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      ‘Servants’ Review: Fighting for Purity of Faith

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      Teenage priests in training resist the mingling of church and the Communist state in Ivan Ostrochovsky’s drama.The captivating ecclesiastical drama “Servants,” set in 1980s Czechoslovakia, follows teenage matriculates at a Christian seminary who awaken to a grim reality. Their Dean (Vladimir Strnisko) is a member of Pacem in Terris, a group of clergy quietly granting control of the church to the Communist state. Considering this a moral corruption, several of the students initiate a discreet rebellion.The story follows best friends Juraj (Samuel Skyva) and Michal (Samuel Polakovic), a solemn duo who join the seminary and pair up to study, play soccer and practice their accordions. But once Juraj meets the peers who are furtively connecting with the Vatican in defiance of their advisers, he snubs Michal to support the cause.Directed by the Slovakian filmmaker Ivan Ostrochovsky, “Servants” pairs chilly black-and-white imagery, reminiscent of films by Robert Bresson, with an austere kind of choreography: Ostrochovsky often begins shots with characters frozen in place for several seconds before they launch into action, as if they were chess pieces moved by God across the bare lines of the seminary’s crumbling stone architecture.Evocative details fill out this spartan world. Through the movie, the ominous Doctor Ivan (Vlad Ivanov), a member of the secret police responsible for weeding out and penalizing student dissidents, suffers from a progressive rash. It snakes across his body in concert with his accruing sins.A clearer picture of the bond between Juraj and Michal may have made this moral tale more affecting. But as Ostrochovsky deploys his arresting imagery, he shows less interest in the boys’ rift than in the political and holy struggles guiding them. “Be careful. The school is undergoing restorations,” a pupil advises the pair early on. “Servants” sees the dissolution of one friendship as a small price to pay toward the restoration of a school’s — and nation’s — purity of faith.ServantsNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. In virtual cinemas and available to rent or buy on Apple TV, Google Play and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘The Burning Sea’ Review: Smoke on the Water

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      An oil-rig accident in the North Sea kicks off this well-acted, pleasantly predictable survival thriller.Even allowing for the elastic credibility standards of the average survival movie, “The Burning Sea” is a stretch. (A favorite moment is when the unconscious half of the central couple pops awake at an especially critical juncture.) Yet if the machinations of the plot are a tad rickety, its geologic premise is inarguably stable.Tucking a simple romance inside a disaster thriller, the director John Andreas Andersen uses an oil-rig collapse off the coast of Norway to deliver a dire warning of environmental disruption. When Sofia (a charming Kristine Kujath Thorp), an underwater robotics expert, joins the team seeking survivors and an explanation for the accident, she’s horrified to learn that a larger catastrophe could be imminent. Unfortunately, mitigation efforts will prove too late to prevent Sofia’s boyfriend (Henrik Bjelland), a sweet-natured rig worker, from requiring the kind of extreme rescue effort only a woman in love would undertake.Nodding to the cataclysmic Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010, the screenwriters Lars Gudmestad and Harald Rosenlow-Eeg underscore the possibly calamitous oceanic consequences of decades of drilling. Opportunities for a more fraught political drama, however, are basically ignored: When an oil-company executive instructs Sofia to sign a nondisclosure agreement, we expect at least some cover-up shenanigans. Instead, we get little more than a bland romance, smoothly professional special effects and a story that’s finally too predictable to raise the heart rate.A more tantalizing tale is teased in segments that bookend the movie and, based on interviews with retired oil workers, explain the cowboy nature of the industry’s early days, when training consisted of an instruction to “just follow the Americans.” Maybe not always the best advice.The Burning SeaRated PG-13 for language appropriate to the expectation of a fiery, watery death. In Norwegian, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Google Play, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Careless Crime’ Review: A Time Loop in Iran

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      Shahram Mokri’s film bends time and space as it considers events from 40 years earlier, when an arson attack on a movie theater set off the Iranian Revolution.In the films of the Iranian director Shahram Mokri, time ripples, bends, devours itself. Mokri’s prior features, “Fish & Cat” and “Invasion,” have ouroboros-style plots, with recursive chronologies and scenes repeated from various characters’ points of view. His latest, “Careless Crime,” pivots on another kind of time loop: the repetitions of history.An epigraph tells us of a 1978 fire set off by four militants at the Cinema Rex in Abadan, Iran, that killed hundreds of moviegoers and incited the Iranian Revolution. In its opening scenes, “Careless Crime” seems to recreate that event, as a theater proprietor argues with two colleagues about adding more seats to his cinema, while a wayward pyromaniac, Takbali, falls in with three Islamist arsonists. But temporal tricks already abound: References to the Shah suggest prerevolutionary Iran, even as the settings — replete with gleaming phones and computers and cars — are contemporary.Things grow stranger as Mokri begins cutting between Takbali, the theater crew and a film-within-the-film (called, err, “Careless Crime”) about a military captain’s run-in with two women organizing an outdoor screening of “The Deer” in a remote village. (To add to the whiplash: “The Deer” was screening at Cinema Rex during the 1978 fire.)Mokri constructs his film like a control experiment, tweaking each of its variables — time, space, narrative — as if to see what he might catalyze. At times the results are poetic, as when, in a marvelous feat of both shooting and acting, a sequence of interactions is repeated multiple times within a seamless circular panning shot. At other times, “Careless Crime” feels rather enervating, the film’s political charge and the pathos of its characters diffused by Mokri’s mathematical zeal.Careless CrimeNot rated. In Persian, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 19 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Big Gold Brick’ Review: Sad Sack Makes Good

