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      Will Anyone Give ‘Don’t Worry Darling’ a Chance?

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      Olivia Wilde’s new film is trying to fight free of its pre-release reputation.Years ago, when I was a film critic, I was asked out for coffee by a guy who’d just been hired at the review-aggregating website Rotten Tomatoes. I can’t remember the purpose of the meeting. I just recall the sense — as he ventilated about the site’s “Tomatometer” rating, which would soon crush all my elitist insights into hard data — that I’d been summoned to witness the digging of my own grave.This was actually fine with me. I was already demoralized by the whole enterprise. I’d always seen the role of the critic as a conduit, someone who has an aesthetic experience and then reports on what it was like; I never cared to tell others what to see or avoid, imposing a hegemony of tastes and interests that I didn’t believe in. At work, though, I was feeling the pressure to serve readers with ratings and recommendations — and, increasingly, sites like Rotten Tomatoes seemed to push a binary of “good” and “bad,” all based on consensus. It was depressing, all this holding up of fingers to the wind. Consensus is a snowball with a hard, mineral center, barreling down a slope, and few people want to be on the wrong side.Sometimes consensus accretes around the story of a movie, even before people see the film itself. A couple of weeks ago, I attended a screening of “Don’t Worry Darling,” which I’d been looking forward to since first getting a glimpse of its poster. I had been vaguely aware of some noise emanating from the film’s press rollout, I suppose, but it wasn’t until the now-infamous spit video that I realized just how much flak the movie was catching. The video showed Harry Styles, one of the film’s stars, approaching his audience seat at the Venice Film Festival, suavely buttoning his jacket, leaning down and then — according to nothing but gleeful online supposition — purportedly hocking a loogie on another of the film’s stars, Chris Pine, who stops clapping and, with his eyes, traces a trajectory from Styles’ lips to his own lap. No actual spit is discernible in the video, and no motive was ascribed. But none were needed. Those few frames of video were scrutinized, analyzed, slowed, zoomed, dissected and compared to the Zapruder film so often that the joke begged for mercy.People were happy to believe anything — even the baseless-rumor equivalent of jumping the shark.To me, though, the Cold War artifact it recalled was Kremlinology — the practice of scrying every available scrap of information to discern the hidden motivations and power struggles of distant, unknowable figures. The events that drew such close attention to “Don’t Worry Darling” were not huge ones, in the scheme of things: They included a supposed feud between the director, Olivia Wilde, and the lead actress, Florence Pugh, possibly involving a pay gap between leads; the actor Shia LaBeouf’s being replaced, under disputed circumstances, with Styles; LaBeouf’s leaking messages from Wilde about Pugh; Wilde’s being served with custody papers from her ex-fiancé, Jason Sudeikis, while onstage at CinemaCon; and, above all, Wilde’s becoming romantically involved with Styles, 10 years her junior. Where the theoretical animosity between Styles and Pine was supposed to fit in was unclear. But by then people were happy to believe anything — even the baseless-rumor equivalent of jumping the shark — as long as it kept building the story of a woman who fostered a work environment so fraught that one star would spit on another, in public and on camera, for no apparent reason.More on ‘Don’t Worry Darling’In this much gossiped-about feminist gothic, Florence Pugh plays a seemingly happy housewife whose world starts to crack apart.Review: “If Pugh’s performance never gets beneath the shiny, satirical surface, it’s because there’s no place for it or her to go,” our critic writes of the film.Publicity Crisis: It was one of the hottest projects in Hollywood. But a series of missteps on the promotional trail, hinting at supposed feuds and behind-the-scenes drama, have raised questions about the film’s viability and about Olivia Wilde, its director.Bad Reputation: Amid all the rumors and negative press, a vocal portion of the public seems to have grown oddly invested in witnessing Wilde’s comeuppance. Will that affect the movie’s ratings?