Movies

The company has experienced deep losses in its theme park division because of the pandemic, but investors don’t seem to care at the moment. More

The comedy of male immaturity reached its peak a little more than a decade ago, when “Step Brothers” brought the genre to obnoxious perfection. “The Climb” takes what seems to be a more elevated — more grown-up — consideration of some of the same themes. It’s about two best friends from childhood struggling with some of the challenges of heterosexual adult life, principally women.Directed by Michael Angelo Covino from a script he wrote with Kyle Marvin — the two are real-life buddies playing guys named Mike and Kyle — the film layers non-jokey (but sometimes quite funny) sitcom beats with difficult feelings and painful dramatic situations. There are two weddings (one offscreen) and a funeral, as well as a bachelor party and a handful of awkward holiday gatherings.But don’t be fooled by the signs of cinematic sophistication: the kinetic Steadicam shots; the numbered chapters; the semi-surreal quasi-musical numbers; the French movie one of the characters goes to see by himself. Rather than ascending to new heights of bromance, “The Climb” coasts down into the barren flatlands of masculine self-pity.[embedded content]This sour, regressive wallow starts and ends with bicycles. We first meet Kyle and Mike pedaling uphill through a mountainous stretch of French countryside. Mike is the more serious cyclist, with a lean physique, tight shorts and a way with words like “bidon” and “cadence.” His fitness and confidence offer a clear contrast with the soft-bodied Kyle, who is wearing ordinary sneakers and a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. The alpha-beta hierarchy all this implies will be complicated later on — nearly to the point of reversal — but first Mike reveals that he has been sleeping with Kyle’s fiancée, Ava.That’s not a spoiler. It happens before the opening titles. Ava, played in a single scene by the French actress Judith Godrèche, turns out to be disposable. Perhaps a better word is functional, since like all the other women in the movie — another fiancée, a mom, a stripper, a couple of sisters — she serves as a speed bump on Kyle and Mike’s long road toward a more perfect manly union.What Ava does is provide both guys with wounds that alienate them from each other while guaranteeing them perpetual indulgence from the audience. Mike, his guilt compounded by grief, lets himself go. He drinks recklessly and puts on weight, while Kyle slims down and gets his act together. (The physical transformations seem to be achieved mainly by means of grooming and posture). He reconnects with Marissa (Gayle Rankin, giving the best and most thankless performance), the high school girlfriend who dumped him, even though nobody else in his life can stand her.That includes Kyle’s sisters (Daniela Covino and Eden Malyn) and mother (Talia Balsam). There’s also a dad (try not to shout “Norm!” when you spot George Wendt), but he’s marginal to the story. Men can be boobs or brutes, but they are fundamentally without malice. That’s girl stuff. The acts of deceit, manipulation and betrayal that drive Kyle and Mike apart are all the work of women.That might actually be interesting if Marvin and Covino had written a screenplay with genuine wit, rather than an agglomeration of zingers and non sequiturs. The verbal humor makes “The Climb” seem smarter than it is, just as Covino’s dexterity with pacing and camera movement provides some comic momentum. But the emotional core of the film — the love that supposedly binds Kyle and Mike in spite of everything — is empty. The final scene, which finds them back on their bikes, manages to be sentimental and cynical in equal measure.It’s not that they’re bad guys. They’re just so tentatively and generically drawn that they never emerge as characters beyond a handful of easy-to-read attributes. Why do they care about each other? What else do they care about? They seem like extras in their own movie. Or maybe they should have been supporting characters — “Boyfriend No. 1”; “son”; “drunk dude at ski lodge”; “future ex-husband” — in a movie about Ava, Marissa, and Kyle’s mom.The ClimbRated R. Guy stuff. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More

This Netflix holiday movie offers energetic sequences, charming music and a delightful cast. More

