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    ‘We Grown Now’ Review: A Child’s Eye View

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    Minhal Baig’s third feature follows two boys living in a public housing complex in Chicago as they cope by building their own dream worlds.The two boys in the gauzy nostalgia piece “We Grown Now” are total charmers. They’re also worryingly vulnerable, something you clock soon after the movie opens. Set in 1992, it takes place primarily in Cabrini-Green, at the time a public housing development in Chicago. There, the boys frolic and dream amid cinder block walls. Every so often, they wander outside to the concrete playground and to a jumble of old mattresses that the local kids use as cushioning. One boy likes to vault through the air and onto the mattresses; he likes to fly.The two boys are around 10 years old, and the closest of friends. They live in the same broken-down tower building, one of several in the complex, where sometimes they hang out in an abandoned apartment. There, they like to talk and stare at the stained and cracked ceiling, conjuring up visions from it the way they might do under the sheltering dome of the sky. Malik (Blake Cameron James) turns out to be an especially dreamy child, a pint-size philosopher who lives with his loving mother (Jurnee Smollett), doting grandma (S. Epatha Merkerson) and sister (Madisyn Barnes), a typical if benign sibling thorn in his side.For his part, Malik’s best friend, the more prosaically drawn Eric (Gian Knight Ramirez), lives with his older sister (Avery Holliday) and their father (Lil Rel Howery), a kindly fount of praise and disappointment. The friendship between Eric and Malik — the child performers are dear — is one of the truest parts of the movie, and it’s easy to fall quickly into step with them as they wander Cabrini, head to school and one day briefly escape from their routine. Bored one day while in class, the boys jump on a train and eventually make it to the Art Institute of Chicago, where they roam its galleries, at one point pausing before Walter Ellison’s striking painting “Train Station,” a 1935 canvas that depicts a segregated terminal.Their interest in the painting is easy to believe: It’s beautiful, arresting and at once familiar and mysterious (as the child of a former museum guard, I can relate). At the same time, like so much of this movie, the scene also feels forced, partly because the writer-director Minhal Baig’s expressionistic reveries don’t always fit with the issues she recurrently invokes. When the boys run through the museum, the other patrons remain frozen in place, as if they were in a different dimension. Yet when Malik connects the painting to his grandmother’s home in Mississippi, he opens a window onto a profound history that’s too heavy for this otherwise fanciful scene. He also sounds more like a filmmaking conceit than a child, however wise.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Mill’ Review: A Cog in the Machine

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      This spare dystopian thriller offers a serviceable but mostly unimaginative satire of a capitalist nightmare.If we as a nation are reaching an increasingly critical juncture over the fate of labor, “The Mill” is a film that appears startlingly well-suited for the moment. The dystopian thriller, directed by Sean King O’Grady, almost literally translates the idea of cog in a machine, following Joe (Lil Rel Howery), a middle manager within a major corporation called Mallard, as he mysteriously wakes up in an open-air prison and is forced to push a grist mill hundreds of times, 18 hours a day. He doesn’t know how he got there, only that, as a neighboring prisoner who talks to him through a vent explains, you better keep working or get “terminated.”It’s an intentionally spare work — most of the film is confined to this one small outdoor space — but its stripped-down nature exposes the film’s often graceless execution. While it aims for sharp-edged commentary, the movie at times reads, ironically, like an A.I. generator took a handful of anticapitalist talking points — the ruthlessness of the corporate apparatus, the unwieldy danger of Big Tech’s algorithms, the power of labor organizing — and spit out a serviceable but unimaginative dystopian satire.The film lacks any well-executed surprises to help it push past one-dimensional satire, and Howery is not strong enough of a dramatic actor to keep a single-setting, single-character film like this consistently engaging. As Mallard’s computer overlord increases Joe’s work demands and punishments, the film has the feel of an overextended, limp episode of “Black Mirror”: moderately entertaining, but lacking any teeth to its political bite.The MillNot rated. Watch on Hulu. More

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      ‘Vacation Friends 2’ Review: Last Resort

