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      ‘In the Summers’ Review: Understanding a Father’s Flaws

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      The film, by Alessandra Lacorazza, follows two siblings as they visit their father, played by Residente, in New Mexico.“In the Summers” follows two siblings, Violeta and Eva, as they visit their father over four staggered summers from childhood to adulthood. Most of the year, they live in California with their mother, but both she and their lives there go unseen. The film, told in chapters, depicts only the most sweltering months, which they spend in Las Cruces, N.M., with their father, Vicente, played by René Pérez Joglar, also known as the rapper and singer Residente.The movie, written and directed by Alessandra Lacorazza, won the top prize for an American fiction feature at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. It increases in power as it proceeds, as Violeta (played in succession by Dreya Castillo, Kimaya Thais Limon and, from last year’s “Mutt,” Lío Mehiel) and Eva (Luciana Elisa Quiñonez, Allison Salinas and Sasha Calle) grow older and gain sharper understandings of their father’s flaws. Each segment begins with their arrival at the airport. Vicente’s temper is apparent in the first section, when he explodes at a stranger in an amusement park after she tries to help a sick Eva.Soon after that, Vicente’s dangerous driving habits emerge as a motif. In one chapter, to impress the children, he swerves recklessly at night, making a game out of not stopping. In another, Violeta has to prevent him from driving drunk. (Emma Ramos as Carmen, the bartender who drives them home and who has known Vicente for years, is in some ways Lacorazza’s secret weapon. Her character becomes a watchful eye and sounding board for the siblings.)Vicente can’t seem to keep track of Violeta and Eva’s ages. But even with his wavering attention, he is capable of flashes of warmth. He works as a tutor and has a knack for explaining things. In a sweet early scene, he pours chili flakes on a pizza to illustrate how scientists can estimate the number of stars in a given area. And even at his most irresponsible — he introduces the teenage Violeta to marijuana, reasoning that it’s better to smoke it in a safe place — he often means well. A late scene in which he haltingly tries to apologize for his shortcomings constitutes the film’s most perfectly underplayed moment.Pérez Joglar becomes the movie’s through line, a constant presence who has to act against a changing roster of co-stars. If the casting shifts aren’t always persuasive, Vicente’s limited ability to perceive Eva and Violeta is part of the point. The structural conceit is the most engaging aspect of “In the Summers,” even if it gives the storytelling some perspective issues. (While Vicente sees Violeta and Eva only during the summer, they in theory see each other much more regularly.) Lacorazza’s deftness with actors, feel for the setting and aesthetic decisions — shooting in the snapshot-like 1.66-to-1 aspect ratio, or leaving the characters’ Spanish without subtitles — help the drama ring true.In the SummersNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Featherweight’ Review: Boxing Is Easy. Retirement Is Hard.

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      In this biopic, a documentary crew follows the boxer Willie Pep during his 1960s comeback.In “The Featherweight,” James Madio nimbly portrays Willie Pep, the boxing champion from Connecticut whom The Ring magazine once nicknamed the Hartford Tornado.The movie, directed by Robert Kolodny, opens on the acclaimed pugilist in 1964, two decades after he started his career and five years after he first retired. At 42, Pep has been selling autographed photos and other memorabilia, a requirement and curse of a fading fame. He often appears with his nemesis, Sandy Saddler (Lawrence Gilliard Jr.), a Black featherweight champ who is along for the downward slide.Pep is angling for a comeback, which is the reason a documentary film crew is trailing him. “The Featherweight” is the fruit of their fly-on-the-wall ubiquity.In Hartford, Pep lives with his much younger wife, Linda (Ruby Wolf), an aspiring actress, and his mother (Imma Aiello), who doesn’t much like Linda. His grown son, Billy Jr. (Keir Gilchrist), is openly antagonistic. Talk about bobbing and weaving.Pep often engages the crew with a sweet and cocky slyness, which befits a boxer who would amass almost 230 wins during his career. That doesn’t mean he’s happy being filmed bullying one of Linda’s fellow actors or being battered at his old gym once he returns to his former trainer, Bill Gore (Stephen Lang).Kolodny handles his movie-as-documentary conceit with subtle flair and finesse. For a subgenre as crowded with movies as boxing has weight classes, “The Featherweight” isn’t a knockout. But it does land more than a glancing blow.The FeatherweightNot rated. In English, with some Italian in subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Eureka’ Review: No More Cowboys and Indians

