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      ‘Showing Up’ Review: Making Art in All Its Everyday Glory

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      In their latest movie together, Michelle Williams and Kelly Reichardt paint a portrait of an artist who’s a real and wonderful piece of work.The stubbornly independent filmmaker Kelly Reichardt makes small-scale movies rooted in specific worlds, both inner and outer; nearly all take place in Oregon, where she’s long lived and worked. She traveled back in time for her last movie, “First Cow,” a moving chronicle of love, land and capitalism set in the Oregon Territory in the 19th century. Reichardt is back on more familiar ground in her latest, “Showing Up,” a wonderful slice of life that’s set in present-day Portland and is about something that she knows intimately: making art.The movies love tortured artists, inflamed geniuses who thunder against the establishment, aesthetic conventions, their historical epochs, God or just the nearest warm body. No one rages or slashes a canvas in “Showing Up,” though a few characters do raise their voices. At one point, its stubbornly independent hero, Lizzy — a sculptor played by a revelatory, notably de-glammed Michelle Williams — leaves an angry message on a colleague’s voice mail, an expletive-laced tirade that she ends with a comical bleat: “Have a great night.”It’s a gently funny and true moment in a gently funny and true movie that perfectly captures Lizzy’s complicated interiority. By the time she makes that call, you know a great deal about her. You know that she makes sculptures in her home studio and works at an art school, though what she does there remains unclear. What’s more crucial is that over the course of this delicate, detailed movie you become familiar with the petulantly downward slope of Lizzy’s mouth, the welcoming disorder of her apartment, the tender care that she takes with her art. You also know that she rarely smiles and scarcely ever says please or thank you.Written by Reichardt and Jon Raymond, “Showing Up” is a portrait of an individual but the film is universal in the sense that it’s about a woman living in the concrete here and now. Reichardt is interested in abstract ideas and everyday intangibles, but her filmmaking is precisely grounded in the material world, and so is Lizzy. If she has aesthetic principles, for instance, she doesn’t voice them. Reichardt, though, speaks volumes about art and the artistic process in this movie, which focuses on Lizzy as she prepares for a fast-approaching exhibit — a quietly fraught few days filled with painstaking creative labor as well as testy and comic interactions.When “Showing Up” opens, Lizzy is putting the finishing touches on the textured, small-scaled figurative sculptures that she molds from clay and then paints before having them fired in a kiln at the school. (The kiln operator is played by André Benjamin, making the charming most out of a modest role.) The figures are of women captured in well-defined poses, with some mounted with rods on wood bases. Several of these little women are erect, and others are recumbent; one stands on her head while a few look like they’ve been captured in mid-leap. A figurine with downcast eyes and a tiny, private smile looks a bit like Reichardt.As Lizzy works on her sculptures, their shape, details and distinct personalities emerge as do she and this wispy story. Things happen in Reichardt’s movies — minor, fleeting and profound things, just like in life. Story can seem both too grand and too impoverished a word to describe the personal, richly inhabited and realistic worlds she creates from faces and bodies, poses and gestures, rituals and habits, and her very specific grasp on time and place. But of course there’s always a story in how human beings navigate one another and sometimes try to bridge — and hide out in — that bristling, ineffable space between us.That space swells and contracts, by turns narrowing and expanding until it seems as vast and impassable as the Grand Canyon. Lizzy doesn’t make it easy to bridge; it’s instructive that she’s more openly affectionate with her cat than with her mother (Maryann Plunkett), who’s her boss at the school, or with her gruff father (a lovely Judd Hirsch). Yet while Lizzy works on her art in solitude (the cat comes and goes), she’s rarely alone for long, and the movie is filled with people, a vivid, eccentric and amusing collection that includes Jo (an essential Hong Chau), a vivacious artist who’s Lizzy’s landlord and the recipient of her angry phone call.Lizzy has reason to be irritated at Jo, who’s taking her time with fixing her broken water heater. But Jo is more than carelessly inattentive. A jolt of energy with a pickup truck and long, sweeping hair, Jo is sexy and popular, the very picture of the hip, hot artist and the apparent polar opposite of Lizzy, with her bob and frumpy look. Jo too is readying a new exhibit, but her gallery is bigger than Lizzy’s and her show more prestigious: It will have a catalog! The women get under each other’s skin, but like everyone else in Lizzy’s life — her family, her colleagues, the art students, her cat and a pigeon who swoops in and stays awhile — Jo sustains her.For Lizzy, making art is an act of self-creation, but it is also and always an act of communion, a way of being in the world and with other people. That makes “Showing Up” a somewhat reflexive self-portrait, one that owes much to Reichardt and Williams’s beautifully synced collaboration. This is the fourth movie that they’ve done together (their first was “Wendy and Lucy”), and it’s a joy to witness how perfectly aligned their work has become. Together, Reichardt and Williams — with little dialogue and boundless generosity — lucidly articulate everything that Lizzy will never say and need not say, opening a window on the world and turning this wondrous, determined, gloriously grumpy woman into a sublime work of art.Showing UpRated R for language. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘On a Wing and a Prayer’ Review: Faith as Flight Insurance

