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      Review: ‘The YouTube Effect’ Is a Discursive Documentary

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      Alex Winter offers an overview of the world’s second most popular website in this unfocused tech documentary.The numbing experience of web video surfing is recreated — intentionally, I think — in “The YouTube Effect,” a discursive documentary that assembles a fair amount of information about the impact of YouTube on society, but struggles to find something new to say with it. Directed by Alex Winter, the film charts the rise of the video sharing platform and then attempts to trace its Sasquatch-size footprint on the culture.YouTube, the world’s second most popular site (after Google), is a stimulus machine. The film emulates this quality, finding a formal rhythm by layering a hodgepodge of YouTube clips with voice-over analysis from tech experts. It also spotlights several popular YouTube creators, including the social commentator Natalie Wynn, who is best known for her channel ContraPoints. A cogent speaker, Wynn says that she has declined offers to partner with streamers or cable because she values the “creative control” YouTube offers.Interrupting these success stories are tangents into a number of troubling chapters in the site’s history. We hear from the video game developer Brianna Wu, a target of death threats during Gamergate, as well as Caleb Cain, who describes his tumble into a matrix of far-right videos. These events have already been heavily reported on — “Rabbit Hole,” a New York Times podcast, relays Cain’s experience — and the sections often feel like retreads.The internet moves quickly, perhaps too quickly for an overview this unfocused. Even Winter seems overwhelmed by the task of curating this deluge of white-noise news and memes: His rundown of YouTube’s connection to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot lasts about as long as the viral video “Charlie Bit My Finger.”The YouTube EffectNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Once Upon a Time in Uganda’ Review: When Ragtag Met Rambo

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      A new documentary tells how a Ugandan filmmaker and an American producer have reshaped African cinema.Wakaliwood is more than a production house; it’s a spirit of ragtag moviemaking born from the pure desire to create. Founded in 2005 by the writer-director Isaac Nabwana and based in Wakaliga, a slum in Kampala, Uganda, the studio produces low-budget, hyperviolent action films inspired by “Rambo” and Chuck Norris but starring African actors.The director Cathryne Czubek’s documentary “Once Upon a Time in Uganda” is as playful as Nabwana’s audacious movies, explaining how the unlikely partnership between the Ugandan filmmaker and the American producer Alan “Ssali” Hofmanis has reshaped African cinema.The documentary is initially told from Hofmanis’s perspective. He explains how a trailer for Nabwana’s “Who Killed Captain Alex?” on YouTube inspired him to travel to Uganda, where he witnessed a pure film culture so unlike the cynical movie business that had burned him out in America that he decided to permanently move to the African country to become a multi-hyphenate creative partner on Nabwana’s Wakaliwood movies.Czubek poses the relationship between Nabwana and Hofmanis as an artistic roller coaster: They’re either gleefully collaborating on script ideas for a cannibal movie or having a falling out over the direction of the studio. Czubek’s strategy means Nabwana’s wife, Harriet, the head of the studio, doesn’t get much attention, and it leaves unexamined Hofmanis’s desire to share his “discovery” of Wakaliwood, through his white gaze, with the world.The film is strongest when capturing Nabwana’s resourcefulness, the exuberance of the local volunteers who serve as his actors and crew, and the joy his films bring to a Ugandan audience hungry for movies. “Once Upon a Time in Uganda” reminds you how the art of moviemaking can make dreams real.Once Upon a Time in UgandaNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Lesson’ Review: Carefully Taut

