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      ‘The Gutter’ Review: A Phenom Is Born

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      This bowling comedy, co-directed by the standup comedian Yassir Lester and his brother Isaiah, has absurdity to spare.The pantheon of Great Bowling Comedies is a small one. You’ve got the terribly rude 1996 “Kingpin,” directed by the Farrelly brothers and featuring an over-the-top, vulgar performance by Bill Murray as a maniacal strikes competitor. Then there’s the Coen brothers’ 1998 “The Big Lebowski,” in which Jeff Bridges, in the sort-of title role, looks like a slightly buzzed beacon of sanity compared with his fellow frame enthusiasts. “The Gutter,” written and co-directed by the standup comedian Yassir Lester and his brother Isaiah, is even more overtly absurdist than those earlier offerings.“The Gutter” tells the story of a Black phenom, Walt (Shameik Moore), achieving stardom in a sport dominated, if not defined, by white men. Walt — his elusive last name is a running joke — has a way with a strike that is discovered while he is tending bar at his aunt’s alley, which of course is in imminent danger of going out of business. Walt is not an ambitious man. His unlikely friend Skunk (D’Arcy Carden), a bowling observer, advises him to start putting away some money after he has won a few tournaments. “Don’t you have any dreams or anything?” she asks him. He considers this for a couple of blinks, and answers, “A threesome?”In addition to ridiculous — think the Wayans brothers’ parody pictures, or “Napoleon Dynamite” (that movie’s director, Jared Hess, is an executive producer here) — the humor is almost uniformly broad. The organization sponsoring the contests here is the “Super League of Bowling,” known as SLOB. And Susan Sarandon, as a champion bowler compelled out of retirement by Walt’s success, smokes and mugs with confident abandon, recalling Cecilia Monroe, the egomaniacal soap star she played on “Friends.”The GutterNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘Chasing Chasing Amy’ Review: A Fan’s Favorite

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      Sav Rodgers sets out to define the legacy of Kevin Smith’s “Chasing Amy” in this documentary, which is elevated by one instructive interview.Partway through “Chasing Chasing Amy,” Sav Rodgers, a first-time feature director and a mega fan of the 1997 movie he’s exploring, sits to interview the film’s star, Joey Lauren Adams. He begins to discuss the role when Adams cuts in.“Are you looking to me for something that I can’t give you?” she asks Rodgers. “I don’t know what it is you want from me.”The moment marks a turning point in Rodgers’s agreeable documentary, which sets out to provide a contemporary lens on “Chasing Amy.” It opens with the director sharing that he once used the story as a queer field guide and a source of comfort amid adolescent struggles. He then calls on writers and thinkers to unpack the movie’s themes and fraught position in the queer canon.But it is not until his interview with Adams that Rodgers touches on the most urgent questions of his cinematic survey. What do filmmakers owe their fans? Who can lay claim to a movie? And who defines its legacy?Adams goes on to share painful memories from that era, including leering Hollywood men — Harvey Weinstein was the producer — and jealous barbs from the “Chasing Amy” director Kevin Smith, her boyfriend at the time.Rodgers, a sheepish and at times bewildered guide, seems ill-equipped to reconcile Adams’s reflections with his admiration for Smith and “Chasing Amy,” and instead pivots the story to focus on his own personal and professional evolution. It’s a convenient ending, but one senses that Rodgers can’t see that, in his overview of the movie’s cultural impact, some perspectives are more instructive than others.Chasing Chasing AmyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Absolution’ Review: Brain Drain

