ride with Garrett and his men. Billy and Rio bond along the way, especially after Uncle Grant catches up to them and abducts Sara with the intention of putting her to work in his whorehouse. Directed by Vincent D'Onofrio (who also has a small role as an incompetent lawman), THE KID is actually a cross between Billy the Kid fan fiction and an unofficial TRUE GRIT redux, especially once Billy the Kid exits before the third act and Rio begs grizzled Garrett to help him rescue Sara from Uncle Grant.

There's a few sporadic shootouts and some suspense, and it works best when Hawke (in a very shouty and intense performance) and DeHaan are onscreen, but it's prone to post-UNFORGIVEN revisionist philosophizing like Garrett declaring "It doesn't matter what's true...it matters the story they tell when you're gone!" at the start of a gunfight, thinking it's PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID when it's barely even YOUNG GUNS II. Sporting a ridiculous fake beard, an over-the-top Pratt is an ineffective villain and acts like he prepped for his role by binge-watching DEADWOOD. THE KID was probably a fun gathering of friends and family--father-and-son Schurs; D'Onofrio and Hawke go way back; D'Onofrio and Pratt were also in JURASSIC WORLD; and George is D'Onofrio's daughter with ex-wife Greta Scacchi--and it's certainly an improvement over D'Onofrio's previous behind-the-camera efforts, like DON'T GO IN THE WOODS and the unwatchable MALL, which he scripted and produced, but it's a generally forgettable endeavor. Lionsgate must've felt the same way as it topped out at just 268 screens at its widest release. (R, 99 mins)



J.T. LEROY
(US/Canada/UK - 2019)

Claiming to be from a broken upbringing with a prostitute mother working truck stops and in endless cycle of poverty, drugs, and sexual abuse, Jeremiah Terminator "J.T." LeRoy published three harrowing, semi-autobiographical novels and short story collections in the late '90s and early '00s that made him a literary sensation. It took several years, but "LeRoy" was revealed to be a character portrayed by two women: Laura Arnold, who actually wrote the novels, and her boyfriend Geoffrey Knoop's younger sister Savannah, who portrayed "LeRoy" in public for six years until the ruse was exposed. J.T. LEROY tells the story from SavannahKnoop's perspective, based on their memoir Girl Boy Girl. Knoop also co-wrote the script with director Justin Kelly (KING COBRA) and is one of 32 credited producers, and the more the film goes on, the more one senses there's some degree of score-settling going on. Albert's side was already told in the 2016 documentary AUTHOR: THE J.T. LEROY STORY, but here, Savannah (Kristen Stewart) is introduced arriving in San Francisco in 2001 to crash with her aspiring musician brother Geoff (Jim Sturgess) in the midst of the LeRoy phenomenon in literature circles. The mystique around LeRoy is reaching a boiling point, and two years since the release of his debut novel Sarah, he's still never made a public appearance, with Laura (Laura Dern) adopting a mumbled Southern drawl for phone interviews where she can pass herself off as a 20-year-old male writer. Under immense pressure from her publisher and the media to introduce LeRoy to the public, Laura convinces Savannah to don a wig and sunglasses and play the androgynous writer for photo shoots and interviews. It's harmless for a while, and Laura pays Savannah for her time, but the more she's required to be in public as LeRoy, the more she's forced to speak as LeRoy and make important statements and decisions. This relegates Laura to the sideline in another invented role as LeRoy's overbearing British publicist and handler "Speedie," and growing more resentful by the day that Savannah-as-"LeRoy" is getting all the attention and accolades.

It's hard to feel much sympathy for Laura, which is probably what Knoop is getting at in their script (Knoop now identifies as gender neutral and uses "they" and "their" pronouns). There also seems to be no love lost with Asia Argento, represented here by Diane Kruger as "Eva Avelin," a wild child European actress and filmmaker who's desperate to make a movie version of Sarah (in 2004, Argento starred in and directed THE HEART IS DECEITFUL ABOVE ALL THINGS, based on LeRoy's 1999 short story collection, but the ruse was exposed by the time the film was released in 2006) and is not above seducing "LeRoy" to get it, causing confusion for the bisexual Savannah. Stewart and Dern are very good here, but the in medias res storytelling gives the opening act no breathing room. To tell the "LeRoy" story, Laura Albert's story must be told for the sake of context, but before we even know what's going on, Savannah's already in the J.T. LeRoy disguise and we're only ten minutes into the movie. Knoop is so concerned with their side that we never really get a handle of either Laura or Geoff, as Sturgess is given nothing to do but pout because Laura doesn't have the time to devote to their band. Even Knoop's motivations for going along are frustratingly vague ("I like performing"). Barely released by Universal before being shuffled off to iTunes and Blu-ray, J.T. LEROY has an fascinating story to tell, but it seems unsure how to tell it. The general absurdity of it could've been helped by a more satirical or darkly comedic approach, but it's so glum and serious that it's ultimately a superficial navel gaze. (R, 109 mins)

