Movies

Like many of you, we miss going to the movies, and we also miss having new movies to think, write and argue about. But there is still a lot to say about a lot of the older movies out there, including some that not all of us have seen. Your Weekend Watch is a chance for us to crowd into the (virtual) theater together and then meet up afterward to enthuse, complain and (politely or not) talk about what we just saw. In the coming weeks, we will be looking at classics and curiosities, misunderstood masterpieces and movies we somehow missed.First up: “Top Gun.”[embedded content]Misunderstood masterpiece or jingoistic dreck? In spite of the fact that he shares the director’s name, A.O. Scott (you can call him Tony) has never seen it, which appalls Manohla Dargis (you can call her Mistress Manohla). Released in 1986 and starring Kelly McGillis, Val Kilmer and some other guy, the movie is a prime specimen of its era’s high-concept entertainment, full of movie-star bravado and flyboy bluster.Reviewing it in The New York Times, Walter Goodman declared that “‘Top Gun’ fires off as spectacular a show of state-of-the-art jet battle as the movies have given us.” It also put Tom Cruise’s career into orbit, spawning indelible pop-culture catchphrases.Do we still feel the need, the need … for speed? How does the movie’s military machismo hold up after all these years? Does its vision of a peacetime fighting force instructed to “act as though we’re at war” resonate in an era of forever wars and our epidemiological equivalent of war? The sequel scheduled for release this summer may or may not have answered those questions, but in the meantime let’s turn and burn, baby.The movie is available on several platforms (here’s a guide). After watching it, tell us what you think in the comments section below and be sure to do so by 6 p.m. Eastern time on Monday. We’ll return with our reactions to your comments on Tuesday. More

At midnight on Sunday, Los Angeles shut down its movie theaters. On Tuesday, New York did the same. These closures were part of an urgent and necessary effort to stop the spread of the coronavirus and are the right thing to do, no question. Even so, the news filled me with a sense of loss. So much of my life has been defined by — and literally organized around — watching films in theaters. Moviegoing is who I am.For those who came of age with home video it can be hard to grasp why anyone still bothers to go out to see movies. This bafflement has become part of a steady drumbeat of complaints about watching movies in theaters: the pricey tickets, bad projection, overpriced junk food, the creeps, potential maniacs and selfish people texting or talking on their phones. Just stay home, kick back and binge on another suboptimal Netflix show. But moviegoing helped make me who I am, shaped my world and my sense of self, beginning in childhood.It started with my film-crazed parents, young East Village bohemians who couldn’t afford babysitters and so brought me everywhere, including to the movies. This was in New York in the mid-1960s, a heroic age of cinephilia before home video. When I was 3, they took me to see Vincente Minnelli’s “Lust for Life,” a glorious, overheated drama with Kirk Douglas as Vincent van Gogh. I cried so loudly when van Gogh cut off his ear that afterward, my mom says, some of the other patrons smiled, as if to reassure me everything would be OK. I like to think that this was the start of my life in film.By the time I was 8, my favorite movies were Jean Cocteau’s “Orpheus” and François Truffaut’s “Jules and Jim,” which sounds ridiculous but is true. As I got older, I started going to theaters by myself. I went to everything, often without knowing anything about what I was seeing. I’d ask for a buck or two and trot over to St. Marks Cinema, a second-run theater on Second Avenue, or Theater 80, a revival house. The prints at Theater 80 were criminally battered and the rear projection appalling, but it had jaw-dropping concessions and a sustained commitment to Astaire and Rogers musicals.So many of my memories are connected with moviegoing; some are of being alone in a theater full of people, which is a metaphor for my life, though also a metaphor for being alive. I love laughing and crying and shrieking with an enthusiastic audience. And while I now go to the movies for work, I also go to the movies for pleasure and for the love of the art. I go because I’m curious, because I like the director or star. I go because I’m happy, anxious or depressed. I go because films have provided comfort throughout my life, offering me an escape from my own reality but also a way of making sense of it, giving me glossy and gritty worlds to discover and reassuringly disappear in.When I write about movies, I tend to frame them in aesthetic and cultural terms. What I don’t write