Movies

Subterms

    More stories

    • 113 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      ‘The Adam Project’ Review: Back Talk to the Future

      by

      Ryan Reynolds plays a time traveling wise cracker in Shawn Levy’s science fiction adventure.Early in “The Adam Project,” a pipsqueak asthmatic named Adam (Walker Scobell) and his golden retriever gallivant through the woods among shimmering falling debris. The cause of the wreckage, Adam learns, is a time jet that was crash landed by his older self (Ryan Reynolds) traveling from the future. This is pure ’80s sci-fi pastiche for the ages. Add a few flying saucer chases, cook up a quickie solution to the grandfather paradox and this movie might have fallen at the intersection of “E.T.” and “Back to the Future.”Instead, “The Adam Project,” directed by Shawn Levy, might as well be called “The Ryan Reynolds Project.” Last summer, Levy and Reynolds teamed up under a different Hollywood juggernaut to deliver the clamorous video game flick “Free Guy.” This new movie (on Netflix) is a comparable package — noisy and formulaic, but still occasionally enjoyable. Reynolds recycles his trademark twerpy charisma, using quips to punctuate battle scenes that are spiced up with special effects. Mileage for the actor’s wise guy persona will vary — I’ve personally had my fill for several lifetimes, with or without time travel — and it’s hard here to separate the movie from the leading man.This is because Reynolds imbues Adam with such excitable, exhibitionistic energy he might as well be waving jazz hands. Levy and the screenwriters, Jonathan Tropper, T.S. Nowlin, Jennifer Flackett and Mark Levin, have crafted in “The Adam Project” a vehicle that enables Reynolds to multiply his shtick by two. By allying Adam with himself, not only can Reynolds poke fun at his adversaries — “your outfits are incredible,” he gushes at one point to a squad of henchman — he can actually mock his own insufferableness. “You have a very punchable face,” he tells Adam the preteen early in their peregrinations. Scobell, for his part, mirrors Reynolds’s mien with precision, making the duo feel less like Marty McFly and Doc Brown than twin sidekicks who stumbled into the spotlight.Their adventure begins when the adult Adam, visiting 2022 from 2050, explains to his kid accomplice that time travel has ruined mankind, and impeding its invention is their only hope. Complicating the mission is Adam’s dad, Louis (Mark Ruffalo), a physicist who models traversable wormholes, and Louis’s ruthless business associate, Maya (Catherine Keener). How tampering with the past will upset the future — including Adam’s marriage to fellow insurgent Laura (Zoe Saldaña) — is a mystery that the movie declines to dwell on.Blissfully under two hours, “The Adam Project” is no modern classic. But it does benefit from an affecting finale that pays special attention to Adam’s strained relationship with his father. Reynolds may play the smart aleck, but beneath Adam’s zingers he is compensating for a profound pain, and Louis is critical in activating his son’s tender side. It’s an unexpectedly sweet note to end on. Or perhaps it’s just that after a double dose of wise cracking, some authentic feeling is a welcome respite.The Adam ProjectRated PG-13. A little battle, a lot of prattle. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Movies

      ‘I Am Here’ Review: A Holocaust Survivor Reckons With Her Pain

      by

      Decades after experiencing some of the most nightmarish moments of World War II, a woman shares her stories.“I Am Here” begins with a promise it does not entirely keep. Jordy Sank’s documentary about the Holocaust survivor Ella Blumenthal ends its opening montage depicting antisemitic acts with a talk radio host telling listeners about the open letter Blumenthal wrote to a social media Holocaust denier.“Instead of condemning the person who posted it,” the host says admiringly, Blumenthal “reaches out an arm of friendship and even of love.”Given that lead-in, one might expect a documentary about a survivor who engages, maybe even transforms, those people who would refute history. That movie is not forthcoming. Instead, “I Am Here” is something more familiar, although undeniably stirring: a portrait of a dynamic soul whose life continues to defy the horrors she experienced.Whether she is swimming laps or walking a beachfront in South Africa — where she has lived since the 1950s — Blumenthal is a vision of vigor and faith, yet it was not until late in life that she began to reckon openly with her memories.In the film, as her 98th birthday nears, Blumenthal sits with her assembled children and grandchildren, recounting the ordeals she and her niece, Roma Rothstein, endured during the war.Animated sequences accompany Blumenthal’s accounts of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Majdanek, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen camps. The animation tempers the graphic tortures of the Holocaust without quelling the heartbreak.Sank was a teenager when he first met Blumenthal, and “I Am Here” feels like a primer pitched to younger viewers. As inspiring as his chosen subject is, the director missed an opportunity to use the story to deepen our understanding of our own memories, trauma and forgiveness.I Am HereRated PG-13 for Holocaust-related thematic content, disturbing images and violence. Running time: 1 hour 13 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 50 Shares159 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Gold’ Review: Dry Heave