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      This intriguingly languorous Western by the Argentine director Lisandro Alonso explores the existential plight of Indigenous Americans in three separate timelines.In the beginning of “Eureka,” we’re plunged into the Wild West — and it’s pretty much how the movies have always imagined it. A rogue gunman (Viggo Mortensen) hitches a wagon ride into town; unfriendly locals squint at him in a rowdy pub; guns are drawn and brains are blown out.There’s something overly affected — comically macho — about this standard revenge plot. That’s by design. We zoom out from the black-and-white drama, which is playing on a TV set, and enter the modern world: colorful, yes, but with none of the exaggerated emotions and chest-thumping justice-seekers of the earlier sequence.“Eureka,” an intriguingly languorous, visually audacious drama from the Argentine director Lisandro Alonso, is about the existential plight of modern-day Indigenous Americans — people too often trapped in the fictions created by others.In the present, we follow the wonderfully deadpan Alaina (Alaina Clifford), a cop in South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation, where the problems far outnumber the staff on the sheriff’s payroll. That’s not to say that Alaina fends off gunslingers — there are missing children, people with intense substance abuse problems; grim realities that feel distressingly typical.In another plotline, Sadie (Sadie LaPointe), a young woman with a deceptively chipper manner, shoots hoops by herself; visits her cousin in jail; chats with an actress (Chiara Mastroianni) passing through the reservation. LaPointe’s is a beautiful performance: a slight crack in her voice, the flicker of her eyes, conveys the strength it takes to persist — to keep a straight face — within such bleak circumstances.Ultimately, the film feels a bit misshapen. A third act set in the jungles of Brazil in the 1970s depicts tribe members discussing their livelihoods as gold prospectors encroach on their lands. Here, extra-long shots of wild splendor and oblique talk of dreams makes the film go from patient to listless. At this stage, it’s a challenging sit, but perhaps that’s the point considering where we started.EurekaNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 27 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘All Shall Be Well’ Review: Aching With Absence

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      The indignity of being someone’s spouse while they are alive and merely a friend after their death is the theme of this extraordinarily moving Hong Kong drama.The delicately crafted drama “All Shall Be Well” opens on the easy intimacy between life partners. Angie (Patra Au Ga Man) and Pat (Maggie Li Lin Lin) amble along a wooded path, their elbows softly bumping. Back in their apartment, Angie scoops tea leaves while Pat pours boiling water. Later, the pair sit before their vanity sharing daubs of moisturizer.Set in Hong Kong, this graceful picture of love soon swivels to become one of loss when Pat dies unexpectedly. Nearly catatonic with grief, Angie finds comfort with in-laws, particularly Pat’s luckless brother, Shing (Tai Bo), and his superstitious wife, Mei (Hui So Ying). But the family closeness collapses once an attorney informs them that, without a will or marriage license from abroad, Pat’s estate — including the home the couple lived in for decades — will go to Pat’s next of kin, Shing.The indignity of being someone’s spouse while they are alive and merely a friend after their death is the theme of this moving film, which brims with compassion and uses a silky light touch. The writer-director, Ray Yeung, prefers his camera static or, when observing Angie’s queer chosen family, dollying ever so slightly, as if to telegraph the buoyancy they bring.But the film’s most extraordinary trick is how Pat’s presence hovers over the film. It is a feat of filmmaking and performance that a character only onscreen for a few scenes can feel truly missed by the audience. The home Pat and Angie built together aches with her absence, and so does the film.All Shall Be WellNot rated. In Cantonese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Wolfs’ Review: Brad Pitt and George Clooney as Themselves

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      They play underworld fixers in this trifle of a movie, though really they’re here to look enviably fabulous.“Wolfs” — a new something or other starring George Clooney and Brad Pitt — would like you to think it’s a thriller with a helping of comedy, though maybe a comedy with guns and guts. Whatever the case, it isn’t remotely tense or mysterious, and its modest thrills derive wholly from the spectacle of two beautifully aged, primped, pampered and expensive film stars going through the motions with winks and a degree of brittle charm. The movie is a trifle, and it knows it. Mostly, though, “Wolfs,” written and directed by Jon Watts, is an excuse for its two leads to riff on their own personas, which can be faintly amusing and certainly watchable but also insufferably smug. It’s insufferable a lot.Clooney and Pitt play underworld fixers, the kind of misterioso professionals whom people with power and money hire to clean up their messes. Much like the character in Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction” played by Harvey Keitel — named Winston Wolfe but known as the Wolf — the fixers here swoop in and, with some elbow grease and a duffel bag large enough to hold a body, discreetly make the problem go away, or that’s the idea. Tarantino’s influence is conspicuous throughout “Wolfs,” most notably in its reams of self-aware dialogue, theatricality, casual violence and focus on characters talking to and at each other, including in a diner booth.The fixers in “Wolfs” meet cute, as it were, early on when Pitt’s unnamed character interrupts Clooney’s mid-job inside a sprawling penthouse in a New York hotel. Since neither character has a name, it’s easier to refer to the actors playing them, which is very much to the movie’s meta-referential point. Clooney is tidying up a gruesome mess involving a local politician, Pam (a reliably appealing Amy Ryan). Faced with a potentially career-torpedoing situation — there’s blood and shattered glass on the floor, along with what may be the body of a dead male prostitute — Pam has speed-dialed a mysterious number hoping for help. Clooney comes to the rescue, and it’s on.Pitt’s arrival baffles Clooney and adds to what becomes a messier, more dangerous problem. After some teasingly testy back and forth, the two settle into a wary partnership. Pam cleans up and splits as Clooney cleverly deals with her mess in between side-eyeing Pitt. (If you ever wanted to know how to unobtrusively move a body, this movie offers a helpful to-do list.) And then Pitt spies a backpack holding several bricks of drugs, and the cleanup becomes instantly far more complicated. It gets trickier still when the body turns out to be alive, and he flees into the night. Called the Kid (Austin Abrams), he looks a bit like Griffin Dunne in Martin Scorsese’s “After Hours,” another nocturnal adventure that racks up mileage in downtown New York.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Transformers One’ Review: Back to the Beginning