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      Shaggy and dull, this film follows a slovenly writer who’s taken in by the man who hit him with a car.Samuel, a nice failed writer and slob, turns his life around one day by stepping in front of a car in “Big Gold Brick.” But success — a best-selling memoir — doesn’t happen overnight. First the wealthy driver, Floyd (Andy Garcia), takes in Samuel (Emory Cohen) as his in-house biographer, and a movie’s worth of mostly domestic misadventures follow that are shaggy and dull.Addled from the collision, Samuel bumbles his way around Floyd’s family: a coldly flirtatious wife (Megan Fox) who might as well be introduced with the “Oh Yeah” song, a sweet grown daughter (Lucy Hale) devoid of personality, and a sociopathic son, Eddie (Leonidas Castrounis). Garcia’s Floyd, who claims to have a secret past, ambles through a two-hour-plus movie that nearly forgets to give this crew any story to speak of.The writer-director, Brian Petsos, misses the timing or verve shown in his short films, which have been a lovely outlet for freak-outs by Oscar Isaac. The star goofs off in a brief turn as a nefarious tycoon, hidden behind half-opaque glasses, a fey warble and a riot of facial hair. This and other touches keep suggesting half-remembered bits and bobs from indie crime capers and sketch shows of the late 1990s and early 2000s.While it’s not clear whether anyone could, Cohen doesn’t carry this movie, but he does wear an amusingly aerodynamic ponytail during the glimpses of Samuel’s future book tour. The title of this perfectly well-appointed production is apt: “Big Gold Brick” looks all right but it truly just sits there.Big Gold BrickNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 12 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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      ‘Butter’ Review: High-Stakes Popularity

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      Fed up with his classmates’ contempt, an obese high school student decides he’ll gorge himself to death on New Year’s Eve.Why do movies that take on bullying so often fetishize the very acts they seem to be critiquing? “Butter,” directed by Paul A. Kaufman — who adapted Erin Jade Lange’s young adult novel — seems to wallow in the brutality.Fed up with his classmates’ contempt, a high school junior, Butter (Alex Kersting), decides he’ll show them by eating himself to death on New Year’s Eve. Just tune in to buttersfinalmeal.com, he announces online. But far from shaming or freaking out his peers, Butter’s promise makes him a celebrity at his school.Once the movie gets going, Kersting, a newcomer, gives an all-in performance. Butter is a gifted saxophone player, a thoughtful soul. He’s gaining ground in his incognito courting of the school’s popular girl (McKaley Miller). Onetime foes are becoming friends. Is there any wonder he’s approaching his big night with less and less verve?The adults in Butter’s life are less compelling. Mira Sorvino plays Butter’s flummoxed mom. His dad (Brian Van Holt) is even more confounded and distant. And Butter’s physician (Ravi Patel) is a tad too madcap. The only adults who seem to really see him are his band teacher (Mykelti Williamson) and a hospital psychiatrist (Annabeth Gish).The movie is a good-hearted dramatic comedy about the bedeviling issues of bullying, and the hazards of social media. But the lessons become stand-ins for richer characters who could have been memorable — and persuasive. For all its ache and churning emotions, “Butter” winds up being little more than a meager “Afterschool Special.”ButterRated PG-13 for suicidal ideation, crude sexual material and even cruder language. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters. More

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      'Family Squares' Takes on the Pandemic, Zoom and Human Nature

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      Secrets erupt and tensions are bared when the bereaved Worth family gathers on Zoom.“I just want to say, I am so happy that Mom did not die of Covid,” says Bobby Worth (Henry Winkler) in “Family Squares,” a film told through FaceTime, Zoom and phone calls immediately before and after the death of the Worth family matriarch, Mabel (June Squibb).That a dying loved one evaded the virus may be little consolation to the grief-stricken, but it’s precisely this plot point that allows Stephanie Laing, the writer and director, to poke gentle fun at our shared pandemic predicament. Her film is a lighthearted and touching look at the feuds, resentments and secrets that can surface when someone dies.The film underlines the idea that it’s never too late to tell the truth or repair tattered bonds. Mabel, on videos played after her death, urges her descendants to heal their broken relationships.The star-studded cast is introduced in a hectic grid: The faces include Mabel’s son, Bobby; daughter, Diane (Margo Martindale); late-in-life partner, Judith (Ann Dowd); and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.After less than a minute of virtual overtalk, Chad (Scott MacArthur), a whistle blower grandson hiding out in Russia, suggests they raise their hands when they want to speak; the others respond with mocking middle fingers.The inherent clumsiness of Zoom interactions gives rise to other funny moments, such as a decision by Cassie (Elsie Fisher) to sit with Mabel’s body “until the free session runs out.” When she’s still there a while later, her father asks incredulously, “How has it not expired yet?” (She has upgraded to a premium account, using his credit card.)Laing’s writing is sharp, drawing vivid characters and exposing family tensions through acerbic dialogue. For example, one granddaughter, Dorsey (Judy Greer), in a dig at her sister, Katie (Casey Wilson), comments, “Your kitchen looks really nice. How much did Grandma spend on that remodel?”Filmed during quarantine in 2020, “Family Squares” uses the communication tools of the pandemic era to deliver a film with the intimacy of a home movie, while still exploring the chaos and limitations of technology.Family SquaresRated R for language. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Amazon, Vudu and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More

