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Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera.Film directors walk viewers through one scene of their movies, showing the magic, motives and the mistakes from behind the camera. More
Japanese nationalism and religious faith fuel a battle in the spirit realm in this awkward martial-arts fantasy.I’m positive I’ve never seen anything like “The Cherry Bushido.” It’s terrible — not even in a way that I tend to want from my demon-studded, karate-chopping, English-dubbed international-warfare polemics. But this movie means every speech about the power of religious faith and the restoration of Japanese might (and boy, are there plenty of those). It’s not kidding about every slash of samurai sword, either, even though most of those are awkward, too. I’m talking about the kind of entertainment where as soon as three young women in martial-arts robes stand poised for action, back-to-back-to-back, on comes a piano-kissed rock song that this stationary bike of a movie suddenly summons the zest to pedal hard to.Plotwise, the made-up Republic of Sodorrah keeps sending test missiles over Japan. And a band of young spiritualist patriot-activists taps a college student named Shizuka (Yoshiko Sengen; dubbed by Kana Shimanuki) to help save this movie’s Japan from its military past and current governmental fecklessness. Enough with this talk of diplomacy and sanctions; Japan must defend itself in the ways of the old Japanese traditions, she writes in a news editorial about the response to Sodorrah — which, given the arrows that arc from one spot on the movie’s map to Japan, seems a lot like China.Shizuka suffers nightmares of nuclear Armageddon that correspond with a divine prophecy of Japan’s destruction. But that real-world threat takes a back seat to all the trips to the movie’s spirit realm, where the glowing essences of Shizuka and the gang exit their physical selves to do battle against the Great Demon of Hades and his dozens of masked goons. (Ryuji Kasahara wears a lot of Halloween makeup to play the Great Demon, and he’s the one person here really willing to go for it.)Now’s as good a time as any for a movie about a bellicose national neighbor and extra-strength patriotism; for a movie with a theme song whose lyrics have been translated as, “It’s not that I hate men/It’s that men are too weak/I can’t find any stronger than me.” But the movie has been written by Sayaka Okawa and directed by Hiroshi Akabane with big eager-pupil energy that needs you to know everything it knows, which includes centuries of Japanese military affairs and how ruthless Japan was to its neighbors during World War II, for starters. The movie rolls out archival footage to imply as much. (Apparently, this is news to Shizuka and her nationalistic pluck.)So an air of retributive justice hangs over this thing like a cloud. It’s all a mess of ideology and theology, of flowing robes, flying fists, karma, camp, cant and can’t: can’t act, can’t kick, can’t marshal any art.The Cherry BushidoRated PG-13. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes. In theaters. More
A bereaved woman is trapped on a mysterious island in this atmospheric horror movie.An island might seem an ideal setting for a horror movie — what’s scarier than having nowhere to run? — but restricted characters can also leave you with limited narrative options. “Offseason,” the latest feature from the writer and director Mickey Keating, is a good example: Despite a wonderfully eerie atmosphere, this moody examination of guilt and mourning is too generic to scare and too predictable to surprise.The story (which in some ways resembles the recent HBO series “The Third Day”) centers on Marie (Jocelin Donahue), who learns that the grave of her recently deceased mother, Ava (Melora Walters, seen in flashback), has been desecrated. Almost as disturbing, the grave was located on the very island that Ava had expressly forbidden she be buried. Desperate to solve both mysteries, Marie and her boyfriend (Joe Swanberg, barely registering) head to the storm-battered spot where, it being the end of the summer season, the bridge is about to close and the residents are about to turn very, very weird.What unfolds is an uninspired blend of familiar spooky devices. But Keating, wisely continuing his collaboration with the marvelous cinematographer Mac Fisken, designs an effectively ominous world of mist-wrapped trees and a frothing shoreline that shades into a baleful gray horizon. And one scene featuring Richard Brake as the threatening Bridge Man is so strangely, surreally shot and performed that the character appears sui generis.It might sound odd to describe a horror movie as soothing. And yet there were entire stretches of “Offseason” where I was content to watch Marie wander from one disturbing discovery to another, more shackled by her grief than by any supernatural entity.OffseasonNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More