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      A family receives impromptu flight lessons when their pilot dies in the middle of a chartered flight in this spiritually insincere action film.Doug White (Dennis Quaid) is a person whose happiness has grown from deep roots. He possesses a steady Christian faith. He has a warm and loving partnership with his wife, Terri (Heather Graham), and together, they are the proud parents of two teenage daughters. But when Doug’s beloved brother suddenly dies, Doug’s faith in a higher power is shaken. And his spiritual crisis is amplified when Doug charters a small plane to return from his brother’s funeral.The action-driven drama “On a Wing and a Prayer” is based on a true story of the ordeal that the White family faced when they entered the air in 2009. Their pilot suddenly died of a heart attack in the cockpit, leaving the severely inexperienced Doug to guide the plane to a safe landing. The movie follows Doug and his family as they work and pray to defy the odds stacked against their survival, with remote assistance from air traffic controller‌s and flight instructors.The director Sean McNamara includes plenty of computer-generated action, with the plane darting through storm clouds, and narrowly swerving away from the ground. The images portray a weightless crisis, and the film’s emotional narrative feels similarly insincere, with the balance of fate seeming to sway on the placement of a well-timed prayer. Doug and his family call upon their faith as a kind of invisible parachute, a deus ex machina that can always save them from harm. It’s a cynical view of faith, one which removes the mystery and terror from life’s unforeseen calamities, and instead frames survival as a matter of calling into the correct belief system.On a Wing and a PrayerRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 42 minutes. Watch on Amazon Prime Video. More

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      ‘What If? Ehud Barak on War and Peace’ Review: An Israeli Leader’s History

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      Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak discusses his career in power in this lifeless, often confusing documentary.In “What If? Ehud Barak on War and Peace,” the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak comments on the key military and diplomatic events that took place from his early years as an army commander through his tenure as head of state, from 1999 to 2001. Directed by Ran Tal, this lifeless documentary plays like a cable-TV special slapped together from one long interview with Barak, then fattened up with archival footage and bottom-shelf explanatory graphics.Those unfamiliar with the general beats of the Israel-Palestine conflict beware: This doc assumes you are, and it skips back and forth in time with little explanation. Barak is the film’s only talking head, so his insights into specific events, often presented with minimal context, are the movie’s primary focus. For instance, the war that broke out around Israel’s declaration of independence in 1948 is explained in terms of military strategy, with Barak recollecting conversations he had with leaders at the front lines during that time.Early on, Barak discusses his childhood years living in a kibbutz; his Zionist upbringing; and, toward the end, the 2000 Camp David Summit, where he tried and failed to negotiate a peace plan with Palestine.Barak is a divisive figure, tough on matters of national security and ultimately forced to resign from office after the Camp David talks led to the breakdown of his government. (Since then, Barak has held multiple government positions and has challenged Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom he has long criticized.)The latter part of the movie’s title is a reference to Tolstoy, who rejected the idea that exceptional individuals determine the outcomes of history and empathized with leaders who took action when confronted with impossible decisions. Sure. Though even if Barak’s scattered play-by-play reminds us of this truism, it fails to demystify the man and his legacy.What If? Ehud Barak on War and PeaceNot rated. In Hebrew, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. Rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘Ride On’ Review: Jackie Chan, Back on the Horse