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      A tense standoff between two writers kindles familial fireworks in this wittily self-aware melodrama.No one is quite what they seem in “The Lesson,” Alice Troughton’s winking literary mystery whose languid summer setting — a swanky estate in the English countryside — hides coldly destructive secrets.The seemingly innocent arrival of Liam (Daryl McCormack), a hunky recent graduate hired as a live-in tutor to the son of the celebrated author J.M. Sinclair (Richard E. Grant), almost immediately causes ripples in the family’s strained dynamic.Sinclair, a pompous control freak, is struggling to finish a novel so long delayed that his fans fear he has retired. His son, Bertie (Stephen McMillan), is smart and snotty, jaggedly rebuffing Liam’s patient attempts to coach him to take the entrance exams for Oxford University. (Honestly, he should fit right in.) Then there’s Sinclair’s wife, Hélène (Julie Delpy), an art curator so coolly, seductively enigmatic that at least one of Liam’s assignments is immediately predictable.Unfolding with a tonic intelligence and a slow accretion of menace, Alex MacKeith’s screenplay is smoothly in sync with the specific skills of each performer. Grant is magnificent as a cruel, past-his-prime genius burdened by terrible guilt over an earlier family tragedy, and Delpy — well, can any actor express so much with a single, withering look? Or persuade us that experiencing cunnilingus is no more exciting than having a pedicure?Yet in an atmosphere as chilly as the lake that lurks on the property, it is Liam — played by McCormack with open-faced guile — who intrigues. Drinking heavily and scribbling in a notebook when everyone’s asleep, spying on the family while concealing his long obsession with Sinclair, Liam gains a trust he doesn’t deserve. In this den of deceit and desperation, it’s never quite clear who is manipulating whom.The LessonRated R for Delpy en déshabillé and Grant on his knees. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Amanda’ Review: A Friendship Forged in Delusion

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      A delusional college grad befriends an agoraphobic misanthrope in this stylish dark comedy by the Italian director Carolina Cavalli.“Amanda,” a smart, stylish debut by the Italian writer-director Carolina Cavalli, plays like “Lady Bird” by way of Wes Anderson’s deadpan existentialism. Its heroine, the prickly Amanda (Benedetta Porcaroli), a college grad and the daughter of wealthy pharmacy owners, would rather twiddle her thumbs than work. Terrified of socializing with people her own age, she claims to prefer hanging out in the family chateau with her prepubescent niece and the maid. She would secretly kill for meaningful companionship — but first, she has to learn not to bite.Equipped with an arsenal of verbal snapbacks, Amanda stomps around her northern Italian hometown, a smattering of Brutalist buildings and empty parking lots, with a hustler’s steely resolve — only her “hustle” consists of racking up enough department store loyalty points to win a prize, a shoddy standing fan that she could otherwise easily purchase.When Amanda’s mother (Monica Nappo) suggests she seek out Rebecca (Galatéa Bellugi), the misanthropic daughter of another moneyed family — and technically an old friend (as in, the girls went on play dates when they were toddlers) — Amanda throws herself into the relationship like a running back in the last quarter. An agoraphobic who refuses to leave her room, Rebecca wears armor of her own, though when she and Amanda finally warm up to each other, the blending of their distinct cocktails of neuroses produces something like a chemical explosion.The snappy script pokes fun at the friends’ delusions, connecting them to a listlessness born of extreme privilege. Beyond style for its own sake, the color-blocked quirkiness of the set-pieces feels justified, and somehow more effectively funny, within the context of such gratuitous wealth and the infinite yet empty sense of time it creates for those who wield it. That’s why Cavalli’s character study feels so rich. Amanda is absurd and abrasive, but also sympathetic thanks to Porcaroli’s performance. She’s a flaming narcissist with a gooey core of vulnerability, a being forged by the fear of making herself known.AmandaNot Rated. In Italian with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Out-Laws’ Review: Adam Devine, Funny at Last

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      Devine channels Jack Lemmon as a law-abiding Everyman whose fiancée’s parents rob the bank he manages. (Awkward.)You can really see Adam Devine going for the Jack Lemmon vibes in his latest vehicle, “The Out-Laws.” As Owen Browning, a tidy but slightly schlubby suburban Everyman with an impending wedding, he meets adversity with a broad grin and an implied ambition to ingratiate himself to the whole world. So a superficial Jack Lemmon vibe — except Jack Lemmon never twerked in boxer shorts. Not that he necessarily would have considered it beneath him.In theory, Devine should be funny: He’s talented and game and has a decent supply of goofy shtick. This critic’s experience of his work, however, including the surprisingly bland “Mike and Dave Need Wedding Dates” (2016) and the nearly unspeakable “Game Over, Man!” (2018) — like this production, also a Netflix picture — has been almost disturbingly laugh-free. Until now. “The Out-Laws,” directed by Tyler Spindel, is a slight comedy, but it’s also raucous and kickily violent, with several laugh-in-spite-of-your-better-judgment bits.The hook is that Owen’s future in-laws, up until recently off the grid, are possibly the notorious criminals who rob the bank Owen manages shortly after they blow into town. The question doesn’t remain open for long. Pierce Brosnan and Ellen Barkin play the parental units with unabashed, even unhinged, broadness, against which Devine’s haplessness really sings. Richard Kind and Julie Hagerty go to town as Owen’s brash parents. The comedic virtuosi Laci Mosley and Lil Rel Howery play Owen’s bank colleagues, and the early scene where they frankly admit that they initially thought Owen’s fiancée was imaginary is rich. (She’s not imaginary; Nina Dobrev plays her, and she’s fine in the movie’s most plain part.) In fairness to Devine, the watchability is not just the result of his being surrounded by a cast of aces; he genuinely commits to and sells his bit here.The Out-LawsRated R for violence and salty language, complete with almost endless sexual innuendo. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘The League’ Review: A Crucial Baseball Legacy

