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      Magic Mike Is Just Trying to Pay the Bills

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      Forget getting ahead in America. The stripper at the heart of the film trilogy is working frantically not to lose his shirt.The first thing you learn about Mike Lane, played by Channing Tatum and otherwise known as Magic Mike, in the new movie “Magic Mike’s Last Dance” is that his dream has died. The Covid-19 pandemic destroyed his custom furniture business, his raison d’être beyond stripping in the first two movies. Now Mike is working for a catering service, serving drinks to wealthy people who donate to causes they don’t even care to learn about.The “Magic Mike” movies are about impeccable abs, female pleasure, male friendship and the power of a great lap dance. But just beneath all the joy of gyrating hips lurks economic anxiety. “Magic Mike” has always been about money, and not just the dollar bills that are slipped into G-strings.With “Last Dance,” opening Friday, Tatum, the director Steven Soderbergh, the writer Reid Carolin and their collaborators have created a trilogy that’s sneakily about the last decade or so in American instability. What started as a (mostly) realistic portrait of stripper life in the wake of the Great Recession has evolved into a fantasy for the days of Covid-related financial strife, in which Mike is rescued from his economic travails by a rich almost-divorcée (Salma Hayek Pinault) who sees his talent and whisks him away to London to direct a show.Maxandra and Mike (Salma Hayek Pinault and Tatum) each have financial worries in the new film.Claudette Barius/Warner Bros.Sure, it’s a lot of rom-com escapism, but it also has real-world resonance. Mike saw the one thing he worked for crumble. Now he gets a way out, and the kind of happy ending for which many long. Even then, the specter of monetary worries still lingers.When the first “Magic Mike” arrived in 2012, the story was irresistible: With his movie career heading into overdrive, Tatum was starring in a film based on his own pre-Hollywood experiences as a dancer in a male revue. The movie, set in Tampa, Fla., drew audiences looking for “hot boys,” but the story within was more melancholy than the squeal-inducing imagery of ripped dudes in goofy, barely there costumes suggested.As Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The Times, the film “is also very much an inquiry into capitalism and its woes.” In The Atlantic, Alyssa Rosenberg argued that the dancers “reveal the naked truth about the recession.” She explained, “These strippers are marginally employed men trying to move up the economic ladder in a state with the second-highest foreclosure rate in the country.”The Return of ‘Magic Mike’The seductive stripper saga is back with “Magic Mike’s Last Dance,” directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Channing Tatum.‘Magic Mike’: Our critic called the original 2012 film “an inquiry into capitalism and its woes, which means that, like them, it’s also about movies.”‘Magic Mike XXL’: The 2015 sequel faced the challenge of managing enlarged expectations while remaining true to the authenticity of the original.Gay Audience: There was nothing explicitly gay about the plot, but gay men flocked to “Magic Mike” in large numbers after its debut. Here is what some viewers said.A Classic Movie Dance: In “Magic Mike XXL,” Richie, played by Joe Manganiello, performs a prop-heavy routine with just the right touch of desperation and awkward vulnerability.The deeper concerns of “Magic Mike” shouldn’t have been a surprise. Soderbergh is known for flitting among genres, but whether he’s making sleek heist movies, uncomfortably real thrillers or dramas based on actual events, he’s always interested in power structures and how they affect the people in his lens.Though the Great Recession was technically over by the time “Magic Mike” was released, you can feel its aftermath coursing through the screenplay. In the most devastating scene, Mike is refused a bank loan to open a furniture business because of his low credit score. The loan officer (Betsy Brandt) tells him, “We do offer relief programs for our qualified distressed candidates.” His flirty demeanor drops. “I read the papers,” he replies. “The only thing that’s distressed is y’all.”But it’s not just that one moment: The feeling of trying to understand a system that has failed you permeates the movie. Dallas, the slick M.C. portrayed by Matthew McConaughey, says that he would not send his hypothetical child to school. Instead he would make the kid watch Jim Cramer’s “Mad Money” all day and “get him into Ameritrade.” It’s a grim-sounding attempt to win a game that’s not worth playing.A bank loan is just out of reach for Magic Mike in the first film.Warner Bros.By “Magic Mike XXL” (2015), directed by Soderbergh’s frequent assistant director, Gregory Jacobs, the economy had bounced back and Mike’s furniture company, if not thriving, was up and running. He couldn’t pay for health insurance for his one employee, but he was doing what he loved — other than dancing, that is. His passion for the latter draws him back to his pals from the Xquisite club, who are planning a road trip to Myrtle Beach for a male stripper convention as one final hurrah before they leave the life behind.The question of what these guys will do once that one night is over hovers over the action. Tito (Adam Rodriguez), for instance, wants to make artisanal frozen yogurt but will end up slinging snow cones at a mall. Still, the movie — which is the most outright fun of the bunch — has a twinkly-eyed Obama-era optimism. It ends with the crew watching July Fourth fireworks as the DJ Khaled song “All I Do Is Win” plays.The purportedly final movie of the saga opens with a British-accented voice-over that treats Mike as an anthropological subject to be explored. Dance, it says, could not save Mike’s furniture company from the effects of the pandemic, thus forcing him to return to service work in Florida.Later, we learn that the disembodied voice belongs to the awkward teen daughter of Maxandra, Hayek Pinault’s character, writing a novel about Mike that includes some intellectual posturing about the history of dance. Still, her dialogue speaks to that underlying interest that has always been a part of this franchise: Mike is representative of an Everyman’s struggle to stay afloat.In those initial minutes the audience is made to feel his exhaustion as he returns to the kind of odd jobs he thought he had left behind. The independence that he had as a small-business owner is gone, and he is now forced to respond as stuck-up lackeys bark orders at him. At a party he is helping cater, he is recognized by a woman named Kim (Caitlin Gerard), who turns out to be a screaming college student he danced for in the first movie. Now she’s a successful lawyer, and he’s behind a bar, his past something for her to titter about as she walks away. Their dynamic has shifted. Kim tells Maxandra about Mike’s former profession, and Maxandra, in need of a release, offers him an obscene amount of cash for one dance.Through the sensuous choreography, their chemistry is undeniable, and when she coaxes him to travel overseas with her for a mysterious project, he goes along with the proposition, having nothing to lose. In fact, the one time we see his buddies from the first two films, they are on a video call and Mike owes them money. Max, meanwhile, is also negotiating her relationship to her wealth, which could disappear in a flash with her breakup. Mike is her knight in shining armor, helping her get revenge on her wayward spouse, but she is also his, rescuing him from pandemic depression.It would be easy to look at “Last Dance” as just that: a love story set against the backdrop of a production that looks a lot like the “Magic Mike Live” stage shows that Tatum, Soderbergh and Carolin have taken out on tour in the real world. And it is. But it’s also the creators’ version of a conclusion to Mike’s journey that offers him a respite from the troubles that plague a working-class striver like him. Yes, it’s a bit magical, but, after all, this is “Magic Mike.” More

