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      ‘Small Engine Repair’ Review: Of Mechanics and Men

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      John Pollono directs and stars in an adaptation of his play that adds depth to the original text but also struggles in its translation from stage to screen.What happens in Manch-Vegas stays in Manch-Vegas. Just ask the men from “Small Engine Repair,” an adaptation of the play of the same name by the actor and playwright John Pollono. The film, which Pollono also directs, provides more depth than the original but still flounders in the translation from stage to screen.Frank (Pollono) calls together his longtime buds Swaino (Jon Bernthal) and Packie (Shea Whigham), middle-aged natives of Manchester, New Hampshire, who’ve fallen out because of a brawl. When a frat boy named Chad (Spencer House) joins what seems like a normal night of bro-ing, the darker intentions behind the gathering are revealed.Pollono’s film has the same grit as the play, which premiered Off Broadway in 2013. Pollono, Bernthal and Whigham deliver ace performances that humanize these puerile man-children without pardoning them. The dialogue is brutal: crass, racist, homophobic, misogynist. It’s The Testosterone Show. Though the play examined the men’s relationship to women, it lacked women characters; the film thankfully corrects that, introducing Frank’s ex Karen (Jordana Spiro) and daughter Crystal (Ciara Bravo).The film self-consciously cushions the trim content of the play, converting anecdotal moments in the dialogue into flashbacks. These additions more explicitly critique the characters for a 2021 audience with greater sensitivity to depictions of toxic men, but they’re largely distracting, highlighting how the film sits uneasily between the contained world of the play and the larger world the adaptation attempts to build. Ultimately, the story still feels unfinished, and Pollono’s direction falters in the film’s big twist, when it tries to balance horror and humor before its tidy resolution.Small Engine RepairRated R for gutter-mouth trash-talking. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Fire Music’ Review: An Impassioned Case for Free Jazz

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      The beautiful souls that created free jazz — including Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, Don Cherry and Carla Bley — light up this new documentary from Tom Surgal.One default reaction to the musical form called “free jazz” — Ornette Coleman’s phrase for this improvised, experimental style of jazz — has long been that it’s “not music.” This concise but cogent documentary directed by Tom Surgal is crammed with exhilarating sounds, moving reminiscences and stimulating arguments that it is not just music, but vital music.Gary Giddins, a critic who’s equally at home explicating Bing Crosby as Cecil Taylor, points out at the film’s beginning that someone playing the blues on a porch can make their phrases 12 bars or 14 bars or whatever at will. In group playing, certain agreements have to be met.One basis of free jazz is to approach ensemble playing without conventional agreements. Hence, Coleman’s practically leaderless double quartet approach on the 1961 “Free Jazz: A Collective Improvisation” album. Much consideration is also given here to Coleman’s break with bebop in insisting one could improvise without chords. His playing sounded out of tune to traditional jazz musicians not yet conversant with microtones.This sounds a little dry, but the movie is anything but. Among other highlights are incredibly well-curated archival footage and contemporary interviews that allow the viewer to briefly commune with some beautiful souls, including Coleman, Sam Rivers, John Coltrane, Rashied Ali, Don Cherry, Carla Bley. “Whatever he did was the right thing to do,” Bley, now 85, says of Cherry, who died in 1995.Most of these players are Black, and their innovations in the ’60s had trouble gaining traction in the United States. So they flocked to Paris, and the movie is scrupulous in chronicling how the European movement “free improvisation” grew into something allied with, but distinct from, what the U.S. founders created.As a fan of improvisational music myself, the 88 minutes of this movie constituted a too-short heaven on earth. I’d binge on an expanded series, honestly.Fire MusicNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Alpinist’ Review: Dizzying Heights

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      This documentary tries to shed light on the attitude of a Canadian rock climber it describes as “elusive.”In a podcast excerpted at the start of “The Alpinist,” the rock climber Alex Honnold, from the Oscar-winning documentary “Free Solo,” is asked to name a climber who impresses him. He cites Marc-André Leclerc, a Canadian whom Honnold says takes on some of the sport’s most difficult challenges in “such a pure style.” Honnold’s remarks suggest Leclerc would happily ascend in obscurity, keeping his accomplishments between him and the mountains.“The Alpinist” — directed by Peter Mortimer (who narrates) and Nick Rosen, both specialists in climb documentaries — tries to pin Leclerc down. The difficulties go beyond filming him at great heights on rock faces covered with ice or snow. While the lanky, curly haired, almost goofy Leclerc proves an affable screen presence — after we’ve watched him ax his way up an icicle wall in the Canadian Rockies, he describes it nonchalantly as “a really good day out” — his commitment to the documentary is tenuous. At one point, he ditches the filmmakers. When they reconnect, he points out that the camera’s presence interferes with the notion of climbing alone: “It wouldn’t be a solo to me if somebody was there.”The movie could stand to demystify how some of its most terrifying early shots were filmed. (Later on, we’re told Leclerc agreed to carry a small camera himself to shoot part of a conquest in Patagonia.) But it does capture its subject’s philosophy. As with Honnold in “Free Solo,” the film raises the prospect that Leclerc was innately predisposed toward thrill-seeking. In Argentina, he says he eats every pre-climb dinner as if it might be his last.The AlpinistRated PG-13. Dangerous climbs. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Kate’ Review: Lost in Assassination