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      Sam Pollard’s new documentary traces the history of the Negro leagues.If you thought that Jackie Robinson was the first Black player in professional baseball, “The League” would like to offer a correction. Moses Fleetwood Walker became a catcher for the Toledo Blue Stockings in 1884, before organized baseball was segregated and more than 60 years before Robinson broke the major leagues’ color line.This documentary from Sam Pollard (“MLK/FBI”) traces the history of the Negro leagues that formed in the intervening years. And while the sport’s post-World War II integration was long overdue — one commentator cites the absurdity of Black and white men fighting together at Guadalcanal but being banned from competing on a diamond — “The League” notes that, as the majors grabbed star players without buying out their contracts, the Negro leagues and the economic communities built around them never received adequate compensation.Pollard presents the subject matter straightforwardly, occasionally dryly, with authors, historians and — in archival material — the players themselves sharing stories of team rivalries and of visionary owners. Among the (sometimes tragic) figures singled out are Rube Foster, credited here with increasing the tempo of the game and persuading other team owners to form a league; Josh Gibson, who still has one of the best season batting averages ever recorded; and Effa Manley, an owner of the Newark Eagles, a team raided for talent after the color barrier fell. The film even complicates the picture on some baseball legends. Larry Lester, a founder of the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum, notes that when Babe Ruth set the home run record — later broken by Hank Aaron — he did it at a time when racism had kept out many of the best pitchers.This history has surely been well-covered elsewhere, but “The League” recounts it movingly.The LeagueRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Biosphere’ Review: It’s the End of the World. Two Men Survived.

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      What happens when a petulant, anti-intellectual president destroys the planet and he and his childhood buddy, the brainy one, are the only survivors?Over the decades that Billy (Mark Duplass) and Ray (Sterling K. Brown) have been best buds, the world has gotten worse — and they’re to blame. Honestly. “Biosphere,” a honed yet heartfelt two-person dramedy by the first-time feature director Mel Eslyn, takes place in a geodesic dome under a black sky. A few years back, Billy, then president of the United States, destroyed the planet; luckily, his consigliere, Ray, had already built this bunker. Barring a miracle, it will be humanity’s final tomb.Naturally, there’s blame to spread. “Maybe if you’d done your job, we wouldn’t need to live in a dome,” Ray huffs to his petulant, anti-intellectual roommate. Ray, the brains of the pair, still treats Billy less like a former commander in chief than like the child he’s known since grade school. Their lingering locker-room power struggle factors into why everyone else is dead.At first, we’re steeling ourselves for an extended skit. Duplass, who wrote the script with Esyln, gives Billy the same dopey charm that Will Ferrell awarded George W. Bush, and comes off as so likable in a would-drink-a-beer-with-him-if-beer-still-existed kind of way that it’s hard to hold onto the full horror of the hell he’s unleashed. (It’s possible to interpret Danny Bensi’s and Saunder Jurriaans’s a cappella score as a haunting by the apocalypse’s ghosts, though it’s a hair too chipper.)The film is only glancingly interested in science fiction mechanics. Billy and Ray face a relentless list of threats: the dwindling supply of fresh fish, the fragility of their dome’s filthy glass, the mysterious green light that looms ever closer, and their history of stifled resentments compounded by a lack of privacy (“It’s not like you can put a sock on the door in here”). Yet these aren’t problems to be solved; “Biosphere” uses their survival as a stress test to gauge whether these old friends are capable of change. Can extreme pressures turn two towel-snapping, Earth-murdering lumps of coal into diamonds? Even at the end of everything, is there hope our species can evolve?I can say without hyperbole that there are conversations in this movie that I have never heard before (and refuse to spoil). Better, I can confirm that Brown — the straight man to Duplass’s comic relief — delivers his half with conviction. At one point, his eyes well with tears as he tells a story about a magical bowling ball; later, he works himself into such a tizzy that he interrupts his own patter to lift weights. He and Duplass start off simply keeping pace with the audacious setup. By the end, the actors seem even braver than the script, which hesitates on the final step.There’s an unreconcilable tension in a film that aims to celebrate the unpredictability of life while manicuring every last prop and casual aside for maximum resonance. Still, I’ll allow Eslyn’s heavy hand for a scene in which Billy delivers an ode to his underused phallus while gazing at a nightlight shaped like the Washington Monument. “You made me feel powerful,” he intones — a farewell salute that doubles as a goodbye to bad government.BiosphereNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘Joy Ride’ Review: A Raunch-Com Roller Coaster

