HIGH LIFE, the latest film from French auteur Claire Denis (CHOCOLAT, TROUBLE EVERY DAY) is an arthouse/sci-fi journey to the end of the universe and the kind of mainstream audience-alienating pisser-offer that's become synonymous with distributor A24. But even they knew to keep this one at a limited level, topping out at 146 screens at its widest release. Not unlike SUNSHINE or INTERSTELLAR if directed by Michelangelo Antonioni, HIGH LIFE is certainly like nothing else you'll see in 2019, and it even switches between aspect ratios (1.66:1 most of the time, but also 1.33:1 and 1.85:1) for maximum cineaste cred. Denis doesn't make it easy: the pace is extremely slow, and it takes time to find your bearings, with the opening of the film actually being the middle of the story, with non-linear editing and cutaways to various points past and future eventually filling in the blanks like an early Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu film with a touch of the significant passage of time of Nicolas Roeg's THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH. The opening act is focused on Monte (Robert Pattinson), the lone remaining original member of the mission, and his infant daughter Willow, as something catastrophic has happened and Monte releases the bodies of several dead crew members into the forever nothingness of space. Denis cuts back and forth, revealing that a crew of death row convicts--among them Monte, Tcherny (Andre Benjamin), Boyse (Mia Goth), pilot Nansen (Agata Buzek), and Mink (Claire Tran)--who were assembled and given a chance to "serve science" on a journey to a black hole at the end of the universe in the hopes of harnessing a new energy source. It seems like a fool's mission, as one Earth-bound scientist (Victor Banerjee) even states that they won't even reach their destination in the lifetimes of those back home. But problems arise: captain Chandra (Lars Eidinger) suffers a stroke as a result of radiation poisoning and is put out of his misery by Dibs (Juliette Binoche), a deranged scientist who takes command of the mission and is obsessed with performing reproductive experiments and harvesting healthy fetuses, and isn't above sedating and raping a male subject to get the semen sample she needs.
In addition to the copious amounts of cum on display, nearly every bodily fluid and discharge puts in an appearance, including blood, piss, snot, breast milk, and menstrual blood. That's not to mention "The Fuck Box," a recreational masturbation chamber where the crew goes to let off some steam (and for Dibs to collect more specimens; seriously, there so much onscreen jizz in this that it probably qualifies for its own SAG card). Perhaps the most frequent Fuck Box flyer is Dibs herself, who rigs a contraption that gyrates in a mechanical bull-like motion as she rides a large silver dildo emerging from the center of it. Binoche leaves little to the imagination with her fearless performance here, and it's surprising that this managed to avoid an NC-17. HIGH LIFE isn't all about shock value, and the striking imagery of bodies floating in space, the sounds, and the overwhelming claustrophobia really stay with you even if the story proves frustratingly impenetrable at times. It feels like a more pervy Panos Cosmatos space movie at times, and another offbeat project for Pattinson, who also sings the closing credits song. Obviously, HIGH LIFE isn't for everybody (it would've been great to see this in a packed theater and count the walkouts), but it's a bold, original film that's an instant cult item and will no doubt take several viewings to unpack everything that's going on. (R, 113 mins)
THE PROFESSOR (US - 2019)
With his financial issues and the back-and-forth allegations and protracted legal battles with ex-wife Amber Heard, it's hard to tell from day to day whether Johnny Depp has been officially cancelled, but Lionsgate seemed to err on the side of caution by dumping THE PROFESSOR on VOD nearly two years after it was shot. Blatantly transparent Oscar bait for Depp, the film casts him as Prof. Richard Brown, a tenured Lit lecturer at an upscale university who's just been given a stage four lung cancer diagnosis. Facing the option of having maybe a year with treatment and six months without, he opts to live his remaining months to the fullest. Encouraged by his wife Veronica's (Rosemarie DeWitt) extramarital affair with asshole university president Henry (Ron Livingston), Richard goes all in--drinking in class, asking students for weed, raw-dogging a waitress in the men's room of a campus bar, and even accepting