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      ‘Friends and Strangers’ Review: G’day, Mates

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      In this funny, productively cryptic Australian feature, the characters are alternately abrasive and invasive.The opening credits of “Friends and Strangers,” a funny, productively cryptic debut feature from James Vaughan, unfold over a series of watercolors painted during the first years of Australia’s colonization; they are synced to a score from a silent film, and the first shot after they end seems inspired by the pointillist Georges Seurat. All of this might be taken as an invitation to look beyond dialogue, to pay attention to gaps.Nearly every scene in this ultra-low-key cringe comedy involves people behaving with varying degrees of over- and under-chumminess. Alice (Emma Diaz) and her friend Ray (Fergus Wilson) drive separately to a campground. Almost immediately, a bewhiskered fellow camper persistently advises them to move their tent, and a girl, Lauren (Poppy Jones), assumes Ray is Alice’s romantic interest (a mistake that Ray may share). Soon Lauren is offering Alice articles of clothing from her dead mother, an act of queasily intimate hospitality that is a hallmark of Vaughan’s characters.When the action relocates to the Sydney area, the sense of Australia as a big, passive-aggressive small town only grows more pronounced. Ray and his pal Miles (David Gannon) drive to a wedding-videography gig (which Ray plans to bluff his way through) only for Miles to develop food poisoning and take refuge not at their destination, but at the house next door.True to its title, “Friends and Strangers” is a movie of opposites. Motives are misread. A scenic waterfront home is rendered ominous by the avant-garde string music that an ambiguously hostile neighbor blasts at high volume. Ray makes an effort to go unnoticed that increases his visibility.While the pieces don’t necessarily fit in obvious ways, that’s presumably the point — and part of what makes “Friends and Strangers” so singular.Friends and StrangersNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 22 minutes. In theaters and on Metrograph’s virtual cinema. More

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      ‘Studio 666’ Review: Foo Fighting the Devil

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      The band members play themselves in this horror comedy from BJ McDonnell. But the gore overtakes the (limited) fun.It isn’t always enough for a lousy horror comedy to splash around in its lousiness. But I’d like to thank the people who made “Studio 666.” They’ve splashed me — with the blood of food-delivery guys and the viscera of Chris Shiflett, the chief guitarist of Foo Fighters until he meets his end here, and with the wink-wink nastiness that lightens all of the excess. (This thing is too long and cover-your-eyes gory.)The cheeky, punny humor of that title is something for the filmmakers to live up to. Ditto for Foo Fighters. The sextet plays itself, holed up at a fetching Southern California chateau to record some overdue music when resident evil takes over the band’s leader, Dave Grohl. No one tries for anything mightier than put-on dumbness because that’s the outer limit of where the acting, writing (by Jeff Buhler and Rebecca Hughes) and directing (by BJ McDonnell) can take this premiseIt’s fun, nonetheless, to catalog everybody’s imperviousness to embarrassment. The rhythm guitarist Pat Smear’s entire performance — again, as himself; wonderfully flip yet warmly blasé — is a deluxe snarl. The keyboardist Rami Jaffee leans into New-Age-y randiness; and Taylor Hawkins, the drummer, is a natural, both behind his kit and impaled to a wall. And when Grohl’s satanic possession sends him on a rock-star power trip, the rest of the band endures tirades, bullying and potential ritual sacrifice.The movie exudes real “Scooby-Doo”-meets-“The Shining” vibes that rope in Korean horror and extend to Grohl, who gives, if not his all, then at least his most charismatic “some.” He knows what to do with his eyes, when to narrow, roll and pop them. That might not seem like much — he’s just as watchable in videos for “Everlong” and “Learn to Fly,” which are far more imaginative and much shorter than this movie.” But in a film starring so many people who can’t act, a good set of eyes is an indication of effort, of life. And Grohl is expending something here, blurring the line between demonic possession and prima donna.His satanic tantrums are about the music, man. And what the devil makes him do culminates in an epic song that sounds, in one section, like the bridge on “No One Knows” by Queens of the Stone Age, and, in another, like “Master of Puppets”-era Metallica. But the music is evidently beside the point, too. “Studio 666” is seriously overcommitted to grossing us out. Pat Smear is the name of an excellent musician. Here, it’s also a verb.Studio 666Rated R for F-bombs, chain saws, a cymbal as a power tool. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. In theaters. More