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      ‘Freaky Tales’ Review: Totally Oakland

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      Misogyny and racism get their butts spanked in this bold, messy celebration of the Bay Area in the 1980s.Crammed to the margins with peaceable punks, vicious skinheads, ambitious rappers, racist police — oh, and a green supernatural whatsit — Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s “Freaky Tales” is a nostalgic homage to the music, movies and personalities of the 1980s.Set in 1987 in Oakland, where Fleck grew up, this revenge-of-the-underdogs picture unfolds through a lens of pop-culture goofiness. Blending multiple genres — action, comedy, horror, martial arts — Fleck and Boden’s screenplay is blunt and broad, a flurry of flyby references only loosely tethered to narrative logic. Bursts of animation and graphic-novel gore lend familiar gimmickry to the film’s four, vaguely connected stories, none of which feel fully cooked.In the first, two teenagers (Ji-young Yoo and Jack Champion) and their fellow punks are forced to defend a beloved music venue from a tribe of marauding neo-Nazis. This segues into a sparking rap battle between a young female duo (Dominique Thorne and Normani, both standouts) and Too $hort (played by the hip-hop artist Symba). The third segment feels more robust, thanks to Pedro Pascal’s performance as a burned-out enforcer trying vainly to escape his violent past. And a bloodily operatic finale sees a loathsome detective (Ben Mendelsohn) pay when a scheme to rob the home of the basketball star Sleepy Floyd (Jay Ellis) goes spectacularly awry.High on revolutionary spirit, “Freaky Tales” is a frisky, frantic pastiche that doesn’t always make sense. (In the third chapter, an unexpected cameo by a major celebrity is such a non sequitur even Pascal seems momentarily flummoxed.) Yet the visuals are meaty, and the filmmakers (whose last feature collaboration was on “Captain Marvel” in 2019) show considerable affection for their movie’s setting. I wish, though, they had focused less on the era’s greatest hits and more on the details of their script. Maybe then we would have learned the provenance of that supernatural whatsit.Freaky TalesRated R for lewd lyrics, slow-motion bloodletting and an exploding racist. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘A Nice Indian Boy’ Review: Meet-Cute at a Hindu Temple

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      Thanks to the instant chemistry between Karan Soni and Jonathan Groff, the film pulls off their whirlwind romance.Jay (Jonathan Groff) and Naveen (Karan Soni) experience their first meet-cute while worshiping at the same Hindu temple, united by their shared culture: Naveen is Indian, and Jay is white with adoptive Indian parents.Early on, the film “A Nice Indian Boy” hints at this swift romantic pace when Naveen’s mother, Megha (Zarna Garg, a standout), pokes at the familiar tropes of gay romance films while on a phone call with Naveen. “They just give each other a look, and like, boom, they’re kissing,” she says.Thanks to the instant chemistry between Groff and Soni, whose wit and vulnerability make him a natural rom-com lead, the film pulls off their whirlwind romance. Glances between them convey Naveen’s internal struggle to be open to his family about Jay, and Jay’s corresponding frustration with Naveen’s hesitation. True to the genre, there are heartbreaking fallouts, followed by tender reconciliations.Throughout the movie, the director Roshan Sethi’s sly and thoughtful touches respect conventions — the ultimate fairy-tale ending, for instance — while deepening the story with cultural nuances, like how Naveen’s same-sex relationship affects his sister, Arundhathi (Sunita Mani), who is in an arranged marriage. What happens when one sibling can break the rules but the other cannot? Within a family rooted in tradition, Naveen emerges as a quiet but powerful authority on true love — a rare, significant role for a gay character.In this vibrant addition to cinema’s romantic landscape, love isn’t the only winner: cultural understanding and the freedom to choose your own path triumph as well.A Nice Indian BoyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Martial Artist’ Review: Tap Out

