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      ‘Hocus Pocus 2’ Review: Still Spelling Trouble

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      The Sanderson sisters return, bringing the same spooky humor with some modern twists.Disney’s “Hocus Pocus” is one of the company’s few true cult classics; after an initial negative reception when it was released in 1993, the Halloween-themed comedy starring Bette Midler, Kathy Najimy and Sarah Jessica Parker as a trio of campy witch sisters gained a fan base through seasonal VHS rentals and repeated airings on ABC and the Disney Channel. And while its new sequel, “Hocus Pocus 2,” may be a blatant attempt by Disney to continue propping up its streaming platform Disney+ (where the movie has its debut), it manages to capture the same hokey magic of the original while creatively updating its humor.In a slight retread of the first film’s plot, “Hocus Pocus 2” follows two present-day Salem teenagers, Becca and Izzy (Whitney Peak and Belissa Escobedo), who accidentally bring the witchy Sanderson sisters back to life while performing their yearly Halloween night ritual. (The teens’ interest in witchcraft and the occult is benign, a very 2022 detail that might not have come across the same way 30 years ago.) High jinks ensue as the girls race to stop the witches from kidnapping the town’s genial mayor (Tony Hale) and casting an immortality spell that would make them all-powerful, while also making amends with their former friend, the mayor’s daughter, Cassie (Lilia Buckingham).Anne Fletcher (“Step Up,” “The Proposal”) directs this sequel, but follows the same goofy comedic approach of the Kenny Ortega-directed first film — namely, how the sisters react to modern inventions like robot vacuums, Amazon’s Alexa and Walgreens. Even a few meta-jokes nod to the Sanderson sisters’ popularity in the world of drag. Thankfully, with a cast rounded out by Doug Jones, Hannah Waddingham and Sam Richardson, the brew-haha’s aren’t solely concentrated in the three leads.Hocus Pocus 2Rated PG. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. Watch on Disney+. More

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      ‘Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon’ Review: Escape From New Orleans

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      This hyper-stylized quasi-superhero movie by Ana Lily Amirpour follows a mental hospital patient with supernatural abilities; it looks a lot more fun than it actually is.“Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon,” the third feature by the writer-director Ana Lily Amirpour (“A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night”), is a quasi-superhero movie that feels in step with something like “The Suicide Squad” or “Birds of Prey.”It, too, lays hard on the confetti-colored visuals and slick violence. And its lead, Mona Lisa (Jong-seo Jun), a mental hospital patient with telekinetic abilities, is only a hero insofar as we’re rooting for her to come out on top.Having broken out of the asylum, her mangled straitjacket mistaken for a fashion statement, Mona Lisa meets the clever stripper-single mother Bonnie (Kate Hudson), whom she saves from an unceremonious beat down. Blank-eyed and completely out of touch with the ways of the world, Mona Lisa is a mostly-silent, Edward Scissorhands-like character who might be mistaken for an innocent were she not also a literal puppet master able to control people’s bodies with her mind.Bonnie takes advantage of her new pal, directing the directionless Mona Lisa to force strangers into making sizable A.T.M. withdrawals. Naturally, there’s also a determined cop (Craig Robinson) on their tail, with the stakes of the manhunt heightened by an unconvincingly adorable friendship between Mona Lisa and Bonnie’s son, Charlie (Evan Whitten).The setting, a violet-drenched New Orleans, takes on the sweaty haze of a 3 a.m.-nightclub, but for all its glowing hyper-stylization and giddy needle drops, “Mona Lisa” only ever manages to tread shallow waters. Its comedy lands flat and its moments of emotional catharsis (when, for instance, Mona Lisa scares off Charlie’s egg-tossing bullies, or Charlie clashes with his neglectful mother over her exploitation of Mona Lisa) feel perfunctory. The movie, more often than not, has the look and feel of an edgy music video, which wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if it weren’t also oddly boring.Mona Lisa and the Blood MoonRated R for bloody self-inflicted violence and street assault. Running time: 1 hour 46 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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      ‘What We Leave Behind’ Review: A Father’s Final Project

