Aurelia Butler

In this slippery farce, a schlubby coder falls in love with a prostitute and takes in a teenager he suspects is a terrorist.In the first few minutes of Alain Guiraudie’s meandering farce, “Nobody’s Hero,” Médéric (Jean-Charles Clichet) spots a middle-aged woman across the street and immediately declares his love. Contrary to cliché, the gesture is not romantic but droll and startlingly arbitrary — it’s early in the morning, and the two are at an empty suburban intersection. When the lucky lady, Isadora (Noémie Lvovsky), reveals she’s a prostitute, Médéric is unfazed, even after it turns out she’s also married to her pimp, Gérard (Renaud Rutten), an oddly jealous brute who resembles Dennis Hopper in “Blue Velvet.”Guiraudie, best known for his Hitchcockian gay-cruising thriller “Stranger by the Lake,” is a gifted conjurer of paranoia with an erotic edge. Things aren’t typically “solved” at the end of his woozy mysteries, which are often set in rural dream worlds where the boundaries of gay and straight don’t seem to matter.In “Nobody’s Hero,” this paranoid mood is played for snickers when a jihadist terrorist attack hits the town, Clermont-Ferrand, in central France, and Médéric is suddenly approached by a shifty, panhandling teen, Selim (Iliès Kadri), who looks just like a composite sketch of the perpetrator shown on TV. But Médéric, a schlubby coder, spends most of his time trying to have sex with Isadora, which proves a remarkably difficult feat given her occupation. Gérard keeps his menacing cop buddy on the lookout, and Médéric’s new employer, Florence (Doria Tillier), tends to call at the worst moment. Then there are his neighbors, who knock at his door incessantly and eventually coax Médéric into taking Selim in — it’s best he not loiter in the stairwell.As a straight dark comedy about French Islamophobia, “Nobody’s Hero” doesn’t make a lot of sense. Guiraudie is after something much different here: creating a palpable sense of the connection between fear and desire, which, sure, aren’t the most rational of our human impulses — but neither are love, marriage or jihadist crusading.Nobody’s HeroNot Rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

With a tragic hero at its heart, the Hughes brothers’ debut drama painted nuanced portraits of characters rarely fleshed out in other films.When it was released 30 years ago, “Menace II Society” was a shock to the system.Maybe because the trailer conveyed a sense of optimism amid scenes of Black urban life, many moviegoers were expecting another “Boyz N the Hood,” which had met with universal acclaim two years earlier. Both were coming-of-age dramas set in tough Los Angeles neighborhoods. And both involved a hero who is put to the test and a key character who dies.In “Boyz,” that hero, Cuba Gooding Jr.’s Tre, survives. Hell, he thrives: the movie ends with him leaving to attend Morehouse College. In that hopeful narrative, the main character escapes. Not so in “Menace.” It is about those who cannot escape, the thousands of boys who grow into men trapped by circumstances. If “Boyz N the Hood” was a dream that few got to experience, “Menace II Society” was the reality of those who were left behind.The debut of the directors Albert and Allen Hughes with a script by Tyger Williams — all in their 20s at the time — “Menace” tells the story of Caine (Tyrin Turner), who moves in with his grandparents after his mother dies of a drug overdose and his father is killed in a drug deal gone wrong. But he’s really raised by Pernell, played by Glenn Plummer, and other denizens of the streets. Caine himself is dealing drugs and stealing cars to get by. He’s best friends with the unapologetic killer O-Dog, played magnificently by Larenz Tate, and has feelings for Ronnie (Jada Pinkett), who has a baby with the now-imprisoned Pernell. But Caine makes decisions that prove to be his undoing. In true tragic-hero fashion, he brings about his own demise. He fathers a baby, then refuses to claim it, setting out on a path that ultimately leads to his death at the hands of a cousin of the baby’s mother.Partly what makes “Menace” (available on most major platforms) such a rich film is the surprising number of characters who are fully fleshed out — not just Caine but also O-Dog, a murderer who is also supportive of friends and gentle with children. Even the man who kills Caine is given layers: he is tender with his cousin, and his love for her sets him on a collision course with Caine. The cousin goes unnamed but he isn’t depicted like the antagonists in “Boyz N the Hood,” who are treated with as much care as gangsters in Grand Theft Auto.John Singleton, second from right, working with Ice Cube, in the car, and Cuba Gooding Jr. on “Boyz N the Hood.”Columbia PicturesThe film makes a point of exploring how Caine’s circumstances plays a major role in shaping him — whether it’s his upbringing by an addicted mother and dealer father, or his boyhood interactions with Pernell, who allows him to drink beer and hold his first gun. He then witnesses his father murder a man over a card game. It’s clear that Caine did not choose this life; this is the world as he found it. And though his determination not to care for his child is unquestionably the wrong decision, he is using the logic he inherited. We hear his inner monologue. He is trying to do the right thing, he just does not know how. Compared with the others around him, Caine is relatively moral.“Menace” was part of a ’90s wave of gritty urban films centered on Black leads that included “South Central” (1992) as well as “Boyz.” The $3 million “Menace” was a success with audiences (making $30 million at the box office) and critics alike. Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly called it “brilliant, and unsparing,” and both Siskel and Ebert put the film on their lists of the best films of 1993.Thanks to their initial hit, the Hughes brothers were able to make “Dead Presidents” two years later, about a Black Vietnam veteran who resorts to robbing banks to feed his poverty-stricken family. Both films show filmmakers interested in exploring the systemic conditions in America that give rise to the tragedy at the core of the Black experience.Albert Hughes has said that “Menace” was made for white people, and it was lampooned as part of an overall goof on the genre in “Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood” (1996). Still, Gucci Mane, A$AP Rocky and Lil Wayne have all referenced “Menace” in their music, and a younger Kanye West noted that it was one of his “most watched” films.Kiese Laymon, the novelist and author of “Heavy: An American Memoir,” told me, “It was the first film that my friends and I memorized every word.” He added, “O-Dog was mesmerizing. Some of us liked talking like him. A few of us liked acting like him. That had deadly consequences for one or two of us.”Indeed “Menace II Society” has become a cornerstone in Black households, required watching alongside “The Color Purple,” “Malcolm X” and, yes, “Boyz N the Hood.”“Menace” isn’t perfect, of course. The women are hardly three-dimensional. Caine’s mother is no more than a crackhead who fails to raise him, while Ronnie has little to do other than be a dutiful mother and romantic interest. But the legacy of this film cannot be overstated. As the critic Caryn James wrote in The New York Times when the film was released, “The movie’s very bleakness — not the moviemakers’ youth — is what makes ‘Menace II Society’ so radical, so rare and so important.” More