In Theaters: COLD PURSUIT (2019)

COLD PURSUIT
(France/UK - 2019)

Directed by Hans Petter Moland. Written by Frank Baldwin. Cast: Liam Neeson, Laura Dern, Tom Bateman, Tom Jackson, Emmy Rossum, Domenick Lombardozzi, Julia Jones, John Doman, William Forsythe, David O'Hara, Nicholas Holmes, Benjamin Hollingsworth, Michael Eklund, Raoul Trujillo, Michael Richardson, Gus Halper, Arnold Pinnock, Bradley Stryker, Wesley MacInnes, Elizabeth Thai, Aleks Paunovic, Glen Gould, Michael Adamthwaite, Kyle Nobess, Nels Lennarson. (R, 118 mins)

An almost scene-for-scene English-language remake of the 2014 Norwegian film IN ORDER OF DISAPPEARANCE by the same director (Hans Petter Moland, who also helmed DEPARTMENT Q: A CONSPIRACY OF FAITH), COLD PURSUIT is perfectly-tailored for the now-decade-long "revenge thriller" phase of Liam Neeson's career (the actor has said this might be his last film of this type). Its opening hijacked by the fallout of an honest but ill-advised Neeson revelation on the press junket--and really, who better to judge a reactionary, knee-jerk response to a violent incident involving a close friend from over 40 years ago by a young man who came of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s during the sociopolitical upheaval of The Troubles in Northern Ireland than uber-woke and perpetually-offended Vulture and AV Club contributors in their mid-twenties who may not even be aware of Neeson's career before TAKEN?--COLD PURSUIT would, at first glance, appear to be the now-customary winter Neeson revenge offering. But if you've seen IN ORDER OF DISAPPEARANCE or are at least familiar with its black comedy elements, it's something else entirely. Thanks to the genre expectations that come from Neeson rather than the original film's Stellan Skarsgard, COLD PURSUIT is an irreverent, witty, and frequently laugh-out-loud absurdist revenge thriller that feels like an in-his-prime Charles Bronson starring in a Coen Bros. movie. It works at its own pace and on its own wavelength, and everything about it just feels wonderfully offbeat and a bit off-kilter. It's a risky gamble for those expecting another TAKEN and it won't appeal to everyone, but once you're in sync with its oddball stylings and rhythms--it takes some time before it's clear that you're supposed to be laughing at most of this--it's an inspired blast filled with clever callbacks to earlier incidents and numerous visual gags, and it's vividly brought to life by Neeson and a terrific ensemble cast.

In the remote Colorado skiing town of Kehoe, local snowplow driver and man-of-few-words Nels Coxman (Neeson) barely has time to celebrate being named Kehoe's Citizen of the Year for his tireless efforts at keeping the main road clear before he and his wife Grace (Laura Dern) are dealt a tragic blow: their only son Kyle (Michael Richardson, Neeson's eldest son with late wife Natasha Richardson), a baggage handler at the local airport, is found dead from a heroin overdose. Insisting his son wasn't a junkie and that there must be some explanation for his death, Coxman embarks on what's initially the usual Neeson path of vengeance but one that's quickly defined by numerous unpredictable twists and turns. He offs a couple of low-level guys who turn out to be flunkies of Denver-based drug lord Trevor Calcote, aka "Viking" (Tom Bateman). When three of his guys turn up missing (Coxman has wrapped them in chicken wire and tossed them off a gorge into the ice-cold rapids on the outskirts of Kehoe), Viking is certain it's the beginning of a turf war with White Bull (Tom Jackson, presumably because Wes Studi and Graham Greene were busy), a Native American crime boss based in Kehoe who clashed with Viking's late father decades earlier (the cultural aspects and the oft-mentioned legality of weed in Colorado are the major structural diversions from the Norwegian original). At this point unaware of Coxman, Viking has White Bull's adult, first-born son killed and strung up on a road sign outside Kehoe, an unprovoked attack that breaks decades of peace and leads to White Bull planning the retaliatory kidnapping of Viking's classical music-loving young son Ryan (Nicholas Holmes), much to the chagrin of Viking's soon-to-be-ex-wife Aya (Julia Jones). All the while, Coxman keeps upping the body count, whacking guys with names like "Speedo" and "Limbo," and even getting advice from his retired and estranged criminal brother Brock, aka "Wingman" (William Forsythe), who recommends hiring a hit man known as "The Eskimo" (Arnold Pinnock).

