Boys being boys in public housing

 

Set in 1992, We Grown Now takes place in Cabrini-Green, a now-defunct Chicago public housing project that began with high ideals and wound up as a hotbed for crime. The story centers on two boys, played with engaging naturalism by Blake Cameron James and Gian Knight Ramirez. Ramirez's Eric lives with his widowed dad (Lil Red Howery); James' Malik lives with his mother (Jurnee Smollett), grandmother (S. Epatha Merkerson) and his sister (Madisyn Barnes). The families struggle but they're  strong and resilient, and the boys know how to have fun. They use old mattresses as landing pads for playground leaps they refer to as “flying.” Relying on atmosphere and the realism of its performances, director Minhal Baig’s episodic movie fully embraces the boys' world. The movie follows them as they skip school or try to understand the hand they've been dealt. Baig sounds tough notes when one of the boys' classmates is shot and killed. She also stages a police raid in which cops search the projects for drugs, wrecking apartments and showing no regard for the lives they're disrupting. The apartments are neat and homey, islands of normality. Tears flow at the end after  Smollett's character makes a pivotal choice. When Baig refuses to let boyhood be smothered by the harsh surroundings of public housing, We Grown Now is at its best.

Tennis anyone? Or is it something else?

 

   Challengers, the latest film from director Luca Guadagnino (Call Me By Your Name), thrives on energy -- the energy generated by competition, the energy that ripples through tennis matches, the energy that underlies sexual attraction, and, most of all, the energy of youth.

    Slick to a fault, Challengers pumps adrenalin into a plot that never wanders far from a surface in which the story's conflicts are so clearly drawn they might as well have been marked with chalk lines. 

   Built around a love triangle, Challengers spans 13 years in the lives of three characters, telling its story in flashbacks from a 2019 tournament that builds toward a fierce but ambiguous conclusion. 

   Tennis players Art and Patrick (Mike Faist and Josh O'Connor) renew a long-standing rivalry when both enter a challenger event, a low-grade competition in which A-list Art is supposed to tune up his flagging game. 

    O'Connor's Patrick has spent his life scuffling through a small-time career that has left him living in his car. He's familiar with tennis's lower rungs. You might think of him as a tennis bum.

    Both players are under the sway of Zendaya's Tashi, a once-rising tennis star whose career was derailed by a knee injury. A ferocious competitor, Zendaya eventually marries Art and channels her competitive drives into managing his career.

    Working from a screenplay by Justin Kuritzkes, Guadagnino moves the story backward and forward, picking up fragments of backstory that could have served as pieces of a tantalizing jigsaw but knock the story off track.

     On or off court, Zendaya is the movie's driving force, commanding the screen as the woman who's coveted by Art and Patrick, both of whom are struck by Tashi’s charisma. In a scene set early in the story, Art and Patrick watch Tashi play and invite her to their motel room.

    Tashi initiates a simultaneous make-out session with both guys, unmasking the homoerotic tension that underlies the young men's adolescent friendship. Now 18, they’ve known each other since they were 12.

    From the start, Tashi makes herself into a prize to be earned in a competition between the two young players. During the motel scene, she piques their desire but leaves,  promising her phone number to the one who wins his match. 

   Years pass and the two teenagers grow into men. Tashi marries Art, but Patrick stays in the picture. He may not have achieved Art's level of tennis success, but he thinks he has Art's number — both on the court and in matters concerning Tashi.

    By the time the movie's final match arrives, Art has grown tired of high-pressure competition but worries that failure might cause Tashi to move on. Patrick thinks he has one more shot at the big time. Of course, they have to slam balls at each other in a showdown match. Balls hit rackets with plenty of whack.

    Guadagnino's camera jitters its way through matches, meet-ups, and closeups, practically insisting that we yield to its power.

    All of this plays against a musical score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross that functions like a flashing red light, signaling whenever the dramatic stakes are about to rise.

   Despite a willing and watchable cast and Guadagnino’s directorial star turn, Challengers seldom deepens the immediacy it works so hard to create. Put another way, there's less here than meets the eye.

A ballet-dancing pre-teen vampire

 

   Abigail may evoke memories of an Agatha Christie mystery in which strangers trapped in a mansion are bumped off one by one. The movie also has elements of a crime caper in which the 12-year-old daughter of a wealthy man is kidnapped by aspiring felons who've been hired by a mysterious organizer. 

   Last but not least, Abigail brings a variety of horror movies to mind, the kind that use humor to ease us toward ample helpings of blood, gore, and gook.

   Having said all that, it may come as a surprise that fans of contemporary horror may find Abigail tolerable and even amusing, a slickly realized production from directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, who operate under the name of Radio Silence and who previously directed a couple of Scream films. 

   The movie also arrives with an ostensible pedigree, notably a connection to the 1936 movie, Dracula's Daughter. Let's just say, the reference feels tenuous and most likely will be irrelevant to many of today's moviegoers.

   No one who has seen the trailer will be surprised to learn that Abigail, the kidnapped child, is a vampire who initially presents as a helpless pre-teen ballerina we first meet during a rehearsal of Swan Lake. Abigail evokes sympathy that would have been greater if we didn't already know the movie is out for blood.

 The motley crew of kidnappers centers on Frank (Dan Stevens) who emerges as a take-charge jerk and a young woman (Melissa Barrera) with a tragic past that includes drug addiction. 

  The rest of the bunch includes stock characters such as Kathryn Newton's Sammy (rich girl turned bad), Kevin Durand's Peter (the muscular dope), Angus Cloud's Dean (the clueless member of the group), and William Catlett's Rickles (a former marine).

  It takes a while for Abigail (a hard-working Alisha Weir) to show her true colors, which include bad teeth, a ferocious roar, a variety of physical acrobatics, and a couple of lines that underscore the movie's taste for sarcasm.

  At one point, Abigail tells us she likes to "play with her food."

  The directors are caught in a trap that encourages them to take horror tropes semi-seriously while also offering each shock as if it were a grisly party favor for audiences that are definitely in on the joke.

  When vampires are destroyed in this movie, they explode, their remains turning into pulpy showers of blood and guts. Early victims are decapitated.

