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      ‘Dicks: The Musical’ Review: Hitting High Notes, Going Lowbrow

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      Larry Charles’s musical comedy is so hellbent on being outrageous that it just ends up being tiresome.The funniest part of “Dicks: The Musical” sneaks in at the very end, when outtakes are interspersed with the credits. Nathan Lane, in particular, comes across as a living illustration of the words “game” and “trooper.” He and his co-star Megan Mullally, pros that they are, elegantly suggest hints of disbelief at just how they ended up in a movie in which his character spits pre-chewed cold cuts into the gaping maws of hideous puppet monsters and hers complains that her vagina has flown away (at one point it attaches itself to someone like the facehugger in “Alien”).On paper this sounds intriguing, in a Troma Entertainment kind of way, and maybe one day this musical comedy will turn into a cult film like that company’s “Surf Nazis Must Die” or some of the jetsam perpetually washing up at pop culture’s edges.For now this movie from the hip indie studio A24 simply exerts itself as it tries way too hard to join the hallowed ranks of exploitation favorites extolling schlock values.Directed by Larry Charles (“Borat”), the film was adapted by Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp from a show they performed at Upright Citizens Brigade in the mid-2010s. The two writers also play the supposedly identical twins Trevor and Craig, who were raised separately after their parents (Lane and Mullally) split up. The siblings, whose straightness is too aggressive to not be conspicuous, coincidentally work at the same company, where they compete for the title of best salesman and the attention of their boss, Gloria (Megan Thee Stallion, who gets the movie’s single best number, “Out-Alpha the Alpha”).The new colleagues’ relationship is frosty at first: “You have long hair like a girl,” Craig tells Trevor; “you have short hair like a lesbian girl,” Trevor replies, expertly wielding the rapier wit of a peeved eight-year-old. But eventually, the pair team up to reunite their folks. One potential obstacle is that their father, Harris, is decidedly not heterosexual. Cue the song “Gay Old Life,” in which Harris details his fabulous queer existence and introduces the aforementioned creatures, his beloved Sewer Boys. (Jackson and Sharp wrote the passable songs with Karl Saint Lucy and Marius de Vries, and their staging is mostly anemic.)Once Lane and Mullally, who plays the lisping mom Evelyn like a 1930s movie’s idea of a Park Avenue eccentric, enter the story, they hijack it from Jackson and Sharp, which is not necessarily a bad thing but also destabilizes the movie.Despite brief instances when it spills into surreal madness, most notably in a scene set in a sewer, the film is rudderless — which is a polite way to say limp. Its only point is highly self-aware pseudo-gonzo provocation, peaking in a denouement that feels both surprising and inevitable, and looks as if it had been engineered to deliberately unsettle some viewers. Some keyboard warriors and craven politicians might take the bait, while the rest of us will be left wondering why Lane and Mullally didn’t get a song with Megan Thee Stallion.Dicks: The MusicalRated R for language, sexual single entendres, cartoonish taboo-breaking and offenses against musical theater. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Shadows in the City’ Review: A Sleazy Slice of 1980s No Wave

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      The director Ari M. Roussimoff’s black-and-white homage to the downtown crowd gets a raw screening at the Museum of Modern Art before its restoration.The visual artist and performer Ari M. Roussimoff and his camera crew — including the cinematographer and director Ellen Kuras — crept about the lower depths of 1980s Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens shooting an underground horror movie in 16-millimeter black-and-white film. The thing he assembled, “Shadows in the City” (1991), is an astonishing and often queasiness-inducing curio of No Wave cinema.This week the Museum of Modern Art is displaying its collection’s print — with the scruffy look and distorted audio — before its restoration. Aficionados of late-20th-century New York City scuzz may want to check it out in its raw form, which runs until Oct. 11. After all, it’s a movie for which too much cleanup may be inapt.The movie’s very loose story follows Paul (Craig Smith), who wanders around the city mourning several deaths in his family, soliciting prostitutes and contemplating suicide. From Times Square, he visits Lower Manhattan, and the West and East sides. There’s a terrifying biker bar in the meatpacking district, and some possibly undead high jinks for him in Alphabet City.The cast is replete with avant-garde artists. Taylor Mead, the wise fool of microbudget classics by Ron Rice and one of Andy Warhol’s regulars, is here a skid row wet brain. The documentarian Emile de Antonio plays a mage. The “Flaming Creatures” auteur Jack Smith is “the spirit of death.” And Nick Zedd, Joe Coleman and Kembra Pfahler represent the younger side of No Wave.The story, such as it is, borrows from both the experimental short film “Scorpio Rising” and the classic B-movie “Carnival of Souls.” (Bruce Byron, who appeared in “Scorpio,” also has a role here.) But the movie is mainly driven by a nightmare anti-logic that spews forth gnarly imagery pitched between the art house and the grindhouse. An end credit shows a dedication to Forrest J. Ackerman, the editor of the horror fan magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland. The movie could be alternately titled “Famous Monsters Go Downtown.”Shadows in the CityNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Two Cult Classics Restored and Brimming With Chaotic Life