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      Liam Neeson plays a regretful gangster with a serious medical condition in this drab, downbeat action movie.In 2019, Liam Neeson teamed up with the Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland to make the action thriller “Cold Pursuit.” It did not go well.Nevertheless, the two are back in harness for “Absolution,” a dreary gangster tale as depressing as Neeson’s repeat portrayals of aging tough guys-turned-reluctant avengers. This time, he’s a rumpled, rueful alcoholic and an enforcer for a Boston crime boss played by Ron Perlman. (Tony Gayton’s script is so lazy it declines to even name most of its characters.) The hook here is that Neeson’s leg-breaking character, let’s call him Punchy, is starting to forget important details like where he lives and the names of his criminal cohort. If he hurries, he’ll have just enough time to reconnect with his long-estranged daughter (Frankie Shaw), bed a feisty barfly (Yolonda Ross) and maybe rescue a sex-trafficking victim or two before succumbing to his disease. Or an associate’s bullet.Wrapped in drab visuals and a doomy atmosphere, “Absolution” paints a world where lowlifes rule and neither doctors nor priests can be trusted. Yet there are moments when the beatdowns pause and a misty melancholy shines through: Punchy, hands shaking, writing reminders in a little notebook, or having hallucinatory chats in a fishing boat with his long-dead, abusive father. The movie seeps sentimentality; but Neeson’s scenes with Shaw, who created and starred in the scrappy Showtime series “SMILF” (2017-19), have a touching authenticity, and Ross’s character is so spiky and warm she offers relief from Punchy’s soggy self-centeredness.Watching “Absolution,” I was reminded that Neeson is now 72 and his possible weariness with this kind of role might be lending credence to his character’s frailties. The problem with movies about declining antiheroes is that their arcs can only bend in one direction.AbsolutionRated R for violent men and damaged women.. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘We Live in Time’ Inspires a Thousand Crying Selfies

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      After seeing “We Live in Time,” social media users filmed themselves sobbing, creating a loop of people seeking an emotional release and then sharing it with the world.When they came across videos on TikTok of people crying after they watched “We Live in Time,” a new romantic drama starring Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield, Carmen Wells and her five roommates decided to watch the film.After the screening, “We were the last ones in the movie theater, sitting on the floor, sobbing,” said Ms. Wells, 19, a student at the University of North Carolina Wilmington.Thinking that their reactions were amusing, and wanting to encourage others to see the movie, Ms. Wells made her own video.“This is me before ‘We Live in Time,’” Ms. Well says in the video, looking composed and casual in a hoodie and glasses. A few seconds later, a shaky hand captures Ms. Wells walking on the street, sobbing as she cries out, “He loves her so much!” Another few seconds pass, and Ms. Wells is holding the camera again. She turns it toward herself. “This is me,” she says through tears.The video, which she posted last week, joined a wave of “crying selfies” that fans of “We Live in Time” have created in response to the film’s heart-wrenching story about love and loss. Crying selfies, which have gained traction in recent years thanks to posts by celebrities like Justin Bieber and Bella Hadid, are photos or videos usually shot in response to overwhelming stress or to an emotional crisis like a breakup. But in this new iteration, the videos are endorsing an experience: Go see this movie if you want a good cry.The TikTok call has been heard: Eighty-five percent of the people who saw “We Live in Time” were under 35 years old, according to Deadline. A24, the film’s production company, has leaned in, distributing branded tissue packs at select screenings on opening weekend.

      @_catman0 straight blubbering (everyone needs to see this movie) #weliveintime #andrewgarfield #sobbing @Maeve @brie @Mary Cooper @Danielle ♬ original sound – carmone

      @brianna.kearney We Live In Time is just wow. #weliveintime #florencepugh #andrewgarfield #movie #movies #moviestowatch ♬ QKThr – Aphex Twin

      @cameliacgarcia this is what happens when you don’t watch the trailer and go in blind @We Live In Time so good tho 🥹 #weliveintime #weliveintimemovie #andrewgarfield #florencepugh #paratii #fypシ ♬ Fine line – Instrumental – Kapa Boy We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Youth (Hard Times)’ Review: Working Till They Drop

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      In Wang Bing’s riveting new documentary about Chinese garment workers, a generation asks: What good is money when you have no rights?Wang Bing calls his new films about Chinese garment workers the “Youth” trilogy for good reason: Most of the people shown clocking marathon hours at sewing machines are barely in their 20s. Maybe that’s why the concrete buildings where they both work and live can feel like dystopian dorms. The men and women split their time largely between cluttered workshops downstairs and bunkrooms upstairs, where they trade war stories of long hours, short wages and bad bosses.It’s a story as old as time, or industrialization, which may be why the English title of the trilogy’s second entry, “Youth (Hard Times),” evokes Charles Dickens’s 1854 novel set in a mill town. Wang’s nearly four-hour documentary depicts the migrants who trek to these streets of Zhili in the district of Huzhou City and earn “bitter money” (to borrow the title of an earlier Wang film). To watch them toil away despite thankless conditions is to admire their resilience but also feel their time being lost.“Youth (Hard Times)” leans into the obstacles thrown at workers and how, despite iron nerves and late nights, the house always wins. Shot in a present-tense vérité style, it stitches together micro-stories into a larger narrative in which negotiation can’t undo exploitation. Some tales are mundane but maddening: A man is pushed to work faster with a broken machine. Others combine the ache of short fiction and the brutality of a police report: A slender young man fumes to friends about getting locked up in a police station over a wage dispute, and then his boss stiffs him when his “pay book” (logging his hours) goes missing.Wang’s camerawork feels keen, even personal. Often we hustle along the buildings’ open-air terraces, which lend a theatrical sense of everybody being in everybody else’s business. Days blur into nights — the workrooms don’t seem to have much sunlight — and Wang follows the workers’ youthful energies and comings and goings, which set the film’s pace over the machine-gun chatter of sewing desks. In one workshop, one man starts working shirtless, prompting someone to quip, “That’s a bit sexy.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat’ Review: What Lies Beneath