“Don’t Worry Darling” is just the most recent example of a film maudit, or “cursed film.” That was the term coined for Jean Cocteau’s Festival du Film Maudit in 1949, describing works that had been wrongfully neglected, or deemed too outrageous to merit serious attention — “movies rendered marginal by disrepute,” as J. Hoberman would later write in The Village Voice. Films made by women are not the only ones stuck in this defensive position, but they seem disproportionately prone to it, often with criticism centering on the director herself. (Elaine May’s experience on “Ishtar” was such that Hoberman classed her as a cineaste maudit; she wouldn’t direct again for decades.) Hints of a production’s chaos or excess are less likely to be taken as signs of unruly genius, and more often framed as messiness or lack of authority. The more that talk swirled around “Don’t Worry Darling,” the more its quality — and then, specifically, Wilde’s competence — were called into question.Out comes the Tomatometer, and the party’s over.Cinema has a century’s worth of lore about films troubled by budget overages, clashing personalities and on-set affairs: Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski’s wanting to kill each other while making “Fitzcarraldo,” mental breakdowns on the set of “Apocalypse Now,” Peter Bogdanovich’s leaving his actual genius of a wife after an affair with a young Cybill Shepherd on “The Last Picture Show.” These productions were plagued by bad press and rumors, but they never faced the wrath of stan Twitter. These days, fans spread rumors and memes, which are picked up by media outlets, which disguise their prurience with speculation about box-office prospects or reviews. Then out comes the Tomatometer, and the party’s over.But of course the idea that this consensus opinion emerges from some pure, objective place is disingenuous. Press always colors reviews — and now some vocal portion of the public seems oddly invested in Wilde’s comeuppance, a fact we may see reflected in ratings. (Given statements Wilde has made about some of the film’s real-world inspirations, it’s not hard to imagine the online response including the kind of organized backlash that has greeted other disfavored films.) And while critics’ responses won’t be actively malicious, they won’t be magically free of their own biases, either. “More or less the definition of the history of cinema,” Richard Brody wrote in The New Yorker in 2012, “is: the stuff that most of the best-known critics didn’t like, or damned with faint praise — it isn’t that they didn’t care for it, but that they didn’t care about it.” Male film critics outnumber female ones 2 to 1, and tend to award “slightly higher average quantitative ratings to films with male protagonists,” according to studies conducted by Martha Lauzen of San Diego State University’s Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film.It’s odd that this could be the fate of “Don’t Worry Darling,” a film about men trapping women in a regressive, suffocating place where dissent means repudiation and exile — a film whose big plot developments must be hard for Wilde to resist talking about, given how much the narrative surrounding the film echoes their point. But it’s impossible to discuss without spoiling the story, so I’ll just share an anecdote. My 14-year-old daughter came with me to the screening, unencumbered by external baggage. When the credits began to roll, she announced, “That was the best movie I’ve ever seen in my whole life.” Seeing Wilde’s name among the cast, she asked which character the director had played. When I told her, she was impressed. She said: “I want to be her. I want to do what she does.” It made me happy to hear this. And then I started to worry.Source photographs: Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images; Screen grab from Warner Bros.Carina Chocano is the author of the essay collection “You Play the Girl” and a contributing writer for the magazine. She frequently writes for the magazine’s Screenland column. More

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      ‘Lou’ Review: Unfinished Business

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      A child’s kidnapping ignites a protracted bid for redemption in this down-and-dirty thriller.Whatever else one might say about the Netflix thriller “Lou,” making it must have been murder. Pummeled by near-constant rain, soaked in swampy mud and battered by frequent bouts of hand-to-hand combat, the movie’s headliners look to have suffered miserably.Consequently, my admiration for Allison Janney, already high, skyrocketed. As the formidable title character, a woman of indeterminate vintage commonly accessorized with shovel, rifle or deer carcass, Janney leaves spry in the dust. Unfazed either by the working conditions or by Maggie Cohn and Jack Stanley’s ridiculously over-the-top