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AT THE MOVIES
Unlike some of the other
former Hollywood A-listers
now stuck making cheap
VOD genre pictures, Nicolas
Cage can usually be counted
on to bring some funky ener-
gy to routine roles. Without
Cage, there’d be almost no
reason to see the by-the-
numbers revenge thriller “A
Score to Settle.” With him,
the movie isn’t just watch-
able, it’s occasionally riv-
eting.
Written by John Newman
and directed by Shawn Ku
(who, to be fair, add a few
grace notes of their own), “A
Score to Settle” sees Cage
playing Frankie Carver, who
gets out of prison after doing
a long stretch with two burn-
ing desires. First, he wants
to make up for the mistakes
he made with his family. Sec-
ond, he wants to kill every-
one who put him behind
bars.
For much of the film’s
first half, Frankie readjusts
to the modern world with
the help of his estranged son
Joey (Noah Le Gros). Frank-
ie has a pile of money stash-
ed away, so he checks into a
luxury suite and has fun
learning about smart-
phones, catching up with Jo-
ey and spending time with a
high-end prostitute (Kar-
olina Wydra).
Once the story shifts
more to the revenge, it loses
steam, despite two big twists
—one predictable, the other
wild. The action sequences
and the underworld charac-
ters are underdeveloped.
But Cageplays even the
blandest pulp material with
soul and gusto, as though
the pathetic grudges of a
petty criminal were the stuff
of epic drama. His passion
brings some color to an oth-
erwise drab picture.
“A Score to Settle.”Not
rated. Running time: 1 hour,
43 minutes. Playing: Monica
Film Center, Santa Monica;
also on VOD.
Hey, patriarchy,
‘Is That You?’
In the quietly creepy Cu-
ban horror film “Is That
You?,” Gabriela Ramos
plays Lili, a teenager living in
the country with her tyran-
nical father, Eduardo (Os-
valdo Doimeadiós), and her
mother, Alina (Lynn Cruz)
— whom Eduardo keeps
bound with ropes. The dad is
more affectionate toward his
daughter, though, which
may explain why Lili takes
his side when Alina consid-
ers fleeing with the family’s
employee Carlos (Jorge En-
rique Caballero).
Writer-director Rudy
Riverón Sánchez waits a
good long while before he
brings in his movie’s super-
natural elements. When Ed-
uardo is abruptly killed, Lili
calls on some ancient Carib-
bean hoodoo to bring him
back. And as is usually the
case with resurrection sto-
ries, what returns from the
beyond ... well, it ain’t quite
right.
Sánchez doesn’t waste
any time, however, before he
plunges viewers into a night-
mare. In the opening se-
quence, Eduardo is forcinghimself on a clearly unwilling
Alina; and in the scenes that
follow, “Is That You?” estab-
lishes the family’s perverse
dynamic, made all the more
upsetting by their relative
isolation, emphasized by the
incessant chirping of insects
on the soundtrack.
Make no mistake: “Is
That You?” is a grim, grim
movie that keeps the con-
ventional horror beats to a
minimum, replacing them
with disturbing domestic
drama that many will find
hard— or even impossible —
to sit through.
But Sánchez really has
something difficult but nec-
essary to say here, about
how sometimes an oppres-
sive patriarchy endures be-
cause the people who bene-
fit from it — even if just mar-
ginally — won’t let it stay
dead.“Is That You?”In Spanish
with English subtitles. Not
rated. Running time: 1 hour,47 minutes. Playing: Laem-
mle Music Hall, Beverly
Hills; available Aug. 13 on
VOD‘The Operative’
gets conceptual
It’s hard to tell exactly
what writer-director Yuval
Adler is going for in “The Op-
erative,” an espionage
drama that’s well acted but
largely inert. Based on Yif-
tach R. Atir’s acclaimed nov-
el “The English Teacher,”
the movie hits all the right
plot points but never con-
nects them to a story with
any kind of momentum or
tension.
Martin Freeman plays
Thomas, a Mossad handler
who loses track of one of his
best spies — the Iran-based
Rachel (Diane Kruger) —
and then tells the story of
their relationship in a seriesof flashbacks, as he tries to
figure out where she might
be.
What emerges is a none-
too-rosy portrait of modern
spy-craft, where agents feel
disconnected from any
larger cause or mission.
Kruger and Freeman give
fine performances — as does
Cas Anvar as Rachel’s Irani-
an target, who guides her to
adifferent perspective on
“the enemy.” But while the
movie doesn’t lack for pro-
vocative ideas, it remains
too conceptual throughout.
“The Operative” is in the
spirit of the smart, slow-
burning, cat-and-mouse
thrillers by John Le Carré
and Graham Greene, but
those authors’ books do a
much better job of balancing
sociopolitical analysis with
genuine suspense.“The Operative.” Not rated.
