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      ‘Five Nights at Freddy’s’ Review: Creepypizza

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      This adaptation of a video game franchise is more interested in unpacking childhood trauma than packing in jump scares.A workweek’s worth of graveyard shifts should offer ample time to convert an overwrought trauma plot into a congenial camp scare-fest. But although “Five Nights at Freddy’s,” based on a popular video game franchise, reaches for horror-comedy flair, this dreary, mild adaptation never achieves the hybrid pleasures of a movie like “M3gan.” You may chuckle, but it’s hard to tell if the movie is laughing with you.Directed by Emma Tammi, “Five Nights” follows the morose Mike (Josh Hutcherson), whose trouble keeping employment has put him in danger of losing custody of his younger sister, Abby (Piper Rubio). Desperate, Mike accepts a mysterious gig as the sole security guard at the defunct and ramshackle Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza, a onetime playhouse showcasing animatronic animals.One might expect that the movie’s built-in timeline amid these creepy machines would translate to a series of set pieces escalating in violence or alarm. Instead, the story takes more of a mystery route. On top of his immediate burdens, Mike is fixated on solving the long-ago kidnapping of his younger brother, and hopes that inducing REM sleep (even while on the job) will replay the memory in his dreams and turn up repressed details.It’s a distressing back story, and Mike’s lingering pain sucks a lot of life out of what could have been an enjoyably eerie affair. The jump scares — hinging on fast cuts to close-ups — are often ineffective, and genre tropes abound: creepy, gawking children; a local policewoman (Elizabeth Lail) dispensing oblique warnings. Come to think of it, the cop’s apparently unlimited time to hang out at Freddy’s while on duty is a little frightening.Five Nights at Freddy’sRated PG-13. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters and on Peacock. More

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      ‘After Death’ Review: Visions at the Brink From Those Who Returned

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      A documentary about near-death experiences crescendos with redemptions and literal come-to-Jesus moments.The faith film “After Death” enters a crowded field of testimonials about near-death experiences, a staple of YouTube videos and bookstores. This documentary convenes a supergroup of writers and survivors: from early expounders like the author Raymond Moody (widely credited with coining the term “near-death experience”) and the cardiologist Michael Sabom, to such recent best-selling names as the pastor Don Piper (“90 Minutes in Heaven”) and a surgeon, Mary Neal (“To Heaven and Back”).The members of the group recount their forays into the hereafter, illustrated with murky re-enactments of what brought them there: a car accident, an abdominal rupture, a near-drowning, a plane crash. There’s the initial pretense of scientific objectivity, but it soon feels beside the point. These accounts crescendo naturally with redemptions and literal come-to-Jesus moments.In the documentary, written and directed by Stephen Gray and co-directed by Chris Radtke, not much deviates from the usual tropes: People drift out of their bodies and journey into light, love, and new awareness (with PBS “Nova”-style trippy imagery). That sounds transcendent, and reassuring, but the stories are rolled together in a hash of editing, and the speakers can be oddly low energy. One exception is Howard Storm, a professor-turned-minister who believes he was hustled not toward heaven but to the darkest reaches of hell.Released on more than 2,000 screens by the studio behind the recent child trafficking movie “Sound of Freedom” — at a time when a majority of Americans say near-death experiences are possible — this film also closes with a QR code to buy more tickets. But whether you believe these phenomena are spiritual journeys or visions created by the human mind (or both), the film loses its sense of epiphany in the lackluster jumble of its moviemaking.After DeathRated PG-13. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Yellow Door: ’90s Lo-Fi Film Club’ Review: Cinema Education

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      This documentary is both a look at a small, obsessive film club that formed in the early ’90s in South Korea and an origin story of the director Bong Joon Ho, who was in the group.Every filmmaker, including the great ones, starts somewhere — even if that means making a low-rent stop-motion short called “Looking for Paradise” that’s about a stuffed gorilla searching for freedom while fighting a caterpillar that emerged from its fecal matter. That was how a young, student Bong Joon Ho made his debut, a saga detailed in “Yellow Door: ’90s Lo-Fi Film Club,” a charming documentary about a cohort of South Korean cinephiles formed in 1992.Before becoming one of the world’s most acclaimed contemporary auteurs (through movies including (“Parasite,” “Okja” and “Snowpiercer”), Bong found an education as part of this tiny, makeshift film academy made up of graduate students and other film lovers. The documentary, directed by Lee Hyuk-rae (who was part of the group), gathers the club members to reminisce about these early days, when they’d congregate in a yellow-painted office to watch and study bootleg VHS copies of art-house movies.Their interests were representative of what was then a larger, budding wave of South Korean cinephile culture that would produce major talent, including Bong and the filmmaker Park Chan-wook, though most of the other members of this particular group went on to have careers outside of film.The documentary carries a couple of interesting insights into Bong’s own origins: There’s a surprisingly profound kernel of emotional acuteness in his amateur debut, along with an early instance of the motif of basements that shows up in many of his later films. But the doc mostly amounts to a sweet nostalgia trip about a niche group of obsessive young people. It’s also an ode to young adulthood itself: For most of the group, latching on to cinema was simply a means of finding a community, and themselves.Yellow Door: ’90s Lo-Fi Film ClubNot rated. In Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Deep Rising’ Review: Who Gets to Mine the Ocean Floor?