screenplay, she lends her grouchy character more than a ramrod spine and steely stare: She gives her a woundedness that keeps us watching long after this prolix quest for redemption should have reached its preordained conclusion.When the plot — a dense weave of familial pain and political misdeeds — requires Lou to leave her cabin in the Pacific Northwest and help a young mother (Jurnee Smollett) reclaim her abducted preteen daughter, Lou barely hesitates. Abandoning her careful plans for a final exit, she takes off through a storm-lashed forest on the trail of the kidnapper, distraught mother in tow. The journey will be filled with perils and flashbacks, regrets and secrets as Lou excavates her past; yet the director, Anna Foerster — who, aside from the instantly forgettable “Underworld: Blood Wars” (2017), has worked mostly in television — pays greater attention to the movie’s impressive fight choreography than to the details of its central mystery.Methodically violent and more than a little silly, “Lou” delivers a kick in the head to ageism. When did you last hear an arthritic heroine warn a woman half her age not to slow her down?LouRated R for knives, fists, bullets and a lethal tin can. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘A Jazzman’s Blues’ Review: Tyler Perry Revisits a Jim Crow-Era Romance

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      The writer-director returns to his first screenplay — a dark melodrama with soulful musical numbers — after two decades.“A Jazzman’s Blues,” Tyler Perry’s melodrama about ill-fated teenagers who fall in love in rural Georgia, marks the writer-director-studio head’s return to his first screenplay, w‌hich he wrote in 1995. In the meantime, he broke through with a slew of Madea comedies, and whetted the skills required to deliver the faceted beauty of Bayou — his richest male character to date — with dramas like 2010’s “For Colored Girls.”It helps, too, that he has found a perfect portrayer in Joshua Boone (“Premature”). Bayou, who is embodied with a luminous sincerity by Boone, offers a touching take on the kind of compassionate man a so-called mama’s boy might become.The movie begins in 1987. An elderly version of Hattie Mae Boyd (Daphne Maxwell Reid) paces around her home, listening to a white political candidate (Brent Antonello) being interviewed on television. He blathers about his family’s civic legacy. When he begins nattering on about not being racist, she shuts off the TV. Then, in short order, she arrives at the candidate’s office with a stack of love letters — proof, she says, of her son’s killing in 1947. As the man begins reading the letters, the movie shifts to the past, where it stays for much of the star-crossed, racism-infused romance.Amirah Vann (in a bulwark turn) portrays the younger version of Hattie Mae, the loving mama of Bayou and his brother, Willie Earl (Austin Scott). Solea Pfeiffer, in a promising onscreen debut, is Leanne, the intended recipient of Bayou’s missives.From the get-go, Bayou and Leanne recognize in each other something wounded, yet also sheltering. But their clandestine affection is upended when Leanne’s mother, Ethel (Lana Young), bent on passing for white, wrenches her daughter away. The romance is briefly rekindled when a war injury sends Bayou home to his mother’s juke joint outside Hopewell, Ga., and Leanne arrives, newly wed to a scion of the town’s reigning family.With this turn, the movie might have collapsed under the weight of its twists or drowned in the sentimentality of Aaron Zigman’s score. A volatile scene between Leanne and her childhood-friend-turned housekeeper, Citsy (played with fierce sensitivity by Milauna Jemai Jackson), helps shore it up.When Bayou leaves, this time to avoid a lynching, he heads with Willie Earl and his brother’s music manager, Ira (Ryan Eggold), to Chicago. There, Ira lands a nightclub gig for Bayou, a honey-voiced singer, and his trumpet-playing, heroin-shooting brother. (It is here that the composer Terence Blanchard, who wrote songs for the film, and the choreographer Debbie Allen create some of its most exuberant musical numbers.)“A Jazzman’s Blues” is packed with outsize emotions, but also grand themes. The relationship of antisemitism to white supremacy gets a significant nod. And while addiction, domestic abuse and rape have in the past been Perry staples — and appear here as well — they’re now in the service of a more expansive, chastising saga.A Jazzman’s BluesRated R for scenes of substance abuse, violence, rape, brief lovemaking and cruel language. Running time: 2 hours 7 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Athena’ Review: Oh Brothers, Where Art Thou?