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      In this overwrought action film by Shaz Khan, a mixed martial artist’s career is upended when his brother is killed.In the self-absorbed action movie “The Martial Artist,” the director Shaz Khan stars as rising Pakistani American mixed martial arts fighter Ibby “The Prince” Bakran, an unconventional pugilist whose bouts are live streamed from remote locales like Death Valley in eastern California.Impressed by Ibby, the head of a mixed martial arts league (Gregory Sporleder) promises him stardom. But alcohol, women and the killing of Ibby’s brother and trainer, Ali (Babar Peerzada), by friends of a former opponent, derail his career.After four years of boozing and working as a waiter, a frustrated Ibby tries to revitalize his moribund career by venturing home to the lush green mountains of Pakistan to be trained and spiritually healed by his grandfather (Faran Tahir).It’s disappointing that “The Martial Artist,” an adaptation of Khan’s 2016 short film “Say It Ain’t So,” is a shallow film. Characters like Ibby’s long-suffering mother (Thesa Loving), his estranged girlfriend (Sanam Saeed) and his deceased brother are nothing more than maudlin plot devices. Though Pakistan is filmed with a sense of grandeur, Ibby’s return to his cultural roots is rushed and superficial. Khan’s lack of screen presence, toothless mixed martial arts sequences and unintelligible editing further knock the film down.By the end, when Ibby faces the undefeated Decan Johnson (Philippe Prosper) at the foot of some Mayan pyramids in Belize, we’re unsure what or who he is fighting for, or why we should care.The Martial ArtistRated PG-13 for violence and bloody images. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Love Hotel’ Review: Finding Space for Beauty in the Bleakness

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      A Shinji Somai contribution to a narrow soft-core subgenre crushes together the anonymity and violence, desire and trauma, that bind lives of alienation.Two harrowing sexual assaults occur in the first 15 minutes of “Love Hotel,” a 1985 erotic drama from the cult director Shinji Somai. First, Tetsuro (Minori Terada), a flailing Tokyo businessman in debt to the yakuza, is forced to stand by while his wife, Ryoko (Kiriko Shimizu), is raped by a mob loan shark. Later, in a twisted bid at reclaiming some agency, Tetsuro hires Yumi (Noriko Hayami), a sex worker, plotting to kill her and himself. He assaults her savagely, but doesn’t carry out his plan, instead leaving Yumi naked and chained to the bed at a love hotel.Nothing else in the film matches the shock of these acts of violence, captured unflinchingly in static shots and gliding pans. Their memory, however, lingers throughout and infects this human drama of romantic disillusionment and sexuality warped by trauma with serious feel-bad vibes occasionally tempered by mordant humor.Some years later, the two reconnect — on radically different footings — when Yumi, who works at a publishing house (and is now known by her real name, Nami), hops into the cab Tetsuro is driving.There’s a lot more sex, too. “Love Hotel” is one of the best-known entries in the roman porno subgenre, a kind of elevated skinflick developed by financially strained film studios in Japan in the 1970s meant to entice audiences looking for quality and coitus.It’s also something of an outlier in Somai’s filmography (he was best known for his dark coming-of-age tales, like “Typhoon Club,” 1985). Yet his exquisite visual compositions (of lonely bedrooms, concrete piers, and nocturnal courtyards) infuse even the film’s racy images with a somber sense of longing and introspection, finding beauty and humanity in the midst of the macabre.Love HotelNot rated. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Gazer’ Review: Peering Out From a Lonely Place