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      Matthieu Rytz’s documentary about the bounty at the bottom of the sea examines the fight over whether to reap these riches or preserve them.Documentaries on ecological crises often begin by scaring the bejesus out of viewers before adding a note of tempered optimism. For “Deep Rising,” a film about the race to mine the deep seabed (in particular, the floor beneath the Pacific’s vast Clarion-Clipperton Zone), the director Matthieu Rytz eschews shock for awe, and inflammatory rhetoric for measured persuasion.The director’s choice of his two chief characters proves richly dialectical. Gerard Barron is the hipster CEO of The Metals Company, a Canadian mining concern focused on harvesting polymetallic nodules containing nickel, manganese, cobalt and copper among other minerals that the so-called green economy craves. (“Please get nickel!,” Elon Musk can be heard saying in an audio clip.) Sandor Mulsow is a warm, serious-minded marine geologist and the former head of the Office of Environmental Management and Mineral Resources at the International Seabed Authority, the organization the U.N. has tasked with protecting the ocean floor.Rytz takes care not to lionize or demonize either man. Even so, the pitch Barron gives a roomful of high-net investors sounds too good — and low-impact — to be true.The composer Olafur Arnalds’s string-led score and the actor Jason Momoa’s sonorous narration add to the film’s argument that where the world’s biodiversity and the seafloor’s still mysterious environs are concerned, caution and care are paramount.The footage of iridescent creatures with billowing tentacles or translucent bodies mesmerizes but it also creates contemplative pauses amid the documentary’s facts, interviews and the damning history of the mining industry. The optimism here resides in the filmmaker’s trusting his audience to grapple with the entwined fates of the seafloor, its inhabitants and humankind.Deep RisingNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Pain Hustlers’ Review: Seeking Dr. Feelgood

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      In David Yates’s film, Emily Blunt plays a single mother who takes a job at a pharmaceutical start-up with questionable sales methods.“Pain Hustlers,” a conflicted yet entertaining dramedy from David Yates, takes its title from a group of pitchmen hawking fentanyl to clinics across the southeast. The drug is legal. Their sales methods aren’t — but in the mockumentary footage that opens the film, they try to sell the audience on their innocence. One pusher (Catherine O’Hara) huffs defensively that she’s not “El Chapo or something.”The script, by Wells Tower, is about a fictive drug named Lonafen. It’s inspired by the journalist Evan Hughes’s coverage of Insys Therapeutics, whose founder, John Kapoor, was convicted and served two years in prison. Like so many other recent movies on brands from Blackberry to Beanie Babies, it’s about how low people will sink to make a buck while justifying their misdeeds as the cost of successful capitalism. Turns out the price of a soul is pretty cheap.Our way into the story is Liza Drake (Emily Blunt), a single mother who once peddled lipstick, steak knives, and pig dung, and is scraping by as a stripper when a skeevy patron, Pete (Chris Evans), enlists her into pharmaceutical sales. Her new boss, a widower named Dr. Neel (Andy Garcia), invented a fast-acting fentanyl spray for cancer patients like his late wife. Within months, Liza propels Lonafen’s market penetration from zero to 86 percent.Liza is an enthralling huckster. In one great bit, she fast-talks a principal out of expelling her daughter (a promising Chloe Coleman) for nearly burning down the school. She’s also an amalgamation of several real people from Hughes’s book, “The Hard Sell,” which makes the character feel overstuffed with multiple personalities that flip-flop between greed and guilt. Both Blunt and the woman she’s playing come off as hard-working charmers, but it’s impossible to buy that Liza is at once Lonafen’s savviest employee and the only naïf who believes the drug is, as she insists, “safer than aspirin.”It’s not, of course. Beanie Babies fanatics lost fortunes; Lonafen users are losing their lives. The movie is constrained by its own conscience, thriving when Evans’s marvelously feral Pete is unleashed to dress like a Lonafen spray and rap about sales commissions, only to pivot apologetically from corporate bacchanals to suffering victims. There’s a wonderful, hallucinatory shot of a hooked veteran (Willie Raysor) gazing across a car lot at an inflatable sky dancer whose sagging limbs are slowed down to become an interpretive dance of addiction. Other junkies are merely sketches of mass misery, such as the anonymous horde of extras instructed to stumble toward Liza like zombies.The scariest characters, however, are the doctors. The strip mall lonely-heart Dr. Lydell (Brian d’Arcy James) writes narcotic prescriptions in exchange for fancy macarons, phony flattery from women, and cash costumed as speaking engagement fees. (One savagely funny young drug hustler played by Colby Burton even traffics in sexual favors.) Here, only the fictional Liza frets over the patients while the increasingly money-mad Dr. Neel vows to push Lonafen onto people without cancer. “Grow or die!” he orders his sales team — the language of a tumor.Pain HustlersRated R for language, nudity and drug use (legal and illegal). Running time: 2 hours 2 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Inspector Sun’ Review: A Web of Cinema Classics