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      Chan, playing a former stuntman, has a few good trademark fight scenes, but the film is too busy stuffing sentimental elements into its lowbrow comedy premise.One doesn’t necessarily expect much going into a slapstick stunt animal comedy, and yet even by these softened standards, the director Larry Yang’s “Ride On” cooks up an egregiously, almost comically bad movie. Starring Jackie Chan as Luo, a washed-up former stuntman who trains his horse, Red Hare, to become his partner, this film from China is a consistently awkward, over-the-top mess, attempting to infuse a cheaply written, sentimental father-daughter (and father-horse) story into its lowbrow laughs.After being out of work for years, Luo catches a lucky break that leads him back into the movie business, with Red Hare by his side. Yet, amid his newfound success, Luo finds himself in a legal battle over ownership of Red Hare, forcing him to go to his estranged daughter for help.As the two slowly reconcile their strained relationship, seemingly every other scene is populated by a new tear-jerker back story or moment of triumph, signaled by a maudlin score that relentlessly hammers away at the viewer. The film is so graceless and bizarre in its attempts at tugging at the viewer’s emotions that it often feels like a work of parody.Chan has a few trademark fight scenes, as a gang keeps chasing him down for money owed, though it’s clear that the 68-year-old actor naturally doesn’t bear the same kind of comic physicality he once did. In a way, one could see the film as both a potential tribute to his remarkable and decades-long career doing real, often dangerous stunt work and a consideration of his sunset years as a performer. But that hope is quickly buried underneath a cynical film that has nothing to offer by way of charisma, comedy or the like, outside of Chan’s name itself.Ride OnNot rated. In Chinese, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 6 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Paint’ Review: Watch It Dry

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      Owen Wilson plays a Bob Ross-inspired painter in this dated, mildly amusing parody of male privilege.In “Paint,” an aging TV star with punchline hair and a storied libido lords it over his superfans, so wrapped in the cocoon of celebrity that he fails to recognize his rapidly waning significance.If that outline sounds uncomfortably familiar, then rest easy: “Paint” is not a political satire. What it is, exactly, is more difficult to pin down: A bland romantic comedy that feels strangely contemptuous of female desire; a portrait of a landscape artist that infrequently ventures outdoors; a dispiriting merger of small-town mind-set and giant-sized delusion.“They all fall for Carl,” one woman marvels, though why they do is one of this movie’s enduring mysteries. She’s referring to Carl Nargle (a perpetually mellow Owen Wilson), Vermont’s premier public-television painter. Even leaving aside his embroidered-denim outfits and a ’do that looks like an explosion in a couch-stuffing factory, Carl is no prize. His personality has all the depth of a blank canvas, his voice is an A.S.M.R. purr and his paintings — endless variations on a local peak and its environs — garage-sale relics.Yet Carl, from flooffy head to bell-bottom hems, is the epitome of soft power and hardened ego. When his show is on the air, his audience — revealed in a repeated sequence of lazily uninspired shots — is invariably agog. A roomful of rapt retirees; two mesmerized men at a bar; a line of breathless female colleagues in cottage-core knitwear. So sexually starved are these women that they will do almost anything for a bounce on the sofa bed in the back of Carl’s customized van. One, a professed vegan, even allows Carl to feed her lamb larded in cheese fondue, with predictably unpalatable results.Written and directed by Brit McAdams, “Paint” is a comedically inert parody of male privilege that’s all sight gags and very little substance. Wrapped in a fuzzy blanket of easy-listening oldies — John Denver, Kris Kristofferson, Gordon Lightfoot — the screenplay asks us to believe that Carl is so out of touch he has no idea what an Uber is or how to use his cellphone. And that the warm, talented woman he loved and left (Michaela Watkins) has hung around for two decades hoping for a second chance to rinse his brushes.As a result, “Paint” feels not just dated, but oddly sad. Inspired by the popular public-television host Bob Ross (who died in 1995), the movie seems caught in a time warp, its attitudes as antiquated as Carl’s wardrobe. Only the estimable Stephen Root, playing Carl’s station chief, and the vivacious Broadway performer Ciara Renée as Ambrosia, Carl’s younger, more talented rival, manage to nudge scenes from a saunter to a brisk walk. When Ambrosia, with her cheeky paintings of hovering spaceships and bleeding rocks, makes moves on Carl’s time slot and even his true love, I lamented his — and the movie’s — lack of a sharper edge and more lacerating tongue. He should have been furious; yet, like the film’s unconvincing flashbacks to his much younger self, he looks essentially unchanged.PaintRated PG-13 for a bit of toking and dirty joking. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Praise This’ Review: An Unlikely Savior