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      Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays a vengeful contract killer in this predictable thriller.The thriller “Kate” is an undistinguished action film that makes a hero of a hit woman. Kate (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), guided by her wily handler, Varrick (Woody Harrelson), has been a professional since adolescence. Her only rule is to never kill in front of a child. Naturally — this being a relatively unimaginative plot — Kate betrays her principles within the first five minutes of the movie, murdering a yakuza gang member in front of his daughter.The fallout for Kate proves worse than a mere breach of assassin’s creed. She learns that her victim’s gang has targeted her, slipping her a fatal dose of polonium. She has 24 hours to live before radiation destroys her body, and in that time, she is determined to get her revenge. But the only person who knows where she can find the shadowy leader of the gang that wants her dead is Ani (Miku Martineau), the child who witnessed her father’s slaughter.The film takes place in Japan, and the director Cedric Nicolas-Troyan tries to use the setting to inject a shot of style into the largely routine story. There are neon cars, Kabuki theater performances and as many murders committed with samurai swords and katanas as there are with guns. The movie presents an eye-catching fantasy of a candy-colored Japanese underworld. But the exoticism feels as cheap as a whiff of a green tea and musk cologne called Tokyo wafting over a department store counter. Even Winstead, stoic in her fashionably boyish haircut, looks bored.KateRated R for graphic violence, brief gore, and brief sexuality. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Dogs’ Review: Fish Out of Water

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      A city boy inherits land used by the Mafia in this unoriginal neo-western crime thriller from Romania.The city boy Roman (Dragos Bucur) is lured into the Romanian outback when he inherits 550 hectares of land from his recently deceased grandfather, a local “godfather” figure not terribly unlike those popularized by Mario Puzo. Though Roman arrives with the intention of quickly selling the miserable property for some extra cash, his sojourn is upended when a group of thugs headed by the smug, sinister Samir (Vlad Ivanov) come to play.A neo-western crime thriller in the grim, nihilistic vein of “No Country for Old Men,” “Dogs,” by the filmmaker Bogdan Mirica, sees Roman thrown into a violent, lawless arena with only a dilapidated shack as his fortress.
      His grandfather’s guard dog, a mangy mutt named Police, winkingly calls attention to the near-absence of law enforcement around these parts, while the two-man law enforcement squad, led by the aging Hogas (Gheorghe Visu), mostly turns a blind eye to the illicit activities afoot. It’s common knowledge, after all, that Roman has stumbled upon a property used for moonlit confrontations and the disposal of body parts — such as the dismembered foot we glimpse in the deceptively serene opening tracking shot.Indeed, human brutality unfolds against a backdrop of pastoral quietude, with the film’s most evocative moments making use of negative space — shadowy showdowns and unnervingly empty expanses of wildlife captured in wide screen — as well as startling sounds that break through the eerie silence.Yet “Dogs” doesn’t go much deeper than the platitude that seems to inspire its title — presenting as it does a merciless dog-eat-dog world without generating ideas of its own that might distinguish it from similar Wild West fare. One can imagine how the particularities of the Romanian bush might yield novel dynamics. Instead, “Dogs” underplays these elements and commits to the beats of the slow burn thriller in mostly generic form.DogsNot rated. In Romanian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Capote Tapes’ Review: New Narratives and Unanswered Prayers

