Margaret Betts‘ Novitiate is about various repressions (mostly spiritual) visited on a group of young women who’ve committed to be nuns-in-training, or novitiates. It’s mostly set in 1964, which is when various Vatican-led reforms, known as the Second Vatican Council or Vatican II, were being implemented.

It’s a reasonably well done thing, a little eccentric, a little Sundance-y but not bad. And boy, does it have a hot lesbo scene in the third act! And this new Sony Pictures Classics trailer doesn’t even hint at this. Why, Michael and Tom? What do you have against lesbo tingles? Straight guys the world over eat this shit up, and you won’t even allude to it?

Right off the top you’re going “hmmm, possibly an austere Robert Bresson-like film about the denials, devotions and disciplines of the life of a young would-be nun.” The young protagonist is Cathleen (Margaret Qualley, 22 year-old daughter of Andie McDowell), and over the course of this 123-minute film “her faith is challenged by the harsh, often inhumane realities of being a nun,” etc.

The strongest supporting performances are from Melissa Leo as Reverend Mother (basically doing the same kind of thing that Meryl Streep did in Doubt, only with a heavier hand), Julianne Nicholson as Qualley’s skeptical, non-religious mom, and Denis O’Hare as an Archbishop pressuring Leo into adopting Vatican II’s more liberal “suggestions” about how to run things.

I’m not saying Novitiate is mostly or even partly an erotic thing, but that third-act scene…yowsah! The old axiom about “the stronger the constraints, the hotter the eroticism” certainly applies here. After the Sundance showing I asked around and everyone agreed this was the stand-out — trust me.

I saw Steven Soderbergh‘s Logan Lucky (Bleecker Street 8.18) this morning, and I came out fairly happy or soothed or whatever. I wasn’t exactly dazzled or blown away but I don’t think was the intention. It’s a mild, easygoing entertainment. Yes, it’s Ocean’s Eleven in a rural, lower-middle-class realm, except the principal thieves (Channing Tatum, Adam Driver, Daniel Craig) are unassumingly brilliant in both the planning and execution of a big heist, or the removing of millions from Charlotte Motor Speedway.

So far most critics are delighted with Logan Lucky. It has a 100% Rotten Tomatoes rating as we speak, and an 81% rating from Metacritic. But what about Joe and Jane Popcorn, not to mention rural shitkicker types?

Soderbergh is such a master, such an exacting orchestrator. This has been said repeatedly about many films, but Logan Lucky has really and truly been assembled like a fine Swiss watch. I really love hanging in Soderberghland. I relish his dry sense of humor, his laid-back naturalism and low-key way of shooting stuff, plus his cool framings and cutting style, etc. A total pro.

I’m too stupid to understand all the logistical and strategic maneuvers, double-backs and fake-outs. To this day I don’t entirely understand every last thing about how the heist was pulled off in Soderbergh’s Ocean’s 11, and I don’t care enough to see it again anyway. I’m just not very smart when it comes to this stuff.

Part of the problem today was that I was unable to hear about 35% or 40% of the dialogue because of the horrible sound system in the Wilshire Screening Room.

But I loved so much about Logan Lucky. I really did. It’s such a nicely assembled alternate-reality caper piece. It’s a light cultural fantasy thing, and is quite funny here and there. Very droll and low-key and plain spoken. But I mainly love it because it’s so well made. All hail cinematographer Peter Andrews!

And yeah, I loved the surprise appearance of Hillary Swank, but I’m too dumb to…forget it.

Of course, Logan Lucky is set in a version of Bumblefuckland that’s not quite real. Because the characters aren’t real Bumblefucks but Hollywood hybrids pretending to be the Real McCoy. Skilled, clever, laid-back smoothies performing with yokel accents and wearing the clothing and all the rest of it in a casual, pocket-drop way, and at the same time handling their complex robbery scheme in a much smarter way than you might expect garden-variety Bumblefucks to do, or anyone for that matter who isn’t an Einstein-level genius at pulling off robberies.

George Clooney‘s Danny Ocean would be seriously impressed by these guys.

My mood always sinks when a film I want to catch is showing at the dreaded Wilshire Screening Room (8670 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, CA). The sound isn’t awful there, but it’s bad enough that I’m often unable to decipher some of the dialogue. Sometimes half of it and sometimes less than half, but there’s always a little bit of a problem when I see a movie there. Because the sound just isn’t sharp or trebly enough, and so I can’t hear some of the consonants all that clearly. You can respond with the usual bullshit about how I need to get my ears checked, but I’ve heard dialogue just fine in dozens of other venues. Okay, maybe I’m slightly at fault and maybe I need to clean the wax out, etc. But why do I always have problems with the Wilshire and almost never anywhere else? I’ve seen two films at the Wilshire within the last couple of days (Only Living Boy in New York, Logan Lucky), and both times I was muttering to myself, “Why can’t I hear what they’re saying half the time?”

Two things about my highly positive riff about Brad’s Status (Amazon/Annapurna, 9.15), which posted three days ago (7.31). One, when I wrote the piece I somehow hadn’t noticed that Mike White‘s film is slated to play the Toronto Film Festival under the Platform program. Two, I posted outside the realm of regular protocol. I was given a chance to see it outside normal channels, you see. This plus my extremely positive reactions resulted in a decision to post early. If I’d seen Brad’s Status under the usual circumstances I would’ve naturally adhered to the embargo date. What I wrote was more of an emotional data burst or outpouring rather than a “review”, if that’s of any help. I always follow the reviewing rules (if anything my tendency is to post after the embargo date), but this was a special thing, a one-off.

