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      ‘A Quiet Place Part II’ Review: Pump Up the Volume

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      This sequel to John Krasinski’s alien-invasion blockbuster is brasher, louder and less focused than its predecessor.Movies need endings, but franchises need cliffhangers, and “A Quiet Place Part II” is emblematic of this problem. The first “A Quiet Place” (2018) gave us a beautifully tragic finale, one that emphasized the story’s core themes of human resilience and familial devotion. It was almost perfect, and it could have been enough.The film’s unexpected success, however, gave Paramount Pictures other ideas. And while this new installment is, like its predecessor, wonderfully acted and intuitively directed (by John Krasinski, who is solely responsible for the story this time around), it has also largely replaced the hushed horror of the original with full-on action. Faster, coarser and far noisier, “Part II” sacrifices emotional depth for thriller setups that do less to advance the plot than grow the younger characters.A tensely orchestrated opening rewinds to Day 1 of the alien invasion as Lee and Evelyn Abbott (Krasinski and Emily Blunt) and their three children enjoy a small-town Little League game. Once again employing a combination of terrifying visual effects and unsettling sound design, Krasinski and his team build a sequence of kinetic chaos that serves as both prologue to the first movie and primer for those who unwisely skipped it.Catapulted to Day 474, mere minutes after the earlier film’s devastating conclusion, we find the remaining family members — including the newborn whose birth was a petrifying highlight of the previous installment — seeking shelter with a former neighbor, Emmett (Cillian Murphy), in an abandoned mill. Emmett, withdrawn and bereaved, is a less than congenial host. Nevertheless, when Evelyn’s daughter, Regan (still played to perfection by the deaf actor Millicent Simmonds), sneaks off to follow a radio signal she believes indicates other survivors, he agrees to follow and bring her home.Splitting the film into two separate story lines, Krasinski strains to replicate the bonding that gave “A Quiet Place” its heart — scenes of tender domesticity that paused the horror and allowed us to exhale. And while the remainder of “Part II” never quite rises to the vigor and excitement of its prologue, its action-movie commitments leave little room for the characters to mourn their losses. So as we follow Regan and Emmett’s sometimes harrowing adventures; watch her injured brother, Marcus (Noah Jupe), fight to protect the baby back at the steel mill; and worry about Evelyn as she scavenges for oxygen and medical supplies, “Part II” becomes primarily a story of children forced to grow up too fast and see too much.The aliens themselves, though, remain unfathomable, wanting nothing more than to eradicate us. (An idea that now, more than a year after the film’s original release date, feels uncomfortably metaphorical.) We know that they’re blind, navigate by sound, and that the feedback from Regan’s cochlear implant gives them the heebie-jeebies. But what do they eat? (If not humans, what are all those teeth for?) Are there baby beasties? Show me the nests!Though in many respects an exemplary piece of filmmaking, “Part II” remains hobbled by a script that resolves two separate crises while leaving the movie itself in limbo. At least until Part III.A Quiet Place Part IIRated PG-13 for toothy monsters and skeevy humans. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Plan B’ Review: A Joy Ride in Search of Emergency Contraception