      by

      Zac Efron stars in an unrelentingly miserable post-apocalyptic movie from the Australian actor and director Anthony Hayes.There’s a type of blunt, brutal fable about men and avarice that has been reworked every decade or so since Erich von Stroheim’s silent epic “Greed” was released in 1924. The middling “Gold,” directed by Anthony Hayes from a screenplay he wrote with Polly Smyth (who is also Hayes’s spouse), is one of them. It rides on the dusty coattails of touchstones of the genre: think “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” the “Mad Max” franchise and “There Will Be Blood.”“Gold” is set on a sunbaked wasteland, in a future in which an apocalyptic war has scarred the earth. (The film was shot in Australia, so the mettle of “Mad Max” hovers over each frame.) Among the blackened craters left by the war live a few sweaty, irritable survivors, all of whom go unnamed — as if they’d waste too much saliva introducing themselves. Zac Efron and Hayes play antisocial strangers car-pooling across the badlands. During an unplanned pit stop, Efron’s character, the more soft-bellied of the two travelers, discovers a massive chunk of gold bigger than both men combined. Hauling it out of the sand will be a test of endurance for the characters — who Efron and Hayes ground in a weary, wary reserve — and for the audience, which must suffer watching Efron’s skin become riddled with sun blisters that appear to be supercharged by radiation. There’s no missing the message that we’re in a dog-eat-dog world. But we’re shown an actual dog eating a dog just in case.The movie’s mood is unrelentingly miserable. Its cinematography, by Ross Giardina, is bleached-bone bright; its soundscape features more buzzing flies than music. The closest thing to hope comes from a line that the script — apparently calling for us to value our own planet while we still can — has Efron pant to a scorpion: “Look at you, crawling on a massive cluster of gold your whole life and you don’t even know it.”GoldRated R for pain and anguish. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 88 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Ultrasound’ Review: Trapped in a Murky Mystery

