Movies

A loving documentary about a Pacific Northwest amphitheater, created by a long-ago natural catastrophe, that is a haven for concertgoers.What’s the ideal place to experience live music? For some, a midsize hall with immaculate acoustics; for others, an intimate nightclub with a well-stocked bar; for others still, a clamorous, sweaty dive. For those who are able to get there, and who have an affinity with its vibe, the Gorge Amphitheater in George, Wash., with its scenic beauty and open-air sonics, is heaven.Early in this friendly and entirely uncritical documentary about the venue, directed by Nic Davis, a geologist explains that while the Grand Canyon formed over five to six million years, it took mere minutes for a Columbia River flood to create this striking narrow valley whose geography practically demands an amphitheater.The land once belonged to a couple of adventurous vintners, who put out seating and began hosting modest musical events there. Promoters, sponsors, and others took notice, and after a Bob Dylan booking in 1988 that showed the commercial potential of the site, the place grew.It’s now home to several genre festivals, and a Labor Day weekend event hosted by the Dave Matthews Band. Matthews himself is a wittily self-effacing interviewee. Other famed players chime in, mostly with bromides. Footage from certain concerts does make the place look like a great, if rather exclusive, place to experience music.Threaded through “Enormous: The Gorge Story” are the reminiscences of Pat Coats, a devotee of Gorge shows who shares 30 years’ worth of sometimes exhilarating stories, capped by one of loss. The dimension this adds is welcome. It reminds us that death is unavoidable, even in an anodyne documentary about a music venue.Enormous: The Gorge StoryNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 5 minutes. Available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

America’s creepiest family takes a road trip in this animated sequel, though their antics are far more kooky than spooky.In 2019, the Addams family returned to the big screen for the first time since the 1990s, this time in animated form. The macabre clan, directly styled after Charles Addams’s original New Yorker cartoon characters and voiced by a star-studded cast, railed against normalcy and blew up a lot of stuff. Now, in a new sequel, they’re taking that show on the road. Like it’s predecessor, “The Addams Family 2” is more kooky than spooky, offering much more to young children than it may to the adults accompanying them.This newest iteration opens at a science fair; Wednesday (Chloë Grace Moretz) has figured out how to implant her pet octopus’s intelligence into her dopey Uncle Fester (Nick Kroll). Though she captures the attention of the wealthy genius Cyrus Strange (Bill Hader), she merely earns a participation award, and her resulting melancholy makes her withdraw further from her parents.In an attempt to bond with their teenagers, Gomez (Oscar Isaac) and Morticia (Charlize Theron) take the family on a road trip to Death Valley, but their cross-country antics are waylaid when a pushy stranger (Wallace Shawn) insists Wednesday may have been switched at birth.The filmmakers (the “Addams Family” and “Sausage Party” directors Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernon) are smart to focus on Wednesday for most of this plot. She is the wittiest character, and it’s difficult to imagine an actor better suited to voice her than Moretz. But where it could lean into the typically bone-dry Addams family humor, this film more often relies on poop jokes, explosions and the musical talents of Snoop Dogg. It’s sure to entertain little ones, but parents may find themselves itching for something more impish.The Addams Family 2Rated PG. 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

Two horror comedies that champion the downtrodden are part of the anthology series “Welcome to the Blumhouse,” streaming on Amazon.“The summer I got breasts, that was the same summer I fought vampires,” the feisty Shawna (Asjha Cooper) tells us at the beginning of Maritte Lee Go’s “Black as Night,” a hard-times-in-the-Big-Easy tale and one of a pair of horror-comedies that begin streaming this week on Amazon as part of the Welcome to the Blumhouse anthology. The other is Gigi Saul Guerrero’s “Bingo Hell”; and while the two are vastly different, they nevertheless share a sociopolitical sensibility that champions the downtrodden and makes heroes of the marginalized.In “Black as Night” (the cooler, fleeter option), the lingering effects of Hurricane Katrina dust a screenplay (by Sherman Payne) that sees the city’s homeless being transformed into a vampire army by a formerly enslaved über-bloodsucker (Keith David). As Shawna and her sidekick, a gay Mexican immigrant (Fabrizio Guido), fight to stop the slaughter the old-school way — with sunlight, garlic and holy water — Payne uses their quest to directly address colorism, addiction and the tension between the French Quarter and the projects. The special effects are fine, if unremarkable, but the actors are into it