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      ‘Cobweb’ Review: A Film Within a Director’s Cinematic Ego Trip

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      Kim Jee-woon toys with the absurdity of filmmaking itself in this story of a director compelled to take his cast and crew captive to shoot one more scene.To be a director is to be a madman of sorts. It’s a rare artist that has the will and belief required to pull together so many forces to create a movie, let alone a good or even great one. In other words, it’s a space only occupied, perhaps, by the delusional or self-involved.“Cobweb,” directed by Kim Jee-woon, mines the comically absurd reality that is filmmaking, at times with bouncy cinematic verve, at others somewhat aimlessly and a little too indulgently.In the film, set in early-1970s South Korea, a director, Kim (Song Kang-ho), desperately struggling to prove he isn’t a sham, has come up with a new ending to fix his current film that he insists will transform it into a subversive masterpiece. Working surreptitiously around his studio’s president and the government censorship agency, he reconvenes his cast and crew, boards them up in a sound stage, and gets to work on his opus. Personalities clash and antics ensue, as the movie set becomes as much of a soap opera as the movie they’re making, whose scenes are cut into “Cobweb” throughout.Even if “Cobweb” often feels like it’s a film that is telling itself its own industry insider joke — poking fun at the competing, wounded egos of directors, actors and studio brass — Kim Jee-woon captures it all with a sleekly choreographed charm that keeps us along for the ride. Until it doesn’t. Toward the second half, the film becomes overlong, losing its narrative thread and including too many scenes of the movie being made. Eventually we feel a little trapped in the sound stage ourselves, as “Cobweb” falls victim, ironically, to its own punchline — becoming a movie that is too obsessed with itself.CobwebNot rated. In Korean, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. Rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘Drift’ Review: Cynthia Erivo Keeps a Breakdown at Bay

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      Anthony Chen’s quiet character study follows a traumatized Liberian woman (Cynthia Erivo) on a Greek island who befriends an American tour guide (Alia Shawkat).“Drift,” a patient character study set on a craggy Greek island, proves a mesmerizing showcase for the actress Cynthia Erivo’s talents. She plays Jacqueline, a traumatized Liberian refugee whose cautious air is a gentle source of forward motion even as the film around her stalls.The story takes place during a season of vagrancy in Jacqueline’s life, tracking her efforts to find shelter and enough food to keep from fainting. She spends her days selling foot massages to sunbathers and her nights sleeping in sandy beach nooks, and is often pictured alone against the coastal scenery. Eventually, she meets Callie (Alia Shawkat), a chatterbox American tour guide whose hunger for friendship helps Jacqueline to open up.The director, Anthony Chen, is sensitive to Jacqueline’s struggles, and shows her mental state as a delicate equilibrium. The film features limited dialogue, and Erivo conveys feeling through body language, expression and small glances. What emerges is a portrait of a young woman using survival mode as a means to stave off an impending breakdown.“Drift” frames the source of Jacqueline’s psychological torment as a mystery, meting out cryptic flashbacks to the character’s back story in Liberia. Those scenes culminate in seemingly inevitable tragedy that the film treats as a grand reveal. This upheaval is informative, but the film is at its strongest when it lingers in present tense, exploring how Jacqueline’s strategically cultivated myopia keeps her alive.DriftNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Out of Darkness’ Review: Prime Evil

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      A Stone Age tribe is hunted by an unseen entity in this wondrously atmospheric survival thriller, which unfolds in a fictional language.Set in the Scottish Highlands some 45,000 years ago, “Out of Darkness” follows the misfortunes of a small band of humans whose boat has landed on a lonely beach. What they hope for is food and a cave to shelter in; what they find is terror and torment.At first, the group is purposefully united, its leader (Chuku Modu) calming the worries of his young son (Luna Mwezi), pregnant partner (Iola Evans) and more fragile younger brother (Kit Young). As they head toward distant hills, however, their anxieties grow. Above them hang graphite skies; underfoot lie treacherous rocks. Huddled around a campfire in a forbidding wood, buffeted by unearthly nighttime noises and fearsome black shapes, the tribe begins to panic — all except one young woman (a ferocious Safia Oakley-Green) who’s prepared to go to unspeakable lengths to survive.Unfolding entirely in a fictional language (which the actors deliver with fluid conviction), and enriched by lovingly rendered practical effects, this first feature from Andrew Cumming pairs its minimalist narrative with the maximum of atmosphere. The setting may be prehistoric, but there’s nothing primitive about the filmmaking, which molds mostly natural light and an unusually rich soundscape into something both elemental and hostile. Trees sigh and shadows stir, and milky mists blur our field of vision as the cinematographer, Ben Fordesman, turns the forest itself into a predator.Bolstered by extensive period research — and in line with our evolving understanding of the overlap between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens — Ruth Greenberg’s script delivers a thoughtful, unexpected ending that’s more cautionary than splatterific. We can’t be reminded too often that fear and ignorance can kill as surely as any enemy.Out of DarknessRated R for mauled flesh and misogynistic beliefs. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Marmalade’ Review: Getting Out of a Jam