   My bottom line: To me, Abigail felt longer than its one hour and 49 minutes, perhaps because the movie seems overly calculated in its attempts to shock and amuse while happily embracing its schlocky roots. 

   By current standards, Abigail can't be called awful, but I found it a little too eager to lick its own bloody lips.

  

Bob's Cinema Diary: April 12, 2024 -- 'Arcadian' and 'Damaged'

 Arcadian

Nicolas Cage headlines  Arcadian but the character he plays spends much of the movie off-screen and unconscious. Cage plays Paul, a father who flees an unspecified apocalypse with his two infant sons. The movie quickly leaps ahead to show how Paul and his now teenage sons (Jaeden Martell and Maxwell Jenkins) survive an onslaught of buggy monsters who seem to attack mostly at night. After an injury leaves Paul in a near comatose state, the kids take over. Sandwiched  between post-apocalyptic survivalist drama and straightforward horror, Arcadian benefits from the naturalistic performances of its young cast. Paul's sons are joined by Charlotte (Sadie Soverall), a girl from another outpost. She and Jenkins' Tommy try to be typical teenagers even as a hellish catastrophe unfolds. Director Ben Brewer skimps on explanations and shortchanges the initial potential of what might have been a more developed story about a stern but loving father trying to save his sons. In short, a movie whose narrative insufficiencies limit its chances for success.

Damaged

Director Terry McDonough tries his hand at a hardboiled serial killer movie that transports a Chicago detective (Samuel L. Jackson) to Scotland. Jackson's Dan Lawson, an alcoholic cop who still has some detective chops, has a reputation for investigating serial killings and for overstaying his welcome on the force. Acting as a consultant, Lawson teams with Scottish policeman Glen Boyd (Gianni Capaldi) in the hunt for a killer who dismembers his female victims as part of what appear to be perverted religious beliefs. The movie receives a substantial boost when Vincent Cassel shows up. Cassel plays Lawson's former Chicago partner, a French-born detective who left police work, moved to England, and still retains a bit of charm. An international flavor doesn't enhance a grisly tale, and the actors are limited by a screenplay that places them in too many improbable scenarios to keep the movie from misfiring.

Carnage at home in ‘Civil War’

   A bit of background on director Alex Garland's Civil War before we plunge ahead. When the movie opens, Texas and California already have seceded from the Union. Florida lags closely behind.

  Armed conflict has broken out between the two-state Western Forces and the US government which is led by a president who has violated the constitution by taking a third term and disbanding the FBI.

  As a result, a brutal civil war has pitted American against American in ways so chaotic it has become difficult distinguish friend from foe or even to tell what's at stake.

   What exactly caused this catastrophe and what has turned parts of the country into battlefields remains a mystery. Garland evidently wants us to see the movie's vicious conflict as a warning, a flashing red light about the dangers of venomous division.

  What transpires is startling. If I had to pick a single word to describe Civil War, it would be "shock." 

   The movie chronicles the horrors of war by following a quartet of journalists: a battle-hardened war photographer (Kirsten Dunst), her reporter partner (Wagner Moura), and an aspiring young photographer (Cailee Spaeny) who regards Dunst's Lee as role model. Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), a grizzled New York Times reporter, rounds out the quartet.

  The journalists drive from New York toward Washington, DC., taking a roundabout route through Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Virginia. A disquieting variation on familiar genre ensures, a road movie -- only this with bullets and blood.

   Henderson's Sammy wants to reach Charlottesville, VA, the front line in this ill-defined war. The others want to interview the president (Nick Offerman) who has avoided the press for 14 months and who opens the movie rehearsing a duplicitous speech about the government's impending victory.

    Evidence of war and plunder scar the countryside. Garland deftly creates the kind of ravaged landscapes we've become accustomed to seeing in movies set on foreign soil: a badly damaged JC Penny's, a football stadium housing refugees, and a roadside attraction called Winter Wonderland, now the setting for a sniper fight.

   In its most disturbing scene, the journalists encounter a uniformed soldier (Jesse Plemons) whose eyes are hidden behind red sunglasses. The solider terrorizes them in ways that suggest a rogue form of extreme right-wing insanity. 

  Generally, though, the movie has little to say about politics or political views. Garland must be betting that a series of horrific episodes will establish the movie's bona fides as a cautionary, anti-war tale that's sufficient unto itself.

   Asking a movie to explain a Civil War might be too much. But asking "how" the events of the movie came about seems fair. How did the Western Force become a well-equipped and well-trained army? Is it composed of  rebellious members of the US military who have seized everything from armored vehicles to helicopters?

   Rather than dealing with such questions, Garland  focuses on the journalistic psyche. Dunst's Lee tries to school Spaeny's Jessie about the dangers of emotional involvement, even as her defenses begin to crumble. Moura's Joel craves the adrenalin rush of combat, and Sammy functions as the movie's sage.

   The performances strike the right notes, notably Dunce's. Lee tempers her cultivated disengagement from horror with concern for Jessie, a young woman who quickly loses her innocence. Jessie learns to accept the job's prime mission: Get the photograph.

   When it comes to fear and tension, Garland's movie proves devastatingly effective but the violence has some of the same impact on us as on the movie's journalists; it holds our emotions in check.

  I wondered about another aspect of the movie. These journalists are witnesses to horror. But for whom? Infrastructure has been impaired. Internet connections surely have become patchy. Who will see  the photograph we see, Lee's in color, Jessie's in black-and-white?

   Or is that the point? Are we watching journalists running on automatic pilot because they don't know what else to do? Are they covering the war or are they action junkies who have no convictions about the fighting? Do they use press credentials to shield themselves from harm while leaving questions of moral responsibility to others?

  Garland goes all-in on vivid depictions of the havoc wrought by an ill-defined war in which nearly everyone seems armed with an automatic weapon. 

   But to achieve anything approaching greatness, the movie needed to do more than turn familiar American geography into scenes of horror and estrangement. 

    Garland's vivid picture of war culminates with shattering action in the streets of Washington, but we probably should have learned more about the people who are fighting and the journalists who are covering them.

