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      ‘Roh’ Review: I See Dead People

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      This atmospheric and grisly horror movie from Malaysia sees a single mother and her children rattled by the arrival of mysterious strangers.When a ghoulish little girl caked in mud suddenly appears near the isolated hut of a single mother, Mak (Farah Ahmad), and her two children living in the Malaysian jungle, things take a turn for the sinister. Not that the family — impoverished and in denial of their father’s death — was doing particularly well before the arrival of the lost child, who rattles them with a morbid prophecy then slashes her own throat within the first fifteen minutes.Emir Ezwan’s feature directing debut, “Roh,” which translates to “soul” in Malaysian, belongs to a wave of homegrown, folklore-inspired horror films taking Southeast Asia by storm (see “Two Sisters,” also from Malaysia, or “Satan’s Slaves,” from Indonesia).A grisly ghost story set against a backdrop of scraggly, claustrophobic vegetation given an eerie vibrancy by the cinematographer Saifuddin Musa, “Roh” isn’t big on the details. The story unfolds at some unspecified point in the past as a distant war rages on, and Ezwan relies on vivid imagery — burning trees, mushy piles of blood — over a concrete narrative, which renders the entry of two additional strangers disorientingly opaque if acutely unsettling.As the indeterminate evil spreads, Mak’s children take cues from “The Exorcist” and a beguiling neighbor begins to wield inordinate levels of influence over the increasingly aghast mother. Symbolism overshadows characterization, or any sense of motive for that matter, nevertheless “Roh” succeeds as a spine-tingling baffler, hitting at nerves we can’t quite articulate but feel all the same.RohNot rated. In Malay, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. On virtual cinemas and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘A Mouthful of Air’ Review: Depression Clouds a Domestic Idyll

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      Amanda Seyfried stars as a young mother suffering from postpartum depression in Amy Koppelman’s weepy adaptation of her novel.A young mother battles postpartum depression in the arid melodrama “A Mouthful of Air.” Living in Manhattan in the ’90s, Julie (Amanda Seyfried) is a vision of bliss. Sunlight pours through the windows of her vibrantly colored apartment as she lays sprawled beside her cherubic infant son. But minutes later, the domestic idyll cracks when Julie settles on the floor to slit her wrists.Directed by Amy Koppelman and based on her novel of the same name, “A Mouthful of Air” aspires to show how depression can sully even the loveliest of scenes. The scenes the movie chooses, however, play like a parody of white privilege: Julie and her husband Ethan (Finn Wittrock) are an affluent, affectionate couple whose greatest concern is whether they should relocate to Westchester. Julie’s pampered lifestyle is even such that, upon her suicide attempt, she is carried to an ambulance by her doting doorman.In the months following her rehabilitation, Julie suffers ongoing anxiety. Grocery shopping is fraught with indecision over food brands, and later, a discussion about Julie’s second child spurs a panic attack over whether the baby will like her hair. Koppelman uses jump cuts, a hand-held camera and sound effects to sketch Julie’s distress, but absent a more penetrative window into her character, the movie’s portrait of depression often feels as facile as its opening image: Julie’s wide blue eyes with a single tear trailing down her cheek.A Mouthful of AirRated R for language and inner turmoil. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Cicada’ Review: A New Relationship Buds as Old Wounds Reopen

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      Matthew Fifer writes and co-stars in this understated drama about a man struggling with his past as he forges a new bond.The camera in “Cicada” dwells on scars, literal and metaphorical. There’s a rough, discolored line running down the stomach of Sam (Sheldon D. Brown), the new boyfriend of Ben (Matthew Fifer). Ben drags his finger along that line while the two are in bed together. And there are the ambiguous nightmares that take Ben back to his Long Island childhood home and the beach nearby, the noise of cicadas and waves of the nearby ocean deafening.Ben is first introduced via an elliptical montage of alcohol-infused dates and hookups. But after these encounters, he often finds himself on the floor of his small room overcome with nausea or shaken awake by nightmares. An impromptu date with Sam, which does not lead to sex, unlocks new possibilities for healthy intimacy for Ben, but also reopens the old wounds he’s let scar over.“Cicada,” which is directed by Fifer and Kieran Mulcare, is a muted affair, with even its diffused and desaturated palette conveying a sense of understatement. Ben and Sam’s blossoming romance does a lot of telling and little showing. While there’s the occasional amusingly idiosyncratic section of dialogue that sounds like a series of stagily poetic non-sequiturs, much of the couple’s bonding feels straightforward and unremarkable.The sound design by Gisela Fulla-Silvestre and Travis Jones gives the film a modicum of thoughtful and detailed texture. Their calibrated and minimalist soundscape is subtle and graceful, offering insight into an ostensibly complex relationship informed by trauma when the rest of the film struggles to do so.CicadaNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Snakehead’ Review: Nightmares on the Way to the American Dream