Ryan Reynolds plays a time traveling wise cracker in Shawn Levy’s science fiction adventure.Early in “The Adam Project,” a pipsqueak asthmatic named Adam (Walker Scobell) and his golden retriever gallivant through the woods among shimmering falling debris. The cause of the wreckage, Adam learns, is a time jet that was crash landed by his older self (Ryan Reynolds) traveling from the future. This is pure ’80s sci-fi pastiche for the ages. Add a few flying saucer chases, cook up a quickie solution to the grandfather paradox and this movie might have fallen at the intersection of “E.T.” and “Back to the Future.”Instead, “The Adam Project,” directed by Shawn Levy, might as well be called “The Ryan Reynolds Project.” Last summer, Levy and Reynolds teamed up under a different Hollywood juggernaut to deliver the clamorous video game flick “Free Guy.” This new movie (on Netflix) is a comparable package — noisy and formulaic, but still occasionally enjoyable. Reynolds recycles his trademark twerpy charisma, using quips to punctuate battle scenes that are spiced up with special effects. Mileage for the actor’s wise guy persona will vary — I’ve personally had my fill for several lifetimes, with or without time travel — and it’s hard here to separate the movie from the leading man.This is because Reynolds imbues Adam with such excitable, exhibitionistic energy he might as well be waving jazz hands. Levy and the screenwriters, Jonathan Tropper, T.S. Nowlin, Jennifer Flackett and Mark Levin, have crafted in “The Adam Project” a vehicle that enables Reynolds to multiply his shtick by two. By allying Adam with himself, not only can Reynolds poke fun at his adversaries — “your outfits are incredible,” he gushes at one point to a squad of henchman — he can actually mock his own insufferableness. “You have a very punchable face,” he tells Adam the preteen early in their peregrinations. Scobell, for his part, mirrors Reynolds’s mien with precision, making the duo feel less like Marty McFly and Doc Brown than twin sidekicks who stumbled into the spotlight.Their adventure begins when the adult Adam, visiting 2022 from 2050, explains to his kid accomplice that time travel has ruined mankind, and impeding its invention is their only hope. Complicating the mission is Adam’s dad, Louis (Mark Ruffalo), a physicist who models traversable wormholes, and Louis’s ruthless business associate, Maya (Catherine Keener). How tampering with the past will upset the future — including Adam’s marriage to fellow insurgent Laura (Zoe Saldaña) — is a mystery that the movie declines to dwell on.Blissfully under two hours, “The Adam Project” is no modern classic. But it does benefit from an affecting finale that pays special attention to Adam’s strained relationship with his father. Reynolds may play the smart aleck, but beneath Adam’s zingers he is compensating for a profound pain, and Louis is critical in activating his son’s tender side. It’s an unexpectedly sweet note to end on. Or perhaps it’s just that after a double dose of wise cracking, some authentic feeling is a welcome respite.The Adam ProjectRated PG-13. A little battle, a lot of prattle. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More
Decades after experiencing some of the most nightmarish moments of World War II, a woman shares her stories.“I Am Here” begins with a promise it does not entirely keep. Jordy Sank’s documentary about the Holocaust survivor Ella Blumenthal ends its opening montage depicting antisemitic acts with a talk radio host telling listeners about the open letter Blumenthal wrote to a social media Holocaust denier.“Instead of condemning the person who posted it,” the host says admiringly, Blumenthal “reaches out an arm of friendship and even of love.”Given that lead-in, one might expect a documentary about a survivor who engages, maybe even transforms, those people who would refute history. That movie is not forthcoming. Instead, “I Am Here” is something more familiar, although undeniably stirring: a portrait of a dynamic soul whose life continues to defy the horrors she experienced.Whether she is swimming laps or walking a beachfront in South Africa — where she has lived since the 1950s — Blumenthal is a vision of vigor and faith, yet it was not until late in life that she began to reckon openly with her memories.In the film, as her 98th birthday nears, Blumenthal sits with her assembled children and grandchildren, recounting the ordeals she and her niece, Roma Rothstein, endured during the war.Animated sequences accompany Blumenthal’s accounts of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Majdanek, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen camps. The animation tempers the graphic tortures of the Holocaust without quelling the heartbreak.Sank was a teenager when he first met Blumenthal, and “I Am Here” feels like a primer pitched to younger viewers. As inspiring as his chosen subject is, the director missed an opportunity to use the story to deepen our understanding of our own memories, trauma and forgiveness.I Am HereRated PG-13 for Holocaust-related thematic content, disturbing images and violence. Running time: 1 hour 13 minutes. In theaters. More
