Quick takes on 5 films

We know fear can be contagious in a group. What if a person was certain they would die the next day, and that fear passed on to every person they discussed this with? That is the premise behind She Dies Tomorrow. Amy is a single woman and a recovering alcoholic, and she is absolutely positive that today is her last day on this planet. As she drinks the night away, she talks of her fear to her friend Jane, who tells her brother Jason, who tells his wife Susan, and so on and so on. Each person becomes convinced that they too will die the next day. The film becomes a story of people’s reactions to irrational fear, and what they do with that fear. Honestly it’s a silly movie. I guess it’s a psychological thriller, but I wasn’t thrilled. The acting outside of Amy (Kate Lyn Sheil) and Jane (Jane Adams) is pretty rough, and the characters are unbelievable. The film is super low budget, and while not a bad thing when there’s a good story and strong characters, this movie just feels amateurish. ★

The only thing good about The Broken Hearts Gallery is lead actress Geraldine Viswanathan (from Bad Education and Hala) (and Broadway legend Bernadette Peters, in a minor role). She’s fun, funny, charming, and the camera loves her. Everything else in this picture is a bore. Viswanathan plays Lucy, a woman who has a hard time moving on from past relationships. She keeps little mementos from all of her ex-boyfriends, from neckties to rubber duckies to shoe laces to nail clippings. When she loses her latest boyfriend and job in the same night, in spectacular social media viral fashion, she stumbles upon an idea: open her own gallery dedicated to the objects people need to finally cast off to emotionally move on from their ex’s. Her gallery space is on the balcony of a new friend’s, Nick’s, renovation hotel project. He seems to stay away from relationships with anyone, devoted to his dream of opening the hotel. Yep, you can see where this is going. Lucy is a hoot, but this is about as predictable as it gets, and unfortunately it doesn’t set itself apart from other films of the rom-com genre. ★½

In Out Stealing Horses, Trond (the incomparable Stellan Skarsgård) has just moved to an isolated house in rural Norway, content to spend time by himself after his wife died 3 years ago. One night he meets his new neighbor, Lars. As soon as Trond hears the name, he becomes troubled, and later that night as Trond lays in bed, we find out why. In flashback, we see Trond as a 15 year old with his dad at a cabin along the Norway/Sweden border. His dad apparently comes out here every year, but this summer, Trond is old enough to join for some father-son time, and the two do some logging. Trond befriends Jon, a boy who lives at a nearby farm. One day, Jon comes home from hunting and leaves his gun out, and Jon’s younger brother kills the youngest brother. The little boy who killed his brother: Lars. In present day, Trond immediately knows that the Lars he just met is one and the same; despite it being a common name in their country, he knows it in his guts. The rest of the film plays out as Trond and Lars carefully poke at each other, as there is obviously some secret that they prefer to keep buried, and in the past, we see how the rest of that summer went for 15 year-old-Trond and his dad. With World War II raging to the south, and jealousy and marital affairs raging in the woods, this is a very good, borderline great, foreign film drama. You might not like it if you want all the little storylines tied up in pretty bows by the end; the film feels very real and real life is not so tidy. But there are some beautiful moments of tenderness and heartache. Skarsgård is great, though the role is a bit heavy, and the character seems like he still hasn’t moved on from events that happened decades ago, which makes the current-day timeline a bit unbelievable at times. However, the story in the past is fantastic, and it does all blend well, with suspense built properly between the timelines. ★★★½

The Short History of the Long Road is an apt title for this film, which seems to go nowhere fast. It stars Sabrina Carpenter (in her first leading role) as Nola, a teenager who’s lived her life out of her dad’s van. Homeschooled and sheltered, she’s spent her life traveling from point A to point B, and they’ve never settled down anywhere. When her dad dies suddenly of a stroke, Nola gets behind the wheel with no seeming destination. It isn’t too long before the old van breaks down, but luckily it is close enough to a kindly mechanic, who allows Nola to work off what she owes for parts and labor. She then goes on a trek to find her mom, the woman who seemingly walked out on Nola just after she was born. It leads to some answers, though maybe not what Nola wanted to find. The film’s premise isn’t bad, though it’s been done before (and better), but, and this is as delicate as I can be, Carpenter just isn’t very good. We see 90 minutes of the same 3 facial expressions, and whether it is her acting or the paper-thin backstory, but I could never bring myself to root for her to find her balance in this world. She’s comes off as a spoiled brat who should know how to handle adversity, yet doesn’t. ★½

Finally, Christopher Nolan’s Tenet. I’ve been looking forward to this one for, what seems like, years, since I saw a preview in a theater a very long time ago. I love Nolan’s films, and went in with such high hopes, that I had to be let down. For the most part, I wasn’t. If you’ve seen the trailers, you know the movie deals with things going both forward and backward in time. The premise set up is this: there’s some person or some group in the future that is sending technology backwards in time. So far, it has been simple non-mechanical items like gears and bullets, and these items move backwards instead of forwards. You don’t shoot the bullet out of the gun so much as catch it in reverse. But the fear is that more advanced weapons can find their way back, and that whatever nefarious person in the future is doing it, may seek an armageddon-type event to end the world. Our unnamed hero, played by John David Washington, is recruited by a group called Tenet, who has tasked themselves with finding out where the weapons are coming from, for what purpose, and how to stop it. In typical Nolan fashion, that’s all I can say without giving away some of the fun. This movie is intense from the get-go, maybe a little too intense. After about 30 minutes of frenetic pacing and little plot development, I started thinking maybe I should wait for a hoped-for director’s cut to add about an hour onto the length, to better explain what’s going on. Unfortunately I don’t think it would help. The movie is, I think, too smart for its own good. The visuals are fantastic, that’s to be expected at this point from this director, but the film is very convoluted. There’s no way you can pick up on everything going on in one sitting, there’s just too much happening. They try to explain it in dialogue, but even the explanations come with twists and turns. It’s very good, and after a second (or third, or fourth) viewing, I may grow to like it more (I did after a couple extra viewings of Interstellar). But unlike Memento, The Prestige, or Inception, I wasn’t immediately blown away. ★★★½