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      At 89, Julián Moreno began building a home in Mexico for his children who had immigrated to the U.S. His granddaughter made the poignant documentary “What We Leave Behind.”When Iliana Sosa’s grandfather Julián Moreno turned 89, he stopped making trips from Mexico to El Paso, Texas, where Sosa’s mother lives. In her documentary “What We Leave Behind,” his granddaughter follows Moreno to his home in the Mexican state of Durango and watches as he undertakes one last project: building a house next to his own that his children who migrated to the U.S. might return to.With an approach that is more elegiac than sociological, the director signals the passage of nearly seven years with the progress of the new building and the evidence of Moreno’s decline. He shovels a bit. He fries an egg that begins sunny side up but ends scrambled. He carries a plank, annoyed that he can’t carry two. A quad cane appears.Eschewing the politics of policy, “What We Leave Behind” honors the poetics of a life: Moreno’s memories of his long-dead wife; his affection for the land; his fealty to his son Jorge, who is legally blind and lives with him; but also his belief in hard work. His face holds traces of the handsome young man pictured on the ID card he used as a bracero — an agricultural worker issued a temporary work permit to come to the United States after World War II.Compositionally calm but never static, the documentary trusts in motes of beauty: a dog lapping water out of a mop bucket; Jorge’s green bristled broom poised above a courtyard floor as he listens; a once-sturdy man lying in bed, his family surrounding him. “What We Leave Behind” insists upon power in stillness, and the poignancy in staying — and leaving.What We Leave BehindNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 11 minutes. In theaters and on Netflix. More

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      ‘InHospitable’ Review: Fight for Survival

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      Patients push back on a medical behemoth in this persuasive health care documentary.“InHospitable” is a decent advocacy documentary that compellingly argues a couple of points that aren’t easy to make compelling onscreen. One is that supposedly nonprofit hospitals often behave more like for-profit hospitals and don’t provide benefits commensurate with the tax breaks they receive. Another is that hospital mergers and anticompetitive practices tend to increase costs for patients.The movie, directed by Sandra Alvarez, focuses on a surge of activism in Pittsburgh, where, in mid-2019, a pair of consent decrees agreed to by two medical bodies, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (or U.P.M.C.) and Highmark, were set to expire. Both organizations were insurers and providers rolled into one, as well as competitors. The agreement ensured that U.P.M.C. would remain in-network for Highmark subscribers for certain care.The bad guy, in the film’s telling, is U.P.M.C., which is described as Pennsylvania’s largest employer and portrayed as having enormous political power. If the agreement expired, many Highmark patients would in effect have to switch insurers, pay higher costs or find new doctors elsewhere.“InHospitable” spends time with subjects like Vicki and Maurice Arnett, who travel to Atlanta to obtain covered cancer treatment for Maurice rather than risk a disruption in his care, and Evie Bodick, who is frustrated with having to leave her doctors at U.P.M.C. and find five new specialists.How this dispute was resolved three years ago — and even an early-pandemic coda from 2020 — is old news at this point. But Alvarez showcases a handful of experts, including health care economists and the former New York Times reporter Elisabeth Rosenthal, who cogently explain how the principles apply nationally.InHospitableNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 42 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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      ‘I Didn’t See You There’ Review: A View From His Seat

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      The filmmaker Reid Davenport, by turns pensive and irritated, takes viewers inside his life as a disabled person through footage shot entirely from his perspective.In the personal essay film “I Didn’t See You There” the filmmaker, Reid Davenport, makes an extended attempt to fully embody his point of view with the help of kinetic camerawork. As an artist with a disability, Davenport navigates the world in a wheelchair, with verve and little patience for the obstacles others can pose, both physical and ideological.His trips around Oakland, Calif., and across the country to visit his caring family in Connecticut lead him to reflect on “being looked at and not seen,” as he puts it, as well as on the labor of just going about his business in a world that doesn’t always have his needs in mind. His occasional meditations in voice-over are punctuated by pointed encounters with strangers, from flight attendants to an impressed neighbor, and an energizing percussive soundtrack.Davenport also dwells on dazzling views of the patterned surfaces — such as colorful pavements and walls — that he rolls past. These suggest a heightened attention to potential hazards, but they also evoke the joyous run-on reels of avant-garde diarists like the filmmaker Jonas Mekas.Davenport’s circumstances are different, of course. His mobility is often dependent on others, and he keeps the camera off himself, in contrast with the many dramas that turn people with disabilities into passive subjects. When he encounters a circus big top that has been erected in his neighborhood, he laments its galling presence and its associated history of freak shows.With his feature, Davenport stakes out his own vantage point on the world, one that leaves a viewer wishing to hear his thoughts elaborated even further.I Didn’t See You ThereNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 16 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘From the Hood to the Holler’ Review: A Race to Galvanize the Poor