The myth of Bonnie and Clyde dies hard, especially because of Arthur Penn’s romanticized crime film, which hit screens with a splatter in 1967. That movie’s special mix of Hollywood chic and frenzied violence rekindled the legend and kept it smoldering. Americans love their outlaws and really love them running wild, partly because the world’s most powerful country clings to its foundational us-versus-them identity.The hollow genre exercise “Dreamland” is the latest to take its lead from America’s favorite bandit couple, even as it tries to chart its own course. This time the focus is on a 17-year-old, Eugene (the very adult Finn Cole), whose failed family farm is part of a larger national catastrophe. It’s the 1930s and times are tough, or so the movie insists, even if the production design, costumes, etc. show otherwise. Eugene has the usual back story of an absent dad and stern stepfather (a fine Travis Fimmel). And, like every human to walk the earth (and most who crop up in fiction), Eugene has dreams.Eugene wants to help his family, though apparently not enough to work, preferring to wander and read pulp magazines. The promise of a hefty reward for a bank robber, Allison Wells (a criminally wasted Margot Robbie), seems to show him the way, but mostly puts his fanciful imagination into further overdrive. He decides he will find Allison, a plan that takes a far-fetched turn after she’s wounded and takes refuge in his family’s barn. The movie more or less writes itself after she hikes her skirt and he tends her wound. Dust swirls and so do passions, and before long this unremarkable pipsqueak and outlaw woman have become a wholly unbelievable couple on the run.It’s a lot of hooey and might have been at least tolerable if the movie had been rougher, meaner, tighter, and if the filmmakers — the writer is Nicolaas Zwart, the director is Miles Joris-Peyrafitte — had never watched a Terrence Malick movie. There are honeyed landscapes, still-life shots of crepuscular, peopleless rooms and a voice-over (by Lola Kirke), which tries to elevate Eugene’s story with penny-ante psychology and a splash of mythopoetic fancy. “The land turned on us,” the narrator says early on, pinning the Dust Bowl on Mother Nature, “and then the banks came.” So Eugene hides in the barn to read Black Mask magazine and “daydream about his destiny.”We see Eugene in that barn, his eyes fixed on his magazine and one hand down the front of his pants. He’s “fantasizing about a life like his heroes,” the narrator reassures us as there’s a cut to a scene of bank robbers using hostages as shields against police fire. The implication here is that Eugene is turned on by the violence he reads about, an idea that the movie rationalizes by ending the robbery with a punctuating close-up of Allison’s face. Mass culture, it turns out, was just the first temptation for Eugene, who finds his second in another movieland Jezebel, who, the moment she appears, makes it clear that we’re watching a movie about the wrong character.DreamlandRated R for the usual gun violence and gratuitous female nudity. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More

A titanic figure, the Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira (1908-2015) got his start in the era of silent cinema and completed his last feature at the age of 105.Not every one of Oliveira’s many films, the vast majority of which were made after he turned 65, can be considered great — he was a filmmaker given to experimentation. But a good many are, and “Francisca” (1981), streaming in a digital restoration from Film at Lincoln Center, is one.A leisurely two hours and 45 minutes, set in mid-1850s Portugal with the country in unseen political turmoil, the movie tells a tale of “ill-omened passion” (its suitably Victorian term for insane romantic love). Oliveira constructs an enigmatic, unbalanced triangle consisting of a beautiful and innocent English woman, Francisca “Fanny” Owen, a louche and handsome Portuguese aristocrat, José Augusto, and the cynical writer Camilo Castelo Branco.Although resembling a 19th-century novel, “Francisca” is actually meta 19th-century; rather than making the setting seem natural, Oliveira renders it strange. The movie is an adaptation of a pastiche written by the feminist author Agustina Bessa-Luís. Branco is a real person, one of Portugal’s great writers, but Fanny and José Augusto (played by Teresa Menezes and Diogo Dória) are larger-than-life fictions. The actors who play the English angel and her Byronic cad are taller than their cast mates and — divinities come to earth — tower over the diminutive Branco.“Francisca” is both classical and postmodern, a cross between a lush Visconti period piece and the stylized expressionism of “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.” Oliveira evokes the past as though reconstructing a dinosaur from a handful of bones. Different planes of existence intersect throughout. José Augusto is introduced at a society ball, a wax statue amid a riotous whirl of masked revelers. More than once, the aristocratic protagonists stumble upon singing peasants seemingly oblivious to the doings of their social betters.Oliveira is a frugal filmmaker and a master of camera placement. Many sequences play out in a single shot as if to document their own artifice. Fanny’s theatrical line readings alternate with deadpan grand gestures. Having been expelled from Fanny’s family home, suggestively named Paraiso (Paradise), José Augusto twice rides his horse into Camilo’s room to report the news.Mysteries proliferate. On the eve of his marriage to Fanny, José Augusto receives, courtesy of Camilo, a packet of letters written by Fanny. Reading them, he is driven into a cold fury — that can only be construed as pure plot device. Neither the content nor the original recipient of the fatal letters is ever revealed. (Nor, it should be said, is the exact nature of the couple’s perverse, self-defeating desire.)“The soul is a vice,” Fanny proclaims at one point, and, after running off with José Augusto, she dreams of Camilo bad-mouthing his rival and threatening to take her soul away. Much in the movie implies that the writer has stage-managed the whole fiction. He does have the last word — or rather, Oliveira does.For all its doomy descent into darkness, “Francisca” ends in the boîte where José Augusto received the letters, reprising the gay music of the masked ball that opened the film.FranciscaAvailable for streaming at Film at Lincoln Center, starting Nov. 12; filmlinc.org.Rewind is an occasional column covering revived, restored and rediscovered movies. More