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      Ryan J. Sloan’s brooding thriller is a murky tale about an isolated woman, with many shades of Schrader, Nolan and Cronenberg.Frankie, the roaming, cogitating mystery woman at the center of the cryptic drama “Gazer,” has eyes as big as hubcaps and a strange charisma. Much of her appeal stems from the striking looker who plays her, Ariella Mastroianni, who wrote the script with the director, Ryan J. Sloan. Although indebted to its influences to the point of self-sabotage, the movie manages to surmount enough of its flaws — including some shaky acting and distracting awkwardness — to hold your own gaze, more or less. Like Frankie, who watches others with visceral intensity, you keep looking as you wait on events, wonder and wait some more.A solitary, unsettled soul, Frankie lives in a spartan apartment in modern-day Newark that she seems to have sublet from one of Paul Schrader’s existential loners. Like those characters who brood throughout his “man in a room” trilogy (“First Reformed,” “The Card Counter,” “Master Gardener”), Frankie doesn’t always communicate easily with other people. Instead, much of the story emerges from her on-and-off voice-over and from cassette-tape recordings that effectively function as critical mental aids (shades of Christopher Nolan’s “Memento”), prompts she uses to try and keep her mind and world ordered. It’s a continual struggle.It’s also a struggle without an apparent happy ending because many of Frankie’s problems seem to stem from dyschronometria, an incurable condition that wreaks havoc with her sense of time. This malady has profoundly isolated her, and is getting worse; in one early scene, a doctor suggests that she check into a facility that cares for “patients with cognitive impairment,” as he puts it. Frankie demurs. She’s trying to save money for her young daughter who lives with someone else, a goal that leads to a series of complications that push the movie into self-conscious noirish territory with varied results. There, as the shadows darken, she meets another question mark, Claire (Renee Gagner), who offers to help her.Things grow progressively complicated, sometimes intriguingly so, especially when the story is fuzzier. In its first stretch, Sloan and Mastroianni build a palpable air of dank menace by creating tension with narrative ellipses and leaning into Frankie’s unusual condition and her isolation. Frankie doesn’t just live alone, she also seems OK with being estranged from most of her family and whatever friends she may have had. An early, foreboding sequence of her warily walking into a house to shrieking electronic music adds more mystery and intrigue, particularly when her creeping entrance is abruptly interrupted by the appearance of a gun.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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      ‘Eric LaRue’ Review: When Pain Won’t Stay Quiet

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      Judy Greer stars in a searing drama about the mother of a school shooter and all the things we try not to say.Most of us would say we’re “at a loss for words” when senseless tragedy strikes. We try to use words anyhow — to comfort, to explain, to process, to apologize. It’s a human impulse. But it’s insufficient, and can harm as much as it helps.That insufficiency of language is the stealth subject of “Eric LaRue,” the feature directorial debut of Michael Shannon. Stealth, because its premise is a bit of a misdirect. Like last year’s “Ghostlight,” it’s a gut-punching indie drama borne out of the Chicago theater scene. The playwright Brett Neveu adapted it from his play by the same name, produced in 2002 at A Red Orchid Theater, of which Shannon is a founding member. Writers who come from theater tend to evince a keen understanding of how, in talking to one another, we reveal and conceal what’s inside of us — and that’s at the core of Neveu’s script.But that premise, it’s a tough one to sit down and watch: Janice LaRue (a remarkable Judy Greer, in a lead role at last) is the mother of a school shooter. Her teenage son, Eric, is in prison, and she is trying to put her life back together, or at least figure out if that’s something she wants to do.Her husband Ron (Alexander Skarsgard, sporting an admirably off-putting arrangement of facial hair) is not helping: he’s eager to move on from the incident, and is making headway, thanks to his overly friendly colleague Lisa (Alison Pill). She’s convinced him to join to her church, an evangelical congregation pastored by the imperious Bill Verne (Tracy Letts), who instructs Ron to act like the head of his household and tell Janice how things will go in their home.Janice is not interested, either in being told what to do or in Ron’s new church family, and not really interested in Ron at this point, either. She’s still attending their less trendy Presbyterian church, pastored by the well-meaning but blundering Steve Calhan (Paul Sparks), who tries to counsel her in his office but doesn’t have many helpful things to say.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 Movie That Can Help You Understand Cory Booker’s 25-Hour Senate Speech

