Aurelia Butler

Owen Wilson plays a Bob Ross-inspired painter in this dated, mildly amusing parody of male privilege.In “Paint,” an aging TV star with punchline hair and a storied libido lords it over his superfans, so wrapped in the cocoon of celebrity that he fails to recognize his rapidly waning significance.If that outline sounds uncomfortably familiar, then rest easy: “Paint” is not a political satire. What it is, exactly, is more difficult to pin down: A bland romantic comedy that feels strangely contemptuous of female desire; a portrait of a landscape artist that infrequently ventures outdoors; a dispiriting merger of small-town mind-set and giant-sized delusion.“They all fall for Carl,” one woman marvels, though why they do is one of this movie’s enduring mysteries. She’s referring to Carl Nargle (a perpetually mellow Owen Wilson), Vermont’s premier public-television painter. Even leaving aside his embroidered-denim outfits and a ’do that looks like an explosion in a couch-stuffing factory, Carl is no prize. His personality has all the depth of a blank canvas, his voice is an A.S.M.R. purr and his paintings — endless variations on a local peak and its environs — garage-sale relics.Yet Carl, from flooffy head to bell-bottom hems, is the epitome of soft power and hardened ego. When his show is on the air, his audience — revealed in a repeated sequence of lazily uninspired shots — is invariably agog. A roomful of rapt retirees; two mesmerized men at a bar; a line of breathless female colleagues in cottage-core knitwear. So sexually starved are these women that they will do almost anything for a bounce on the sofa bed in the back of Carl’s customized van. One, a professed vegan, even allows Carl to feed her lamb larded in cheese fondue, with predictably unpalatable results.Written and directed by Brit McAdams, “Paint” is a comedically inert parody of male privilege that’s all sight gags and very little substance. Wrapped in a fuzzy blanket of easy-listening oldies — John Denver, Kris Kristofferson, Gordon Lightfoot — the screenplay asks us to believe that Carl is so out of touch he has no idea what an Uber is or how to use his cellphone. And that the warm, talented woman he loved and left (Michaela Watkins) has hung around for two decades hoping for a second chance to rinse his brushes.As a result, “Paint” feels not just dated, but oddly sad. Inspired by the popular public-television host Bob Ross (who died in 1995), the movie seems caught in a time warp, its attitudes as antiquated as Carl’s wardrobe. Only the estimable Stephen Root, playing Carl’s station chief, and the vivacious Broadway performer Ciara Renée as Ambrosia, Carl’s younger, more talented rival, manage to nudge scenes from a saunter to a brisk walk. When Ambrosia, with her cheeky paintings of hovering spaceships and bleeding rocks, makes moves on Carl’s time slot and even his true love, I lamented his — and the movie’s — lack of a sharper edge and more lacerating tongue. He should have been furious; yet, like the film’s unconvincing flashbacks to his much younger self, he looks essentially unchanged.PaintRated PG-13 for a bit of toking and dirty joking. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

The R&B singer-songwriter Chloe Bailey stars in this musical comedy about an aspiring pop singer who lands in a scrappy competitive gospel group.For an aspiring pop star from L.A., heading to the South to sing about Jesus might feel like a detour. But that’s where Sam, played by the R&B singer Chloe Bailey, finds herself to at the start of the musical comedy “Praise This.” After the death of her mother and a struggle to set herself straight, Sam is sent to Atlanta to stay with her aunt, her uncle and her peppy, God-loving cousin, Jess (Anjelika Washington).Jess introduces Sam to her praise team, a scrappy competitive gospel group run out of a local, ramshackle church. When Sam and Jess are caught at a party, Sam is forced to join the group, a punishment that, no great surprise, allows her to open herself up to a new life, and to God’s grace. As Sam reluctantly leads her team through a national gospel singing competition, the film, directed by Tina Gordon, takes the “Pitch Perfect” template — an underdog singing group beating the odds — and gives it a modern Black gospel twist.Some of this can be lightly charming and funny — particularly the chemistry Bailey has with Washington, the funniest and most charismatic star of this show. But things get cringe-worthy as the movie leans on the narrative gimmick that Sam has a God-given ability to turn any trap banger into a gospel tune, eventually leading her to the recording booth of Ty (Quavo), a famous rapper she partners with.From this point on, the film reads like a faux-hip youth pastor in movie form, only instead of an acoustic guitar, it’s an 808 drum machine luring the kids toward God.Praise ThisNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. Watch on Peacock. More

