Roy Andersson is back -- and treading water -- with ABOUT ENDLESSNESS

They're all here, once again, those special pleasures of viewing a film by Swedish master Roy Andersson: the stationary camera, perfect compositions, elegance, ugliness, humor (dry, dark), and above all quietude -- even amidst what would normally be considered a terribly trying time (a modern-day Christ being persecuted as he carries his cross uphill in one of those uber-sanitary Scandinavian towns). 

Beginning with a Chagall-like image (above) of a man and woman floating in the sky, Andersson's newest, ABOUT ENDLESSNESS, is only his fourth full-length film in 20 years. None of these are what you'd call lengthy (maybe 95 or 100 minutes), and his new one lasts but 78. 

Yet for TrustMovies, this one seems the longest, thanks to a certain repetition and sameness that have clearly set in to the filmmaker's work (Mr. Andersson is shown at right). Not that his situations are the same (though they are often pretty similar), but his themes -- from religion, war, commerce, communication (or the lack of it), and a populace that is at best utterly brainwashed -- remain front and center, with little new to be said about any of these. 

What the filmmaker has done, I think, is to pare down each of his segments more and more to what is currently coming very close to the bone. (Andersson has always been a minimalist; he's simply more so now.)

He's right, of course, in that society is certainly not changing (except for the worse), but then neither is his own vision. And since there are usually a few years inserted between his last and the debut of his latest, we're more primed for yet another chapter of Andersson-ville.

And so as About Endlessness was unspooling, I found myself, as ever, engaged with the simultaneous beauty/ugliness of it all. At the same time, my mind wandered back to his first (and still best) full-length film, Songs From the Second Floor, and how much more deeply, movingly, often shockingly, these same themes were rendered.

Well, society certainly ain't changing ('cept for the worse), so can you blame a filmmaker for staying his course? (Even treading water, Roy Andersson puts most other movie-makers to shame in so many ways.) And if we perceive an awful lot of state-sanctioned, by-rote behavior here, I can also tell you that the likes of Adolf Hitler makes an appearance, as well.

The refrain, "I saw a man..." (or sometimes a woman) occurs often here, as do forms of love and even thermodynamics. And if I can detect any really special loathing of Andersson's, it just might be toward psychotherapy and its practitioners (maybe even toward the entire medical profession). 

I might suggest that it's time for Andersson to move on, but as the world appears to be arriving at its  end, in its own not-so-good time, perhaps it is this filmmaker who is the best choice to help us properly embrace it all.

From Magnolia Pictures, in Swedish with English subtitles (damn few, actually; fast, snappy dialog is not Mr. Andersson's thing) and running 78 minutes, About Endlessness opens theatrically this Friday, April 30 in limited release. (It will not be challenging Godzilla and King Kong for the box-office crown.) Click here for more information on the film and its theatrical and/or digital-viewing venues.

Italian workers and nuns unite in Samad Zarmandili's progressive comedy, BEATE

Religion and Marxism-lite unite in the very nicely-done Italian comedy from 2018, BEATE (in English, blessed), in which a group of female, suddenly-unemployed workers in a lingerie factory join forces with a group of nuns from a local convent -- in order to keep those workers working while stopping the convent from being surreptitiously turned into a seaside resort. Yeah: Capitalism strikes again. Or tries to. This being somewhat of a fantasy -- a quite dear one, nonetheless -- the bad guys have a bit tougher time of it. Also, it must be said that European workers, Italians and French in particular, have more of a history of intelligent, sometimes fierce (and still current) worker solidarity than does the American variety, in which trade unions seem nearly defunct. (Thanks so much, Amazon.)

The filmmaker (shown at right) is a name new to me -- Samad Zarmandili -- though he worked as first assistant director on two excellent Italian movies, 20 Cigarettes and Valzer, the latter being one of TrustMovies favorite films of all time, the filmmaker of which, Salvatore Maira, is one of the three credited writers on Beate (and not by coincidence, I suspect). Both filmmakers must share a very progressive attitude. 

Signore Zarmandili and his writers set up their tale quietly and firmly, allowing, within the framework of a 90-minute screen comedy, as much character development as plot development, all of which makes for more depth, as well as enjoyment.

In the leading role of the woman who organizes the workers is the excellent Sicilian-born actress Donatella Finocchiaro (above, from Secret Journey, Sorelle Mai and Terraferma). As usual Ms Finocchiaro brings a lovely, appealing combination of intelligence and easy-going sex appeal to the role. 

The "leader" of those nuns -- played with proper reticence and discretion by Maria Roveran (above) -- turns out to be one of the youngest and least tutored (but also the most aware and willing), and the movie's combination of religion and labor proves pretty irresistible because it takes seriously the Italian need for religious faith without ever succumbing to any insistence on belief in miracles and the like.