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      “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” starring Jimmy Stewart as a naïve senator, explores the idealism — and reality — behind the tactic.Late in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” Frank Capra’s 1939 ode to democracy, free speech and the filibuster, a CBS newsman is trilling into his microphone near the Senate chamber. Inside that august room, he tells his listeners, is a man engaging in “the American privilege of free speech in its most dramatic form.”“The rrrrright,” he calls it, rolling that r, “to talk your head off!”He is referring to Jefferson Smith (played by a 30-ish Jimmy Stewart, all big eyes and gee-willikers wonder), the fish-out-of-water junior senator from some unnamed Western state and political party, who’s held the Senate floor all night and is still at it. He’s filibustering an appropriations bill to protest graft and injustice, specifically injustice against himself and more generally against the people of his state, his country and heck, why not, the whole world.I thought of Smith and his idealism while watching Senator Cory Booker on Tuesday, 24 hours into his own record-setting speech to protest the actions of the Trump administration. (Technically it wasn’t a filibuster because it did not come during a debate over a specific bill or nominee.) Stewart’s performance is calibrated to heightened Hollywood standards, to be sure, but by the end of the movie’s daylong filibuster, Smith looks as if he’s got the flu: sweaty, haggard, staggering around, voice reduced to a painful rasp. By contrast Booker, who’s about 25 years older than that character, remained coherent and composed and also audible, even when he concluded at the 25-hour mark.Cory Booker emerging from the Senate after his record-setting speech.Eric Lee/The New York TimesIn truth, I always think of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” (for rent on Apple TV+) when this kind of speech comes up. I saw it dozens of times as a teenager, as it was a favorite in the home-school community to which my family belonged. It’s both very funny and profoundly idealistic, with its underlying belief that anybody who tries a feat this athletic and grueling — as the CBS newsman reminds the crowd, sitting down ends the filibuster — must be in the right. “Either I’m dead right or I’m crazy!” Smith hollers at one point.“You wouldn’t care to put that to a vote, would you, senator?” one of his irritated colleagues replies. We know the movie’s answer.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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      ‘A Minecraft Movie’ Review: Block by Bizarre Block

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      Jack Black and Jason Momoa star in this adaptation of the megahit video game that leans into the mindless silliness of mid-aughts comedy.Occasionally, amid the cycles of nostalgic clip-sharing that periodically occur online, you might happen upon the Berries and Cream video. The viral Starburst commercial, involving a briefcase-toting pilgrimesque lad, is a concise distillation of the particular brand of mid-to-late-aughts humor that dominated the early internet: quaintly absurd, silly, and above all, random. When, early on in “A Minecraft Movie,” a makeshift rocket pack is sent hurtling toward a nearby potato chip factory, obliterating its giant mascot chip and leaving executives inside wailing, that genre of ad improbably blazes in the mind.That this adaptation of the megahit video game, directed by Jared Hess, fully commits to capturing that era of stupidly “epic,” or epically stupid, laughs shouldn’t come as a surprise. Hess, after all, laid a lot of groundwork for early internet humor with his 2004 indie comedy “Napoleon Dynamite.” And the star here, Jack Black, was the lead in Hess’s 2006 follow-up, “Nacho Libre.”This retro sensibility might, on paper, make for an out-of-touch comedy, but there’s something almost refreshingly bold in the full-tilt inanity here — in taking a blockbuster budget and embracing idiocy, as if to knowingly say, “I mean, it’s a Minecraft movie.”That charitable read is most immediately guided by Black, whose comedic persona of earnest goofiness has survived our age of irony. He plays Steve, a disillusioned office worker who decides to chase his dream of working as a miner. When he axes into a mysterious magic cube, it opens a portal to the Overworld, the blocky world of Minecraft, with its limitless potential for creation.But when a crew of ragtag outsiders, led by a washed-up video game champion named Garrett (Jason Momoa), unwittingly get their hands on the cube and enter the Overworld, they become caught in a battle for the universe’s survival.Most of this plays out with a camp quality of so-dumb-it’s-sort-of-fun. The visuals often appear intentionally, even egregiously artificial, something that only partly works; Hess’s early success was rooted in a deliberately askew visual grammar that worked in an indie medium, but with a studio extravaganza, it often simply translates as — well, a Starburst commercial.But those who can buy into Hess’s sensibility will get a nostalgic kick: Momoa, who is at times genuinely funny and at other times just capably creating sketches, is essentially doing a rendition of Rex, a side character from “Napoleon Dynamite.” (Also, for fans of that movie, there is more than one bit about tater tots.)The silliness of “A Minecraft Movie” will appeal to kids who love the game, to adults who think fondly of this comedy era, and perhaps to few else. But the movie could have gone a more polished and predictable route, like another of Black’s game-related movies, “Jumanji.” In a world of such factory-line adaptations, there’s more of an identity here, even if it’s a mindless one.A Minecraft MovieRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. More