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      A besieged French housing project is the setting for Romain Gavras’s relentlessly kinetic action movie.“Athena” begins in a state of maximum tension and escalates from there. An angry crowd has gathered outside a police station near a high-rise housing project in the suburbs of Paris. A video of the killing of a local teenage boy, apparently by uniformed officers, has gone viral, igniting long-smoldering resentments. Violence breaks out quickly, and before long, the talk on social networks and news broadcasts will be forecasting not civil unrest, but outright civil war.At the center of the maelstrom, spinning in different directions, are the slain teenager’s three surviving brothers. Abdel (Dali Benssalah), the first one we encounter, is a soldier in the French Army, recently returned from combat in Mali. He’s inside the police station when the trouble (and the movie) begins, and his long walk to meet the demonstrators outside symbolizes his predicament. He’s pulled apart by conflicting loyalties, caught between the power of the state and the rage of the streets.His brother Karim (Sami Slimane) is a militant leader in the process of becoming a military commander as protest accelerates toward armed conflict. With guns and vehicles seized from the forces of law and order, Karim and his army of young men stage a small-scale revolution, taking control of the courtyards and corridors of Athena, the high-rise complex where they have grown up in poverty and alienation.Another brother, Moktar (Ouassini Embarek), is a drug dealer whose business is disrupted by the chaos. He and his associates are trying to get out of Athena while Karim is trying to lock it down and Abdel, increasingly desperate and less and less secure in his convictions, is attempting to calm the situation.Fraternal melodrama and social turmoil provide fuel for relentless action. In principle it’s not a bad formula, and “Athena,” directed by Romain Gavras from a script he wrote with Ladj Ly and Elias Belkeddar, is not shy about evoking gangster movies, classic westerns and classical tragedy, investing its contemporary story with brutal, archaic power.Gavras’s filmmaking is technically impressive. He pulls the camera through complex, kinetic tableaus in long, breathless takes. Some of these sequences are thrilling, but after a while they become repetitive, and Athena feels more like a video game background than an actual place. There’s no modulation: Nearly every scene ends in either a screaming argument or a literal explosion. Karim and Moktar rarely utter a line without shouting. Abdel is more of a brooder, at least for a while — Benssalah has a clenched, melancholy watchfulness that holds your attention in the midst of all the noise — but eventually he starts yelling, too.There are other characters: a young riot policeman (Anthony Bajon) who is taken hostage, and a terrorist mastermind (Alexis Manenti) who is coaxed out of retirement to join Karim’s rebels. Their presence complicates the plot, and amplifies the film’s hectic, hectoring gestures toward topical urgency. But like the three brothers, these secondary figures are sociological composites, inserted into a carefully diagramed, ultimately incoherent narrative scheme.You could argue that “Athena” uses the syntax of action cinema to make a point about the state of French society. And while it’s true that there are real issues at play here — police violence, racism, the disaffection of the immigrant underclass — the filmmakers don’t so much explore as exploit them, giving a loud and sloppy genre exercise a patina of relevance.AthenaRated R. Nonstop violence. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Sidney’ Review: A Lovingly Assembled Career Portrait

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      Sidney Poitier is memorialized in this thorough, and thoroughly conventional, documentary.“Sidney,” a documentary about the actor and filmmaker Sidney Poitier, who died in January, is a compendium of hero worship. The director is Reginald Hudlin, but, in tone and temperament, this lovingly assembled encomium is peak Oprah Winfrey. As one of the film’s producers and a close friend of Poitier (whom she calls her “great Black hope”), Winfrey glows with emotional authenticity. Her breakdown at the end is unexpectedly moving, if not entirely unexpected.Oblivious to the film’s fire hose of adulation and thicket of talking heads, Poitier (speaking mainly in a 2012 interview with Winfrey) softly addresses the camera, unfailingly modest and supremely chill. Around him, Hudlin unrolls a life that, Poitier believed, fulfilled the