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      ‘C’mon C’mon’ Review: Are You My Mommy?

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      In Mike Mills’s latest film, Joaquin Phoenix plays an uncle who takes care of his precocious nephew during a family crisis.There’s a scene in Mike Mills’s “C’mon C’mon” when a guy talks to his sister about how tough parenting can be. “I have so much sympathy,” he says, with a laugh. It’s a wink-wink moment because everyone knows the challenges. We know them, Mills knows them and so do these characters, who are sensitive and concerned. The brother has been taking care of his sister’s son and is gently mocking himself with his observation — kids are a lot! — though he’s also drawing attention to himself and the work he’s put in.A story about love and the eternal tug of war between self-interest and caring for others, “C’mon C’mon” is a nice movie about characters who are so nice that I almost feel bad for not being nicely disposed toward them or this movie, even with Joaquin Phoenix as the guy and Gaby Hoffmann as the sister. Their characters, Johnny and Viv, get the story rolling when she says she needs to deal with her husband (Scoot McNairy), who’s suffering a mental-health crisis. Johnny steps in to help with her 9-year-old, Jesse, played by Woody Norman, a charmer who looks a bit like a peewee Mathieu Amalric.The story tracks what happens when Johnny, who’s single and has no children, steps into the parenting role. Although it’s foreign territory for him, he approaches his new responsibilities with kindness and openness, if rather too much unconvincing, narratively expedient naïveté. Certainly the family’s redrawn geometry proves beneficial for Viv and Johnny, who were estranged and now frequently check in with each other, phoning and texting. Viv misses her son, and is reaching out, but she’s also coaching Johnny, teaching him how to handle Jesse. And, as the siblings talk and talk, their complex past burbles up.Mills manages the preliminaries seamlessly, creating an instant sense of cohesion and flow: You believe and recognize these people and places. Although he always lavishes conspicuous attention on the visual scheme of his movies — everything is very precise, very arranged — his gift is for the seductive sense of intimacy among characters, which quickly turns actors into people you care about. That’s true even when he’s working with established performers like Christopher Plummer in “Beginners” (an autobiographical movie about Mills’s father) and Annette Bening in “20th Century Women” (about his mother). “C’mon C’mon” was inspired by Mills’s relationship with his child.Shot in black and white, which gives the visuals a jewel-like shimmer and a patina of misplaced nostalgia, the movie opens with Johnny on the road. He’s in Detroit, gathering material for a radio documentary about children. Now, alone in a hotel room, he speaks into a microphone, cycling through his interview questions. He opens with: “When you think about the future, how do you imagine it will be?” He then turns to nature and cities and families, the scene ending just after he asks: “What makes you happy?” Over the course of the movie, Johnny continues to ask these existentially freighted questions, eventually finding his own answers through his evolving relationship with Jesse.And so while Viv cares for Paul, Johnny tends to Jesse. Johnny also takes Jesse on the road with him, so he can work on the documentary. There are giggles and laughs, pinpricks of pain and storms of emotion. Over time, as the connection between Johnny and Jesse tightens, their respective wariness gives way to deeper feelings and mutual appreciation. Yet, while the story’s emotional weight is meant to rest in the moments of tenderness between these two, and especially how they effect Johnny — his issues, his growth, his capacity for love — the characters never register as deeply or have the poignancy of the scenes with the nonprofessional children whom Johnny interviews.Phoenix, bearded and in full shambolic mode (he often looks as if he just woke up), nevertheless makes an appealing center of gravity. That’s useful, because the more Johnny gropes his way through his parenting duties, the more exasperating the character becomes, and the more precious and self-regarding the movie feels. Mills smartly keeps the dramatic incidents in a minor key, and while Johnny and Jesse bond, they also argue over small stuff. Jesse makes sense as a character and periodically acts out — he’s a kid (a person!) and worried about his dad — but Johnny increasingly seems like a storytelling contrivance, as well as a lesson in enlightened gender roles.At one point, Johnny picks a book up from Viv’s desk. “Motherhood,” he reads in thoughtful voice-over, “is the place in our culture where we lodge or rather bury the reality of our own conflicts, of what it means to be fully human.” As he continues reading, the text shifts to mothers themselves: “Why on earth should it fall to them to paint things bright and innocent and safe?” These are good questions. The answers are also staggeringly obvious, and it’s difficult to know whether Mills thinks these thoughts are revelatory or whether he wants us to think that Johnny — a 21st century, presumably well-educated, ostensibly enlightened bougie, NPR-style journalist — has been living under a rock.It’s hard not to regret that “C’mon C’mon” isn’t about Viv, a spiky, persuasively honest character who’s actually one of the mothers Johnny reads about. But, much like the children whose words and faces are sprinkled throughout the movie, Viv is mostly on hand to help Johnny on his journey. Unlike her, these kids aren’t fictional, and their inclusion is a terrible miscalculation: “C’mon C’mon” is too slight and too narrow a vessel to bear the intense weight of their reality. These children are tentative, painfully sincere and at times terribly raw. And while their future may not necessarily be bright, unlike Johnny, they manifestly do live in the mind-blowing, heartbreaking great big world.C’mon C’monRated R for language. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Princess Switch 3’ Review: Meow, It’s Fiona’s Turn