about are the people I saw them with and whose presence — their bodies next to mine — can become inextricably bound up with how I think about certain films. I love “The Road Warrior” for many reasons, but part of what makes it still feel meaningful is the group of friends, now scattered, I saw it with in the front row of St. Marks Cinema. Whenever I rewatch “The Silence of the Lambs,” I think about my close friend Amy and how we clung to each other when we first saw it. I can’t think of “The New World” without flashing on sitting in my car with my husband afterward and sobbing, overcome by the emotions the movie had unleashed about it, life, him.Cinephilia has profoundly changed since home video took off in the 1980s. Before, you had to leave the house and tailor your viewing desires to the theater’s schedule, not yours. To see a film required planning, determination. You had to juggle calendars and scour newspaper listings that you invariably taped to the fridge. The more interesting theaters had their own programming sensibility and calendars that often included capsule reviews. As a kid, I also pored over TV listings, and my favorite critical take of all time remains a one-sentence tour de force that frequently ran in The New York Times: “This dog has fleas.” (How could I not become a film critic?)There are more ways now to watch films than ever, but I still vastly prefer seeing them on the big screen, even if it means navigating rush-hour traffic in Los Angeles, where I now live. I am committed to the rituals of moviegoing: scrutinizing the new posters, cruising past the concessions, checking out the crowd (and exits), landing the perfect seat and savoring the delicious moment when the room darkens right before the screen lights up. In that instant, I always hope for the best and on occasion actually see it. Because even though I love moviegoing, I don’t love every movie.But I always love thinking about films and puzzling through both how they work and how they work on us. It’s easy to understand why a drama about a dying parent can knock us sideways (or cause us to sneer at its cheap tricks). That little old lady onscreen may be your personal Proustian madeleine, tapping memories of your own mother. And if you drive a bit faster after seeing the latest “Fast & Furious” blowout (yes, I’ve done that) it may have to do with what the Italian neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese calls “mirror neurons,” the neural mechanism that fires in our brains when we perform an action and when we watch someone else perform one. The idea being that when Vin Diesel revs his engine, our brains react as if we’re gunning ours too.Gallese asserts that we live in a “we-centric space,” which is a perfect metaphor for movie theaters and moviegoing. However films do their work — create their magic — they do so because of other people: making movies is a social act and so is moviegoing. And while you can watch them sitting alone on your couch (I regularly do although usually with a few cats), there is something qualitatively different about going to a designated space and sitting, and staying, in the enveloping dark with a lot of people you don’t know and maybe some you do. It is an exquisite, human thing to sit with all those other souls, to be alone with others.With social distancing, quarantines and self-isolation, many of us are now physically alone. I am fervently hoping for the best for us all. When we at last can go out again and be with one another, I hope that we flood cinemas, watching every single movie, from the most rarefied art film to the silliest Hollywood offering. The movies can be exasperating and worse, but they have seen us through a lot, including economic bad times and wars. And there is nothing like watching a movie, leaving the world while being rooted in it alongside friends, family and everyone else. I miss that, I miss you. More

It looks like spring break 2020 will be remembered more for the break than the spring.From Florida to Mexico, spring break festivities — pool parties, beach parties, hotel parties, party parties — have been canceled in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. To stem the spread of the virus, many locales have closed beaches, enacted curfews and limited access to bars and restaurants, effectively canceling spring break. (But not everyone is listening.)Of course nothing can replace the feeling of a clingy T-shirt soaked in cheap beer. There’s no bigger thrill than the crisp clap of a massive belly flop made by an actual massive belly. To counter spring break withdrawal, here are five movies that will bring sun and fun (and beefcake and cheesecake) to your screen in these dark times.