predictions of the soothsayer his mother consulted when he was not expected to survive infancy. Having exchanged Bahamian poverty for Jim Crow-era America, barely literate, he claimed, and baffled by segregation, Poitier discovered that acting was therapy, a way to express the many personalities roiling inside him. (Much later, he would require many years of actual therapy in part to process his love affair with the gorgeous Diahann Carroll.)Painstakingly thorough, “Sidney” scans a career freighted with political and social significance, its litany of firsts — including the first Black leading man to win an Oscar for best actor; the first Black director to make a $100 million movie — no deterrence to those who would later accuse Poitier of subservience to the desires of white audiences. Spotlighting the courage of Poitier’s civil rights activism and the daring of his acting choices, Hudlin labors to convey their significance to Black Americans: The man who had grown up without ever seeing a mirror was now tasked with reflecting Black lives back to an audience avid for recognition.The inescapable impression is of a picture buckling beneath the weight of its subject’s achievements. Yet there are moments when the focus shifts and the movie shrugs off its hagiographic shackles: Lulu, the Scottish pop star, belting out the theme of “To Sir, With Love” (1967), her pipes barely corroded; the tart, mischievous interjections of interviewees like Denzel Washington and Spike Lee; and Poitier’s first wife, the admirable Juanita Brady, explaining how she gave her inexperienced spouse critical financial advice, even selling her mink coat to invest in “A Raisin in the Sun,” the 1959 stage play in which he starred.These interludes act like lemon juice squirted on heavy cream, brief reagents in a movie that, despite the meticulousness of its making, seems a peculiarly orthodox tribute to a revolutionary life.SidneyRated PG-13 for racial slurs. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. Watch on AppleTV+. More

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      ‘Petrov’s Flu’ Review: Roaming a Grim, Rowdy Underworld

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      In this fever dream of a movie by Kirill Serebrennikov, a Russian man wanders a wild urban landscape that he regularly hallucinates his way out of.When the phantasmagoric “Petrov’s Flu” opens on a crowded bus — a nightmare of jostling, babbling bodies — it seems obvious that there’s more troubling its hero than a typical seasonal malady. Sweaty and unsteady, he navigates through the other surging, grumbling passengers. Then a man yanks him off the bus, someone hands him a gun and Petrov is suddenly in a firing squad mowing down prisoners — and then he gets back on the bus and rejoins the clamorous horde he never wholly escapes. Welcome to Russia!For the next two and a half hours in this droll, chaotic, fitfully dazzling movie (it was at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival), Petrov (Semyon Serzin) continues to sweat and stagger as he roams a derelict urban landscape. Feverish and often plastered, he is in bad shape, and so is his world, with its ominous faces, soupy gloom and rowdy human comedy. His reason for rambling isn’t obvious. But as he wanders, he keeps slipping into outlandish reveries amid meeting friends, drinking and drinking some more. It’s unclear at first whether he’s seeking to escape reality or whether it is eluding him.Much of what happens in “Petrov’s Flu” is intentionally and enjoyably destabilizing. It takes place over a fairly compressed period of a day or two (maybe!), but includes several long flashbacks that expand the overall time frame by decades. And while the story is relatively straightforward — Petrov travels through a strange, at times hellish realm, evoking Odysseus and Leopold Bloom in their respective underworlds — the filmmaking is richly imaginative and unbound by the usual time-and-space constraints. When Petrov enters one location, he sometimes exits someplace entirely different.In recent years, the director Kirill Serebrennikov has been best known abroad for his difficulties with the Russian government. In 2017, he was placed under house arrest, accused of embezzling around $2 million. The charges have been seen as retaliation from the Kremlin for both Serebrennikov’s work and his expressed views on, among other issues, Russian censorship, the country’s aggression abroad and its persecution of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. He was put on trial and sentenced, but in March, after the remaining sentence was suspended, Serebrennikov fled to Germany, where he