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      ‘The Gutter’ Review: A Phenom Is Born

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      This bowling comedy, co-directed by the standup comedian Yassir Lester and his brother Isaiah, has absurdity to spare.The pantheon of Great Bowling Comedies is a small one. You’ve got the terribly rude 1996 “Kingpin,” directed by the Farrelly brothers and featuring an over-the-top, vulgar performance by Bill Murray as a maniacal strikes competitor. Then there’s the Coen brothers’ 1998 “The Big Lebowski,” in which Jeff Bridges, in the sort-of title role, looks like a slightly buzzed beacon of sanity compared with his fellow frame enthusiasts. “The Gutter,” written and co-directed by the standup comedian Yassir Lester and his brother Isaiah, is even more overtly absurdist than those earlier offerings.“The Gutter” tells the story of a Black phenom, Walt (Shameik Moore), achieving stardom in a sport dominated, if not defined, by white men. Walt — his elusive last name is a running joke — has a way with a strike that is discovered while he is tending bar at his aunt’s alley, which of course is in imminent danger of going out of business. Walt is not an ambitious man. His unlikely friend Skunk (D’Arcy Carden), a bowling observer, advises him to start putting away some money after he has won a few tournaments. “Don’t you have any dreams or anything?” she asks him. He considers this for a couple of blinks, and answers, “A threesome?”In addition to ridiculous — think the Wayans brothers’ parody pictures, or “Napoleon Dynamite” (that movie’s director, Jared Hess, is an executive producer here) — the humor is almost uniformly broad. The organization sponsoring the contests here is the “Super League of Bowling,” known as SLOB. And Susan Sarandon, as a champion bowler compelled out of retirement by Walt’s success, smokes and mugs with confident abandon, recalling Cecilia Monroe, the egomaniacal soap star she played on “Friends.”The GutterNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 32 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on most major platforms. More

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      ‘Absolution’ Review: Brain Drain

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      Liam Neeson plays a regretful gangster with a serious medical condition in this drab, downbeat action movie.In 2019, Liam Neeson teamed up with the Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland to make the action thriller “Cold Pursuit.” It did not go well.Nevertheless, the two are back in harness for “Absolution,” a dreary gangster tale as depressing as Neeson’s repeat portrayals of aging tough guys-turned-reluctant avengers. This time, he’s a rumpled, rueful alcoholic and an enforcer for a Boston crime boss played by Ron Perlman. (Tony Gayton’s script is so lazy it declines to even name most of its characters.) The hook here is that Neeson’s leg-breaking character, let’s call him Punchy, is starting to forget important details like where he lives and the names of his criminal cohort. If he hurries, he’ll have just enough time to reconnect with his long-estranged daughter (Frankie Shaw), bed a feisty barfly (Yolonda Ross) and maybe rescue a sex-trafficking victim or two before succumbing to his disease. Or an associate’s bullet.Wrapped in drab visuals and a doomy atmosphere, “Absolution” paints a world where lowlifes rule and neither doctors nor priests can be trusted. Yet there are moments when the beatdowns pause and a misty melancholy shines through: Punchy, hands shaking, writing reminders in a little notebook, or having hallucinatory chats in a fishing boat with his long-dead, abusive father. The movie seeps sentimentality; but Neeson’s scenes with Shaw, who created and starred in the scrappy Showtime series “SMILF” (2017-19), have a touching authenticity, and Ross’s character is so spiky and warm she offers relief from Punchy’s soggy self-centeredness.Watching “Absolution,” I was reminded that Neeson is now 72 and his possible weariness with this kind of role might be lending credence to his character’s frailties. The problem with movies about declining antiheroes is that their arcs can only bend in one direction.AbsolutionRated R for violent men and damaged women.. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Lost on a Mountain in Maine’ Review: Peak Experience