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      The newly released English version of this Spanish children’s film about an arachnid gumshoe is a comic mystery indebted to Agatha Christie and swashbuckling epics.“Inspector Sun,” a computer-animated family film released in Spain last year and now arriving in an English-language dubbed version, is very clearly a product of the director Julio Soto Gurpide and the screenwriter Rocco Pucillo’s deep affection for motion picture history. The movie draws on a range of classics, from silent adventure serials to screwball mysteries like “The Thin Man” to the swashbuckling epics of Douglas Fairbanks and Errol Flynn.This comic detective story, set largely on a flight from Shanghai to San Francisco in the 1930s, is modeled on another famous peripatetic detective story from the same decade, Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Orient Express.”This tale’s version of Inspector Poirot, however, is a huntsman spider, and his campy sleuthing takes place in a world vibrantly and charmingly populated by a host of ants, flies and other insects, including a locust crime lord and a femme fatal black widow spider. The comedian Ronny Chieng plays Inspector Sun, the arachnid gumshoe. He’s an odd fit for the inspector, who sports a thin mustache and looks like he should sound archly French or Belgian, but Chieng brings an easy cheerfulness to the performance that feels more distinctive than a full-blown Poirot parody.The humor alternates between somewhat dorky but likable wordplay (“I’m not a praying man … tis,” Sun quips at one point) and some fairly juvenile sight gags, many of them scatological (and none of them funny).But while sometimes grating, the film is always appealing, with pleasing details, down to its Art Deco end titles. I hope they make a sequel, and just adapt a Christie story outright — perhaps “Spider’s Web.”Inspector SunRated PG for some action and mild innuendo. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Four Daughters’ Review: The Role Family Plays

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      This documentary from Kaouther Ben Hania restages pivotal moments from a family’s life.Re-enactment is not an unusual or particularly novel tool in documentary filmmaking yet recently it seems to have made a pointed resurgence — perhaps because the method has a distinct relationship to trauma and offers a compelling means of picking open old wounds for cathartic and/or healing purposes. Think “Framing Agnes,” “Procession,” and Nathan Fielder’s HBO series “The Rehearsal.”“Four Daughters” is another re-enactment film, distinct for the sense of intimacy and familiarity it brings to seemingly extraordinary circumstances. Olfa Hamrouni, a Tunisian woman, has four daughters, two of whom disappeared in 2015 to join ISIS in Libya. Directed by Kaouther Ben Hania, the documentary blends direct testimony by Olfa and her two youngest daughters, Eya and Tayssir, with stagings of pivotal scenes from the family’s life. The talking-heads style confessions, beautifully framed in velvety shadows, resemble stained-glass portraits.The docufictional interludes are performed by Eya and Tayssir, as well as two actresses who play the lost daughters Ghofrane (Ichraq Matar) and Rahma (Nour Karoui). A separate actress also plays Olfa (Hend Sabri), though Ben Hania shifts between the fictional drama and a behind-the-scenes perspective, meaning we occasionally see Olfa directing her double and tweaking the performances to conform to her version of events.We learn that Eya and Tayssir, only teenagers when they fled Olfa’s home, turned to Islamic extremism as a form of rebellion; Olfa, because of an upbringing punctuated by violence and misogyny, raised her daughters with an iron fist. Despite the documentary’s exciting hybridity, the conceit is more interesting in theory than it is in practice. The re-enactments map out the family’s tension and lay bare their wounds, but the lost daughters remain cyphers — the appeal of radicalization frustratingly murky through the end.Four DaughtersNot rated. In Arabic, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Jonathan Majors’s Accuser Is Arrested but Won’t Face Prosecution