Running time: 1 hour, 56
minutes. Playing: Laemmle
Music Hall, Beverly HillsGuns overtake
‘War’ diplomacy
The historical action pic-
ture “15 Minutes of War” is
mildly disappointing as a
thriller, but it’s fascinating
as a look back at a pivotal
moment in the global war on
terrorism. Set on the
Djibouti-Somalia border,
the film dramatizes one of
the first major operations of
GIGN, a French special
forces unit formed in the
wake of the 1972 Munich
Olympics hostage crisis.
When Somali rebels kid-
napped a busload of school-
children in 1976, GIGN snip-
ers deployed in the sur-
rounding hills, ready to take
action when negotiations
failed.
Though director Fred
Grivois drops in some dram-
atic ’70s-style split screens
in the early going, “15 Min-
utes of War” is mostly
square in its style — until a
climactic shootout that
makes some effective use of
gun sight POV.
Even during its long set-
up, though, this movie is a
broadly sketched but illumi-
nating depiction of what
happens when powerful na-
tions grow weary of sorting
through the subtleties of ge-
opolitics and start letting
heavily armed secret agents
handle diplomacy.“15 Minutes of War.” In
French with English subti-
tles. Not rated. Running
time: 1 hour, 38 minutes.
Playing: Laemmle Music
Hall, Beverly Hills; also on
VODStrong premise
drained in ‘Lake’
The presence of “River-
dale” star Camila Mendes in
the muted crime drama
“Coyote Lake” might attract
some of her curious fans.
Butwhile she gives a good
performance as a young
woman feeling trapped in
her remote border town,
and Adriana Barraza gives
an even better one as her
mother, writer-director
Sara Seligman struggles to
build on a strong premise.
Mendes and Barraza
play Ester and Teresa, who
run a lakeside boarding-
house but make their real
money from killing human
traffickersand taking their
loot. The movie’s slim story
follows what happens when
armed thugs arrive and hold
the women at gunpoint, un-
aware of how lethal they can
be.
The setting and the char-
acters are fairly unique. But
they’re put to fairly mun-
dane use, in service of a blah
coming-of-age tale that has
less to do with tense border
crossings than with a kid
who’s getting tired of her
dull daily routine of murder.“Coyote Lake.”Not rated.
Running time: 1 hour, 33
minutes. Playing: Vintage
Los Feliz 3; also on VODCAPSULE REVIEWS
Kept
glued
as he
settles
scores
NICOLAS CAGEhas “A Score to Settle” — several, actually — in a pulpy just-out-of-prison drama with twists.Jessica and Andy SchlampRLJE FilmsADOMINEERINGhusband, played by Osvaldo
Doimeadiós, gets supernatural in “Is That You?”Breaking Glass Pictures
ASPYgoes missing in the cat-and-mouse “The Op-
erative” with Martin Freeman and Diane Kruger.Vertical EntertainmentBy Noel Murray
A tart, seriocomic morsel
of desire and doubt, Louis
Garrel’s “A Faithful Man” is
the French actor-film-
maker’s second examina-
tion of triangulated ro-
mance after his debut fea-
ture as a director, “Two
Friends.”
It starts with a scene of
peculiarly deadpan devas-
tation: Parisian journalist
Abel (Garrel) calmly ac-
cepting the news that his
live-in love, Marianne
(Laetitia Casta), is preg-
nant with the child of his
best friend and is leaving
him. Ten years later, Mari-
anne, with a precocious son
(Joseph Engel) in tow, is
back in Abel’s life. But so is
the now-grown sister of
Abel’s friend, Eva (a vibrat-
ingly funny Lily-Rose
Depp), whose girlhood
crush on Abel has turned
into what she sees as a
reachable conquest.
Garrel, who wrote the
screenplay with art-house
elder statesman Jean-
Claude Carrière, knows how
to coast on the classic ap-
peal of a sexy, sardonic
French relationship three-
hander while tweaking the
emotional contours with a
gimmick here (narration
from all three leads), a twist
there (is someone a mur-
derer?), and the kind of
third-act romantic gambit
that finishes everything
with the right amount of
blushing, humorous sus-
pense.
The simplistic heart wis-dom about the road not
traveled isn’t as fun as the
journey, however, which —
at a friendly hour-and-a-
quarter — satisfies in the
manner of a brisk short
story. Casta’s wry, enig-
matic and fiercely intelli-
gent modern-woman sensu-
ality, however, is the one ele-
ment that could burst free of
Garrel’s bite-size archi-
tecture and be worthy of
epic treatment.REVIEW
Morsel of French romance
Short and sexy, Louis
Garrel’s film tweaks
a classic format with
gimmicks and twists.
By Robert Abele
LOUIS GARRELand Lily-Rose Depp play two characters in a love triangle.Kino Lorber‘A Faithful
Man’
In French with English
subtitles
Not rated
Running time:1 hour,
15 minutes.
Playing:Laemmle Royal,
West L.A.