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      ‘Zombies 3’ Review: Take Me to Your Cheerleader

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      In the final installment of this Disney trilogy, the arrival of aliens alters our high school heroes’ quests for college — and social — acceptance.In “Zombies 3,” directed by Paul Hoen, an interspecies utopia faces an alien invasion. Like the franchise’s previous allegories for marginalized experiences — the zombies of “Zombies” and werewolves of “Zombies 2” share hardships with Black and Indigenous Americans, respectively — this one is dubious at best.Zed (Milo Manheim) hopes to become the first zombie to go to college, while his girlfriend, Addison (Meg Donnelly), is eager to lead her cheer squad to victory. But Zed’s college dreams and the cheer championship are thrown into chaos when aliens descend upon their peaceful town.“These aliens are here to take what’s ours,” laments Addison’s vapid cousin, Bucky (Trevor Tordjman). That’s right — the aliens represent undocumented immigrants! Having apparently learned nothing in the last two movies, the citizens must learn to accept another group of outsiders.This is not your mother’s Disney Channel, and thank god. All of the “Zombies” movies are brimming with camp delights, as though the crew watched “But I’m a Cheerleader” while dropping acid. This is particularly true for “Zombies 3.” The sets and costumes are awash in pastel pinks, blues and greens. One pivotal conversation ends with a woman ripping off her wig. RuPaul Charles even voices the aliens’ mother ship.But while “Zombies 3” offers a gonzo aesthetic and radio-ready pop songs, it clumsily tackles social issues. The movie features a nonbinary character, the alien A-Spen, played by Terry Hu. While it’s nice to finally see queer characters in this extremely flamboyant franchise, A-Spen’s introduction raises more questions than it answers. Why is the only character to claim a nonbinary identity an alien? Why would aliens have a gender binary in the first place?If you watch this with your favorite young people, be warned: There’s a lot more here than just 90 minutes of silliness.Zombies 3Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. Watch on Disney+. More

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      ‘The Deer King’ Review: Medicine, Family and Empire

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      A series of Japanese fantasy novels is the basis for this tenderly wrought and brilliantly animated adventure movie.Based on a series of fantasy books by the Japanese author Nahoko Uehashi, the animated film “The Deer King” opens on a chain gang of enslaved people forced to labor in a salt mine. While they and their captors sleep, a pack of wolves enter the mine, biting hundreds and passing on a deadly disease. A pair of humans manage to get out alive: Van (Shinichi Tsutsumi), a former soldier, and Yuna (Hisui Kimura), an orphaned toddler. The two escape to the countryside, only to find themselves thrust into an effort to discover a cure for the disease that killed the others. The movie, directed by Masashi Ando and Masayuki Miyaji, follows Van’s tender relationship with Yuna and the lengths he will go to protect her, even as he finds nefarious forces stacked against him.The mysterious illness only infects and kills the Zol people, who a decade earlier invaded the nation of Aquafa, leading many to believe that the disease is the result of a curse that protects Aquafa. Concerned that his people’s hold in the region could slip should the disease spread, the Zol emperor sends Hohsalle (Ryoma Takeuchi), a medical doctor, to find a cure. Van, whose blood Hohsalle believes can help those infected, lands in the center of two seemingly opposing forces: spirituality and modern medicine.The film is tenderly wrought and brilliantly animated, with transitions that emphasize the communion between the land and the human body. Its final moments don’t quite stick the landing, but the characters all have clear motivations, and the political themes are distinctly woven in throughout but do not overpower the film; they become secondary to the depictions of the natural world and the characters’ relationships.The Deer KingRated R for violence. In Japanese, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours. In theaters. More

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      ‘Earwig’ Review: Danse Macabre

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      The latest trip down the rabbit hole by the French director Lucile Hadzihalilovic follows a young girl with teeth made of ice and her cadaverous caretaker.Near the beginning of “Earwig,” the latest trip down the darkest of rabbit holes by the French director Lucile Hadzihalilovic, a 10-year-old girl admires a landscape painting, seated before it in an image similar to the famous scene from “Poltergeist.” Fascinated, she runs her fingers over the rough canvas and its vibrant colors; it’s a moment not unlike the experience of watching the film, which can feel like being hypnotized by disturbingly palpable still lifes from the unconscious realm.Set somewhere in midcentury Europe (though everything feels as if it were ripped out of a 19th-century Gothic novella), “Earwig” takes place mostly indoors, between the jaundiced, windowless walls of a near-empty dwelling. The girl, Mia (Romane Hemelaers), has teeth made of ice, which are melted down and remolded each day by Albert (Paul Hilton), a cadaverous man whose unseen and menacing overlords croak cryptic orders to him over the phone.Like in her past films, Hadzihalilovic explores the psychic tensions of a cloistered, ritualized existence — this time taking on the point of view of an adult (Albert) to create a loose drama around the event of Mia’s release. One day, the bosses tell Albert that he will no longer serve as the girl’s warden, upending his womblike routine and sending him into a macabre frenzy complete with visions of what may be his long-dead wife, broken-bottle bloodshed and a jarring suicide attempt at the lake. These events are woven together by a twinkling uncanny score and blurred lights that function like title cards.Hadzihalilovic is an expert conjurer of other worlds, and “Earwig” unearths a startlingly seductive array of visual and sonic textures that don’t quite add up to much more than a powerful mood. There’s no big revelatory payoff, even though there’s the semblance of (or the attempt at) one — best to let this one simply wash over you should you choose to sip the magic tea.EarwigNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 54 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Queen of Glory’ Review: Back to the Bronx

