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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

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      ‘Friends and Strangers’ Review: G’day, Mates

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      In this funny, productively cryptic Australian feature, the characters are alternately abrasive and invasive.The opening credits of “Friends and Strangers,” a funny, productively cryptic debut feature from James Vaughan, unfold over a series of watercolors painted during the first years of Australia’s colonization; they are synced to a score from a silent film, and the first shot after they end seems inspired by the pointillist Georges Seurat. All of this might be taken as an invitation to look beyond dialogue, to pay attention to gaps.Nearly every scene in this ultra-low-key cringe comedy involves people behaving with varying degrees of over- and under-chumminess. Alice (Emma Diaz) and her friend Ray (Fergus Wilson) drive separately to a campground. Almost immediately, a bewhiskered fellow camper persistently advises them to move their tent, and a girl, Lauren (Poppy Jones), assumes Ray is Alice’s romantic interest (a mistake that Ray may share). Soon Lauren is offering Alice articles of clothing from her dead mother, an act of queasily intimate hospitality that is a hallmark of Vaughan’s characters.When the action relocates to the Sydney area, the sense of Australia as a big, passive-aggressive small town only grows more pronounced. Ray and his pal Miles (David Gannon) drive to a wedding-videography gig (which Ray plans to bluff his way through) only for Miles to develop food poisoning and take refuge not at their destination, but at the house next door.True to its title, “Friends and Strangers” is a movie of opposites. Motives are misread. A scenic waterfront home is rendered ominous by the avant-garde string music that an ambiguously hostile neighbor blasts at high volume. Ray makes an effort to go unnoticed that increases his visibility.While the pieces don’t necessarily fit in obvious ways, that’s presumably the point — and part of what makes “Friends and Strangers” so singular.Friends and StrangersNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. In theaters and on Metrograph’s virtual cinema. More

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      ‘Cyrano’ Review: Who Wrote the Book of Love?

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      Peter Dinklage wields pen and sword in a musical adaptation of the durable French romance.Cyrano de Bergerac is a lover and a fighter, but when we first meet him he is indulging in a brutal bit of theater criticism. Played with grace and gusto by Peter Dinklage, Cyrano emerges from a standing-room-only crowd to berate a pompous actor and drive him from the stage. With cutting rhymes and a sharp sword, he defends dramatic truth against the woeful thespian’s powdered preening. The audience, which had paid to see Cyrano’s victim, nonetheless mostly applauds his humiliation. The few who object are marked as fools, phonies or outright villains.Artifice mobilized in defense of authenticity. It’s a paradox as old as art, and one that “Cyrano,” a new screen musical based on Edmond Rostand’s French-class chestnut, embraces with a risky ardor. Directed by Joe Wright, with songs by members of the National (Bryce and Aaron Dessner wrote the music, with lyrics by Matt Berninger and Carin Besser) and a script by Erica Schmidt, this version wears its heart on its ruffled sleeve, pursuing its lush, breathless vision of romance with more sincerity than coherence.The original Cyrano, first performed in 1897, was an artful throwback to the poetic dramas of the 17th century, written in Alexandrine couplets and infused with lofty, archaic notions of love and honor. In the decades since, the story has become familiar through countless variations and adaptations. Cyrano, a soldier ashamed of his large, misshapen nose, is in love with Roxanne, who is smitten with a callow cutie named Christian. Cyrano uses his literary talents to woo Roxanne in Christian’s name. Each man becomes the other’s proxy. “I will make you eloquent, and you will make me handsome,” Cyrano says.The resulting confusion produces both comedy — a tangle of crossed signals and mistaken identities — and tragedy. Some versions soften or eliminate the tragedy, like Fred Schepisi’s sweet “Roxanne” (1987), starring Steve Martin and Daryl Hannah, and the recent Netflix teen charmer “The Half of It.” Wright and Schmidt’s “Cyrano,” which originated onstage in 2019, charges in the other direction, telegraphing its heartache in lyrics and building toward an operatic, death-haunted end.Along the way, it supplies some moments of fun, mostly thanks to Dinklage and Ben Mendelsohn as his conniving, predatory nemesis, the Duke De Guiche. He too is smitten with Roxanne (Haley Bennett), and as a high-ranking military officer holds the fates of Cyrano and Christian (Kelvin Harrison Jr.) in his hands. Mendelsohn excels at playing silky, sadistic bad guys like this, and he offers himself as a perfect foil to Dinklage, whose Cyrano is acerbic, cantankerous and openhearted.His small stature rather than his large nose makes this Cyrano think himself unworthy of Roxanne, who sees him as a close friend and confidant. She and Christian have an immediate physical spark, efficiently conveyed through smoldering glances. Bennett and Harrison do their part to infuse a technically chaste courtship with an element of horniness. Her cheeks are in a state of permanent semi-blush, and he conveys stammering, tongue-tied desire.They almost upstage Cyrano’s words, which are meant to supply the conduit for a truer form of love. Rostand’s play is built on an emotional rendering of the mind-body problem. Together, Cyrano and Christian add up to a perfect man — word and image, spirit and flesh, agape and eros — but only insofar as they succeed in deceiving Roxanne. Even though there is only one of her, she is also divided between the cerebral and the sensual dimensions of love.At one point, Wright tries to bridge this gap by staging part of a musical number in Roxanne’s bedroom, where she reads Christian’s — that is, Cyrano’s — letters in a state of soft-focus ecstasy, pressing the pages against her lips and bosom as she tumbles across the duvet. The earnest preposterousness of this sequence, which might have worked on MTV sometime in the early ’90s, is representative of the movie’s silliness and its longing for sublimity.A musical should be capable of embracing both. But Wright, while a canny craftsman, is too committed to good taste to go over the top into either melodrama or camp. The music strikes a pretty good balance between rock ’n’ roll economy and show-tune extravagance, though the soundtrack is like an album of second-best songs. Only a plaintive anthem sung by soldiers on the eve of battle stands out, partly because its sentimentality has little to do with the central love triangle.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      IMAX Looks Beyond Movies to Live Events

