Monday at the Movies - April 11, 2016

Welcome to another installment of “Monday at the Movies.”

Remember (2015) – With this Atom Egoyan film starring Christopher Plummer as a Holocaust survivor hunting the Auschwitz guard who killed his family, I was expecting something close to Taken mixed with The Debt, a taut revenge thriller with an aging protagonist against Nazis in hiding. What I hadn’t expected was a liberal dose of Memento, with Plummer’s Zev Guttman suffering from an unreliable memory brought on by dementia. Guttman is spurred on by a letter from his nursing home neighbor Max Rosenbaum (Martin Landau), who instructs him on the whereabouts of four suspects, all named Rudy Kurlander. Remember has the atmosphere of a less fantastical episode of The Twilight Zone, with moral quandaries taking the place of spaceships and time travel. Plummer gives a compelling performance as the aging survivor, whose memories are compromised by his failing mind; he’s an engaging action hero of a sort, but his more successful moments are those mired in confusion. Hats off also to Dean Norris (late of Breaking Bad and Under the Dome), who delivers a particularly terrifying turn as a neo-Nazi sheriff whom Guttman encounters in a house loaded with Hiterlian memorabilia, and he gives Plummer a fantastic opportunity to act frightened within an inch of his life. Along the way, Egoyan delivers salient commentary on the value of vengeance, the unreliability of memory, and access to firearms, but it’s the pervading sense that something is not what it seems that makes the film an engaging exercise in controlled filmmaking.

That does it for this week’s edition of “Monday at the Movies.” We’ll see you next week!

BUT – face front, True Believers – we’ll continue to Make Yours Marvel this Wednesday with the antepenultimate installment in “The Grand Marvel Rewatch,” so check back then for 2014’s Guardians of the Galaxy. Or subscribe above, and receive those missives right in your inbox. Nuff said!