Movies

It’s been five years since “Mad Max: Fury Road” came out in theaters, but if the director George Miller has his way, Furiosa will soon ride again.Just don’t expect Charlize Theron to play her.When we discussed the production of “Fury Road” for a new oral history, Miller confirmed rumors that he is moving ahead with a stand-alone movie about the action film’s heroine, who became a fan favorite thanks to Theron’s determined portrayal. Still, for those hoping to see the Oscar-winning actress back in the driver’s seat, you may have to adjust your expectations: The film is a prequel centered on a young Furiosa, and Miller is searching for an actress in her 20s to take over the role.Miller hopes to make the Furiosa film once he completes the drama “Three Thousand Years of Longing,” starring Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba. That film was supposed to begin shooting this spring, but production was delayed when fears of the coronavirus forced an industrywide shutdown.“So after we finish it, and hopefully everything settles down with the pandemic, we’ll see what the world allows us to do with Furiosa,” Miller said.The project has been long in the works. During the decade and a half it took to bring “Fury Road” to the screen, Miller and his co-writer, Nick Lathouris, came up with extensive back stories for every character in the film, from the antagonist Immortan Joe to the comparatively minor Doof Warrior, who wields a flame-spewing guitar.But it was Furiosa who received the bulk of their attention. Miller sought to answer questions about what the character’s life was like in the idyllic “Green Place,” why she was plucked from the group of woman warriors known as the Vuvalini, and how she became the hardened warrior we meet by the time “Fury Road” begins.“It was purely a way of helping Charlize and explaining it to ourselves,” Miller said.Still, they found Furiosa’s story so compelling that they decided to write a second screenplay even before a frame of “Fury Road” had been shot. “I got to read it when I was cast,” said Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, who played Splendid, one of the “Fury Road” wives. “It’s genius. I’ve always wondered if that movie’s going to get made.”For years, it seemed that it might not, since Miller was locked in a legal battle with Warner Bros. over unpaid earnings related to “Fury Road.” But now that Miller has been given the go-ahead to proceed, he’s begun auditions for the lead role, and he admitted that whoever is cast as Furiosa will have significant shoes to fill.“For the longest time, I thought we could just use CG de-aging on Charlize, but I don’t think we’re nearly there yet,” Miller said. “Despite the valiant attempts on ‘The Irishman,’ I think there’s still an uncanny valley. Everyone is on the verge of solving it, particular Japanese video-game designers, but there’s still a pretty wide valley, I believe.”Though Theron won’t be returning, some crucial members of the “Fury Road” team have signed on. One is the Oscar-winning production designer Colin Gibson, who dropped a tantalizing detail about the prequel’s scale: As we discussed all the vehicles he built for “Fury Road” — 88 were seen onscreen, but 135 were made in total — Gibson teased, “The next possible iteration, which is on the table, has even more.”A Furiosa film even bigger than “Fury Road”? That was enough to lure back the cinematographer John Seale, who finished work on “Fury Road” in 2013 and has spent the last several years in a state of semiretirement.“I’ve had wonderful opportunities to work after ‘Fury Road,’ as you can imagine, and I’ve passed on all of them,” Seale said. “But on ‘Fury Road,’ I told George, ‘If anybody else rings, I’m retired. If you ring, we’ll have lunch.’ And seven years later, he rang.” More

We’re feeling loopy and a little loony tunes under lockdown, and bet you are, too. We want to run around in the great outdoors, chase after a pizza-delivery guy and maybe throw a cream pie in someone’s face, all of which happens in the madcap comedy “What’s Up, Doc?”As light and ticklish as a cockatoo feather, Peter Bogdanovich’s ode to 1930s shenanigans is a guy-meets-gal story with pratfalls, silly jokes and perfectly timed slamming hotel doors. It doesn’t have a lot on its mind other than movie love and its own style — or does it?The dizzy story almost defies synopsis and involves spies and crooks and scholars and assorted identical red-plaid bags, all spinning like precariously balanced plates. At its core, though, there’s Ryan O’Neal as Howard Bannister, a sober, bespectacled music professor who arrives in San Francisco with his hilariously no-nonsense fiancée, Eunice Burns (a sublime Madeline Kahn in her feature debut). Their future and the film’s denouement is sealed the minute Judy Maxwell, an anarchic force played by Barbra Streisand, sets her sights on Howard.[embedded content]Bogdanovich made “What’s Up, Doc?” after “The Last Picture Show,” the ecstatically received film that established his reputation as one of New Hollywood’s wunderkinder. Vincent Canby, writing in The New York Times, dug “What’s Up, Doc?,” calling it a “beautifully disordered farce.” Writing in the paper the following month, The New Yorker’s future art critic Peter Schjeldahl was having none of it. Slamming it harder than a Marx Brothers door, he called it a “plague,” “offensive in the extreme” and a “simulacrum of a movie, a celluloid zombie.” Yikes!What’s up, reader? Are you Team Canby or Team Schjeldahl? Does “What’s Up, Doc?” make you laugh or wince or maybe both? If you’re a fan of classic 1930s screwball, do you find Bogdanovich’s stylings inspired or inane? How does it compare to its most obvious inspiration, Howard Hawks’s “Bringing Up Baby,” a 1938 flop that was eventually hailed as a classic? And what is it like to encounter an adorably nutty Streisand in the full bloom of her 1970s movie stardom, before she was enthroned as the empress of all popular culture?“What’s Up, Doc?” is widely available to rent or buy online; here’s a guide. Please watch it over the weekend and let us know what you think in the comments section below. The cutoff for feedback is 6 p.m., Eastern time, Monday. We’ll read what you have to say and publish our thoughts on the film and your observations on Tuesday. More