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      Joe Keery plays a seeming dupe in a crime movie that plays dumb, then tries to play smart, but only becomes dumber.The protagonist of “Marmalade” is “dumber than a box of crayons,” a police chief declares at one point in the movie. That may be true — but it’s no reason to treat viewers that way.Written and directed by Keir O’Donnell, “Marmalade” never actually locates any humor in the main character, Baron (Joe Keery), who speaks with an exaggerated Southern twang and uses malapropisms like “inseparadable.” On some level, O’Donnell seems to recognize that he has gambled on an unfunny premise, and so what begins as a hicksploitation comedy tries to save face by recasting itself as a twisty thriller. In essence, “Marmalade” pretends to be more dunderheaded than it is, then acts as if it’s been smart all along, in a shift that takes it from insulting to incoherent.Broadly speaking, “Marmalade” consists of the newly imprisoned Baron explaining to his cellmate, Otis (Aldis Hodge), how he met and fell for a strawberry blonde named Marmalade (Camila Morrone) who sweet-talked him into helping her rob a bank. (He only wanted to buy medicine for his ailing mother, of course.) If Otis, who claims to have experience with prison escapes, helps Baron break out, the bank loot — $250,000 — awaits him. All Baron wants is Marmalade.Does Baron’s naïveté mean he is on the list of cinematic dimwits who have never seen a movie with a femme fatale? O’Donnell surely has. There is also a particular, much-imitated crime movie from the 1990s whose conceit “Marmalade” draws on shamelessly. O’Donnell may not owe royalties, but he might consider finding a way to repay the audience for its time.MarmaladeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘Molli and Max in the Future’ Review: Love, Interplanetary Style

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      This rom-com brings futuristic absurdity and nimble timing to a comfort-food story line of friends turned soul mates.Science fiction has become such a mainstay of lumbering franchises that it’s hard not to root for left-field small-scale twists on the genre like the fizzy, funny “Molli and Max in the Future.” Michael Lukk Litwak’s quantum-age rom-com brings futuristic absurdity and nimble timing to a tried-and-true story line of friends turned soul mates.Molli (Zosia Mamet) and Max (Aristotle Athari) meet-cute when their spaceships collide near an asteroid field, and despite different outlooks — she’s hunting for crystals, he’s an aspiring mecha-fighter — they end up bonding for a while until Molli goes off on a quest. But in the movie’s next chapter, five years later, they cross paths by chance: Molli is now a “passionaut” in a bigamous cult led by a psychic floating head (Okieriete Onaodowan), and Max has legions of fans as a robo-gladiator and a relationship with his own bot (Erin Darke).The space-age paraphernalia abound — interdimensional travel, digital pickleball, a gabby galactic goddess named Triangulon (Grace Kuhlenschmidt) — but Mamet and Athari take the ridiculousness in stride, which is also funnier. The thread of their on-again-off-again connection is never lost in the film’s pleasingly artisanal, jazz-scored futurescape, which meshes practical and digital effects under the sign of Douglas Adams as much as Adult Swim and anime.Many of the complications for Molli and Max — like a trash-talking political candidate (Michael Chernus) whom the crowds eat up — echo the present day, and yet as the pair hit their requisite rom-com marks, it’s comforting to think of love as something still reliable in a sea of mind-boggling cosmic tumult.Molli and Max in the FutureNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Lisa Frankenstein’ Review: When Mom Finds Out, You’re So Dead