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      ‘At Midnight’ Review: Running Out the Clock

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      A movie star and a junior hotel manager meet cute in Mexico in this ingratiating rom-com.Not long ago, a little-noticed indie called “Dating & New York” (2021) nudge-nudged viewers into noticing how it put a millennial spin on a timeworn rom-com formula. (You’ve heard of Instagram? Podcasts? So had the movie.) In that case, a likable cast helped hedge against clichés and the self-consciously peppy approach of the writer-director, Jonah Feingold.“At Midnight,” Feingold’s follow-up as director — he’s not the sole screenwriter this time — again has attractive leads with decent chemistry, but for whatever reason the balance tips the other way, and their efforts aren’t enough to counteract the filmmaker’s strained whimsy and tired formal tricks.Sophie (Monica Barbaro) is the star of a superhero franchise that she quietly thinks is silly (“and according to Scorsese not cinema”). Her on- and offscreen romantic partner, Adam (Anders Holm), turns out to be cheating on her, but Sophie chooses to maintain the appearance that they’re still together, to avoid what her agent describes as becoming Katie Holmes to Adam’s Tom Cruise. (That’s just one of many ingratiating attempts at Hollywood humor in a movie that also finds time to plug “Florence Pugh’s cookbook release party.”)While shooting a sequel in Mexico, Sophie meets cute with Alejandro (Diego Boneta), a junior manager at the hotel who realizes that Sophie’s room needs towels and delivers them at the predictably awkward time. But hey, he can cook, and for whatever reason he has a lot more charisma than her movie star ex.Barbaro and Boneta’s charm offensive never amounts to much, though. The eagerness this film has to please could never match how pleased Feingold clearly is to be making a movie like it.At MidnightRated R. A towel-free meet cute. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Watch on Paramount+. More

