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      ‘Creation Stories’ Review: The Man Behind a Raucous Record Label

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      A rock ’n’ roll biopic about Creation Records, which gave us Oasis, My Bloody Valentine and more.There’s a poem in which the British writer and musician Martin Newell turns the name of a superstar 1960s guitarist into a verb. Like so:I Hank Marvinnedwe all didwith badminton racketsin front of our mirrors.No matter what country, if you grew up when rock ’n’ roll was king, you knew what he was talking about. Alan McGee knew. In the early scenes of Nick Moran’s “Creation Stories,” a fiction movie based on the real man’s autobiography, we see him, a nerdy Glasgow teenager in the ’70s, whacking a racket while his stereo makes one. Dad doesn’t approve.This bouncy, time-hopping biopic recounts McGee’s journey to rock legend — not as a performer but as a manager and the owner of a label that championed trailblazing artists like My Bloody Valentine. “I didn’t have any talent,” an older but not yet wiser McGee, played by Ewen Bremner, admits. The story of how McGee managed to conjure up the phenomenally successful label Creation — and, with its supernova band Oasis, shape the British pop zeitgeist — while conducting himself in a manner highly contrary to that embraced by highly effective businesspeople is hardly without interest.But for much of its running time the movie’s reverb knob is set high, and what’s echoing are the movies “Trainspotting” (in which Bremner co-starred; its director Danny Boyle is a producer here) and “24 Hour Party People” (about another gonzo entrepreneur and his record label).“Stories” does have a handful of funny and affecting scenes. But it’s most interesting when McGee, after sobering up, makes an ill-advised alliance with Tony Blair. The interesting times in which, as McGee puts it here, “corporate disguised itself as hipster,” could make a righteous stand-alone movie. Alas, “Creation Stories” only spends about 20 minutes on them.Creation StoriesNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Available to watch on AMC+, and to rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘The Desperate Hour’ Review: An Exercise in Panic

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      Naomi Watts plays a mother whose morning jog becomes a nightmare in this thriller from Phillip Noyce.If your 84-minute movie about family trauma turns into a school-shooting thriller but that thriller is also about the family’s mother having the worst jog of her life and that jog includes dozens of phone calls to and from 9-1-1, it doesn’t need a director. It needs a life coach and a personal trainer. The audience, meanwhile, needs a hostage negotiator. That mom? She basically becomes one, too. And because Naomi Watts plays her, it seemed fair to assume that Amy’s helplessness would achieve more than this single note. But nope.Not much time is required to explain what’s happening here. A recently widowed mother of two named Amy (Watts) leaves her teenage son languishing in bed while she gets some morning exercise in the nearby woods of a generic mid-Atlantic town. While she’s out, Amy discovers that someone heavily armed has invaded her son’s school and opened fire. Is he a victim? Is he the shooter?For answers, Amy races toward danger on the ankle she twists, making frantic calls the whole way: to the mechanic not far from the siege, to a friend with a kid at the school, to a Black police dispatcher (repeatedly) named Dedra, who, in the middle of all the chaos, makes time to comfort Amy with lines like, “You did what any other mom would do.”The only thing I want less than a thriller about a school shooting is a thriller whose other main character is the main character’s iPhone. Watts has to conjure anguish from dropped calls and dying batteries, from deceitful ride-share arrival times and unknown callers, from calls that go straight to voice mail. She has to find a way to play the sort of person who’s already taken and made half a dozen mid-run calls before there’s any crisis, someone whom we don’t mind saying something like, “Siri: Directions to Lakewood Community Center. Fastest route” or “You got other people’s kids out. Why can’t you get mine out?”Few screen actors are better at externalizing parental anguish than Watts. The physical beating she took in “The Impossible” felt proportional to her performance of a mother’s determination to reconvene her family. The movie turned the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 into an action-melodrama, but Watts’s mastery of bodily suffering transcended the film’s racial turpitude. Her privileged mommy persuasively stood in for maternity itself.“The Desperate Hour” becomes its own kind of impossible. There’s no way for Watts to make this person more than the most exasperating character I’ve experienced in a work of fiction in a long time. Until Amy, I couldn’t truly have appreciated the difference between courage and effrontery. She guilts that mechanic into some probably illegal sleuthing. And when she makes her urgent limp to the scene holding two phones, it was my turn to call the cops. Amy, come on. That’s your Lyft driver’s phone!Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      ‘Hellbender’ Review: The Family That Preys Together