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      A little too enamored of its own references, this teen horror-comedy feels a bit misshapen but still delivers some light fun.Ever since Mary Shelley wrote “Frankenstein” at age 19, it has functioned as a remarkably versatile Rorschach test, prescient in ways its author could hardly have anticipated. Usually it’s interpreted as a story about hubris, about man playing God and reaping the consequences. But you can just as easily read it as a lucid explication of Rousseau’s ideas about human nature, or as a slippery narrative told by a not-quite-reliable narrator who’s trying to get away with murder.On the other hand, Guillermo del Toro, one of our greatest contemporary horror directors, has described “Frankenstein” as “the quintessential teenage book,” full of angst and curiosity about becoming an adult. And though he wasn’t talking about “Lisa Frankenstein” specifically, he might as well have been. Shelley’s novel lends itself well to teen horror-comedy, and the screenwriter Diablo Cody — who wrote “Juno” and “Jennifer’s Body,” as well as the book for the youth-focused “Jagged Little Pill” Broadway show — seized on that angle. The result is a very, very loose adaptation of “Frankenstein” that doesn’t draw on much from the original. Directed by Zelda Williams in her feature debut, this is instead the familiar story of a loner finding love in an unlikely place.Perhaps you spent the late 1980s and early ’90s doing something other than being a school-age girl. So it’s worth noting that the title of the film is a nod to a company, named for its founder, that produced brightly colored stickers with characters like unicorns and kittens and bears that eventually made their way to the broader school supply set. (In grade school circa 1992, my friends and I yearned for Lisa Frank Trapper Keepers, the true marker of cool.)I was a little bummed out to discover that, despite the title, the nostalgic brand never really shows up in the movie — in fact, the vibe isn’t Lisa Frank-esque at all. But it’s OK, because “Lisa Frankenstein” is girly-gothy, in a way that’s a lot of fun once you get used to it. In fact, the best thing about the film is its production design, which takes familiar trappings from movies of the era (I thought of everything from “Poltergeist” to “Edward Scissorhands” to “Pretty in Pink” to “Weird Science,” itself a loose “Frankenstein” adaptation) and just dials up the color temperature a few degrees. It’s a pastiche crossed with a tribute, complete with references to slasher films, Cinderella, loner high school flicks and a makeover montage. Plus, of course, “Frankenstein.”The movie itself leaves a little more to be desired. The plot is fairly predictable, albeit in a way that feels distinctly of its era — a bit of a disappointment from a writer who has in the past played more boldly with expectations around teen girls. Lisa (Kathryn Newton) lives with her father (Joe Chrest), her stepmother (Carla Gugino) and her cheerleader stepsister (Liza Soberano) in the suburbs. She misses her dead mother desperately, but is trying to get on with life at her new school, where she’s even spotted a cute guy to crush on. Yet her true love, a 19th-century dead guy, is in the graveyard, where she hangs out to make grave rubbings and daydream.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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      ‘Suncoast’ Review: How to Act When Your Brother Has Brain Cancer

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      Laura Chinn’s promising feature debut fictionalizes an excruciating experience: her brother’s slow death at the same time as Terri Schiavo’s ordeal.The writer and director Laura Chinn amassed a lifetime’s worth of material while in her teens. Her fantastic memoir, “Acne,” is a survivalist tale of enduring her distracted Scientologist parents; one darkly funny low point comes when she drops out of high school and gets a nightclub gig as M.C. of topless Jell-O wrestling events. “Suncoast,” Chinn’s promising feature debut, fictionalizes the book’s most excruciating part: her older brother’s slow death from brain cancer at the same time — and same Florida hospice — as Terri Schiavo, the vegetative patient whose right to die became a moral and legal flashpoint nationwide in 2005.With commendable wit and zero self-pity, Chinn sketches the daily surreality of her teenage analogue, Doris (Nico Parker), and mother, Kristine (Laura Linney), navigating a gantlet of protesters who call the hospice an execution chamber. Max (Cree Kawa), the dying boy, controls the story even as he is lying nonverbal and inert. Chinn fearlessly acknowledges that his yearslong illness holds the family hostage. It’s a bummer to spend endless dull hours at Max’s bedside while other kids party. Selfish? A little. False? No.Linney plays Kristine as a martyr with a hair-trigger temper. Terrified she’ll miss Max’s last breath, she begins sleeping at the hospice and abandons Doris (and, in one hard-to-believe scene, forgets her daughter even exists). When Doris complains, her mother scolds her for being a callow narcissist.Doris would be more compelling if she was. The script’s fundamental misstep is flattening Doris into a shy innocent — a sympathetic, synthetic template of a good kid. Even softened, there’s much to admire in the film’s bracing truths about witnessing a loved one’s inexorable decline, as when Paul (Woody Harrelson), a big-hearted but obstinate Schiavo protester, says he’ll pray for Max’s survival and Doris blurts: “Please don’t.”SuncoastRated R for teen drinking, drugs and sexual situations. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. Watch on Hulu. More