Chris Hemsworth returns as an Australian mercenary in this bloated, banal action sequel.“Extraction 2,” a drab, brawny sequel starring Chris Hemsworth as an Australian mercenary, offers a turgid shadow of the type of crowd-pleasing escapism that action blockbusters used to provide.The shaky foundation of the director Sam Hargrave’s movie is a trite script by Joe Russo: Recovering from near-fatal wounds he incurred on his previous mission, Tyler Rake (Hemsworth) wakes from a coma. He retires to a quaint cabin in the woods, a gift from his comrades Nik (Golshifteh Farahani) and Yaz (Adam Bessa). It’s a quiet life, surrounded by a dog and chickens, until a mysterious man (Idris Elba) offers him a job: Ketevan (Tinatin Dalakishvili) — Rake’s ex-wife’s sister — and her two children are being held captive in a Georgian prison by their abusive mobster father (Tornike Gogrichiani). Regrouping with Yaz and Nik, Rake devises a plan to save them.Foregoing any semblance of a story after its initial setup, “Extraction 2” can be separated into three distinct, noxious action sequences. The most elaborate, lasting an interminable 24 minutes, sees Rake infiltrating the facility housing the family, then fleeing with them past claustrophobic cells, through a crowd of prisoners determined to murder them all, and, finally, onto a runaway train.Edited less-than-seamlessly to look like a single shot, the scene attempts to one-up a similarly elaborate chase from the previous film. But such long sequences require a director and their cinematographer, in this case Greg Baldi, to be cognizant of the story bodies can tell through motion (think Park Chan-wook’s “Oldboy” and John Woo’s “Hard Boiled”). Hargrave lacks such feeling and grace; he merely plants explosions in view of a spinning, swirling, ducking and diving camera in the misplaced hope of building tension.This movie sacrifices character development — what’s Nik or Yaz’s back story? — in favor of bloated, banal combat scenes. Hargrave tamps down the hints of attraction between Nik and Rake before the two can strike an ember, and leans on narrative shortcuts — including incoherent flashbacks showing Rake’s deceased son — to reach for an unearned pathos. Hemsworth and Farahani do their best to rise above the saccharine material, grasping for human moments amid the vacuous melees. But burdened by its bluster, “Extraction 2” is merely a loud, blithering mess masquerading as fulfilling escapism.Extraction 2Rated R for strong, bloody violence throughout. Running time: 2 hours 2 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