For Henry (Alex Wolff), the 19-year-old unfortunate at the heart of “Castle in the Ground,” crushing pills for his dying mother (Neve Campbell) is only the first step in a wearyingly familiar journey. And as he gradually transforms from grieving son to endangered opioid addict, his descent is so depressingly predictable that, for the viewer, sticking with this miserablist dependency drama could be quite the challenge.Offering Henry an escape from his post-funeral funk is his neighbor Ana (Imogen Poots), a supposedly recovering addict and a flurry of red flags: She needs money, a phone, a refill on her Methadone prescription. Her demands are nonstop, her visitors shady; but Henry is accustomed to fulfilling the needs of an ailing woman, and Ana slides all too easily into that echoing space. Soon, his mother’s phone becomes Ana’s, who, later in the movie, will also be offered one of the dead woman’s dresses. These quiet expressions of profound grief are the movie’s most affecting touches, a fragile subtext whispering beneath the story’s ruinous swerve into thriller territory.[embedded content]Unfolding largely inside a pair of grim apartments, “Castle in the Ground” offers a parade of seedy deals and sick people. Wolff is so low-key he barely registers a personality, making Henry not much more than a numb observer of Ana’s begging and bartering. Weak plotting and sluggish direction (by Joey Klein) bury his increasing peril in a story that emphasizes the dead-end chaos of lives controlled by cravings. We’ve seen it before: Faces, substances and locations may change, but the self-destructive behavior and dreary vibe are pretty much constants.Castle in the GroundNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

In the French dramedy “Alice,” an overextended young mother wakes up one morning to find that her husband has disappeared, having secretly spent her entire inheritance on luxury escorts. Stuck with a mortgage, a furious Alice (Emilie Piponnier) goes to the escort agency frequented by her husband — a bright pink parlor where campy madams titter about their elite clientele. After a chat with a free-spirited escort, Lisa (Chloé Boreham), Alice gives the gig a shot herself.Directed by Josephine Mackerras, “Alice” presents sex work as a potentially empowering option for women. The film is mostly light and frothy, painting a rosy picture of the world of high-end escorts: The pay is good, the hours are flexible and the clients — often played for laughs — are meek and easy to please.[embedded content]Tensions do arise, but mainly from Alice’s personal life: child care struggles, her hypocritical husband. Otherwise, Alice relishes her newfound independence, while Lisa offers soap-boxy spiels about reclaiming control over one’s sexuality. She notes, at one point, that escorts like them should not be confused with victims of human trafficking.But what makes their jobs so safe and freeing? Do the female bosses ensure that the work is fair? Does the agency provide them with protections? Mackerras doesn’t go into these details. And a single moment of menace during one of Alice’s appointments turns quickly comic, exposing the movie’s glibness. “Alice” (rightfully) regards the choices of its heroine with respect and empathy. But its picture of sex work as an easy out, devoid of any real danger, feels like a simplistic fantasy.AliceNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. Watch in select virtual theaters. More

Jim Reed (Tom Berenger), the primary, barely moving part of the backcountry thriller “Blood and Money,” is not a well man. A retired U.S. Marine whose alcoholism has him coughing blood and wheezing every few steps, Jim subsists on cigarettes, peanut-butter sandwiches and an array of medications. Not your typical action hero, you might think, and you’d be right; but that doesn’t stop Berenger and his director, John Barr, from spending the next hour and a half trying to prove otherwise.[embedded content]A slow start finds Jim and his customized R.V. in the snowy vastness of northern Maine during hunting season. A regular visitor to this wilderness, Jim is ideally placed to click into survival mode when a deer-stalking incident uncovers a dead woman, a bag bursting with cash and a passel of furious thieves. For the rest of the movie, he will engage in a panting cat-and-mouse with a dwindling group of far-heartier pursuers, and some of his dodges will even seem credible. Most of the time, though, when Jim fares poorly in a fight, we’re just glad he’s getting the chance to sit down.As derivative as its title and as implacable as its declining hero, “Blood and Money” suffers from near-calamitous narrative lapses. The script, by Barr and two others, presents Jim’s crucial connection to a struggling waitress (Kristen Hager) in little more than outline. And by gesturing broadly toward Jim’s painful past without fully cluing us in, the movie provides only the barest justification for his descent into vigilantism. His growing need for a stiff drink, however, is all too easily excused.Blood and MoneyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. Rent or buy on FandangoNOW, iTunes and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