[embedded content]Where the Boys Are (1960)Available on Amazon, YouTube, Google Play, iTunesEver wondered where spring break as a thing came from? Start with this classic CinemaScope romp about four coeds (Connie Francis, Dolores Hart, Paula Prentiss and Yvette Mimieux) who spend their spring vacation under the Fort Lauderdale sun strategically flirting up a storm with young men on the make (including George Hamilton, Jim Hutton, Frank Gorshin and Rory Harrity). Directed by Henry Levin, the film features frivolities like dancing and making out, but also jazz and, surprisingly, a pensive ending. In his review for The New York Times, Bosley Crowther was gentlemanly — and timeless — in his description of spring break: “Here are all these youngsters jammed together, on the beach, in beer joints and motels — coeds from state universities, fellows from the Ivy League — flirting and making passes, with only one thing on their minds. That is xes spelled backwards.” Francis, a popular singer at the time, scored a chart-topping hit with her version of the title theme song.Spring Break (1983)Available on Amazon, YouTube, Google Play, iTunes“It’s the reason kids go to college in the first place.” That’s how the trailer sets up the rowdy shenanigans in this quintessential spring break film, about two friends (David Knell and Perry Lang) who visit Fort Lauderdale for a spring break bacchanal. With only debauchery on the brain, the film checks every spring break box: barely-there bikinis, a wet T-shirt contest, sex aplenty. The movie is also a time machine back to the randy Golden Age of early ’80s teen sex comedies like “Porky’s” and “The Last American Virgin” that made pearl-clutchers clutch even harder. And talk about pivots: “Spring Break” was directed by Sean S. Cunningham, who in 1980 led lustful teens down a less pleasurable path as the director of the original “Friday the 13th.”Nightmare Beach (1989)Available on KanopyThe horror genre loves to upend a beloved tradition — Christmas, birthday parties, birth itself — into an opportunity for mayhem and massacre. Spring break is the target in this under-the-radar oddity that marries the slasher film and the beach party flick, two genres that share a love of “naked girls and stupidity,” as one critic put it. The director, Harry Kirkpatrick (possibly a pseudonym for the Italian director Umberto Lenzi), uses pool parties, sweaty machismo and topless young women to set the mood. The outlandish script has something to do with an angry biker gang, fratty spring breakers and a leather-clad killer who rides a motorcycle that doubles as an electric chair. Fans of bargain-bin ’80s horror will find plenty to enjoy: a hair metal soundtrack, girls with feathered bangs, guys in mesh tank tops, studded headbands and a busybody preacher. For a spring break horror movie double feature, add “Piranha 3D” (2010), a gory dark comedy about flesh-eating fish who ruin everything.Another Gay Sequel: Gays Gone Wild! (2008)Available on Amazon, iTunes More

Straddling the line between advocacy documentary and D.I.Y. infomercial, “Dosed” promotes psychoactive vegetation as a potential cure for drug addiction. The filmmaker, Tyler Chandler, trails a friend, known in the film only by a first name, Adrianne, as she experiments with psilocybin mushrooms and the hallucinogenic plant iboga to treat her seemingly intractable dependence on heroin, methadone or morphine. The effectiveness of these alternative-medicine therapies, and the question of whether they should be legal, is still the subject of debate.Adrianne, who lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, has a third, potentially powerful ingredient contributing to her recovery: the presence of the camera, which, at times, is clearly on her mind. As the documentary opens, Adrianne is asked how she would like it to end. “I’d love to be sober,” she replies, but adds that she’d like to be sober, generally. And although her treatment does not follow a straightforward path — her initial efforts at a supervised iboga retreat are disrupted by a hospital trip for a panic attack — she eventually achieves the sobriety she foreshadows.[embedded content]Which is great. But the shot-calling undermines the movie’s pro-psychedelics argument, because there is no way to control for the psychosomatic effects of starring in a documentary. Nor does “Dosed” do much to counter or even address objections to mushrooms or iboga as treatments, although it does include firm warnings about the need for supervision.The movie, which was scheduled to be released in New York on Friday, will instead be available to rent or buy on Vimeo. The distributor has pledged a portion of the proceeds to fighting the coronavirus pandemic.DosedNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. More

