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    ‘Final Cut’ Review: A Feeble Rise of the Living Dead

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    A remake of a Japanese zom-com, this French adaptation about the making of a B-level zombie flick does little to justify its existence.If you’re going to remake a film whose footprint is still fresh, you better make it your own if not significantly better. The French zom-com “Final Cut” does neither — the veteran filmmaker Michel Hazanavicius (“The Artist”) may have an Oscar, but his uninspired riff on the Japanese movie “One Cut of the Dead” (2019) has got nothing on the original’s ultra-low-budget charms.In “One Cut of the Dead,” a crew shooting a B-level zombie flick is attacked by the undead in a shaky single-take sequence that works despite its inexplicable pauses and blatantly phony severed limbs. We step into the making of the film-within-the-film, tracking the shoot from a chaotic behind-the-scenes perspective. The first half is fun, but the second half is golden, mining absurd humor, breathless tension, and movie-magic triumphalism from an onslaught of minor crises.Hazanavicius’s adaptation is an almost beat-for-beat copy: there’s an ax-wielding makeup artist played by an actress (Bérénice Bejo) who goes frighteningly Method; a blood-splatterd “final girl” (Matilda Lutz) who lobs off the head of her lover (Finnegan Oldfield); some all-too-realistic practical effects courtesy of a drunken, vomit-spewing castmate and another player seized by a bout of explosive diarrhea.Some tweaks account for Hazanavicius’s French translation, the most intriguing of which further deepen the plot’s metacinematic layers. “One Cut” exists within this world, too, with a Japanese cohort representing that film’s rights holders looming over the director Rémi (Romain Duris). There’s a long, fascinating history of Japanese and French cultural cross-pollination — and both countries are home to two of the oldest, most robust film industries in the world — but Hazanavicius works in the globalization of moviemaking only superficially, primarily through lazy culture-clash mockery: a Pearl Harbor joke here, a jab at the stereotypically poor French work ethic there.“Final Cut” puts its predecessor’s ingredients through an unflattering Instagram filter. The shoot’s intentional shoddiness — authentically kitschy in the original — rings false, with Hazanavicius spelling out the crew’s missteps in such a way that flattens the humor and kills the momentum.In France, to make a film about the making-of-a-film is practically a rite of passage (see François Truffaut’s “Day for Night,” Mia Hansen-Love’s “Bergman Island,” or “Olivier Assayas’s “Irma Vep”). With its metafictional bounties and playful genre bent, “One Cut” offers a conceit ripe for the picking. But what Hazanavicius has done here is a lifeless mock-up, a rehash made purely for audiences who’d prefer not to read Japanese subtitles. At least that’s some kind of justification for its existence.Final CutNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Man in the Basement’ Review: The Occupation of Paris

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      This nebulous French thriller tracks the unraveling of a Jewish family that accidentally sells their storage cellar to an antisemitic conspiracy theorist.A Jewish family’s new neighbor is an antisemitic conspiracy theorist in “The Man in the Basement,” a nebulous thriller by the French director Philippe Le Guay.Not that their dingy storage cellar is fit for habitation — though like many Parisian sub-dwellings, it was once occupied by Jews in hiding during the war, as in François Truffaut’s “The Last Metro.”Simon (Jérémie Renier), the family’s affable patriarch, suspects nothing when he sells the space to the ex-history teacher Jacques Fonzic (François Cluzet). The older man claims to want to offload his dead mother’s things sooner rather than later, and Simon doesn’t think twice about handing over the keys and cashing the check.Turns out that’s enough to seal the deal under French law, so when Fonzic settles in to his underground abode, irritating the building’s other residents, Simon is powerless to evict the stranger even after he discovers the awful truth.That Fonzic at times appears perfectly pleasant, even sagacious when he, for instance, invokes certain revisionist versions of American history, is a testament to Cluzet’s charms. But the most malignant people are just that — innocuous, friendly-seeming — spreading their beliefs like an odorless poison.Simon grows desperate as his legal actions repeatedly fail, allowing Fonzic’s ongoing presence to corrupt his loved ones. His wife, Hélène (Bérénice Bejo), spirals, and his teenage daughter Nelly (Victoria Eber) — already a Krav Maga-practicing nonconformist who is in love with her cousin — finds herself drawn to the convincingly levelheaded Fonzic’s “freethinking” philosophy.Despite Cluzet’s disarming performance and the film’s provocative conceit, Le Guay’s ideas — about modern-day Jewish identity, ideologies of victimhood, the emboldening of right-wing extremists, and the sundry loopholes offered to them by our systems of justice — swirl chaotically around the plot-heavy film, underdeveloped. Somewhere in “The Man in the Basement” there is a smart psychodrama sharpened by political urgency, but what we get is a middling think piece that too quickly loses momentum — and peters out by the end.The Man in the BasementNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. In theaters. More