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      In the writer-director Nana Mensah’s amusing and astute feature debut, a death forces a reckoning for a brainy young Ghanaian-American living in both worlds.Molecular neuro-oncologist Sarah Obeng is very smart. But in the subtle delight “Queen of Glory” — written and directed by its lead actor, Nana Mensah — the American daughter of Ghanaian parents can be foolish, too. Take her married boyfriend and university colleague, Lyle (Adam Leon): He’s simply not worthy.Sarah is organizing their relocation to his next job when she learns of her mother’s death. Now she must decamp from Manhattan’s Upper West Side to the Bronx to plan her mother’s funeral, deal with her father (Oberon K.A. Adjepong) and decide what to do with her mother’s home, her Christian bookstore and the store’s grateful employee, Pitt (Meeko Gattuso). Pitt especially gladdens as the former inmate with the face tattoos and creative side gig.The child of Ghanaian parents herself, Mensah traverses the polyglot turf well, infusing details with astute affection and understated laughs. Even the occasional slapstick proves more sweet than silly.Sarah’s return to the neighborhood of immigrant melding and cultural adjacency stirsher feelings of being an outsider but at the same time awakens her sense of community. Mensah pokes gentle fun at her heroine and treats the failings of some of the menfolk here with deadpan wit and little rancor.Ghanaian drums and dance set a sonic and visual motif that recurs, at once disruption and glue. With so much to do, Sarah has had little time for grief. When her reality, the drumming and the movie’s archival images of African gatherings finally converge, a mother, a motherland and a daughter get their emotional due.Queen of GloryNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 18 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Persuasion’ Review: The Present Intrudes Into the Past

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      Dakota Johnson smirks her way through a Netflix adaptation of the rekindled romance in Jane Austen’s last novel, our critic writes.The great irony of this new, not-quite-modernized adaptation of Jane Austen’s final novel, “Persuasion,” is that it communicates its tense relationship to its 19th-century source material in a repressed, passive-aggressive manner — an approach oddly suited to Austen’s trenchant view of society. The film doesn’t take the creative leap to transpose the beloved story in the present day. Instead, in curiously excruciating fashion, the director, screenwriters, and star imply their discomfort with Georgian-era social norms from within the novel’s period setting.Both the film and the novel begin in the early 1800s, as the story’s heroine, Anne Elliot (Dakota Johnson), visits her sister Mary (Mia McKenna-Bruce) in the English countryside, after their father squandered the family savings. Anne is an unmarried woman who is fortunate to be respected — or, at least, perceived as useful — by her blue-blooded relations. But in direct addresses to the camera, Anne admits that she is haunted by the memory of a love affair she was persuaded to end with an enterprising but fortuneless sailor, Frederick Wentworth (Cosmo Jarvis).Now Anne is alone, and her regrets only grow when Wentworth returns to the country as a wealthy naval captain. He’s eager to find a wife, and if his sights are first set on Anne’s lively sister-in-law Louisa (Nia Towle), his attention always seems to wander back to Anne.For this story of rekindled romance, the film summons the handsome appointments expected for a big-budget period drama. There are extravagant mansions, brocaded costumes and magnificent vistas. But there is a crisis of contemporaneity at the heart of this pretty adaptation, and the trouble begins with its presentation of its heroine.Johnson, wearing smoky eye shadow and pink lipstick, displays the confident appeal of a celebrity sharing her secrets with the audience. Her smile reads as a smirk. The incongruous bravado of her performance is mirrored by the film’s script, written by Ron Bass and Alice Victoria Winslow, which peppers lines from the novel with meme-ish truisms like, “Now we are worse than exes. We’re friends.”The contrast between the modernized dialogue and Austen’s period-appropriate language only makes both styles seem more mannered. The story’s heroine, its dialogue and even its themes of regret and loneliness seem to be swallowed up by the need to maintain an appearance of contemporary cheek.For fans of Austen’s novel, it’s hard to imagine the director Carrie Cracknell’s version providing a sense of ease or escapism. Instead, the unbearable tension between past and present serves as a disarmingly naked window into the anxieties of current Hollywood filmmaking. Better to have the whole movie be a skeptical, uncertain affair than to risk presenting a pre-feminist heroine who lacks confidence.PersuasionRated PG. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

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      ‘Anonymous Club’ Review: The Joy of Creation