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      Two teenagers embark on a madcap road trip to Planned Parenthood in this comedy from Natalie Morales.In the endearing comedy “Plan B,” Sunny (Kuhoo Verma) and Lupe (Victoria Moroles) are teenage best friends, bonded by hormonal longings and their will to sneak around their strict but loving parents.Together, the pair throw a party when Sunny’s mom is out of town, and impulsively, Sunny has sex for the first time. When she wakes up, she realizes that she slept with a condom inside her body, risking an unplanned pregnancy. Emergency contraception is needed, and Lupe is right alongside her friend as she runs to retrieve it.The only problem is that Sunny and Lupe live in South Dakota, a state that allows pharmacists to deny medication based on objections to reproductive rights. Sunny and Lupe are refused morning after pills at their local pharmacy, so they take to the road in search of the nearest Planned Parenthood, making room on their route for rendezvous with playground drug dealers and concerts headlined by crushes.This buddy comedy (streaming on Hulu) was directed by the actress Natalie Morales, and her filmmaking demonstrates the same easy confidence she has shown as a performer in movies like “Battle of the Sexes” and TV series like “Dead To Me.” The pace isn’t rushed, the punch lines are casually underplayed and the performances are relaxed and charismatic. The emphasis in “Plan B” stays on its characters and their relationships with each other, and this grounded sense of care lends a sense of assurance to more risqué sequences — including an extended scene of full frontal male nudity.The movie doesn’t make a joke of Sunny and Lupe’s concerns about pregnancy, dating and parental expectations, and in turn, it’s a delight to laugh through their goofier exploits.Plan BNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      ‘Blue Miracle’ Review: Fishing Lessons

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      Mexican orphans find hope through a fishing tournament in this cloying underdog Netflix drama.Gratingly sentimental and simplistic, Julio Quintana’s “Blue Miracle,” set in Cabo San Lucas in 2014, turns a potentially compelling underdog tale into a sermon. But if you’re in the mood to see Dennis Quaid learning and growing — and engaging in sappy conversations about fatherhood — then step right up.As the prizewinning fisherman Wade Malloy, Quaid evinces a manic desperation that, were it tended to, would be inconvenient to the script’s homily-strewn march toward uplift. Temperamentally grumpy and ethically malleable, Malloy learns he can only enter the latest fishing tournament if he has a local man on his team. Enter Papa Omar (Jimmy Gonzales), the saintly director of an imperiled orphanage. In debt to the bank for over $100,000, Omar needs the contest’s prize money to avoid eviction. That he doesn’t know one end of a fishing rod from the other is seemingly irrelevant.Based on a true story, “Blue Miracle” suffers mightily from slapdash plotting and superficial moralizing. (A scene where Omar is tempted by his criminal past needlessly emphasizes his reformed bona fides.) Realism is not a priority: When the orphanage is flooded by Hurricane Odile, the water appears to disappear of its own accord. Neither is it made clear why three orphans — broadly stamped as the smart one, the funny one and the tough kid with issues — are also included on the fishing crew, given their contribution to the task at hand can charitably be described as minimal.What is obvious, though, is that if the movie’s depiction of events is even close to accurate, its outcome is indeed a miracle.Blue MiracleNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      'American Traitor: The Trial of Axis Sally' Review

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      Meadow Williams plays Mildred Gillars in this plodding and ultimately infuriatingly noncommittal movie.Mildred Gillars was an American woman who propagandized for the Nazis on German state radio for much of World War II. While not as well known as her Pacific counterpart “Tokyo Rose,” she acquired enough of a cachet to be nicknamed “Axis Sally” by contemporary troops who weren’t buying what she was selling.Directed by Michael Polish from a script by Polish, Vance Owen and Daryl Hicks, “American Traitor: The Trial of Axis Sally,” a fictionalized version of her story, was executive produced by Meadow Williams, who plays Gillars. The movie begins with her arrest in Germany after the war. Gillars is extradited to Washington and indicted on many counts of treason and conspiracy. Her case is dumped in the lap of the gruff lawyer James Laughlin, played, well, gruffly by Al Pacino.As the case moves to trial, the movie intercuts flashbacks detailing Gillars’s distinctly nonbrilliant career in Germany, from meeting with a condescending Joseph Goebbels to bedroom strategizing with her lover, who’s also her radio producer. Williams plays Gillars as a not particularly clever or sympathetic tough cookie doing what she needs to do to “survive.” The argumentation conveyed through both the performance and the script is weak.This is a plodding and ultimately infuriatingly noncommittal movie. Its special pleadings are all over the map. And to make them, the filmmakers distort truth; for instance, mangling a famed Ernest Hemingway quote on the nature of war to make it specific to World War II. If Mildred Gillars has a story worth telling in a feature film, this isn’t it.American Traitor: The Trial of Axis SallyRated R for language, violence. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. In select theaters and available to rent or buy on Google Play, FandangoNow and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Five Years North’ Review: Opposite Sides of Immigration