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      The R&B singer-songwriter Chloe Bailey stars in this musical comedy about an aspiring pop singer who lands in a scrappy competitive gospel group.For an aspiring pop star from L.A., heading to the South to sing about Jesus might feel like a detour. But that’s where Sam, played by the R&B singer Chloe Bailey, finds herself to at the start of the musical comedy “Praise This.” After the death of her mother and a struggle to set herself straight, Sam is sent to Atlanta to stay with her aunt, her uncle and her peppy, God-loving cousin, Jess (Anjelika Washington).Jess introduces Sam to her praise team, a scrappy competitive gospel group run out of a local, ramshackle church. When Sam and Jess are caught at a party, Sam is forced to join the group, a punishment that, no great surprise, allows her to open herself up to a new life, and to God’s grace. As Sam reluctantly leads her team through a national gospel singing competition, the film, directed by Tina Gordon, takes the “Pitch Perfect” template — an underdog singing group beating the odds — and gives it a modern Black gospel twist.Some of this can be lightly charming and funny — particularly the chemistry Bailey has with Washington, the funniest and most charismatic star of this show. But things get cringe-worthy as the movie leans on the narrative gimmick that Sam has a God-given ability to turn any trap banger into a gospel tune, eventually leading her to the recording booth of Ty (Quavo), a famous rapper she partners with.From this point on, the film reads like a faux-hip youth pastor in movie form, only instead of an acoustic guitar, it’s an 808 drum machine luring the kids toward God.Praise ThisNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 51 minutes. Watch on Peacock. More

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      ‘Chupa’ Review: A Terrifying Myth Made Cuddly

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      On a trip to his grandfather’s ranch in Mexico, a boy makes an astonishing discovery that turns into a family adventure.Alex is an outcast at his school in Kansas City — for the picadillo he brings for lunch (“It’s just hamburger meat,” he tells one bully), for the video games he plays, and for apparently being the only Mexican kid in the lunchroom.At home, Alex (Evan Whitten) reacts by rejecting Mexican cuisine and refusing to learn Spanish. When his mother reminds him that he is heading to Mexico to visit his grandfather over spring break, he groans. But the trip surprises him, in no small part because of the adorable mythical creature, a baby chupacabra, he encounters in his grandfather’s barn.Inspired by the Latin American legend of the bloodsucking creature, “Chupa,” directed by Jonás Cuarón, makes a family adventure out of a traditionally horrifying subject. Set in the late 1990s, the film follows Alex, his grandfather Chava (Demián Bichir), a former lucha libre champion, and his cousins Memo (Nickolas Verdugo) and Luna (Ashley Ciarra) as they try to protect Chupa from capture by an American scientist, Richard Quinn (Christian Slater). All the while, Alex learns to accept and embrace his roots.Though the characters are charming and well-defined, it’s hard to become invested in their story lines because their relationships are not given enough time to develop. The stakes do not feel high enough, with Quinn seeming more like a cartoon villain than a true menace (it’s not clear what exactly he plans to do with Chupa). And though the concept is promising, and some moments are tender, one wishes the film had delved deeper into the chupacabra myth and the characters’ stories to make for a more satisfying watch.ChupaRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘How to Blow Up a Pipeline’ Review: A Different Kind of Oil Boom