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      In a horror feature by a family of filmmakers, a young woman discovers her mother has been stifling her supernatural abilities.In the last two years, The Adams family — Toby Poser, her husband, John Adams, and their daughters, Zelda and Lulu — began producing lo-fi rock under the band name H6LLB6ND6R and made “Hellbender,” their sixth feature film together. Poser, Zelda and John co-wrote and co-directed the film, and all the family members had acting roles. The music project inspired the movie project, an act of true collaboration that saw Poser, Zelda and John trading places in front of and behind the camera to execute their vision. Many scenes were devised ad hoc, as inspiration struck. While the result is a mostly-compelling tale of matriarchal megalomania, occasionally this group composition feels more like a jumble.In the film, a mother (Poser) with mysterious, witchy powers keeps her daughter Izzy (Zelda Adams) isolated on their rural property by telling her she is immunocompromised. As Izzy comes of age and befriends a local teenager (Lulu Adams), she discovers she stems from a lineage of Hellbenders, supernatural women who asexually reproduce and draw their magic from the blood of living creatures.That initial premise is familiar in horror, but “Hellbender” takes a fresh approach. Some keen editing by John Adams and special effects by Trey Lindsay elevate this into formidable genre fare, with psychedelic sequences that are remarkably polished. If you thought a no-budget film couldn’t feature pirates, flying witches and underground lairs, think again.Yet the film’s spooky focus is often waylaid by detours. H6LLB6ND6R appears not only on the soundtrack, but also as an actual band in the script, yielding tonally discordant sequences that feel like music video breaks. It’s certainly possible to make an amazing horror film about insatiable monster-women with some irreverence — Julia Ducournau did it with “Raw” — but “Hellbender” isn’t focused enough to nail it.HellbenderNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. Watch on Shudder. More

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      ‘Servants’ Review: Fighting for Purity of Faith

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      Teenage priests in training resist the mingling of church and the Communist state in Ivan Ostrochovsky’s drama.The captivating ecclesiastical drama “Servants,” set in 1980s Czechoslovakia, follows teenage matriculates at a Christian seminary who awaken to a grim reality. Their Dean (Vladimir Strnisko) is a member of Pacem in Terris, a group of clergy quietly granting control of the church to the Communist state. Considering this a moral corruption, several of the students initiate a discreet rebellion.The story follows best friends Juraj (Samuel Skyva) and Michal (Samuel Polakovic), a solemn duo who join the seminary and pair up to study, play soccer and practice their accordions. But once Juraj meets the peers who are furtively connecting with the Vatican in defiance of their advisers, he snubs Michal to support the cause.Directed by the Slovakian filmmaker Ivan Ostrochovsky, “Servants” pairs chilly black-and-white imagery, reminiscent of films by Robert Bresson, with an austere kind of choreography: Ostrochovsky often begins shots with characters frozen in place for several seconds before they launch into action, as if they were chess pieces moved by God across the bare lines of the seminary’s crumbling stone architecture.Evocative details fill out this spartan world. Through the movie, the ominous Doctor Ivan (Vlad Ivanov), a member of the secret police responsible for weeding out and penalizing student dissidents, suffers from a progressive rash. It snakes across his body in concert with his accruing sins.A clearer picture of the bond between Juraj and Michal may have made this moral tale more affecting. But as Ostrochovsky deploys his arresting imagery, he shows less interest in the boys’ rift than in the political and holy struggles guiding them. “Be careful. The school is undergoing restorations,” a pupil advises the pair early on. “Servants” sees the dissolution of one friendship as a small price to pay toward the restoration of a school’s — and nation’s — purity of faith.ServantsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. In virtual cinemas and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘The Burning Sea’ Review: Smoke on the Water

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      An oil-rig accident in the North Sea kicks off this well-acted, pleasantly predictable survival thriller.Even allowing for the elastic credibility standards of the average survival movie, “The Burning Sea” is a stretch. (A favorite moment is when the unconscious half of the central couple pops awake at an especially critical juncture.) Yet if the machinations of the plot are a tad rickety, its geologic premise is inarguably stable.Tucking a simple romance inside a disaster thriller, the director John Andreas Andersen uses an oil-rig collapse off the coast of Norway to deliver a dire warning of environmental disruption. When Sofia (a charming Kristine Kujath Thorp), an underwater robotics expert, joins the team seeking survivors and an explanation for the accident, she’s horrified to learn that a larger catastrophe could be imminent. Unfortunately, mitigation efforts will prove too late to prevent Sofia’s boyfriend (Henrik Bjelland), a sweet-natured rig worker, from requiring the kind of extreme rescue effort only a woman in love would undertake.Nodding to the cataclysmic Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, the screenwriters Lars Gudmestad and Harald Rosenlow-Eeg underscore the possibly calamitous oceanic consequences of decades of drilling. Opportunities for a more fraught political drama, however, are basically ignored: When an oil-company executive instructs Sofia to sign a nondisclosure agreement, we expect at least some cover-up shenanigans. Instead, we get little more than a bland romance, smoothly professional special effects and a story that’s finally too predictable to raise the heart rate.A more tantalizing tale is teased in segments that bookend the movie and, based on interviews with retired oil workers, explain the cowboy nature of the industry’s early days, when training consisted of an instruction to “just follow the Americans.” Maybe not always the best advice.The Burning SeaRated PG-13 for language appropriate to the expectation of a fiery, watery death. In Norwegian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Google Play, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Careless Crime’ Review: A Time Loop in Iran