Enid Devlin (a snake-eyed Margo Martindale, who wields a cane with finesse) runs a bed, breakfast & beyond, complete with a candy dish of condoms in the foyer and a retinue of young women on duty in the tiny Maine town where “Blow the Man Down” is set.With a gracious exterior that’s only sparingly applied, she fails to hide her true nature for long. She’s too busy for the funeral of her old friend Mary Margaret Connolly, but the rest of the gang, Irish Catholic women who grew up and raised families in Easter Cove, enfold the dead woman’s daughters, Mary Beth (Morgan Saylor) and Priscilla (Sophie Lowe).In this Amazon feature, streaming on Prime Video, the daughters are bitterly divided. Mary Beth, outwardly more spirited, can’t wait to break free from the town. Priscilla wants to stay and make a go of the family seafood market, although her mother’s only legacy is debt.In the few days the film covers, three people will end up murdered, and a stunned Mary Beth and Priscilla will wrestle with a messy obstacle, until a greater force takes charge.Women are the only ones who really have any agency in the movie, which was written and directed by the filmmaking team of Danielle Krudy and Bridget Savage Cole.Men rarely come up; those who do are one-dimensional (there are a couple of police, a bad guy and a sea shanty chorus). The older women, on the other hand, Annette O’Toole among them, are almost uncannily attuned to one another, and once they decide to act, they slide effortlessly into their roles, as they always have, pulling the town’s strings.While the sisterhood in Easter Cove is indeed powerful, the secrets that bind its members prove to be fairly simple, and the result is intriguing enough to make you wonder what these writer-directors might accomplish if they applied their vision to a more expansive canvas.Blow the Man DownRated R. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

What are we supposed to do with a movie like “Human Capital”? It opens with a banquet-hall waiter, somewhere in Westchester, being run off the road and into a coma, then spends the rest of its 97 minutes with the folks who maybe did it. The movie is not concerned about the waiter, or the family he was on his way home to. The other characters don’t care either.I could forgive the indifference, if we’d been plunked down for some hearty character exploration or a juicy moral essay. But maybe I’m asking too much of a movie that couldn’t bother to call itself anything more than “Human Capital.”The loose sources are an American novel (by Stephen Amidon) and a much better Italian movie by the same name, from 2013. But the Italian movie, which Paolo Virzì directed, had a marrow-deep instinct for class. There were higher costs. The people in it were stranger, with sharper angles; they were alive. This new movie, which Oren Moverman wrote, Marc Meyers directed and has parts for Liev Schreiber and Marisa Tomei, is a character study that hasn’t done its homework.After the car hits the waiter, played in a blink by a charismatic Dominic Colón, the story jumps somewhere else. A real estate broker named Drew Hagel (Schreiber) drives his teenage daughter, Shannon (Maya Hawke), to hang out with her boyfriend, Jamie (Fred Hechinger), at his family’s grand concrete, stone and steel manse. Rather than drive back home, Drew mopes around the property. I knew I was in for a rough hour and a half when Jamie’s dad, Quint (Peter Sarsgaard), gets a load of Drew and, rather than say “I love ‘Ray Donovan!’” or “Which defensive line were you on?” invites him to help win a tennis match.Drew is so taken with Quint and the hedge fund he runs that he takes out a $300,000 bridge loan to invest in it. His application is riddled with financial hyperbole. But he needs in — so desperately, in fact, that he dismisses a call from Shannon saying, “It’s just my daughter.”Schreiber is playing this part as though there were a depth to Drew. He gives him a strong working man’s New York accent. But the movie doesn’t give him anything to act. Not anything compelling. When Drew’s wife, Ronnie (Betty Gabriel, pitifully underused), tells him she is expecting, he looks unmoved. We’re supposed to wonder: Is he thinking about Quint’s firm? The risk in performing preoccupation is you can wind up looking bored. Anyway, it’s obvious the minute you hear Sarsgaard hiss his first line that Drew’s 300K has nowhere to go but south.Just when I thought I couldn’t take much more of Drew’s desperate choices, Moverman switches perspectives, to Tomei, who’s playing Jamie’s mother, Carrie — hair, shades, fur, a touch of snoot. We watch her have a day — she visits her mentally absent mother, buys some clothes and, for kicks, a decrepit old movie palace. (“Kids have never seen ‘Singing in the Rain’!”)This is the film’s most successful stretch. Maybe because it doesn’t take a great imagination to conjure up “life of an unhappy rich lady.” Books and soaps have got centuries of those. Give her somebody sexy to flirt with, give her a crushing