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      Timothy Carey’s erratically brilliant “The World’s Greatest Sinner” and Emilio Fernández’s redemption melodrama “Victims of Sin” finally come to big screens.“Why can’t I be a god?” wonders Clarence Hilliard, the insurance salesman turned aspiring dictator in “The World’s Greatest Sinner.” Like a grenade slowly rolling around a room, Timothy Carey’s erratically brilliant, thoroughly independent 1962 film tracks Clarence’s rise from family man to rock’n’roller to megalomaniac politician. Along with Emilio Fernández’s “Victims of Sin,” from 1951, it’s one of two outstanding, larger-than-life restorations that are receiving theatrical premieres this week.Clarence (Carey) is introduced as an oddball dad with a devout wife and children — until he tosses away life’s script. Clarence wants more. He takes up street-corner preaching, perhaps inspired by a voice-over narrator who sounds like Satan, a few drinks in. Hungry for attention, he starts a rock band and gyrates for crowds, sparking a riot. (The music is courtesy of a young Frank Zappa.) Now going by God Hilliard, he organizes a movement called the Eternal Man’s Party to run for president.Carey was a genuine wild-card who could make his Method contemporaries look tame. (Stanley Kubrick tried to harness Carey’s unique bearish volatility, casting him in “Paths of Glory” and “The Killing” as a condemned soldier and a gunman.) Doubling as the director, Carey stokes the off-kilter mood with heady camera angles and looming shadows, lingering on Clarence as he goes berserk. But Carey’s reckless fool sure sounds astute on the danger of underestimating tyrants early on: “If they believed in what I was doing, they’d try to stop me. That’s what makes it so easy.”Emilio Fernández’s “Victims of Sin” also goes full throttle with an engrossing redemption melodrama about a nightclub dancer who raises an abandoned baby. Ninón Sevilla, the Cuban-born star of musical rumberas films, plays our heroine, Violeta, with irresistible verve. She wows audiences with her moves, then fights to save the infant that a co-worker was strong-armed into leaving behind.Ninón Sevilla in “Victims of Sin.”Janus FilmsFernández’s lustrously shot Mexico City film is partly a tale of two nightclubs. Violeta dazzles audiences at Cabaret Changó, where the mix of mambos and more is bumping. But a zoot-suited gangster named Rodolfo (Rodolfo Acosta) holds sway, and other women must work as private dancers. Pushed into the streets for her defiance, Violeta struggles to take care of her adopted child, until she is taken in by the decent owner of a nightclub by train tracks, Santiago (Tito Junco).Kindness and cruelty are forever at war in Fernández’s world, as Violeta nobly raises her child; the hard-luck plot sometimes bursts with the moody poetry of alley views and bridge vistas (thanks to the cinematographer, the great Gabriel Figueroa). Onstage there’s a mini-anthology of music by Pérez Prado, Pedro Vargas and Rita Montaner (who charms with a spicy number called “Ay José”). But there’s music, too, in the movie’s melodrama, swooping low with Violeta’s travails before making us hope that our spirits will be lifted again.The World’s Greatest SinnerNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 17 minutes. In theaters.Victims of SinNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘When Evil Lurks’ Review: These Demons Are Fast and Furious

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      Humans become bloodthirsty demons in a shockingly grisly new contagion horror film from Argentina.Evil strikes fast and mean in Demián Rugna’s punch-to-the-face new film.It begins as Argentina is facing a supernatural plague that turns people into bloodthirsty demons, a contagion that has Pedro (Ezequiel Rodríguez), his brother, Jimi (Demián Salomón), and their rural village on edge. When the brothers come across one of the infected — a man who’s turned into a putrid, drooling. horrifically obese monster — they manage to move him far out of town. But that only spreads the contagion and fear, forcing Pedro and Jimi and their families to flee.Into the picture comes an older woman (Silvina Sabater, wonderfully understated) who is one of the few who knows how to use a strange (and under-explained) device to kill off the creatures, and it’s her wily mother-protector resolve that drives the film’s frenzied final stretch. That is until Pedro makes an out-of-character decision that ends the otherwise smart story on a what-were-you-thinking note.Rugna’s film is at its most electric when it delivers jolts of stomach-churning violence to push the action forward and build its brutal world. A horrific scene involving a dog and a little girl happened so suddenly and gruesomely, I sat up and gasped out loud.If only Rugna’s script had more such explosive moments and fewer directionless loose ends, like Pedro’s undercooked relationships with his mother and his autistic son. Still, this is a dark and timely parable about what happens when trust — among community members, within families, between a government and its people — disintegrates.When Evil LurksNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘She Came to Me’ Review: A Sea of Troubles (the Romantic Kind)