    Civil War has undeniable attention-riveting power. Maybe it's asking for more than is possible from a movie that lives in a world of disordered immediacy,  but I wish I hadn't found Civil War more harrowing than heartbreaking.

Sasquatches searching for hope

Some movies clearly try to say something but still leave me wondering whether they were worth the trouble. 

   I won't provide examples because if you’re interested in movies, you have plenty of your own.

   For me, Sasquatch Sunset is one of those movies that has a point to make yet I found it as unsavory as it is amusing. This oddball entertainment was made with humor, much of it reflecting gritty appreciation of the excremental or sexual. 

   The costumes and make-up are convincing, particularly faces that make the sasquatches ready for their close-ups. Situated somewhere between humans and apes, the movie’s sasquatches wander through forests, foraging for food, working out conflicts, grunting, and eventually encountering evidence of human intrusion into their world. 

   Directors Nathan and David Zellner found a crew of willing actors to hide behind all the makeup. Jessie Eisenberg, Riley Keough, and Christophe Zajac-Derek deserve credit for joining the Zellners' adventure.

   Presumably, the sasquatches are meant to represent a form of "natural" living.They make what appear to be minimal attempts at building shelters and at least one of them is a bit of an authoritarian. 

    You get the idea. The Zellners are up to something and it would be unfair — despite vulgar jokes about defecating and urinating — to dismiss their efforts. 

   Still, I couldn’t relate. I found the movie repetitive as it struggled to be more than a one-joke affair that built toward a conclusion that features a punchline some will find meaningful. I found it wan.

    Sasquatch Sunset is roughly 90 minutes long. I watched the whole movie but half way through found myself ready for something in which it was the job of humans to gross me out.

Seydoux anchors a masterful movie

 

  Cinema tells the truth. Cinema also lies. Nearly everything we see on a screen can be viewed as a form of deception. Cinema is the art that teases us into thinking seeing is believing. At its best, cinema demands second thoughts.

  Director Bertrand Bonello knows this — or least I think he does. Bonello begins The Beast, which takes place during the course of several time periods, by showing actress Lea Seydoux taking directions in front of a green screen. 

  One of the best actresses working today, Seydoux is supposed to show fear. A monster lurks. Her eyes and her body react to the unseen menace, but, then, aren't all the worst monsters invisible?

  Immediately, we know we're watching a movie, that we're about to enter an illusory world in which even fear can become a performative act. 

  Bonello has made a version of a time travel movie that doesn't treat time travel as a self-consciously employed conceit. The movie takes place in the present, in the past and in the future. It takes place in Paris and Los Angeles. It pushes against constraints.

  Bonello manages all this by focusing on Seydoux's Gabrielle who, in 2044, lives in a society that wants her to purge herself, to purify her DNA so that she finally can abandon her doom-struck propensities. By becoming a blank slate, she'll find happiness and success.

  Gabrielle reluctantly agrees and immerses herself in a  tank where she floats while listening to intermittent instructions. The movie floats along with her. Bornello never totally clarifies what's happening; he threads the movie's central conceit throughout, offering hints more than explanations.

  Bonello bases the movie on a 1903 story by Henry James. The Beast in the Jungle tells the story of a man immobilized by the fear that something catastrophic will happen, something "prodigious and terrible."

 

Gabrielle shares this crippling anxiety, most keenly expressed in early 20th century sequences in which she meets Louis (George McKay) at a party. 

   In this incarnation, she's married to a successful business man who runs a doll factory. She's also an accomplished pianist who's struggling to master the music of Arnold Schoenberg.

  McKay's Louis reappears in each of the film's episodes in different guises but he’s always around to remind us that this relationship with Gabrielle -- passionately yearned for by each of them -- resists consummation. 

  Bonello uses the Great Flood of Paris in 1910 to create an eerie coda to the episode. Louis visits the toy factory. Gabrielle's husband leads a minimal tour, but Louis and Gabrielle are stranded when the factory floods and the electrical system shorts. Fire breaks out.

  Bonello includes a haunting underwater sequence in which bodies turn into a kind of doomed floating poetry. It's a great bit of filmmaking -- tense, horrifying and beautiful.

  There are other kinds of death at work here, not the least of them, the elimination of the human personality in a world of AI and androids, a world that attempts to manipulate people for their own good. 

  During the future segment, Gabrielle meets an amazingly empathic woman who calls herself a "doll" (Guslagie Malanda). The "doll," probably an extremely life-like android, will do anything to provide Gabrielle with  happiness.

  When the movie shifts to Los Angeles, Gabrielle has become an aspiring actress who's working as a model. She's house sitting in a sleek modern home where she's isolated.

   In this variation on Bonello's theme, Louis has become an enraged, self-justifying incel who believes he has earned the right to kill women. He makes Gabrielle his target.

    Tense and bordering on horror, this section of the film introduces Gabrielle to Dakota (Dasha Nekrasova), a model who suggests that Gabrielle consider body-altering plastic surgery, another refusal to accept bodily limitations.

    Bonello moves toward a bitter finale that doesn't quite resound the way we expect, but gets the job done. 

     The Beast employs lots of moving parts and I'm not sure all of them are joined with finesse. No matter. Bonello  exploits, teases, and explores the beautiful fluidity of cinema and Seydoux provides him with the center -- wavering, malleable, erotic, and conflicted -- the film needs. 

      In a way, The Beast is an acute analysis of cinematic possibility and the ongoing battle to retain some measure of humanity -- for Gabrielle, maybe for all of us.

  

Mood can't carry 'Omen' prequel

 

  I suppose we shouldn't be surprised that Omen enthusiasts populate the MovieVerse, fans who enjoy repeated visits to the chilly hunk of 1976 horror that spawned several additional helpings.

  Still, fan service alone can't explain The First Omen, a moody but muddled prequel to the original, which acquired some of its cache from the presence of Gregory Peck and Lee Remick. 

 Arkasha Stevenson makes her directorial debut with a single task: To explain how the Antichrist Damien arrived in the world before being adopted by Peck's character, who secretly substituted the infant for the baby Remick's character lost during childbirth.