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      Four friends travel to China in a trip that goes entertainingly off the rails in this terrific comedy, starring Ashley Park and Sherry Cola.The new “Joy Ride” offers a modern-comedy bingo card with pretty much all the squares checked: mismatched besties, an oddball crashing a group outing, said outing going wildly off the rails, freewheeling sex, projectile vomiting, unhinged debauchery involving booze and drugs, and a crucial plot point hinging on an intimate body part.This film, directed by the “Crazy Rich Asians” co-writer Adele Lim, may not reinvent the raunch-com wheel (see: “The Hangover,” “Girls Trip,” “Bridesmaids”), but it does change who’s driving the car. And, most importantly, it is really, really funny.“Joy Ride” processes all of its familiar ingredients into a sustained, sometimes near-berserk, barrage of jokes, interspersed with epic set pieces. That is, up until the two-thirds mark, when the movie paints itself into a corner and presses the “earnest sentimentality” eject button before managing a narrow escape. It’s a small price to pay for the inspired pandemonium that precedes.The mismatched friends here are Audrey (the brilliant Ashley Park, from “Emily in Paris”) and Lolo (a deliciously acerbic Sherry Cola), who have been best friends since childhood, when they bonded over being the only two Asian girls in their Pacific Northwest town.Audrey, who was adopted from China by a white couple, grows up to become a prim, career-obsessed lawyer. She is sent to Beijing to close a deal, with a promotion hanging on her success. Since her Mandarin is practically nonexistent, she brings along the irrepressible Lolo. Completing the comic superteam are Lolo’s socially awkward cousin, Deadeye (Sabrina Wu), whose superpower is extensive K-pop knowledge, and Audrey’s college roommate Kat (Stephanie Hsu, from “Everything Everywhere All at Once”), now a screen star in China and engaged to her very hunky and very Christian co-star (Desmond Chiam).Eventually, Audrey decides to find her birth mother, and the four women set off on an odyssey that immediately devolves into a series of mishaps. The shenanigans come at breakneck speed, and peak with a repurposing of the Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion hit “WAP” that could become a late-night-karaoke staple in its own right.The film is especially sharp around identity and assimilation, and the screenwriters Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao have fun with the expectations and stereotypes placed on Asians and Asian Americans — including those that are self-imposed. The seams show only toward the end, when the film’s pace slackens, but even then, the cast’s chemistry and flawless timing hold steady.As the straight arrow protagonist, Park expertly pulls off a trick similar to Kristen Wiig in “Bridesmaids”: Her character serves as the narrative engine, while also setting up comedy opportunities for the others.If there is any justice, Park will soon be a marquee name. But this applies to all of the central quartet, who so effectively take advantage of the movie’s many opportunities to shine. With “Joy Ride,” summer has truly arrived.Joy RideRated R for exuberant sexuality, bilingual foul language, brief nudity and liberal use of drugs and booze. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More