The Iron Claw and The Boys in the Boat

 

Sean Durkin's The Iron Claw and George Clooney's Boys in the Boat offer audiences different takes on androcentrism (male-centered culture) with one (Claw) depicting the destructiveness of toxic masculinity dressed up like filial bonding and the other (Boys) espousing the productive nature of circumstantial fraternity. Both are insightful and engaging pictures.

Durkin's Iron Claw is based on the lives of real-world professional wrestlers the Von Erich brothers of the '70s, who shared an enviable familial attachment to one another and to their father. The brothers are played by Zac Efron (The Greatest Showman), Jeremy Allen White (The Bear), Harris Dickinson (Triangle of Sadness) and Stanley Simons. Efron's Kevin is father Fritz's (Holt McCallany) second favorite after Dickinson's David, followed by White's Kerry (an Olympic-hopeful discus thrower) and Simon's non-wrestler Michael.

This is important because Fritz makes it clear to his boys they win his favor and improve their rankings, which they all desperately want, by working hard to give him what he wants. He's the center of a household in which deeply religious mother Doris (Maura Tierney) plays a decidedly supportive role, fearing to interfere or intervene on behalf of her sons as it relates to their father and his demands.

Durkin's story makes it clear the Von Erich brothers love one another and their parents, after a fashion, but they have been groomed to fulfill their father's frustrated dream of winning a world championship in the heavily scripted televised competitions where image and fan-base wins over talent. The falseness and destructiveness of Fritz's enterprise parallels the chaos and heartbreak they foster in his sons, who seem to have no close associates other than themselves, no desires except what their father has given them. A series of tragic events, beginning with the death of the fifth Von Erich son when he was just a boy, has convinced Fritz the family is cursed, but his sons can defeat it.

Kevin eventually meets Pam (the ever-luminous Lily James) but he lacks dating experience and is uncomfortable outside of the family enclave. Pam eventually frees him, they marry, begin a family, and Kevin slowly loses his edge as a wrestler. This leaves him conflicted and resentful.

As Kevin's star descends, David and Kerry's rise with the aid of drugs, and they eventually become casualties. In fact, the whole family is decimated by the quest.

The opposite of narratives of destructive bonding are stories about the creative potential of brotherhood in the form of team competition. Clooney uses the true story of an underdog University of Washington rowing team defying the odds to compete in the '36 Olympics in Berlin to celebrate the forging of nine individuals into one performing unit.

Joel Edgerton (a personal favorite) stars as Coach Al Ulbrickson, who hopes to mold a junior squad of newbie rowers into shape against better funded and legacy teams in California and on the East Coast. Among the newbies is Joe Rantz, a struggling student living in a migrants' camp, who tries out for the team to get money to continue his studies.

Joe draws the attention of classmate Joyce (Hadley Robinson), who is curious about the quiet boy with the serious face, and their relationship offers counterpoint to the toil of training.

Clooney is a Hollywood traditionalist with a penchant for character-driven stories, but Boys is most riveting as it recreates the bracing action during rowing meets. He puts a lot of emotional weight in Joe's adventure, the blossoming of the introverted oarsman Don (Jack Mulhern) and the brash coxswain Bobby Moch (Luke Slattery) and it's for them we root. But it's in the racing set pieces that Clooney show his razor-sharp eye for telling detail and the thrill of winning because of singularity of purpose.

Such a needed message these days.

Napoleon

 