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      To combat the decline of theatergoing, the large-format cinema company will show events like concerts, stand-up comedy and e-sports tournaments.As Kanye West thundered through “Black Skinhead” at the Los Angeles Coliseum in December as part of a benefit concert, young fans in the front row threw their bodies around in wild abandon. Others pumped their fists in the air and shouted along to the lyrics: “Pardon, I’m getting my scream on!”Except these fans were nowhere near the Coliseum. They were inside a suburban movie theater. IMAX, the large-format cinema company, had teamed up with Mr. West to expand the concert’s live footprint by beaming his performance in real time to 35 IMAX theaters, adding more than 10,000 seats. Although the first-of-its-kind event was also available to stream live on Amazon Prime Video, IMAX sold out its shows.“It’s hard to beat a six-story Kanye standing in front of you,” Richard L. Gelfond, IMAX’s chief executive, said in a phone interview.Kanye X Drake Concert IMAX Reaction🔥👀 pic.twitter.com/1uwHgz0dM5— Rap301 (@_Rap301) December 12, 2021
      Mr. Gelfond needs a lot of ticket buyers to agree with him — and not just for events involving Mr. West, who did another live collaboration with IMAX on Tuesday night, this time in 60 theaters, with a near-sellout crowd of almost 18,000 and tickets costing $20 to $30. In the coming months, IMAX intends to expand its menu to include stand-up comedy and e-sports tournaments. A company spokesman said negotiations were underway with several pop stars for concerts. H.E.R., the R&B sensation, has already agreed to collaborate with IMAX on a project. (One challenge: artist punctuality. Mr. West started his Tuesday performance more than two hours late.)Other events will revolve around exclusive film screenings, with stars and filmmakers participating in live question-and-answer sessions. Frances McDormand and the director Joel Coen did one tied to “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” a film that was primarily distributed on Apple TV+. Peter Jackson fielded questions after an IMAX-only release of his Disney+ documentary, “The Beatles: Get Back.” Both streaming services were looking for ways to “eventize” the content — to focus attention on “Macbeth” and “Get Back” so they didn’t get lost in the torrent of streaming-service offerings.A discussion featuring the actor Frances McDormand and the filmmaker Joel Coen was shown at 17 IMAX theaters after a screening of “The Tragedy of Macbeth” in December.Loren Wohl for IMAXIn December, Gwen Stefani hosted an IMAX fan event live from her house, where she screened her favorite holiday film (“Elf,” which had never been shown in the IMAX format) and promoted her Christmas album. Steven Spielberg and members of his “West Side Story” cast also participated in an IMAX event.“If you don’t keep reinventing yourself, you’re not going to move your business forward,” Mr. Gelfond said. “So we’ve been working for the last few years on events, what we informally call IMAX 3.0. The world is changing, and the movie industry is changing.”Mr. Gelfond was referring to the ascendance of streaming services and the decline of traditional moviegoing. Both trends have been percolating for years, but they intensified during the pandemic, when many theaters were closed. Studios are now diverting most of their dramas, musicals, comedies and modestly budgeted action movies to affiliated streaming services. Leviathan fantasy franchises and sequels will continue to flow to theaters. But how will theater operators fill the gaps in their schedules?Megan Colligan, the president of IMAX Entertainment, noted that live events “often bring in audiences that haven’t been to an IMAX theater and, in many cases, have not been to a movie theater at all in a very long time, sometimes ever.”Ms. Colligan emphasized that IMAX events were not just about throwing content onto a really big screen, but would specifically make use of the company’s premium-format technology. Mr. West and his team, for instance, used 16 extra-high-resolution IMAX cameras to capture the December benefit performance (out of 20 cameras in total).“There was a lot of smoke and mist, and making sure we were capturing that correctly was something that was really important to them,” Ms. Colligan said. She added that the Oscar-nominated cinematographer Larry Sher was the project’s director of photography.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      ‘Mr. Bachmann and His Class’ Review: Learning From the Best

