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‘Brats’: What to Know About the Brat Pack Documentary
A new documentary revisits the group of young actors that helped define the decade. Here are some of its most interesting moments.In the documentary “Brats,” Andrew McCarthy attempts to come to terms with being part of the Brat Pack, the group of young actors who were ascendant in ’80s movies. Turns out, many of them didn’t like the nickname, or the association. “I lost control of the narrative of my career overnight,” McCarthy said of the period after the writer David Blum coined the immediately catchy term, in a 1985 New York Magazine profile of Emilio Estevez.He and other actors, like Estevez and Rob Lowe, who had been frequently cast together in ensemble coming-of-age dramedies (“St. Elmo’s Fire”), scattered, fearful that appearing together would be a career liability. In the documentary, streaming on Hulu, McCarthy, an actor, director and travel writer, checks in, after many years of absence, to see how they processed this pop culture twist.Some — like Demi Moore, a “St. Elmo’s” co-star — handled it all a lot better than others.In a phone interview from his Manhattan home, McCarthy, 61, said his impulse was not nostalgia — though he knows that’s what might draw an audience — but an excavation of how time and memory collide with youthful expectations. It was a leap: He walked around New York and cold-called Brat Packers he hadn’t seen in decades, with a camera crew trailing. “I thought, if anyone calls me back, I have a movie,” he said.Prompted by McCarthy’s low-key, conversational style, Moore, Lowe, Estevez and others turned up; Judd Nelson and Molly Ringwald did not. In kitchen table and couch-side interviews that also serve as a kind of celebrity home tour — Ally Sheedy’s Upper West Side apartment ranks as the most relatable — the movie cracks the time capsule of the Brat Pack’s appeal. Here, some takeaways.McCarthy, right, with Emilio Estevez, who was the main subject of the original article that gave the Brat Pack its name. ABC News StudiosWe 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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‘Treasure’ Review: Unearthing the Past
Lena Dunham and Stephen Fry star in a Holocaust-memory drama that uneasily doubles as a father-daughter road movie.Along with Jesse Eisenberg’s “A Real Pain,” scheduled for release this fall, Julia von Heinz’s “Treasure” is one of at least two dramas this year to follow the American descendants of Holocaust survivors on travels across Poland. Von Heinz’s film is based on a novel by the Australia-raised author Lily Brett, herself the daughter of survivors. But whatever complexities might come across in the book don’t register in a film that has been fashioned, sometimes uneasily, into a sentimental father-daughter road movie.It is 1991, and Ruth (Lena Dunham, asked to do the most serious acting of her career), a journalist, has planned a trip to Poland. Her father, Edek (Stephen Fry), who, along with Ruth’s mother, survived Auschwitz, has insisted on joining her. He says he couldn’t let his daughter visit Poland alone.Initially, “Treasure” presents Edek as a goofy lug, jocular and uninhibited. But his carefree attitude masks repressed trauma, to an extent that Fry never manages to make visceral. Unnerved by train travel, Edek hires a driver (Zbigniew Zamachowski, from Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “White”) to take them from site to site. “Treasure” builds to their trip to Auschwitz, where Edek quickly takes over from the tour guide with an outpouring of memories.The crux of the film involves their visits to the Lodz apartment from which Edek and his family were exiled in 1940. Ruth wants to reclaim what was stolen from her family; Edek has a learned fear of not moving on from the past. Their difference in outlooks is a potentially powerful subject, but miscasting has blunted its impact.TreasureRated R. Intense descriptions of survival in Auschwitz. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters. More
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‘Summer Solstice’ Review: Through Thick and Thin
A triumph of sensitivity, Noah Schamus’s debut feature tracks a rural reunion between old friends struggling to recover their bond.“When I look at you, I see an old friend,” a voice croons over the credits of the delicate relationship drama “Summer Solstice.” Much like the film in which it features, the song (by Margaux, who contributes original music) is an aching ode to love worn thin, gesturing at how time and changes in circumstance, life planning or self-perception can deepen bonds, or erode them.A triumph of sensitivity from the first-time feature filmmaker Noah Schamus, “Summer Solstice” tracks two college friends who reunite for a weekend in the verdant valleys of upstate New York. It’s been a while, and when Leo (Bobbi Salvör Menuez), a shy actor, and Eleanor (Marianne Rendón), an attention-seeking teacher, initially meet at Leo’s apartment, the pair have not seen one another since his transition.Eleanor was once the popular girl; Leo, her doting sidekick. Now on the brink of 30, the old friends should have a lot of catching up to do. But Schamus gracefully shows how, as the summer days wear on, Eleanor neglects to acknowledge Leo’s personal growth and instead grasps at the fraying threads of their old dynamic. That thread finally snaps, with two outside witnesses to its wreckage: the queer friends Joe (Yaron Lotan) and Oliver (Mila Myles, a heartthrob whose chemistry with Menuez cries out for a sequel).It’s difficult to discern what Leo saw in Eleanor; she mostly comes off as a bossy mess. But perhaps that characterization is deliberate: In declining to put us under Eleanor’s spell, Schamus is able to focus on coaxing out the magic in Leo, a onetime wallflower just beginning to bloom.Summer SolsticeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 21 minutes. In theaters. More
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‘Reverse the Curse’ Review: Baseball Is Life