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      ‘Your Place or Mine’ Review: Try Neither

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      This humdrum Netflix romantic comedy features Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher as longtime friends with possibly hidden feelings for each other.Reese Witherspoon, Ashton Kutcher and the screenwriter (and first-time director) Aline Brosh McKenna each have decades of experience making hit romantic comedies. So it’s all the more confounding that their latest, “Your Place or Mine,” is as phony and flat as a store-bought valentine forced on every kid in class. Witherspoon and Kutcher play Debbie and Peter, longtime chums who shared a sole night of passion 20 years ago before settling into a bicoastal best friendship. Why haven’t these codependent singletons gotten back together? “She’s … her and I’m … me?” he sputters. His answer sums up the hard thinking that went into this script.An opening flashback to Debbie and Peter’s previous hookup is the film’s comedic peak. Brosh McKenna points out the onscreen 2003 signifiers: trucker hats, flat-ironed hair and enough layered shirts to turn Witherspoon into a matryoshka doll. There’s also, of course, Witherspoon and Kutcher themselves, who spent that year shooting separate rom-coms, hers with Luke Wilson and his with Tara Reid and Brittany Murphy. Past the intro, they’re kept apart here, too. Instead, their characters swap homes, forcing the two stars to squander their breezy familiarity with each other on separate sides of phone conversations and split-screen bubble baths.This Netflix production is banking on nostalgic good will for curiosity clicks. People puttering in and out of the room folding laundry can rest easy that there are few crucial plot points to miss — and the ones that exist tend to get repeated at least twice.Peter, for example, is a Manhattan marketing consultant with commitment problems. Early on, he breaks up with his latest girlfriend at the six-month mark; in his next scene, he has a near-identical conversation with his latest corporate clients. (The clients take it harder.) Debbie, a risk-averse single mother in Los Angeles, is pilloried with advice from one friend (Tig Notaro) — “Get your degree, find a man, then come home and redo your kitchen” — and escapes only to immediately collide with a second pesky pal (Rachel Bloom), who tacks on that the self-sacrificial parent should also pursue her dream job as a book editor.The pacing of these scenes feels as though we’re trapped in a spaceship airlock and can only faintly remember what natural life felt like back home on Earth. It only takes a squint to see that Debbie’s adorable foibles — rules scribbled on Post-it notes stuck all over the house, an insistence that her overprotected 13-year-old son (Wesley Kimmel) is allergic to everything from grass to fun — would, in reality, demand an intervention and, perhaps, a diagnosis of Munchausen by proxy. But no one in this movie is playing anything near a human being, although Kutcher occasionally resembles one when he lowers his head, crinkles his eyes and chuckles.The movie’s sincerity can be measured by how flippantly it disposes of its love rivals. Steve Zahn suffers the most indignities as a tech millionaire who retired to garden Debbie’s yard pro bono, while Jesse Williams’s charming literary publisher never gets a chance to put up a fair fight. As for Minka (Zoë Chao), Peter’s ex, a marvelously droll narcissist somehow willing to drop her whole big-city life to help a stranger get her groove back, she may not win the guy, but she steals all of her scenes.Your Place or MineRated PG-13 for strong language and suggestive material. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Huesera: The Bone Woman’ Review: What to Dread When You’re Expecting