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      Sitcom-grade setups and predictable punchlines make a chore of this blithe, freewheeling comedy sequel.The 2021 comedy “Vacation Friends” had a premise so thin that it scarcely counts as high concept: One couple befriends another couple on holiday, only to realize that the other couple is a little too wild. It worked, just barely, because the couples were played by Lil Rel Howery, Yvonne Orji, Meredith Hagner and John Cena, all of them funny and charming with bubbly, upbeat chemistry. The story of clashing personalities and adventures gone wrong was dull and uninspired, but the cast members, clearly enjoying themselves, kept things brisk and mildly entertaining.That cast returns for “Vacation Friends 2,” a perfunctory sequel with an even duller story. (The first movie’s director, Clay Tarver, returns too.) Howery and Orji, as the timid newlyweds Marcus and Emily, are off on another holiday with their kooky friends Ron and Kyla (Cena and Hagner), this time at a luxury resort in the Caribbean. They’re joined by Kyla’s father, Reese (Steve Buscemi), a squirrelly man with a criminal past whose approval Ron desperately seeks, and by Yeon (Ronny Chieng), a testy owner of the resort, with whom Marcus hopes to land a business deal.Marcus’s efforts to woo Yeon, as well as Ron’s campaign to win over his skeptical father-in-law, are nothing more than glorified sitcom plots, and as the harried friends careen across the resort through a series of comical mishaps, the movie has the feel of a TV rerun. More compelling are the too-rare moments of plotless leisure, when the charismatic holidaymakers guzzle rum, snort cocaine and just riff. Cena manages to squeeze a very funny bit from the action of picking up a brunch menu — no artificial dramatic stakes necessary.Vacation Friends 2Rated R for strong language, sexual content, action violence, drug use and more holiday debauchery. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      ‘Vacation Friends’ Review: Life Lessons Amid Chaos

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      Clay Tarver’s movie is a better grade of outrageous couples comedy.The outrageous couples comedy is by now an established if not reliable genre. “Vacation Friends” has a quality advantage in the casting of the couples; Lil Rel Howery, Yvonne Orji, John Cena and Meredith Hagner are all guaranteed laugh generators.Howery and Orji are Marcus and Emily; Marcus is a buttoned-up planner whose surprise proposal to Emily is overturned pretty much as soon as they arrive at a swank Mexican resort. Their own suite, which had been festooned with rose petals, is flooded on arrival. The culprits are the upstairs neighbors Ron and Kyla, who left their Jacuzzi running before they went out to jet ski.Played by Cena and Hagner, the couple embody spontaneity pushed to the point of psychopathy. These two rim their margarita glasses with cocaine. In less than 24 hours they trash both a jet ski and a yacht. Ron initiates a William Tell act with his automatic. And then things get sloppy.Seven months later, Marcus and Emily are to be wed in Atlanta. Components designed to sabotage a serene union include the bride’s snobbish father, hostile brother, a pair of heirloom rings that Marcus must keep safe, and more. Ron and Kyla literally crash the event. True to the subgenre, the ensuing chaos also contains mutated “life lessons.”Clay Tarver, a veteran of the TV series “Silicon Valley” (and a founder of the postpunk band Chavez) directs with an eye and ear that’s a cut above what one usually gets with this sort of fare. (A scene in which Marcus and Ron hallucinate on tree fungus is inventively lo-fi.) What Kyla says of the cocaine-margarita stunt — “it gets the job done” — can be applied to the movie as a whole.Vacation FriendsRated R for outrageous couple comedy outrageousness. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      ‘Bad Trip’ Review: On the Road, Leaking Fluid

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      Two pranksters, and a brace of hidden cameras, travel across country in this jauntily gross comedy.Strictly for devotees of degrading pranks and public humiliation, Kitao Sakurai’s “Bad Trip” — a “Jackass”-style road movie belching clouds of poor taste — follows two hapless dreamers from Florida to New York City.Strapping squalid stunts on the back of a dopey narrative, this hidden-camera Netflix comedy sends Chris (Eric Andre, of the supremely weird “The Eric Andre Show”) and his friend Bud (Lil Rel Howery) on a cross-country quest for romance. Chris has learned that his onetime high-school crush (Michaela Conlin) is working in a Manhattan art gallery, and he plans to declare his still-fervent devotion.Contrasting the starry-eyed innocence of this goal with the pair’s repellent misadventures en route, the screenplay (by Andre, Sakurai and Dan Curry) concentrates on bathing its leads in as many noxious emissions as possible. Fake vomit, urine and gorilla ejaculate squirt across the screen as our heroes horrify the unsuspecting patrons of a cowboy bar and a zoo, exemplifying pranks queasily fixated on orificial and genital abuse. Bud’s wrathful sister (Tiffany Haddish), whose beloved car the two have pinched, might be murderously in pursuit, but she can take her time: Her prey won’t get very far with their penises stuck in a Chinese finger trap.However effortful, the movie’s tricks are more likely to activate your gorge than your funny bone. An end-credits reveal of the hidden cameras to the film’s good-natured dupes has a humorous purity that’s unexpected and appealing — if far too late to mitigate the dreck that has gone before.Bad TripRated R. Did I mention the gorilla ejaculate? Running time: 1 hour 24 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More