Aurelia Butler

Tina Fey and Jon Hamm fail to invigorate this listless murder mystery about two victims who shared the same name.“Some of this actually happened,” we are advised at the beginning of John Slattery’s second feature, “Maggie Moore(s).” At least it’s a variation on the groaningly familiar “based on a true story,” even if both claims are equally meaningless.Degree of truth aside, this comedy-thriller succeeds as neither. Top-heavy with big names (Tina Fey, Jon Hamm) and set in a nondescript small town populated primarily by sad sacks and losers, the movie struggles to get out of second gear. A terrified woman flees a hulking hit man, her body later discovered by a police chief named Sanders (a hammy Hamm) and his pragmatic deputy (Nick Mohammed). Days earlier, another woman had been found, burned to a crisp in her car. Two murdered women, two sketchy spouses, one shared name: Maggie Moore.Suspicions aroused, Sanders begins a desultory investigation. Distracted by the recent death of his wife — whose loss he medicates by reading his sappy scribblings aloud to a rapt writing group — Sanders seems drained and becalmed. Any plot momentum, then, is due solely to Micah Stock and Christopher Denham’s heroic efforts as the weaselly husbands of the murdered Maggies, though their comedic vigor is undercut by the sheer bleakness of Paul Bernbaum’s script. Desperately unhappy people are rarely a laugh a minute.Or, for that matter, convincing lovers. So when Sanders sidles into a relationship with Rita (Fey), a chatty casino employee, their scenes are never believable as anything other than Hamm and Fey doing a particularly boring bit.“I’m trying to be a little more spontaneous these days,” Sanders confesses to Rita at one point. “I hear the ladies really like that.”With dialogue this dreadful, even Jon Hamm would struggle to score.Maggie Moore(s)Rated R for inappropriate language, unsavory behavior and unconvincing sex. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters. More

In the latest DC Comics blowout, Ezra Miller suits up as the speedy superhero alongside special guests like Batman (hello, Michael Keaton).The Flash, the latest DC Comics superhero to get his very own big show, isn’t the outfit’s usual brooding heavyweight. He’s neither an old-style god nor new (a.k.a. a billionaire), but an electrified nerd who joined the super-ranks by accident, not by birthright or by design. Out of uniform, he is a normie, a goof and kind of endearing. He’s really, really fast on his feet, you bet. But what makes him pop onscreen is that when things go bigger and grimmer here, as they invariably do in blowouts of this type, he retains a playful weightlessness.That’s a relief, particularly given how the movie tries to clobber you into submission. Big action-adventures invariably give the viewer a workout, smacking you around with their shocks and awesomeness, though it sometimes feels as if contemporary superhero movies have taken this kind of pummeling to new extremes. That may be true, though movies have long employed spectacle — pyrotechnics, lavish set pieces — to bait, hook and bludgeon the audience so it keeps begging for more. If the bludgeoning feels more inescapable these days, it’s partly because the major studios now bank so heavily on superhero movies.“The Flash” is one of the more watchable ones. It’s smartly cast, ambitious and relatively brisk at two and a half hours. The story tracks Barry Allen (Ezra Miller) and his superhero persona, the Flash, as he whooshes, wrapped in tendrils of lightning; traverses space-time continuums; and tries to exonerate his father (Ron Livingston), who’s in prison for killing Barry’s mom (Maribel Verdú). As is usually the case with superhero movies, the story is nonsensical and convoluted — it’s no wonder a character uses a tangle of cooked spaghetti to try to explain a major plot point — but not calamitously so. The overall vibe is upbeat.Some of that liveliness comes from Miller, a tense and almost feverishly charismatic presence. (Their well-publicized offscreen troubles hang like a cloud over this movie.) Some of the Flash’s appeal, of course, is also baked into the original comic-book character, “the fastest man on Earth,” who first hit in 1940 (via creators Gardner Fox and Harry Lampert) and was revamped (by Robert Kanigher and Carmine Infantino) in 1956. Five years later in Issue No. 123, these versions of the Flash (there are others) discover that they exist on two seemingly separate Earths, an idea this movie, well, runs with by introducing parallel DC Comics realms.It’s a conceit that pays off the second a shambolic Michael Keaton makes his entrance as a graybeard puttering about a near-derelict Wayne Manor. Having hung up