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      In Michelle Garza Cervera’s terrifying and transfixing debut feature, a pregnant woman battles visions of a demoness who threatens her body and mind.Ever since I saw “Huesera: The Bone Woman,” the captivating horror film from the Mexican director Michelle Garza Cervera, at the Tribeca Film Festival last year, I haven’t been able to shake its images from my mind. Both a quintessential horror crowd-pleaser and an exceptionally specific deconstruction of the trials of pregnancy, the film offers a portrait of Valeria (Natalia Solián), a furniture maker in Mexico City, as she transitions into a life of domesticity.The story begins as Valeria, accompanied by her mother and aunt, ascends a staircase toward a towering golden statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe to appeal for a child with her husband, Raúl (Alfonso Dosal). Her prayers are soon answered, and the couple begins a long stretch of medical appointments and home refashioning as they anticipate the baby’s arrival.For our protagonist, the new chapter also presents some strife. Her sister sneers at Valeria’s lack of maternal instincts. Raúl is reluctant to have sex for fear of harming the fetus. And Valeria must give up her vocation to convert her workshop into the infant’s room. Power tools and baby-proofing don’t exactly mix.But even graver threats are approaching. Soon into the pregnancy, Valeria envisions a bony demoness who creeps in the darkness and scurries away the moment Valeria attempts to alert others to her presence. Whether the tormentor is an evil spirit or a prenatal hallucination is beside the point; no matter her form, we recognize that she is a menace to Valeria’s mental, physical and spiritual well-being.Valeria finds solace from the dread with a former girlfriend who awakens memories of her onetime nonconformist lifestyle — in the film’s only flashback, we see the pair as teens running from the police while chanting, “I don’t like domestication!” — and their renewed bond reinforces for Valeria the sense that motherhood is as much about loss as it is about gain.In her first feature, Garza Cervera admirably wields all of cinema’s tools to assemble her story: The sound design, heavy on snaps and cracks, is sharply anxious, and the cinematography makes moody use of mirrors, shadows and color. Dialogue is employed economically, and in the film’s most majestic set piece, speaking halts altogether in favor of careful rhythms of editing and chilling group choreography. “Huesera” is the type of staggering supernatural nightmare that is as transfixing as it is terrifying.Huesera: The Bone WomanNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

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      What an ’80s Feeling: ‘Flashdance' Turns 40