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      A golden star on loan from the Vatican to crown the holiday tree in tiny Montenaro has been stolen. What’s a royal family to do?One of the most satisfying moments of “The Princess Switch 3: Romancing the Star” is seeing the scheming villain Fiona, in sequined beanie and stiletto sandals, swabbing the floors of the local convent and orphanage, working off the hefty community service sentence she earned last year in the previous edition of this seasonal Netflix movie series directed by Mike Rohl.The only scene to top it is when Fiona (Vanessa Hudgens) tries to walk a dog, and ends up being hauled along a snow-dusted sidewalk like a sled by the very Great Dane at the end of the leash. But it turns out that even this batty outsider has something to contribute when her cousin Queen Margaret (also Vanessa Hudgens) needs her help — and can commute her community service.Margaret and Fiona’s look-alike cousin from America, Stacy (also played by you-know-who), is on hand with Prince Edward (Sam Palladio), her handsome but clueless husband, for the much-anticipated Christmas pageant. One thing is certain: The celebration will be dripping with enough lights to run up a staggering electric bill. What they don’t suspect is that an intrigue of Continental proportions is going to shake up the impeccable snow globe that is Montenaro.That intrigue would involve the Star of Peace, a precious decorative relic from the Vatican (who knew there was a lending library there?), which has barely arrived when it mysteriously disappears. What the royal retinue needs is an expert on the criminal mind: in a word, Fiona.When the flamboyant answer to their prayers sashays into the room, she locks eyes with Stacy’s husband and greets him with a purring “Hello, royal six-pack.” That’s how she talks. And she meows, and says “Zzzzzzzttttt!”Anyone who has seen one of these movies can just take over for the characters and guess their lines as easily as the three cousins can swap clothes and accents to impersonate one another.Interchangeable though the cousins may be, Fiona grabs the spotlight this year. Through her connections she produces an ex, Peter Maxwell (Remy Hii), a former Interpol officer with the sophisticated suite of crook-catching tools needed to retrieve the Star. But, paving the way for more sequels that are less superficial, she is drawn as the one character who actually grows, who steps out of her one-dimensional bad-girl type to reveal her vulnerability. Sharing some long-buried memories, she helps us understand why she is cold and distant when she puts down her peppermint martini and feather boa.The Princess Switch 3: Romancing the StarRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘The First Wave’ Review: How to Fight a Virus

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      The documentary tracks the first four months of the novel coronavirus in March 2020, as it overwhelms works at a hospital in Queens.The documentary “The First Wave,” an intimate portrait of the first four months of the coronavirus pandemic in New York City, goes inside the Long Island Jewish Medical Center in Queens, as doctors, nurses and patients attempt to fight a surge that threatens to overwhelm the hospital’s capacity.The director Matthew Heineman (“Cartel Land,” “A Private War”) prefers a fly-on-the-wall style as he observes the scenes in the hospital. It’s clear he was granted a remarkable degree of access to make this documentary. The camera watches from the bedside of flat-lining patients as their doctors try to resuscitate them.Heineman pans close to intubated faces, and the audience sees the desperation of patients who try until their last breaths to expel fluid from their lungs.In the scenes that follow, the film’s central figure, Dr. Nathalie Dougé, is overwhelmed by a new disease that doesn’t follow familiar patterns. It’s agonizing to witness the degree of suffering that this movie documents, all the more so because the pandemic is still ongoing.Heineman doesn’t include talking heads to contextualize the images that are presented, preferring to allow doctors and nurses to explain the chaos surrounding them. The deliberate lack of an external perspective adds to the crushing atmosphere at the hospital. This is not a comprehensive portrait of diagnostics, treatment plans or even the political circumstances that produced such a deadly first surge. But the film succeeds in presenting an on-the-ground view of what it felt like to be inside a hospital in the spring of 2020. It was harrowing, death was everywhere and there was no end in sight.The First WaveRated R for graphic images, medical gore and language. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn’ Review: No Sex, Please, We’re Romanian