remains.It’s hard not to take this history into account while watching “Petrov’s Flu,” which paints a bleak, wistful, tragically funny portrait of a man, a people, a world. Yet despite the grimness, the violence and the grotesque bleating of some hateful, prejudiced trolls, the movie never drags you down (though it might exhaust you) because it’s buoyed by Serebrennikov’s bravura, unfettered filmmaking. As the gorgeously restless camera travels alongside Petrov — as walls disappear and locations melt into one another — it starts to feel like both the character and director are trying to imagine a way out.As Petrov dreams and boozes and meanders, a sketchy portrait of him emerges. He has a family, though it’s complicated. He says he’s divorced but refers to his ex, Petrova (Chulpan Khamatova), as his wife. Like Petrov, she too experiences lurid, vicious fantasies. The pair have a young son, and all three seem to live in the apartment where Petrov draws comics. He and Petrova also sleep together, having sex that turns uneasily aggressive and, at one point, inspires Petrov to get out of bed and draw. Some of the comic panels he’s working on seem to mirror what happens onscreen.Part of what gives the movie its tension and kick is that it’s not always clear how much of what transpires is happening in Petrova’s and Petrov’s heads. The movie is based on the Russian novel “The Petrovs In and Around the Flu,” by Alexey Salnikov. Despite the English-language title, the movie regularly shifts from Petrov to Petrova, who also experiences hallucinations. These take place during fraught, frustrating encounters with other people. She pauses, as if possessed, her eyes briefly blacken, and she wreaks terrible violence: She pummels one man’s face and slits another person’s throat.Whether these dark thoughts originate in Petrov or Petrova seems beside the point. What matters is that these frenzied visions recurrently engulf the characters — and the movie — transporting them from their everyday brutish reality into an equally brutish fantasy world. Asleep or not, they are dreaming, but their dreams are nightmares that are, by turns, inventive and liberating, grotesque and suffocating. At least Petrov flashes back to his relatively pacific childhood, a period of light and tenderness, a time before Russia’s current regime. And of course Petrov is an artist, which I imagine is finally his salvation as much as it is for the wildly talented Serebrennikov.Petrov’s FluNot rated. In Russia and English, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 25 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Greatest Beer Run Ever’ Review: Vietnam on the Rocks

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      Zac Efron plays a man trying to deliver brewskis to his Vietnam War buddies in Peter Farrelly’s film.In the early winter of 1968, the 26-year-old civilian Chickie Donohue arrived in Vietnam with a duffel bag of brewskis and an errand that could be reasonably called idiotic, patronizing, suicidal — and, even, as this shaggily appealing comedy insists, “The Greatest Beer Run Ever.” Donohue (Zac Efron) has been double dog dared by his drinking buddies back home in Inwood, then a working-class Irish neighborhood in Manhattan, to hand-deliver a beer to four of their buddies serving in the war. “A sudsy thank you card!” Donohue exclaims, delighted by his own moxie. His farcical mission is mostly true and just the sort of crowd-pleaser about lunkhead enlightenment that intoxicates the director Peter Farrelly in the wake of his Oscar for “Green Book.”Farrelly and his co-writers, Brian Currie and Pete Jones, see the national id reflected in Donohue’s patriotic, ill-reasoned rationale for his quest, which is clearly a few cans short of a, you know. To this layabout slacker, his blustering pals and their jingoistic barkeep, the Colonel (Bill Murray, near-invisible under a gruff flattop), a pull-tab of domestic ale supports the troops by reminding the fighters abroad that America reigns supreme. For a while, Farrelly feigns to agree; the film starts like a Super Bowl commercial and ends like a hangover.When Donohue sets sail for Saigon, public opinion supports the conflict, an innocence Efron embodies by hitchhiking toward the front with a schmucky grin affixed like a shield. (Grunts one soldier, “Every once in a while, you run into a guy who’s too dumb to get killed.”) But by the time Donohue returns home, the Tet offensive — which he witnesses — will have turned the majority of Americans against the war, including him. After all, if a dingbat like him is able to bluff his way past officers to get to the battlefield, things are