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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

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      ‘Last Night in Soho’ Review: Dream Girls

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      Two young women from different eras form a psychic bond in Edgar Wright’s sumptuous and surprising horror movie.Early in Edgar Wright’s “Last Night in Soho,” there’s a rapturous sequence showing Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie), a fashion student recently arrived in London, experiencing what seems to be a vivid dream. Entranced by a gorgeous young singer named Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy, a vision in pink chiffon and blonde bouffant), Eloise finds her on a busy street where Sean Connery in “Thunderball” blazes from a gigantic marquee. As the two women enter a glamorous nightclub and Cilla Black’s aching 1964 hit, “You’re My World,” throbs on the soundtrack, they become mirror images and their stories irrevocably fuse.Nothing in Wright’s previous work quite prepared me for “Last Night in Soho,” its easy seductiveness and spikes of sophistication. Dissolving the border between present and past, fact and fantasy, the director (aided by the euphoric talents of the cinematographer Chung-hoon Chung) has produced some of the most dazzling imagery of his career. This is also his first film with a female lead — he’s best known for buddy comedies like “Shaun of the Dead” (2004) and “Hot Fuzz” (2007) — a choice that lends an authentic shiver to a story anchored in male sexual violence and swinging London’s seedy underbelly.As Eloise’s psychic connection to Sandie starts to overwhelm her daily life — given welcome flashes of normalcy by Michael Ajao as a supportive suitor — the plot (of which it’s best to say as little as possible) drastically darkens. The movie, though, remains luminous: Streets gleam and shadows pulse, the amber light from doorways spilling like whiskey over Eloise’s nighttime adventures. What we’re watching is a gorgeous horror movie, its surface sleekness roughened by three legendary British actors: Diana Rigg, in one of her final roles, as Eloise’s landlady; Rita Tushingham, as her grandmother; and Terence Stamp. Our first clear look at Stamp, pausing in the door frame of a dubious establishment to carefully adjust his overcoat, is a master class in minimalist menace. His mysterious character might be woefully underwritten, but I would take minutes with Stamp over hours with Chalamet any day of the week.Though unable to sustain the patient assuredness of its first act, “Last Night in Soho” delivers almost as many pleasures as apparitions. The editing is dizzying, the music divine as Wright reaches across time to show what the big city can do to a young woman’s dreams. This gives the movie an undercurrent of wistfulness that feels exactly right, as when Eloise tells Stamp’s character that her mother is dead. “Most of them are,” he replies, before walking away.Last Night in SohoRated R for sleazy men, spurting blood and ghosts galore. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Only the Animals’ Review: A Missing Woman, a Cruel World

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      When an outsider disappears from a remote region in France, she leaves a mystery and a lot of messy complications in her wake.What would movies do without troublesome women — the cruel, the cold, the difficult, the dispensable? That’s one of the takeaways of “Only the Animals,” a cynical French puzzler from the director Dominik Moll about a woman who goes missing. Her disappearance stirs up the usual interest; that she’s white and wealthy helps. There’s a police investigation and news reports and plenty of pain and suffering, but the many tears the movie vigorously pumps aren’t necessarily spilled over her.The setup is fairly simple; what ensues is more complicated. (Moll and Gilles Marchand wrote the script, adapting it from a novel by Colin Niel.) When an empty S.U.V. is found on a desolate country road, the police open an investigation and begin looking for its driver, Evelyne (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), who’s been staying in a nearby vacation home. As the search continues, leads are pursued and locals interviewed. The kink here is that the story doesn’t focus on the inquiry or even Evelyne, but on five characters who have somehow contributed to her disappearance and are directly or very tangentially in her orbit. Some know her intimately; others don’t know her at all.The movie follows these five in titled chapters that assume their respective points of view and dip into their bleak, economically fragile lives. It opens with Alice (Laure Calamy, one of the delights in the French television show “Call My Agent!”), who knows next nothing about Evelyne other than what’s appeared on the news. Like everyone in this movie, Alice is largely defined by her problems, which in her case includes too many disagreeable men in her life. Calamy’s restless physicality and emotional transparency do a lot for the character, and when Alice enters a room, she jolts it awake even if she hasn’t a clue about what’s happening in it. You miss that energy when she’s not onscreen.The movie’s other most recognizably human figure is Marion (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), a young, doll-faced waitress whose relationship with Evelyne helps bring the missing woman into focus. This chapter isn’t altogether credible, and Marion’s naïveté is more narratively expedient than persuasive, but her raw desires and vulnerability are a relief from the movie’s free-ranging cruelties, petty and otherwise. The remaining chapters focus on men who together paint a grim, at times pathological picture of masculinity that the movie doesn’t engage with or doesn’t recognize. The first has profound psychological issues; the second is a violent fantasist; and the third is a desperate con artist.Telling a story through multiple perspectives is a familiar strategy: “Citizen Kane” builds on different narrative points of view, as does “Rashomon” and the recently released “The Last Duel.” Divergent voices and memories can be meaningfully deployed; they can also just be fun or showy or banal. Much depends on how and why they’re marshaled in a story, whether they create consensus or conflict, and how they work with the timeline. In “Kane,” the sweep of the title character’s life emerges piecemeal through the reminiscences of some who knew him; in “Rashomon,” the same event is recounted by characters (the dead included) who put their own spin on what occurred.In “Only the Animals,” by contrast, the multiple viewpoints are just a clever, self-satisfied device to deliver stale goods and familiar ugliness with a soupçon of glib class politics. As the cipher at its center — sacrificial lamb or guilty bourgeois, you decide! — the charismatic Bruni Tedeschi makes a predictably solid impression, which is impressive given the vaporousness of her role. The movie doesn’t deserve the actress, but its attitude toward her character is instructive. That’s particularly true in the chapter in which Evelyne is brutally assaulted, an attack that Moll lingers on long enough, getting close enough for you to see both her terror and the movie’s contempt for this woman.Only the AnimalsNot rated. In French and Nouchi, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Antlers’ Review: Buck Wild