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      An animated prequel maps out a tidy mythology while indulging in the toy-smashing thrills of the ’80s cartoons.When settling into “Transformers One,” the latest spinoff of the alien robot franchise, you may have a pang of nostalgia for what suddenly feels like the quaint mayhem of Michael Bay’s original film from 2007.Back then, “Transformers” was about as much of a ludicrous commercial tent pole as you could come up with: Bayhem unleashed on a Hasbro toy. The franchise that film spawned has managed to extend its life force well into a movie era defined by intellectual property equations. Say what you will about Bay’s metal masher, but it was, in its early goings, a blockbuster that had its own ethos. Now, 17 years later, we’re down to an animated prequel for kids.This is all what a cynic may think at the start of “Transformers One.” But by the end, the film offers a different kind of nostalgia, one that harks back to and indulges the toy-smashing thrills that an ’80s kid would get from a dose of the original animated cartoons.This movie, directed by Josh Cooley, scraps everything we associate with its cinematic forebears and goes back to the beginning, creating, on a structural level, an effective origin story of the Transformers universe.Before Optimus Prime (Chris Hemsworth) and Megatron (Brian Tyree Henry) were enemies, they were best friends and young nobodies, two miners toiling away as part of an underclass that provided the energy for the planet of Cybertron.But after unwittingly finding a clue to the long-lost Matrix of Leadership, the vital key to the their world’s energy, they, along with Elita-1 (Scarlett Johansson) and a young Bumblebee (Keegan-Michael Key), embark on an adventure and uncover a conspiracy that shifts both the fabric of the planet and of their friendship.It’s a completist piece of lore-building that is sturdily developed but frequently includes stiffly explicative dialogue; Hemsworth and Johansson don’t help much, though Henry gives us a believable transformation into villainy and Key is dexterous comic relief. The missteps can be forgiven and even feel somewhat appropriate when it becomes clear just what kind of itch the film means to scratch: to plot out an immersive mythology in order to have some pulpy fun.That philosophy may explain the film’s confounding computer-generated style — one that can have a rich Cybertron universe but also can revert to what feels like a B-rate children’s TV spinoff. The result is a blockbuster animation film that somehow reads both very expensive and inexplicably cheap.Will fans care all that much, though? Most palpable in its frames are the heart and genuine love for this universe, and when the bots start colliding, with action sequences toward the end that are thrillingly punchy, it’s easy to surrender to the lore. In this way, Cooley’s film makes a good spinoff suddenly seem simple: Sometimes all you need is the imagination for heroes and villains, betrayal and glory — and heaps of plastic to smash together.Transformers OneRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Substance’ Review: An Indecent Disclosure

