Another attempt at nouveau horror in Philip Gelatt's 2-character creep-out, THEY REMAIN

Somewhat similar to last year's all-atmosphere/low-on-plot-and-characterization movie, It Comes at Night, this new film -- the sophomore effort from Philip Gelatt (The Bleeding House) entitled THEY REMAIN -- relies on quite a lot of exposition coupled to an attempt at slow-burning suspense and creepy behavior (from both its protagonists and from the animal/insect life on view). TrustMovies admits that he is impressed by the continuing attempts of filmmakers to find new ways to tell the same old stories. But for every Babadook or Creepy that appears we seem to get a double dose of the very labored, tiresome and ultimately annoying movies such as It Comes at Night, Daguerrotype, and now this one.

On the plus side, Mr. Gelatt, shown at right, sets most of his movie in daylight, in a quite beautiful, autumn-colored countryside in which the bad things that will soon happen take place in often the brightest of sunshine and greenery. The plot, such as it is, has to do with a couple of scientists/researchers that have been sent to this site by a "big corporation" (yes, feel free to read oh-oh! into this) in order to study the "animal life," which we soon learn is behaving oddly.

Because, I am assuming, of his very low budget, Mr. Gelatt does not allows to see this odd behavior on view. Instead, we're told about it secondhand, via the researchers. Oh, we do see a small animal skeleton, and a dog who actually seems to be behaving pretty much like dogs often act. But, again, since we're getting most of this via exposition, we'd best try to read something into all this.

The movie is mostly what they call a "two-hander," meaning we have only two characters on view: our researchers (played by William Jackson Harper, above, and Rebecca Henderson, below) who, it tuns out, have had some kind of past relationship that must have ended badly. So now they can spend the movie being vaguely annoyed with each other until, yep, they start having sex again. Or do they? As the movie moves along, it grows more difficult to detect dream or fantasy from reality.

Our pair knows from the outset that the site upon which the are doing their research doubles as the place where a series of grizzly mass murders occurred some time back. So now the animal life is affected? Is it the soil? The water? Or our researchers' imagination? Maybe even that naughty corporation, the representatives of which -- a pilot who flies in supplies and a disembodied voice we hear only over the phone -- are clearly assholes. Perhaps our two protags are simply going nuts, all on their own.

Whatever it is, it seems to take for-fucking-ever to make itself known. Meanwhile, we get lots of wandering-thru-the-woods and unpleasantness between our two lead characters, who actually don't seem to have much "character" of their own. We also get some very clunky exposition about their respective family life (wouldn't they have told this to each other during their earlier relationship?) but little else except increasing arguments, paranoia and a some now-and-then sex.

Oh, yes: A word or two ought to be said about the use of nightmare/intuitive memory flashbacks that help fill in plot-lines. Either find a better way to include these tiresome tropes or, better yet, leave them out altogether and come up with a entirely different way to inform your audience of "what happened earlier." Here, we see that naughty cult at work with snippets that increase in length but don't add much that's worth our energy or concentration. Plus, the POV for these flashbacks/fantasies seems more than a little "iffy."

By the time we've reached the end credits, the "they" who "remain" are unlikely to be the annoyed audience members who paid good money for their tickets to this nonsense. The poster (shown top) by Jeanne D'Angelo, however, is lots of fun.

From Paladin and running about 20 minutes too long at its 102-minute length, They Remain opens this Friday, March 2, in New York City at the Village East Cinema and on the following Friday, March 9, in Los Angeles at Laemmle's Music Hall 3. A national release (probably highly limited) is said to be upcoming, as well.

Carlos Bolado's OLVIDADOS sheds some light on those South American dictators' dirty wars

The 1970s were not a good time for many South America countries, what with one dictator after another -- in Chile, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay -- cracking down on any perceived rumblings of unrest by the populace: torturing, murdering and finally "disappearing" that portion of the people considered to be a left-wing threat. One of the strengths of the new film, OLVIDADOS (Forgotten), getting its U.S. theatrical debut today in New York City (it opens next month in Los Angeles) is that it demonstrates to a greater extent than I have seen previously in a narrative film how those South American dictators joined forces to do their dirty work, thus making it easier than ever to crush the opposition.