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      This documentary adds some material to the tragic tale of a great American writer, but also teases at what it can’t deliver.There’s some fascinating and provocative material in “The Capote Tapes” that is diluted by the director Ebs Burnough’s insistence on teasing a question that, arguably, has a self-evident answer.The movie opens with onscreen texts referring to “a journalist’s” archive on interviews about Capote and rumors of an “unfinished scandalous manuscript.” The journalist turns out to be George Plimpton, who published an oral history on Capote in 1997, over a decade after Capote’s 1984 death at age 59. The manuscript would be “Answered Prayers,” excerpts from which caused much disaffection among Capote’s high-society associates when they ran in Esquire magazine in the mid-70s.Capote’s story is one of fierce talent, personal bravery, poor professional ethics, eccentric celebrity, and eventual addiction and dissolution. It’s been dramatized in two notable fiction films. And the man himself features in scores of documentaries. Burnough’s movie very much wants to add something new to the narrative, and it does, introducing Kate Harrington, whom Capote quietly adopted in the ’60s. (It’s a complicated and odd story.)After this, the movie flips and flops from a linear approach and one that implies “Hold on, we’ll get to that manuscript in a bit.” Over a shot of the steel reels of an analog tape recorder rolling, we hear Norman Mailer say “nobody wrote better sentences” — one of the few observations here on Capote’s work. Onscreen, the writer Jay McInerney is unfortunately assigned to deliver a lot of “I want to be a part of it, New York, New York” boilerplate.As for that manuscript, anyone paying attention knows the answer early on. By the end of his life, Capote was such a human wreck that the idea of some kind of posthumous literary time bomb is ridiculous on the face of it.The Capote TapesNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘No Responders Left Behind’ Review: Heroes Need Heroes Too

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      John Feal works tirelessly as an advocate for rescuers injured or sickened in the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and their aftermath.In “No Responders Left Behind,” John Feal is a kind of action hero — political action, that is. This documentary by Rob Lindsay follows Feal’s tenacious efforts to obtain government health benefits and compensation for the thousands of rescuers with illnesses and injuries from working on Sept. 11, 2001, and beyond.Feal organizes multipronged campaigns to press Congress to pass aid bills, and the government’s delays and denials feel increasingly galling as the documentary retraces the timeline using interviews and archival footage. The banner piece of legislation on the benefits issue — the Zadroga Act — was not passed until 2010, with renewal and related pushes necessary in 2015 and 2019.Feal — who was injured by falling steel while managing World Trade Center debris removal — is blunt and funny in a way that helps cut through the movie’s hurried, sound-bitey, fundamentally televisual quality. Along the way, he introduces (and amiably rags on) some fellow injured responders, including Ray Pfeifer, a revered firefighter (who died in 2017). He’s open about his tactic of putting politicians on the spot and pushing buttons as necessary. Jon Stewart lends his celebrity as a loyal and sincere supporter of the cause, testifying before Congress.While pragmatic in bent, the documentary repeatedly underlines the toxic manner in which this country treats many who have sacrificed body and mind in service to others. With its blue-collar ranks of responders, the movie also shows who tends to bear such all-consuming burdens and how it can take someone singular like Feal to get both attention and results.No Responders Left BehindNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 19 minutes. Watch on Discovery+. More

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      ‘Queenpins’ Review: Suburban Scammers

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      Two cash-strapped neighbors devise a multimillion-dollar coupon swindle in this mildly entertaining comedy.“Queenpins” might have been a snappy little comedy had it lost 20 minutes and found a point beyond glorifying grand larceny. Erasing the lead character’s smug-perky narration wouldn’t have hurt, either.Set mainly in suburban Phoenix, Ariz. — with pit stops in other dehydrated locations — the movie smiles on Connie (Kristen Bell), a cash-strapped coupon cutter whose bland good cheer masks a desperate longing for a child.“You’re trying to replace a baby with coupons,” her husband (Joel McHale), a withdrawn I.R.S. agent, accurately observes before largely disappearing from the story. Connie’s true partner, though, is JoJo (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), a bubbly neighbor and vlogger looking for a break. Together, they hatch a scheme to steal coupons from a printing facility in Mexico and sell them on YouTube. What could possibly go wrong?Written and directed by the husband-and-wife team of Aron Gaudet and Gita Pullapilly, “Queenpins,” inspired by actual events, can’t decide if its pink-collar criminals are fools or geniuses. Neither can the two men on their trail: a businesslike postal inspector (Vince Vaughn, starved for decent lines) and the movie’s true hero, Ken Miller (an excellent Paul Walter Hauser), an officious loss-prevention officer for a supermarket chain. Ken’s longing for respect makes him a ridiculous, even pathetic figure; but he has a dogged, shabby sense of honor that the film views as a joke and repeatedly undermines.Making no secret of where its sympathies lie, “Queenpins” scampers toward its ludicrous conclusion with less concern for logic than for ensuring that everyone gets what he or she wants. With the possible exception of the audience.QueenpinsRated R for iffy language and icky behavior. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters and on Paramount+. More