      by

      This genre hybrid opens on a dark, stormy night, takes a turn into a narrative maze only to dead end despite some promising kinks.One of the attractions of contemporary puzzle movies — with their ambiguities and labyrinths, unreliable narrators and storytelling thickets — is that their complexities are by turns beguiling and confounding but also familiar. Life takes some navigating, and so do Christopher Nolan movies; capitalism is dehumanizing, just like in the Wachowskis’ “Matrix” series. The stories may be bummers, but at least you’ll have fun putting all their jagged pieces together or just savoring their inscrutable depths.Sometimes, though, the mysteries prove unsatisfyingly murky, which is the case with the genre hybrid “Ultrasound.” A low-key science-fictiony puzzler, it opens in textbook fashion on a dark, stormy night with Glen (Vincent Kartheiser) motoring alone on a deserted road in the rain. When he drives over some nails, he abandons his car and seeks shelter in a nearby house. Uh-oh, you think, having seen a few movies. The people inside, Art (Bob Stephenson, the movie’s ace in the hole) and Cyndi (Chelsea Lopez), seem friendly, but so did Norman Bates. They also seem off-kilter, cagey, devious.For his part, Glen looks wary, but because he’s a narrative cog rather than a character, he also makes a lot of seemingly foolish choices. He drinks too much with Art and then crawls into bed with Cyndi. You half expect Glen to end up hanging from a meat hook with an apple in his mouth. But he makes it home, and soon Art comes knocking and then so does Cyndi. Glen is pulled back into a busily plotted yet anemic story that involves a woman who may or may not be pregnant, a conservative politician, and some lab-coat types milling around a Cronenbergian research facility. There, things happen, mostly bad.In time, the director, Rob Schroeder, and writer, Conor Stechschulte, introduce some undercooked ideas about surveillance, mind control and contemporary politics. (The movie is based on Stechschulte’s multivolume comic “Generous Bosom.”) More characters enter, notably a skittish researcher, Shannon (Breeda Wool), who plays an outsize role in the more focused second half. Working with a shoestring budget and actors of widely divergent abilities, Schroeder keeps things moving along while also managing the difficult task of creating and sustaining an atmosphere of suffocating unease.There are some promising glints here and there, flashes of mordant wit and obvious ambition. But like too many movies, “Ultrasound” is better at setting up its story than delivering on its promise, as if the filmmakers were still pitching ideas in the elevator. The first hour or so consists of a series of enigmatic scenes that gesture — and keep gesturing — at the story’s larger mystery but don’t build to create a coherently integrated (and involving) whole. The results are frustrating and fragmentary. And while these pieces finally converge, by the time they do, the movie’s claustrophobia has become oppressive and you’re looking for the exit.UltrasoundNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Google Play, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

    • 88 Shares169 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Fear’ Review: Stranger in a Strange Land

      by

      The arrival of an African refugee upends a Bulgarian town in Ivaylo Hristov’s pointed tale of xenophobia.At the beginning of “Fear,” the dominant feeling is loneliness. In a coastal town in Bulgaria, shot in somber, expressive black and white, a middle-aged woman named Svetla (Svetlana Yancheva) leads a life that seems to shrink before our eyes. The school where she had been teaching shuts down, leaving her unemployed. A widow, she visits her husband’s grave, buys a few eggs on credit at a small grocery and engages in some desultory banter with a group of soldiers.The soldiers work for the border patrol, and in due course they are alerted to the arrival of a group of migrants from Afghanistan. Dealing with refugees is a matter of dreary routine — displaced people pass through here frequently, hoping to make it to Germany — though a television news reporter tries to sensationalize the situation. She asks the unit commander (the wonderfully gruff Stoyan Bochev) leading questions about terrorists and drug smugglers and tells her viewers that the mood on the border is “tense.” Not really. The Afghans are tired and anxious. The locals seems to be afflicted by a mixture of grumpiness and resignation, torn between xenophobia and compassion.Svetla experiences her own version of that struggle when she meets Bamba (Michael Flemming), a refugee from Mali. Their first encounter, while she is hunting rabbits in the forest not far from her house, has a surreal, almost cartoonish quality. She brandishes her shotgun like a Balkan Elmer Fudd. Bamba carefully sets down his suitcase and greets her in English, a language she doesn’t speak. Bewildered, she brings him home, putting him up first in a storage shed and then in her home.It’s their friendship, inching toward romance, that inflames Svetla’s neighbors and activates the fear of the film’s title. The director, Ivaylo Hristov, is adept at slow-burning suspense and comic misdirection. At first the casual racism that peppers discussions about Svetla’s houseguest seems a matter of ignorance — ugly but not fully hateful. Hristov shows how words lead to actions, how jealousy and boredom blend with prejudice into a toxic brew. Someone throws a rock through Svetla’s window. Obscene graffiti appears in front of her house. A cluster of townspeople who might have been written off as bumpkins, drunkards and clowns coalesces into something like a lynch mob.It’s scary. Not that Svetla is easily frightened. Yancheva gives off a strong Frances McDormand vibe — sarcastic, weary and impatient, her brusque manner shrouding a flinty decency. She’s the charismatic moral center of the film, much as McDormand was in “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.”“Fear” has a clearer, more detailed sense of place than that misguided movie. The faces feel as lived-in as the landscape of stubbled fields and boxy farmhouses and sprawling buildings that look either unfinished or half demolished. The caustic, fatalistic humor has as strong and distinctive a local flavor as the hot peppers and mushrooms that Svetla prepares for Bamba.He is the catalyst for the film’s actions and reactions, but at the same time “Fear” doesn’t quite know what to make of him. Flemming has a wry, melancholy manner, and Bamba has a tragic back story, but he also functions more as a symbol than a fully formed character. His role is to awaken Svetla’s latent tenderness, to expose the intolerance of the people around her, and to help Hristov deliver a timely humanist message. But he remains a stranger in a story whose moral is that he shouldn’t be.FearNot rated. In English and Bulgarian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. On virtual cinemas and available to rent or buy on Amazon, Apple TV and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