With more jokes than jump scares, this comedic horror film is as tartly amusing as it is provocative.There are two games at play in “The Blackening,” a comedic horror film with more jokes than jump scares. The first is the titular race-baiting board game with the grotesque Jim Crow-style figurine that Morgan (Yvonne Orji) and her boyfriend, Shawn (Jay Pharoah), discover as they explore the cabin they have rented for a reunion of college friends.The rest of their crew will arrive soon for a celebratory Juneteenth weekend of recreational drugs, card playing and — once they learn where Shawn and Morgan have disappeared to — trying to survive the night, initially by answering trivia questions such as: Which Aunt Viv was better on “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air”?The other game is the tartly amusing one the director, Tim Story, and the writers, Tracy Oliver and Dewayne Perkins (on whose viral sketch comedy skit the film is based), invite viewers to play. It tests our familiarity with horror tropes while messing with the variegated verities of Black identity. The film’s marketing come-on, “We Can’t All Die First,” winks at the notion that when there is a Black person in a predominantly white horror film, he or she is sure to be the first lamb (Black sheep?) to the ensuing slaughter. What, then, if all the characters are Black?Looking like a charred version of the Creature From the Black Lagoon and wielding the whitest weapon on earth — a crossbow — the movie’s masked killer has an answer for that. Beaming in from an antique TV monitor, he offers the friends a lose-lose, if philosophically fertile and futile, proposition: Sacrifice the Blackest among you and the rest go free.The ensemble embodies the affection as well as the prickliness of friends who may not have seen each other in a while, but know each other well and may still harbor a resentment or two. Lisa (Antoinette Robertson) has not been honest about her ex, Nnamdi (Sinqua Walls), with her gay best friend, Dewayne (Perkins, the co-writer), and he’s hot about it. In a film that features card playing — it could have been bid whist but it’s spades — Nnamdi throws down the race card most often, making King (Melvin Gregg), who’s married to a white woman, and Allison (Grace Byers), whose father is white, bristle ever so slightly.And then there’s Clifton (Jermaine Fowler), a mildly passive-aggressive nerd whom no one quite recalls inviting. Shanika (X Mayo) runs into him at a convenience store while evading the clerk, who seems to be following her and looks like he didn’t quite make the cut for “Deliverance.”The quandary of what “Blackest” means puts this movie squarely in the company of others that have used genre tropes to make sense of race in America. (Yes, “Get Out” gets a nod.) It is a deft gesture to have the question turned on its head as the characters leverage what they think of as their whitest credentials.“The Blackening” comes with a horror movie’s requisite skittish and stalking camerawork, its creaks and breath-holding hushes, its gore and payback. But it is the friends’ flee, fight, freeze — or throw under the bus — banter that makes the film provocative fun.The BlackeningRated R for pervasive language, genre violence and drug use. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

In this film a young woman searching for her missing sister infiltrates a gang, but the focus is diffuse and the promised thriller never materializes.The description of “Cadejo Blanco,” directed by Justin Lerner, reads like a thriller: After her sister disappears, a young Guatemalan woman infiltrates a gang to try to find her. But there are few thrills in the film, which moves slowly and with too much ease through the world of Guatemalan gangs. It’s beautifully shot and gives an authentic view of street life there, but the characters’ journeys are not sufficiently developed, and the resolutions feel unearned.The film kicks off in Guatemala City with Sarita (Karen Martínez) being dragged out for a night of clubbing with her free-spirited sister, Bea (Pamela Martínez), who had the ulterior motive of meeting up with her boyfriend Andrés (Rudy Rodríguez). Sarita leaves the bar early, and the next morning, discovers that Bea never came home. Sarita suspects Andrés, who is a gang member, so she travels to the coastal town of Puerto Barrios to befriend him and find Bea.But Sarita’s mission to find her sister seems quickly forgotten, as the film’s focus shifts to the day-to-day interactions of the gang members. Perhaps this is intentional. The director cast predominantly nonprofessional actors in the film, among them real-life gang members from Puerto Barrios. Many of the cast members had a hand in reworking the script to better reflect their lives and daily vernacular. But this authenticity was not enough to make up for the shoddy storytelling. Had the film leaned more intentionally into the interior lives of its characters rather than positioning itself as a thriller, it may have been a more satisfying watch.Cadejo BlancoNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes. In theaters. More

The writer-director Tyler Taormina shot this highly experimental feature, which mostly takes place after dark, during the most restrictive phase of the pandemic.Except in its final shot, “Happer’s Comet” takes place entirely at night. But if it weren’t for occasional glimpses of clocks, discerning the precise time would be tricky. There are plenty of people out and about, performing quiet, personal, often inexplicable tasks in an unidentified pocket of suburbia. (The film was largely shot in Smithtown, Long Island.)One person records the sounds of crickets and trains on a cellphone. Another does push-ups in a closed auto body shop. Still another tries to reach a human being on an automated phone system, but all of the agents are currently busy. The only dialogue in this movie comes from external sources, like the phone system or televisions. The characters never speak, and they are never named. It may say something about the film’s foreboding mood — it’s been described as Lynchian, and the opening shot appears to nod to “Blue Velvet” — that one of the figures who looks sleepiest is driving (and drifting over the yellow line).Motion becomes a motif: As “Happer’s Comet” progresses, it becomes difficult to keep track of how many of its subjects have donned roller blades or skates. They glide through the area almost ritualistically (or somnambulistically).The writer-director, Tyler Taormina (“Ham on Rye”), shot this highly experimental feature during the most restrictive phase of the pandemic, apparently with a crew of two.Taormina has taken the problem of having to look at the same thing every day and turned it into an aesthetic — staring at, and listening to, ordinary sights to the point where they become eerie and unfamiliar. (The sound design on a cornfield makeout session gets in way closer than movies normally do.) Sometimes wearying, sometimes pointlessly cryptic, “Happer’s Comet” nevertheless has a distinct way of viewing the world.Happer’s CometNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 2 minutes. In theaters. More