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      ‘Knock at the Cabin’ Review: Who’s There? The Apocalypse.

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      In M. Night Shyamalan’s latest thought experiment, Dave Bautista brings the end of the world to a peaceful country cottage.A little girl, out collecting grasshoppers in the forest, meets someone who might be described — if this were a picture book — as a friendly giant. His huge arms are covered in tattoos, and his demeanor walks a fine line between gentle and fearsome.His name is Leonard, and his new acquaintance, just about to turn 8, is called Wen. Since this is a movie by M. Night Shyamalan — and a pretty good one, all things considered — a sinister vibe creeps in around the edges of their first encounter. The colors are uncannily bright, the close-up shots unnervingly angled (Jarin Blaschke and Lowell A. Meyer are responsible for the 35-millimeter cinematography). The music (by Herdis Stefansdottir) hums with menace. Something scary is about to happen.What happens is a version of what former philosophy students and debate-happy internet smarties will recognize as the Trolley Problem, a chestnut of hypothetical ethical disputation. Would you, the classic version goes, run over one person with a trolley if doing so meant you could save five people on the other track? The variation that Leonard (Dave Bautista) proposes to Wen (Kristen Cui) and her family is at once grander and more intimate. Would you sacrifice yourself or someone you loved to prevent a global apocalypse?Think fast! But don’t, maybe, think too hard about the premise and the narrative scaffolding of this itchy, claustrophobic, metaphysical thriller, which Shyamalan adapted (with Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman) from a novel by Paul Tremblay. Leonard is accompanied by three other believers in his end-times scenario: Sabrina (Nikki Amuka-Bird), Adriane (Abby Quinn) and Redmond (Rupert Grint). Strangers until very recently, they received identical visions of flood, plague and darkness. They believe this cascade of catastrophes will come to pass unless Wen or one of her dads, Eric (Jonathan Groff) and Andrew (Ben Aldridge), volunteers to die.Why them? Is it because Eric and Andrew are a gay couple, or because they happen to have rented an unlucky vacation property? Surely not the first thing: Sabrina insists on behalf of the group that “we don’t have a homophobic bone in our bodies.” Even if that doesn’t turn out to be true (Redmond has some ugliness in his back story), the real estate seems like a more plausible explanation. The movie is called “Knock at the Cabin” (the book is called “The Cabin at the End of the World”), and the house, with its remote location, floor-to-ceiling bookcases, dark wood paneling and deep cellar, looks like a perfect place to host a horror movie.Is “Knock at the Cabin” one of those? That’s another topic for debate. Shyamalan is sometimes classified as a horror auteur, but the genre label doesn’t always fit with his themes and methods. While this movie is suspenseful and (discreetly) bloody, it is more interested in thoughts and tender sentiments than in fright or shock.The story isn’t coiled around a clever, rug-pulling twist — a sometimes tiresome, sometimes bracing Shyamalan signature — so much as balanced on a series of simple binaries. Either Leonard and his pals are telling the truth or they’re out of their minds. Andrew and Eric will believe them or not. The film’s effectiveness depends on what occurs on the way to the answers, and in this respect Shyamalan’s wit and sincerity serve him and the audience well.Granting the preposterousness of the whole idea, he is genuinely nonetheless curious about what it would be like to have this kind of experience. Whether Leonard is the kindly schoolteacher and reluctant prophet he claims to be or the leader of a small and lethal doomsday cult, he tries to be sensitive to the predicament of his captives. The rules of the vision forbid him or his colleagues from performing the sacrifice themselves, so they engage Eric and Andrew in a lengthy, sometimes brutal seminar, with occasional news broadcasts to emphasize their argument.A handful of flashbacks of Andrew and Eric’s life as a couple — including their adoption of Wen — makes them seem like more than panicked, generic victims, while also opening up the occasionally stagy action. Aldridge and Groff do what they can to overcome the blandness of the characters, but the movie really belongs to Bautista and Cui, who provide the danger, charm, wit and grit that it needs to be even remotely credible.I wish it were more than that. There is a grandiosity here that’s hard to swallow, and a final swell of emotion that isn’t quite earned. For all its skill and cunning, “Knock at the Cabin” is an overwrought quasi-theological melodrama that also manages to be a half-baked thought experiment. It’s a thrill ride in a toy trolley.Knock at the CabinRated R. You see dead people. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Full Time’ Review: No Rest for the Working Girl