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      A book that proposed violent action in response to the climate crisis becomes a propulsive heist thriller.Discussions of the 2021 book “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” inevitably note that it does not really contain instructions for blowing up a pipeline, although its author, Andreas Malm, a Swedish academic who has pressed for radical action on the climate crisis, hardly opposes the idea. He argues that the status quo has grown so dire that activists would be foolish not to turn to sabotage, and that peaceful protest alone is unlikely to achieve results quickly enough.Movies, though, are more of a show-don’t-tell medium, so the screen version of “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” directed by Daniel Goldhaber (“Cam”), turns Malm’s ideas into the basis for a propulsive heist thriller. Instead of busting into a vault or a museum, the characters conspire to commit an incendiary act that will wreak havoc on oil prices.Is the film itself, by having heroes some might call eco-terrorists, playing with fire? It certainly has the veneer of being daring. Then again, given the imagination that movies routinely apply to crimes of all sorts, it scarcely seems fair to object to the depiction just because the target is novel or has real-world implications.After dispensing with some preliminaries — in an attention-grabbing opening, the film watches as a young woman slashes tires and leaves a preprinted note: “why I sabotaged your property” — “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” shows its ensemble assembling in West Texas to prepare for their operation. Goldhaber’s roving camera and vaguely retro zooms, and a trendy (if derivative) electronic score by Gavin Brivik, contribute to an anxious atmosphere as the group’s self-taught chemists fool around with combustible substances. There are hints that their plan isn’t airtight. For one thing, the no-drinking rule falls away.A jagged, Tarantinian flashback structure slowly familiarizes us with the plotters. From Long Beach, Calif., Xochitl (Ariela Barer, also one of the film’s writers and producers), the tire slasher of the prologue, mourns the sudden death of her mother from a heat wave and frets over the sluggishness of fossil fuel divestment efforts. We learn that she grew up with Theo (Sasha Lane), who early on is shown at a support group talking about a “diagnosis” whose specifics will eventually be revealed.In North Dakota, Michael (Forrest Goodluck) picks fights with men who have come to work in the oil fields. He has little concern for his physical safety; at one point, he says he doesn’t care about the odds that they might blow themselves up. Dwayne (Jake Weary) is a Texas family man whose baby daughter and diabetic wife just want him home for Christmas. He is angry that the pipeline has intruded on his property, and he resents the well-meaning documentary crew members, including Shawn (Marcus Scribner), who film his sob story but can’t actually help.Alisha (Jayme Lawson), Theo’s girlfriend, is on hand to play devil’s advocate: She worries that the pipeline scheme is pure ego and bristles when one of the others likens their work to that of the civil rights movement. (The response she gets echoes Malm’s ideas about selective historical memory.) Most mysterious is Rowan (Kristine Froseth), who furtively photographs some of the preparations. Her boyfriend, Logan (Lukas Gage), looks punkish but comes from wealth.“How to Blow Up a Pipeline” is at its best when it functions as a kind of roughed-up caper movie; it has a degree of suspense and efficiency that are becoming all too rare in the mainstream. Goldhaber makes the most of potential complications at the pipeline site: a fraying belt, unexpected visitors, a bloody injury that might leave DNA. These are the sort of tactile details on which heist films thrive.But “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” has been packaged as a movie with something to say, and for all its excitement, as a statement it is less than satisfying. In the spirit of collectivity, it is billed as a group effort; while Goldhaber is listed as the director, the “film by” credit lists him alongside his fellow writers (including Barer) and his editor. But the contrivances that have enabled them to construct such a tight nuts-and-bolts thriller also allow them to dodge grappling with the characters’ ideology as ideology. Militant environmentalism is more of a hook than a subject about which the film has a point of view.The flashbacks’ placement seems designed solely to facilitate twists. All the members of the group have been written with convenient excuses for taking action, with Theo’s illness making her an especially obvious vehicle for self-sacrifice. Just in case viewers might fear for the good dad, the movie devotes significant time to showing Dwayne constructing an alibi — admittedly a tense stretch, but such slick reassurance, as machine-tooled as anything from Hollywood, feels at odds with the project’s ostensibly confrontational goals.A truly radical film wouldn’t go out of its way to concoct sympathetic motives, or to keep its plotting so clean.How to Blow Up a PipelineRated R. Dangerous explosives, put to use. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More