blow, let Marisa Tomei do the acting. I don’t know that she’s having a great time here, but she certainly seems invested and connected to whoever she’s sharing a scene with.She’s not enough, though. Eventually, the script moves on to a third P.O.V. that’s supposed to deepen the first two. All there is to say about that is that it involves Alex Wolff, who played the tortured son in “Hereditary” and knows how to wring drama from even a diet-tragedy. He’s just about the only person here who can. Wolff is spared the rest of cast’s groaners like: “All this anxiety is palpable” and “human misery is a profit indicator” and “when did elite become such a dirty word?” None of that, by the way, has anything to do with the waiter. Remember him?The movie might argue that making him negligible is the entire point. But the filmmakers don’t seem interested in a true class crisis. This is a yarn. And the longer it spends ignoring him, flirting with his accident, the better off I’m convinced he is.Human CapitalNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

What more predictable way of introducing a sex addict than, well, with a sex scene?In the first few minutes of “Hooking Up,” which is available on demand, Darla (Brittany Snow) has an intimate encounter with the leader of her sex-addiction support group right before a meeting, smokes indoors and offends a cancer patient. She’s a crass, messy, rule-breaking antiheroine, and her work as a sex columnist only enables her promiscuity, until it becomes so excessive (in-office intercourse with an intern), that she is fired. Darla’s meet-not-so-cute with the aforementioned patient, Bailey (Sam Richardson), who has just learned his testicular cancer has returned, sets off a raunchy rom-com plot.When Darla’s group suggests that as a therapeutic exercise she map the scenes of her past sexcapades, she proposes re-enacting those memories with Bailey on a cross-country trip. The experiment presents Darla with an opportunity to get back in her editor’s good graces with an irresistible pitch for a juicy sexual travel diary. Meanwhile, Bailey, whose scorecard includes only his recent ex, will get to flaunt his new “girlfriend” on a last hurrah before he faces surgery.[embedded content]With his first feature, the director and co-writer Nico Raineau flips gender stereotypes, giving Darla more sexually aggressive traits and Bailey more timid ones But even that feels trite, especially when the itinerary, including the bumps along the way, is consistently foreseeable: opposites bonding, manipulation, self-discovery, then finding their way back to each other — through a cringey epiphany, no less.Hooking UpRated R. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. More

Stephanie Turner adeptly performs the roles of writer, director and troubled lead in “Justine,” a bittersweet drama about a grieving widow who comes to care for a girl with spina bifida. Now streaming on Netflix, the movie is a tightly observed character study that thins out during more expositional moments, but it’s still a thoughtful tale of loneliness and its remedies.Turner plays Lisa, a single mother of two who has been irritable and shut off from loved ones in the months since her husband’s untimely death. Needing money, she leaves her children under the care of her father-in-law and accepts a job as a nanny for Justine (Daisy Prescott), the girl with spina bifida, whose fussy, pampered parents would prefer their daughter spend most of her time at home. (The film was made long before any of the current coronavirus restrictions were put in place.) Justine’s genial mood cuts through Lisa’s melancholy, and they become friends. Both characters have been isolated — Justine not by choice — and could each use a boost to feel a little freer and more alive.[embedded content]As a writer and director, Turner isn’t subtle in illustrating how Justine’s parents’ choices are harmful to her growth. Home-schooled with a regimented schedule, Justine has adapted to her alone time by cooking up a host of imaginary friends, but her gregarious personality leaves her wanting for real social interaction. Worse still, Justine seems to be absorbing her father’s bigotry, innocently parroting swears and racist slurs.The film’s critique of ignorant parenting — particularly when it comes to race — can sometimes feel forced and obvious. But “Justine” makes an earnest case for letting kids live a little. As actors, Turner and Prescott mesh naturally, and Glynn Turman, who plays Lisa’s obliging father-in-law, provides a sympathetic foil to Lisa and her frequent bad temper. The bonds these characters forge are organic and heartfelt; even in sentimental moments, Turner wisely declines to tug on any heartstrings. We care about her characters enough already.JustineNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. More