By Adann-Kennn J. Alexxandar

“The Count of Monte-Cristo” (Period Drama: 2 hours, 58 minutes)

Starring: Pierre Niney, Anaïs Demoustier and Bastien Bouillon

Director: Alexandre de La Patellière and Matthieu Delaporte

Rated: PG-13 (Violence and thematic elements)

Movie Review:

Despite being nearly three hours long, “The Count of Monte-Cristo” is engaging throughout. However, if you do not speak French, reading subtitles for a lengthy time feels like speed reading through a book.

Adaptations of French author Alexandre Dumas’s “Le Comte de Monte-Cristo” have graced multiple media forms. The first was a silent short film that debuted in 1908 debuted. The 1934 movie directed by Rowland V. Lee was the first full-length feature film. A current miniseries is airing now. This latest, set in a Bourbon Restoration period of France, a post-Napoleonic era of political turmoil, avoids the period’s political upheaval and nicely focuses on one man’s quest for retribution.

French authorities arrest Edmond Dantès (Niney), a young sailor on his wedding day to fiancée Mercédès Herrera (Demoustier). Dantès is falsely accused of aiding the exiled French emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte. He is sentenced without trial to life in prison and sent to the Château d’If, an island penitentiary off Marseille. After being in solitary confinement for four years, Dantès, prisoner Number 34, meets fellow prisoner, Abbé Faria (Pierfrancesco Favino), who tells the young man about a vast treasure on the Isle of Monte-Cristo. Nearly 14 years later, Dantès escapes, and he returns to Paris, France, as the wealthy Count of Monte-Cristo to exact revenge on revenge on the three men responsible for falsely imprisoning him.

Despite some tattoos on the main character that looks overly sophisticated for the 15th century, “The Count of Monte-Cristo” is a well-done movie, even if it still feels rushed for its lengthy run time.

This screenplay has three parts. We get to know Edmond Dantès as a man smitten with love and ready to marry his lover Mercédès. Then, audiences see him in prison. There, Dantès is a scrawny man with ruffled hair and a wild long beard. That is where he meets Abbé Faria who gives admin Dantès Hope and ends his loneliness in the underground sale where he resides.

The bulk of this photoplay deals with Dantès’ revenge, carefully plotting the demise of the men who framed him. The directors and writers of the screenplay do not rush the stage. Instead, they move at a snail’s pace so that one can see the plan being laid for the antagonist of this movie.

Wrongly imprisoned, Edmund Dantes states he is not seeking revenge; it is justice he desires. However, for moviegoers, vengeance is always gratifying in cinema. It is always entertaining to see the antagonists get their comeuppance.

Alexandre de La Patellière and Matthieu Delaporte’s direction and writing is superb. They condense Dumas’s lengthy literary work into an elaborate cinematic experience.

Grade: B+ (You can count on it to deliver.)

“Den of Thieves 2: Pantera” (Action/Crime: 2 hours, 24 minutes)

Starring: Gerard Butler, O’Shea Jackson Jr. and Evin Ahmad

Director: Christian Gudegast

Rated: R (Pervasive language, violence, drug use and sexual references)

Movie Review:

“Den of Thieves 2: Pantera” turns into a good heist movie after a slow start. It is the sequel to “Den of Thieves” (2018), also directed by Christian Gudegast. “Pantera” immediately follows where its prequel ended. While missing some of its major talents from the first movie, “Pantera” is better than its prequel.

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Detective Nicholas ‘Big Nick’ O’Brien (Butler) goes to Nice, France. He rendezvouses with thief Donnie Wilson (Jackson), a man who escaped from O’Brien and his team a short time earlier. Wilson is planning a major heist, the world’s largest diamond exchange.

Unlike many modern heist films, this one allows audiences time to understand its characters through good development as these onscreen people plan their heist proficiently. Although these are criminals, it is easy to relate to them, even if you disagree with what they are doing.

Gudegast humanizes his characters, so even the stereotypical ones have interesting depictions. Therefore, you want to see them succeed, making “Den of Thieves 2: Pantera” pleasing.

Grade: B- (They steal audiences’ attention.)

“Better Man” (Biography/Docudrama: 2 hours, 15 minutes)

Starring: Robbie Williams, Jonno Davies and Steve Pemberton

Director: Michael Gracey

Rated: R (Drug use, pervasive language, sexual content, nudity and violent content, including attempted suicide)

Movie Review:

“Better Man” is a biographical sketch of British pop superstar Robbie Williams’ life. It details his childhood to the apex of his career as a singer and entertainer with the boy band “Take That” and his hit solo career. It is a good biopic, although the chimpanzee shenanigans are unneeded.