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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‘Firebrand’ Review: Placid Queen
Top-shelf actors and authentic Tudor table-setting fail to quicken this glumly unfocused take on the exploits of Henry VIII’s last wife, Katherine Parr.Not until I watched “Firebrand” did I think the sight of Jude Law’s naked behind could cause me to recoil rather than rejoice. Playing a late-career Henry VIII, Law is all rutting buttocks and barely mobile bulk, an obese, paranoid ruler with a weeping leg wound where maggots wriggle in ecstatic close-up. Law (and his director, Karim Aïnouz) might be laying it on thick, but his grotesque tyrant is the only thing lifting this dreary, ahistoric drama out of its narrative doldrums.Adapted from Elizabeth Fremantle’s 2012 novel, “Queen’s Gambit,” “Firebrand” seeks to highlight Henry’s sixth and last wife, Katherine Parr (Alicia Vikander), the only spouse to outlive the infamous king. Studious and devout, Parr conceals her Protestant sympathies while arguing in favor of women’s education and an English-language Bible. Her clandestine support for the poet and Protestant preacher Anne Askew (Erin Doherty), however, almost proves fatal when she’s accused of heresy by an oily bishop (Simon Russell Beale).Unfolding in and around Whitehall Palace in 1547, the movie is lavishly, oppressively costumed, the actors imprisoned by fabric and a screenplay that plays fast and loose with the historical record. A plummy voice-over describes Henry’s kingdom as “blood-soaked” and “plague-ridden,” though we see little of either plasma or pustules. What we see is a queen whose downcast demeanor speaks less of a firebrand than of a wife placating a husband who isn’t above spousal decapitation if a younger, saucier option should wiggle past.That Parr deserves a spotlight is easily argued. But the woman who believed herself chosen by God to influence the King is, despite Vikander’s skills, ill-served by this meandering, glum picture. So much so that, in just two brief appearances, Doherty’s vivid portrayal of the reformist Askew makes us wonder whom the film’s title is really memorializing.FirebrandRated R for spousal abuse and celebrity skin. Running time: 2 hours. In theaters. More
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‘Tiger Stripes’ Review: A Ferocious Change
Myth and the changes of puberty combine in Amanda Nell Eu’s fierce, funny debut feature.Decades of storytellers have framed changes in the adolescent female body as somehow mysterious and dangerous, almost sorcery. That’s why horror films like “Carrie,” “The Witch,” “The Exorcist” and “Teeth” are so spine-chilling. The theme is so well-trodden that it’s a little hard to find a fresh spin on the subject. In her feature debut “Tiger Stripes,” the director Amanda Nell Eu pulls it off.Eu’s film is set in her native Malaysia, and centers on Zaffan (Zafreen Zairizal), a vivacious 11-year-old whose world revolves around her best friends Farah (Deena Ezral) and Mariam (Piqa). Together they film TikTok dances, play in the river on the way home from school, plaster stickers everywhere and talk about bras. They pretend to be kittens and they have a club for the three of them. They are, in other words, typical tweens.Then one day, Zaffan discovers she’s begun menstruating, and overnight her life changes. In her strict religious school, she doesn’t attend prayers while on her period. Her friends suddenly see her as unclean, dirty, an outsider. They gang up on her. They call her names. And strange things start to happen to Zaffan’s body and mind, including the lingering presence of a red-eyed woman in a tree that only she seems to be able to see.“Tiger Stripes” literalizes some of the potential side effects of menstruation — mood changes, cramps, body dysmorphia and more — but it also heads in a more fanciful direction, with the idea of a stalking tiger lurking around the edges of Zaffan’s consciousness.In her village, a tiger is a figure of curiosity, with everyone wanting to look at it and film it, and a source of danger, a powerful being that can hurt you if it chooses. Zaffan begins to feel that’s what she has become; no longer is she the little girl who sometimes misbehaves but mostly follows the rules. She has stepped beyond their reach, and deserves her own kind of freedom.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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‘Ride’ Review: Heists, Heifers and Hospital Bills
A father and son resort to desperate measures to save an ailing child in this Texas-set dramatic thriller.Like many movies before it, including “John Q,” and “Ambulance,” the indie thriller “Ride” is about a well-meaning father who turns to crime in a desperate bid to cover his family’s medical bills. It’s a distinctly, bleakly American crisis, one with an inevitable political subtext: If a man is forced to choose between stealing and watching his daughter die of cancer, maybe it’s the system, not the man, that’s the problem.“I’m praying for you,” John (C. Thomas Howell) is told when his request to draw on his pension is denied. In the United States, you might not get help, as “Ride” bitterly makes clear, but you’ll get plenty of thoughts and prayers.John is a rancher and former rodeo star in Texas worn down by years of hard labor, and Howell, looking much older than his 57 years, brings a Sam Elliott-type of rugged cowboy pathos to the role of the family patriarch. The writer-director Jake Allyn also stars as John’s wayward son Peter, who helps him plan a high-risk theft.But Allyn always seems a bit out of his depth trying to convey Peter’s inner anguish. Consequently, the character’s struggles with addiction and a troubled past feel like a distraction from the heart of the story, which is John’s drive to do anything to help Virginia, his ailing child (Zia Carlock). Decked out in cowboy hat and Carhartt jacket, Allyn looks the part. But only Howell truly embodies the spirit of the Old West.RideRated R for drug use, strong language and some violence. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. Available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More