As directed by Mexican filmmaker Carlos Bolado, shown at left, and starring that fine Mexican actor, Damián Alcázar (seen below),  the movie is a Bolivian production, filmed in its home country, as well as in Chile, Argentina and the USA. Among other historically accurate things, it shows how much of the training for this multi-country repression and torture came from the United States, which provided the training and some military -- as well as funding -- to fight this "Communist threat," which is how the USA labeled it, though the general populace of the countries involved might as easily have called it a fight for government by the people.

Señor Alcázar plays José Mendieta, a high-level military Bolivian officer given the job of finding, imprisoning, torturing and obtaining evidence/confessions/names of co-conspirators from within the populace. He does all this with enormous relish and barely a second thought for the lives of the prisoners he and his henchmen destroy. Alcázar is capable of great versatility, from fine comedic acting through nearly all else. Here, he plays the Colonel at two ages: middle and old (in not very good "age" make-up), and is mostly asked to be cruel as his younger self and frightened/guilty in his older incarnation.

It is the rest of the ensemble cast that enliven the movie with their energy and fraught situation. Mostly, they are the victims, and our sympathy goes out to them, along with a good degree of horror at what they must endure. Movies like this -- and we have now seen quite a number of them in both narrative and documentary form -- almost by necessity demand a certain amount of realistic torture. My spouse found the film too much -- torture porn, he called it -- while I felt it did what was necessary to get across the message

The movie gives both sides the opportunity to advance their message (even within the protesters, there is disagreement about how far to go and how much to give up), but when one side accompanies its message with the kind of maiming and murder that so many South Americans were put through, this does tend, rightly I think, to stack the deck against it.

Stylistically, the film has enough flourish to make it easy to sit through. The torture is intercut with good memories from the victims' lives, while the past and present of the Colonel and his absent son are handled well, too. There is a particularly telling scene toward the end of the film between that son and an interrogator, when the son returns to Bolivia after a long absence.

A pregnant woman (Carla Ortiz, above, the film's female star and its producer) figures prominently in the story, too, which pushes open even farther the door to the subject of parenting, parentage and those babies said to have been stolen from their birth mothers and given to "better" families who would raise them "properly."

Olvidados covers a lot of territory in its 112-minute length. You can think of it as a kind of Holocaust movie with Latin American socialists taking the place of Jews (though some victims here are both). Just as it is vital not to forget what happened to the Jews, it is just as important to remember the "disappeared" of South and Central America. Otherwise, those olvidados will indeed be forgotten.

The movie, from the Cinema Libre Studio, opens today, Friday, September 18, in New York City at the Village East Cinema, and on Friday, October 2, in Los Angeles at Laemmle's Royal.  The DVD, Blu-ray and download-to-own option (via Amazon and Vimeo) will become available on December 1, with an iTunes debut scheduled for January 15, 2016. HBO and HBO Latino will join the parade in mid-December.

Matthew Saville's NOISE: a good deal of sound and fury signifying... what, exactly? Your choice.

A provincial Australian town on the route of a major railway that has lately experienced a mass-murder must now deal with the after-effects of this hideous and confusing crime. The shooter has left one possible victim alive, which perplexes her, as well as the police. In Matthew Saville's quiet and unsettling movie, NOISE, we get to know the municipality's police, some of the little town's citizens -- a pretty bizarre lot -- and especially one particular policeman, and his live-in lady.

As written and directed by Saville (shown at left), a veteran of Aussie television, the film weaves from character to character, incident to incident, connecting them in offhand ways that eventually pay off -- to some extent. The film's opening is almost guaranteed to keep you watching, both surprising and quietly breath-stopping in its revelations. The film's star and centerpiece is an actor named Brendan Cowell, below, who plays a cop named Graham with a physical problem, Tinnitus (an occasional ringing, sometimes roaring, in the ears), that seems to bring on other physical problems. Graham would like to be let off work for awhile, but then this massacre happens and he's put on duty in this little outpost of weirdness that only adds to the weirdness he's already experiencing.

Meanwhile that left-unhurt victim of the massacre (a nice performance from Maia Thomas, shown with Cowell in photo at bottom) has her own problems -- particularly the fear that the murderer, whom she clearly saw, will come after her now.

Graham and his girlfriend, herself a policewoman (played by Katie Wall, above right) bicker and screw, odd locals pop in and out of the ersatz headquarters where Graham and other cops work, and we begin to get a picture of life in this rather strange community.