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      Grace Jabbari, who accused the actor of assaulting her in a car, was herself arrested on a countercomplaint.A woman who has accused the actor Jonathan Majors of assaulting her in a car in Manhattan in March was arrested late Wednesday on a countercomplaint he filed against her, claiming to be the true victim in the altercation, the police said.The woman, Grace Jabbari, was charged with misdemeanor counts of assault and criminal mischief and released with a desk appearance ticket that requires her to appear in court at a later date, the police said.The arrest occurred even though the Manhattan district attorney’s office said in a court filing this month that it had told lawyers for Ms. Jabbari and Mr. Majors in September that the office “would decline to prosecute” her “if she were arrested.” The filing did not explain what was behind the decision not to prosecute.A lawyer for Ms. Jabbari did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Mr. Majors has pleaded not guilty to misdemeanor assault and harassment charges arising from the March episode. Ms. Jabbari’s surrender came the same day a Manhattan judge set a Nov. 29 trial date after rejecting the actor’s bid to dismiss the charges.Mr. Majors, a 34-year-old Yale graduate, was a rising Hollywood star when the altercation with Ms. Jabbari, his former girlfriend, occurred. Performances in vehicles like the HBO series “Lovecraft Country,” the film “Creed III” and the gritty drama “Magazine Dreams” had marked him as a potential Oscar contender, and his character Kang, from “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania,” was emerging as a linchpin of Disney’s Marvel franchise.The fallout from his arrest was swift. The U.S. Army pulled two recruiting commercials featuring him, with a spokeswoman explaining that “prudence dictates that we pause our ads until the investigation into these allegations is complete.”His movie career is effectively on hold. In part because of the continuing actors’ strike, Disney does not need to make a decision about his future involvement in the Marvel films until next year. “Magazine Dreams,” which stars Mr. Majors as a troubled bodybuilder and which generated buzz at the Sundance Film Festival, remains on Disney’s theatrical calendar for December, with the company’s art-house division, Searchlight Pictures, as the distributor.In light of Mr. Majors’s legal problems, theater owners expect Disney to push the film into next year, with an announcement coming as soon as this week. A Searchlight spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.In their filing this month, prosecutors said the episode at issue, on March 25, began when Mr. Majors and Ms. Jabbari, 30, were using a car service to go from Brooklyn to their Manhattan home.During the ride, the filing says, Ms. Jabbari saw a message on Mr. Majors’s phone that said, “Wish I was kissing you right now.” She grabbed the phone to see who had sent the message, the filing says.Mr. Majors, the filing says, began to grab the right side of Ms. Jabbari’s body and to pry her middle finger off the phone. He then grabbed her arm and hand, twisted her forearm and struck her right ear, cutting it, the filing says. Grabbing his phone, he left the car, the filing says.When Ms. Jabbari tried to get out, according to the filing, Mr. Majors picked her up and threw her back inside. In addition to the cut on her ear, the filing says, Ms. Jabbari sustained a broken finger, bruises on her body and a bump on her head.In April, after Mr. Majors had been charged, his lawyer, Priya Chaudhry, wrote to a judge that Ms. Jabbari’s version of events was a “complete lie” and that Ms. Jabbari had been the aggressor, hitting and scratching Mr. Majors.Ms. Jabbari, Ms. Chaudhry wrote, had then gone out clubbing, had passed out in a closet at home and had woken up to find the injuries to her finger and ear. Two months later, Mr. Majors filed the countercomplaint against Ms. Jabbari accusing her of assault, The police subsequently developed sufficient evidence to support the charges on which she was arrested. He faces up to a year in jail if convicted.Among the other notable details in the prosecutors’ filing was the mention of a “police report prepared by the London Metropolitan Police” as a piece of potential evidence in the case, as well as the prosecutors’ efforts to obtain “medical records from London related to an incident that occurred in September 2022.” The filing does not indicate who was involved in the incident.The filing also questions the veracity of a witness statement provided by the defense. In the purportedly firsthand statement, the filing says, the witness said that he saw Ms. Jabbari slap and “tussle with” Mr. Majors and that Mr. Majors had “gently” placed Ms. Jabbari in the car.When prosecutors presented the statement to the witness, the filing says, he said that he had not written or approved it, that he had not previously known it existed and that the statements attributed to him were false.Ms. Chaudhry did not respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.Brooks Barnes More