and the script manages to be thoughtful without dampening the fun.Greed and gentrification are the twin curses that drive “Bingo Hell,” a warmhearted look at what happens when an evil entity co-opts a retirees’ bingo hall. People are going missing in the low-income community of Oak Springs, but Lupita (Adriana Barraza), the hipster-hating local busybody, is on the case. Inflamed by the changes to her beloved neighborhood, Lupita is further troubled by the sinister, toothy figure (Richard Brake) who has converted the bingo hall into a flashy, cash-spewing casino.From left, L. Scott Caldwell, Adriana Barraza and Bertila Damas in “Bingo Hell.”Amazon StudiosTaking a sly, metaphorical dig at homeowners abandoning their friends for fast buyouts, “Bingo Hell” sprinkles hardship and loss on a story of oldster gumption. When the action gets creaky, Byron Werner’s photography gooses things along: He’s especially effective with low-to-the-ground shots that add a creepy surreality to simple setups. The final third fizzles, but I enjoyed the droll musical choices and seriously gloopy special effects. (One scene in a motel bathroom should come with a warning to anyone suffering from even the mildest skin condition.)Despite the generally humorous vibe, “Bingo Hell” quietly accumulates an unignorable pathos. However brave and resourceful, Lupita and her friends are battling to save a neighborhood that poverty and progress have already claimed.Black as NightNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. Watch on Amazon.Bingo HellNot Rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. Watch on Amazon. More

A group of female insurgents hunt down weary men in this halfhearted, half-feminist fantasy from Karen Cinorre.The dreamy but indistinct fantasy “Mayday” finds its Alice-before-Wonderland in Ana (Grace Van Patten), a server who is terrorized by her superiors and adored by her kitchen colleagues. Ana finds her proverbial rabbit hole when a voice calls from the oven. She crawls after it and lands in an unknown sea.In this alternate universe, Ana is washed ashore and taken in by a female insurgency run by the charismatic Marsha (Mia Goth). Men are absent from the island’s makeshift society, and Marsha explains that men have been consumed by a forever war beyond their shores. To hear Marsha tell it, men are prone to assault any girl who crosses their path, and Marsha’s vagabond crew picks off the fellows they can snare. They act as sirens over their radio system, drawing soldiers to their deaths at sea. On land, they prefer sniper fire, and a skeptical Ana is to be their latest sharpshooter.It should be a bold premise, but there is a curious contrast in this film between the richly defined images and the story’s ethical indeterminacy. Visually, the writer and director Karen Cinorre is sure-footed, impressing with steampunk production design and sun-dappled cinematography. But narratively, her movie waffles, refusing to generate plausible rationales for Marsha’s girlboss-ish militancy.Marsha insinuates, commandeers and oversimplifies from the moment she is introduced. Her peach-fuzzed targets are too immediately identifiable as lambs rather than wolves. The movie undermines its characters’ principles, and without sincere justification for their warped actions, all dramatic tension dissipates. For a film about misandrist revolutionaries, “Mayday” lacks the courage of its convictions — it sets up boogeymen as targets only to shoot them point blank, in broad daylight.MaydayNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

This trite Covid-19-era comedy follows a pair of kooky sisters on a cross-country mission to save their grandmother from a nursing home overrun with cases.Frankly, a “Covid-era comedy” reads like a threat to this critic, though maybe others will get more mileage out of social distancing gags circa March 2020, when the mere thought of public spaces sent shivers down the spine. The pandemic is hardly behind us, yet “Stop and Go,” starring and written by Whitney Call and Mallory Everton, formerly of the sketch comedy show Studio C, feels awfully outdated. Many of us may have doused our things in comical amounts of disinfectant and flown into frenzies by mere throat tickles, but the relatability factor is redundant at this point.The girls, at the very least, just want to have fun. Jamie (Call) and Blake (Everton) are motor-mouthed sisters whose lives are upended by lockdown, though the bleakness of that reality is never really apparent save for the occasional groaning mention of “people dying out there.”The girls’ grandmother, who lives in a nursing home overrun by Covid cases, is one such potential victim, prompting a cross-country rescue mission. It’s a race against time: the quicker they can get to Nana, the lower the chance of infection. Then there’s a third sister who doesn’t quite take the pandemic as seriously as she should — she’s on a cruise when Jamie and Blake first give her a ring, and she intends to take Nana in herself when she gets back, adding another layer of urgency.Directed by Everton and Stephen Meek, “Stop and Go” joins the ever-expanding genre of female buddy comedies that posits women can be weird, manic, and messy, too. (See: “Broad City,” “Booksmart” or “Never Goin’ Back”). Everton and Call are charming enough, and Everton is a particularly magnetic physical performer, but their high jinks — from a ridiculous saga involving one of Jamie’s students and a pair of mice to a pit stop at a dog breeder’s pad — are hit-and-miss. But mostly miss.Stop and GoNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