    • 100 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      ‘All My Friends Hate Me’ Review: Party Animals

      by

      Things turn nasty when a peculiar stranger infiltrates a reunion of college pals in this clever horror-comedy.Cringe comedy hurtles toward psychological horror in “All My Friends Hate Me,” Andrew Gaynord’s delicious, fearless dive into age-related angst and chronic insecurity.Years have passed since Pete (Tom Stourton) has seen his old friends from college, four of whom are throwing him a 31st birthday party at an ancestral home in the British countryside. After a couple of unnervingly odd encounters en route, Pete, already anxious and out of sorts, arrives to find the house empty. His mood is not improved when, hours later, his friends return from the pub with a weird stranger named Harry (Dustin Demri-Burns), who seems rather too familiar with Pete’s past and personality.Dancing on the line between funny and menacing, the ingenious script (by Stourton and Tom Palmer) is a tonal tease, a limbo where every joke has a threatening edge and every “Just kidding!” only increases Pete’s unease. No one is interested in his volunteer work with refugee children; instead, they seem to be criticizing him at every turn, especially the unsettling Harry, whose mysterious notebook becomes a focus for Pete’s growing anger and paranoia.Cleverly playing with our sympathies, Gaynord, in his feature debut, stirs upper-class twittery and working-class pragmatism into scenes prickling with ambiguity. Was it really a prearranged prank when Harry pursued Pete with an ax? And was Pete’s nightmarish birthday roast a ruse to force him to confess a long-ago sin?Tightly paced and slickly composed, “All My Friends Hate Me” loses its nerve a trace in the final moments. Yet its commitment to unearthing the masochism that lurks at the heart of any reunion is unwavering.All My Friends Hate MeRated R for liberal drug use and conservative nudity. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

    • 88 Shares109 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Turning Red’ Review: Beware the Red-Furred Monster

