Movies

Pass the champagne — out of reach of the ill-fated newlyweds Hayley (Eleanor Tomlinson) and Roberto (Tiziano Caputo) in the comedy “Love Wedding Repeat,” streaming on Netflix. The couple’s reception at an Italian villa becomes a drunken, disastrous lab experiment carried out by an unseen oracle (Penny Ryder) who wants to prove that happily-ever-after is merely a game of chance.Table four is where the bride (a charming redhead with a wide smile that shifts from phony to petrified) has quarantined her English-speaking friends: one shiftless male maid-of-honor, two vengeful exes and three lovelorn fools. One of those includes Hayley’s brother Jack (Sam Claflin), haplessly mooning over his dream girl (Olivia Munn), an American war journalist who gets a few muttered zingers, but is otherwise stuck acting, well, dreamy. This volatile cocktail is given one more ingredient — a glass of bubbly spiked with tranquilizers — and a twist. Devilish children have randomly rearranged the seating cards so the poisoner, Jack, isn’t sure who has the sleeping potion until they’ve passed out on their plate.[embedded content]Naturally, the nuptials climax in blood and tears. Unnaturally, however, the film rewinds to test whether the evening might improve if a different guzzler became the Sleeping Bungler. It’s a clever conceit based on the 2012 French film “Plan de Table,” here reduced to a hasty montage of possibilities and one other story line played out in full, accompanied by a stately classical score to balance the mayhem.With a few more slammed doors, the action-packed script could be a passable British farce. Alas, the director and screenwriter Dean Craig instead favors British chagrin plus an overdose of noblesse disdain, which is well-executed by the groom’s silent, suffering grandmother (Giusi Merli). Freida Pinto, however, playing Jack’s loathsome ex, appears to have been instructed to recoil until her head is a foot behind her shoulders.Craig’s comic delivery belabors gags that should run light on their feet. Rather than serving up a variety of zingers, the movie settles for one joke per character, repeated endlessly. A case in point: the jealous boyfriend (Allan Mustafa) who’s fixated on that male measurement. Instead, the best bits of comedy come from physical slapstick. Jack Farthing, playing a coked-out schoolyard crush hellbent on sabotaging Hayley’s marriage, stumbles into the movie like a marionette missing most of his strings, while Joel Fry, as her wastrel best friend, is somehow able to suck his eyeballs into his skull. Cheers to that.Love Wedding RepeatNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

Opening in 1950s Taiwan, during the rule of the Kuomintang (the Chinese Nationalist Party), “Tigertail” introduces us to a young boy named Pin-Jui. He lives with his grandparents in the countryside while his mother looks for a job.The film, streaming on Netflix, soon jumps to the present day: Pin-Jui, now an old man (Tzi Ma), lives in the United States and clearly has a fraught relationship with his grown-up daughter (Christine Ko); it’s not hard to discern that from the awkward silences. Spanning more than half a century, “Tigertail” goes back and forth in time, tracing the events that allowed Pin-Jui to achieve his American dream yet made him so aloof to his loved ones. It does this to mixed results.The writer and director Alan Yang (co-creator of “Master of None”) was inspired by the story of his own father, who immigrated to the United States from Taiwan. Hong-Chi Lee portrays Pin-Jui as a young man, who finds work in a factory alongside his mother, just like Yang’s father had; they make just enough to scrape by.[embedded content]These penniless years are the film’s most romantic, shot with rose-colored nostalgia. Pin-Jui starts dating his childhood crush, Yuan, and their shared scenes pulsate with longing. When he takes her out to a fancy restaurant — an all-red banquet hall with a glamorous chanteuse serenading patrons — one might think of Wong Kar-wai, the master of amorous atmosphere. Unable to foot the bill, the two lovebirds grab hands and make a dash for the exit in slow motion, set to a heart-racing string score.These moments of ecstasy dwindle when Pin-Jui chases his American dream, leaving behind Yuan. He accepts an arranged marriage with his boss’s daughter and moves to New York. Of course, America isn’t what he expected it to be. He continues to live a routine, impoverished life and is still unable to afford to eat out.It’s easy to see how disappointment would wear Pin-Jui down, yet the callousness he develops toward his wife feels abrupt and unwarranted. The film is especially heavy-handed in the present-day scenes with his daughter, who says she was neglected. Their painfully expository conversations reveal the weakness of Yang’s script. Those scenes left this viewer missing the sensory experience of the earlier parts of the film: the rustling among rice fields, the scarlet glow of dimly lit bars, the soft current of the river accompanying the sweet voice of Yuan as she sings Otis Redding under the blue hue of a moonlit night.TigertailRated PG. In English, Mandarin and Taiwanese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. More

