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    ‘Reverse the Curse’ Review: Baseball Is Life

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    The writer-director David Duchovny plays a long-suffering Red Sox fan with cancer who may yet live to see the team defeat the Yankees.David Duchovny is hardly the first American novelist to find literary profundity in baseball — Bernard Malamud and Don DeLillo spring quickly to mind. Not just baseball as a thing itself — a very American thing, better still — but baseball as a metaphor for Life Itself.But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. While Duchovny is the author of several novels, he is better known as an actor and director. His new movie, “Reverse the Curse,” is an adaptation of his 2016 novel — now with a more newspaper-friendly title.This tale of father-and-son reconciliation is set against the backdrop of the long rivalry between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox. The year is 1978 and Ted (Logan Marshall-Green) is a struggling novelist who makes his living as a stadium peanut vendor; Marty (Duchovny) is his father, once a low-level ad man stuck in the suburbs, now dying of cancer.The movie struggles with period detail from the beginning. Green’s stringy wig and mutton chops make him look like Steve Guttenberg in the ’90s comedy “Don’t Tell Her It’s Me” if Guttenberg’s character had been a werewolf. And Duchovny’s haircut is pretty Beverly Hills, despite many of the movie’s scenes taking place in a regular-guy barbershop.Ted and Marty’s interactions are alternately earthy and highfalutin. On a road trip, they have a flatulence competition, and then one rhapsodizes over a woman whose smile makes “a rip in the fabric of time.” After Ted introduces Marty to weed, Marty is seen reading Walter Benjamin’s “On Hashish.”Duchovny’s smarts are commendable, theoretically, but the movie falls short of compelling. And for all the novelistic details that he packs in, “Reverse the Curse” moves at the pace of a self-defeating snail.Reverse the CurseNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘Intrusion’ Review: We’re All Trying to Find the Guy Who Did This

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      This domestic thriller from Netflix is painfully dumb and laughably obvious.In the simplest terms, “Intrusion” is about a woman who begins to think that her husband may be up to something sinister. The movie makes it immediately obvious, however, that her husband really is up to something sinister, because he’s always prowling around suspiciously, with ominous music playing pretty much whenever he’s onscreen. But this is a feature-length thriller, and it needs to buy some time and build suspense, so the faithful wife is obliged to be very, very obtuse and draw some very foolish conclusions. It’s an exercise in watching someone have the world’s slowest revelation.The wife is Meera (Freida Pinto), a cancer survivor and therapist, and the husband is Henry (Logan Marshall-Green), an architect who has designed the couple’s modernist dream home in rural Corrales, outside of Albuquerque. After their home is burgled, Meera surmises that they may have been targeted, and seeks answers by investigating Henry’s private life, which is both highly dubious and conveniently easy to look into. This is one of those mysteries where both the suspect and the sleuth keep making the kind of implausible, idiotic mistakes that generate trite suspense. Henry leaves evidence lying around with laughable carelessness; Meera roots around his office as he’s right about to walk in the door.If “Intrusion” has one redeeming feature, it’s Marshall-Green, whose performance as the husband with a dark secret has a crackling, tightly controlled intensity far more nuanced and persuasive than anything else in the film. Marshall-Green was similarly sensational in Karyn Kusama’s excellent thriller “The Invitation,” but the director of “Intrusion,” Adam Salky, squanders the actor’s terrific work. It’s tempting to imagine this material realized with the maniac verve of a film like James Wan’s “Malignant,” where the ridiculous verges on camp, instead of how Salky plays it: thuddingly literal and painfully dumb.IntrusionNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More