Director Ridley Scott's epic study of war and ambition, Napoleon, tells two stories -- one of a military genius whose daring and precision were unmatched for a while in the late 18th and early 19th centuries and the other of a severely flawed and emotionally stunted man. The picture is most involving during the elaborate battle scenes Scott has spared no expense in staging with an exacting master's eye for detail. They are brilliant, stirring and bloody and might be painful for some to watch in light of events in the Middle East. The film droops when probing Bonaparte's storied egoism that led the great general and emperor to conflate his personal will and triumphs with those of his country. He WAS France for a while. The source of his narcissism is left to speculation, which might be just as well. Joaquin Phoenix plays the taciturn Napoleon, whose ambitions, fueled by the insatiable hunger for power and admiration, would eventally turn all of Europe, which he had hoped to rule, against him. A savvy strategist in battle, Napoleon was lost in his marriage to the willful, and willfully unfaithful, Josephine (a never-better Vanessa Kirby). Though he seemed to love her desperately (or maybe more precisely needed her to love him desperately) Josephine's inability to bear an heir to succeed Napoleon as emperor -- even though she had two children from a previous marriage -- led Bonaparte to divorce her, ostensibly for the nation's future. But in Scott's telling, it is clear Bonaparte felt diminished by not having a son and could not live with the possibility others would pity him. Still, his attachment to Josephine never waned over the years of their separation, his exile and return, and ultimate defeat at Waterloo. The film's unevenness is not because of the performances -- I did not detect any weak links in the large cast -- but in the vastness of the movie's ambitions. A subject as enormous as Napoleon Bonaparte requires more time, I think. The 4-hour cut of the picture which will be streamed on Apple TV might fill in some of the narrative holes and offer a more fully satisfying viewing experience.

Saltburn

 

Writer / director Emerald Fennell's smoldering send-up of English aristocracy, Saltburn, casts the terrific young Irish actor Barry Keoghan (The Banshees of Inisherin) as Oxford first-year scholarship student Oliver Quick, who befriends an impossibly handsome and irresponsible older student, Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi), the heir to a large country estate.

After becoming carousing buddies, Felix invites Oliver, who has said he's estranged from his drug-addict parents, to the Catton home for the summer. At the house will be Lord and Lady Catton (Richard E. Grant and Rosamund Pike), Felix's sister Vanetia (Alison Oliver), their cousin Farleigh (Archie Madekwe of Gran Turismo) and Lady Catton's sister Pamela (Carey Mulligan of Promising Young Woman). It's a coterie of clueless self-absorption with which Oliver appears to fall in love.

Unlike the title character in Anthony Minghella's 1999 thriller The Talented Mr. Ripley (the comparisons will be inevitable), Oliver is a cipher for much of the first half of the picture. He lurks and observes his betters, and we suspect there is more going on here but can't be sure who, or what, is the object of his obsession. The most obvious answer would be Felix, but there's the boozy Vanetia with whom Ollie consorts half-naked in the garden, and the carping Farleigh, who suspects Oliver is on the hunt but is not immune to seduction.

Fennell takes her time unwrapping the story; Oliver's menace becomes more obvious as the summer progresses. Like Tom Ripley, the unassuming Ollie knows how to stroke the vanities of the idle rich. That they are so easily flattered and manipulated simply adds to the audience's disdain for them and makes it easy to root for the cagey Quick.

Like her 2020 debut picture Promising Young Woman, Fennell's Saltburn will not be for every taste. Its bitterness is heavy, as is its kinkiness. But it's Keoghan, fearlessly baring all in the film's last reel, who makes the whole smarmy party pretty entertaining.

Rustin

 

Award-winning stage director George C. Wolfe's stirring biopic Rustin (a Netflix production that has first been released to big-screen theaters) is more evidence to me that the arts communities will fill the gaps left by the scrubbing of marginalized people from classrooms and history books.

Bayard Rustin, the masterful organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, was long forced out of history's frame by established civil rights leaders who were either envious of his abilities or repulsed by his sexuality.

Only after the success of the historic march and Rustin's expansion of his social change agenda to include labor unions and LGBTQ+ equality was his work re-evaluated and elevated. In fact, Barack and Michelle Obama are executive producers of this wonderful film.

As played by the always-engaging Colman Domingo, Rustin's character is conflicted about some things but absolutely certain about the rightness of his calling, even after being ousted from NAACP leadership by Roy Wilkins (an impressive turn by Chris Rock) and failing to win, at first, the support of his old friend Martin Luther King Jr. (Aml Ameen).

