Written by Chris Roessner based on his experiences as a machine gunner in the Sunni Triangle in Iraq, SAND CASTLE is pretty conventional as far as movies about modern war go, but its ring of authenticity and theme of futility in counterinsurgency overcomes this objection to offer a worthwhile experience. Critics and audiences didn’t seem to care for it a whole lot, but I liked it quite a bit. Though it’s no OUTPOST, it’s as enjoyable as similar efforts like HYENA ROAD.

It’s the eve of the Iraq War in 2003, and Private Matt Ocre (Nicholas Hoult), who’d joined the Army Reserve to pay for college, is fearful about what he’s about to get into. The troops roll out, and soon Ocre and his platoon are engaged in heavy street fighting. Soon after that, with the war all but over, he and a squad are tasked to team up with a Special Forces unit in a dangerous town called Baqubah. Headed by Captain Syverson (Henry Caville), the mission is to repair a water plant that was damaged in the fighting. Unfortunately, this seemingly simple task starts to feel frustratingly impossible as every step forward takes them two steps back as they deal with a hostile and fearful populace.

The movie has a lot to say about the contradictions and difficulty in fighting a counterinsurgency effort, as well as the difference between soldiers regarding what they’re doing as a job, which keeps them emotionally secure, versus a mission, where they care about the task, possibly too much. The action feels authentic and fairly intense, and the characters are likeable enough, especially Ocre’s sergeant (Logan Marshall-Green) and an Iraqi engineer trying to help the squad (Nabil Elouahabi, a terrific actor and veteran of war movies like HYENA ROAD and ZERO DARK THIRTY and TV series like GENERATION KILL). The only problem is Ocre himself; he obviously has plenty of fears and longings, but we rarely get to peer into his private world. He’s a good soldier at the best of times and a fair soldier at the worst. He’s important but not critical to the story, and the movie might have been improved if it had focused equally on the entire squad.

Overall, I don’t know if SAND CASTLE added anything new to an action-packed and thoughtful field, but I found it definitely a worthwhile watch.

Amazon Prime’s OUTER RANGE, a New West drama with sci-fi elements, promised a new favorite show for me, and at first it delivers, only it quickly evolves into a sprawling soap opera that alternates between taking itself too seriously and not seriously at all.

Here’s the setup: At a family ranch in Wyoming, family patriarch and man of the earth Royal (the great Josh Brolin) lives with his wife (Lili Taylor), two sons, and granddaughter. The family feels the pain of Rebecca, one of the son’s wives and mom to the granddaughter, being missing for some months. An odd young woman (Imogen Poots) arrives and pays to camp out on the land. The neighboring ranching family, the Tillersons, are a bunch of spoiled rich people led by a patriarch (Will Patton) who has perverse lusts. A murder threatens to upend the order of things, driving most of the plot, as well as the appearance on Royal’s land of an impossible hole in the ground, filled with smoke, which appears to be some kind of portal, possibly through time.

There’s plenty to work with here. Beautiful scenery, terrific actors, good sound design, the tension between the ranching clans, the culture and contradictions of the New West, and a solid cosmic mystery that threatens the suffering of awareness of human insignificance. The ending pays off with a dramatic event and several powerful reveals. The show has been compared to LOST, though to me it was more a cross between FORTITUDE and THE LEFTOVERS. From the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes, it appears the show has resonated with a lot of people, who seem to love it.

Not this guy, unfortunately, though I was super excited for this one. The heavy drama has that feel where you can picture the writers saying, let’s have this happen, that would be cool, without it emerging organically from the story, resulting in a feeling of artifice or senselessness for me. Royal is articulate and smiling when he doesn’t need to be and mum and distant every time it matters, especially to his own family. His wife broods her way through the entire show with a good performance by Lili Taylor but zero influence on anything in the story. Nobody seems to know how to parent the poor granddaughter, who appears to be raising herself. The Tillersons don’t really play a significant part in the story, the same with the sheriff who promises to be interesting but is kinda boring and one note. Characters change motivations and sometimes personalities, such as one of Royal’s sons making an ultimately selfless decision only to follow it up with an ultimately selfish decision. The directors often put themselves into the show with heavy-handed zooms and other camera work. The New West stuff is laid on so thick it sometimes feels like a truck commercial. There’s an odd and seemingly tacked-on theme, touched on in voiced over narration from time to time, about God forsaking his creation, which sounds good but doesn’t fit.

In the end, it just didn’t work for me. I think the show’s makers should have picked one path–FORTITUDE, with its utterly wacky TWIN PEAKS drama and crime procedural with a bio-thriller element, or THE LEFTOVERS, with its dead serious, sad, brooding story about people psychologically suffering due to an impossible event that can’t be understood. By riding the line between the two, we have a show that deviates between taking itself very seriously and not taking itself seriously at all, thereby not really accomplishing either. They also should have tightened the story’s focus on the hole itself. Or something, I don’t know, anything that would make me care.

Still, while it didn’t connect for me and turned into a slog, the show has undeniable charms, it comes together at the end with some interesting payoffs, and there’s enough here that while it missed for me, it might hit for you. If you have Amazon Prime, I’d say it’s definitely worth a shot if you’re looking for something weird and nice to look at it, something that might turn out to be a viewing gem for you.

In BOILING POINT (2021), personal and professional crises threaten to destroy everything a successful London head chef has worked for on one busy night. I loved this one.

As Christmas nears, it’s one of the busiest nights in a popular upscale London restaurant. We see head chef Andy Jones (played to perfection by veteran Stephen Graham) heading to work, where we learn he’s estranged from his wife and trying to get his life in order. Meanwhile, at the restaurant, a grueling health inspection discovers the distracted Andy has not been taking care of business. We meet some of the members of his staff, his stalwart second Carly (played so well by Vinette Robinson I said to my partner during one of her scenes, “Where did they find her!?”), assistant chefs, servers, manager, and so on. After they organize for the night, the customers start filling the tables, some pretty obnoxious, and they include Andy’s old partner, a celebrity chef (Jason Flemyng producing just the right amount of smugness) and his date, a brutal food critic. Along the way, we see the staff play wack a mole with issues and squabble, and we finally get to the root of Andy’s problems.

The film is audaciously shot in a single take, always an impressive feat, especially for this film, where the result really feels like you’re a fly on the wall in a restaurant. This could have been be a show-offy gimmick, but in this case, it really ratchets the tension, which periodically releases only in the storytelling, not in the camera work. Otherwise, it’s pretty cinema verite, and it works here. Stephen King, I think it was, once wrote that people enjoy reading about other people doing work, and I have to admit that’s true, especially in this film. Much of the action is the staff coming together and apart while dealing with workers showing up late, there not being enough of certain ingredients, tedious but necessary safety regulations, dealing with asshole customers and coworkers, juggling too many demands in too little time, and finding a moment for some quick kidding and a laugh. (Anybody who’s ever worked in a restaurant–I worked dish washing jobs all through high school back in the day–can relate, and my partner, who once worked as a bartender, ended up having a stress dream set at her old job after watching the movie.) Interlacing it all is the fact Andy isn’t on the ball, his life is crumbling, and it’s disrupting the entire operation, which provides a subtle central conflict that slowly unravels until the big reveal.

The result is a really solid film. From the skilled direction to the excellent, natural acting and world building, I found it quite compelling for a story about work. My only criticism is when things go bad, the story really goes for it. Everything makes sense, when the final punch is revealed, though it might have been more effective to contrast that punch with a big success. Overall, though, again I enjoyed this one a lot, and I’ll be keeping an eye on the director (Philip Baranti, who befriended Graham on the set of BAND OF BROTHERS) for his next feature.