Yet that picture does not go very far or very deep. While the film is consistently interesting, it refuses to coalesce, and this cut-off experienced by the characters from each other and their own life, as well as what we viewers experience from the film itself, is intentional, I suspect. The noise of the title, the noise in Graham's head, the noise, static, distraction and disconnect of modern life makes it impossible for us all to properly connect. (Or not.)

That's what I got out of this odd film that offers little closure, but which I found, on balance, worth seeing. My spouse did not -- and unusual response from him to any film from Film Movement, the distributor that released this movie in the U.S. You can view it now via Netflix streaming, Amazon Instant Video, or on DVD.

Slaughter in high school: Michelle Danner's and John Buffalo Mailer's HELLO HERMAN

Well-intentioned but coming a bit late to the table (after better films such as Elephant, Beautiful Boy and We Need to Talk About Kevin, to name but three), the new movie about yet another high-school massacre -- HELLO HERMAN, written by John Buffalo Mailer (from his play of the same name) and directed by Michelle Danner -- has its moments and, to the credit of the filmmakers, has been opened up enough to not seem stage-bound. Beyond this however, it never quite finds its footing in order to take off far enough to make us understand and/or care about its characters. Or, for that matter, to believe in them much.

Parceling out blame for why the film doesn't work is difficult when you weren't at the shoot itself, but because Mailer's dialog and plot points are interesting enough to command some respect, it may be the manner in which Ms Danner (shown at left) -- a well-known acting teacher here directing her second film (her first was the 2006 rom-com How to Go Out on a Date in Queens) -- has put all this together that seems wanting. There is often a kind of disconnect between dialog, acting, visuals and editing that makes for a result that seems almost constantly just a little "off."

This is particularly true in the scene in which Herman's mom (played by the director) unburdens herself to the protagonist/reporter named Lax (essayed by Norman Reedus, below, right). Solid, genuine points are made here and yet the whole thing comes up a tad phony due to that above-mentioned combo of disconnect. Mailer offers the reporter as a kind of mirror image of the high school assassin (Garrett Backstrom, above, and below, left). Both are severely troubled and have the death of a human being on their hands -- though the kid has 42 to the reporter's one.

Speaking of, how in hell does that kid even know about the reporter's baseball-bat clubbing of an innocent black boy? This is not something this very cagey character Lax would be likely to bandy about. Love interest (unnecessary, considering how little is done with this) is provided by another reporter, played by Martha Higareda (below, right), who was Lax's girfriend back in the day and reconnects with him now. ("He's her ex-lax!" my companion noted with glee, providing the best line of the evening -- even if it wasn't part of the movie.)

Hello Herman wants to spreads its indictments around, and so the media takes its shares of hits via interviews with an crass 'n nasty Republican senator (Christine Dunford) and an asshole TV host who loves to turn up the volume on hate and violence (Rob Estes, below). Bullying gets its share of time, too, taking its place as one of the reasons for the murderous kid's killing spree. So does a fractured family, with Dad missing in action, mom working herself silly and -- in the one truly dumb segment, our anti-hero as a baby-sitter too interested in playing video games (the violence of which is also heavily indicted) to take proper care of his little sister. Oh, yes -- the kid's desire for fame-at-any-price comes into play, as well.

All the ingredients (except maybe a specific plea for gun control) are here to provide the usual recipe for mass-murder. But so what? They don't mix well or truly compel. Set slightly in the future, where our poor, miserable, fame-hungry fellow is to be executed via electric chair on TV in front of the entire nation (sort of a modern-day Keir Dullea in an updated Hoodlum Priest), the movie doesn't go far enough for either sci-fi or satire. It is definitely well-meaning, and just as definitely so-so. For those expecting a lot of blood and gore, be warned: The carnage is suggested then replaced by freeze frames gone to sepia mode. (That's OK: Beautiful Boy left the killings out entirely and still proved a riveting, deeply-felt movie.)