  In this edition, Nell Tiger Free stars as Margaret, a novitiate who arrives in Rome in 1971 to "take the veil." She's welcomed by Cardinal Lawrence (Bill Nighy), a high-ranking churchman who believes Margaret has a special destiny. 

  Nuns in movies always seem to require stern superiors. In this instance, Sonia Braga lands the job. Braga portrays Sister Silva, head of the creepy orphanage where much of the story unfolds.

  Early on, Margaret meets another novitiate (Maria Caballero), an aspiring nun who's intent on sowing some wild oats before taking her vows. 

  Agreeing to join her for an evening of clubbing, Margaret dons a sexy outfit that had me wondering whether First Omen might be ready for a touch of satire.

   Forget that. The movie seldom lets us forget that evil lurks, even it takes its time making an entrance.

  At the orphanage, a sympathetic Margaret becomes fascinated with Carlita (Nicole Sorace), an orphan who's regarded as a troublemaker. Carlita insists that she's seeing terrible visions. 

   About midway through, Margaret is sought out by Father Brennan (Ralph Ineson), an excommunicated priest who warns Margaret about a secret cabal that has hatched a cockeyed plan for restoring the primacy of a church that's losing its power. 

   I can't say more without introducing spoilers but the more you think about The First Omen, the more preposterous it may appear to be.

  That's not to say that Stevenson doesn't have chops: She infuses the movie with dread -- and Mark Korven's suggestively ominous score adds flavor. Free's portrayal of Margaret's climactic aria of trembling, moaning, and quaking possession provides another highlight.

  First Omen offers some grisly sights, a fiery suicide and an auto crash that severs a body in two, among them. A few of the jump scares deliver the right jolts.

   The story, which can confound as much as it clarifies, heads toward a finale built around a weird birth ritual that goes heavy on blood, slime, and gore, which could be the name of a band if punk rock ever makes a comeback.

   I wish I could have taken The First Omen as seriously as it takes itself, but, for me, the movie seemed to carry on a heavy flirtation with horror hooey that even its rich atmospherics couldn't always mask.

   

   

     

He seeks revenge in 'Monkey Man'

   

 Dev Patel makes his directorial debut with Monkey Man, a movie that sometimes looks like an Indian variation on the orchestrated frenzy we find in John Wick movies. 

  Whatever Patel is trying to accomplish in Monkey Man, he’s in a hurry to do it. The rushed immediacy and rapid-fire editing of early scenes allow little time to relax.

   A minimal storyline soon emerges. Kid (played by Patel) hustles to survive on the mean streets of an Indian City where wealth and luxury contrast with abject poverty.

  Kid knows how to live with pain. He earns money in bare-fisted fights in which he wears a gorilla mask. Usually, he’s beaten to a bloody pulp in front of jeering crowds who bet against him.

  The movie's real agenda emerges in a fragmented flashbacks to Kid's life as a child. Kid, we learn, aims to avenge the death of his mother (Adithi Kalkunte). She was killed by a brutal police chief (Sikandar Kher) for resisting his sexual advances during a raid aimed at dispersing the poor community where she lived.  

  Kid’s mother represents a near fairy-tale innocence that connects Kid to a lost past, as well as to mythology that references Hanuman, a Hindu deity. 

  At times, the narrative feels as if it's bouncing off walls.. At one point, Kid acquires a sidekick (Pitobsh Tripathi) who adds comic leavening but quickly vanishes.

  Patel wisely slows his freight train of movie down when a badly battered Kid finds refuge with a guru figure (Vipin Sharma), who takes him on a drug trip and encourages him to connect with this noble warrior self — or some such. 

 Throughout, Patel creates a character fueled by seething, concentrated anger that makes Kid immune to distraction.

  Kid shows some humanity when he takes care of a street dog that appears during scenes in which he lands a job at a  posh nightclub, which also functions as a high-end brothel where his enemies engage in debauched amusements.

     A final showdown offers two pivotal confrontations. The Wick movies allow us to feel the exuberance that the filmmakers put into concocting increasingly creative action sequences. Here, that feeling comes across as tight-jawed resolve.

     References to the city’s impoverished underside are vivid but fleeting. The movie also weaves its way through political references involving a corrupt leader (Makrand Deshpande) who claims allegiance with the common folk.

   If Patel wanted to blend culture and genre, he does so successfully in a scene in which Kid trains on the heavy bag to the beat of an encouraging village drummer.

  The movie's unevenness occasionally creates a sense of jagged freshness but the frantic action comes with a price. Kid may be discover the person he was meant to be, but we're left wishing we had something more substantial to take from the movie's violent onrush.

A potentially good story wasted

  Put Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley in the same movie, and good things will follow. But wait. That's already happened. In 2021's acclaimed The Lost Daughter, both actresses earned high praise for playing the same character at different ages.

  Judging by Wicked Little Letters, a comedy also starring both actresses, the second pairing is far from a charm.

  Based on a true story, Wicked Little Letters transports us to small-town England in the 1920s. Life becomes tense when residents of the coastal city of Littlehampton start receiving a flood profanity-laced letters.

   An Irish immigrant with a young daughter, Buckley's Rose Gooding immediately falls under suspicion. Her staunchly religious next-door neighbor (Colman's Edith Swann) fans the flames of mistrust, pointing to Rose as the culprit.

   Working from a screenplay by Jonny Sweet, director Thea Sharrock errs by serving up the story's big reveal after an hour, leaving 40 or so minutes still on tap.

   Sharrock also relies too heavily on the presumption that audiences will be convulsed by hearing otherwise strait-laced characters spout the profanity found in the letters, which are often read aloud.

   Some of the supporting cast seems stuck in a kitchen- sink drama. Timothy Spall plays Edith's domineering father, and Gemma Jones appears as her cowed mother. 

  It falls to a local police officer (Anjana Vasan) to clear up the mess. Her superiors want her to follow orders, much as her late father, also a cop, supposedly did. They have no interest in seeing a woman take any initiative.

   Thematically, the movie seems intent on showing the commonplace misogyny that dominated the time, but these characters aren’t deep enough to fuel the kind of performances we expect from Colman and Buckley.