Special counsel Robert Mueller has empowered “his own” grand jury on the Russia probe, and not just a default grand jury under the usual, reflexive, run-of-the-mill procedures that enable grand jury convenement. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier today about the Mueller move, which is almost certainly a sign that the Russia probe is gaining momentum and becoming more declarative.

Forbes‘ Scott Mendelson on Twitter (posted early this morning): “Fair or not, I can’t think of a more tone-deaf and thematically pointless idea in this political/social environment than white male filmmakers remaking Death Wish.”

Jeffrey Wells reply: What you’re saying is that a movie about a middle-aged vigilante shooting ethnic gang members in 1974 was a crude Nixon-era exploitation piece about lawlessness and racial tensions in a city that was succumbing to urban rot and going downhill fast. But a movie telling more or less the same tale in 2017 or ’18 will be a flat-out racist screed trying to appeal to angry Trump voters and other thoughtful types who believe that black lives might matter in a certain sense (i.e., not too specifically or militantly) but that blue lives matter also, and that young men of color had better not cause any trouble or pull out guns or argue or run away when a cop pulls them over.

Whatever this is, I’m not getting it. All I’m feeling is a kind of trippy, neo-psychedelic vibe. Director Darren Aronofsky understands that kind of current, of course. Remember The Fountain?

In what sounds like a gesture of industry-wise, tender-hearted compassion, Variety‘s Owen Gleiberman is claiming that the allegedly trouble-plagued The Dark Tower “is no shambles. It aims low and hits (sort of)…it’s a highly competent and watchable paranoid metaphysical video game that doesn’t overstay its welcome, includes some luridly entertaining visual effects, and — it has to be said — summons an emotional impact of close to zero. Which in a film like this one isn’t necessarily a disadvantage.

“With any luck, The Dark Tower could prove a solid box-office performer over the weekend, yet the picture’s no-frills design raises an interesting question: Would it have been more commercial had been an ambitious, two-hour-plus sprawl of a movie that attempted to be more digressively true to the weight of King’s novels? My instinct says no. The Dark Tower works as a movie because it’s not trying to be multiverse — and because, in its light derivative ballistic way, it packs in just enough of the King vision to remind you that everything old can be new again, especially if it wasn’t all that novel the first time.”

On 1.17.14 Deadline‘s Mike Fleming reported the skinny about why Oliver Stone‘s Martin Luther King biopic as well as Paul Greengrass‘s Memphis project had run into a wall. The bottom line was that the MLK estate didn’t want the assassinated civil rights leader’s extramarital adventures (allegedly with white women) to be part of the narratives. And yet at the end of 2014 Ava Duvernay‘s Selma put MLK’s extramarital episodes right on the table and nobody said boo. Yesterday Fleming reported that financing is secure on Scott Cooper‘s Hellhound On His Trail, an adaptation of Hampton Sides‘ factual account of MLK’s murder and the subsequent FBI manhunt for assassin James Earl Ray. Presumably the film will acknowledge that FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover taunted and threatened King when he was alive with tapes of his extramarital motel flings. In short, the “MLK had a randy nature” cat — the same that killed Stone and Greengrass’s MLK films — is finally out of the bag.

“I had a cancer scare, and my boss said that if I was a truly good assistant I would’ve dealt with [my] emotional baggage earlier, so I wouldn’t have cancer. She also wouldn’t let me off work to go to the doctor, and I had to sneak around in order to find out if it was cancer or not.” — Sam, talent management assistant, speaking to LAist contributor Emma Specter in 8.2 piece called “Sex Toys, Crossbows & D.I.Y. Facelifts: Hollywood Assistants Spill Their Wildest War Stories.”

In other words, the cancer concern that Sam was dealing with was partly regarded as a personal imposition upon the talent manager and a general drain on the effectiveness and profitability of her operation. The truth is that Sam needed to get his shit together before the cancer scare manifested. If he’d done so he would have been a better assistant, and would’ve been more appreciated.

Translation: “Do you ever think about anyone or anything else besides your cancer scare? Yes, cancer is a drag, we get it, of course. But cancer is not just a threat to your health but also to your boss, her business and your co-workers. Did you really need to get cancer, Sam? Couldn’t you have lived a more healthy life before it was detected? Can we be honest? You may be disappointed by the prospect of an early death, Sam, but we’re disappointed in you.”

Down at the Metrograph, the Safdie brothers are attempting to elevate their reputation and particularly that of Good Time, their latest film, by creating an association with several respected crime and urban adventure films — Heat, Thief, Miami Blues, Jackie Brown, The Running Man, 48 HRS., Jackson County Jail, Short Eyes, et. al. “Movie crime, real crime, heroes, zeroes, the naked, the dead and the termites eating away at your Lazy Boy’s legs,” the Safdie copy reads. “Here’s a bunch of movies that kept us hot and bothered all through the conception and realization of our newest feature.”

Don’t even go there, guys. It’s illegitimate — certainly a reach — to try and position yourselves in the same realm as Michael Mann, George Armitage, Walter Hill, Robert Young, et. al. Good Time (A24, 8.11) has good street energy but it lacks in so many other departments it’s not even funny. The Rotten Tomatoes critics who helped give Good Time a 94% rating were mainly jerking themselves off, trust me. Don’t go into the Safdies!

From “Dear Cops — Please Capture or Shoot These Assholes,” posted on 5.26.27: “The Safdie brothers know how to whip action into a lather and keep the kettle boiling, but I can’t abide stupidity, and after 40 minutes of watching these simpletons hold up a bank and run around and ruthlessly use people to duck the heat I was praying that at least one of them would get shot or arrested. I can roll with scumbags and sociopaths (like Robert De Niro‘s Johnny Boy in Mean Streets), but I need a little something I can relate to or identify with. If the repulsion factor is too strong, I check out. And that’s what I did in this instance. And good riddance.”