an offer of a blowjob from an admiring male student (Devon Terrell). He only confides his terminal illness to his colleague and best friend Peter (Danny Huston), and is unable to break the news to either Veronica or their teenage daughter Olivia (Odessa Young). THE PROFESSOR was shot under the title RICHARD SAYS GOODBYE, which may give it some connection to writer/director Wayne Roberts' debut KATIE SAYS GOODBYE, which played the festival circuit in 2016 but wasn't commercially released until it went straight to VOD in June 2019, a month after THE PROFESSOR. It's always amusing watching characters give zero fucks with nothing to lose, but too much of THE PROFESSOR plays like a disease-of-the-week take on AMERICAN BEAUTY, whether it's Olivia forced to listen to the passively aggressive combative dinnertime conversation between Richard and Veronica, or Richard threatening to blackmail Henry if he doesn't grant him permission to take a sabbatical. Livingston is saddled with a completely unbelievable character, never more so than when he sees Richard smoking a joint while lecturing his class outdoors, and harumphs "Is...is that a marijuana cigarette?!" like he just wandered in from REEFER MADNESS. Depp has some good moments, but the drama becomes more forced and implausible as it goes on. It's nice to see perennial sneering prick Huston in a rare sympathetic role, and Zoey Deutch is charming as one of Richard's students, but THE PROFESSOR just feels too rote and too familiar and a couple of decades too late to be borrowing so much of AMERICAN BEAUTY. (R, 92 mins)
THE MAN WHO KILLED HITLER AND THEN THE BIGFOOT (US/Belgium - 2019)
Is there anyone who doesn't love Sam Elliott? He's a goddamn national treasure who's been a reliable presence in movies and on TV for 50 years, and he's one of those actors who's so consistently good that maybe we take him for granted. At any rate, the 74-year-old badass is enjoying a late-career renaissance that began with 2017's THE HERO, which didn't get great reviews but generated praise for Elliott as an ailing western star making amends with his family. He then received his first Oscar nomination for his work in Bradley Cooper's remake of A STAR IS BORN, but shot just before that (and released after) was THE MAN WHO KILLED HITLER AND THEN THE BIGFOOT--the eclectic likes of John Sayles, Douglas Trumbull, and Lucky McKee are among its producers--which sounds like the kind of bizarre, bonkers movie that would venture into a revisionist history scenario akin to BUBBA HO-TEP and INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS. And it's...not. It's certainly sincere on the part of writer/director Robert D. Krzykowski, and he's to be commended for providing Elliott with a role that's tailor-made for him. And, in all fairness, the title delivers what it promises, but there seems to be a fundamental disconnect with the tone implied by a title like THE MAN WHO KILLED HITLER AND THEN THE BIGFOOT and what's presented in the film.
For an hour or so, it's a serious, somber character study set in the 1980s, with elderly WWII vet Calvin Barr (Elliott) living a quiet life of small-town anonymity among family and neighbors who have no idea of the secret that's haunted him for 40 years: he was the trigger man (played in flashbacks by Aidan Turner) in a successful covert plot to take out Hitler (Joe Lucas), and the Allied forces and the German government subsequently covered it up. He also never got over Maxine (Caitlin FitzGerald), the schoolteacher and sweetheart he planned to marry but never contacted once he returned home from the war. He now spends his days with his dog, eating TV dinners, and going to the corner bar (and he's still able to handle three punks who try to steal his car), seemingly waiting to die. But his government calls on him again when an agent (Ron Livingston) informs him that a blood sample still on file at a military lab reveals him to be immune to a lethal virus spreading across Canada that's been traced the mythical Bigfoot (Mark Steger). The film abruptly switches gears to become a throwback '70s Bigfoot movie with Barr venturing alone into the Canadian wilderness to track and kill the creature. To get a feel of how much of an oddity this thing is, imagine Clint Eastwood spending the second half of GRAN TORINO hunting down the Loch Ness Monster. Elliott is terrific here as the melancholy Barr, but Krzykowski can only get away with subverting expectations to a point. Sure, the confrontation with Bigfoot has some action and grossout gore, but the Hitler section of the film is a bit of an