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      A love-triangle comedy from Rebecca Miller, starring Peter Dinklage, Marisa Tomei and Anne Hathaway, gets an emotional boost from an unexpected source.There’s a scene in “She Came to Me,” the writer-director Rebecca Miller’s juggling act of a romantic comedy, that sounds like the setup of a joke: An opera composer and a tugboat skipper walk into a Brooklyn dive bar. The composer’s wife, a psychiatrist, is back at their brownstone. But for the blocked composer, Steven (Peter Dinklage), his wife, Patricia (Anne Hathaway), and his seafaring muse, Katrina (Marisa Tomei), what happens next is hardly a laughing matter.The unexpected liaison cures Steven’s writer’s block. It also provides an object for Katrina’s affection — or, rather, affliction. “I’m addicted to romance,” she tells Steven, revealing an anomaly in her otherwise independent personality. As for Patricia, she’s got her own compulsions. This is a romantic triangle that may recall the screwball of a Nancy Meyers rom-com.Buoyed by a score from Bryce Dessner of the rock band the National, an original Bruce Springsteen song and the expert performances of its all-in ensemble, the film also casts a luminous aura around a first love, that of two high schoolers, Julian (Evan Ellison) and Tereza (Harlow Jane). He’s Patricia’s son and Steven’s stepson; she’s the daughter of their housekeeper, Magdalena (Joanna Kulig in a soulful turn). Tereza’s stepfather, Trey (Brian d’Arcy James), is a persnickety Civil War re-enactor and a court reporter.The teenagers’ relationship hits serious snags, through no fault of their own. Age plays a part, but so does class and Julian’s race; he identifies as Black. Amid the roiling neuroses of the adults, the young beloveds provide the film with a surprising emotional ballast.She Came to MeRated R for salty language. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Totally Killer’ Review: More Like Marty McDie

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      This teen slasher comedy with a time-traveling twist can’t muster up enough charisma to make its mash-up concept sing.“Totally Killer,” a time-travel teen slasher comedy, is quick to acknowledge itself as a mash-up of two 20th-century cultural touchstones. “Have you seen the movie ‘Back to the Future?’” Jamie (Kiernan Shipka), the movie’s teenage protagonist, asks a pair of cops, before later making an allusion to “Scream,” Wes Craven’s spooky-season classic. The somewhat gimmicky genre combination may have had the potential to be a winning combo, but “Totally Killer,” directed by Nahnatchka Khan, struggles to muster up enough charisma to stick the landing.After the Sweet Sixteen Killer, who murdered Jamie’s mother’s friends when her mother was a teenager, makes a sudden return on Halloween, Jamie is thrust into a time machine that sends her back to 1987, when the original killings took place. Posing as the new kid in town, Jamie becomes close with the teenage version of her mother (Olivia Holt), hoping to stop the killer before he begins his rampage.The fun premise can make for a passively enjoyable watch during a Halloween binge, but the film mostly feels like it’s just going through the motions. Its ‘80s throwback setting is short on color and life, and its slasher elements lack the choreographic or cinematic oomph to induce any terror, or even tension. Shipka is the unequivocal bright spot, naturally embodying the charm, emotion and wit that made this movie’s forebears shine in the first place.Totally KillerRated R for bloody violence, language, sexual material and teen substance use. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. Watch on Amazon Prime Video. More

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      ‘The Royal Hotel’ Review: Pulling Pints and Watching Their Backs