Zac Efron stars in an unrelentingly miserable post-apocalyptic movie from the Australian actor and director Anthony Hayes.There’s a type of blunt, brutal fable about men and avarice that has been reworked every decade or so since Erich von Stroheim’s silent epic “Greed” was released in 1924. The middling “Gold,” directed by Anthony Hayes from a screenplay he wrote with Polly Smyth (who is also Hayes’s spouse), is one of them. It rides on the dusty coattails of touchstones of the genre: think “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” the “Mad Max” franchise and “There Will Be Blood.”“Gold” is set on a sunbaked wasteland, in a future in which an apocalyptic war has scarred the earth. (The film was shot in Australia, so the mettle of “Mad Max” hovers over each frame.) Among the blackened craters left by the war live a few sweaty, irritable survivors, all of whom go unnamed — as if they’d waste too much saliva introducing themselves. Zac Efron and Hayes play antisocial strangers car-pooling across the badlands. During an unplanned pit stop, Efron’s character, the more soft-bellied of the two travelers, discovers a massive chunk of gold bigger than both men combined. Hauling it out of the sand will be a test of endurance for the characters — who Efron and Hayes ground in a weary, wary reserve — and for the audience, which must suffer watching Efron’s skin become riddled with sun blisters that appear to be supercharged by radiation. There’s no missing the message that we’re in a dog-eat-dog world. But we’re shown an actual dog eating a dog just in case.The movie’s mood is unrelentingly miserable. Its cinematography, by Ross Giardina, is bleached-bone bright; its soundscape features more buzzing flies than music. The closest thing to hope comes from a line that the script — apparently calling for us to value our own planet while we still can — has Efron pant to a scorpion: “Look at you, crawling on a massive cluster of gold your whole life and you don’t even know it.”GoldRated R for pain and anguish. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More
This genre hybrid opens on a dark, stormy night, takes a turn into a narrative maze only to dead end despite some promising kinks.One of the attractions of contemporary puzzle movies — with their ambiguities and labyrinths, unreliable narrators and storytelling thickets — is that their complexities are by turns beguiling and confounding but also familiar. Life takes some navigating, and so do Christopher Nolan movies; capitalism is dehumanizing, just like in the Wachowskis’ “Matrix” series. The stories may be bummers, but at least you’ll have fun putting all their jagged pieces together or just savoring their inscrutable depths.Sometimes, though, the mysteries prove unsatisfyingly murky, which is the case with the genre hybrid “Ultrasound.” A low-key science-fictiony puzzler, it opens in textbook fashion on a dark, stormy night with Glen (Vincent Kartheiser) motoring alone on a deserted road in the rain. When he drives over some nails, he abandons his car and seeks shelter in a nearby house. Uh-oh, you think, having seen a few movies. The people inside, Art (Bob Stephenson, the movie’s ace in the hole) and Cyndi (Chelsea Lopez), seem friendly, but so did Norman Bates. They also seem off-kilter, cagey, devious.For his part, Glen looks wary, but because he’s a narrative cog rather than a character, he also makes a lot of seemingly foolish choices. He drinks too much with Art and then crawls into bed with Cyndi. You half expect Glen to end up hanging from a meat hook with an apple in his mouth. But he makes it home, and soon Art comes knocking and then so does Cyndi. Glen is pulled back into a busily plotted yet anemic story that involves a woman who may or may not be pregnant, a conservative politician, and some lab-coat types milling around a Cronenbergian research facility. There, things happen, mostly bad.In time, the director, Rob Schroeder, and writer, Conor Stechschulte, introduce some undercooked ideas about surveillance, mind control and contemporary politics. (The movie is based on Stechschulte’s multivolume comic “Generous Bosom.”) More characters enter, notably a skittish researcher, Shannon (Breeda Wool), who plays an outsize role in the more focused