Movie Nation

John Cleese’s latest stop on his North American “Catch me while you still can” tour is at the Florida Film Festival, at the Enzian Theater in Maitland (North Orlando).

It begins tonight at 8ish with a showing of “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” followed by a Q&A with Our Lord J.C.

Packed house, festival director Matthew Curtis says — he’s the one not dressed for prom night — but there are still. A few tix left. I’m moderating the Q&A after the movie This should be a fun evening of memories and taunting and flesh wounded knights.

Getting an “Inception Lite” vibe from this May 8 thriller from Apple TV+.

Guy comes out of a come with a new life in a new “world” created — he thinks — around him. Who or what is his “real” life, real wife, etc?

Good cast. Earmark this one as worth taking a peek.

Yeah, I’d say so. But to be fair, I mean, come ON.

Note that the paid extras are the only ones keeping it together. And that this is merely the most busted-up sketch of the night.

This is a regular feature of Gosling appearances on “Saturday Night Live.” He cracks up and the seasoned cast joins in. This time he lost it in almost every sketch. Yes, it’s funny to people watching it, but one wonders about the memos and/or staff meeting about this to come.

Some of its power to shock and repel still clings to “Hardcore,” the debut feature by “Taxi Driver” writer turned writer-director Paul Schrader.

But as it travels from the conservative Rust Belt just before Reagan and the “Rust” set in, into the strip clubs, sex shops, lap dance “arcades” and porn film industry of the Southern California of 1979, it can feel almost quaint as it exposes a mostly-naive Middle America to variations of “The World’s Oldest Profession.”

It’s a quest thriller, loosely based on the classic John Wayne/John Ford Western “The Searchers,” about a Grand Rapids, Michigan father hunting for a teen daughter when went missing on a trip to church camp in California, and somehow wound up in the sordid, dangerous porn film/sex-worker underworld of Van Nuys and environs, a landscape later surveyed in Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic “Boogie Nights.”

George C. Scott gives us shades of guilt-ridden concern, shock and his trademark enraged histrionics as Jake VanDorn, owner of his family’s venerated furniture manufacturing concern. We’re immersed in their world, first, a snowy Christmas with the whole clan gathered, singing carols, dutifully attending their Dutch Reformed (Calvinist) Church and enjoying the bountiful fruits of lives their belief system tells them they were predestined to receive.

Writer-director Schrader’s religion has long informed his cinema, something he made even more obvious with his 2017 “comeback” movie, “First Reformed.”

When Jake says grace before the whole family that evening, he finishes with “keep up safe from harm and danger, if it be thy will.” Remember that.

In “Hardcore,” that faith is discussed and those values are tested when Jake gets a call that his daughter disappeared on a field trip from California church camp to the Knotts Berry Farm theme park. His support system is such that his brother-in-law (Dick Sargent of “Bewitched”) thinks nothing of saying he’ll book the flights and go with him out West to find Kristen (Ilah Davis) or at least get some answers.

Sitting with a not-particularly comforting cop (Larry Block), seeing a wall of teen girls and boys “missing persons” posters and fliers around him makes Jake despair. But on the cop’s recommendation, he hires “the best” private investigator for this sort of case in that corner of Southern California.

Peter Boyle has one of his best roles and runs with it as Andy Mast, a sleazy guy in a sleazy business doing a sleazy job of hunting through a world of sleaze. Mast’s bluntly sexual questions about the missing teen and his salty language offend VanDorn.

“You wanna hire a choir boy, go back to Grand Rapids.” But he assures Jake he’ll find her in “a week or two, a month at the most.” He doesn’t.

But as seasons change Mast shows up in Grand Rapids, takes Jake to a seedy 8mm peep show porn theater where he shows what he did find. Kristen is working in “Hardcore” porn.

That and rising impatience with how long this is taking launches Jake’s odyssey, a conservative man in conservative suits wandering the mean and sordid streets, showing pictures of his daughter in that dirty movie to sex workers and porn shop operators (Tracey Walter plays one, naturally), roughing up Mast in his righteous wrath over his child’s fate and the private eye’s “methods,” which include bedding porn actresses on VanDorn’s dime “for information.”

Eventually, our hero will have to descend to everyone else’s level, pose as an “investor” with a porn producer (Leonard Gaines, in a definitive portrayal of a “type”) in order to trace his child’s journey, determine her fate and perhaps accept his role in it.