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      The true story of a 12-year-old’s survival in a vast mountain wilderness for nine days in the 1930s.The family adventure film “Lost on a Mountain in Maine” — based on the 1939 memoir of the same name by Donn Fendler with Joseph Egan — recounts the story of a 12-year-old boy alone in the wilderness of Mount Katahdin, Maine’s highest peak.An opening intertitle declares, if a tad defensively, “This Is a True Story.” Sure, the movie is inspired by actual events, but the truth the film yearns for is to be a story unencumbered by the insights or demands of our current moment. Even the film’s director, Andrew Bood Kightlinger, characterizes it lovingly as a “throwback.” (Sylvester Stallone is one of the producers.)After angrily arguing with his father, Donn (Luke David Blumm) gets separated from his twin brother and their energetic hiking guide amid a slashing summer storm. The movie alternates between the headstrong protagonist’s battles with bugs, leeches, hunger and disorientation, and his parents’ fraught limbo of guilt, hope and despair. Interspersed throughout is documentary footage filmed decades later of friends, family and others who witnessed those nine days that captured much of the nation’s attention.Caitlin FitzGerald portrays Donn’s steadfast mother, Ruth. Paul Sparks is the stern father whose brow is furrowed by muted but palpable economic woes. Before he took his boys on the hike, he’d been eyeing headlines and listening to radio reports of a slow, post-Depression recovery and of brewing international unrest.Theirs may not be a wonderful life — and “Lost on a Mountain” never fully achieves its complicated halcyon aims — but an early scene of Ruth on the phone, rallying help in the search for Donn, is pure Mary Bailey.Lost on a Mountain in MaineRated PG for thematic elements, peril, language and some injury images. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘A Real Pain’ Review: Mourning as an Act of Survival

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      Jesse Eisenberg directs and stars in a melancholic yet funny exploration of Jewish loss and belonging, with an outstanding Kieran Culkin.American movies about grief tend to end with sniffles and pasted-on smiles that reassure audiences that whatever horrors have come before — however brutal the tragedy, no matter how severe the torment — everything is going to be OK. It’s a crock, but that’s the Hollywood way, even in indies. No matter how distinct their subjects, their scale and scope, they insist on drying the tears that they’ve pumped. The pursuit of happiness was an inalienable right for the founding fathers, one that our movies have made a maddeningly enduring article of faith.Jesse Eisenberg races straight into life’s stubborn untidiness in “A Real Pain,” a finely tuned, melancholic and at times startlingly funny exploration of loss and belonging that he wrote and directed. He plays David, a fidgety, outwardly ordinary guy who, with his very complicated cousin, Benji (Kieran Culkin), sets off on a so-called heritage tour of Poland. Their grandmother survived the Holocaust because of “a thousand miracles,” as David puts it, and they’ve decided to visit the house where she grew up. Theirs is an unexpectedly emotionally fraught journey, and a piercing, tragicomic lament from the Jewish diaspora.The journey begins and ends in the United States, but mostly unfolds during a compressed road trip through Poland that they set off on with a British tour guide, James (Will Sharpe), and five other travelers. Together, the group tours Warsaw, crosses pastoral countryside, peers into picturesque corners and makes a relatively brief, heart-heavy visit to the Majdanek concentration camp a few miles from the medieval city of Lublin. Eisenberg doesn’t delve into the history of the camp (also known as Lublin), but it became a killing center and was instrumental in a 1941 Nazi plan to murder the Jewish population of German-occupied Poland. An estimated 1.7 million Polish Jews were killed during this operation alone.That’s a profound history for any movie to grapple with intelligently, especially one that’s as modest and laugh-laced as “A Real Pain.” Eisenberg, though, deftly handles its weight, in part because it is a given for his characters. The Holocaust doesn’t need to be summarized for David, Benji and the rest of the tour group; they’re in Poland specifically because, in one attenuated way or another, it has been with them all their lives. It’s history, but for David and Benji it is, fundamentally, a history that’s inseparable from the existential reality of their grandmother, from the woman and the mother she became, and from the family that she had. It is, as this gentle movie plaintively suggests, an anguished generational bequest.Eisenberg brings you right into the story with a burst of jump cuts and the sight of an agitated David, who’s in a car en route to the airport in New York, leaving one anxious message after another for Benji. Eisenberg excels at playing live wires, characters who can seem so tightly wound you wonder if or when they will break. Like him, they tend to be fast talkers — Eisenberg’s clipped enunciation means that their words generally jab rather than flow — and David is no exception. He’s still leaving messages by the time he rushes into the terminal, where a widely smiling Benji is waiting. They embrace, Benji all but throwing himself at David, and by the time they’ve settled in their plane seats, it feels like you already know them.This sense of awareness, that these are guys you like and maybe even know, is crucial to the movie and how it uses intimacy to fortify its realism. “A Real Pain” is a fluidly blended amalgam of pleasing, approachable subgenres, including an odd-couple buddy flick, a consciousness-raising road movie and a charged family melodrama. These story forms add to the overall sense of familiarity as does the focus on David and Benji, who emerge more through the complexities of their relationship than through individual quirks of personality. We are who we are, Eisenberg says, because of the people in our lives, a truism that becomes more stark and affecting as his characters travel through a country haunted by Jewish ghosts.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Here’ Review: Life Is Like a Box of Regrets