In “The Wrong Missy,” the twerpy bank executive Tim (David Spade) has just met his dream girl — and his nightmare. Trouble is, both women are named Melissa, and though he intended to text Melissa, the former Miss Maryland (Molly Sims), an invite to his company retreat in Hawaii (along with a selfie of his unmentionables), he’s accidentally made Melissa the motormouth (Lauren Lapkus) his plus-one, a feral lonely heart who forces a dog tranquilizer and a nonconsensual sex act on Tim before their plane has landed in paradise.If that “joke” feels like a relic, just wait until the New Kids on the Block dance number. Directed by Tyler Spindel, “The Wrong Missy” (streaming on Netflix) comes from Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison productions, which guarantees four auteurist signatures: the smirking slapstick of early ’90s “Saturday Night Live,” a bizarrely accented Rob Schneider (here, as a shark trawler named Komante), a vacation resort setting where the producers can chillax with their cast member buddies between takes, and an unshakable belief that every schlub deserves a babe with a banging bikini bod. Despite having the personality of a cabbage, Tim is pursued by three. In a nod to the ludicrous setup, the maniacal Melissa (who goes by Missy) chirps, “The age thing doesn’t concern me. What are you, 65?”[embedded content]Between broken bones — yes, plural — and bonks to the head, Spade’s corporate dork spends most of the mercifully short running time willing himself to be invisible. The leading male vacuum allows Lapkus’s Missy to dominate every scene with hostile come-ons, projectile vomiting and demonic laughter. Yet, though the gags are retrograde groaners, Lapkus embarrasses herself with confidence. Her full-throttle verve transcends the script like a water skier leaping over a Great White. One might even swoon when, in a romantic bubble bath, she places rose petals over her eyelids and dubs herself Hellstar. Who has time for shame when there’s a Vanilla Ice cameo to squeeze in before the closing credits?The Wrong MissyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

Did you ever wonder what it might be like to be one of the three pigs of children’s story and animated cartoon fame? Is this a bad time to ask that question? Bear with me.“The Wolf House,” an astounding new animated film from Chile, has a cheeky meta-film opening that purports to be from “La Colonia” — a slight variant of the very real-life Colonia Dignidad, a German-founded isolated colony in Chile renowned for its honey and disdained for its exploitation of the labor of Chilean natives. The first clever conceit of this movie is that it, too, is a product of that colony, one with a lesson. What follows is the story of Maria, an escapee from there, who finds a house in the forest where she holes up with two pigs who become her adopted children. Together they live in terror of a wolf at the door.[embedded content]Sounds odd, and it’s odder than that still. The movie is a mix of drawn and stop-motion model animation. And it’s presented in the form of a single unbroken shot. The backgrounds are always in movement. A bathroom changes into a bedroom not through camera movement, but by having the backgrounds painted over to concoct the new background. The characters themselves are constantly broken down and reconfigured. The imagery is often grotesque, the atmosphere claustrophobic.The co-directors, Joaquín Cociña and Cristobal León, did the ultra-painstaking animation themselves and it’s a wonder they weren’t driven insane in the process (although, come to think of it, one can’t authoritatively say they weren’t). Comparisons with visionary animators like Jan Svankmajer and the Quay Brothers might not be inapt, but they also won’t do the trick — these filmmakers have a perspective and a voice that feels entirely new. The film surprises, with incredible force, in every one of its 75 minutes.The Wolf HouseNot rated. In Spanish and German, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. Watch through KimStim Virtual Cinema. More

The bittersweet character drama “Fourteen” examines a friendship that seems like it should last forever. Despite their differences, Mara (Tallie Medel) and Jo (Norma Kuhling) have been close since childhood. They’ve been friends long enough to have secrets from each other, and they’re close enough to know those secrets don’t really matter. The film around them is like their friendship — intellectual and loving, with a little too much left unsaid.[embedded content]“Fourteen” circles Mara and Jo across 10 years of their adult relationship, lingering on beginnings before the years start to fly by. At the onset, their friendship works as a push and pull between equals — both are gainfully employed 20-somethings building their résumés and dating around in New York City. But when Jo’s mental health devolves, their relationship loses its balance. Jo can no longer hold down the social-work jobs she once enjoyed. Her hot-and-heavy romances used to make Mara jealous, but now they end more dramatically, with threats of self-harm. With each disaster, Mara is Jo’s first call.This story of intimate friendship was written and directed with a subtle touch by Dan Sallitt. He eschews close-ups, preferring to observe how his characters fit within their environment. Denying the satisfaction of grand expressions or gestures, Sallitt instead uses time to show the changes in Jo and Mara’s relationship.As Mara’s life moves forward and Jo’s falls apart, time starts to move faster. Instead of it being a week since Mara last saw Jo, it’s a year, and then several years. What begins as a movie with two protagonists almost imperceptibly evolves into a movie with just one — a touching demonstration of how narratives that seem inevitably intertwined can unravel.FourteenNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. Watch through virtual cinemas. More