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      A new documentary revisits the former Kentucky state representative Charles Booker’s 2020 campaign to unseat Mitch McConnell in the Senate.At a hearing in 2019 for a vote on a bill that would restrict abortion access in Kentucky, Charles Booker, a state representative at the time, gave an impassioned speech about abortion rights, criticizing politicians who had compared the medical procedure to lynching. When the speaker of the Assembly tried to silence him, Booker yelled, “My life matters, too, speaker,” as an older white man screamed at him to “sit down.”“I can only imagine that in this white person’s mind, he thought he had the right to tell this Black person to sit down,” Attica Scott, another state representative from Kentucky, says later.The exchange plays out in the new documentary “From the Hood to the Holler,” directed by Pat McGee. It follows Booker’s subsequent run for Senate in 2020, including a campaign defined by his willingness to walk across that racial divide, traveling to “hollers,” or poor, mostly white communities in Appalachia, to unite impoverished voters. Booker lost narrowly in a Democratic primary against Amy McGrath; some weeks before the election, the documentary notes, he had raised around $300,000 compared to her $29.8 million. (In May, Booker won the primary by a landslide, and he’ll face off against the Republican senator Rand Paul in November.)The documentary succeeds at presenting Booker as a candidate who can unite voters, and its best scenes show him meeting the moment. In one scene, he mediates between the police and protesters after the death of Breonna Taylor, whom he knew, convincing the officers to drop their batons in a show of solidarity. In another, he strategizes with his team about safety procedures for traveling through places that may have once been considered sundown towns, showing how racism persists in modern-day Kentucky and the nation.But though Booker’s story and success are inspiring, the documentary falls flat, feeling more like a political tool than a commentary on the state of politics in Kentucky. It would have benefited from less focus on Booker and more on the many Kentuckians he spoke to who are ready for a change.From the Hood to the HollerNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 42 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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      ‘Sirens’ Review: The Risk in Rocking Out in Beirut

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      A documentary about an all-female metal group in Lebanon shows the difficulties of asserting complex identities in a repressive environment.“Sirens,” a documentary by Rita Baghdadi about Slaves to Sirens, an all-female metal group out of Beirut, Lebanon, opens in 2019 with the band united and happy — they’ve been invited by a record label to play a small stage at Glastonbury Festival in England. And while they wind up playing to a handful of people, the band gives its all.Slaves to Sirens is a five-piece, and its neon-haired singer, Maya Khairallah, nails the monster voice that’s so common in contemporary metal. But the movie’s focus is on the band’s two guitarists and main composers, Shery Bechara and Lilas Mayassi. Baghdadi (“My Country No More”) shows how difficult it is to assert their identities in a repressive environment.When the band returns home to Beirut, an environment in constant turmoil — one where they’re barely tolerated, if noticed at all — tensions emerge.Nobody in the band is getting any younger. Lilas still lives with her mother. She has to enact childish subterfuges when her Syrian girlfriend comes to visit to hide the true nature of her relationship. Shery, bristling at Lilas’s bossiness (and perhaps still hurt because the two were once romantically involved), quits.With few other choices, Lilas and Shery find their way back to each other, at least creatively. The ending, in which the reunited Sirens play before an enthusiastic crowd, is heart-tugging and rousing, even for non-metal heads.SirensNot rated. In Arabic and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 19 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Justice of Bunny King’ Review: No Way Out

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      In this unsteady drama from New Zealand, Bunny, a chronic rule-bender, wants to pay a birthday visit to her daughter, but first she needs a house.A grim social-realist drama from New Zealand that labors to twist its narrative into a redemptive arc, “The Justice of Bunny King” has an unsteady tone to match its ungainly title.Bunny (Essie Davis) is introduced squeegeeing windshields for cash. She has no home of her own and, for reasons soon revealed, no custody of her children. Bunny, a chronic rule-bender, wants to pay a birthday visit to her young daughter (Amelie Baynes) in a couple of weeks, but she can’t secure permission from social services until she has a house.So the movie, directed by Gaysorn Thavat, follows Bunny’s desperate and increasingly self-defeating efforts to find a home in time for her daughter’s birthday, or, barring that, to find a way to be there with presents, whether or not she can pay for them. For a time, it seems like “The Justice of Bunny King” will find a way out of poverty for Bunny, who engages in a series of small cons to get what she needs. (One of the less convincing ideas in a movie with many is that donning a pantsuit will immediately shift people’s perception of her.)Around the halfway mark, Bunny hits the road with Tonyah (Thomasin McKenzie), her niece, who may be suffering abuse at home, and whose own story helps fill in the movie’s notion of Bunny as a righteous, loving protector whom the authorities simply refuse to treat as a human being. But the film needn’t stack the deck in Bunny’s favor — a less noble character might be more interesting — or look for glimmers of hope in a story that has few.The Justice of Bunny KingNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. More