In fact, the single "miracle" that helps bring things to a proper close is more ironic than anything else, and were Beate not such an endearing and kindly little film, you might also call what happens here deeply cynical. (The Capitalists can now make even more money off religion than they might have from their real estate project!).

The movie's attitude toward sexuality is properly adult, as well. Humanity's foibles, particularly those of the male of the species, are not going to change anytime soon, so let's accept them/enjoy them (or not) -- and move on. 

And, sure, labor can work with the Church (wouldn't that be nice?!), and women with men, and retailers with wholesalers, and everyone can profit -- well, somewhat. Cooperation outdoes competition, employing locals is better than outsourcing, and acceptance beats being judgmental -- at least for the length of time you're viewing this little charmer.

Another "find" from Corinth Films, in Italian with English subtitles, and running 90 minutes, the movie opened in virtual cinemas this past weekend. Click here for more information and to view the several locations from which you can choose. 

Short take: Ralph L. Thomas' based-on-true-life tale, APPRENTICE TO MURDER, hits Blu-ray

The oddball Canada/USA/ Norway co-production from 1988, APPRENTICE TO MURDER, proves an unusual but worthwhile film for several reasons. It's based on actual events that happened in Pennsylvania back in the 1920s involving an itinerant preacher/religious healer and the 16-year-old boy he takes in and trains as his assistant.

As played -- and very well -- by Donald Sutherland as the "healer" and Chad Lowe as his disciple, these two characters control the movie and keep us interested in the bizarre plot. But it's the film's attitude toward religion and faith healing that is the hook here. Instead of the usual Elmer Gantry-ish fakery and corruption, this healer seems awfully good at what he does, and so we are as taken with him and his work as is his flock. And Mr. Sutherland (above) is at all times convincing.

As directed by Ralph L. Thomas (Ticket to Heaven) and co-written by Wesley Moore and Alan Scott, the film moves slowly and keeps us as off-balance as it does its hero, played as an intelligent, searching innocent by Mr. Lowe, shown above. Its take on the preacher and his religion is consistently ambivalent, which forces us to try to view and understand things from a different perspective than the usual, and the film's odd but effective mix of religion, romance and (possible) horror renders it one of the more unusual of genre-mashers and/or genre-benders

Mia Sara provides the romance, while Norwegian actor Knut Husebø (above) makes an impressively scary neighbor who helps brings all the pieces of this oddball puzzle together. From Arrow Video, distributed in the USA via MVD Entertainment Group, Apprentice to Murder hit the street earlier this week -- for purchase and (I hope, somewhere) for rental. (Do watch the informative bonus feature on the Blu-ray, featuring Kat Ellinger's take on this interesting movie.)

Blu-ray debut for Desiree Akhavan's THE MISEDUCATION OF CAMERON POST

A movie that was well-received at its debut at last year's Sundance Film Fest and later in the year when its had its limited theatrical run, THE MIS-EDUCATION OF CAMERON POST, directed and co-written by Desiree Akhavan
(shown below), didn't set the box-office on fire nearly as much as those who championed the film would have liked.

Now that a special edition of the movie has appeared on Blu-ray, home viewers will have further opportunity to judge for themselves. Although The M of CP, as we'll call it, is all about the increasingly outlawed practice of GLBT "conversion therapy" (it takes place in 1993) and we've already seen two other films on this subject within past year (the excellent based-on-fact narrative movie, Boy Erased and the unusual documentary The Sunday Sessions), this one easily finds it own special niche.

For one thing the protagonist here is female rather than male, as in the other two films, and Ms Akhavan's style is lower-key, generally resisting melodrama very well -- even in the one toward-the-end scene in which this is very nearly unavoidable. The filmmaker draws fine performances from her entire cast, many of whom will seem brand new to the viewer's eye.

Though lead actress Chloë Grace Moretz (above) and three supporting players -- Jennifer Ehle,(below, right), John Gallagher Jr. (below, left) and Sasha Lane -- are well-known, most of the other faces are fresh and new enough to make the film seem as close to documentary in feel as to narrative.

Ms Moretz, in particular, is such a fine actress (even in claptrap like the recent Suspiria remake) that she makes every tiny gesture and small thoughtful moment something you never question. She is so adept here at keeping her thoughts and feelings close to the vest, even as you realize how difficult is the position in which she has been placed, that you will find it hard to take your eyes off her.

When at last Cameron is able to truly bond with a couple of her co-prisoners -- Ms Lane (center, above) and the excellent American Indian actor Forrest Goodluck (above, left) -- this quiet, increasingly deeply-felt relationship binds the movie. As usual with these "conversion therapy" stories, religion plays a huge and pretty terrifying role. And though The M of CP doesn't make any of its characters out-and-out villains, if you're anything like me, you'll want to shove a pocket version of the Holy Bible down the throat of most of these faith-based idiots.