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      The film helped bring breaking into the mainstream. Over the years, it also became famous for the subs and doubles of its star, Jennifer Beals.At the climax of a strip routine, a young woman in silhouette arches back across a chair and pulls a cord. A cascade of water drenches her flexed body.In a leotard and leg warmers, the same woman stretches and runs in place, her wet hair flinging moisture as she shakes and rolls her head.Still in the leotard and leg warmers, she faces a panel of judges at an audition— jog-skipping while pumping her arms high, turning and turning, diving into a somersault, spinning her on back.These and other moments from the 1983 movie “Flashdance” still circulate in cultural memory, loved and mocked and recognized, even by people who never saw the film. On Monday, in honor of its 40th anniversary, New Yorkers get a rare chance to watch it on a big screen, as the closing selection of this year’s Dance on Camera Festival at Film at Lincoln Center. Get ready to cheer or jeer.Jennifer Beals, the star of “Flashdance,” in the off-the-shoulder sweatshirt she made famous.Everett Collection“So many people hold it in a special place,” Michael Trusnovec, a curator of the festival, said, noting how the movie’s style permeated the Long Island dance studios that he grew up in. He also pointed to how “Flashdance” had affected fashion: the sweatshirts with the neck hole cut to fall off one shoulder. And he stressed how dancers, including those inspired by the brief appearance of B-boys, had gravitated to the movie, thinking: “That’s what I want to do. I want to be that.”Beyond dance, much of the movie’s staying power comes from the soundtrack, especially Michael Sembello’s “Maniac” and Giorgio Moroder’s “What a Feeling,” sung by Irene Cara. The songs support sequences that are essentially music videos, which is how those scenes (the jogging workout, the audition) became ubiquitous on MTV — and why they still circulate online. Cara’s voice connects “Flashdance” to “Fame,” the 1980 movie with her hit title song, just as the supporting actress Cynthia Rhodes connects it to “Dirty Dancing,” from 1987. It’s an ’80s dance-film node.Beals in the movie’s freak-out scene.Paramount Pictures, via Getty ImagesThere’s some fondness for the plot, too. Set in Pittsburgh, it’s a follow-your-dreams story and a Cinderella tale. Alex — Jennifer Beals in the role that made her a star — is a welder by day and dances in a burlesque club at night (occasioning not just the famous water-drenched number but also a freak-out in white Kabuki makeup amid strobe lights). Her dream is to be accepted into a prestigious dance conservatory. By the end, she gets in, and she gets the guy, her older boss at the steel mill.Over the years, the film has acquired a kind of notoriety, too, because Beals did so little of Alex’s dancing. Most was performed by a French dancer, Marine Jahan. And in the climactic audition scene, there were more doubles: the gymnast Sharon Shapiro for the dive into the roll; and for the backspin, the 16-year-old B-boy Richard Colon, better known as Crazy Legs.Richard Colon, better known as Crazy Legs, doubling for Beals.Paramount Pictures, via Getty ImagesInitially, Colon said in an interview, he was brought in to teach the other doubles — on the day before shooting. That wasn’t enough time, so the director, Adrian Lyne, asked him to perform the backspin himself, in a leotard and wig, after shaving his legs and his newly grown mustache.“I was this little arrogant Puerto Rican from the Bronx with all this machismo,” Colon said. “I put my hands up to Lyne’s face and rubbed my fingers together, like, ‘You gotta pay me.’”They paid enough, Colon said. And in the next decades, the residual checks “definitely came in handy,” he added, as did his joke about being the first in hip-hop to dress in drag.Colon was known to the filmmakers because he was already in the movie. He and a few other members of the pioneering B-boy group Rock Steady Crew appear in another scene, when Alex discovers them dancing with a boombox on the sidewalk.To the B-boy anthem “It’s Just Begun” by the Jimmy Castor Bunch, Normski pops and locks like a windup robot, Ken Swift and Crazy Legs spin on their backs and Mr. Freeze holds an umbrella while doing the backslide, just before Michael Jackson made that decades-old move famous as the Moonwalk. This one-minute sequence had an outsized impact.“It’s impossible to overestimate the significance of ‘Flashdance’ in the history of breaking,” said Joseph Schloss, the author of “Foundation: B-boys, B-girls and Hip-Hop Culture in New York.” “That one scene pretty much single-handedly brought breaking into the mainstream.”Some members of Rock Steady were at first hesitant to be in the movie. “We didn’t practice with other groups,” Colon said, “because it was all about the element of surprise.” Marc Lemberger, better known as Mr. Freeze, said he was afraid that other dancers would “bite our moves”— steal them.A scene from “Flashdance.”Parmount PicturesAfter the movie’s release, the crew “became instant ghetto celebrities,” Colon said. “There was lots of love and lots of jealousy.” They got on the David Letterman show and into “Beat Street,” one of a few breaking-themed movies that came out the next year. “Flashdance” is connected to that part of the ’80s, too.The Hollywood interest was a quick fad, but breaking lived on. For decades, Colon said, he would meet people who sneaked into “Flashdance” just to see that one scene, people who saw themselves in the dance, many of them far from the Bronx.“When you talk to people in different hip-hop dance scenes around the world,” Schloss said, “almost inevitably they will say, ‘Well, the first time we saw it was in ‘Flashdance.’”In “Planet B-boy,” a 2008 documentary focused on the international B-boy competition Battle of the Year, dancers from Japan, Germany and France all testify to that effect. (And where did the director of the film, Benson Lee, get idea for the documentary? From rewatching “Flashdance” and wondering what had happened to the form.)The ripples from the scene can also be felt in “Top Nine,” a new documentary getting its world premiere at Dance on Camera just before “Flashdance.” It’s about the Russian B-boy crew Top 9, formed around 20 years ago.Its members tell their story of banding together, improving their skills and gaining global respect for Russian B-boys. They win Battle of Year in 2008, beating a dominant Korean crew. That glory doesn’t solve their money problems — this isn’t a “Flashdance” fairy tale — but they keep dancing.Through it all, they don’t mention “Flashdance,” but listen to the song they use to win in 2008: “It’s Just Begun.” And when some of them start a festival in St. Petersburg, which masters do they import? Ken Swift and Crazy Legs. More