anticlimactic dud, and the trite, facile symbolism (the pebble in Barr's shoe!) would generate dismissive eyerolls in a high school creative writing class. In the end, Elliott is the whole show here, and he's given the perfect intro, sitting alone at an empty bar looking down at his glass while Billy Squier's "Lonely is the Night" blares from the jukebox. If you took all the humor out of BUBBA HO-TEP, you'd still be left with the heartfelt and oddly convincing performances of Bruce Campbell as Elvis and Ossie Davis as JFK, so it wouldn't be a total loss. Similarly, THE MAN WHO KILLED HITLER AND THEN THE BIGFOOT has the great Sam Elliott as its sturdy foundation, but no movie with that title should be this dour and downbeat. (Unrated, 98 mins)
KING OF THIEVES (France/Germany/UK - 2018; US release 2019)
A chronicle of the 2015 Hatton Garden safe deposit burglary in London headlined by a cast of living legends is a film that almost seems impossible to screw up. Hell, it's even got guys from two of the most iconic heist thrillers with THE ITALIAN JOB's Michael Caine and SEXY BEAST's Ray Winstone. But KING OF THIEVES is an almost total misfire--the heist is glossed over, the characterizations thinly drawn, the police investigation a muddled, incoherent mess. It never generates any tension or suspense, the actions of the characters seem completely random, and when all else fails, it relies on the tired standby of old people doing old people things, like griping about technology ("What's an eBay?"), or in the case of Tom Courtenay's befuddled character, giggling after unexpectedly ripping a loud, bubbling fart in a pool. Despondent and bored after the sudden death of his wife (Francesca Annis), former criminal Brian Reader (Caine) is approached about taking part in a safe deposit break-in at Hatton Garden by safecracking young acquaintance Basil (Charlie Cox), who's got the keys and the alarm code. In what seems like the next scene, Brian's got his old associates rounded up and they're inside, posing as repairmen working on a gas line. There's Terry Perkins (Jim Broadbent), Kenny Collins (Courtenay), Carl Wood (Paul Whitehouse), and brutish Danny Boy Jones (Winstone), and tensions flare afterward when Kenny takes it upon himself to bring in a fence in the form of doddering, incontinent drunkard Billy "The Fish" Lincoln (Michael Gambon), who can hardly be trusted to keep his mouth shut. Brian announces he's out, and Terry and Danny proceed to systematically cut everyone else out of the take, with none of them realizing that they've been under police surveillance pretty much the entire time thanks to their careless actions during and after the burglary.
It's hard to believe any of these guys had careers as professional criminals considering the stupid decisions they make, from not even obscuring their license plates outside the building (and the youngster Basil is the only one who thinks ahead and wears a disguise) to Kenny being assigned lookout and immediately removing his hearing aid and dozing off to all of them talking loudly in public places about what they did. Director James Marsh (MAN ON WIRE, RED RIDING: 1980, THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING) and screenwriter Joe Penhall (THE ROAD and the creator of the Netflix series MINDHUNTER) could've approached this from the angle of inevitable, fatalistic doom, but they don't do much of anything. It's part GRUMPY OLD MEN and THE BANK JOB until its abrupt shift in tone when Terry and Danny start going full post-Lufthansa Jimmy Conway with their rapidly escalating paranoia and incessant talk of getting rid of everyone. It's obvious that the filmmakers assumed they had the kind of cast where this thing could basically just make itself, but it's total letdown for everyone. The elder statesman of the ensemble at 85, Caine is effortlessly Caine, and has some poignant moments in Brian's initial grieving, shrugging in disbelief that he'll never see his wife walk into the room again and observing "When somebody dies, nothing prepares you for the silence of an empty house." But in no time at all, KING OF THIEVES becomes such a plodding, lifeless bore that unless you're a completist who has to see everything Caine does, there's little reason to bother with it. That is, unless you've been waiting to cross "seeing Jim Broadbent's ass" off your bucket list. (R, 108 mins)