From FilmRise and running 91 minutes, The Miseducation of Cameron Post hit the street last week on Blu-ray, complete with Bonus Features -- for purchase and/or rental. According to the distributor, it will soon be available on VOD, as well.

MARTYR: Mazen Khaled's fantasia of love, death, grief--and imprisoning religion/tradition

It is difficult to imagine, after viewing MARTYR -- the new movie from Lebanese filmmaker Mazen Khaled -- that the film was not hugely divisive, both in its home country of Lebanon and elsewhere. This is one of the most homoerotic movies I have ever seen, while remaining just this side of anything obviously/overtly homosexual. There are good reasons for this particular artistic stance. Writer/ director Khaled (shown below) is exploring a Muslim society in which the

highly religious adhere to a strict code that, by not allowing nearly as much interplay between male and female as does most of western society, pushes young men together into kinds of "closeness" that cannot help but move from mental, physical and spiritual into the sexual, especially when some of these men are, of course, already genetically programmed to want and need the kind of love from each other that can best be expressed sexually.

Further, while fostering homoeroticism, the restrictive nature of the Muslim religion allows for less privacy. The movie's "hero," Hassane (played with fraught intensity by a beautiful newcomer, Hamza Mekdad, below, being carried), can't even masturbate in peace while taking a shower -- thanks to his parents' constant badgering.

Khaled's film is a fantasia of visuals and themes -- imagined and real, on land and sea, impressionistic, grounded, emotional, some of these even danced and sung -- about attraction, love, employment, economics, death and grief, all sifted through the sieve of the kind of fundamentalist religion that controls all.

The bare bones of the story could hardly be simpler: a day in the life of Hassane, his family and friends. Yet within all this resides every major emotion and event you could ask for (except perhaps some humor). The movie is elliptical, however; don't expect to have everything explained in typically expository fashion.

Instead of looking for work (or simply showing up at the jobs some of them already have), Hassane and his pals take a day off at the beach, above, where the popular sport is to take a somewhat dangerous dive or jump (below) from a favored point above the water.  One particular dive changes everything, and from there the movie fills with questioning and grief, as the group begins to pine for what might have been.

Characters explore the thoughts and feelings they are unable or unwilling to vent in their actual life -- via dance (below, in the closest thing to something homosexual the movie offers) and choral keening (from Hassane's mother and her peers), even as the movie continues its immense and near-constant fascination with the human body, skin and touch.

Moving from documentary-like footage to philosophical inquiry to religious ritual to the question of what the title term actually means, Martyr balances the formal with the elliptical, finally arriving full circle back to the sea -- and the skin.

Don't expect something at all standard here, but if you approach the film in anything like the spirit in which it was conceived and executed, I think you will find yourself enmeshed and enraptured by its beauty, while saddened at the picture of male youth wasted and/or sacrificed to tradition and religion.

From Breaking Glass Pictures and running 84 minutes, the movie opens this Friday, November 30 in Los Angeles at Laemmle's Glendale and then on Friday, December 14 in New York City at the Cinema Village. In between times, on Tuesday, December 4, Martyr will have its release on DVD and VOD (the latter via iTunes, Amazon Prime Video, Google Play, Vudu and FandangoNOW).

Emma Thompson, superb as usual, in Richard Eyre and Ian McEwan's THE CHILDREN ACT

If you are looking for a movie full of ideas, excellent performances and situations that will move you and make you think -- without actually forcing you into some preordained box -- THE CHILDREN ACT may be exactly your cup of classy British tea.

As written by Ian McEwan (from his novel) and directed by Richard Eyre, the film probes subjects such as oddball religion beliefs, the law, justice, and most especially, what your responsibility is to someone whose life you have entered and irrevocably changed.

Mr. Eyre (Stage Beauty, Notes on a Scandal), a director of theater, opera, film and television, pictured at right, has had an up-and-down movie career, and this is one of his "ups," encompassing so much so gracefully that you may find yourself thinking about the film as much after viewing as during.

The film's main character is a noteworthy British judge named Fiona Maye, played exceptionally well by Emma Thompson (below), whose workload seem to concentrate most on cases involving children at risk. She soon finds herself embroiled in a case involving a family of Jehovah's Witnesses whose teenage son desperately needs a blood transfusion that the son and his parents all reject for religious reasons.

Simultaneously Judge Maye is going through a bad time in her sexless, emotionless long-term marriage to her University professor husband Jack (a tamped-down but still effective Stanley Tucci, below), who is about to embark upon an extra-marital affair. When the judge decides that she must meet with and question the son regarding his reasons for not agreeing to the blood transfusion, everything suddenly begins to change.