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      Maria Speth’s enthralling documentary spends a year in the classroom of an unconventional teacher in a German industrial town.The students in Dieter Bachmann’s class are sometimes bored. They’re in the sixth grade, so this is to be expected, though there’s a decent chance that these particular adolescents, observed by the filmmaker Maria Speth over the course of the 2016-17 academic year, are less bored than most of their peers, thanks to their energetic and unconventional teacher.What is certain is that, even at more than three and a half hours, the fly-on-the-wall documentary Speth has culled from her time in the classroom is the opposite of tedious.By virtue of its length, the elegance of its editing and the warmth of its curiosity, “Mr. Bachmann” and his class might remind you of a Frederick Wiseman film. The comparison only goes so far. Wiseman tends to be interested in how collective and impersonal structures — neighborhoods, organizations, institutions — illuminate individual personalities and relationships. Speth’s attention moves in the opposite direction.Her film starts with the teacher, whose patience and charisma draws out the children and magnetizes the viewer. Gradually, a group portrait emerges that is also a remarkably detailed and complex picture of a town and a nation. And more than that: an intimate, humanist epic.The town is Stadtallendorf, Germany, about an hour north of Frankfurt. A rural village for most of its history, it was industrialized by the Nazis, who built armaments plants and forced-labor camps. After World War II, “guest workers,” mostly from Turkey, were recruited for metalworks and other factories. (You’ll learn these facts and more on field trips and during class discussions.)Bachmann’s pupils are mostly the children of immigrants — from Bulgaria, Morocco and Azerbaijan, among other countries. Their proficiency in German varies, as do their academic prospects. Part of Bachmann’s job is to decide which secondary-school track is right for each student, a task he undertakes with clarity, compassion and some reluctance.A former sculptor and sociology student now in his 60s, usually dressed in a knit cap and a hooded sweatshirt, Bachmann is aware of the tension between his countercultural impulses and his bureaucratic duties. He administers tests and hands out grades, but also keeps musical instruments and art supplies on hand for jam sessions and creative projects. Even though his anarchist streak is partly what makes him a benevolent authority figure, you wouldn’t say he’s soft or lenient with his students. Instead, he’s honest with them, treating them not as friends or peers but as people whose entitlement to dignity and respect is absolute.They test and tease him and can be inconsiderate or cruel with one another. They’re kids, after all. A handful come into special focus, nearly upstaging their teacher and contributing to the emotional richness of the film. We don’t learn much about their lives outside of school (or about Bachmann’s), but each one is a universe of feeling and possibility, vivid and vulnerable.And lucky to have crossed paths with Bachmann. The film ends with his retirement after 17 years of teaching, a bittersweet moment that Speth observes with tact and understatement. This isn’t a heroic-teacher drama about idealism in the face of adversity. It’s an acknowledgment of the hard work of learning, and the magic of simple decency.Mr. Bachmann and His ClassNot rated. In German, with subtitles. Running time: 3 hours 37 minutes. Watch on Mubi. More