Coxman's killing spree mines humor from its over-the-top violence (and, yes, also his name--Skarsgard plays "Nels Dickman" in the original film), with the laughs often coming in the repetition, whether it's the soon-to-be-customary chicken-wire-wrapped corpse being thrown off the gorge ("Why chicken wire?" Brock asks his brother. "So the fish can eat enough of the body to keep it from bloating with gas and rising to the surface...I read it in a crime novel") to the names of the deceased being displayed onscreen in order of disappearance, to the point where we don't even see them being killed (maybe just a curtain being drawn or a polite request to step off an expensive rug), but the inevitability is such that it becomes a clever running gag. Other delightfully dark-humored bits range from Viking telling his bullied son to read Lord of the Flies to learn how to handle himself; local cops Gip (John Doman) and Dash (Emmy Rossum) having conflicting views on how to deal with the expanding turf war; sex-crazed Viking goon Bone (Gus Halper) endlessly crowing about the "31% success rate" of his $20 trick with motel cleaning ladies, which of course results in a great sight gag later on; young Ryan helping his father's chief henchman Mustang (Domenick Lombardozzi) with his hapless fantasy football team and pointing out that he's losing because he's starting four Cleveland Browns; and some of White Bull's crew threatening a hotel desk clerk with a bad Yelp review. Neeson is the nominal star, but he's more than willing to let almost every member of the large supporting cast get a memorable turn in the spotlight. Nels Coxman doesn't seem like he'd be a man especially adept at violence, but a throwaway line about his and Brock's father being a criminal is enough to justify his ability to navigate through this world, even though he seems to have distanced himself from it when he met Grace (the film's biggest flaw is that it gives Dern almost nothing to do). COLD PURSUIT handles its laughs without crossing the line into parody, which would've been the easy route to take for a standard-issue remake. Thankfully, this takes a more droll, tongue-in-cheek approach. Indeed, the audience seemed hesitant to laugh along at first, like they weren't sure what to make of it, but once it gets rolling and establishes itself, COLD PURSUIT won them over. Now if only people could forgive Neeson for some irrational, impulsive thoughts borne of misdirected rage that he quickly abandoned after coming to his senses decades ago.

On DVD/Blu-ray: ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING (2017); BLACK BUTTERFLY (2017); and WILSON (2017)

ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING
(UK - 2015; US release 2017)