The intrigue of the WWE, where wrestlers wear gimmicky costumes while tussling, captures a child’s imagination in the amiable Netflix movie “The Main Event.” Sweet-natured Leo (Seth Carr) is an 11-year-old pipsqueak and pro wrestling enthusiast who’s picked on by bigger boys. Escaping his bullies one day, he stumbles into an estate sale where he finds a mysterious wrestling mask that, once donned, imbues him with superhuman strength. In a note of silliness, the magic fabric also stinks of body odor.Armed with this disguise, Leo becomes a superhero of sorts. Most of the day, he’s a nervous kid with a few friends. But in the mask, he transforms into a smooth-talking strongman who can topple a tree with a karate kick, or turn the charm on with his school crush (Momona Tamada). The mask fulfills a juvenile fantasy of limitless power, and Leo puts it to the test when, with the blessing of his kooky grandma (Tichina Arnold), he enters a pro wrestling competition under the moniker Kid Chaos.[embedded content]The movie, helmed by the TV comedy director Jay Karas, blends in real elements of the sport. The WWE stars Mike “The Miz” Mizanin and Kofi Kingston play themselves in cameos, and Babatunde Aiyegbusi (a.k.a. Samson) appears as a hulking, nonverbal adversary. The wrestling matches themselves, though, are flamboyantly embellished: During one, an opponent passes gas strongly enough to blast Kid Chaos across the ring.“The Main Event” is a light comedy that takes the joys of a real WWE match — the escapism, the performance — and gives them a kid-centric spin. Karas balances the movie’s clowning with a human story, while showing empathy for childhood growing pains. Although a subplot concerning Leo’s sulky father (Adam Pally) ends up undercooked, it’s of little concern. The kids are who matter most here, and the rapport among Leo’s group of friends sparkles with sly energy.The Main EventNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. More

This may be merely a quirk on this reviewer’s part, but generally it doesn’t bode well for a movie when the opening text, setting up its premise, is in the passive voice. “In the 25th century, time travel has been achieved,” it reads. Additionally, “assassins have been dispatched” to kill those who would make — or, I suppose, would have made — that future world a worse place.By way of example, “Same Boat” — directed by Chris Roberti, who also stars in it — then takes us to a beach in the year 1989. There, a couple of those assassins from the 25th century, James and Mot (Roberti and Julia Schonberg), use a device that looks like what you might call a phaser, but more like what you would definitely call a forehead thermometer, to kill a couple that would have, years later, pioneered reality television.Get it? Yes, surely you do.Cut to the present day on a cruise ship, and James and Mot, who haven’t aged because they are, after all, time travelers, are on the lookout for Lilly, who must die for a reason not immediately specified. Lilly (Tonya Glanz) has just broken up with her goofball boyfriend on the ship, and as James observes her, he develops — you guessed it — romantic feelings for her.[embedded content]Roberti also wrote the screenplay for “Same Boat.” (Two other writers are credited with concocting the story line, which is astonishing considering it’s wafer-thin.) The instinct to give him credit for devising a sci-fi premise that needs almost no special effects quickly diminishes as the movie slogs through a series of what look like filmed scene workshops. (As the end credits tell us, the movie’s cruise-ship shoot was a stealth one.)While Glanz is the only cast member who gets within swinging distance of charisma, Roberti’s chops as a romantic lead are lacking. His way of maintaining some idea of bro cool is to deliver most of his dialogue as if he just woke up. Remember how people used to complain about Marlon Brando mumbling? When James reveals the reason he must kill Lilly — “she discovers a legal loophole that allows for rampant pollution” — it at first sounds like he’s saying, “She shugs a lilo oompah that lows for remnant sloop show.”Same BoatNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. Rent or buy on iTunes, Amazon, Vudu, Google Play, Xbox, Direct TV and through local cable providers. More

After her recent high-profile campaign for New York governor — not to mention untold episodes of “Sex and the City” — Cynthia Nixon struggles to convince as an Eastern European motelier and possible human trafficker. Playing the shady Una in “Stray Dolls,” a small-scale crime thriller, she delivers both performance and accent without fault. Even so, her casting is a problematic distraction, both from the movie’s far less recognizable stars and from a story that’s flimsy to begin with.“I got a big heart,” Una tells her latest acquisition, Riz (Geetanjali Thapa), an undocumented Indian immigrant who has arrived in upstate New York hoping for a better life. Promised a room and a cleaning job, Riz crashes into reality immediately when she meets her roommate, Dallas (Olivia DeJonge), a grasping runaway who steals Riz’s meager belongings at knife-point. They will be returned when Riz has carried out Dallas’s instructions to steal from the motel’s guests, a crime that Riz is adamantly unwilling to commit. Given that we have already seen Una surreptitiously shred Riz’s passport, it’s clear that the newcomer’s reluctance will be short-lived.[embedded content]So begins a depressingly familiar downward spiral as the young women’s fiercely-held dreams of advancement are derailed by fate and their own weaknesses. Pills are popped and imprudent liaisons conducted — most notably with Una’s shiftless son, Jimmy (Robert Aramayo) — as the fallout from a stolen brick of cocaine causes escalating peril. With no plan beyond the next disastrous move, the women are simply reacting to fairly predictable events that the script (by the director, Sonejuhi Sinha, and Charlotte Rabate) fails to weave into an original message.As Riz and Dallas inch from foes to friends (and maybe more), the movie’s vision is too narrow to exploit the obvious gifts of its stars. DeJonge, who strongly resembles the young Kirsten Dunst, has a feisty energy that doesn’t overwhelm the vulnerability beneath Dallas’s brashness. It’s Thapa, though, with her too-wise eyes and steely composure, who gives the movie substance: Initially appearing a helpless victim, Riz gradually reveals a fearlessness and facility with violence that suggest a darker past than she or the writers acknowledge. And when she seals herself in a phone booth to call her anxious family back home, her brightly animated lies transform her shocking behavior into a simple story of immigrant yearning.Despite its sense of dead-end desperation, “Stray Dolls” is made worthwhile by the richness of Shane Sigler’s nighttime cinematography and the consistent empathy of its tone. Sinha, herself a first-generation immigrant, isn’t about to judge anyone for reaching.Stray DollsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. Rent or buy on iTunes, Amazon, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More