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      ‘The Automat’ Review: Put a Nickel in the Slot for Nostalgia

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      A documentary about Horn & Hardart’s automated cafeterias is sweet and shaggy, but an engrossing tale of cultural harmony.Whatever nostalgia is — homesickness, fantasy, delusion — it’s flooding “The Automat.” There’s something about people’s memories of these automated cafeterias that flourished in the United States for much of the 20th century — you put a nickel into a slot, open a door in an enormous wall of cabinets and pull out, say, a slice of pie or a ham sandwich — that sends them back to the era in which they frequented one. The documentary Lisa Hurwitz has directed about Automats is shaggy and full of cutesy stuff, mostly involving Mel Brooks. But the sight of all these lit-up faces — see Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Carl Reiner, Colin Powell — made me hunger to be back where they wish they were: at 5, at 17, at 20-something, plunked down at a table with a bowl of baked beans.The movie unfurls the history of Horn & Hardart, the Manhattan-and-Philadelphia-based chain of restaurants the Automat was synonymous with. It’s an engrossing tale of commercial expansion, industrial innovation and cultural harmony even in times, like the Civil Rights era, when that kind of unison seems tough to fathom. Hurwitz finds biological descendants of Hardart and professional heirs of Horn. She locates John Romas, an Austrian immigrant who was the company’s vice president of engineering. There are conversations with the authors of a Horn & Hardart book, a moving visit to one of the designers of a powerfully witty 1970s ad campaign and a sit-down with W. Wilson Goode, Philadelphia’s first Black mayor, who served during a notoriously cataclysmic period. And the worst that anybody has to say about anything is that the Automat is gone.Hurwitz and her editors, Michael Levine and Russell Greene, have the interviews, archival footage and bright, soaring, relentless music to plunge us, accordingly, into states of delight and visceral lament. I, at least, am astounded that a movie this chipper, one so easily distracted by its boldface names (Hurwitz includes footage of Brooks essentially telling her how to make the movie), also feels like the key to some lock on the American soul. Just about every source says that what they loved about the Automat was that everyone was welcome. So as the millionth exterior shot and umpteenth photo of those towering cabinets hit me, I got sad, too: why oh why did it all have to end? The answer is typical: the interstate, suburbanization, mismanagement, classism, snobbery, inflation. All of which this movie does more than allude to.And yet — and this, for me, is a heavy yet — it feels as if the movie is skirting something. I get it: Hurwitz wins time with at least four American VIPs, three of whom are no longer with us, and the fourth, Brooks, remains so bewitched by the Automat that he writes a theme song and performs it with real Jimmy Durante bark. Romas, we learn, has also died. And each luminary’s enchantment appears to have inhibited an urge to commit more rigorous probing. (This is a feel-good movie!)I just wonder whether it could have felt better to know more precisely how Horn & Hardart managed a racially integrated clientele when its competition couldn’t have cared less for that sort of thing. When Ginsburg and others enthuse that everybody was welcome, they mean matrons and stenographers, executives, artists and “bums,” to quote Brooks; a panorama of metropolitanism commingling over coffee and Salisbury steak. But the montage of images that accompanies Ginsburg’s assessment includes one photo of an Asian family and another of a blurry Asian man sharing a table with a white diner. The movie has photos of other nonwhite diners; they just don’t appear in this “everybody was welcome” section.The doors did appear to be open to all. Goode offers that Horn & Hardart was “a nice place where African Americans could go and feel dignified.” Powell more or less backs him up, only to have Hurwitz interrupt not with a follow-up question but to move and make an unseemly adjustment of his necktie. (He doesn’t seem amused.) On one of our regular phone calls right before she died in 2020, when she was about 90, my grandmother Martha Ann James, a lifelong Philadelphian (and dignified African American) who is very much not in this movie, rhapsodized for 20 minutes about Horn & Hardart: the coffee, the classy downtown building, the meatloaf, the affordable prices, the magnitude of welcome. (This from a woman who maintained quite a catalog of unwelcome.)So — this is not to dispute the film’s gloss on the belonging one could experience at the Automat. It’s merely to say that it is indeed a gloss. Powell remembers that part of the magic of the dining experience was the magic of the automation itself. As a boy, he knew that someone was behind that wall of food lockers — cooks, maintenance men, servers of a sort. But Hurwitz is content to let the mystery be.If anything, “The Automat” seeks to burnish the mystique — it won’t be hijacked by social politics even if the company’s stance in such matters appeared to be the right one. The movie opts for a starry, top-down vantage. We hear about the chiefs and their business decisions and, save for the late appearance of the actor and former busboy Apache Ramos, very little from or about the people behind the lockers, or even regular people who remember eating there. What we learn about the bosses is illustrative, of course. So is Hurwitz’s approach.Her determination to embody nostalgia succeeds all too well. As the film unspools Horn & Hardart’s demise, something telling happens. A person close to the company identifies a shift away from a kind of civic benevolence in its management style after its president, Edwin Daly, died in 1960. A minute later, the movie turns to Howard D. Schultz, the Starbucks founder and executive, who recalls that his first Automat experience is what made him want to be a merchant. The Horn & Hardart ethos infuses Starbucks’s, he says, beaming. You can see what he means. He then holds up a framed photograph of Automat cabinets that hangs in his office, a handsome people-free image of imprisoned pies. He, too, mentions that the place was run by magic. It’s a shame we don’t hear more about the less fancy magicians. The closest we get are rapturous accounts of the women who changed dollars into nickels without ever looking at the coins. With minutes left, Brooks goes gaga at the thought of the Automat’s coconut custard. “God made that,” he says. In this movie, He might as well have.The AutomatNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 19 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Automat,’ Where Dining Out Was D.I.Y.