  Buckley finds herself in a one-dimensional role that leans heavily on showy displays of pluck. Colman? Well, she's had better parts. 

 In an early scene, Rose coaxes Edith toward spontaneity while the feuding women, still able to abide each other, walk on a pebbled beach. We find few such relaxed moments, perhaps because the characters are often being pushed around by a plot that lays on thick helpings of drama when it's not looking for laughs.

  Sharrock eventually starts speaking the language of caper movies, a tonal shift that may reflect an underlying confusion about what this broadly drawn comedy aims to accomplish. 

   By the end, a promising story has given way to blatant attempts at crowd-pleasing and the hopes I had for Wicked Little Letters had dimmed, faded ink on another set of high expectations.

‘Greatest Hits’ misses the mark

For a movie about unbearable grief and loss, The Greatest Hits turns out to be a surprisingly forgettable affair.

   Lucy Boynton plays Harriet, a woman who's. unable to recover from the death of her boyfriend Max (David Corenswet) in a terrible auto accident. 

    To make matters even more painful for Harriet, the songs she and Max once loved transport her to the past, episodes she insists are real. Now, if only Harriet could go back to the exact moment when she and Max met, she might be able to save his life. Suppose they had never done more than exchange a glance? 

   Harriet, who wears noise-cancelling earphones to avoid unwanted flashbacks, eventually meets David (Justin H. Min), a young man who falls for her. She's attracted to him but can't break the shackles of the past. 

   Austin Crute plays Harriet's best gay friend (of course, she has one); he urges her to move on.

    Director Ned Benson  (The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby) can't keep Harriet's visits to the past from feeling repetitive.

    In service of its title, the movie's time travel episodes are accompanied by a playlist that includes Ryan Lott, Roxy Music, Jamie xx, and Nelly Furtado. 

    Treating Harriet's problem literally (we watch as her present-day self relive moments in the past) diminishes the story's psychological potential as it moves toward a predictable conclusion.

     Put another way: Proust got more value from a single madeleine than this movie gets from all its songs together. Too highbrow a reference for a quasi-romcom? Probably, but if the pastry fits .... 

An Iranian woman seeks her freedom

 

You'd have to have been living in an alternate universe not to know that many Iranian women face difficulties bred by oppression and patriarchal tyranny. So it's hardly surprising that writer/director Nora Niasari's Shayda provides another powerful example, this time focusing on Shayda (Zar Amir Ebrahimi),  a woman who traveled to Australia  with her medical-student husband (Osamah Sami). When the movie opens, Shayda already has separated from her abusive spouse. She and her seven-year-old daughter (Selina Zahednia) live in a shelter that protects battered women. The story's considerable tension revolves around Shayda's attempts to be free. She has filed for divorce but fears that if her husband takes their child to Iran, mother and daughter will be separated forever. As the story develops, Shayda receives support from a friend (Rina Mousavi) who no longer lives a traditional lifestyle. She also meets a young man (Mojean Aria) who has spent time in the US and embraces modernity.  Ebrahimi carries the movie, infusing every scene with a mix of determination and dread. Initially, Shayda's husband claims to be receptive to change but he can't contain the rage that drives him. Nasari, who reportedly based some of the movie on her own life, may not break new ground, but with Ebrahimi's help, she makes Shayda's story feel alarmingly fresh.

A cop who has lost his memory

I can watch Russell Crowe in almost anything and not feel cheated. And, yes, I've seen The Pope's Exorcist. Crowe has traveled a long way from his Gladiator days; he now seems immersed in pure character work with little emphasis on heroism. In Sleeping Dogs, a jumbled noir thriller, Crowe plays a retired homicide detective who's suffering from Alzheimer's. Crowe's Roy Freeman has been given an experimental treatment to help jar his memory back to life. The story kicks in when a death row inmate (Pacharo Mzembe) asks Roy to revisit a case in which he helped get a conviction. The former detective struggles to rebuild long-ago events involving the murder of an academic (Marton Csokas) who had a sexy femme fatale research assistant (Karen Gillan). Roy asks his one-time partner and drinking buddy (Tommy Flanagan) to help. Some of the story is told in flashbacks that introduce us to an aspiring author (Harry Greenwood) who falls for Gillan's character.  Crowe gives the movie a solid center but it's not enough to keep incredulity at bay. A surprise twist of an ending fails to shock (you probably will see it coming) and Sleeping Dogs winds up squandering Crowe's efforts. 

Time to give up on 'Ghostbusters'?

 

 It would be a mistake to assume that critics never crave an evening of simple diversion. That’s how I approached Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, the latest in a comic franchise that has made intermittent appearances in the nation’s multiplexes since 1984.

 Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd, vets of the original, both appear in the new movie, a promising bit of casting and, although the first movie isn’t among my favorite comedies, I was hoping for laughs in a climate of unabashed silliness. 

  Besides, what could be better than an ample helping of the kind of straight-faced intensity only Aykroyd can deliver?

  All I can say is that hopes aren’t always rewarded. 

  Although Frozen Empire didn’t generate embittered antipathy (at least from me), I found it uninspired, callow, and guilty of misstepping by trying to whip up a real scare or two. 

   To begin with, Murray isn’t in Frozen Empire all that much. Aykroyd’s appearance goes beyond cameo levels but it’s as if he’s taking the role of straight man without a comic to foil to play against. 

   The only scene that begins to suggest wit involves Aykroyd and Patton Oswalt, who appears as a paranormal researcher working at the main branch of the New York Public Library.

   Credit Kumail Nanjiani for bringing a shabby conman’s ease to a role that figures heavily in the plot, but could have been further expanded.

    Returning to the revamped New York City firehouse of the original, the movie centers on a familiar group composed of characters from previous sequels: Paul Rudd (now an aspiring stepdad), Carrie Coon (as Mom), and McKenna Grace and Finn Wolfhard) as her two kids. 

     Grace’s Phoebe emerges as a teen with a ghost-busting gift. She befriends a spirit named Melody (Emily Alyn Lind) who happens to be a chess whiz. 