“Love, Divided” is a pleasant-enough love-without-first-sight rom-com about two quarelling neighbors who find a connection through a shared wall, one that’s entirely too thin to get the sound muffling job done.

He, played by Fernando Guallar, is borderline agoraphobic, a tinkerer/game-builder who hasn’t left his apartment in three years. Something set David off, and he’s been obsessing over getting his next game just right, any excuse to not go out.

The new neighbor (Spanish pop star Aitana) “won’t make it through the day,” David predicts to his pal, Nacho (Adam Jezieriski). David has his ways — sound effects gear, noisy machinery, etc. — to chase off anyone who might disturb his peace by moving into the place next door.

He doesn’t need that other neighbor Valentina asks about “the noise” (in Spanish, or dubbed into English) telling her it’s a “ghost.” Couldn’t hurt, though.

She’s a pianist rehearsing for a big audition. Mr. “I require absolute silence” and “Challenge, accepted” and his metallic racket may be getting into an escalation he’s not mentally prepared for.

But a truce is quickly reached, conversations grow more pleasant and her Beethoven audition piece muddles along. Her overbearing ex Oscar (Miguel Ángel Muñoz) may still be in the picture, but she takes a stab at figuring out who the sensitive stranger next door is. That requires conferring with her cousin/bestie Carmen (Natalia Rodríguez) while David copes with the “get out of the house” efforts of Nacho.

Can love be in the offing, or is an old non-soundproofed wall enough to stand in their way? Not having to face or get too close to someone could be “perfect, just the way it is.” Or is it?

It’s a little dispiriting to watch Alex Garland’s idea of what America’s next “Civil War” will look like, and the documentary “Bad Faith” on the same weekend.

The first is about effect, and the second, subtitled “Christian Nationalism’s Unholy War on Democracy,” a point-by-point examination of the steps and the people who schemed, fund-raised, wrote-manifestos and enflamed and misled a fanatical minority to put us there.

Like other films covering similar ground (last winter’s doc “God & Country”), filmmakers Stephen Ujlaki and Christopher Jacob Jones — they collaborated on the “Hollywood Masters” interview series — set out to define “Christian Nationalism,” the political movement that “privileges Christianity” “over all other faiths” and seeks power to impose that view on others.

And they trace the modern version of this KKK-born movement’s birth back to the days when activist/zealot Paul Weyrich found, in abortion, the proper smokescreen issue to enlist ardent Protestant segregationists like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and whichever Bob Jones was presiding over the founder of Bob Jones U.’s white supremacist preacher’s college in Republican politics in the 1970s.

“Bad Faith” features academics, pastors, authors and Russell Moore, the courageously outspoken editor of “Christianity Today” in detailing the history, agenda and assorted manifestos of billionaire-funded right-wing “think tanks,” data banks and “rage baiting” organizations, from the Council for National Policy and Koch Foundation to the Faith and Freedom Coalition, Turning Point USA, ALEC and The Heritage Foundation.

Their latest manifesto could be their Final Solution for ending American democracy and majority rule — Project 2025.

A “Calvinist” view of Christianity is at the heart of it, some suggest, the idea that the wealthy pastors of the Falwell, Robertson, Kenneth Copeland and Joel Osteen variety were “chosen” to be made rich by the Almighty, and thus worthy of being donated to and followed right to the ballot box.

Enlist and coopt them, and you’ve got a virulent one-issue voting bloc.

But who do a lot of those preachers follow? “Bad Faith” takes us back to the way Weyrich and others figured out that connecting this manipulated minority to Big Money and the issues Big Money people support — cutting or eliminating corporate tax rates, attacking estate taxes and lowering taxation on the rich.

The fact that the Hunts, the Kochs and many others were oil and coal barons isn’t even played up. But who denies climate change and who benefits from their electoral denial of scientific fact?

The film’s most troubling footage is of the violence of the January 6 insurrection, with grim images of the assault on police, the nation’s capital and democracy itself interspersed with images of the combatants, urged into “war” by thousands of conservative pastors and others, carrying Jesus wearing a MAGA hat posters, wearing crucifixes and waving Trump flags.

I caught the first IMAX showing of “Civil War” closest to me Thursday afternoon, a Regal Cinemas matinee that had a lot more people than your average non-summer opening day/matinee would pull in at IMAX ticket prices.