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      ‘Sweetheart’ Review: A Seaside Crush

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      In this British coming-of-age film, a young lesbian stumbles through some important firsts.AJ, the moody protagonist of the British coming-of-age film “Sweetheart,” exudes an angst that is recognizable to any person who has lived through adolescence.When she is dragged by her mother, Tina (Jo Hartley), to a family vacation at a seaside trailer resort, AJ (Nell Barlow) initially stews in frustration. She’s not charmed by nights spent watching the resort’s resident magician. And her usual wardrobe, consisting mostly of baggy sweaters, doesn’t suit the sunny weather — much to her mother’s delight.But if “Sweetheart” shows its share of evergreen teenage turmoil, the writer and director Marley Morrison also cannily observes details that feel specific to young people today. AJ is tortured by the lack of Wi-Fi. She signals her defiance not with a leather jacket or tattoos, but by wearing sunglasses and a bucket hat everywhere. AJ is concerned about the environment, and she’s just as likely to argue with her mother about methane emissions as she is about appropriate beachwear. Most crucial to the plot, when the film opens, AJ has already come out to her family as a lesbian, though she lacks romantic experience.On vacation, AJ’s boredom quickly dissipates when she meets Isla (Ella-Rae Smith), a local lifeguard, at the laundromat. Propelled by a desire to get to know this beautiful stranger, AJ stumbles forward through some important firsts for her life. She goes to parties, she smokes and drinks, and she begins to explore her sexuality.Morrison is less discerning in her depiction of Isla’s character, and at times Isla feels flat in comparison with AJ’s broad collection of quirks. But to the film’s credit, the central relationship remains realistically drawn — a teenage courtship that’s marked by misunderstandings and mood swings. The characters aren’t always sweet, but they never feel phony.SweetheartNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. Rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘Somebody I Used to Know’ Review: Reigniting Old Flames

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      In Dave Franco’s new comedy, Alison Brie plays a reality television showrunner attempting to break up her ex-boyfriend’s engagement.In the catalog of comedies about city strivers who decamp to their suburban hometowns to hassle former lovers, Dave Franco’s “Somebody I Used to Know” is an upbeat but minor entry, destined to recede behind the worthier stories from which it borrows. The unfortunate irony of the movie’s title — one word off from the Gotye earworm, presumably to preserve search engine optimization, if not originality — is that the film lacks the indelible details and authentic feeling necessary to encode it in long-term memory. Indeed, soon after finishing the movie, it already feels far away.The story begins as Ally (Alison Brie), a reality television showrunner, craftily wrests a tearful disclosure from an interview subject on camera. It should be a triumphant moment, but the implication is that in her pursuit of Hollywood success, Ally has sold her soul and sacrificed her dignity. Not to worry: The chance for a reset arrives after the network declines to renew the show, and Ally, whose workaholism has left her friendless, makes the impromptu decision to visit her mother (a criminally underused Julie Hagerty) in Leavenworth, a small town situated in the mountains of Washington.This cinematic overture is among the most successful sequences in the movie, and sets us up for a conventional but comforting journey back to more wholesome roots. It also teases a gleefully unlikable protagonist who’s more schemer than achiever and more sourpuss than socialite; Brie (who co-wrote the script with Franco) has a knack for tapping into her nasty side, and as we zigzag through a handful of set pieces that don’t quite register comedically — one hinges on cat diarrhea — we yearn for our city mouse to go fully feral.Regrettably, the moment never arrives. While in Leavenworth, Ally bumps into her ex-boyfriend, Sean (Jay Ellis), and is aggrieved to learn of his recent engagement to Cassidy (Kiersey Clemons), a self-possessed local punk singer. Ally spends the remainder of the film’s running time batting eyelashes and crashing wedding events as she conspires to reignite their old flame. It’s remarkable that nobody tells her to get lost and get a life; despite some side-eyeing, even Cassidy and her protective pals seem glad to have the grating Ally around.As the movie’s co-writer and director, Franco brings a sunny disposition and a touch of idiosyncratic farce. There are the usual jaunty montage sequences and forlorn shots of characters gazing out windows, but there is also vomit, obscene texts and an overwhelming dose of public nudity. Franco and Brie are clearly riffing on a suite of movies about career women rediscovering roots and wreaking havoc on old relationships — “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” “Sweet Home Alabama” and “Young Adult” come to mind — and seek to inject the familiar premise with millennial novelty.But there’s something missing from the equation. Each of those predecessors appreciate that their heroines, in acting harshly toward their peers, also become their villains. By reeling in Ally’s ruthlessness, expunging her comeuppance and mollifying those she wrongs, “Somebody I Used to Know” actually distances us from Ally and her issues. The truth is that jealousy and cruelty are human; anything less is just a portrait with the blemishes erased.Somebody I Used to KnowRated R for full-frontal nudity. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. Watch on Amazon. More