his Bat-suit in his reality (while DC has repeatedly rebooted the franchise in ours), Bruce appears to have entered the Howard Hughes chapter of his cosseted life when Barry drops by. Long story short, the two rapidly join forces, dust off the Batcave tech, furrow their brows and suit up, as other members of the DC stock company join the party, including Alfred Pennyworth (Jeremy Irons), General Zod (Michael Shannon) and Supergirl (Sasha Calle).The entrance of these company players are timed like special-guest appearances — ladies and gentlemen, Zod the Zaniac! — and they’re obviously meant to delight true believers. To a degree, they also feel like they’ve been brought in to shore up the Flash during his first stand-alone outing. Cramming the screen with established names to hedge their expensive bets is an old-fashioned studio gambit, whether in a 1920s musical revue or 1970s disaster flick. Whatever the rationale here, the results are amusing, and it’s especially nice to see Keaton, who first played Batman in Tim Burton’s 1989 film. He seems to be having a good time, and when he looks in the mirror approvingly, it’s easy to share in his self-admiration.Working from a script by Christina Hodson, the director Andy Muschietti keeps these pieces greased and quickly moving, though he almost blows it as soon as the movie begins. It opens with an unfunny protracted bit in which Barry, who’s late for work, orders a sandwich from a pokey server. (That the first villain in the story is a service worker is a choice.) While the guy readies the order, Barry turns into the Flash to help his world’s Batman (an uncredited Ben Affleck) dispatch some villains. It goes as expected — bam, splat — but then a hospital wing collapses, and newborn babies go flying, hurtling toward the street.It’s a creepy setup that Muschietti milks for laughs that become queasier and ickier the longer and the more gleefully flamboyant the scene plays out. It’s absurd, outrageous, digitally fabricated and needless to say the Flash will save the day. The problem is that Muschietti, who has a talent for fraying your nerves with images of child endangerment (as he showed in the “It” horror flicks), is so obviously pleased with these airborne babies that he keeps showing off (turning a microwave into a bassinet), which drains the sequence both of its outlandish comedy and of any tension that might make the Flash’s heroism resonate.The movie more or less recovers, settling into its lively groove, even if the Flash remains a curiously uncertain presence. Surrounding him with bigger superheroes may have made branding sense, but the net effect is that the movie never persuasively establishes the Flash as a confident stand-alone entity. That may make the question of Miller playing him in the future moot. Who knows? Last year, Miller apologized for their behavior and said they were seeking treatment for “complex mental health issues.” I liked “The Flash” well enough while watching it. But thinking and writing about it and everything that has gone down has been dispiriting — real life has a way of insinuating itself into even better-wrought fantasies.The FlashRated PG-13 for superhero violence. Running time: 2 hours 24 minutes. In theaters. More

The Coens and Ridley Scott are among the directors who took big swings at the novelist’s work. The distinctive writer left his mark on the big screen.By turns terse, poetic and baroque, able to find the essence of human nature in the bleakest of circumstances, Cormac McCarthy, who died Tuesday, was widely considered to be one of the greatest novelists of his generation. His writing, with its Western landscapes, noir-inflected dialogue and biblical inclinations, proved to be catnip to filmmakers, including the Coen brothers, Ridley Scott and Billy Bob Thornton. Here is a look at how this most distinctive of writers left his mark on the big screen.‘All the Pretty Horses’ (2000)Rent or buy it on most major platforms.Probably the gentlest of McCarthy’s Border Trilogy novels, this film adaptation tells the story of John Grady Cole, a young man who high-tails it across the border to Mexico, where he falls in love with a wealthy rancher’s daughter (Penélope Cruz), runs afoul of her family and the law, and navigates the horrors of prison life. Yes, this is gentle by McCarthy standards. Matt Damon, riding the success of “Good Will Hunting” and “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” plays Cole as a sensitive lad dumbstruck by love. Cruz, a native of Spain, does her best as a south-of-the-border lass. Thornton directs with lyrical respect for the source material, if not a whole lot of grit or imagination.