Hello Herman -- from Warner Bros, Gravitas & Freestyle and said to be running 100 minutes (although the version I saw ran only 89) -- opens Friday, June 7, in New York City at the Cinema Village, in the Los Angeles area at Laemmle's Noho 7, in Atlanta at the Plaza Theatre, in Miami at the Palace 18, in Tempe/Phoenix at the Harkins Valley Art, in Cleveland/Mentor at the Great Lakes, in Modesto/
Sacramento area at the Brenden 18, in El Paso at the Premiere 18, in St. Louis at the Jamestown 14, in Florida (in Lake Park at the Mos' Art, in Lake Worth at the Stonzek Theater, in Philadelphia at the Montgomeryville Stadium 12, in Albuquerque at The Guild, in New Jersey (Boonton) at the Darress Theatre and in Louisiana (at Shreveport's The Robinson). Simultaneously, it will be available via Time Warner On-Demand in some 100 million US homes.

Bello and Sheen in Shawn Ku's BEAUTIFUL BOY: difficult, riveting and awe-inspiring

We've had films about mass murder in high school and university (Elephant and the under-seen but very good Dark Matter come immediately to mind) but until now I don't believe there has been a movie about this subject shown exclusively from the perspective of the parents of the murderer. The very idea of this broadens and enriches our understanding, but who would have guessed that a relatively fledgling filmmaker like Shawn Ku, director and co-writer (along with Michael Armbruster), would come up with something that's, yes, difficult to watch, but increasingly riveting and finally an awe-inspiring accomplishment? We'll soon be getting another film on this topic (Lynne Ramsay's We Need to Talk About Kevin), but for now BEAUTIFUL BOY is the first out of the gate.

As writers, Ku (shown at left, on set) and Armbruster choose their details carefully. We never see the massacre (we don't need to), but each tiny bit of information the writers provide about the parents adds to our understanding. And thankfully, we are given none of those cheap "a-hah!" moments. As much as we grasp about these adults and their child (a barely-seen Kyle Gallner, below, who makes his every short appearance count), full comprehension of the event, and how and why it came to be, while desperately needed, remains elusive -- for us and for them.

TrustMovies is usually not a big fan of the hand-held camera, and the more he gets of it in a single sitting, the more jumpy and fretful (just like that camera) he can become. Having said that, Mr. Ku's use of this technique is extraordinary. (His cinematographer, Michael Fimognari, is also responsible for the recent grabber Brotherhood and the smart-but-underseen teen movie Dare.)

Together these two keep that camera moving and come in close, then closer, until you know you're prying.  And yet you go along gladly because Ku and Fimognari know when to move in, how far, and when to stop. They value quiet, and so we're able to be about as close as possible to our protagonists, played by the it-doesn't get-much-better-than Maria Bello (above) and Michael Sheen (below). We enter their minds, and get under their skin. And due to the spot-on work of these actors, the dialog seems so real as to be have been improvised (though I doubt very much that it was.)

By definition these parents, Bill and Kate, bear some responsibility for their son Sammy's actions, but exactly how much? And what might they have done to prevent this? Bill initially will have none of the "responsibility" thing, and Sheen makes it clear that the character cannot begin to face reality yet. Bello's Kate faces it immediately but get too wrapped up in the guilt and the why and the how. Both fall apart in their own way, as they stay with Kate's brother and his wife -- fine jobs from Alan Tudyk (below, right) and Moon Bloodgood (center, right) -- who open their home indefinitely to the pair. Meatloaf Aday (shown, right, in the photo at bottom) also does a beautiful job as the clerk at the motel where Sheen finally retreats.

As we delve further inside our pair, we can't help but empathize as they hear (often by sudden accident) the TV news reports. One particularly nasty FOX-News-type commentator's take on these parents should make you recoil for life from this sort of hate-mongering. Yet, as much as we enter the souls of the two, the ferocity and finality of what their son has done is never far away. It eats around every scene, and into nearly every moment.  How in the world, the movie asks us over and over again, do we empathize with and understand people in this position?  The movie's greatness comes from the fact that it enables us, finally, to do exactly that -- and to a greater extent than we could possibly imagine going in.

For all caring parents -- as problemed as we are, and as many mistakes as we make -- Beautiful Boy will be punishing. But it should be equally rewarding. Utterly specific and beautifully realized, this story of the parents of a boy gone brutally haywire will certainly be among the best films of the year.

Beautiful Boy (from Anchor Bay Films, 100 minutes) opens in select cities this Friday, June 3. In New York, catch it at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas and the Angelika Film Center. Click here for playdates and showtimes elsewhere.