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      ‘Of an Age’ Review: A Boy’s Own (Coming Out) Story

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      In 1999 Melbourne, a teenage outsider meets a young man who’s smart, kind, sensitive and looks mighty fine in a tight black T-shirt.One of the trickier hurdles that romantic movies need to clear is convincing the viewer to swoon, too. That bar proves insurmountably high in “Of an Age,” a confident if unpersuasive story about a quintessentially alienated teenager falling for guy in his mid-20s who checks all the heartthrob boxes: He’s kind, good looking, has a nice smile and seems to like the attention directed at him. Yet why this object of desire, an ostensibly serious thinker en route to grad school, would fall for our charisma-challenged protagonist remains thoroughly mystifying.The writer-director Goran Stolevski made a modest splash at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival with his feature debut, “You Won’t Be Alone,” a silly witchy-woman horror movie set in 19th-century Macedonia that effectively flicks at your nerves without taxing your brain. For his new movie, Stolevski has shifted focus and swapped genres to create a low-key, intimate portrait of a young man’s awakening — sexual and otherwise — in Melbourne. It’s the summer of 1999 when Kol (Elias Anton), a Serbian immigrant a few weeks shy of 18, encounters Adam (a fine Thom Green), who over the course of a day upends the teen’s life.Overlong story short, they meet strainingly cute through Adam’s sister Ebony (Hattie Hook), who’s Kol’s dance partner and only apparent friend, though mostly just an off-putting script contrivance. Her role is to get the guys together, which she does in a protracted opener that settles down with Adam behind the wheel and Kol riding jumpy shotgun. They talk and talk. Adam not-so-casually shares that he’s gay and single, news that Kol receives with transparent anxiety and obvious interest. Later, they attend a party where a couple of girls are mean to Kol, who’s rescued by Adam. The guys hit the road again, and talk and talk some more.Stolevski, as his earlier work shows, knows his way around a camera. Working with the cinematographer Matthew Chuang (who also shot “You Won’t Be Alone”), Stolevski uses the physical confines of the car with intelligence, shrewdly marshaling its tight space to create a sense of claustrophobia that subtly shifts into intimacy as the men warm to each other. He also does nice work with the Australian light, in some sequences giving the visuals a blurry radiance that softens every hard edge, turns an ordinary cityscape into a jewel box and looks particularly lovely when bounced off Adam’s bare skin.It’s too bad then that, for all the bashful and gawking looks he employs playing Kol, Anton just doesn’t cut it as a timid, socially awkward adolescent outsider, a serious impediment to the movie’s fragile realism. The actor makes more sense in the role when the story jumps forward in time, bringing a now-strappingly adult Kol with it. The movie’s greater, intractable problem, though, is that Stolevski has burdened his characters with such obvious narrative instrumentality — Kol is the sensitive naïf while Adam is the appealing, gentle exemplar of an authentic life — that the two simply never come to life as people, either as individuals or as a couple. They say and do everything that they should, and also everything that you expect.Of an AgeRated R for language. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters. More