    Director Gil Kenan, working from a screenplay he wrote with Jason Reitman,  piles on franchise references and adds the requisite amount of special effects. But the principal "ghost" — an evil god named Garraka  -- lacks the necessary silliness to keep the comedy on track. The movie takes Garraka, who can coat the world with layers of life-destroying ice, a little too seriously.

    The original movie relied on Murray’s sardonic delivery and the unashamed and often tacky preposterousness of its ambitions. The giant Stay Puft Marshmallow man who trampled Manhattan in 1984 has been shattered into legions of tiny Marshmallow men, a proliferation that’s overused to the point where it loses its whacky charm.

     The movie also includes an additional team of paranormal researchers financed by the wealthy Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson of earlier movies). That group includes more characters from previous editions who are charged with studying the behavior of captured ghosts, perhaps hinting at the possibility of a rapprochement between humans and the spirit world.

      Other figures from the series reappear, notably Annie Potts, the original  Ghostbusters secretary, and William Atherton, who portrays the oppositional authority figure who wants to hold the Ghostbusters responsible for collateral damage wreaked by their efforts.

      Judging by this edition, there seems little need for another Ghostbusters. Passing proton packs from generation to generation has its limits.

      At one point, Aykroyd’s aging character refers to being in his Golden Years. He wants to spend his twilight years doing what he’s done before, busting ghosts, I guess. I wouldn’t wish a life spent playing golf on Aykroyd's Ray Stantz, but there must be a better alternative.

     

‘Cabrini:’ an ode to determination

 

    I always feel a bit awkward reviewing movies about religious figures. Such movies can trigger a series of false assumptions on the part of readers.

   If a reviewer praises the movie, he or she can be seen as endorsing a particular set of spiritual assertions. Criticism, on the other hand, easily can be confused with rejection of someone's beliefs. 

   Moreover, the sincerity that marks most "religious" movies doesn't always equate with artistic success.

   Cabrini, a bio-pic about Frances Xavier Cabrini, occupies a middle ground, locating itself somewhere between inspirational fare and hardscrabble realism while trying to liberate itself from parochial constrictions.

   I don't know if Mother Cabrini, as she was widely known, viewed herself as a prototypical feminist  but the movie tends to treat her as one, an ambitious and determined woman battling long odds to achieve her vision. 

   Frances Xavier Cabrini arrived in the US in 1889 determined to care for New York's poor Sicilian immigrants while also aiming to expand her work into a global network of orphanages and hospitals. 

  Cristiana Dell'Anna plays the lead role, painting a portrait of a dedicated woman who challenges male authority: first the Pope (Giancarlo Giannini), and later a New York archbishop (David Morse) and the mayor of New York City (John Lithgow).

   Note: I used the word “woman” and not the word “nun.” That tells you something about the movie’s generalized approach.

   Director Alejandro Gomez Monteverde plops Mother Cabrini and her nuns into the squalor of New York's Five Points, a lower-east side neighborhood. 

  Driven by respiratory problems, Cabrini knew her body eventually would betray her. In the film, she works as if every day might be her last. 

  In New York, Cabrini takes orphans off the streets and provides refuge for a Five Points prostitute (Romana Maggiora Vergano) who's being brutalized by her pimp. 

    The dialogue sometimes has the ring of a rudimentary civics lesson. At one point, Cabrini talks about defending immigrants of all ethnicities; they're the future of America, etc.

  Aside from WASP prejudice, little mention is made of the social conditions that forced so many Italian immigrants into abject poverty.

   As an outsider, it struck me that the movie downplayed the spiritual/religious aspects of Cabrini's Catholicism, as well as the role religion played in the lives of the populations Cabrini served en route to becoming a saint in 1946, some 29 years after her death.

   It would be an exaggeration to think of Cabrini as a movie about a nun who becomes a feminist superhero, but you get the idea and, in this case, the moral of the story seems reducible to a bromide: Miracles are made by determination, hard work, and to use a decidedly non-Catholic word, chutzpah.

  

Adventure racing movie hits its marks

I’ve often asked myself the following question: If I weren’t reviewing would I bother with this or that movie? When it comes to Arthur the King, a story about adventure racers starring Mark Wahlberg and co-starring an indefatigable mixed-breed dog, the answer probably would be a resounding, “No.” But Wahlberg, who produced, and director Simon Cellan Jones turn out a sports adventure picture built around endurance, courage, and the willingness to take chances. The action sequences — competitors crossing a deep divide while hanging on a wire with mountain bikes strapped to their backs, for example — generate white-knuckle tension. Wahlberg plays Mikael Lindnord, a racer determined to win what will be his last race. He gathers some stalwarts (Simu Liu, Ali Suliman, Nathalie Emmanuel), and it’s off the Dominican Republic. About the dog:  As the adventures unfold, the team meets the dog, eventually dubbed Arthur. A wounded denizen of the streets, Arthur becomes a helpmate and companion to the team, even at one point saving their lives. He follows Mkael wherever he goes. A true story about a Swedish racer has been transferred to the US, but as depicted here, the sport seems to have a definite international flavor.  Focusing on adventure racing -- a competition about which most of us know little -- freshens the movie's formula. And, yes, the finale tugs at the heart strings, particularly for dog lovers. So, no, I might not have otherwise sought this one out, but I wasn’t sorry I saw it, either.

An introduction to samba jazz

Every music scene has its history. In They Shot the Piano Player Spanish directors Javier Mariscal and Fernando Trueba build a story around Brazilian jazz and one its premier artists, pianist Francisco Tenorio Junior. Skillfully employing hand-drawn animation, the directors introduce us to Jeff Harris (Jeff Goldblum), a fictional American journalist who travels to Brazil to research a book on bossa nova.  While there, Harris becomes fascinated by Tenorio's story. A key figure in samba jazz, Tenorio traveled to Buenos Aires where he vanished in 1976, a disappearance that was considered odd because, in a time of brutal Argentine oppression, he wasn't a political figure. One of Harris's Brazilian pals (Tony Ramos) points him to a variety of Brazilian and Argentine musicians who become the subject of interviews presented as near monologues. Harris's inquiries guide us through the music, Tenorio's mysterious disappearance, and political conditions in Brazil and Argentina in the '60s and '70s. Centering the film on the inquiring Harris creates the feel of an animated documentary that's illustrating -- often beautifully -- a journalistic quest. But the interview structure also keeps the story from evolving dynamically. Consider They Shot the Piano Player an imperfect but worthy introduction to a musical chapter with which many will be unfamiliar. 