On a trip to his grandfather’s ranch in Mexico, a boy makes an astonishing discovery that turns into a family adventure.Alex is an outcast at his school in Kansas City — for the picadillo he brings for lunch (“It’s just hamburger meat,” he tells one bully), for the video games he plays, and for apparently being the only Mexican kid in the lunchroom.At home, Alex (Evan Whitten) reacts by rejecting Mexican cuisine and refusing to learn Spanish. When his mother reminds him that he is heading to Mexico to visit his grandfather over spring break, he groans. But the trip surprises him, in no small part because of the adorable mythical creature, a baby chupacabra, he encounters in his grandfather’s barn.Inspired by the Latin American legend of the bloodsucking creature, “Chupa,” directed by Jonás Cuarón, makes a family adventure out of a traditionally horrifying subject. Set in the late 1990s, the film follows Alex, his grandfather Chava (Demián Bichir), a former lucha libre champion, and his cousins Memo (Nickolas Verdugo) and Luna (Ashley Ciarra) as they try to protect Chupa from capture by an American scientist, Richard Quinn (Christian Slater). All the while, Alex learns to accept and embrace his roots.Though the characters are charming and well-defined, it’s hard to become invested in their story lines because their relationships are not given enough time to develop. The stakes do not feel high enough, with Quinn seeming more like a cartoon villain than a true menace (it’s not clear what exactly he plans to do with Chupa). And though the concept is promising, and some moments are tender, one wishes the film had delved deeper into the chupacabra myth and the characters’ stories to make for a more satisfying watch.ChupaRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

A book that proposed violent action in response to the climate crisis becomes a propulsive heist thriller.Discussions of the 2021 book “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” inevitably note that it does not really contain instructions for blowing up a pipeline, although its author, Andreas Malm, a Swedish academic who has pressed for radical action on the climate crisis, hardly opposes the idea. He argues that the status quo has grown so dire that activists would be foolish not to turn to sabotage, and that peaceful protest alone is unlikely to achieve results quickly enough.Movies, though, are more of a show-don’t-tell medium, so the screen version of “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” directed by Daniel Goldhaber (“Cam”), turns Malm’s ideas into the basis for a propulsive heist thriller. Instead of busting into a vault or a museum, the characters conspire to commit an incendiary act that will wreak havoc on oil prices.Is the film itself, by having heroes some might call eco-terrorists, playing with fire? It certainly has the veneer of being daring. Then again, given the imagination that movies routinely apply to crimes of all sorts, it scarcely seems fair to object to the depiction just because the target is novel or has real-world implications.After dispensing with some preliminaries — in an attention-grabbing opening, the film watches as a young woman slashes tires and leaves a preprinted note: “why I sabotaged your property” — “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” shows its ensemble assembling in West Texas to prepare for their operation. Goldhaber’s roving camera and vaguely retro zooms, and a trendy (if derivative) electronic score by Gavin Brivik, contribute to an anxious atmosphere as the group’s self-taught chemists fool around with combustible substances. There are hints that their plan isn’t airtight. For one thing, the no-drinking rule falls away.A jagged, Tarantinian flashback structure slowly familiarizes us with the plotters. From Long Beach, Calif., Xochitl (Ariela Barer, also one of the film’s writers and producers), the tire slasher of the prologue, mourns the sudden death of her mother from a heat wave and frets over the sluggishness of fossil fuel divestment efforts. We learn that she grew up with Theo (Sasha Lane), who early on is shown at a support group talking about a “diagnosis” whose specifics will eventually be revealed.In North Dakota, Michael (Forrest Goodluck) picks fights with men who have come to work in the oil fields. He has little concern for his physical safety; at one point, he says he doesn’t care about the odds that they might blow themselves up. Dwayne (Jake Weary) is a Texas family man whose baby daughter and diabetic wife just want him home for Christmas. He is angry that the pipeline has intruded on his property, and he resents the well-meaning documentary crew members, including Shawn (Marcus Scribner), who film his sob story but can’t actually help.Alisha (Jayme Lawson), Theo’s girlfriend, is on hand to play devil’s advocate: She worries that the pipeline scheme is pure ego and bristles when one of the others likens their work to that of the civil rights movement. (The response she gets echoes Malm’s ideas about selective historical memory.) Most mysterious is Rowan (Kristine Froseth), who furtively photographs some of the preparations. Her boyfriend, Logan (Lukas Gage), looks punkish but comes from wealth.“How to Blow Up a Pipeline” is at its best when it functions as a kind of roughed-up caper movie; it has a degree of suspense and efficiency that are becoming all too rare in the mainstream. Goldhaber makes the most of potential complications at the pipeline site: a fraying belt, unexpected visitors, a bloody injury that might leave DNA. These are the sort of tactile details on which heist films thrive.But “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” has been packaged as a movie with something to say, and for all its excitement, as a statement it is less than satisfying. In the spirit of collectivity, it is billed as a group effort; while Goldhaber is listed as the director, the “film by” credit lists him alongside his fellow writers (including Barer) and his editor. But the contrivances that have enabled them to construct such a tight nuts-and-bolts thriller also allow them to dodge grappling with the characters’ ideology as ideology. Militant environmentalism is more of a hook than a subject about which the film has a point of view.The flashbacks’ placement seems designed solely to facilitate twists. All the members of the group have been written with convenient excuses for taking action, with Theo’s illness making her an especially obvious vehicle for self-sacrifice. Just in case viewers might fear for the good dad, the movie devotes significant time to showing Dwayne constructing an alibi — admittedly a tense stretch, but such slick reassurance, as machine-tooled as anything from Hollywood, feels at odds with the project’s ostensibly confrontational goals.A truly radical film wouldn’t go out of its way to concoct sympathetic motives, or to keep its plotting so clean.How to Blow Up a PipelineRated R. Dangerous explosives, put to use. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