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      A breathlessly tense portrait of modern labor, this French drama stars Laure Calamy as a single mother who hits her breaking point during a nationwide strike.“Full Time,” the second feature by Éric Gravel, begins with a womblike moment of rest before pushing the pedal to the floor and launching us into the chaotic workweek of Julie (Laure Calamy), a single mother and the lead chambermaid of a 5-star hotel in Paris.Julie’s routine is demanding yet commonplace: She drops the kids at the nanny’s house, rushes to make the train, endures a lengthy shoulder-to-shoulder commute and settles into her shift tending to the whims of the hyper-wealthy. Then it’s back to the exurbs and the restless little ones, while the slivers of time she manages to carve out for herself are consumed by applying for a new job. Then repeat.The film is a portrait of modern labor that moves with the breathless tension of a Safdie brothers’ joint. But instead of gangsters and cocaine, it finds a flurried momentum in one ordinary woman’s everyday obligations, which threaten to break her when a nationwide strike throws her tenuous act off balance.Unpredictable public transport delays and cancellations get the worker bee in trouble with her snooty boss and septuagenarian nanny, while taxi rides that cost triple the rate of a regular ride drain her bank account. Her ex-husband hasn’t paid his alimony and hasn’t been answering his phone, and it’s their eldest child’s birthday this weekend. Improvisation is necessary, from hitchhiking to nudging the doorman for favors, but Julie — given anxious verve by the always-magnetic Calamy — isn’t a shameless hustler so much as she is acting sheepishly out of necessity.Julie isn’t in a position to throw off her uniform and hit the streets in protest, but the movement (and the inconveniences it causes) isn’t the problem — it’s a symptom. Worked to the bone because of her inability to find decent employment and child care, because her supervisor only values her insofar as she obeys like a robot, Julie is a veritable Everywoman, in thrall to a system that demands productivity at every turn. Such a life makes one brittle, but there are no breaks.Full TimeNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 28 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Locksmith’ Review: A Botched Job

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      Ryan Phillippe plays a lock picker trying to escape his past in this clunky, clichéd crime thriller.In the world of crime capers and thrillers, the “one last job” narrative framework has been used enough that it’s less of a trope than its very own genre — films of all stripes can play in the fun house, so long as they find a way to keep it fresh or winsome. Nicolas Harvard’s directorial debut “The Locksmith,” though, mostly takes stock characters and narrative turns and throws them into its basket, unable to fill the rest in with much color or nuance.The film’s only hope for a defining quality is an awkwardly forced one: the lock-picking abilities of its protagonist, Miller (Ryan Phillippe), serving as an avatar for the past he can’t outrun. After a break-in goes awry and leads to a corrupt cop killing his friend, Miller is framed for the murder and sent to prison for a decade. He comes out ready to make things right with his ex-girlfriend, Beth (Kate Bosworth) — who happens to work on the force alongside the corrupt cop — and his young daughter. But, soon enough, an old friend — naturally, the former lover of Miller’s dead comrade — pulls him into one more scheme that only entangles him in a larger web of crime.Most of the movie is told with big, rudimentary handwriting and slathered in clichés. Its actors, including Ving Rhames — typecast as a gruff mentor but nevertheless an easy comfort — and a nostalgic pair of early-aughts stars in Phillippe and Bosworth, can’t do much with what they’ve been given. Bosworth is perhaps the only one who finds room for some subtlety in what amounts to a stilted, botched job.The LocksmithNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 31 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Love in the Time of Fentanyl’ Review: Heartbreak, Death and Hope in Vancouver