‘No Country for Old Men’ (2007)Rent or buy it on most major platforms.The Coen brothers return to the Texas noir roots of their first feature, “Blood Simple,” for the most successful McCarthy adaptation to date. It won Oscars for best picture, directing and screenwriting, as well as Javier Bardem’s supporting turn as one of McCarthy’s nihilistic villains, an implacable killing machine who speaks in riddles and engages his prey in fatal rhetorical jousts. But the heart of the movie, about a briefcase full of money and the in-over-his-head opportunist (Josh Brolin) who pilfers it, is Tommy Lee Jones as a small-town sheriff who wants out of the game, which seems to get more sinister and incomprehensible by the minute. He is the old man of the title and the author’s surrogate, a poetic soul just trying to wait it out until it’s all over.‘The Road’ (2009)Stream it on Tubi, Vudu and Freevee.The novel that brought McCarthy’s world to a wide audience (and won a 2007 Pulitzer Prize), “The Road” redeems a postapocalyptic hellscape with the pure love of a father (played by Viggo Mortensen with heartbreaking intensity) for his young son (Kodi Smit-McPhee, already a young actor of uncommon instincts). It’s a gray land of digitally enhanced wreckage, peopled by cannibals and other desperate survivors played by the likes of Robert Duvall, Michael K. Williams and, in a brief but indelible and terrifying performance, Garret Dillahunt. John Hillcoat directs like he means it. “The Road” is up there with “No Country” as one of the purest visual distillations of McCarthy’s prose.‘The Sunset Limited’ (2011)Stream it on Max.Sometimes McCarthy likes to take a couple of characters, wind them up and just let them riff on what it all means. His 2022 novel, “Stella Maris,” fits this bill, as does this HBO film version of McCarthy’s play “The Sunset Limited,” about a God-fearing ex-con called Black (Samuel L. Jackson) and the secular humanities professor, called White (Tommy Lee Jones), whom Black saves from jumping in front of a subway train. Confined to Black’s apartment, they thrust and parry, Black offering a brand of streetwise divinity, White stewing in his own suicidal juices. Both actors clearly relish the opportunity to speak McCarthy’s dialogue, and who could blame them? This is some of Jackson’s best work, allowing him to return to his theater roots with a high-wire act of philosophy and feeling. Jones’s direction is workmanlike, but that’s all this material really needs.‘The Counselor’ (2013)Rent or buy it on most major platforms.Ridley Scott directs the only original screenplay on McCarthy’s résumé, an unfairly maligned and misunderstood blast of criminal nihilism that carries the noir direction of “No Country” to its apotheosis. Michael Fassbender plays a glib lawyer whose taste for the finer things gets him in deep with a Mexican cartel. Other players come and go, including Brad Pitt, Penélope Cruz, Javier Bardem, Bruno Ganz and Cameron Diaz, who has an amorous encounter with a luxury car that you will never unsee. This is McCarthy and Scott having infectious fun with humanity’s dark side, including two bravura murder scenes notable for their cruelty and creativity. More

Inventive riffs on the biopic, the movie musical, the classic Western and the celebrity bio-documentary are among the highlights of this month’s roundup of under-the-radar streaming movies.‘Miles Ahead’ (2016)Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.Viewers hoping for a traditional music-legend biopic in the style of “Walk the Line” or “Ray” will likely be baffled by this portrait of Miles Davis from Don Cheadle, who directs, co-writes and stars as the jazz great. Cheadle eschews the cradle-to-grave approach typical of such endeavors, instead building his narrative around a tall tale of Davis and a music journalist (Ewan McGregor) attempting to recover stolen tapes of his latest album. This mostly fictional fabrication gives Cheadle the leeway to create a playful, unpredictable and unexpected work — a cinematic reflection of the music that made him famous. Emayatzy Corinealdi is heart-wrenching as Davis’s wife Frances, while LaKeith Stanfield and Michael Stuhlbarg stand out in memorable supporting roles.‘The Lure’ (2017)Stream it on Max.The Polish director Agnieszka Smoczynska made her feature directing debut with this exhilaratingly odd mash-up of cabaret musical, sex comedy and folk horror tale. Michalina Olszanska and Marta Mazurek are Gold and Silver, a pair of mermaid sisters who leave their comfortable undersea homes in pursuit of a handsome human (shades of “The Little Mermaid”), and end up bumping and grinding at a seedy nightclub. Smoczynska takes this literal fish-out-of-water tale and spices it up with unexpected genre flourishes; it’s the kind of movie where, if you’re not enjoying yourself, you merely have to wait a few scenes for it to become something else entirely.