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      ‘Ennio’ Review: Morricone and His Mastery of Film Scores

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      A lively, absorbing documentary about the Italian composer whose music is featured in hundreds of movies, from “A Fistful of Dollars” to “Kill Bill.”“The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” “Days of Heaven,” “Before the Revolution,” “1900,” “The Untouchables,” “Kill Bill,” “Django Unchained,” “The Mission,” “The Thing,” “Fists in the Pocket,” “The Battle of Algiers,” “The Bird With the Crystal Plumage,” “Bugsy,” “Bulworth,” “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!” — if you’ve watched a movie in the last half century there’s a good chance that you’ve heard music by Ennio Morricone, the titanic Italian composer and arranger who helped define films as we know and hear them.When Morricone died at the age of 91 in 2020, it seemed almost hard to believe given how expansive his reach had been and, well, how long he’d been part of my movie life. (His death was announced with a statement he titled: “I, Ennio Morricone, am dead.”) When I was a kid, we had an LP of his soundtrack for Gillo Pontecorvo’s “Burn!” (1970), a period epic about a British intelligence officer (Marlon Brando) who’s sent to a fictional Portuguese colony to stir up trouble. A audiocassette of the soundtrack is stashed somewhere in my house; every so often, I listen to it on Spotify and am again transported by Morricone’s soaring music.In “Ennio,” a lively, absorbing documentary about the composer, Morricone discusses his work on “Burn!” and so many other films. Written and directed by Giuseppe Tornatore, it is a crowded, hyperventilated portrait stuffed with archival and original material, including interviews with Morricone shot in 2015 and 2016. Like several other filmmakers, Tornatore worked repeatedly with Morricone, a partnership that began with “Cinema Paradiso” (1990), the director’s soppy heart-tugger about a friendship between a theater projectionist and the boy he schools who becomes a filmmaker. It’s perhaps no surprise that “Ennio” is another cinephilic paean.With help from Morricone, whose interviews anchor the documentary, Tornatore ably fills in the composer’s family history, though the details become sketchier as the musician’s fame steadily grows. Morricone’s father, Mario, was a trumpet player, and soon Ennio was playing it, too. He began composing music as a child and studied it formally at a conservatory in Rome, where one of his teachers was the composer Goffredo Petrassi. A force in Italian modernist music, Petrassi became a towering figure for his student, the embodiment of a serious patrimony that seemed (to some) at odds with Morricone’s commercial work.One of the movie’s nice surprises is that Morricone turns out to be a total charmer, a low-key showman with a demure gaze that he works like a vamp and an impish smile that routinely punctuates one of his anecdotes. The movie opens with him speed walking in a circle inside a spacious, elegantly shambolic apartment before pausing to execute some calisthenics. It’s an amusing introduction that suggests Morricone’s vitality and determination, as if he were preparing for another leg in the extraordinary marathon of his life. Or maybe he was warming up for this movie, which runs 2 hours and 36 minutes, though never feels like a slog, even with its frustratingly unmodulated pacing. There’s much to see and to hear, most of it delightful.Among the most engaging sections are those involving Morricone’s work with Sergio Leone. They first collaborated on Leone’s “A Fistful of Dollars,” a western set in Mexico, shot in Spain and starring a television actor on hiatus, straight from Hollywood, named Clint Eastwood. Although Morricone and Leone shared some history, they were not initially on the same wavelength when they started work on the film. Leone was reinventing the genre and drawing liberally from many of his adored influences. He lifted the story from Akira Kurosawa’s “Yojimbo” (Kurosawa later sued), and Leone told Morricone that he wanted to use some music from Howard Hawks’s “Rio Bravo” for the climatic duel in “Dollars.”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