SHIMMER LAKE (US - 2017) Written and directed by Oren Uziel. Cast: Benjamin Walker, Rainn Wilson, Stephanie Sigman, John Michael Higgins, Ron Livingston, Rob Corddry, Wyatt Russell, Adam Pally, Mark Rendall, Matt Landry, Isabel Dove, Angela Vint, Neil Whitely, Julie Khaner. (Unrated, 86 mins) With screenwriting credits on 22 JUMP STREET and the awful horror spoof FREAKS OF NATURE, one wouldn't think Oren Uziel would make his directing debut by branching out with a Coen Bros. knockoff, but the Netflix Original SHIMMER LAKE isn't bad despite hinging on a gimmicky set-up. Set in the days following a botched bank robbery in a small rural town, SHIMMER LAKE plays in reverse, starting on Friday when everything has fallen apart and ending on Tuesday, the day of the robbery. It's like an arc of the FX series FARGO if showrunner Noah Hawley gave it the MEMENTO treatment (this reverse set-up was also done quite well earlier this year in the little-seen western BRIMSTONE). By the end, it's little more than smoke and mirrors to cover up a story that wouldn't be all that interesting or even remotely clever if told in a straight chronological fashion. Indeed, it often requires clumsy exposition to get the viewer up to speed, as in an early scene taking place on Friday where the sheriff is talking to FBI agents and drops this cumbersome chestnut: "We'll see if it matters when we find Andy's--my brother's--dead body!" If they're looking for Andy and have obviously already been working together, wouldn't it be reasonable to assume that the FBI guys already know that Andy is his brother? Nobody would say that sentence like that unless they were characters in a story being told in reverse.
SHIMMER LAKE opens on Friday, and the first time we meet Andy Sikes (Rainn Wilson), he's hiding in his basement with a duffel bag full of money, pleading with his young daughter Sally (Isabel Dove) not to tell anyone he's there. Up in the kitchen, Andy's clueless wife Martha (Angela Vint) is talking to Sheriff Zeke Sikes (Benjamin Walker of ABRAHAM LINCOLN: VAMPIRE HUNTER), who's torn between upholding the law and looking out for his brother. As the story plays out, starting on Friday and working back to Tuesday, all of the details are gradually doled out until everything comes together at the beginning. Zeke and devoted, puppy-dog-like deputy Reed (Adam Pally) are forced to work with snide, condescending FBI agents Walker (Ron Livington) and Biltmore (Rob Corddry) to investigate a bank robbery that took place on Tuesday and resulted in Zeke taking a bullet in the shoulder. Andy is a disgraced former county prosecutor who lost his job in a corruption scandal after taking a payoff in a case involving Ed Burton (Wyatt Russell, Kurt's lookalike son with Goldie Hawn), the former star QB and local superstar who became a drug-dealing shitbag after high school. Ed was charged with murder and drug possession in a meth lab explosion at nearby Shimmer Lake that killed his five-year-old son Ed Jr., but Andy happily accepted a bribe to knock it down to manslaughter. Ed was ultimately released from prison after serving just eight months. With both men desperate for cash, Ed and Andy decide to rob the town bank, owned by local businessman Brad Dawkins (John Michael Higgins), who also happens to be the judge in Ed's trial and agreed to go with the absurd reduction in charges only because he's planning a Senate campaign and Ed and his stupid, drug-added buddy Chris (Mark Rendall) have blackmailed the married, family man judge with a videotape showing him in a compromising position with his secret side piece--a young boytoy known around town as "Meth Billy" (Matt Landry).
As Uziel moves the story back one day at a time, pieces will fall into place and some running gags will be established (on Friday, Reed is introduced freaking out over the perceived insult of being forced to sit in the backseat of Zeke's cruiser because he's giving the mailman a ride to work, and the events of Thursday reveal why he's so pissed off about it), and many sides to Ed's long-suffering, still-grieving wife Steph (Stephanie Sigman of MISS BALA and Netflix's NARCOS) will be revealed, along with several twists that make you see previous (future?) events in a different light. Despite the presence of many people known for their comedic skills, SHIMMER LAKE rarely goes for big laughs and instead exhibits the kind of morbid, pitch-black humor seen in the the great Coen Bros. classics like BLOOD SIMPLE and FARGO. In the end, it's pretty minor and slight, but the performances are good, with Wilson doing a good job conveying that distinct sense of Jerry Lundegaard nervous panic, and it has some surprises up its sleeve, even when you concede that the film wouldn't be much were it not for its backtracking Leonard Shelby structure.