not under control.The script is grounded in Donohue’s memoir of the same name (written with J.T. Molloy) and captures his bravado. (“I was a four-star general when it came to slinging BS,” he writes.) While the film makes his onscreen portrayal more oblivious, it backs his claim to have seen a United States tank blow a hole in the wall of its own embassy, only to later blame the blast on the Viet Cong.A local traffic cop (Kevin K. Tran) and hard-living photojournalist (Russell Crowe with a brusque, sleeves-rolled-up cynicism) are invented amalgamations of the many people who stepped in to save Donohue’s neck. (If pressed, the movie would rather label its protagonist a dangerous distraction over a hero.) To heighten the tension — as well as extend empathy toward the Vietnamese villagers — Farrelly also concocts a scene where Donohue is forced to hide in the jungle from his own countrymen.A few horrors are embellished from the book, particularly those that inspire the cinematographer Sean Porter to shoot in dramatic slow motion: a herd of napalmed elephants, a prisoner plummeting headfirst from a helicopter, a wounded soldier backlit by flames. Otherwise, the film’s style is, like its subject, stubbornly chipper (albeit with a marvelous psychedelic rock soundtrack that pulls from lesser-known acts like The Electric Prunes). Depth comes from Efron’s visible difficulty maintaining a smile as he comes to sense that he’s crossed the ocean only to discover a permanent gulf between him and his childhood friends. They’ve endured agonies he’ll never understand — and a barfly like him can’t deliver a cheers that will set things right.The Greatest Beer Run EverRated R for language and violence. Running time: 2 hours 6 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘On the Come Up’ Review: Battle Rap’s Next Big Thing?

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      This film adaptation of the Angie Thomas novel follows a teenage rapper with a dream.If you’ve seen “8 Mile” or the more recent cinematic delight “The Forty-Year-Old Version” you already know that in a movie with battle rap at the center, the would-be MC with something to prove always chokes in the first battle. “On the Come Up,” the new movie based on the Angie Thomas novel of the same name and directed by Sanaa Lathan, is no different.Brianna Jackson (Jamila C. Gray), nicknamed Bri and known as Lil’ Law on the mic, freezes in the face of an opponent and spends the rest of the film chasing her titular come up.The movie seems geared to teenagers in the way that it over explains events and leaves little room for subtext. Yet at the same time, Kay Oyegun’s script often feels out of touch with the way real teenagers actually behave. Bri and her friends Sonny (Miles Gutierrez-Riley) and Malik (Michael Cooper Jr.) seem to always know the most mature things to do and say. And the predictable narrative arc, the happenstance lighting from scene-to-scene and Lathan’s minimalist take on the material all adds up to something you might watch once and promptly forget about.Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s performance as Bri’s Aunt and manager Pooh stands out from a crowded ensemble cast of supporting players whose many background stories distract us from connecting with Bri and her family as much as we might like. But even Randolph — and Lathan, who also delivers a solid performance as Bri’s formerly drug-addicted mother Jay — can’t overcome a clunky script that bites off more from the novel than it can properly chew in under two hours.The real missed opportunity here is making full use of the battle rap scenes that form the spine of the story. Gray as Bri delivers the expletive-free rhymes penned by the real-life rapper Rapsody well enough, but the canned applause baked into the scenes often doesn’t ring true. Bri’s rhymes sound more like spoken word poetry than the no-holds-barred battle rap that the film is continuously saying she, the daughter of a revered slain rapper, has in her DNA.Yet even with its flaws, the film, by bringing a character like Bri into the cadre of battle rap, is a welcome update to the male bravado types we’re used to seeing dominate the mic. And the lyrics feature a steady stream of word bending metaphors worth savoring:Cranes in the skyI might a be a little sisterSaid I might be like Bey’s little sisterGoin’ up against a bigger guy but this fight only gonna elevatorElevate her, like Solange, watch me riseTo the seat at the table.In other words, turn on the closed captions.On the Come UpRated PG-13 for violence and adult language. Running time: 1 hour 55 minutes. In theaters and streaming on Paramount+. More