A WHOLE NEW BALL GAME

Now playing in theaters and on Amazon Prime Video:

Cinderella--This is a "sassy" new musical version of the venerable yarn. Written and directed by Kay Cannon of the Pitch Perfect flicks, it takes place in a racially and ethnically diverse storybook kingdom, and our heroine (Camila Cabello) wants a career in fashion design more than she wants a boy. Indeed, the incognito Prince (Nicholas Galitzine) gets her to accept his invitation to the ball not by romantically sweeping her off her feet but by promising to introduce her to potential customers.

Neat idea, and while I'm not sure the retelling is as radical as the filmmakers think it is, there's plenty to enjoy, as well as some cringe-inducing moments. The score has a few original tunes, but is mostly comprised of familiar pop numbers; songs from Madonna to Queen to Earth, Wind and Fire to Salt-N-Pepa to Ed Sheeran, among others, get reinterpreted here by the likes of the potent Idina Menzel as the not-quite-completely-wicked Stepmother to Billy Porter as the "Fabulous Godmother" to Minnie Driver as the Prince's Mom. After his Mamma Mia! experience, Pierce Brosnan, as the Prince's stuffy Dad, is mercifully spared any serious singing.

Along with these vets, the youthful leads carry the picture with assurance; the Cuban Cabello has a lovely delicacy, and the stepsisters (Maddie Baillio and Charlotte Spencer) seem like rather fun company, really. And Galitzine manages not to be dull and featureless as the Prince, an achievement all by itself.

Make no mistake, this is a lot of belting in the American Idol manner, and the pushiness can get a little embarrassing at times. But this Cinderella, reportedly conceived by James Corden, who produced--and who plays one of the mice/footmen, with two other excellent Brits--has a tone of built-in self-mockery that takes the edge off this. Overall, the cheesy but irresistible exhilaration of its musical form is infectious.

LILY IN THE VALLEY

Opening this weekend:

Grandma— Lily Tomlin plays Elle, a widowed poet, sort of famous by poet standards several decades ago, now eking out a meager L.A. existence with lecturing and writer-in-residence gigs. Elle’s granddaughter Sage (Julia Garner) shows up one morning in a jam and needing a few hundred bucks, but Grandma’s broke at the moment.

Like last year’s Obvious Child, this comedy-drama from Paul Weitz concerns a young woman who, unlike Diablo Cody’s Juno, is in no serious doubt about her desire for an abortion. Elle and her granddaughter are both reluctant to face the wrath of her high-powered daughter (Marcia Gay Harden) so they set off in Elle’s 1955 Dodge Royal in search of anyone else they can hit up.

It’s a simple, poignant story, but the great Tomlin gives it comic force. Or she did for me, anyway. I’ve never been able to resist Tomlin, not since I was a small child. I interviewed her once, and she cracked me up to a professionally unseemly degree. While most of her lines in Grandma aren’t laugh lines, on paper, her blunt, declarative delivery makes the cantankerous yet kind Elle a potently mirthful figure.

But this enhances her authority rather than undermining it. When she says, in that Detroit accent, that they should stop and buy a couple of dollars worth of gas—“stahp and buy a couple of dahllers wirth of gahss”—it somehow has the quality of a Biblical pronouncement.

Garner, wistful beneath a Jean Harlow-like blond halo, wisely does little more than hang back and serve as Tomlin’s foil. Most of the other cast members that pop up in the episodic storyline—including the late lamented Elizabeth Pena—do the same, but one actor is allowed to shine: Sam Elliot, as Grandma’s distant ex.

Over the last couple of decades Elliot has sometimes been on the borderline of a joke—a piece of prime ‘70s beefcake that aged uncommonly well, an endearing, easygoing hunk emeritus. In his brief scene in Grandma, however, he reveals a painful bit of Elle’s backstory, and in the process gives maybe the most startlingly intense performance of his career.

No Escape—Owen Wilson has taken a job with an American firm operating in an unnamed Southeast Asian country, and has moved there with his wife (Lake Bell) and two daughters. They aren’t even there a day, however, before the government is overthrown and the revolutionaries are massacring people in the streets, including Americans. They have a special resentment for Wilson’s company.

So for the rest of the movie, Wilson and his wife frantically try to elude the murderous mobs and get their kids to safety. They’re eventually helped by Pierce Brosnan as a skirt-chasing Brit expat who [spoiler!] turns out to be with British Intelligence.

Directed by John Erick Dowdle from a script he wrote with his brother Drew Dowdle, No Escape is undeniably gripping, especially in its first half. As it progresses, the hairbreadth escapes and turns of good fortune grow harder and harder to accept, and the dialogue grows more sanctimonious, but the situation keeps us invested until the end credits.

The stars are well-cast, too. Beautiful, strapping Lake Bell has the right physicality for this brave and capable Mom, and Wilson, with his boyishly openhearted American-idiot persona, is a perfect fit for the clueless hero. You think, really? You took this job and dragged your family to this distant country without so much as spending ten minutes reading up on Wikipedia about the potential problems there?  But then you look at Wilson and think, yeah, it’s possible.

No Escape isn’t boring, but it is distasteful. It was hard for me to shake the sense that we’re meant to see what happens to this family as extra-special horrible because it happens to middle-class white Americans. It’s true that Brosnan’s deus ex machina character is given a heavy-handed little speech in which he says all the right things about how western influence in repressive regimes leads to this sort of horror. This seems intended to preempt charges of xenophobia, but it’s cosmetic. The visceral impact of the film is Yellow Peril, all the way.