Muscles, menace in a 'noirish' thriller

   

   It would be a serious mistake to mess with Jackie (Katy O'Brian), an Oklahoma woman who has pointed her life toward winning a Las Vegas body-building competition.

   Jackie's the dynamite that propels director Rose Glass's Love Lies Bleeding, a seamy noir tangle set in New Mexico in 1989.

  A convincing Kristen Stewart — as a woman frantically trying to control the unmanageable — plays the central role of Lou, a chain-smoker who works in the grungy gym where Jackie turns up to pump iron. 

 Lou’s duties include cleaning the toilets, which could be read as both an exercise in degradation and an act of penance for as yet undisclosed sins.

  Sex looms as Lou and Jackie tumble into a heated relationship. But Glass (Saint Maud) has more in mind than an obsessive love story; she's out to pump adrenalin into an exaggerated helping of Neo Noir while injecting it with a healthy shot of cult-classic juice.

   A well-selected supporting cast adds to the grimy atmospherics. Dave Franco portrays JJ, a bully who, early in the movie, has sex with an indifferent Jackie. She hopes he'll help her get by. A first-order sleaze, JJ later beats up his wife (Jena Malone), who happens to be Lou's sister. 

  Revenge looms, and Jackie provides it in a gripping scene made more vicious because by the time it arrives, Jackie has been shooting massive quantities of the steroids Lou provides for her.

  Watching Jackie's muscles bulge brings the Hulk to mind; her strength becomes a near special effect. Her fury can't be controlled; her spring-loaded muscles crack to attention. 

 A bit of comic relief arrives in the form of Daisy (Anna Baryshnikov), a ditzy woman with an undisguised crush on Lou and a refusal to take "no" for an answer.

  Roid rage and noir make for a combustible combination as Lou's gun-running father (Ed Harris) lurks in the background, gradually assuming a more important role in the story. 

  With stringy hair drooping over the sides and back of his bald dome, Harris goes satanic, creating a stand-out figure, the menacing calm at the center of every storm. 

  When the finale arrives, the film rockets over the top in ways that either will amuse you or put you off, perhaps an inviting mix of both. 

   Love Lies Bleeding may encourage you to expand your thoughts about female bodies, but it's firmly rooted in Glass's desire to blast her way into an overcrowded genre -- and do it with boldness and audacity. 

   

The Oscars score a win

    Yes, the Oscar show was better than usual. Much better.

   Some more or less random reactions. * John Cena's nude bit prior to the best costume design award provided a classic Oscar moment. * Host Jimmy Kimmel hit a few out of the park and whiffed on others. * Ryan Gosling's performance of I'm Just Ken played well with the crowd. * The In Memoriam segment might have played better for the audience than it did on TV. * Someone needs to buy Al Pacino reading glasses. He turned the best-picture announcement into a muffled anti-climax. * 20 Days in Mariupol won the Oscar for best documentary, the first ever Ukrainian film to win an Oscar. Director Mstyslav Chernov's acceptance speech was moving, direct, and properly pointed. * Director Jonathan Glazer's Gaza-referencing acceptance speech when The Zone of Interest won best international film was too hurried. I had to go back and read it online. * It was meaningful to see previous Oscar winning actors address nominees in their respective categories. * I was happy American Fiction (best adapted screenplay) won something. * I wasn't upset that Killers of the Flower Moon and Maestro were shut out. * Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse should have won best animated feature. The Boy and the Heron took the prize. It has been billed as director Hayao Miyazaki's last movie and he's a master of Japanese anime, so ..... * I'm puzzled by those who think Oppenheimer -- the night's big winner with seven awards, including best picture -- is too conventional. Does every picture need to follow in the Everything Everywhere All At Once footsteps? *  If I had an Oscar vote, I'd have voted for best-actress winner Emma Stone (Poor Things) over Lily Gladstone (Killers of the Flower Moon). That doesn't mean I didn't admire Gladstone's work, but Stone's daring performance was in a class of its own. * I look forward to the day when Mark Ruffalo, nominated in the best-supporting actor category for Poor Things, wins an Oscar. Ditto for Paul Giamatti, who didn't receive a best actor Oscar for his work in The Holdovers. And ditto, too, for Jeffrey Wright (American Fiction). * Enough. Time to move on to this year's movies. Good luck to us all.

Is this Oscar's most predictable year?

  Oscar looms and the suspense is ... well... minimal.

  Film critics usually make Oscar predictions, but this year the exercise seems superfluous. There's so much agreement among prognosticators that the evening -- should it unfold as expected -- may be one of the least surprising in Oscar's 95-year history.

  Peruse the work of Oscar's many mavens and you'll find consensus in most categories. In this case,  I see no reason to dissent.

   So here's what's likely to happen Sunday night (March 10):

   Oppenheimer will win the Oscar for best picture.     Christopher Nolan (Oppenheimer) will win best director. Cillian Murphy (Oppenheimer) will win best actor. Lily Gladstone (Killers of the Flower Moon) will win best actress. Robert Downey Jr. (Oppenheimer) will win best supporting actor. Da'Vine Joy Randolph (The Holdovers) will win best supporting actress. 

   Best original screenplay will go to Anatomy of a Fall, and American Fiction should land the prize for best adapted screenplay.

   For me, the only mild surprise can be found in the best-actress category. Until Gladstone won the SAG (Screen Actors Guild) award for best actress, I thought Emma Stone (Poor Things) was the frontrunner.

   I suppose Stone's insanely courageous performance in Poor Things still could carry the day. Am I hedging? A bit.

   Another question nags. Could Paul Giamatti's popularity bring an upset in the best-actor category? Giamatti created a memorable character in The Holdovers, and the Academy might want to honor an established pro who always delivers and who seems to be one the most unassuming people in show business.