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      Tom Hanks and Robin Wright reunite onscreen for a drama that showcases generations of existence.“Here” is an aeon-spanning experimental collage by Robert Zemeckis that plants the camera in one spot for give-or-take three billion years. The lens is static; the span, epic. An acre of New Jersey braves meteors, an ice age and dinosaurs. Sometime between the Pleistocene and Columbus, a deer tiptoes past. Alan Silvestri’s score swells triumphantly. Evolution!Mostly, however, we’re staring at two houses. The first was erected before the American Revolution and belongs to William Franklin (Daniel Betts), a British loyalist who calls his kite-flying father Benjamin Franklin (Keith Bartlett) a terrorist. Secure in its place in history, the colonial mansion lords its importance over the second house, the lesser house, that you’d never drive out of your way to visit. But these humble digs are the star. Around 1900, the home’s walls get built around the camera, and in turn, the film builds itself around the mundane goings-on inside. Hovering midway between the sofa and the kitchen, we witness a century-plus of holidays, lazy days, kisses, arguments. Nothing worth a commemorative plaque. It’s a tribute to banality.Richard McGuire’s groundbreaking graphic novel of the same name and conceit used comic panels as a special effect, overlapping anonymous figures into a blurry rumination on time. One page illustrates the chronic popularity of Twister. Another captures the progression of swears: “Nincompoop.” “Dweeb.” “Dirt bag.”Zemeckis can be more interested in pixels than people. But this time, he wants recognizable people, too — heck, he wants movie stars — so he and Eric Roth tighten the screenplay’s focus to one family across six decades. There are glimpses of other characters: two Indigenous lovers (Joel Oulette and Dannie McCallum), a snippy suffragist (Michelle Dockery), a jazzy inventor and his wife (David Fynn and Ophelia Lovibond), and a modern family (Nicholas Pinnock and Nikki Amuka-Bird) who exist so close to our era that they come across bland.The design team does a fantastic job delineating the years. Yet, the film treats everyone else like parentheses around the baby boomers Richard and Margaret (played by a de-aged Tom Hanks and Robin Wright), who fall in love as teenagers. Infatuated and naïve, Margaret coos, “I could spend the rest of my life here.” Cut to the young couple pregnant and married (in that order) and inheriting both the furniture and the mistakes of the groom’s parents (Paul Bettany and Kelly Reilly).We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Charles Brandt, Whose Book Inspired ‘The Irishman,’ Dies at 82

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      “I Heard You Paint Houses,” his true-crime best seller about the death of Jimmy Hoffa, was brought to the screen by Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro.Charles Brandt, a former homicide prosecutor whose 2004 true-crime best seller, “I Heard You Paint Houses,” was adapted by Martin Scorsese into “The Irishman,” starring Robert De Niro as the Mafia hit man who killed the ex-Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa, died on Oct. 22 in Wilmington, Del. He was 82.The death, at a hospice facility, was confirmed by his brother-in-law, Gary Goldsmith, who did not specify a cause.Mr. Brandt’s book purported to solve the mystery of Mr. Hoffa’s disappearance and presumed death in 1975. He identified Hoffa’s killer as Frank Sheeran, a World War II veteran and truck driver who had been recruited into the underworld by the Mafia boss Russell Bufalino.Mr. Sheeran did some enforcement work for Mr. Bufalino, who introduced him to Mr. Hoffa, who said to Mr. Sheeran, “I heard you paint houses.” That was apparently mob slang for killing people — with the word “paint” meaning blood.In a series of interviews over five years, Mr. Sheeran told Mr. Brandt that he had been ordered to kill Mr. Hoffa, who had just been released from prison and was trying to regain power in the underworld.Mr. Sheeran recalled luring him to a house in Detroit for a supposed meeting with organized crime figures.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Looking for the Next Streaming Cult Classic? Try Arrow.