Sensitive and surprising, Reed Harkness’s documentary follows the reverberations in his family after their mother abruptly departs.At the heart of the disarming documentary “Sam Now” is the challenge of coming to terms with familial pain. The director, Reed Harkness, traces how his younger brother Sam and other relatives coped with the abrupt departure of their mother, Jois. Drawing on friendly but frank interviews and 25 years of home-movie adventures shot by Reed with Sam, it’s a film whose emotional reality seems to evolve before your eyes.Jois left without a word just as Sam was starting high school, baffling him and sending another teenage brother, Jared, into a spiral. Their caring father, Randy, joins the rest of the Northwest-based family in moving on rather than hashing out the past. Reed’s musing voice-over and interviews are broken up by the cartoonish superhero capers that Reed shot with the then-cheery Sam.Paired with garage rock, this approach risks becoming precious, but instead, the movie deepens in complexity as Reed intervenes. He urges Sam to search for Jois, and, instead of a peekaboo mystery, she turns up, happy and not especially regretful. She explains why she left, and — as the movie jumps forward in years — we see how her hard-to-accept decision reverberates for Sam and Jared as adults.Observantly edited, the movie mingles the perspectives of many family members without casting judgment, developing an aching poignancy that recalls recent family dramas like “Aftersun” and “Return to Seoul.” Reed’s initial overeager stylings fall back to reveal a mature reckoning with love, hurt, independence, and hard-won wisdom.Sam NowNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. In theaters. More

The inclusion of “Jeanne du Barry,” directed by Maïwenn, is Depp’s first public embrace by the film industry since he won a bitter defamation trial against his ex-wife Amber Heard.Johnny Depp’s first major film since winning a lurid and contentious defamation trial last year — a costume drama in which he plays King Louis XV of France — will open the Cannes Film Festival in May, the festival announced on Wednesday.Depp filmed the period drama, “Jeanne du Barry,” shortly after the trial, in which the jury found that his ex-wife Amber Heard had defamed him when she described herself in a 2018 op-ed in The Washington Post as a “public figure representing domestic abuse.” During six weeks of testimony, which riveted the nation, he and Heard battled over her allegations that he had physically and sexually abused her. Heard initially appealed the verdict, but then announced that she intended to settle the dispute.Since Depp’s victory in court, he has tiptoed back into the public eye, appearing in a fashion show backed by Rihanna and at the MTV Video Music Awards; he also started a TikTok account. But the Cannes premiere is the actor’s first public embrace by the film industry since the trial, where he denied Heard’s allegations of physical and sexual abuse and tried to portray her as the aggressor in the relationship.“Jeanne du Barry” is directed by and stars the French actress and filmmaker Maïwenn, who plays the title character, a working-class woman and courtesan who becomes the favorite of the king. Maïwenn’s film “Polisse” won the Jury Prize at Cannes in 2011.Her new film will premiere on May 16, after the festival’s opening ceremony, and will debut in French movie theaters on the same day. Fifteen months after its theatrical release, Netflix will stream the movie on its service only in France.Depp, 59, had also appealed a narrow part of the jury’s decision in the defamation case, in which they held him liable for a defamatory statement that his lawyer had made about Heard. His lawyers said last year that Heard had agreed to pay $1 million to end the case, far less than what the jury in Virginia had initially called on her to pay.His victory in the trial surprised some legal observers, because a judge in Britain had ruled in an earlier case that there was evidence that Depp had assaulted Heard. The British ruling came in a libel suit that Depp had filed after The Sun, a tabloid newspaper, called him a “wife beater” in a headline. The judge in that case ruled that the defendants had shown that what they published was “substantially true.”Nicole Sperling More

The Scottish musician’s infectious presence makes every familiar documentary trick here go down easy.The Scottish musician Lewis Capaldi knows the drill: In pop star documentaries, we hear the rough cut of a song and then, inevitably, we watch as the crowd eats up every word of the resulting hit. When he mocks just how commonplace that particular scene is in his own doc, “How I’m Feeling Now,” you sense he gets it — this one will be different. But the director Joe Pearlman sticks to that trajectory, where triumph comes after a tough era for Capaldi, who released his debut in 2019 and then returned home during the pandemic to live with his parents in his hometown in Scotland. That would be more of a knock had the film not already winked at embracing that conventional course as the outcome, or if Capaldi’s infectious presence alone didn’t make every familiar documentary trick here go down easy.In the film, his charmingly crass persona is in contrast to his sensitive ballads, a revealing dichotomy that runs through “How I’m Feeling Now,” which examines the fragmented ways in which people appear to be and the ways they actually are. On Instagram, where he has amassed over six million followers, Capaldi has acted like a jaunty college frat boy; in the film, we see a darker side of him, where his palpable discomfort with anxiety and Tourette’s syndrome are deserving of sympathy. Remarkably, “How I’m Feeling Now” manages to escape most of the promotional trappings of its ilk, striking a more meaningful note than other pop star docs. By the time it reaches its predictable end, I still wanted to grab a beer with Capaldi and celebrate his healing, and I don’t even drink beer.Lewis Capaldi: How I’m Feeling NowNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More