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      To combat the overdose crisis, a group that includes former and current users open a safe consumption site where shooting up does not have to mean death.In 2016, in response to record high overdose deaths in Vancouver, a group of artists, activists, and current and former drug users in the Downtown Eastside neighborhood came together to form the Overdose Prevention Society, a renegade safe consumption site where drug users could safely consume drugs. The O.P.S. staff tests the drugs for fentanyl, provides clean needles and has Narcan on hand in case of an overdose. “Love in the Time of Fentanyl,” directed by Colin Askey, tenderly documents this community’s lifesaving efforts.The film follows Ronnie, a frontline worker struggling with burnout; Sarah, an activist who opened the site and works to raise awareness about the crisis; Trey, a graffiti artist who memorializes lost community members on the center’s surrounding walls; Norma, an Indigenous elder and former drug user who cooks meals for the staff; and Dana, who is struggling with active addiction while working at the center.Despite the harrowing overdose scenes, Askey manages to infuse “Love in the Time of Fentanyl” with scenes of joy, creativity and friendship — whether it’s staff members dancing after hours, a guitarist singing an original song about O.P.S. (“O.D., O.D., O.D., Overdose Prevention Society”) or drug users chatting as they prepare their injections. A veteran talks about the trauma he endured during deployment. Another man says that he began using drugs after his girlfriend was killed by a drunken driver. All speak plainly about the challenges of quitting and the dangers of stigmatization. Though at times the film’s narrative momentum and focus on its subjects is lacking, it shows that drug users, to whom the drug crisis is more than an abstract idea, are perhaps the most capable of creating solutions to the overdose epidemic.Love in the Time of FentanylNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. In theaters now and airing on PBS Independent Lens Feb. 13. More

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      ‘The Amazing Maurice’ Review: A Cool Cat and His Band of Merry Rodents

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      Hugh Laurie voices a quippy, self-referential cat in this animated adaptation of a popular Terry Pratchett book.“You know, in many ways, I don’t think the plot of this adventure has been properly structured,” observes the droll Malicia Grim (voiced by Emilia Clarke) during a brief lull in the middle of “The Amazing Maurice.”An animated comedy based on Terry Pratchett’s semi-parodic children’s novel “The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents,” the film abounds with this style of flamboyant, self-congratulatory humor, as Malicia and the talking feline hero Maurice (voiced by Hugh Laurie) routinely break the fourth wall with satirical commentary and glib meta wisecracking.The effect is a kind of self-important distance, as if the director Toby Genkel and his co-creators considered the material beneath them. What should be a cute story about a mischievous orange tabby cat instead becomes an ironic, even vaguely smug movie in the vein of something like “Deadpool.”The foundation of the story derives from the legend of the Pied Piper of Hamelin — in particular the version made famous by the Brothers Grimm: Maurice and his band of friendly, intelligent rats (among them the voices of David Tennant and Gemma Arterton) travel from town to town feigning an infestation, then providing the helpful services of an ersatz pied piper, Keith (Himesh Patel), to clear it up.The modern, coolly sarcastic big-kid riff on a familiar fairy tale has been done before, most notably in “Shrek.” And while it might still have seemed somewhat fresh when Pratchett’s book was first published, in 2001, it now feels like a poor imitation — doubly so when one considers that the script for “The Amazing Maurice” was penned by the “Shrek” screenwriter Terry Rossio, who, with his constant gags about fairy tale clichés, does little to elevate the copy above the original.The Amazing MauriceRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘True Spirit’ Review: Around the World in 210 Days

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      Nothing rocks the boat for long in this can-do drama based on the true story of Jessica Watson, an Australian teenager who sailed the globe.The soft-rock bard Christopher Cross once sang, “Sailing takes me away.” For one gutsy Aussie, Jessica Watson, “away” meant circling the globe at age 16. “True Spirit” streamlines and sanitizes her impressive real-life feat, which began in October 2009, into pure inspo fuel, recounting Watson’s maritime journey without ever turning grim for long.A sunny Teagan Croft (“Titans”) plays Watson, backed by Cliff Curtis as the coach and Anna Paquin as the iron-willed mom in a loving family, alongside a softie dad (Josh Lawson) and three cute siblings. Watson’s trial run ends in a collision, triggering a media frenzy, but she sets out eastward as planned on a pink sailboat covered in decals.The cleanly shot movie cruises through storm-tossed seas and dead air alike, buoyed by a soundtrack of teen anthems, as well as flashbacks to Watson as a tween. Her solitude isn’t absolute, thanks to phone and internet access (she vlogs), and she celebrates Christmas virtually with the family, who packed gifts for her. (On the actual journey, her parents also did flyovers in a small plane.)It all goes by fast — is that the Indian Ocean already? — and nothing rocks the boat for long, though a final-boss storm plays as a cliffhanger (albeit a brisk one). The message of manifesting your goals reigns supreme, which is great, but it’s worth mentioning that Watson’s willpower benefits from the privileges of financial security, family support and a curmudgeonly-turned-selfless coach. Without all that backing, seven months alone on a sailboat might be a non-starter (though many of us, myself included, would be in no rush).True SpiritNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Pathaan’ Review: Fighting the Good (and Long) Fight