Starring Tim Blake Nelson, the film tips its hat to classic westerns, even if it gets caught in their shadows.“Old Henry” makes a solid, honorable go of proving once again that the foursquare western isn’t dead, though in paying homage to its forebears, it inevitably stands in their very long shadows.While the basic standoff scenario is tautly limited in time and place, it’s hard to imagine Budd Boetticher, who made seven fantastically economical westerns with Randolph Scott, burning nearly 40 minutes bringing the opposing sides together. Tim Blake Nelson plays the title part, a farmer who keeps his past shrouded from his son (Gavin Lewis). When Henry brings home Curry (Scott Haze), a wounded man he finds with a satchel of cash nearby, three other men, led by Ketchum (Stephen Dorff), turn up at the farm to collect him.Ketchum and Curry both say they represent the law, and a quietly effective scene finds the wily Henry, feeding Curry at night, trying to trip him up with questions. It takes a few scenes before the performances begin to crackle — Nelson, perhaps the actor most suited for westerns, initially comes across as self-conscious, not to mention dwarfed by an exceptionally wide-brimmed hat — but a sense of lived-in characters does take hold.The writer-director Potsy Ponciroli sometimes gets too ripe in giving the dialogue a stylized twang, and the plot burdens itself with iconography it can’t support. (Even the choice of aspect ratio — rare, ultrawide 2.66:1 — suggests a kind of overreach.) Ponciroli also cheats a bit with perspective. Still, he’s learned a lesson better-illustrated in various classics of Howard Hawks and Clint Eastwood: The deliberate pacing pays off in a satisfyingly volatile climax.Old HenryNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters. More

Jake Gyllenhaal plays an imploding 911 operator in this riveting remake.Whether you favor Gustav Moller’s 2018 Danish drama, “The Guilty,” or the Netflix remake of the same name will depend on whether you prefer your thrillers acoustic or electric, chilly or hot-wired. It will also hinge on your answer to the question, How many close-ups of Jake Gyllenhaal are too many?Embellishing Moller’s jangly psychological study with Los Angeles color, the director Antoine Fuqua and his screenwriter Nic Pizzolatto have amped the original film’s energy a smidge and marginally widened its perspective. The plot’s relentlessly clambering tension, though largely identical to the original, is catnip to Gyllenhaal, into whose tortured eyes and sweating pores the camera happily descends. As Joe Baylor, a disgraced L.A.P.D. officer temporarily assigned to an emergency call center, the actor builds to an all-caps-plus-exclamation-point performance; that he does so without losing his grip — on us or the character — is some kind of miracle.When we meet him, Joe is already approaching his last nerve. As flaring wildfires and other emergencies fill the huge screens that overlook the operators on duty, he’s in the bathroom, gasping through an asthma attack. Back at his desk, he rudely swats away the callers he deems less than emergent, curtly processing the rest. It’s the eve of his disciplinary hearing for the unspecified offense that has landed him in this purgatory, and his resentment and boredom are obvious.Then a woman calls, in what initially appears to be a wrong number as she’s addressing a child, and we can see Joe’s on-the-job instincts click into gear. His face and body suddenly alert, he questions her and deduces that she is being kidnapped and that her abductor is armed. What follows is a taut cat-and-mouse, conducted entirely by telephone, as Joe, instead of following protocol and handing off to other agencies, frantically attempts to solve the crime himself. Only later, as we glean more about his personal life, do we suspect his investment in this woman’s safety might be something more than professional.Thanks to a vibrant voice cast that includes Riley Keough, Peter Sarsgaard and Ethan Hawke, “The Guilty” helps us to visualize its unexpectedly shocking offscreen twists and turns. Maz Makhani’s cinematography is glossily seductive, finding ever new angles to ogle Joe at his computer, while Marcelo Zarvos’s canny musical score resists thrusting itself into every verbal hiatus. When Joe sucks on his inhaler, we hear every wheeze.Essentially a one-man show, “The Guilty” necessarily vibrates to the rhythms of its lead. As the original Joe, Jakob Cedergren was cooler and more physically restrained, perfectly in tune with his movie’s stripped-down aesthetic. In Gyllenhaal’s hands — and feet and everything in between — “The Guilty” becomes a more combustible portrait of mental breakdown. Joe, losing his grip on everything that matters, needs to find this woman before it’s too late. He desperately needs a save.The GuiltyRated R for bad words and horrible pictures in your head. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