   I hope that doesn't sound condescending. Giamatti is a terrific actor, as are the rest of the nominees in this category: Bradley Cooper, Colman Domingo, and Jeffrey Wright.

   Aside from hoping that the show, again hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, won't break the three-hour mark, I have no rooting interests. There's no need for the Academy Awards broadcast to take as long as it took Nolan to tell the story of the invention of the atomic bomb.

  One footnote: Nothing would make me happier than to be wrong on all counts. What an Oscar telecast that would be.

  Happy viewing.

Another film occupies its own world

 

   No one is likely to accuse Julio Torres, the writer/director of Problemista, of lacking ambition. 

   In his mischievous debut film, the former SNL writer and creator of the sitcom Los Espookys, tackles the maddening complexities of emigrating to the US, the insular hypocrisies of the art world, and the coming-of-age problems of one young man.

   That's a lot and Torres’s movie can't handle it all, even with humor and bold, if often silly, displays of creativity. The movie can feel like a scrapbook of ideas set aside for another day.

   Like many immigrants, Alejandro, played by Torres, has a dream. He aspires to design toys for Hasbro, a career that might be an overreach. Consider the duplicitous Barbie-like doll with fingers crossed behind her back, for example. Or how about the truck with the flat tire, intended to teach kids a cautionary lesson?

  To support himself, Alejandro works at a company that freezes corpses for future unthawing. He soon meets Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton), a former art critic whose late husband's body resides at the facility from which Alejandro is in the process of being fired.

   Sporting an unruly crop of red hair and a badly curdled temperament, Elizabeth obsessively works to establish the reputation of her recently departed husband (RZA), an artist who specialized in paintings of eggs nestled in billowy folds of fabric.

   Thanks to Swinton's embrace of her character's fury, Elizabeth blows through the movie with tornadic force.  A sharply offensive woman, she cuts no one any slack. As a character, Alejandro can't compete with her.

   Now and again, Alejandro communicates with the doting mom (Catalina Saavedra) he left in his home country of El Salvador. She believes she can solve any problem her son might encounter, a conviction that has diminished Alejandro's capacity for self-assertion.

   Lacking much by way of ordinary reality to play against, Torres's whimsical approach swamps the movie.  And at times, the movie goes self-consciously bonkers, notably in its depiction of a character called Craigslist (Larry Owens), a surreal embodiment of the website devoted to classified advertising.

   Despite Elizabeth's scourge-like presence, the film's overall tone is only mildly satiric, a movie that too often feels as if it has taken its own idiosyncrasies as its subject.

  Torres treats the film like a playhouse for his imagination. For me, the movie’s ideas, though sometimes clever, didn't always translate into enough laughs: The net result: Problemista left me wishing Torres better luck next time.

'Dune: Part II': a stunning epic

 

 Huge in scale, long in the telling (166 minutes). and sporting arcane references from author Frank Herbert's landmark 1965 sci-fi novel, Dune: Part II has arrived. Don’t fret. Director Denis Villeneuve, who released Part One in 2023, delivers a movie with enough visionary heft and action to justify its epic scope.

  I thought Villeneuve's initial effort represented a marked improvement over David Lynch's 1984 sci-fi foray into Duneland, making the most of a drama steeped in intrigue and boasting enough bizarre-looking characters to sustain several otherworldly parade floats.

   More action-oriented than Part One and benefiting from cinematographer Grieg Fraser's stunning desert imagery, Part Two tells a story even non-fans should be able to follow as opposing planets in a vast galactic empire vie for control of melange, a rare spice that serves as an emblem of power.

   In this edition, we spend more time with the Fremen, desert dwellers of Arrakis, the planet where spice is mined and refined and where the heartless Harkonnen have become an occupying force.

    Much of the movie involves efforts by Paul Atreides (Timothee Chalamet) to earn a place among the Fremen. Paul wants to join their fight against the Harkonnen, led by the blubberous Baron Harkonnen (Stellan Skarsgard).

   Eventually, the Baron unleashes his nephew Feyd-Rautha, a sneering, sadistic villain brought to frighteningly sharp life by Austin Butler.

    Villeneuve keeps a large supporting cast from swamping the various throughlines. A dust-covered Javier Bardem adds humor to his portrayal of Fremen leader Stilgar. Dave Bautista brings bulky menace to the role of Beast Rabban, another Harkonnen sadist, and a subdued Christopher Walken turns up as the emperor who presides over a vast planetary imperium. Josh Brolin returns as Paul's one-time mentor.

    With all that out of the way, let's get to the heart of the movie, provided by Chalomet and Zendaya, who plays the Fremen warrior Chani, a young woman dedicated to ridding the Fremen of oppressive colonial rule. 

     Paul, who earns the Fremen name Usul, and Chani fall in love, allowing the movie to raise questions about Paul’s loyalties. Is he for Fremen freedom or will he use their belief in him to augment his power? Can the aristocratic Paul be trusted by the justifiably suspicious masses?

    Much is made about whether Paul might be the messiah some of  the more fervent Fremen have been awaiting, allowing the movie to touch on additional issues concerning the dangerous ways religious and political aspiration can corrupt each other.

    The stakes may be starkly drawn, but characters are nicely shaded. Rebecca Ferguson returns as Paul's mother, encouraging his ambitious side and sometimes finding herself at odds with her son.

     Part Two thrives on scale, booming set-pieces (a gladiatorial battle with, alas, a crowd that looks CIG-generated), and the summoning of giant sandworms that live beneath the surface of Arrakis and are the source of melange, the spice with near-miraculous powers.

       For all its intricacies, betrayals, and plotting, the story retains its thematic resonance. What moral prices must be paid to control the spice.

      Now, after almost six hours of movie, Dune isn't finished. Questions remain for Paul, Chani, and the entire empire. Expect Part Three. I find that a bit dispiriting. If a story can't be told in six hours, maybe it's a miniseries.

      But the world of Dune remains intriguingly complex, full of characters whose roles shift and evolve. Credit Villeneuve with filling the screen with enough exotic flavor and bold action to keep Dune vividly alive through two helpings. 

      There's no reason to think he couldn't do the same in a third.