That was a tell. A big Thursday and huge Friday take for this cautionary A24 thriller has Deadline.com projecting a healthy (it didn’t cost all that much) $25.7 million opening, making it the top movie in America this weekend.

Reviews have been good to glowing, but breaking down along political lines. The conservative critics and publications try to convince everybody “Nothing to see here,” the vast majority of us sounding the alarm to the vast majority of Americans that this cautionary combat thriller is something to see and take heed of.

Deadline reports Cinemascore tracking that’s possibly politically-divided as well. The movie is “apolitical,” but not for those who catch its clues.

“Godzilla X King: The New Empire” is still making stupid money, another $14-15 million this weekend and is closing in on the $160 million mark, which it could pass Sunday, but will clear by Tuesday or so for sure.

“Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire” will add another $4-5 million, and fall just short of the $100 million mark in North America since opening. It should clear that by the middle of NEXT weekend.

The pin-your-ears-back action pic “Monkey Man” is seriously underperforming in the US, a bit of surprise considering the growing audience for Indian cinema (it’s mostly in English) in the U.S. and the gonzo “John Wick” nature of the violence. It took a steep dive from its middling opening weekend and will earn maybe $4.5 million.

But will it edge “Kung Fu Panda 4” on its SIXTH weekend of release? The animated hit is slated to earn just under $4.5, and may clear that. It could move past the $180 million North American box office take mark by Sunday night.

As always, I’ll update these figures as more data comes in over the course of the weekend.

This indie dramedy puts a would-be stand-up in crisis over a girl she used to nanny. PTSD, Sennott (“Shiva Baby,” “Bottoms,””Bodies Bodies Bodies”) and stand-up comedy.

Sure, Samantha Bee’s husband is the most recognizable face in the supporting cast. But what’s not to (potentially) love?

If one is being perfectly candid, “good” thrillers don’t often wind up down the food chain at Vertical Releasing. But some movies are a hard sell. Many, many actors aren’t “box office,” even if they once were.

This looks good. Money was spent and it’s on the screen.

Steve McQueen got his big break in landing the lead in the late ’50s bounty hunter Western “Wanted: Dead or Alive.” And that translated into his first quality, name-recognition movie roles.

He is the ostensible lead in the ensemble thriller “The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery,” a by-the-numbers heist picture co-directed by Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Charles Guggenheim, father of Oscar-winning documentarian Davis Guggenheim.

That explains the natural light, almost made-for-TV black and white look of this genre picture, a tale told with competent lighting, uncomplicated camera set-ups and a story that was a tad old hat, even for its day.

But McQueen shimmers with real star power, working that contemplative, let-us-see-the-wheels turn style that set him apart from most of his peers (not Newman) and set him up for stardom.

The whole icon of cool thing would come later, after “Magnificent Seven,” “The Great Escape,” “The Thomas Crown Affair” and “Bullitt.”

McQueen plays a college kid who shows up for the gang meet-up in his letter jacket. But George isn’t in college any more. Something to do with a woman. And that woman’s brother, Gino (David Clarke) is the one who set him up for this job.

He’s to be the driver in a bank heist, with 60something John (Craham Denton) the brains of the outfit, always pushing around his demoted wheelman Willie (James Dukas), with Gino an antsy gunman anxious to make a score so’s he can pay off his lawyer.

Twenty thousand bucks? Each? Or to split? They’re “not messing with the vault,” just “the cash drawers,” John growls. They’ll spend five days casing the joint. They’ve already got the three cars they’ll need for the robbery and the get away.

George? He’s new, “green,” and insistent that driving is “all I’m gonna do.” As his abrupt hiring, on Gino’s word, creates friction, John tests him by making him steal license plates for a getaway car.

“I ain’t no petty thief” protests be damned, that’s what he ends up doing — haplessly.

When Gino insists George hit up his ex, Gino’s sister (Molly McCarthy), for spending money, the “punk” kid draws the line again, and again to no avail.

“Look George, this ain’t the university. You’ve got to do some things you don’t like.”

But Ann, invited out, sizes George and the situation up pretty quickly. As John barked to the other three “No WOMEN,” right from the start, George has got problems. With the day of the bank rob closing in, those problems put the whole heist in jeopardy.