As far as unofficial entries in the Monty Python canon go, ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING is so bad that it makes YELLOWBEARD look like MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL. The first film to unite the five surviving members of the legendary comedy troupe since 1983's MONTY PYTHON'S THE MEANING OF LIFE (John Cleese, Eric Idle, Michael Palin, Terry Gilliam, and Terry Jones; Graham Chapman died in 1989), ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING was directed and co-written by Jones, who had the script stashed away since the early '90s and it shows. Jones almost got it going around 2003 but decided to put it on the backburner after the release of the Jim Carrey hit BRUCE ALMIGHTY, which has an almost identical concept but Jones' script has a Douglas Adams/Terry Pratchett twist. Instead of being granted powers by God, ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING's everyman hero Neil's (Simon Pegg) are granted courtesy of a crew of aliens--whose instantly recognizable voices are provided by the Python guys--who have happened upon Earth in their galactic journey and are deciding whether it's a planet worth saving. Picked at random by lead alien Death Dealing Darkness Bringer (voiced by Cleese), Neil is used as a guinea pig to gauge what a normal human will do with unlimited power. With a flick of his hand, Neil is able to make sweeping changes that he often has to walk back due to lack of specification (for example, after he causes an alien attack at a school that kills 40 people, his command to "Bring back everyone who died," ends up creating a brief zombie apocalypse). He tries to use his new ability to make his downstairs neighbor Catherine (Kate Beckinsale) fall for him while avoiding her psycho ex (a grating Rob Riggle), turns his best friend (Sanjeev Bhaskar) into a sausage, and, of course, makes his dick bigger. He also gets his dog Dennis to talk with the voice of the late Robin Williams, which should give you an idea of how long this thing sat around waiting for a US distributor. Shot in early 2014, ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING was dumped into a handful of US theaters in May 2017 by the rinky-dink Atlas Distribution, a company whose only noteworthy--and I use the term "noteworthy" loosely--accomplishment was releasing all three ATLAS SHRUGGED movies. Pretty much every joke lands with a thud in this flat and almost completely laughless fiasco that's made even more depressing by the fact that it was Williams' last performance and the last comedy we'll get from Jones, who was diagnosed with dementia shortly after shooting wrapped, prompting his retirement from public life in 2016. (R, 85 mins)

BLACK BUTTERFLY
(Spain/US - 2017)

A remake of a 2008 French film with the same title, BLACK BUTTERFLY was set to roll in 2011 with Nicolas Cage starring and Rod Lurie (THE CONTENDER) producing, but the project fell apart during pre-production. Director Brian Goodman, an actor whose only previous credit behind the camera was the little-seen 2008 crime drama WHAT DOESN'T KILL YOU, remained attached, and by the time filming began, Cage was replaced by Antonio Banderas, and the film was now a Spanish co-production, shot in Italy with a mostly Italian crew (Mario Bava's grandson Roy Bava served as assistant director), and set in an isolated area of Colorado. Banderas is Paul, a washed-up novelist once anointed the Next Big Thing, but now in his fourth year of writer's block, drinking heavily, feeling sorry for himself after his wife left him, and holed up in a remote cabin failing to deliver an overdue film script that he hasn't even started writing. He's trying to sell his cabin out of financial necessity, and his real estate agent Laura (Piper Perabo) has yet to find any takers. After a road rage incident with a belligerent trucker continues at the local diner, Paul's ass is saved by Jack (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), a glowering drifter looking for a place to stay. Out of gratitude, Paul offers Jack his guest room for the night, but Jack decides to stick around, doing some much-needed handyman work around the cabin and showing an intense interest in getting Paul off the bottle and writing again. Jack's demeanor gets more threatening and controlling and Paul, and eventually Laura, find themselves being held captive by the deranged Jack, who Paul is now convinced is a serial killer responsible for a string of murders in the region that date back several years.

BLACK BUTTERFLY is merely dull and nonsensical for most of its duration, with all the talk about writing, plot, and characters threatening to spill over into a trite exercise in meta storytelling. It doesn't even do anything interesting with the unexpected casting of legendary cult director Abel Ferrara (KING OF NEW YORK, BAD LIEUTENANT) as the manager of the town's tiny carryout, and anyone else would've asked Paul to leave after the first night, but then there'd be no movie. A third act twist requires some significant suspension of disbelief but livens things up in a vaguely giallo-like way portended by the title (I was briefly reminded of AMUCK and Dario Argento's TENEBRE as things started to fall into place), putting things in a different perspective and making it appear that the film is well on its way to maybe not quite completely redeeming itself but at least finishing big in a way that makes it a reasonably entertaining time-killer. But then Goodman and writers Marc Frydman (Lurie's longtime producing partner) and Justin Stanley shit the bed by adding one last twist that represents arguably the hoariest of all thriller genre cliches, one so ancient and played out that it almost qualifies as some kind of sick practical joke that it's being used seriously in 2017. Really, guys? That's how you decided to wrap this up? It couldn't be any more infuriating if Goodman, Frydman, and Stanley appeared on camera and said "You just watched this for 90 minutes. Dumbass."  (R, 93 mins)



WILSON
(US - 2017)