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      A viral video scandal ensnares a Bucharest schoolteacher in Radu Jude’s biting, bawdy and brilliant Covid-age fable.The English title of Radu Jude’s new feature, “Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn,” strikes me as deliberately clumsy, in keeping with the cacophonous, off-kilter tone of the movie itself. My Romanian isn’t what it should be, but I might quibble with “loony,” since the porn in question — a three-minute clip that is the first thing audiences see — doesn’t seem especially crazy. It’s certainly explicit, but the lunacy Jude is interested in exploring has less to do with what’s happening on camera than with some of the reactions to it.A decidedly amateur piece of adult cinema, the video shows a married couple exuberantly enjoying each other’s company. The action, recorded on a cellphone, is inadvertently comical (a mother-in-law knocks on the door in medias res) and mildly kinky. There’s a lot of breathless dirty talk, and also a latex flogger, a magenta wig and a leopard-print mask — the costume-party kind, not the Covid-precautionary kind.There will be plenty of those in evidence later, when the camera (now wielded by professionals) moves out into the noisy, pandemic-anxious streets of Bucharest and the focus shifts from sex as a conjugal pastime to sex as a political and cultural issue. That’s where the bad luck comes in. The naughty video has made its way onto the internet — exactly how is a matter of some ambiguity — causing problems for one of the participants, Emilia Cilibiu (Katia Pascariu), a history teacher at a prestigious secondary school. Outraged parents have demanded a meeting, and much of the movie consists of Emi (as she is called) preparing for that event and then enduring it.But plot summary is more than usually irrelevant here. “Bad Luck Banging” announces itself as “a sketch for a popular film,” and it unfolds, in its first two-thirds, as a portfolio of documentary gleanings and notebook entries rather than as a linear narrative. Shooting in the summer of 2020, Jude and his team were clearly constrained by the realities of Covid-19, but they also succeeded in turning a bad situation to creative advantage, facing the awfulness and absurdity of the present with wit, indignation and a saving touch of tenderness.In the first section (following the pornographic prologue), Emi walks through Bucharest, talking on her phone and pursuing various errands. Dressed in a sober gray suit, her blue surgical mask double-looped over her ears, she navigates a tableau of bustling urban banality, her own stress visible in her eyes and brows.She tries to purchase a single Xanax at a pharmacy and is given an herbal remedy instead. She pays a visit to the school director (Claudia Ieremia), whose apartment is a scene of baroque domestic chaos. The atmosphere in the shopping malls and open-air markets is even more hectic, and much less polite. Citizens lower their masks to scream obscenities at one another. Rudeness is so endemic that it seems like its own form of civility. Graphic remarks about someone’s genitals — or, more often, their mother’s genitals — sound almost neighborly.This dissonant city symphony ends on a somber note, in a shot of a closed-down movie theater with a “For Rent” sign in the window. In the scheme of things, this may be a minor catastrophe, but it segues into a litany of disasters that make up the film’s essay-like middle chapter.Taking a break from Emi and her plight, Jude compiles a “short dictionary of anecdotes, signs and wonders.” The entries run from “August 23, 1944” (the date Romania left the Axis and joined the Allies in World War II) to “Zen” and consist of brief skits and snippets of archival and social-media video. With grim humor, they glance at ugly facts of human existence — war, misogyny, household violence, racism, workplace exploitation — and pay special attention to Romania’s complicity in the two major forms of 20th-century totalitarianism.Some of that information will be on the exam — or will at least resurface when Emi faces her accusers in an open-air, socially distanced inquisition in the courtyard of the school. The indignant parents include an airline pilot, a military officer, an Orthodox priest and a hipster intellectual who reads long passages of sociological theory from his phone. (He may actually be on Emi’s side, but with an ally like that, who needs trolls?) Someone invokes the name of Mihai Eminescu, Romania’s national poet of the 19th century, and Emi responds by reciting one of his lesser-known bawdy poems.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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      ‘Zeros and Ones’ Review: Plague and Paranoia