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      Demi Moore stars in an absurdly gory tale of an aging actress who discovers a deadly cure for obscurity.In Vladimir Nabokov’s 1930 novel “The Eye,” a sad-sack Russian tutor living in Berlin dies by suicide, and then spends the rest of the book skulking around the living — watching, obsessing over their lives. He eventually realizes something bleak: Most of us see ourselves only through the eyes of others, through the stories we think they make up about us from the glimpses they get of our lives. “I do not exist,” the narrator writes near the end of the book. “There exist but the thousands of mirrors that reflect me.”Something of “The Eye” lurks in “The Substance,” Coralie Fargeat’s mirror-haunted gory fable about fame, self-hatred and the terror that accompanies an identity constructed on the backs of other people’s stares. Elisabeth Sparkle (Demi Moore), the aging star at the center of the narrative, is very much alive, but she might as well be dead when the story starts. A career spent in front of cameras — first as a celebrated actress, and then as a celebrity fitness instructor on a show called “Sparkle Your Life with Elisabeth”— abruptly ends when an executive (Dennis Quaid) decides she’s too old to be worthy of being seen. He gets to decide if anyone wants to look at her, and if he turns the cameras away, does she even exist?That executive is loud and disgusting and named Harvey, which should tell you a little about the subtlety of this movie, which is to say it has none, and doesn’t particularly want any. He, like most of the movie, is deliberately way, way over the top. “After 50, it stops,” he tells her, through mouthfuls of mayonnaise-coated shrimp, by way of explaining why she’s no longer attractive. Then he sputters when she asks what “it” is.There are mirrors everywhere in Elisabeth’s world: literal mirrors and polished doorknobs, but also pictures of her in the hallways at the studio and a giant portrait at her house, so that her younger body and face are always looking back at her. Everywhere she looks, there she is, or was — lithe, toned, smiling broadly. Elisabeth is still gorgeous by any sane person’s reckoning (and Moore is in her early 60s), but surrounded constantly by a version of herself with a little more collagen, she is being slowly driven mad.Relatable, really. We all see too much of ourselves. Ancient women had pools of water into which they could peer, but our ancestors didn’t have scads of selfies lurking in their pockets. They weren’t tagged in unflattering photos snapped by friends. They didn’t have to look at their own faces on Zoom all day.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘His Three Daughters’ Review: Sisters at Odds Together

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      Natasha Lyonne, Carrie Coon and Elizabeth Olsen play sisters who are caring for their dying father in this tender, funny family drama.Every so often in the heart-heavy drama “His Three Daughters,” the filmmaker Azazel Jacobs frames the actress Natasha Lyonne in radiant close-up. Her character, Rachel, is one of the daughters of the title, and while she thrums with palpable energy, she also has a quality of stillness about her. When Rachel stares into the distance, as she tends to do, lost in thought or maybe just lost — her huge eyes shining, her face edged by flaming red hair — she brings to mind a hummingbird hovering in midair, its wings beating impossibly fast against the strongest headwind.Rachel is the youngest of the sisters who’ve convened to care for their father, Vincent (Jay O. Sanders), at the end of his life. With her older siblings Katie (Carrie Coon) and Christina (Elizabeth Olsen), Rachel drifts through the New York apartment where their father is fading away, his heartbeat now supplanted by the beeping machinery that he’s hooked up to, which creates an eerie rhythm throughout. It’s a hard, painful setup but also absurdly funny, intimate and human. Jacobs is sensitive to life’s contradictions; he knows how abruptly love seems to boil over into hate, and how quickly adult siblings can turn into whining, raging children.Set over an inexact number of days and nights, the movie tracks the sisters during the course of their vigil. Katie is the scold (and surrogate angry patriarch), who also lives in the city, while Christina (an anxious maternal type from California) plays the part of the diplomat. Outwardly, at least, Rachel — who lives with their father in the apartment — slips readily into the role of the black sheep (and unruly child), especially given her pursuits and pastimes. When she’s not fleeing from her sisters, Rachel is hunkered down in her room, watching sports on TV, playing the odds and taking hits off a blunt. Rachel seems to be in a fog, but she’s perfectly lucid.Most of the movie takes place in the apartment, a modest, pointedly ordinary space with plenty of windows and a couple of bedrooms on the upper floor of a building in a large complex. It’s humble by mainstream, art-directed movie standards; it looks like a real apartment where real people live. There’s nothing fancy about it, just photos, tchotchkes and furniture people might actually use, middle-class people, working-class people, people lucky enough to have an affordable New York (Manhattan!) apartment. It’s a moving emblem of a nearly lost city and, by turns, a haunted house, a cozy home and a theater for the family’s drama, one that the sisters enact at times while reciting grievances they clearly committed to heart long ago.Emotions are already raw when the movie opens on Katie. Seated against a white wall, arms tightly folded across her chest, she is in the midst of an epic tirade directed at an offscreen, silent Rachel. As the camera holds on Katie, she talks and talks, her words running together into a near-indistinguishable slurry. It’s as if she didn’t believe in punctuation or the niceties of conversation; it soon becomes clear she has next to no patience for Rachel. Katie asks her a question without waiting for the answer, emphasizes the obvious, makes demands. It’s not for nothing that the first time you see each sister she is alone in the frame.As the vigil continues, things shift and settle, and other characters come and go, including a hospice worker, Angel (Rudy Galvan); a security guard, Victor (Jose Febus); and Rachel’s friend, Benjy (Jovan Adepo). Each brings some air into the fraught scene; more subtly, they reveal something about how the sisters relate to the larger world. Katie, for one, jokingly refers to the hospice aide as an Angel of Death, which isn’t funny the first or the second time she does so. That Rachel talks more readily to Victor than to her sisters says much about the family — about the siblings’ relations, worldviews and aching need for connection — as does the moment when, in her bedroom, she wearily rests her head on Benjy’s shoulder.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More