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      Horror is well-represented on this service, which makes it an ideal spooky season addition to your streaming menu.Over the past several months, we’ve examined and recommended several streaming services for the discriminating movie lover — sites and apps for those whose tastes run toward titles a bit more esoteric than the likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. Our latest entry spotlights a terrific subscription streamer for genre film fans.The subscription streaming service Arrow has its roots in a boutique physical media distributor much beloved by cinephiles: Arrow Video, established in England in 2009 as an offshoot of the theatrical distributor Arrow Films. The company quickly established itself as a favorite among genre film fans, offering painstaking restorations of long-neglected horror and cult titles on discs packed with copious bonus features; they were one of the reasons so many American collectors invested in all-region disc players, before the company expanded to the U.S. market in 2015.Arrow was one of several companies to enter the subscription streaming space during Covid lockdown, with their platform launching in October 2020. Their initial offerings numbered around 400 titles; they’ve since doubled that number, bolstering their library with short films, documentaries and curated “Selects” collections from name-brand directors like Roger Avary, Eli Roth and Edgar Wright.Horror is unsurprisingly well-represented on Arrow, which makes it an ideal spooky season addition to your streaming menu; the scary movie offerings are so plentiful that one can even deep-dive into subgenres like slashers, giallo, J-horror, zombie movies and once-banned “video nasties.” But there’s more than mere horror in the catalog, which also features offbeat Westerns, science fiction, yakuza crime epics, martial arts movies galore and cult movies of all stripes and decades. Acclaimed directors such as George A. Romero, Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci get well-deserved spotlights, along with lesser-known (to the general public, at least) auteurs like William Grefé and Seijun Suzuki.Arrow’s interface is smooth and easy to use, and the pricing is agreeably reasonable: $6.99 per month or $69.99 for the year, with a current promotion (code: SHOCKTOBER24) cutting 50 percent of the price for the first month. Its offerings are certainly specialized; this is not a Netflix replacement. But viewers with a fondness for the esoteric (and we know you’re out there) will be hard-pressed to find more quality bang for their streaming buck.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What It Means to Make Art About Nazis Now

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      And is the culture telling the right stories about them, at a time when it’s never felt more urgent?A MAN IN a tie and suspenders smokes a cigar thoughtfully, its ash end hot orange in an otherwise cool blue shot. Its fiery pock is the most lurid thing we see in Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest,” even though there’s a crematorium next door.“The Zone of Interest,” winner of the 2024 Academy Award for best international feature, imagines the domestic life of the Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel) and his wife (Sandra Hüller), who for a time lived mere yards from the ovens built to burn the bodies of hundreds of Jews a day. The screenplay might have been ghostwritten by Hannah Arendt, so banal is its portrait of evil. Höss fishes with his children, worries about a promotion, enjoys his garden, conducts an affair. We see no victims, nor, other than that cigar, any flame: just a pretty, smoky glow from the furnaces at night.It’s not as if the movie’s intentions could be misread. Without depicting horror itself, Glazer, who is Jewish, wants to show how easily middle-class values like diligence and ambition were adapted by Nazis to horrible ends. But in avoiding what the cartoonist Art Spiegelman, in response to Roberto Benigni’s 1997 movie “Life Is Beautiful,” called Holokitsch — the sentimental exploitation of victims’ suffering to dredge up drama — “The Zone of Interest” approaches it anyway, only now from the other direction, drawing its aesthetic power from detachment instead of engagement.Is that better?Tear-jerking as they may have been, works like “Life Is Beautiful,” the 1979 mini-series “Holocaust” and Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” (1993) had no trouble plainly acknowledging the murder of six million, which “The Zone of Interest” does only obliquely. If, as the German philosopher Theodor Adorno asserted in 1951, it became “barbaric” to write poetry after Auschwitz, it also, for many, became barbaric not to. What else can artists do with atrocity but make art from it?At the same time, and especially in our time, they are faced with a paradox. The appalling resurgence of antisemitism has made it more important than ever to remind the world of the great crime against the Jews. Yet the names and symbols of Adolf Hitler’s regime — and of Hitler himself, the big rhetorical nesting doll that contains the rest — have been emptied of real meaning by years of overuse as sitcom punch lines (the Soup Nazi from “Seinfeld” nearly three decades ago) and zingers for politicians (Donald Trump called out Joe Biden’s “Gestapo administration” in May). To try to reinvest these ideas with awfulness is to risk aesthetic failure. Not to try is to risk the moral kind.Still, the “Sieg Heil” salutes, SS lightning bolts and swastikas keep coming, even if in most contexts their omnipresence has rendered them not just objectionable but trite. In political discourse, Nazi name-calling almost always diminishes the unique evil of the originals. The words themselves, like amulets, may even burnish the twisted self-respect of those who trade in them. JD Vance, who in 2016 wrote that Trump might be “America’s Hitler,” has had a convenient change of heart, but it’s not clear that Trump minded anyway. That he might just as easily have been called America’s Idi Amin or Joseph Stalin emphasizes the emptiness of the insult.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More