How and why this happens provides the meat of the movie, and, my, is there a wealth to chew on. All of it is held together via Ms Thompson's very strong performance -- which is spot-on moment to moment. The actress takes us through changes minute and major, allowing us to see clearly her character, flaws and all, helping us understand the reasons for each new decision that she must make.

In the pivotal role of the son, Dunkirk actor Fionn Whitehead (above) is even more remarkable here. He captures both the closed-off strength of the religious cult believer and then the strange, sad, buoyant freedom that can come via the release from that brainwashing. A word, too, must be said for the fine Jason Watkins, who plays the judge's aide, a kind, quiet fellow would clearly do anything for his boss yet is treated by her as something approaching the invisible.

What happens in the course of this thoughtful, deeply felt and surprisingly realistic film involves such sudden and life-changing events that even the possibility of these happening to our cast of characters offers more real nourishment that a year's worth of the overdone plots of mainstream soap operas. Viewers who insist on melodrama and cliché may go away unsated, but those who appreciate genuine feeling -- along with characters who struggle with right and wrong and all the stuff in between -- will come away from this film richly rewarded.

From A24 and  running 105 minutes, The Children Act seems to have opened here in South Florida one week prior to its originally scheduled playdate. It hit theaters this past Friday, September 21, at the Movies of Delray and Lake Worth, the Living Room Theaters, and the Tower Theater in Miami. Wherever you live across the country, click here to find the theaters nearest you. If you can[t find a theater close to you, note that the movie is also playing simultaneously via DIRECTV.

COCOTE: Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias' Dominican revenge/art film opens

Is it possible to create a genuine art film around the themes of revenge and religious fervor? On the basis of COCOTE, the new movie from the Dominican Republic written, directed and edited by Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias, the answer is absolutely not. Don't even bother. Of course, another filmmaker might easily manage this combo, but regarding TrustMovies' taste and viewing patience, this may be the worst and most foolish example of pompous, ridiculous movie-making that I have had to sit through in my close to fifteen years of reviewing. It is, in fact, this year's sterling example of a "fart" film (or failed art film: a movie that is mostly comprised of hot, smelly air).

Almost nothing works, and yet almost everything calls heavy-handed attention to itself in Señor de los Santos Arias' bizarre endeavor (the filmmaker is shown at right) -- which alternates black-and-white and color cinematography, a small-screen then wide-screen ratio, a father and a funeral, religion and revenge (with way too much emphasis on the former) to tell a tale that offers barely enough content for a half-hour television segment yet goes on for a punishing 106-minute length. I held on for the entire film (my spouse gave up two-thirds of the way along), but I must admit to growing angrier as time wore on.

The director has certainly cast a striking, handsome and impressive looking actor, Vicente Santos (above and below), in his leading role -- and then deliberately refuses to let us get a very good look at the guy. Few facial close-ups are to be seen, and though much is made of the actor's large stature, don't expect to view him full-frame more than a time or two -- or from such a distance or in such darkness that the figure you're seeing might just be your next-door neighbor. Yes, de Los Santos Arias appears to delight in withholding.

Ditto regarding the "dramatic" scenes. There are three of what you might call "big ones" here: two involve our hero and his female relatives urging him on toward revenge and another that has him speaking to a local policeman and getting reams of exposition as to how and why things work they way they do in the Dominican Republic (and most of the world, actually: it's simply less subtle here).

In two of the three scenes (above and below), the filmmaker pulls his camera back about as far from the actors as possible and just lets us hear the dialog so that we'll understand that this is, yes, "art."

Worst of all is how long and how often de los Santos Arias insists on showing us yet another religious ritual/service to the point that any supposed Christian watching will surely forthwith beg to become a Muslim or Jew. These scenes are all foisted upon us with zero context, yet they go on and on and on.

We get our lesson on class difference via the rich family for whom our hero works. Absolutely nothing new here (or, for that matter, old that is shown in any depth). Everything about the revenge and the family situation is also offered in such broad strokes that what we learn in this movie makes the Death Wish franchise look deep.

Eventually, something does indeed happen -- hooray! -- and then we get an ending in which, oh, joy!, the filmmaker gets to do his let's-shoot-from-as-long-a-distance-as-possible so the viewer won't know what the fuck is going on. But, come on, guys, it's art!

Do I sound angry? You have no idea. Some of the glowing critical response for this film indicates to me that a handful of my compatriots are so eager to embrace what they see as "new and different" that, once again, the infamous emperor's nakedness goes either unnoticed or unremarked upon.

From Grasshopper Film, in Spanish with English subtitles, Cocote opens this Friday, August 3, in New York City at the IFC Center and in Los Angeles on August 17 at the Laemmle Music Hall 3. To view the half dozen or so playdates, cites and theaters currently scheduled, click here, then scroll down to click on Where to Watch.