Adapted by Daniel Clowes from his 2010 graphic novel of the same name, WILSON doesn't continue the success of two previous big screen Clowes adaptations, 2001's GHOST WORLD and 2006's ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL. Both directed by Zwigoff, GHOST WORLD and ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL succeeded where WILSON fails. That's probably not the fault of WILSON director Craig Johnson (THE SKELETON TWINS), but rather from Clowes watering down his own source material and not having the right person in the lead. Woody Harrelson is one of our finest actors, but he's all wrong as Wilson, taking the kind of grumpy misanthrope that's similar to Steve Buscemi's Seymour in GHOST WORLD and the kind of character that was owned by Paul Giamatti a decade or so ago in AMERICAN SPLENDOR and SIDEWAYS, but playing it as an inconsistent mixture of Asperger's and unbalanced psycho.  A bitter curmudgeon whose only friend is his Miniature Schnauzer Pepper, Wilson is the kind of guy who rails against everything that's wrong in the world, smugly spouting off about all of the world's ills without provocation. He's the kind of guy who will sit down next to someone on an otherwise empty bus or invite himself to share a table with someone in an empty coffee shop and make pushy small talk. There will be five available urinals and he'll take the one right next to the one being used and strike up a conversation, of course excusing himself with "Nice cock, by the way." Wilson is supposed to be an fearless guy who doesn't play by society's norms and conventions but he's really just an abrasive, irredeemable prick, and when Harrelson plays him cackling and with wild eyes, you realize how much this needs a Buscemi or a Giamatti, or maybe even a Kevin Spacey to really convey the tone of Clowes' work. You'll want to get away from this movie the same way everyone else tries to back away from Wilson.

Even if having Harrelson play it this way was the intent, the film just never catches fire, lurching lugubriously from one DOA set piece to the next as almost every joke gets chirping crickets in response. WILSON feels like a film made by people who don't understand the material, which is inexplicable considering Clowes wrote the script himself (or, at least, he's the only credited writer). Tired of his angry routine, Wilson searches for a new purpose in his life after his father dies. He seeks out his ex-wife Pippi (Laura Dern) who left him 18 years earlier, aborting their child and getting involved with drugs and prostitution. She's cleaned up her act and turned her life around, and she reveals to Wilson that she actually had the baby and put it up for adoption. Ecstatic about being a father, Wilson finds the girl, Claire (Isabella Amara), an overweight, 17-year-old outcast, and he and Pippi try to establish a relationship with her. What follows is one improbable plot development after another, including an ill-fated trip to visit Pippi's bitchy sister Polly (Cheryl Hines), and Wilson being arrested on kidnapping charges. Sequences just seem to exist in a vacuum in WILSON--there's little forward momentum, either comedic or dramatic, and no one seems to exist in the real world. Clowes really nailed the psychology of his characters in GHOST WORLD, one of the best films of its decade, but this just feels like watered-down GHOST WORLD outtakes, right down to the very Enid-like Claire. There's one legitimately funny scene where Wilson intentionally rear-ends a woman's car just so he can ask her out on a date, and instead attracts a large crowd of witnesses, and Judy Greer is as charming as ever as a dog-sitter who somehow finds something worthwhile about Wilson, but in the end, it just goes nowhere and says nothing, and never gets around the obstacle of a great actor being badly miscast. Fox apparently knew they had a dud on their hands, releasing this on just 300 screens for a total gross of $650,000. (R, 94 mins)

On DVD/Blu-ray: 99 HOMES (2015); MI-5 (2015); and FREAKS OF NATURE (2015)

99 HOMES
(US/UAE - 2015)

Despite critical acclaim and some major pre-release awards buzz, 99 HOMES fizzled in theaters, topping out at 691 screens and grossing just over $1 million. Directed and co-written by Ramin Bahrani, the film takes place in the greater Orlando, FL area circa 2010, after the housing bubble burst and foreclosures were big business. Unable to hold on to his home is unemployed construction worker Dennis Nash (Andrew Garfield), who supports his mother Lynn (Laura Dern) and his young son Connor (Noah Lomax). Sheriff's deputies and a team of movers are present when constantly-vaping real estate foreclosure vulture Rick Carver (Michael Shannon) shows up at Dennis' front door to begin the eviction. Powerless to fight the system despite being given 30 days to appeal, Dennis moves his family into a motel filled with other foreclosure families and when he's unable to find a job, he reluctantly accepts a job offer from Carver to do repair work on his properties. Carver admires Dennis' persistence and the way he stands up for himself, especially in confronting one of Carver's men who stole some of Dennis' tools during the eviction. This leads to Dennis being complicit in Carver's various scams and schemes in the way he takes advantage of federal government loopholes to maximize his own profits, and before long, Dennis is essentially Carver's right hand, evicting good people in the exact position he once was, but doing so for the sake of supporting his family and doing whatever he needs to do to repurchase the family home.