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      Filled to the brim with action set pieces, “Pathaan” stars Shah Rukh Khan as a secret agent saving India from havoc unleashed by a vengeful former operative.The all-out action movie of the sort honed by Hollywood is not as prevalent in Bollywood. But “Pathaan,” a record-setting addition to a series of spy adventures, rolls out a flaming dessert cart of chugging guns, midair melees and ceaseless showdowns.Shah Rukh Khan stars as an affable Indian government agent, Pathaan, who’s pursuing a vengeful former agent named — somewhat less than diabolically — Jim (John Abraham). Jim’s been hired by a rogue Pakistani general to sow havoc in India because of a dispute over Kashmir. He turned smirkingly nihilistic after India once refused to pay ransom for him and his (now dead) pregnant wife.Plotting or politics is an afterthought in this delivery system for action on planes, trains and automobiles, in Dubai, Moscow, Paris, the Spanish coast and apparently the Italian Dolomites. The director, Siddharth Anand (“War”), opens big with Pathaan’s breakout from detainment, swiveling the camera to follow kicks and sending a helicopter aloft indoors.Other setups have the same top-this sense of fun. Anand’s crew boasts the stunt coordinator of “Top Gun: Maverick,” Casey O’Neill, and the “Mad Max: Fury Road” stunt performer Craig Macrae. But the director doesn’t have the greatest feel for tempo, or a consistent flair for staging. A monotonous fight on a train is only redeemed by a Looney Tunes escape from derailment.Lending welcome panache is Deepika Padukone as another deadly operative, Rubina, who may prove helpful to Pathaan. The sweet rapport between Padukone and Khan loosens up the film’s endless fracas, and it’s the spark for, yes, a song. When Pathaan spots Rubina poolside in Spain, she launches a joyful crowded bump-and-grind number. (“The moment I feel a wave of modesty, I throw it to the wind!”)As a villain, Jim’s a bit of a cold bath, and not just because he starts video-calling in threats of biological warfare. “Pathaan” is in some ways a save-the-world superhero movie without suits, and while less self-serious, the hefty length can lag. More is not always better — though the gusto of Padukone speedskating to the rescue at one point goes a long way.PathaanNot rated. In Hindi, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 26 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘A Lot of Nothing’ Review: The Cop Next Door

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      Mo McRae’s feature debut, about a well-off Black couple and their white neighbor, is more of a trauma drama than a satirical thriller.In “A Lot of Nothing,” James and Vanessa, a Black couple, are watching television on the couch in their well-appointed Los Angeles home when a news flash alerts them to “another officer-involved shooting.” James (Y’lan Noel), a corporate lawyer, and Vanessa (Cleopatra Coleman), who works in finance, are rattled and furious. Then they learn that the cop is their white neighbor, Brian (Justin Hartley), with whom Vanessa has already had words — following his contemptuous use of “you people.”After a little fury-as-foreplay sex and a tense day at their respective offices, they spin into action, but their confrontation with Brian on his doorstep spins out of control. Things become thornier still when James’s brother, Jamal (Shamier Anderson), and Candy (Lex Scott Davis), Jamal’s “baby mama” — as Vanessa says derisively — arrive for dinner.In his feature debut, the director Mo McRae displays a nice way with actors and a gift for visual tension, but in aiming for absurdist humor, he lands on something more vexing. It’s the script — by McRae and Sarah Kelly Kaplan — that’s the problem. “A Lot of Nothing” touches on microaggressions, colorism, class, gentrification, fertility, veganism and the sexual fantasies of a biracial Black woman who is this movie’s update on the tragic mulatto trope.More of a trauma drama than a satirical thriller, it never lets up on the buttons it’s pushing or the characters it’s manipulating. Viewers are whiplashed away from empathy and insight, and toward a feeling of superiority to everyone and everything onscreen. Given the film’s precipitating news bulletin and the recent events in Memphis, superiority would seem to be just about the last thing we’ve earned.A Lot of NothingNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More