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      The writer and director Evan Jackson Leong sets a crime tale in New York City’s Chinatown.“Snakehead” is an unvarnished look at the seedy intersections between organized crime and human trafficking in present-day New York City’s Chinatown. In his welcome but oversimplified addition to the American crime family saga, the writer-director Evan Jackson Leong carves out unapologetic space for a villainous family with a strong bond.Telling the story through an intra-diasporic gaze, Leong positions the Chinese American kingpin Dai Mah (Jade Wu) and her sons against Sister Tse (Shuya Chang), a Chinese national who owes Dai Mah nearly $60,000 for smuggling her into the United States and is willing to become a human trafficker herself to clear the debt.The movie wants to be both an insider look at the global apparatus of human trafficking, including its tragic costs, and a redemptive tale about the women at the center of this criminal underworld. Leong is more successful at the former than the latter.Wu plays Dai Mah with a no-frills abandon that often makes her feel like the film’s protagonist, but even her performance can’t overcome the narrative missteps. The script flatly renders its female characters as either strong or weak, which fuels a stilted quest to prove themselves worthy of redemption in the eyes of the lackluster men around them. Leong confuses motherhood for a personality characteristic, and positions this fact as the reason Sister Tse is worthy of a hero’s pedestal despite her complicity in Dai Mah’s crimes. It is hollow and reductive. Add on the aimless voice-over, flashbacks overdone to the point of diluting their meaning and a couple of feeble fight scenes, and “Snakehead” tumbles all too quietly under the weight of its ambition.SnakeheadNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘The Spine of Night’ Review: Cosmic Forces at Work

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      Ultraviolent world-building and bone-crushing dominate this animated fantasy film.While there’s a lot of content out there these days that can be described as “adult animation,” we don’t see much in the tradition pioneered by 1980s stoner semi-classics like the sci-fi anthology “Heavy Metal” or the racy sword-and-sorcery saga “Fire and Ice.”Admittedly, it’s not as if there’s a mainstream outcry for such fare. Nevertheless, the existence of “The Spine of Night,” an unabashedly bloody series of interconnected tales about otherworldly cultures and eras, is kind of heartening. The co-directors, Philip Gelatt and Morgan Galen King, who both wrote the picture as well, are pitching for a venerable dirtbag-nerd sensibility here.The movie signals its commitment to nudity right off the bat, with its depiction of a witchy warrior, Tzod (voiced by Lucy Lawless), racing up a snowy mountainside in the altogether, save for oodles of ceremonial jewelry. Once at the top, she meets the ghostly Guardian (Richard E. Grant), who watches over the “bloom.” It holds an awesome, perhaps cosmic force.They relate to each other stories of the bloom’s power. How it corrupted a medieval scholar turned despot. And of how the quest for knowledge frequently mutates into greed. Some dialogue is amusingly familiar to any Bond fan. “You took me from mother swamp to serve this place?” “No, I took you from mother swamp to die in this place.” Hmm.As philosophical as the movie waxes, it’s mostly a brief history of disembowelment and bone-crushing. Alas, all the world-building filmmakers may contrive doesn’t count for much if they don’t put it across visually. And this heavily rotoscoped vision does not get where it needs to be to achieve genuine trippiness. Not for nothing, the most visually effective sequence is made up of silhouettes.The Spine of NightNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 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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      ‘Army of Thieves’ Review: A Little Help From Some Old Friends