Williams’ life is interesting as a child and an adult. It is a good look at what fame does to a young person and how they must grow up into their celebrity lifestyle. The movie does not shy away from Williams’ sexual escapades and continued drug use. The good and the bad are always good in a biographical photoplay. This biographical drama omits some constant rumors about Williams and how he insinuates tidbits in interviews only to deny them in public.

“Better Man” uses computer-generated chimpanzee images of Williams via a VFX creation to convey a story. His life is interesting enough that bringing in computer-generated imagery versions of himself or people in costumes is unnecessary.

These visual tactics are a means to get people’s attention and work to bring moviegoers into theaters. The primate feature is given to Williams. It matches his primitive behavior — at least in the beginning. As this screenplay moves to a more mature Williams, his character becomes one of impressive humanity. Despite the primate features, this movie involves plenty of emotions. The ending is very touching, and the monkey business becomes less distractive as the movie continues.

Director Michael Gracey and his team pull off what could have been a goofy presentation. They create a very engaging observation of Robbie Williams.

Grade: B (Something to go bananas about.)

“The Last Showgirl” (Drama: 1 hour, 28 minutes)

Starring: Pamela Anderson, Dave Bautista and Jamie Lee Curtis

Director: Gia Coppola

Rated: R (Language and nudity)

Movie Review:

The only good reason to see this movie is Pamela Anderson. She shines, but the rest of this production by Director Gia Coppola (“Palo Alto,” 2013) and Writer Kate Gersten has a dull finish.

Anderson plays Shelley, a showgirl on the Las Vegas strip. She is part of a Cancan-type dancing group, one of the last in the city. All is well until she and the other women are told that the show’s 30-year run will end shortly. Shelley has been dancing for three decades. It is all she knows. Now in her 50s, she contemplates aging and motherhood and deals with sexism and ageism in her profession.

Gia Coppola, the granddaughter daughter of Francis Ford Coppola, is the director of “The Last Showgirl.” Her grandfather may be legendary, but one should not automatically give the family patriarch’s laurels to his descendants.

The narrative of this screenplay is not the problem. It is the execution. For one, little dancing happens. When there is, the camera only captures a small part, usually above the shoulders.

“The Last Showgirl” has second-rate cinematography. Camera operators use their equipment haphazardly; scenes appear jiggled in several scenes. Even more, the images of characters inside of buildings focus on the performances, especially that of Pamela Anderson. However, these tight medium and eye-level shots do not allow a broader concept of the grandeur of the stage and costumes of the performers when they are dancing.

The camera angles give the impression these movie makers were afraid to show shoes and feet. The one time they do, it is a misplaced Jamie Lee Curtis moment. In that scene, she plays a cocktail waitress at a casino who begins dancing at the wrong moment.

The movie also only has one hour and 20 minutes of actors performing, so this story feels, as nice as its story is, too rushed.

Characters argue with each other in one instance. Then, all is well, and these people hug while crying. There is no smooth transformation for character development. Something is lost in translation from one scene to the next. How characters resolve conflict is missing in showgirls.

Again, Pamela Anderson is an attention-getter here. This movie is her second break to stardom. May “The Last Showgirl” catapult her to the center stage once more. She is award-worthy, although the rest of this photoplay does not parallel her performance.

Grade: C (Not showy enough to warrant a curtain call.)

The Snapshot: Phenomenal music numbers bring needed fun, style and reasoning to Robbie Williams’ life story, seen through the eyes of an ape.

Better Man

7 out of 10

14A, 2hrs 15mins. Music Biography Fantasy.

Directed by Michael Gracey.

Starring Jonno Davies, Robbie Williams, Steve Pemberton, Raechelle Banno, Kate Mulvany and Alison Steadman.

Better Man, at the very least, is the best musical biography movie with the main character depicted as a CGI chimpanzee that I’ve ever seen.

Robbie Williams’ life story is a mix of (literal) money business along with great showmanship and outstanding scenes of Williams’ music. Unlike the common knowledge of most musical biopics, it’s also enjoyable to actually learn something new about the main character and their real history.

Director Michael Gracey (best known for 2017’s megahit The Greatest Showman) has conceptualized the life of English pop star Robbie Williams in an unusual way. While it follows the expected formula of a singer’s life story as so many movies do, it quite unexpectedly features Williams through his life as a monkey.

At first, the idea didn’t make much sense. What’s the point of changing Williams’ species? What could it possibly add to the story? And how would it influence the rest of the film?

The answer is revealed early, however, and wisely reinforces the main theme. The real Williams narrates the film, describing how he’s regularly felt “othered” and misunderstood as a person through his public life. 

So the story is imagined in this Hollywood film as Williams not just living with his private self-imposed isolation, but with an obvious public one as well. Being a chimpanzee, it’s slightly familiar in his possible humanity, but as also unfamiliar with his struggle to identify with others now shown as an interspecies conflict.