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      An environmental parable is tucked inside this gloomy film about a creature that terrorizes a small Oregon town.“Antlers,” a moody muddle by Scott Cooper (“Hostiles”), attempts to do for the wendigo, a man-eating, steroidal, elk-like creature from Algonquin folklore, what “Jaws” did for the great white shark: pare a beast to its protuberances and set it loose on an economically-anxious hamlet where basic human well-being is a luxury.The setting is a small Oregon coal mining town that looks funereal even before the wendigo stacks up spines like discarded toothpicks. The mine has shuttered, but promises to reopen. In the interim, its abandoned shaft is an irresistible temptation for two destructive forces fated to collide: Frank Weaver (Scott Haze), a local meth maker who cooks in the darkness, and the wendigo, Mother Earth’s vengeful protector. (The film’s go-green ideology appears only in the opening crawl before becoming as forgotten as a T-shirt from Earth Day 1994.)A cannibal who symbolizes mankind’s appetite for greed and plunder couldn’t be more relevant. In execution, however, “Antlers” isn’t much interested in expanding on its folkloric myth. The wendigo stalks the movie like just another rattle-throat corpse-grinder that yowls and stomps and does its darnedest to trample a path for a sequel. The script, co-written by Cooper, C. Henry Chaisson and Nick Antosca (“Channel Zero”), dwells instead on the miseries of Frank’s oldest son, Lucas (a promising Jeremy T. Thomas), a 12-year-old grappling with the complete destruction of his already fragile home life. Lucas’s English teacher, Julia (Keri Russell), notices that the starved child is scribbling disturbed drawings that demand more attention than the stretched-thin principal (Amy Madigan) is able to give.Julia has her own history of abuse, conveyed through cryptic flashbacks and Russell’s flatlined frown. The film’s smartest insights come from observing how maltreated children bear their secrets. At the same time, Julia’s brother (Jesse Plemons), the local sheriff, is saddled with speculating that the disemboweled victims were done in by “a bear or cougar or something,” inanities made worse by Cooper’s apparent affection for ponderous dialogue delivery that makes every character speak as though they’re hand-whittling each word.The film’s self-seriousness is as oppressive as its setting’s monotonous fog. The cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister shoots handsomely, making Boschian ghouls of men in bug-eyed gas masks, yet it gets frustrating that neither he nor Cooper allow anyone to turn on more than one lamp. Despite Julia’s classroom lectures about the purpose of fiction — on Goldilocks: “Is there a moral or lesson in that story?” — “Antlers” itself is merely a jumbled presentation of awful things, the bones of a good idea with none of the meat.AntlersRated R for blood and guts and emotional bludgeoning. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Bulletproof’ Review: Americans and Their Guns

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      This documentary shows a nightmarish vision of the consumer industry that has sprung up around school shootings.The documentary “Bulletproof” begins as the sound of gunfire echoes through the halls of Woodside Middle School, in Missouri. The live shots are so startling to hear, it takes a moment to make visual sense of the stationary, impeccably lit and composed frames. Teachers barricade doors with tables and desks, but their classrooms hold no students. Volunteers in yellow vests roam the halls. Gradually, it becomes clear that the shots were fired as part of an elaborate drill staged by adults. They are attempting to rehearse their response to a school shooter.Some participants play dead on the door, felled by imaginary bullets. Tourniquets are applied to imaginary wounds. But when the demonstrator role-playing as a shooter knocks at a door, his gun is real.It’s a dreamlike opening sequence, one that uses vérité observation to present an alarmed and alarming vision of safety. The accomplishment of the director Todd Chandler is that he continues to find settings that demonstrate this same eerie divide between the desire for security, and the extreme measures being taken by schools to achieve impregnability.He follows teachers into shooting ranges, where educators are trained to kill. School administrators justify the expenditures they have made for high security camera systems and show off their military grade weaponry. These subjects speak of the need for protection in schools, but what this admirably hands-off film shows is how the feelings of anxiety that have surrounded school shootings have been monetized and translated into demand for consumer products. It is a nightmarish vision — the military industrial complex deployed in the halls where children ought to roam.BulletproofNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. In theaters and on virtual cinemas. More