second half. Working with a shoestring budget and actors of widely divergent abilities, Schroeder keeps things moving along while also managing the difficult task of creating and sustaining an atmosphere of suffocating unease.There are some promising glints here and there, flashes of mordant wit and obvious ambition. But like too many movies, “Ultrasound” is better at setting up its story than delivering on its promise, as if the filmmakers were still pitching ideas in the elevator. The first hour or so consists of a series of enigmatic scenes that gesture — and keep gesturing — at the story’s larger mystery but don’t build to create a coherently integrated (and involving) whole. The results are frustrating and fragmentary. And while these pieces finally converge, by the time they do, the movie’s claustrophobia has become oppressive and you’re looking for the exit.UltrasoundNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Google Play, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More
The arrival of an African refugee upends a Bulgarian town in Ivaylo Hristov’s pointed tale of xenophobia.At the beginning of “Fear,” the dominant feeling is loneliness. In a coastal town in Bulgaria, shot in somber, expressive black and white, a middle-aged woman named Svetla (Svetlana Yancheva) leads a life that seems to shrink before our eyes. The school where she had been teaching shuts down, leaving her unemployed. A widow, she visits her husband’s grave, buys a few eggs on credit at a small grocery and engages in some desultory banter with a group of soldiers.The soldiers work for the border patrol, and in due course they are alerted to the arrival of a group of migrants from Afghanistan. Dealing with refugees is a matter of dreary routine — displaced people pass through here frequently, hoping to make it to Germany — though a television news reporter tries to sensationalize the situation. She asks the unit commander (the wonderfully gruff Stoyan Bochev) leading questions about terrorists and drug smugglers and tells her viewers that the mood on the border is “tense.” Not really. The Afghans are tired and anxious. The locals seems to be afflicted by a mixture of grumpiness and resignation, torn between xenophobia and compassion.Svetla experiences her own version of that struggle when she meets Bamba (Michael Flemming), a refugee from Mali. Their first encounter, while she is hunting rabbits in the forest not far from her house, has a surreal, almost cartoonish quality. She brandishes her shotgun like a Balkan Elmer Fudd. Bamba carefully sets down his suitcase and greets her in English, a language she doesn’t speak. Bewildered, she brings him home, putting him up first in a storage shed and then in her home.It’s their friendship, inching toward romance, that inflames Svetla’s neighbors and activates the fear of the film’s title. The director, Ivaylo Hristov, is adept at slow-burning suspense and comic misdirection. At first the casual racism that peppers discussions about Svetla’s houseguest seems a matter of ignorance — ugly but not fully hateful. Hristov shows how words lead to actions, how jealousy and boredom blend with prejudice into a toxic brew. Someone throws a rock through Svetla’s window. Obscene graffiti appears in front of her house. A cluster of townspeople who might have been written off as bumpkins, drunkards and clowns coalesces into something like a lynch mob.It’s scary. Not that Svetla is easily frightened. Yancheva gives off a strong Frances McDormand vibe — sarcastic, weary and impatient, her brusque manner shrouding a flinty decency. She’s the charismatic moral center of the film, much as McDormand was in “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.”“Fear” has a clearer, more detailed sense of place than that misguided movie. The faces feel as lived-in as the landscape of stubbled fields and boxy farmhouses and sprawling buildings that look either unfinished or half demolished. The caustic, fatalistic humor has as strong and distinctive a local flavor as the hot peppers and mushrooms that Svetla prepares for Bamba.He is the catalyst for the film’s actions and reactions, but at the same time “Fear” doesn’t quite know what to make of him. Flemming has a wry, melancholy manner, and Bamba has a tragic back story, but he also functions more as a symbol than a fully formed character. His role is to awaken Svetla’s latent tenderness, to expose the intolerance of the people around her, and to help Hristov deliver a timely humanist message. But he remains a stranger in a story whose moral is that he shouldn’t be.FearNot rated. In English and Bulgarian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. On virtual cinemas and available to rent or buy on Amazon, Apple TV and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More