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      Abel Ferrara’s lockdown experiment is a spooky political thriller with a double dose of Ethan Hawke.Cryptic to a fault, Abel Ferrara’s “Zeros and Ones” unfolds in a murkiness that’s both literal and ideological. Even its star, Ethan Hawke — speaking to us as himself in two brief scenes that bookend the movie — admits that, initially, he didn’t understand Ferrara’s script. His candor is comforting, and emboldening, encouraging persistence with a story whose destination seems as vague as its characters’ motivations.What’s clear is that the constraints of pandemic filmmaking were catnip to Ferrara, whose jittery camera patrols the deserted nighttime streets of a locked-down Rome alongside J.J. (Hawke), an elite American soldier on a mysterious undercover mission. This requires finding his twin brother, Justin (also Hawke), an imprisoned revolutionary whom we see being questioned and repeatedly tortured.Surveilled by shady foreign agents, J.J. creeps from one furtive encounter to another, constantly filming his progress. Pitiless, grainy close-ups capture him sipping tea with a mother and child — perhaps his brother’s family — in a blank apartment and, later, alongside a mullah in a mosque. A terrorist attack on the city may be imminent, but J.J. is otherwise engaged with a couple of slinky prostitutes (“They’re both negative,” their madam helpfully advertises) and a beautiful Russian woman (played by the director’s partner, Cristina Chiriac) who’s forcing him to have sex at gunpoint. By this juncture, the only thing we know for sure is that Ferrara, bless his guttersnipe soul, is still bracingly, adamantly himself.Steadfastly shouldering this rambling, barely penetrable narrative, Hawke smoothly distinguishes the implacable intensity of J.J. from the delusions of his brother (whose messianic rantings recall Hawke’s startling performance as John Brown in last year’s Showtime drama “The Good Lord Bird.”) Saddled with some of the film’s dippiest dialogue (“You hate trees!,” he screams at his unidentified tormentors), Justin serves as the enfeebled, despairing conscience of a world seemingly abandoned by God and compassion alike.With its prickling, apocalyptic aesthetic and persistent paranoia, this spooky political thriller is all about a mood: conspiratorial, sinister, unsettled. Here, the accessories of pandemic life become even more ominous: A sanitizing team on the subway recalls plague thrillers like “Contagion” (2011), and a suddenly-brandished thermometer pointed at J.J.’s forehead plays like a gun attack. When everyone is wearing a mask, how do we tell the good guys from the bad?Utterly baffling, yet never less than intriguing, “Zeros and Ones” lingers in the mind. Even after you think you’ve brushed it off, its chilly tendrils continue to cling.Zeros and OnesRated R for temptation and torture. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘India Sweets and Spices’ Review: Gossip, Secrets and Biting Laughs

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      A party invitation exposes a family and a community in this Geeta Malik feature starring Sophia Ali.In Geeta Malik’s comedy-drama “India Sweets and Spices” the aunties maim. At least emotionally. The wives and mothers who live in an upscale New Jersey enclave of Indian Americans like their gossip spicy and don’t seem to care who feels the burn. (The scotch-drinking, suit-clad uncles aren’t laggards in that department either.)When Alia Kapur (Sophia Ali) arrives home from the University of California, Los Angeles, for the summer, she sets in motion a maelstrom of chatter. Her plans to chill are derailed by her parents, who draft her into attending the Saturday parties that move from well-appointed home to well-appointed home, starting with theirs. On a whim, she invites Varun Dutta (Rish Shah) and his hard-working parents (the new owners of the titular grocery store) to the gathering. A summer of revelations ensues — the most startling of which concern Alia’s dad and mom, Ranjit (Adil Hussain) and Sheila (Manisha Koirala).Caste snobbery has followed these families from India to the United States. While Alia and her friends roll their eyes at each other about their parents’ obsessions with status, they also enjoy the swimming pools, BMWs and California universities that those priorities make possible.“India Sweets and Spices” is a gentle but firm take on the costs of keeping up with the Joneses, or the Devis in this case. Without sacrificing comedic buoyancy, Malik and her ensemble make palpable a community that is vibrant and claustrophobic. Koirala, a Bollywood star, brings a taut poise to a mother whose veneer seems adamantine until the Duttas walk in the door. Deepti Gupta delivers a soulful performance as the sage shopkeeper who knew Sheila a lifetime ago.India Sweets and SpicesRated PG-13 for frisky fooling around and some smoking. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Tick, Tick … Boom!’ Review: A Bohemian’s Rhapsodies