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      The director Lisa Hurwitz discusses the history of the Horn & Hardart chain of restaurants, which offered comfort food in coin-operated glass boxes.What do Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Colin Powell, Elliott Gould, Carl Reiner and the former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz have in common? They all fondly recall eating at an Automat — that beloved institution of D.I.Y. dining that lasted from 1902 to 1991 in New York and Philadelphia. Lisa Hurwitz’s detailed documentary, “The Automat” (in theaters), toasts Horn & Hardart’s storied chain of restaurants, where comfort-food dishes perched in coin-operated glass boxes lining the walls. Sort of like a mailroom, but with delicious pie and soup instead of bills.The bustling Automats merged marble-and-brass style and a come-one-come-all philosophy. Horn & Hardart’s last Automat (on 42nd Street and Third Avenue) closed in 1991, after a decline hastened by fast food joints, real estate trends and changing habits. The film, Hurwitz’s debut feature, teems with historical detail and varied interviews (including all of the above fans plus Mel Brooks, in a movie-length swoon).I spoke with Hurwitz about her self-distributed film, which was nearly 10 years in the making. These are edited excerpts from our conversation.Why does the Automat hold a special place in many people’s hearts? Do you have any personal connection?Zilch. I grew up in Los Angeles, my mom is from the Midwest, my dad is from L.A. When our families emigrated to America, we did not settle in New York. So I became interested from stumbling upon it in the library. Eventually I made a short film in a nonfiction media class, a profile about Steve Stollman, the Automat collector. I didn’t really start hearing people’s personal stories until I started making the [feature] film and talking to people in New York and Pennsylvania.For people who are younger and remember going to the Automat one or two times, it was this incredible experience, going as a kid. For a lot of kids, that was the first time they got to choose what they wanted. Their parents would give them coins, and they could do what they wish. But for older people, I think the nostalgia is connected to the loved ones they went there with, people who are no longer with them. They think about their grandparents, their parents. It was like a second home.Lisa Hurwitz, the director of “The Automat.”Lucien Knuteson/Film ForumThe superfan Mel Brooks sings a tribute to the Automat, with a 26-piece orchestra. How did that come about?When I was directing this film festival in Olympia, Washington, we had a 3-D 35-millimeter presentation of “Jaws 3-D.” We had one of the screenwriters, Carl Gottlieb, who is part of that Mel Brooks circle. Carl and I became Facebook friends after his visit in Olympia, so he saw my Kickstarter campaign pop up in his newsfeed. He sent me a message saying, “I’m having dinner with Mel Brooks tonight. Do you mind if I mention your project?” He used his Mel Brooks card for me! I was really appreciative.Mel took a liking to me and the project, and he asked what else he could do to help. I asked him if he would sing a song. I would have it written for him, so all he had to do was go to the recording studio and perform it. He said, yeah, sure, and maybe even you and me, we can write something together, think up some ideas. A few weeks later he called me back and said, you know, Lisa, I’ve been doing some writing, and I got something. “Listen to this!” He starts singing to me on the phone, and it’s the beginnings of the song. Then a few weeks later, he’s got more. So he wrote the whole song. It’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me! Mel thinks I’m nutty in the nicest way possible, but he believes in the project. And I wanted the music to match the era. I wanted it to feel like an old Hollywood movie.Does the Automat represent an American ideal in some ways, with its democratic approach?It really does. And it’s a window onto America over 100 years. It was such an important place for immigrants. As people came into New York, the Automat became part of their American story. It played a role in the Americanization process, because it was an incredible environment: it had incredible food, it was cheap, you didn’t need to speak English, you could stay there a while. You could get freebie fare like ketchup soup, lemonade, water. And a place to stay warm. I think the Automat represents people coming together in the literal and metaphorical senses.What surprised you most in learning about the Automat?The big moment was when I found out about Howard Schultz. The creator of what has become the new Automat — ugh, I know people will hate me for saying that. But the way you see a Starbucks on every other block, that’s the way it was with Automats in New York! So to hear from Howard about how he’s never stopped thinking about the Automat when he’s thinking about how to grow Starbucks, I’m just drooling at this point. He could be serving shoes on a plate for all I care, but the point is that one of the most successful food entrepreneurs in the world is saying that. And it was easy to go about getting connected to him because at the time I lived in Seattle, which is kind of like a small Jewish town.If I had to choose one thing that the Automat was about, it’s about people sitting together and taking their time. It’s not only Starbucks — there’s a gazillion cafes out there. I just think it’s really healthy for society, for people, for us to be stuck with each other and to share a table with one another.What would you get if you could go to an Automat now?Macaroni and cheese, creamed spinach, mashed potatoes. I would try all the pies. And I would for sure need to try that coconut custard pie that Mel and Carl were both talking about! More