Playing this week at FilmBar Phoenix:

Turbo Kid—This actioner is set in the post-apocalyptic year of…1997. The conceit is that we’re seeing a cheesy sci-fi flick of the ‘80s, a low-budget Road Warrior knockoff in the vein of Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone or Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared Syn or World Gone Wild or Crime Zone. It even has Michael Ironside, all but reprising his Spacehunter role as an evil warlord.

The title character, played by the sympathetic Munro Chambers, is a bicycle-borne scavenger of the wastes who models himself on a comic-book superhero called Turbo Rider. A sweet, daffy blonde pixie called Apple (Laurence LeBoeuf) befriends him, and when she’s abducted by the despicable Zeus (Ironside), who presides over gladiatorial games a la Thunderdome and has found a way to turn dead bodies into precious water, The Kid comes to her rescue. Somewhere in there he and Apple are also befriended by a Down-Under-Accented cowboy-type tough guy (Aaron Jeffery).

It certainly can’t be said that Francois Simard, Anouk Whissell and Yoann-Karl Whissell, the writing-directing team that created this insane Canada-New Zealand co-production, don’t know their source material. Everything rings on-the-money ‘80s: the editing, the costumes, the hair, the stunts, the special effects and especially the music, including Stan Bush's marvelous pump-up anthem, “Thunder in Your Heart.” Apart from Ironside’s gray hair, about the only giveaway we’re not watching a genuine artifact is the extreme level of slapstick gore, which in those days, if memory serves, was more the province of stuff like the Evil Dead flicks and, later, Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive than of the wasteland-warrior genre.

If this kind of splatter, mostly played for laughs, doesn’t bother you—I wouldn’t recommend the film for younger kids—Turbo Kid is nostalgic fun. I spent many hours in front of movies like this, often with some poor long-suffering girlfriend I’d dragged along, and I can attest to its authenticity.

THE BALD AND THE BEAUTIFUL

He’s been a natty and impressively businesslike 007, he’s dutifully played supporting parts in stuff like Mrs. Doubtfire and The Mirror Has Two Faces, and he’s been superb in a couple of leading roles, notably The Tailor of Panama. He even holds the distinction, in a cast full of embarrassments, of having given the most embarrassing performance in Mamma Mia!

Yet at some level I’m not sure that Pierce Brosnan has ever completely shaken the initial image we’ve had of him, as a pleasantly suave romantic-comedy lightweight, on TV’s Remington Steel. His turn in writer-director Susanne Bier’s Danish film, titled Love Is All You Need in English, could change that, however—if enough people see it.

Or, on the other hand, maybe not. Even if the movie, opening this weekend at Harkins Camelview, was a hit, Brosnan might not get the acclaim he deserves for this performance. He plays the role of a bereaved widower with such honorable restraint and low-key balance, such a lack of histrionics, that his excellence might get overlooked.

Brosnan is Philip, a high-powered expat produce broker in Copenhagen. It’s 26 years since the death of his wife, but Philip is still furious about it, and Brosnan manages to make us feel that anger without ever resorting to actorish telegraphing. He doesn’t grit his teeth or narrow his eyes; he’s too accustomed to his fury for that. It’s just there, in the faintly rising tension in his voice, in the little smile that you often see on somebody when they’re about to explode.

His vents his rage through belittling insults and brutal honesty, heavy on the brutality, to his employees. When hairdresser Ida (Trine Dyrholm) backs into his car in an airport parking lot, it’s a great opportunity for him rave at her—but she’s so shell-shocked and vulnerable that he can’t keep it up. His manner toward her softens at once. Then he finds out that she’s catching the same flight he is, to Italy, for a wedding. He’s the father of the groom, and she’s the mother of the bride.

This seemed to me at first like a contrived specimen of the romantic-comedy “meet-cute,” but the actors make it convincing. By the time Ida and Philip have reached southern Italy, and are sharing a car from the airport to Philip’s beautiful-but-disused old coastal lemon farm that his son (Sebastian Jessen) and Ida’s daughter (Molly Blixt Egelind) are fixing up for the wedding, Philip even makes a clumsy try at complimenting Ida.

Before long he’s opened up to her about the circumstances of his wife’s death. Philip is awkward and uncomfortable around his son, and he openly loathes his sister-in-law (Paprika Steen), who’s shamelessly trying to get her hooks into him. But something about Ida brings out the best in him—and something about the role brings out the best in Brosnan. It may, indeed, be personal experience—it wasn’t until days after I saw the film that I remembered that Brosnan’s real-life first wife died of cancer in the early nineties.

For English-language audiences, Brosnan’s work here is the story about the film, but he isn’t really the star of Love Is All You Need. Trine Dyrholm’s Ida is. Indeed, in Danish Ida is the title character: Den Skaldede Frisor, or, The Bald Hairdresser.

Ida’s bald—under a fine blond wig--because she’s a cancer and chemo veteran. She’s gone to her daughter’s wedding alone because a few days earlier she came home to tell her husband Leif (Kim Bodnia) that she was in remission, only to find him fooling around with a much younger woman. She’s confident that Leif will return to her, until he shows up at the wedding with the young mistress as his date.

I was unfamiliar with Dyrholm, a major star in Denmark, but she’s a revelation. Wide-eyed and gently smiling, she radiates kindness and honesty. Ida’s misfortunes have left her soul as exposed as her scalp, but both remain beautiful.

Nothing that ensues in the plot is especially surprising, but Bier’s touch, both with the dialogue and the direction, is strikingly observant. There are moments—cringe-inducing toasts, bungled propositions, arguments between mortified people—that feel almost painfully naturalistic. This movie has loose ends and rough edges, and may not convince you that love is truly all you need. But it makes a good case that love is, finally, what matters most.