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      This “Army of the Dead” prequel leans in, deliberately, to every last heist movie cliché.The heist at the center of “Army of the Dead,” the action-horror zombie flick Zack Snyder directed for Netflix earlier this year, wasn’t much of a heist at all — a cursory, surface-level safecracking scene that felt like a brief digression from all the violent zombie mayhem happening around it. “Army of Thieves,” a prequel starring and directed by the “Army of the Dead” ensemble player Matthias Schweighöfer, takes place in the very early days of the zombie apocalypse, and with the undead safely confined to the United States, the Europe-set “Thieves” is free to focus entirely on heisting. In fact, this is a heist movie about heist movies: While it stops short of outright parody, it’s meta in the extreme.Heist movies tend of course to be similar and predictable, and “Army of Thieves” leans in, very self-consciously, to the style of the genre. You’ve got all the usual stuff — the assembly of the team of experts with highly specialized skills, the double-cross that’s really a triple-cross, the plan that looks like it’s failed only to turn out that the failure was part of the plan. A recent episode of “Rick and Morty” wittily summarized heist movies as “60% putting a crew together and 40% revealing that the robbery already happened,” and that strikes the heart of the problem: A winking attitude doesn’t make the extremely tired formula any less rote or tiresome. Despite the in-jokes and references (including nods to “Point Break” and “Heat”), the movie can’t transcend its own clichés.Army of ThievesNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 7 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Joy Ride’ Review: Still Standing

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      Bobcat Goldthwait and Dana Gould share the stand-up stage in “Joy Ride,” trading war stories, family nightmares and twisted anecdotes.You can think of “Joy Ride” as similar to “The Trip” but with stand-up comedy where the food would be. The recipe is part meat-and-potatoes joke-telling — the comics Bobcat Goldthwait and Dana Gould doing joint sets at clubs — and part driving around trading war stories and family nightmares.The jumping-off point for the documentary is a car crash that landed this pair of friends in the hospital but didn’t halt their touring. The accident and their dazed persistence lead well into their routines, which are a mix of gallows humor and twisted, twisty anecdotes. Some of the material feels fairly standard, as they share misfit upbringings and showbiz gossip, but each veteran comedian lends an unpredictable element through self-deprecating candor.Gould recalls the longtime trauma of growing up with a father he describes as terrifying, in between hit-or-miss political satire. Goldthwait dwells on the slings and arrows of fame for his yowling stage persona in the 1980s and ’90s, when he could resemble the Tasmanian devil at a dinner party. Both comics display the deliciously mischievous timing of old-school club veterans, reeling out outlandish yarns before yanking you back for the kicker.Goldthwait adds this modest documentary to his overlooked career as a director of comedy specials and wickedly taboo-tweaking films like “World’s Greatest Dad,” starring Robin Williams (remembered here as a misunderstood pal with a penchant for video games). But he and Gould feel more invested in life’s macabre absurdity than shock value, essentially delivering one from the heart.Joy RideNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 10 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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      ‘My Hero Academia: World Heroes’ Mission’ Review: Boy on the Run

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      The third full-length movie in this franchise offers a formulaic plot and forgettable villain.A villain aims to use a biological weapon to eliminate all mutants? Call Professor X: That story’s played now. Too bad it’s the narrative of “My Hero Academia: World Heroes’ Mission,” the missable third film based on the popular anime series.In “My Hero Academia” the majority of the population has a “quirk” or superpower. When a quirk-less boy named Izuku Midoriya inherits life-changing powers, he enrolls in an elite academy to learn how to become a professional hero.Like the other animated films, “World Heroes’ Mission” is a stand-alone story and so holds no stakes in the larger narrative. In the film, when Izuku is framed for a crime he didn’t commit, he goes on the run with a young thief named Rody Soul. They discover they’re linked to a plot by an anti-quirk cult that aims to commit international acts of genocide.“World Heroes’ Mission” has shinier visuals than the anime, with crisp backgrounds in vibrant colors and 3-D graphics. Kenji Nagasaki’s direction feeds on the energy of the fight scenes, but the rapid cuts and camera shifts makes it dizzying to witness. And for an anime that’s beloved for its cast of characters — its earnest do-gooder hero students and fascinating villains — all except Rody are ignored for the sake of a formulaic plot and forgettable antagonist. The final fight is as long and as perfunctory as the rest, despite a god-level power-up.That means “World Heroes’ Mission” has little to offer veteran fans of the series or new viewers, who won’t find any of what makes the series great in what’s essentially a filler arc. At least the film can’t taint the lovable qualities of the show. “World Heroes’ Mission”? Please save me.My Hero Academia: World Heroes’ MissionRated PG-13 for animated explosions, thrashing and bashing. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters. More