Basically a housing bubble redux of WALL STREET, 99 HOMES is sincere in its look at hardworking people victimized by the system and by bad luck, and the performances of Garfield and especially Shannon are excellent. Shannon even gets a big Gordon Gekko-style "Greed is good" speech about how "America was built by bailing out winners, by rigging a nation of the winners, for the winners, by the winners." There are powerful moments throughout, particularly the agonizing and intense sequence where Carver coldly and methodically has Dennis and his family forced out of the house, and a heartbreaking one later on when Dennis has to evict a frail and obviously mentally-diminished elderly widower who just keeps helplessly repeating "We had a reverse mortgage...my wife signed the papers..." These scenes are very effectively done and are certain to get your blood boiling, but Bahrani and co-writer Amir Naderi give Dennis a far too familiar character arc. He doesn't tell his mother he's working for the man who evicted them, and she doesn't seem to question anything as long as he keeps getting paid, and Dern is saddled with playing a character too dim and oblivious to garner much sympathy. Of course, the more money Dennis makes, the more seduced he is by Carver's Mephistophelian appeal, which extends to him leaving Lynn and Connor in a dangerous situation at the motel to go to a swanky, boozy party with Carver and some hot women that of course results in a drunk Dennis with his head in his hands as he ponders What I've Become. 99 HOMES becomes far too predictable in it second half, especially with a by-the-numbers subplot about a deal with an even bigger real estate mogul (Clancy Brown) and Carver's plan to discredit and sabotage one man's (Tim Guinee) attempt to avoid foreclosure. There are moments of gut-wrenching power in 99 HOMES, but there's also a lot of formulaic melodrama. Overall, it's a good film, but not the great one the early buzz predicted. Bahrani dedicates 99 HOMES to the late Roger Ebert, who championed the filmmaker when he was just starting out and spoke very highly of his 2005 indie breakout MAN PUSH CART. (R, 112 mins)


MI-5
(UK - 2015)

A feature-film spinoff of the ten-season BBC television series SPOOKS (retitled MI-5 in most areas outside the UK; the film's UK title is SPOOKS: THE GREATER GOOD), MI-5 is a fairly standard-issue espionage/terrorism thriller, with enough action and genuinely suspenseful set pieces to make it worthwhile, even if it doesn't exactly blaze new trails in its genre. Recurring series director Bharat Nalluri and writers Jonathan Brackley and Tim Vincent stick to the style of the show, but make it accessible for the uninitiated, primarily by relegating most of the participating series stars to minor supporting roles or killing them off not long after they're introduced. Though the series featured the likes of Matthew Macfadyen and David Oyelowo in its earliest years, its only constant throughout its decade-long run was Peter Firth (EQUUS, LIFEFORCE), who reprises his role as Harry Pearce, the no-nonsense head of MI-5's counter-terrorism unit. MI-5 kicks off with a botched convoy transport of apprehended terrorist Adem Qasim (Elyes Gabel) ends up with several agents dead after Pearce lets Qasim go free in order to minimize the risk of civilians getting caught in the crossfire. Decommissioned and with his career and reputation ruined, Pearce publicly jumps from a bridge into the Thames but it's all a ruse that his superiors, namely MI-5 Director General Oliver Mace (Tim McInnerney) quickly see through. As a fugitive Pearce goes on an off-the-grid hunt for Qasim, Mace calls in rogue agent and former Pearce protege Will Holloway (GAME OF THRONES' Kit Harington) to track down his disgraced one-time mentor.