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      The Australian singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett goes on a world tour in this music documentary, and finds that a change is needed.The singer-songwriter Courtney Barnett started out as a DIY artist, home-recording energetic songs communicating knotty feelings. Early in this documentary, written and directed by Danny Cohen, a cheery interviewer leads into a question by saying that it’s not too common to hear artists “singing about panic attacks.” This reflects more on the limited listening experience of the interviewer than anything else, but you get the idea.The images in “Anonymous Club” are pretty conventional for a music documentary, particularly at the start. Barnett’s work blew up commercially after the 2015 release of her album “Sometimes I Sit and Think, and Sometimes I Just Sit.” World tours with a backing band followed: We see trucks being unloaded at stadiums, lighting rigs going up, and electric guitars rocking out with post-punk clamor.At Cohen’s request, Barnett kept an audio diary over several years. In it, she speaks about how the repetition of touring is giving her emotional state a beating. Barnett muses on the contradiction of how, in one performance, she might be “vivid and alive” and in the next “distant,” even though she’s going through the same motions with each show.Because Barnett is shy by nature, and prone to depression and anxiety, touring gets to be a special kind of drag. In public she’s a sport: When a glib German interviewer quotes her lyric “I’m not your mother/I’m not your bitch” and then asks with a grin “who are you mad at?” she doesn’t take the bait.Back at her home in Melbourne, she sits with her depression. Clearly a change is needed. A stripped-down tour with no backing band — and a musical collaboration with the drummer Stella Mozgawa of Warpaint — get Barnett back to the joy of creating. Perhaps not surprisingly, she achieves it in a setting not too different from the one in which she began.Anonymous ClubNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 23 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Don’t Make Me Go’ Review: Sharp Curves Ahead for Next 2,000 Miles

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      John Cho and Mia Isaac play a father and daughter on a road trip in this twisty drama, which explores the gulf between familiarity and intimacy.“You’re not going to like the way this story ends,” Wally (Mia Isaac), 15, warns the audience at the start of “Don’t Make Me Go,” a father-daughter drama of startling honesty and humor. Max (John Cho), Wally’s protective single dad, has learned that his headaches aren’t just from the struggle of parenting his restless teenager. A cancer diagnosis gives him one year to live — and instead of coming clean about his condition, Max packs up their wood-paneled Jeep for a road trip with an ulterior motive: To take a surprise detour to introduce Wally to her mother (Jen Van Epps), who ran away with Max’s best friend (Jemaine Clement) when the girl was an infant.The setup is like a hazard sign reading “Caution: Treacle Ahead.” Yet the director Hannah Marks and the screenwriter Vera Herbert veer from predictability. Life is unpredictable, and the film gambles big to make that point. In one jolting scene, they set an emotional showdown on a nude beach — but neither character finds the gratuitous flaccidity funny. (Thankfully, the film’s editor, Paul Frank, does.)Cho and Isaac’s stellar performances expose the gulf between familiarity and intimacy. The two flinty characters are more likely to expose their own vulnerable bellies to outsiders than to each other. Herbert’s droll, scrupulously realistic dialogue captures the journey of a parent and a child learning to see each other as flawed people. As Cho’s buttoned-up Max attempts to deliver decades’s worth of advice during the drive, he reveals that he was once a musician before he settled into the role of a risk-averse accountant. Max denies Wally’s accusation that he quashed his passions for her sake, yet the film is wise (and brutal) enough to side with her when she’s right — as she certainly is in her early warning about the movie’s polarizing finale.Don’t Make Me GoRated R for teenage drinking and abundant adult nudity. Running time: 1 hour 49 minutes. Watch on Amazon. More

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      ‘Costa Brava, Lebanon’ Review: Paradise Tossed

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      In Mounia Akl’s ambitious debut feature, a family’s attempts to escape the filth of Beirut go awry when the garbage follows them to their doorstep.As civic emergencies go, few possess the symbolic clarity of a garbage crisis. They’re ugly. They stink. They signify dysfunction, rot and toxicity in ways that need no sorting.They are also an effective shortcut to dramatic poignancy, as the Lebanese director Mounia Akl demonstrates in her ambitious first feature, “Costa Brava, Lebanon.” But if it sounds like a facile metaphor, blame history: Beirut has been choking on garbage for years — including, but hardly limited to, the kind you put in bags.Situated in a dystopian near future indistinguishable from the present, the film’s setting is less a space for imagination than for cynicism: The more things change, the more they stay the same. The trash is still a problem. The leaders are still corrupt.Perhaps things could be different in the countryside, where one family struggles to maintain an off-grid Eden. Years before, Souraya (Nadine Labaki), a famous singer, escaped there to build a family with her husband, Walid (Saleh Bakri), a disillusioned and damaged former activist. But after a government land seizure brings the garbage literally to their door, the fragility of their little ecosystem becomes apparent.Souraya wonders whether Beirut was really so bad. Their teenage daughter (Nadia Charbel) dreams of boys and a bigger world. Their other daughter (Ceana and Geana Restom) is too young to give up on her daddy, but she has also absorbed his trauma, harassed by the obsessive-compulsive delusion that by counting she can control the surrounding chaos.The paradise these characters seek might as well be the Spanish coast of the title, elusive as it is. If a fuller sense of their humanity is sometimes lost to the ideas they serve, Akl has nonetheless produced a smart and sensitive film.Costa Brava, LebanonNot rated. In Arabic, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters. More