      by

      A 13-year-old girl becomes a red panda when she loses her cool in Domee Shi’s heartwarming but wayward coming-of-age film.A quirky Asian teenager transforms into a giant red panda whenever she gets excited … even the premise gives me pause. Which makes the task of reviewing the new Disney/Pixar film “Turning Red” (on Disney+ March 11) especially tricky. Because that’s the idea behind this sometimes heartwarming but wayward coming-of-age movie, which toes the line between truthfully representing a Chinese family, flaws and all, and indulging stereotypes.Meilin Lee (voiced by Rosalie Chiang) is a typical 13-year-old girl: she dances, has crushes on boys and has a cohort of weird but loyal besties who share her obsession with the glossy-lipped members of the boy band 4*Town. She’s also Chinese Canadian, living in Toronto in 2002, where her family maintains a temple. There she helps her loving but overbearing mother, Ming (Sandra Oh), and tries to be the perfect daughter — even when that means burying her own thoughts and desires in the process. This becomes a lot more difficult when she goes through her changes — not of the period variety, but the panda kind.The character writing and design are where “Turning Red,” directed by Domee Shi, most succeeds. Mei has the relatable swagger of the middle school cool nerd — she’s creative and confident, and also has a perfect report card. The tomboy skater girl Miriam, the deadpan Priya and the hilariously fiery Abby form a funky trifecta of gal pals who are Mei’s emotional safety net. And Ming strikes an impressive balance between dictatorial and doting, dismissing Mei’s friends and interests but also stalking her at school to ply her with steamed buns.Shi finds subtle yet effective ways to illustrate the personalities of even the ancillary characters, from the stiffly applied makeup of Mei’s grandmother (Ho-Wai Ching) to the flamboyant open-toed footwear of the gang of aunties who follow Grandma Lee around. And the animation of Mei’s hair in her panda form — how it lays flat when she’s calm or spikes upward when she’s mad — reinforces her emotional shifts.It’s no surprise that these kinds of expressions are where Shi’s direction most shines; as in her 2018 Oscar-winning Pixar short “Bao,” “Turning Red” lives and breathes on the complex emotional relationship between a mother and a child preparing to leave the nest. And also as in “Bao,” in which a mother raises a steamed bun child from birth to adulthood, here again Shi uses a culturally specific metaphor to convey her characters’ emotions.This is where “Turning Red” gets sticky: though the plot’s red panda magic is rooted in its characters’ cultural traditions (the Lees honor an ancestor who defended her family with the power of a red panda), these details aren’t enough to absolve the film of its kid-friendly version of exoticism. After all, its characters profit off Mei’s cute and foreign transformation.And when it comes down to the movie’s conflict, the antagonists are the women in Mei’s family. Or, more accurately, the suffocating cultural traditions and familial expectations that are embodied by the women. The fact that Mei’s grandmother gets the kind of shady introductory scene that you’d expect of the head honcho in a mobster flick, and that these women share the red panda affliction, means they fall into a formula of cold, emotionless Asian women. Is the film tackling the stereotype or fulfilling it? The line is too blurry to tell. By the end, a bit of understanding, empathy and a pandapocalypse reassures us that the stoic Asian dames aren’t the source of the problem but also victims, like Mei. Though I wonder what the movie would look like if the conflict wasn’t enacted solely in the form of these women.“Turning Red” offers satisfying morsels despite its messiness, like the few throwbacks to the early aughts, including Tamagotchis and pre-BTS boy band mania. (4*Town’s criminally catchy songs, written by Billie Eilish and her brother, Finneas O’Connell, are perfect reproductions of 2000s pop hits.)It’s too bad that “Turning Red” fumbles its storytelling, because at the very least it has fun when it lets its fur fly.Turning RedRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. Watch on Disney+. More

    • 125 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Playing in the FM Band’ Review: A Free-Form Radio Legend

      by

      The trailer for this documentary shows today’s New Yorkers saying they had never heard of Steve Post. The film itself tries to make a case that they ought to have.Taking its title from a book written by its subject, “Playing in the FM Band: The Steve Post Story” memorializes Post, a New York radio personality who, the movie insists, helped define what became known as free-form radio — a kind of programming without a strict format, in which the D.J. chooses the music and riffs on whatever they like, often soliciting call-in listener responses — beginning at the FM station WBAI in the late 1960s.The documentary posits him as a pioneer but struggles to pin down how he was unique. We hear that he was influenced by Jean Shepherd, the radio personality whose wry storytelling brought him to prominence in the 1950s. And, sure enough, sometimes Post sounds an awful lot like Shepherd. Early in the movie, the director, Rosemarie Reed, chooses to highlight Post’s humor by playing a skit Post did with the character actor Marshall Efron, in which Efron impersonates a swami and speaks with a straight up offensive accent. As the audio runs, Reed presents shots of statues that seem to depict South Asian deities.These shots, like those of the talking heads of colleagues and friends who speak of Post, are enveloped in a black that seems ready to swallow the movie whole. The film’s texts are white on the same shade of black. This visual mode renders the movie drab, a condition not ameliorated by the introduction of animated sequences illustrating Post’s stories. Combine that with poor narrative organization, and you have a movie that’s hard to sit through.“Playing” latches onto a couple of interesting grooves in its last twenty minutes. Descriptions of how great Post was during radio station pledge drives are intriguing, and a tale of how Post got onto a 39th-floor ledge in the middle of a broadcast is hair-raising.Playing in the FM Band: The Steve Post StoryNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More