What follows are the usual shifting alliances and double crosses, with Pearce and Holloway engaged in a game of cat-and-mouse while acknowledging that they're both on the same side, while also dealing with old grudges since it was Pearce who decommissioned Holloway from MI-5 and derailed his career. Pearce is convinced that someone in his unit tipped off Qasim's people about the convoy transport, and of course, he's right. The problem is, Mace and his deputy director Geraldine Maltby (Jennifer Ehle) think the traitor is Pearce. Journeyman director Nalluri, who's spent most of his career in British TV (TORCHWOOD), but has also helmed a variety of features including the 1998 LA FEMME NIKITA ripoff KILLING TIME, 2000's THE CROW: SALVATION, and 2008's minor arthouse hit MISS PETTIGREW LIVES FOR A DAY, does a solid job with the action sequences and the intense climax is very well-handled save for one dodgy-looking CGI explosion. Of the holdovers from the TV series, only Firth and McInnerney get any significant screen time, with Harington, Ehle, and Tuppence Middleton (JUPITER ASCENDING) as another agent helping Holloway, being new additions to the MI-5 universe. MI-5 doesn't offer much in the way of surprises, but it's engaging, it moves fast, and it does exactly what it sets out to do. (R, 104 mins)



FREAKS OF NATURE
(US - 2015)

KITCHEN SINK was a horror spoof script by Oren Uziel (22 JUMP STREET) that spent several years on Hollywood's "Black List" of best unfilmed screenplays that floated around town waiting to get the green light. Something clearly got lost on KITCHEN SINK's way to becoming FREAKS OF NATURE, a dreary and almost completely laughless slog that was shot in 2013 and spent two years on the shelf before Columbia decided to cut its losses and quietly snuck it into 100 theaters last October. Co-produced by Uziel's buddy and two-time Academy Award-nominee Jonah Hill and featuring a cast of all-star comedy ringers, FREAKS OF NATURE is a total misfire that, aside from maybe two lines and a couple of throwaway sight gags, makes SCOUTS GUIDE TO THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE look like SHAUN OF THE DEAD. Set in the small town of Dillford, FREAKS presents a society where vampires (the rich and privileged), zombies (the destitute dregs of society) and humans (the middle class) co-exist. The film doesn't do anything more with the class struggle notion than that, instead focusing on three high-school protagonists: affable, sensitive, baseball-playing stoner Dag (Nicholas Braun) and his hapless attempts at romancing Lorelei (Vanessa Hudgens), who keeps him in the Friend Zone but likes his access to weed; nice-girl Petra (BAD TURN WORSE's Mackenzie Davis), who lets stud vampire Milan Pinache (Ed Westwick) transform her only to break her heart immediately after; and geeky loser Ned (Josh Fadem), who finds love with zombie girl Jenna (Mae Whitman) and lets her turn him into one of the walking dead if it means no longer putting up with his braying jackass of a jock brother (Chris Zylka as Seann William Scott as Stifler). Chaos erupts when an alien invasion (aliens, vampires, zombies, and eventually werewolves figure in, hence the original KITCHEN SINK title) turns Dillford into a war zone, which means Dag, Petra, and Ned (played by actors in their late 20s to early 30s) end up barricading themselves in the school basement in a half-assed re-staging of THE BREAKFAST CLUB, because that's what makes a great horror spoof.

Some very qualified comic performers are wasted in nothing supporting roles: Denis Leary as the asshole owner of Dillford's chief source of income--the processed-meat riblet factory (one of the very few laughs comes from him crowing about firing Dag's mom after she tried to unionize his zombie workforce); Patton Oswalt as a paranoid survivalist hiding in a bunker with his elderly mother; Bob Odenkirk and Joan Cusack as Dag's hippie parents; Ian Roberts and Rachael Harris as Ned's parents; and Keegan-Michael Key as a perpetually angry vampire high-school teacher who's burned out after dealing with 97 years of apathetic students. If you make it to the end, you'll hear Werner Herzog as the voice of the alien leader, announcing their peaceful intentions by quoting Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire," which might sound amusing, but in the context of this disastrous failure, is emphatically not. A comedy that throws in everything except the kitchen sink and comedy, FREAKS OF NATURE is staggeringly awful. A documentary about what went wrong here in the hands of director Robbie Pickering would be far more interesting than anything in the finished product, but hey, garbage in, garbage out. Doesn't matter. Audiences grading it on the horror fanboy's "everything is awesome" curve and insisting it's this week's new genre classic will scarf it up and ask for seconds. (R, 93 mins)