WILLIAM TELL (Goldwyn – 2025): If it requires a certain amount of audacity to take a short children’s story and expand it into a violent adult action epic, that gall has to rise by several orders of magnitude when its 133 minutes conclude on a cliffhanger. William Tell, the one about the dad who’s forced to shoot an arrow through the apple atop his son’s head, is meant to become a franchise. Or so, at least, filmmaker Nick Hamm and his financial backers hope. The story, as told here, is set in early 14th century Switzerland, which was occupied by evil Austria, personified here by the greedy king (a cameo by an eye-patched Ben Kingsley) and his even more evil nephew Gessler (Connor Swindells), who are out to wring taxes out of the Swiss peasants and imprison or kill anyone who objects. Enter William Tell (Claes Bang), here depicted as a weary ex-soldier who returned from the Crusades with a wife, Suna (Golshifteh Faranani), and son (Tobias Jowett). When Tell attempts to protect a fugitive from the Austrians, he incurs Gessler’s wrath and the famous challenge to point a crossbow at his own son. But it backfires, as watching Tell preserve his son’s life inspires the Swiss people to all-out revolution. Hamm, who also scripted, is after Robin Hood by way of Braveheart, and there’s some grandeur to the landscapes photographed by Jamie D. Ramsay, as well as a few reasonably well-executed battles. More often William Tell feels like a retread of a hundred undistinguished Hollywood epics, and dogged rather than fun. Bang is heroic, Swindells is dastardly, Kingsley and Jonathan Pryce earn their cameo paychecks, and only Emily Beecham as a spunky princess provides any zing. The last thing one wants after lumbering through this would-be IP is another 2+ hours more of the same.
THE CUT (no distrib): Sean Ellis tells a boxing story (written by Justin Bull and Mark Lane) from an unfamiliar angle. It starts conventionally enough: a former fighter (named in the film only as The Boxer and played by Orlando Bloom) who lost his one shot at the big-time 10 years earlier and now runs a boxing gym with his wife Caitlin (Caitriona Balfe), gets a chance at a championship belt when a long-planned match falls apart because the challenger is unable to proceed. The catch is that The Boxer will need to make weight, which will require him to lose almost 30 pounds in 6 days. The Cut has very little to do with the match itself, which is just the pretext for the increasingly brutal tale of whether The Boxer will successfully abuse his body enough to reach that goal. (In a way, the film is a companion piece to TIFF’s more celebrated body horror spectacle The Substance, also about a performer who destroys their body in order to achieve success.) The Boxer and Caitlin, with the help of gym friend Manny (Ed Kear), start to go about the weight loss in a responsible way, with strenuous exercise and slim meals of salmon and salad. But soon enough it becomes clear that this won’t get the job done. Enter Boz (John Turturro), an unscrupulous expert in exactly this dark art. There’s no line Boz won’t cross, and The Boxer is on board for all of it, even as he risks his life and alienates his wife and friend. The script, unfortunately, gives The Boxer a past trauma that too easily explains his reckless commitment, while not being particularly interested in anyone else’s interior life. In addition, the ending is fairly ludicrous, even in the contrived context of the story. Still, The Cut is intense as all get-out, and gripping at 99 minutes; Ellis photographed the picture himself, and the editing is by Matyas Fekete. Orlando Bloom, who clearly underwent a serious weight loss himself in the making of the film (hopefully not using the same tactics), is utterly believable, and Turturo eats up the role of his demonic counselor. (Balfe does what she can as the wife who has to embody the voice of reason.) The limitation of The Cut, unlike for example The Wrestler, is that its focus is so determinedly narrow. Like its protagonist, it pays a price for being entirely obsessed with a single goal.
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