Onstage, the ex-senator and “S.N.L.” star doesn’t exactly address his fall from grace. But he doesn’t not address it either. Asked if he’ll run again, he is noncommittal.It was a fairly typical night at the Comedy Cellar’s Village Underground with a procession of young comics telling jokes about bickering couples, body issues and unglamorous sex. After Matteo Lane finished his set with a story about sleeping with a porn star, the curveball came: The host introduced “the only performer on the lineup who was a United States senator.”Then Al Franken, 70, bespectacled and wearing a button-down shirt, slowly walked onstage. He looked back toward Lane, took a considered pause and in mock outrage exclaimed: “He stole my act!”Franken has been opening with that joke a lot lately as he’s been refining material in basement rooms around town in preparation for a national stand-up tour. It’s his way of addressing how much he sticks out in his return to comedy, following a Senate career that ended with his resignation after multiple women accused him of sexual misconduct, including unwanted kissing. New York comics generally don’t do impressions of the Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, of Iowa, or earnestly explain the reasons they remain Democrats. And yet, the four times I have seen Franken perform over the past month, he has consistently gotten laughs or even killed. The only time he really lost a crowd was after midnight when the fury of a rant about the Republican Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, (involving a dispute about an assault weapons ban) crowded out the punch lines. Franken’s set went long, around 50 minutes, and a couple of comics who followed needled him. “I would have killed myself if it wasn’t for his gun legislation,” Nimesh Patel joked.In Franken’s new material, he explains how as a politician, he was often implored by his staff to not be funny. It only leads to trouble. His act presents a less censored Franken, one that includes a story of him inside the Senate cloakroom telling a joke about oral sex with Willie Nelson — with Franken deftly imitating the New York Senator Chuck Schumer and former Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill, both Democrats, as they dissect the joke. Franken’s delivery is a Minnesota mosey with a bristling energy hinting at unspoken feelings and future ambition.On the street after the Cellar show, Franken and I discussed Norm Macdonald, who had died earlier that day. Franken mentioned that when he was on “Saturday Night Live,” Macdonald had beat him out for the Weekend Update anchor job, then recalled how the NBC executive Don Ohlmeyer supposedly fired Macdonald for making jokes about O.J. Simpson, Ohlmeyer’s friend. Franken quipped: “Got to give credit to Ohlmeyer for sticking by a friend.”It’s a funny joke, but as often happens with Franken these days, it can’t help but evoke his own scandal. After all, many of Franken’s colleagues did not stick by him in the wake of the accusations. After a photo of Franken pantomiming groping a conservative talk radio host on a U.S.O. tour was released, many Democratic senators called for him to step down, and he did, denying the allegations in a resignation speech. Since then, many (but not all) Democrats have seen that reaction as a rush to judgment, including nine senators who had called for him to resign now saying they regret doing so. Some politicians who stood by their calls for him to resign, like Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, have faced a backlash.Franken only recently began explicitly mentioning the fallout onstage, but glancingly, with a bit involving a masked ventriloquist’s dummy named Petey who wants to talk about how he was treated by his Democratic colleagues. Without giving away the twist, the conversation gets sidetracked.Is the comedy tour a way to rehabilitate his political career? Franken said, with a laugh, “I’m not sure this is the best way to do that.”Todd Heisler/The New York TimesAt an Upper West Side diner, Franken didn’t want to go into details, calling it a “no-win,” but said it hasn’t changed his politics. “Part of the irony of all this is I was maybe the most proactive member of the Senate on sexual harassment and sexual assault,” he said.As for his old co-workers: “I have forgiven the ones who have apologized to me,” he said, tersely.Outside the diner, a man approached and told him that he looked more handsome in person and then said in a pointed way that seemed beyond politics: “I’m in your camp.”At a few of the New York shows, there was a certain tension in the room before he got onstage, and a curiosity over how warmly he would be received. Franken said he was never anxious about it. “People like me,” he said, in a cadence