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      ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ Review: The Blade Is Back

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      Leatherface returns to terrorize a fresh batch of innocents in this poorly plotted, efficiently executed Netflix blood bath.By this point, the state of Texas has experienced so many chainsaw massacres that it’s a wonder the power tool hasn’t been banned.In David Blue Garcia’s “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” the blade is more active than ever. But while Leatherface, the homicidal head case who fashions masks from the skin of his victims, might be busier, his ability to scare has waned considerably. In empathy, the cinematographer Ricardo Diaz imbues a rare moment of calm with gorgeous pathos as Leatherface lumbers, alone, across a field of dead sunflowers, his hulking figure dwarfed by a bruised violet sky.Establishing a familiar red state-blue state tension immediately, the movie sends four young entrepreneurs (Sarah Yarkin, Nell Hudson, Elsie Fisher and Jacob Latimore) to a virtually deserted small town. Their mission is gentrification, their destination a property flying a Confederate flag and housing a withered crone (a delightfully desiccated Alice Krige). A surly, gun-toting local (Moe Dunford, displaying greater nuance than the silly script requires) appears to be the town’s only other non-maniacal resident.“Why are you such a nihilist?” one newcomer inquires, because that’s how city folks speak to armed strangers. Dialogue, fortunately, is soon overtaken by dismemberments, building to a squelchy, party-bus slaughter and the movie’s sole stab at humor. Flashbacks to an earlier mass trauma suffered by one of the newcomers feel distasteful, but the return of Sally, the sole survivor of the first film (now played by Olwen Fouéré), feels exactly right.Having waited almost 50 years to bag her monster, Sally should not have been surprised to find him, like so many failed sons, living with his version of a mother this whole time.Texas Chainsaw MassacreRated R. It’s right there in the title, folks. Running time: 1 hour 21 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More