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      A passionate and propulsive documentary about the assassination of Patrice Lumumba spins its web in many directions.There are many ways to judge a documentary, but a solid one is this question: Could this movie be an article? A great documentary shouldn’t merely be informative, or even tell a good story; it should also be a movie, harnessing every tool at the filmmaker’s disposal. In making “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat,” the director Johan Grimonprez used every instrument cinema affords. His documentary is rhythmic and propulsive, with reverberating sound and images juxtaposed against one another to lend more meaning. The result, in a word, is marvelous.It’s also demanding, a full dissertation crammed into one feature film, complete with citations and footnotes. (Literally.) You can’t zone out during this film. But that doesn’t mean it’s dry or academic. “Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat” is a furious and elliptical film, a piece of true history structured like a spider web and drenched in real urgency. The story at its center is the rise to power and eventual C.I.A.-led assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo, who was elected in May 1960, shortly before his country gained its independence from Belgium. Congo, a country rich with natural resources that were vital, among other things, to Western countries’ weapons of war, had been colonized by Belgium since the late 19th century.Or is that the story? “Soundtrack” entwines a number of threads, all of which are knotted into one another, though the links aren’t always clear till the movie’s thunderous conclusion. The Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev visits the United States and addresses the United Nations, denouncing American racism and demanding an end to colonialism. Black jazz musicians, like Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone, Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie, are sent to perform around the world as “ambassadors” of American good will and freedom, yet segregation is still the law back home. Leaders of African and Asian countries, newly admitted to the United Nations, form a voting bloc that could threaten the influence of world powers like the United States and the Soviet Union. Leaders of newly independent African nations speak of forming a United States of Africa. And while Eisenhower calls for no foreign interference into African politics, the C.I.A. has other plans.“Soundtrack” largely centers on events of 1960, depending almost entirely upon archival footage as well as the memoirs and writings of leaders and operatives from the time. Text — beautifully designed text, in fact, the work of the designer Hans Lettany — provides historical context and voices from the moment, underscored by on-screen citations (right down to the page number). But Grimonprez swirls the timeline a bit, jumping backward and forward just enough that the links between events — Louis Armstrong’s visit to Congo just as Lumumba is under house arrest and C.I.A. agents arrive in the country, for instance — start to emerge.But what really makes “Soundtrack” work is, well, its soundtrack. The film returns over and over to Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln performing their 1960 album “We Insist! Freedom Now Suite.” These famed jazz musicians and many more provide a kind of score, a gorgeous, buoyant, anxious momentum. We watch them play and talk about their music, their hopes for their travels. Yet it’s probably no accident that this film’s title echoes the lauded 2010 documentary “Soundtrack for a Revolution,” which explores the power of Black activists, and in particular their music, in the Civil Rights Movement.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Lost on a Mountain in Maine’ Review: Peak Experience

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      The true story of a 12-year-old’s survival in a vast mountain wilderness for nine days in the 1930s.The family adventure film “Lost on a Mountain in Maine” — based on the 1939 memoir of the same name by Donn Fendler with Joseph Egan — recounts the story of a 12-year-old boy alone in the wilderness of Mount Katahdin, Maine’s highest peak.An opening intertitle declares, if a tad defensively, “This Is a True Story.” Sure, the movie is inspired by actual events, but the truth the film yearns for is to be a story unencumbered by the insights or demands of our current moment. Even the film’s director, Andrew Bood Kightlinger, characterizes it lovingly as a “throwback.” (Sylvester Stallone is one of the producers.)After angrily arguing with his father, Donn (Luke David Blumm) gets separated from his twin brother and their energetic hiking guide amid a slashing summer storm. The movie alternates between the headstrong protagonist’s battles with bugs, leeches, hunger and disorientation, and his parents’ fraught limbo of guilt, hope and despair. Interspersed throughout is documentary footage filmed decades later of friends, family and others who witnessed those nine days that captured much of the nation’s attention.Caitlin FitzGerald portrays Donn’s steadfast mother, Ruth. Paul Sparks is the stern father whose brow is furrowed by muted but palpable economic woes. Before he took his boys on the hike, he’d been eyeing headlines and listening to radio reports of a slow, post-Depression recovery and of brewing international unrest.Theirs may not be a wonderful life — and “Lost on a Mountain” never fully achieves its complicated halcyon aims — but an early scene of Ruth on the phone, rallying help in the search for Donn, is pure Mary Bailey.Lost on a Mountain in MaineRated PG for thematic elements, peril, language and some injury images. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘A Real Pain’ Review: Mourning as an Act of Survival