that couldn’t help but evoke his character Stuart Smalley, the 12-step aficionado he portrayed on “Saturday Night Live.” After I pointed this out, Franken burst into an impression of the cheerfully cardiganed character: “I’m fun to be with.”Franken — who moves effortlessly from inside-showbiz yarns to political ones — is less deadpan offstage than on, with a slightly quicker delivery, puncturing many sentences with a booming laugh that sounds like a baritone quack.Long before he was a politician, Franken, who moved from Washington to New York in January to be near his grandchildren, was something of a comedy prodigy — performing at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles in a double act with Tom Davis while still in college, and going to work as a writer for the original cast of “Saturday Night Live.” He then pioneered a no-holds-barred style of liberal comedy with best-selling books like “Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Other Observations.” Franken still delights in skewering the right-wing media entertainment complex amid dissections of public policy, which he does regularly on a titular new podcast that welcomes a starry list of politicians, journalists and entertainers. In his show, he says, “The leading cause of death in this country is Tucker Carlson.”Franken says he is returning to comedy because it’s a “part of him,” and his conversation is filled with references to friends in the business. He said he went to the Cellar after speaking with Chris Rock and Louis C.K. But it’s hard to escape the impression that politics animate Franken more than comedy. He said he loved campaigning and being a senator, and for someone as well-known as he is, his act includes an awful lot of résumé highlights (like casting the deciding vote for the Affordable Care Act) coddled in a layer of irony that knows you can get laughs by playing the jerk. “You’re welcome” is a recurring punchline.His act presents a less-censored Franken. Todd Heisler/The New York TimesThere are moments onstage that have elements of a stump speech, and it makes you wonder if this is all a prelude to another run. When asked, Franken shifted from casual comic to preprogrammed politician: “I am keeping my options open.”What about running for senator of New York? He repeated, “I am keeping my options open.”After chuckling at this diplomatic answer, I pointed out I’m not used to interviewing politicians. Franken let out another quacking laugh and acted out a scene imagining the ridiculousness of a comic answering a question about a joke with “I am keeping my options open.”It’s worth noting that even in his telling, the first time Franken ran for senator in Minnesota, his original impulse involved a measure of payback. After Senator Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash, his successor, Norm Coleman, called himself a “99 percent improvement” over Wellstone. In his book “Al Franken, Giant of the Senate,” he describes his reaction with a flash of anger, saying he knew someone had to beat Coleman, before adding that his reasons expanded from that “petty place” to one more about helping the people of his state.In the aftermath of his scandal, which Franken described as “traumatic” for him and his family, he has been trying to work through it and rise above, he said. “I think we need more of that. It’s a struggle but I’m getting there. That’s my goal.”In a sympathetic New Yorker article from 2019, Franken said that after losing his job, he started taking medication for depression; mental health is an issue he has long worked on, he said. When I asked about this, the policy wonk, not the comedian, answered. He brought up the first legislation he passed, calling for a study of the impact on giving support dogs to veterans suffering from PTSD. The conversation moved to the gymnast Simone Biles and how she prioritized her mental health at the Olympics. Franken brought up the people who criticized her, appearing to earnestly address Biles’s situation before making a sarcastic pivot subtle enough that it took me a beat to appreciate the subtext. “So odd — people criticize other people out of ignorance,” he said, a hint of a smirk on his face. “I’d never seen that before. I was just shocked.”When asked what he would say to someone who thought this return to comedy was a way to rehabilitate his political career, Franken said: “I’m not sure this is the best way to do that.” He offered another big laugh before getting serious. “I’m doing this because I love doing this.”On Sunday, running his entire show at Union Hall in preparation for a Friday performance in Milwaukee (it’s not often you hear material in Brooklyn about the Republican Senator Ron Johnson), Franken earned a roaring response to his dummy nudging him to talk about leaving the Senate. At one point, a member of the audience yelled: “Run again!”As the crowd cheered, Franken looked momentarily flustered and flattered. He appeared to be contemplating his next move or maybe weighing a joke. But instead, he made eye contact with the man egging him on and said: “I will need your help.” More