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      This frustratingly sentimental documentary looks at the parallel lives of an undocumented teenager and an ICE agent in New York.“Five Years North” follows two New Yorkers whose paths you hope will never cross. Luis is an undocumented 16-year-old from Guatemala, who at the film’s outset has just been released from detention and awaits a court date. Judy is a middle-age Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer overseeing Luis’s neighborhood. Zach Ingrasci and Chris Temple’s documentary isn’t a cat-and-mouse thriller, but watching Luis try to scrape together money to send home while Judy’s team prowls for immigrants — at one point arresting a man as he takes his daughter to school — is often an exercise in edge-of-the-seat anxiety.The filmmakers have known Luis’s family for a decade, which explains the remarkable access they acquire to his life. Mixing interviews and observational scenes, they trace the boy’s compressed coming-of-age. He precariously juggles school, an exhausting job delivering food and homesick FaceTime calls with his parents, who face crushing debts and poverty.Judy also lets the filmmakers into her office and home, revealing details that might surprise some. Her father is from Puerto Rico, and her mother, who is Cuban, used to resettle refugees. Judy concedes that immigration policy is flawed, though her main gripe is that it lumps together “criminals and non-criminals.” She’s simply — as goes the bureaucratic refrain — “doing her job.”There’s much to unpack here, from the preponderance of Latino agents in ICE to the mental health effects of immigration, evident in Luis’s panic attacks. But the film, frustratingly, stays on the surface, settling for easy emotional moments: crosscuts between Judy and Luis talking about family; the two of them gazing up at Fourth of July fireworks. Systemic injustices remain in the blurry background of these sentimental, humanist portraits.Five Years NorthNot rated. In English, Spanish and Kaqchikel, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. In New York at Film Forum. More

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      A Congo War Movie, 'Mercy of the Jungle'

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      In this immersive portrait of ethnic conflict by the Rwandan filmmaker Joel Karekezi, two men also take on the jungle and the savage elements.Set in Kivu, at the eastern edge of the Democratic Republic of Congo, “The Mercy of the Jungle” wrings existential dread from its immersive conceit, following a pair of Rwandan soldiers swept up in the haze of multinational and regional conflicts that broke out in the late 1990s.Dispatched with the vengeful objective of hunting down ethnic Hutu rebels, the men brave the elements and reckon with their own complicity in the perpetuation of violence.The filmmaker and co-writer Joel Karekezi, a survivor of the Rwandan genocide which was a contributing factor to the military upheaval depicted in the film, skirts the big-picture history lesson here, choosing instead subjective, boots-on-the-ground testimony.Accidentally separated from their unit, Xavier (Marc Zinga), a hardened veteran, and Faustin (Stéphane Bak) a new recruit, plunge deep into the dangerous jungle to avoid the enemy on the main road. Journeying through the wilderness comes with the expected challenges, such as severely volatile weather conditions and feverish hallucinations. At the same time, the film’s palpably-rendered environment, with stiflingly dense foliage and vivid natural soundscapes, heightens the dizzying nature of the war without resorting to titillation or idealized images that might glorify pain and suffering.The film also calls attention to the ways in which one person’s struggle to survive can have a devastating ripple effect. In one particularly poignant aside, a village mourns a soldier found dead after an encounter with the two men. Later they pose as Congolese soldiers themselves to benefit from local hospitality.Contrary to expectations, this morally dubious turn of events is not employed for its thrilling potential. The ease with which Xavier and Faustin are integrated into this “foreign” community reveals the arbitrary nature of territorial boundaries and friend-or-foe distinctions — such is the meaninglessness of modern warfare.The Mercy of the JungleNot rated. In French and Swahili, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. Watch on Film Movement Plus. More

