Movie Reviews: Save Me, Take Out, Hounddog

 
TYLER PERRY’S THE FAMILY THAT PREYS “You’re a woman scorned with no prenup. That’s a recipe for good livin’?” is just one of the zingers Kathy Bates gets to deliver as Charlotte Cartwright, a rich Southern matriarch whose son (Cole Hauser) is having an affair with Andrea (Sanaa Lathan), the social-climbing daughter of Charlotte’s Bible-waving best friend, Alice (Alfre Woodard). Money long ago corrupted the Cartwrights, and now it’s corrupting Andrea, whose cheating ways eventually get her a sock in the face from her absurdly naive husband (Rockmond Dunbar) — a moment of domestic violence that the usually high-minded Tyler Perry appears to condone. Set in an unnamed modern city, this snail-paced film might as well take place in the 1950s, since it seems to have been inspired by one those Hollywood melodramas in which one company employs the entire town, and the only places free of corruption are the church and the local diner. Although juicy secrets spill out on cue in the third act, what’s memorable here is the sparkling chemistry between Bates and Woodard, whose scenes together are a pleasure to watch, even as one thinks that their next outing should be to co-teach a master class titled, “How To Rise Above Cliché.” (Citywide) (Chuck Wilson)

Chris Smith trades Wisconsin for Goa in The Pool

Christian Schulz

Office politics turn deadly in Yella, Christian Petzold’s corporate ghost story

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GO  YELLA The gifted German filmmaker Christian Petzold (Wolfsburg, The State I Am In) wrote and directed this tightly controlled metaphysical horror movie, which begins with an upwardly mobile corporate accountant and her if-I-can’t-have-you-nobody-can ex-husband careening off a bridge and plunging into the icy waters of the Elbe. Miraculously, Yella (played by the excellent Petzold regular Nina Hoss) manages to extract herself from the wreckage and skip town, just in time to start her new job in Hanover, where — in between embezzlement schemes and hostile takeovers — she finds herself stalked by the specter of her possibly dead ex. In Hollywood, these would doubtless be the makings of a cookie-cutter woman-in-distress shocker — a supernatural Sleeping With the Enemy. But Petzold, whose avowed inspiration was Herk Harvey’s Lawrence, Kansas–lensed cult classic Carnival of Souls, is less interested in ectoplasmic apparitions than in the equally disembodied eeriness of poker-faced power brokering and glass-and-steel boardrooms. (Hardly accidental is Yella’s journey from the former East Germany to the new West.) Like Laurent Cantet’s Time Out and Nicolas Klotz’s recent Heartbeat Detector, it’s a corporate ghost story in which the undead are scarcely — and scarily — indistinguishable from the living. (Music Hall (Scott Foundas)