Fortunately, none of this takes away from the heart of Williams’ story rising as a music superstar, nor does it overshadow the spectacular musical numbers and sequences.

I reviewed Michael Gracey’s work on his well-known The Greatest Showman, and I stand by my heavy criticism of the bad script and songs that pandered to the audience. But here, he’s got much richer and clearer writing that feels more nuanced and less stylized, which is a better match for his glamorous directing style.

Read more here: Review – The Greatest Showman is far from great

Gracey got his start as the director of music videos, and that skill is amplified here in Better Man with several truly inventive and eye-popping songs. “Rock DJ”, celebrating a new record deal, is one of my favourite scenes I’ve seen from any movie in the last year. It’s a single take of song and dance mayhem that’s gratuitously fun.

If you can get over the barrier of seeing Williams as a large ape, there’s great songs and a compelling (if overlong) story to see here. 

It’s still over-the-top, but most of it is also a lot of fun – and a great intro to a musical talent we here in North America have maybe overlooked for too long.

“Nahir,” a brooding, glamourized and sexed-up account of a notorious Argentine murder case, is a mystery thriller that aims for engrossing and immersive that never falls short of quite watchable along the way.

Screenwriter Sofia Wilhelmi and director Hernán Gu

erschuny take great pains — with flashbacks and flashbacks within flashbacks — to show us several versions of the title character’s account of what happened the fateful night in which she allegedly killed her allegedly abusive lover.

We’re treated to backstory which dissects the aloof and mysterious teen beauty who either planned a crime of lover’s revenge, carried it out and took some pains to cover up her involvement, or didn’t. Not in the ways the earliest versions of her account of that fateful night played out, anyway.

Valentina Zenera plays Nahir as a vain beauty confident in her allure, even at her (seen in a flashback) quinceañera. Nahir dreams of riding the premiere float at Gualeguaychú’s famed carnival parade and riding that to fame as a model.

Not that she says much of this out loud. Nahir is depicted as inscrutable, controlled and controlling. All the boys fancy her and no one gets more of her attention, and manipulation, than 20 year-old Federico (Simon Hempe).

Nahir says they’re broken up. Then they’re together. As the narrative jumps back and forth from “before the crime” (in Spanish with English subtitles) to “after the crime,” we see both their torrid affair — “torrid” at least in his eyes — and her “No, we weren’t dating” way of describing it to her friends and eventually to the cops.

Because one night, Federico rides his motorbike to his doom.

We see how Nahir takes the “news” of his death. “Poker-faced” barely does that reaction justice. We watch the early questioning, the tear she tries to summon up or fake with a tissue.

And we learn that Nahir’s adored and adoring Dad (César Bordón) is a pistol-packing police officer. If there’s one thing that’s become accepted wisdom the world over in recent years, it’s the idea that police in most any country all consider themselves experts in one thing — knowing what they can get away with, and how.

When Dad says “I’ll get you out of here…I’m working on it. You’ll be home by New Year’s,” Nahir believes it. Is it because of what she knows, or what she knows that he knows?

As we see Nahir’s (perhaps) ex-beauty queen mother (Mónica Antonópulos) primp and prep her for a pageant and for a TV prison interview, we pick up on the dynamic of the household and the narcissism of our heroine.

“No crying,” Mom insists before her interrogation. Or did she? Federico’s come-ons are punctuated with a macho “I get anything I want.” Dad wasn’t shy about showing his pistol to would-be stalkers who stare at Nahir in crowds. His icy “princesa” never betrays any emotion at any of this.

The court case reveals more than just the lovers’ exchanged “love of my life” texts. Protesters demand “justice” for Federico, but witnesses paint a more complicated picture of their on-and-off romance. And as her situation isn’t quickly resolved — one way or the other — and her “story” changes, we wonder what really happened.

I like the way the story’s jumps backwards and forwards in time to wrongfoot the viewer. We’re given just enough information to decide on guilt or innocence, and then new information is brought to light. Think again.

Now on Amazon Prime, “Nahir” was longer when it played in Argentina, and reviews of this “true” story there weren’t the best. Perhaps it’s tighter, as the Prime cut of the film is 14 minutes shorter. Or perhaps Argentines are more invested in the story and uninterested in the doubts “Nahir” suggests.

Zenere, underplaying in ways that hint at the character’s similarities to Amanda Knox — accused because she underreacts to news of a murder — makes her character believably guilty or possibly innocent. And whatever verdict, she ensures the narcissistic Nahir is never seen with a hair out of place or eye shadow and earrings that aren’t perfectly matched, even behind bars.

Rating: TV-16, violence, sex, profanity

Cast: Valentina Zenere, Simon Hempe, Mónica Antonópulos and César Bordón

Credits: Directed by Hernán Guerschuny, scripted by Sofia Wilhelmi. An MGM release on Amazon Prime.

Running time: 1:48