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      ‘Ahead of the Curve’ Review: The Business of Lesbian Identity

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      A 30-year-old lesbian magazine faces an existential crisis in this documentary.In the curiously commercial documentary “Ahead of the Curve,” the lesbian magazine formerly known as Deneuve receives a second shot at the cultural spotlight.Known now by the publication name Curve, the magazine was founded by a lesbian named Franco Stevens in 1990, in the midst of the culture wars. The magazine grew alongside public acknowledgment of lesbian life, and its covers featured newly out stars like the singer Melissa Etheridge or the comedian Margaret Cho. The documentary begins in the present day, as both the glossy and its founder are facing existential crisis.In vérité footage, Stevens is told by Curve’s new owner that the publication might not last another year. The film’s director, Jen Rainin, who is also married to Stevens, uses archival footage of her wife in the ’90s to reflect on Stevens’s history with the magazine and what Curve meant to its larger lesbian readership. In the movie’s contemporary footage, Stevens embarks on a tour of conference halls and community centers, asking young people what lesbian visibility has meant to their lives.There is a tension in the film between the lesbian experience and lesbianism as a consumer product. Stevens connects with young advocates and business leaders over the hopes, fears and traumas that resonate across generations. From a perspective of a business in the process of rebranding, Stevens’s foray into this world of lesbian and queer-centered spaces has focus-tested value. But it is hindered as a documentary by the spotlight on marketing, which boxes conversations about lesbian identity into sterile conference rooms where participants in name tags and lanyards share heartfelt stories for the purpose of a product. The film’s subjects are overwhelmingly earnest, but the movie suffers for its substitution of enterprise over entertainment.Ahead of the CurveNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Dog Gone Trouble’ Review: New Dog, Same Tricks

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      A pampered dog finds himself on the streets in this routine animated comedy.Home is at the center of “Dog Gone Trouble,” about a lost pooch whose owner has just died. But this Netflix animated family feature is nothing to write home about.It begins with Trouble (voiced by Big Sean) living lavishly in a mansion, a far cry from the street-dog lifestyle. After his rich companion, Mrs. Sarah Vanderwhoozie (the always-delightful Betty White, who is criminally wasted here), passes on, her greedy niece (Marissa Jaret Winokur) and nephew (Joel McHale) swoop in to get their hands on Mrs. Vanderwhoozie’s belongings. The catch? If they want her riches, they must take care of her diva dog, too.The setup of Kevin Johnson’s film has promise: a charming montage of Trouble and Mrs. Vanderwhoozie. The crazy, money-hungry relatives you’ll wish had more screen time. Then, a moving scene with Trouble pawing at extravagant paintings of Mrs. Vanderwhoozie and wondering, tearfully, why she’s gone.Once Trouble ends up in what he calls the “jungle” — for the other dogs, including the soul-crushed loner Rousey (Pamela Adlon), this is the street — “Dog Gone Trouble” settles into overdone mutt-movie territory. We essentially get a story about the true meaning of home, explored with more emotional sophistication in other canine-centric animated films (“Bolt,” from 2008, comes to mind). But another one of its themes — a no-label civilization, briefly touched upon when Rousey snaps at Trouble after he calls her an “outside dog” — is far more engaging and culturally contemporary.Instead, the film keeps it basic, right down to a central girl character named Zoe (Lucy Hale) who shares a common outsider bond with Trouble. She’s a stock-millennial, wannabe-musician bore, and her Memoji look does her — and the other humans, animated similarly — no favors.A bunch of dancing squirrels making highly suggestive nut jokes is about as funny as it gets. Elsewhere, Snoop Dogg voices a Doberman named Snoop, who raps a rundown of the plot when the credits roll. That the movie can be summed up in a silly, simple dog rap indicates there wasn’t much of a story here to begin with.Dog Gone TroubleNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More