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      Shahram Mokri’s film bends time and space as it considers events from 40 years earlier, when an arson attack on a movie theater set off the Iranian Revolution.In the films of the Iranian director Shahram Mokri, time ripples, bends, devours itself. Mokri’s prior features, “Fish & Cat” and “Invasion,” have ouroboros-style plots, with recursive chronologies and scenes repeated from various characters’ points of view. His latest, “Careless Crime,” pivots on another kind of time loop: the repetitions of history.An epigraph tells us of a 1978 fire set off by four militants at the Cinema Rex in Abadan, Iran, that killed hundreds of moviegoers and incited the Iranian Revolution. In its opening scenes, “Careless Crime” seems to recreate that event, as a theater proprietor argues with two colleagues about adding more seats to his cinema, while a wayward pyromaniac, Takbali, falls in with three Islamist arsonists. But temporal tricks already abound: References to the Shah suggest prerevolutionary Iran, even as the settings — replete with gleaming phones and computers and cars — are contemporary.Things grow stranger as Mokri begins cutting between Takbali, the theater crew and a film-within-the-film (called, err, “Careless Crime”) about a military captain’s run-in with two women organizing an outdoor screening of “The Deer” in a remote village. (To add to the whiplash: “The Deer” was screening at Cinema Rex during the 1978 fire.)Mokri constructs his film like a control experiment, tweaking each of its variables — time, space, narrative — as if to see what he might catalyze. At times the results are poetic, as when, in a marvelous feat of both shooting and acting, a sequence of interactions is repeated multiple times within a seamless circular panning shot. At other times, “Careless Crime” feels rather enervating, the film’s political charge and the pathos of its characters diffused by Mokri’s mathematical zeal.Careless CrimeNot rated. In Persian, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 19 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Big Gold Brick’ Review: Sad Sack Makes Good

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      Shaggy and dull, this film follows a slovenly writer who’s taken in by the man who hit him with a car.Samuel, a nice failed writer and slob, turns his life around one day by stepping in front of a car in “Big Gold Brick.” But success — a best-selling memoir — doesn’t happen overnight. First the wealthy driver, Floyd (Andy Garcia), takes in Samuel (Emory Cohen) as his in-house biographer, and a movie’s worth of mostly domestic misadventures follow that are shaggy and dull.Addled from the collision, Samuel bumbles his way around Floyd’s family: a coldly flirtatious wife (Megan Fox) who might as well be introduced with the “Oh Yeah” song, a sweet grown daughter (Lucy Hale) devoid of personality, and a sociopathic son, Eddie (Leonidas Castrounis). Garcia’s Floyd, who claims to have a secret past, ambles through a two-hour-plus movie that nearly forgets to give this crew any story to speak of.The writer-director, Brian Petsos, misses the timing or verve shown in his short films, which have been a lovely outlet for freak-outs by Oscar Isaac. The star goofs off in a brief turn as a nefarious tycoon, hidden behind half-opaque glasses, a fey warble and a riot of facial hair. This and other touches keep suggesting half-remembered bits and bobs from indie crime capers and sketch shows of the late 1990s and early 2000s.While it’s not clear whether anyone could, Cohen doesn’t carry this movie, but he does wear an amusingly aerodynamic ponytail during the glimpses of Samuel’s future book tour. The title of this perfectly well-appointed production is apt: “Big Gold Brick” looks all right but it truly just sits there.Big Gold BrickNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 12 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Butter’ Review: High-Stakes Popularity

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      Fed up with his classmates’ contempt, an obese high school student decides he’ll gorge himself to death on New Year’s Eve.Why do movies that take on bullying so often fetishize the very acts they seem to be critiquing? “Butter,” directed by Paul A. Kaufman — who adapted Erin Jade Lange’s young adult novel — seems to wallow in the brutality.Fed up with his classmates’ contempt, a high school junior, Butter (Alex Kersting), decides he’ll show them by eating himself to death on New Year’s Eve. Just tune in to buttersfinalmeal.com, he announces online. But far from shaming or freaking out his peers, Butter’s promise makes him a celebrity at his school.Once the movie gets going, Kersting, a newcomer, gives an all-in performance. Butter is a gifted saxophone player, a thoughtful soul. He’s gaining ground in his incognito courting of the school’s popular girl (McKaley Miller). Onetime foes are becoming friends. Is there any wonder he’s approaching his big night with less and less verve?The adults in Butter’s life are less compelling. Mira Sorvino plays Butter’s flummoxed mom. His dad (Brian Van Holt) is even more confounded and distant. And Butter’s physician (Ravi Patel) is a tad too madcap. The only adults who seem to really see him are his band teacher (Mykelti Williamson) and a hospital psychiatrist (Annabeth Gish).The movie is a good-hearted dramatic comedy about the bedeviling issues of bullying, and the hazards of social media. But the lessons become stand-ins for richer characters who could have been memorable — and persuasive. For all its ache and churning emotions, “Butter” winds up being little more than a meager “Afterschool Special.”ButterRated PG-13 for suicidal ideation, crude sexual material and even cruder language. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters. More