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      Andrew Garfield stars as Jonathan Larson, the composer and lyricist of “Rent,” in this meta-musical directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda.For his feature directing debut, the “Hamilton” honcho Lin-Manuel Miranda points his spotlight at the composer who inspired his own creative awakening: Jonathan Larson.That artist heard little applause in his lifetime. He died at age 35 from an aortic aneurysm the day before the first preview of his breakthrough hit, “Rent.” In addition to “Rent,” Larson left behind the 1991 meta-musical “Tick, Tick … Boom!,” a self-portrait of the artist as an angst-ridden wretch, which Miranda has reverently dusted and polished like a sacred totem for a select cult. When Larson introduces himself as “a musical theater writer, one of the last of my species,” the line prods fans to protest that his as-yet-unwritten rock musical would galvanize a generation of creators. Miranda, who saw “Rent” at 17, is palpably thrilled to gain access to his hero’s hovel on Greenwich Street, here recreated with exactitude — right down to the Scorpions cassette.“Tick, Tick … Boom!” is an autobiography of anxieties. Larson, played with kinetic desperation by Andrew Garfield, fixates on success. How can he get it? How long can his wallet can hold out for it? How much might his all-consuming ambition cost him emotionally? Larson stakes his hopes on wowing producers with a head-scrambling sci-fi operetta called “Superbia.” At the same time, his dancer girlfriend, Susan (Alexandra Shipp, primarily tasked to look beatific), threatens to slink off to a teaching job in the Berkshires, and his best friend, Michael (Robin de Jesús), sells out for a corporate salary and an apartment big enough to host the film’s only full-on dance number. (The charismatic de Jesús celebrates his walk-in closet by letting Garfield spin him in the air like a Christmas puppy.)“Compromise or persevere?” Garfield’s striver croons, convinced that his impending 30th birthday — the time bomb in the title — will mark his decline from future superstar to “waiter with a hobby.” Foreshadowing carries the film. Even the songs cop that Larson was not yet the lyricist he would become. The lyrics dwell on chirpy observations about his diner job, his writer’s block, his favorite swimming pool (another location in the film) and, of course, his prescient fear of mortality, which is the only reason Steven Levenson’s screen adaptation has dramatic heft.Miranda’s devotion to his idol keeps him from expanding the musical’s myopic fretting into a universal story of sacrifice and resolve. Garfield at least gives Larson an endearing vulnerability. While he isn’t a lifelong singer like Vanessa Hudgens (in a supporting role as a cast member in Larson’s show-within-the-show), Garfield holds up his half of their duet with a capable voice that creaks just enough to sound sincere. As a dancer, Garfield is a gleeful pogo-bopping creature in the homespun key of David Byrne. His gangly limbs fill the frame, and the cinematographer Alice Brooks even follows his lead by eschewing pizazz for the humble grays of a walk-up apartment in winter. Instead, it’s up to a constellation of stage legends to bring the glitz — and boy, do they, in a centerpiece number with so many cameos that this small-scale film briefly becomes Broadway’s “Avengers.”Tick, Tick … Boom!Rated PG-13 for unmelodic cursing and a whiff of drug use. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters and on Netflix. More

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      ‘Black Friday’ Review: Killer Sales Bring Killer Customers

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      In this horror-comedy, a group of resentful retail workers struggle to survive as shoppers overtaking their toy store are ravaged by a zombie plague.“Black Friday,” a horror-comedy directed by Casey Tebo, is as chaotic as its characters. The premise goes like this: As an alcoholic single father, Ken (’90s horror vet Devon Sawa), and a hypochondriac, Chris (Ryan Lee), join their neurotic co-workers on Thanksgiving night to prepare for the Black Friday onslaught at a big-box toy store, they have no idea that alien zombies are overtaking the human race. Once the carnage reaches their registers, the workers must band together to make it out alive. That harrowing journey yields a lot more goofiness than it does character development.This film would be perfectly delightful if it only strove for absurdity. Andy Greskoviak’s script lampoons corporate apathy and retail-work ennui with the same swiftness as his voracious zombies. Unfortunately, “Black Friday” also tries to make viewers root for its characters, who are mostly delightful because they are such wildly mediocre people. At one moment while hiding from the monstrous horde, each character explains what brought them to retail. It’s an excellent sequence that offers back story without forcing these misfits to bond. Yet at the end, the film seems to apologize for its refreshing misanthropy by tying these dynamics up with a Christmas bow.Unapologetically low-budget, “Black Friday” makes great use of prosthetics, practical effects and some very game actors to deliver its zany scares. This is exactly the kind of thing horror lovers should watch with like-minded friends as the holidays roll around (probably pre-meal, though, thanks to copious amounts of zombie puke). But it would be more memorable if it delivered a bitter end.Black FridayNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More