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      Jesse Eisenberg directs and stars in a melancholic yet funny exploration of Jewish loss and belonging, with an outstanding Kieran Culkin.American movies about grief tend to end with sniffles and pasted-on smiles that reassure audiences that whatever horrors have come before — however brutal the tragedy, no matter how severe the torment — everything is going to be OK. It’s a crock, but that’s the Hollywood way, even in indies. No matter how distinct their subjects, their scale and scope, they insist on drying the tears that they’ve pumped. The pursuit of happiness was an inalienable right for the founding fathers, one that our movies have made a maddeningly enduring article of faith.Jesse Eisenberg races straight into life’s stubborn untidiness in “A Real Pain,” a finely tuned, melancholic and at times startlingly funny exploration of loss and belonging that he wrote and directed. He plays David, a fidgety, outwardly ordinary guy who, with his very complicated cousin, Benji (Kieran Culkin), sets off on a so-called heritage tour of Poland. Their grandmother survived the Holocaust because of “a thousand miracles,” as David puts it, and they’ve decided to visit the house where she grew up. Theirs is an unexpectedly emotionally fraught journey, and a piercing, tragicomic lament from the Jewish diaspora.The journey begins and ends in the United States, but mostly unfolds during a compressed road trip through Poland that they set off on with a British tour guide, James (Will Sharpe), and five other travelers. Together, the group tours Warsaw, crosses pastoral countryside, peers into picturesque corners and makes a relatively brief, heart-heavy visit to the Majdanek concentration camp a few miles from the medieval city of Lublin. Eisenberg doesn’t delve into the history of the camp (also known as Lublin), but it became a killing center and was instrumental in a 1941 Nazi plan to murder the Jewish population of German-occupied Poland. An estimated 1.7 million Polish Jews were killed during this operation alone.That’s a profound history for any movie to grapple with intelligently, especially one that’s as modest and laugh-laced as “A Real Pain.” Eisenberg, though, deftly handles its weight, in part because it is a given for his characters. The Holocaust doesn’t need to be summarized for David, Benji and the rest of the tour group; they’re in Poland specifically because, in one attenuated way or another, it has been with them all their lives. It’s history, but for David and Benji it is, fundamentally, a history that’s inseparable from the existential reality of their grandmother, from the woman and the mother she became, and from the family that she had. It is, as this gentle movie plaintively suggests, an anguished generational bequest.Eisenberg brings you right into the story with a burst of jump cuts and the sight of an agitated David, who’s in a car en route to the airport in New York, leaving one anxious message after another for Benji. Eisenberg excels at playing live wires, characters who can seem so tightly wound you wonder if or when they will break. Like him, they tend to be fast talkers — Eisenberg’s clipped enunciation means that their words generally jab rather than flow — and David is no exception. He’s still leaving messages by the time he rushes into the terminal, where a widely smiling Benji is waiting. They embrace, Benji all but throwing himself at David, and by the time they’ve settled in their plane seats, it feels like you already know them.This sense of awareness, that these are guys you like and maybe even know, is crucial to the movie and how it uses intimacy to fortify its realism. “A Real Pain” is a fluidly blended amalgam of pleasing, approachable subgenres, including an odd-couple buddy flick, a consciousness-raising road movie and a charged family melodrama. These story forms add to the overall sense of familiarity as does the focus on David and Benji, who emerge more through the complexities of their relationship than through individual quirks of personality. We are who we are, Eisenberg says, because of the people in our lives, a truism that becomes more stark and affecting as his characters travel through a country haunted by Jewish ghosts.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More