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      Two young women struggle to handle the obstreperous patrons of a remote Australian pub in this coolly calibrated thriller.We are barely 12 minutes into Kitty Green’s “The Royal Hotel” before the first C-word is dropped, but it isn’t gratuitous. The film’s language, dominated by the braying of obnoxious, bellies-to-the-bar boozehounds, is both spice and thickening agent in its pervasive mood of clammy menace. Our reward for enduring this relentless churn of apprehension is not the one we anticipate.Teasing expectations — to some viewers’ ultimate disappointment, no doubt — is much of what this keenly calibrated thriller is about, the familiarity of its setup raising our most bloodthirsty horror-movie hopes. Place two young, attractive female backpackers in a forlorn mining town somewhere in the Australian Outback; surround them with sex-starved, boorish miners; allow them no access to cell service or reliable transport. Their ensuing trials are a cyst that Green and her co-writer, Oscar Redding, take their sweet time to lance.Until then, we must gnaw our fingernails as Hanna and Liv (Julia Garner and Jessica Henwick, both terrific) refresh their finances by working as live-in bartenders in the titular establishment. The hotel’s dilapidation — to say nothing of its grubby, grabby, mostly male clientele — is a far cry from the yacht parties the women were recently enjoying in Sydney. The bar owner (an indispensable Hugo Weaving) is a raging alcoholic, yet his girlfriend (Ursula Yovich) seems kind and possibly protective. And while one regular (Daniel Henshall) is frankly terrifying, another (Toby Wallace) is so clean and cute that his off-color humor is easier to ignore. At what point should the women feel alarmed enough to leave?That question haunts every frame of a movie that persistently taunts us with the likelihood of male violence, its blasted landscapes and aura of desolation pumped relentlessly by Michael Latham’s brooding cinematography. Green, in her second collaboration with Garner (after the similarly themed — if significantly less raucous — “The Assistant” in 2020), is proving a cool chronicler of workplace abuse and the kind of harassment that disguises itself as harmless fun. Sometimes a woman’s only defense is to trust the pricking skin and spasming gut that warns her otherwise.Inspired by Pete Gleeson’s 2016 documentary about two Finnish backpackers, “Hotel Coolgardie,” “The Royal Hotel” is after something more subtle than pure horror. In its destabilizing presentation of men whose motivations appear to shift from scene to scene — the women’s fun-loving English predecessors seem genuinely sorry to leave — it places the audience on a knife edge. This, along with the general drunkenness and the bar’s oppressive gloom, can be exhausting; but Green, filming for the first time in her native Australia, displays such a sure hand with the movie’s tone that even her brief slips into genre cliché (like a surprise snake and a convenient storm) inflict minimal damage. Her overtly feminist climax, though, feels more problematic, a betrayal of the movie’s carefully drawn ambiguities and concern for its more vulnerable characters. Hanna and Liv were never looking for a fight; all they really wanted was to see some kangaroos.The Royal HotelRated R for female skin and men with a skinful. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘More Than Ever’ Review: A Shared Melancholy

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      This middlebrow weepie about a woman dying from a rare lung disease stars Vicky Krieps and Gaspard Ulliel in his final role before his death in 2022.Since her star-making turn in “Phantom Thread,” the Luxembourgish actress Vicky Krieps has found fertile work, particularly in European productions, playing women responding to tragedy, sometimes with recklessness or self-harm.“More Than Ever,” a solid (mostly) French-language weepie, follows suit, with Krieps playing as Hélène, a 30-something married woman suffering from a rare and debilitating lung disease. Directed by Emily Atif, this middlebrow drama showcases Krieps’s captivating blend of melancholic fragility and spiky tenacity, riding on the strength of its performers, including the Gaspard Ulliel in his final live-action role before his accidental death in 2022.Ulliel plays Hélène’s loyal hubbie, Matthieu, whom we first see applying mascara to his feeble wife before a social outing. Their pals tiptoe awkwardly around the knowledge of Hélène’s health, triggering a minor meltdown by Hélène that also sketches out the tensions that inform the rest of the film.Matthieu refuses to give up hope while Hélène inches toward an acceptance of her fate that requires her to reframe her life. This means untethering herself from the past, her spouse included. This understanding comes courtesy of an “Eat Pray Love” style excursion to rural Norway, where Hélène bunks with a friend she met on the internet, Bent (Bjorn Floberg), a blogger with terminal cancer, a dark sense of humor and an idyllic property at the edge of a lake.Krieps and Ulliel give weight and texture to the couple’s push and pull. Guilt and grief intermingle, but no single feeling stands up to the brute fact of Hélène’s physical deterioration, made stark against an impassive backdrop of crystal waters and shivering woodlands. If her past films haven’t already made this clear, this is one of Krieps’s trademarks: transcendence through willful obliteration.More Than EverNot rated. In French, English and Norwegian, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 3 minutes. In theaters. More