‘St. Vincent’ (2014)Stream it on Netflix.The gruff but lovable geezer, the harried and hard-working single mom, the hooker with the heart of gold — the character types on display in Theodore Melfi’s comedy-drama are, to put it charitably, well-worn. Yet they’re written with such sensitivity and played with such nuance by Bill Murray, Melissa McCarthy and Naomi Watts that the amiable viewer won’t much mind; in fact, these overly familiar characters, and the stock situations Melfi writes them into, allow these actors to give them a good, old-fashioned, movie-star spit shine. All three pros are in fine form, with McCarthy particularly good in a lived-in, semi-dramatic turn that predicts her affecting work in “Can You Ever Forgive Me?” But the standout is young Jaeden Martell, charismatic and charming as the kid who brings them all together.‘The Old Way’ (2023)Stream it on Hulu.So much of today’s B-movie output consists of Xeroxed action movies and unimaginative horror that it’s easy to forget how the Western was once a key corner of that world. This revenge melodrama from the director Brett Donowho serves as a reminder of the genre’s vitality, even on a low budget. Though burdened by a thin script and a distractingly contemporary look, the picture’s flaws are handily outweighed by the presence of Nicolas Cage in the leading role — shockingly, his first turn in an oater in a 100-plus film career. He brings a hard-fought gravitas to this old gunslinger character, his familiar face sharpened by weary eyes and deeply set lines reminiscent of old-school Western stars like Randolph Scott and Audie Murphy.‘Run All Night’ (2015)Stream it on Max.This Liam Neeson vehicle was released the year after “John Wick,” and feels, in retrospect, like the first of that film’s many imitators, with Neeson as a former Mob enforcer who puts his own life in jeopardy when he kills his boss’s trigger-happy son. Whatever its origins, this is one of Neeson’s better late-period action efforts, thanks to a stellar supporting cast (including Vincent D’Onofrio, Ed Harris, Bruce McGill, Lois Smith plus a “John Wick: Chapter 2” co-star, Common) and a tightly focused Neeson performance; he has one especially good scene at the hospital bed of his dying mother, wearing the face of a man who knows how much he’s let her down.‘The Exiles’ (2023)Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.Christine Choy, the initial subject of this documentary from the directors Violet Columbus and Ben Klein, is such a compelling, colorful character — a foul-mouthed, chain-smoking, no nonsense local legend — that one could watch a film merely of her telling stories and barking complaints. But Columbus and Klein are up to much more than that. “The Exiles” details how fellow documentarian Choy spent much of the summer of 1989 interviewing “political exiles” from China’s Tiananmen Square protests (and subsequent massacre) and attending their Stateside events. Decades later, she rediscovers that footage and sets about reconnecting with her subjects, a process that results in poignant reflection and righteous indignation over how their cause was adopted but eventually discarded by the U.S. government.‘Call Me Kate’ (2022)Stream it on Netflix.Katharine Hepburn is the subject of the documentary “Call Me Kate.”NetflixNetflix is notoriously reluctant to license films from Hollywood’s golden era (frankly, it can be hard to find much of anything from the 20th century in general). But they will offer up the occasional documentary study of cinema history, such as “Five Came Back,” “Is That Black Enough for You?!?,” and this recent British documentary valentine to the one and only Katharine Hepburn. The writer and director Lorna Tucker draws from rare archival audio and home movies, elegantly assembling a portrait that both celebrates and demystifies her considerable legend. Intimate and unapologetic, it leaves the viewer with a keener understanding of Hepburn — the person and the persona.‘Tim’s Vermeer’ (2014)Stream it on Hulu.The current hullabaloo over A.I. and visual art makes this a fine time to revisit this provocative and pointed documentary, written by the magicians and self-appointed debunkers Penn and Teller, narrated by the former and directed by the latter. They detail the efforts of inventor Tim Jenison to both investigate and replicate the methodology of Dutch master Johannes Vermeer, whose photorealistic paintings have impressed admirers and challenged skeptics for years. Assembled with the pair’s usual and potent mixture of cynicism and curiosity, it’s a compelling journey into the past with implications for the future. More