Rustin's relationships with a young, white fellow organizer (Gus Halper) and later a young Black minister affiliated with the NAACP (Johnny Ramey) show that even one steeped in the importance of exactitude in planning social change can be blind to personal matters.

Though he had an outsized personality that galvanized teams of workers and won him great affection and loyalty, Rustin was forced to operate in the background, seeking anonymous and dangerous rendezvous that his political enemies (Sen. Strom Thurmond, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover) sought to dishonor him and dismantle the movement.

Ultimately, the coalition Rustin created with the support of his mentor A. Philip Randolph (a terrific Glynn Turman) united behind him, as evidence was clear of what had been accomplished on that day in August 1963.

And that, to my mind, is the beauty and gift of this film -- that it reminds us (or perhaps tells some for the first time) that turning a country around does not happen with thoughts and prayers but with the "grunt work," as Rustin refers to it, to move people to lay comfort on the line and demand that the nation live up to its promise and its promises.

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The Marvels

 

Despite tissue-thin plotting and a frustrating lack of narrative freshness, writer / director Nia DaCosta's The Marvels squeezes a surprising number of solid laughs into its earnest celebration of female fire in which most of the principals are women.

Brie Larson returns as star-powered Capt. Carol Danvers a/k/a Captain Marvel, and finds herself linked to two other women in (what else?) a battle to save the universe.

Her partners this round are Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris), the brilliant cosmologist daughter of a lost companion who has been mentored by the ubiquitous Avengers wrangler Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), and a teenaged New Jersey fangirl named Kamala (a wonderfully energetic Iman Vellani), who has inherited a powerful bracelet that can turn light into matter.

Hunting the bracelet is Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton), the monomaniacal leader of a dying planet that Captain Marvel doomed in an over-zealous attempt to save its people from a tyrannical intelligence. Dar-Benn owns the bracelet's partner and when she has both she'll be able to restore life to her planet, and destroy everything and everyone held dear by Captain Marvel, whom she calls the Annihilator.

As usual, the picture's sci-fi mumbo-jumbo will turn on diehards but others might find real entertainment in the cockeyed lunacy at work when the serious matters of galactic upheaval are not on the screen. For example, a sequence set in a watery world where the inhabitants' native language is song is so outrageously ridiculous that I thought for a minute I was watching a Monty Python bit.

Of the more than 30 pictures produced by Marvel Studios, The Marvels will not be counted among its best. But for what it is -- a full-throated declaration that "the ladies got this" -- it's a welcome addition to the seemingly endlessly expanding universe.

The Holdovers

 

In Alexander Payne's hilariously tender The Holdovers, a curmudgeonly ancient civilization teacher (Paul Giamatti) spars with his equally dyspeptic teenaged counterpart (Dominic Sessa) in a boarding school over the two-week Christmas break in 1970, when the two of them and the school's kitchen supervisor (Da'vine Joy Randolph) spend the holidays together.

The characters, lovingly crafted by seasoned television writer David Hemingson, are managing personal trauma that they reveal over the course of the fortnight with spirited good and bad humor and the occasional tear.

Payne, who doesn't make a lot of movies but his pictures are always on the money, precisely captures enduring moments that are meaningful because the frailties and fears on display are so familiar to us. All three of the movie's principals -- Giamatti, Randolph and Sessa in his first movie role -- are so immersed in their characters' skins that the parts feel tailor-made.

Giamatti is a frequent Payne collaborator; his monologue on the pinot grape in 2004's Sideways is a cinematic moment for the ages, because of the actor's nuanced reading and the pure poetry of the passage. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCS1Gnwbtp0)

Holdovers has several captivating scenes and Giamatti, who is on camera for most of the film's running time, delivers a performance that will undoubtedly be celebrated for quite a while.

Fiddler on the Roof redux

 

Canadian director Norman Jewison has not only made wonderful pictures but wonderfully IMPORTANT pictures, at least to my mind.

Jewison is photographed here with the stars of 1971's Fiddler on the Roof Norma Crane and (Chaim) Topol. Jewison also directed In the Heat of the Night (1967), A Soldier's Story (1984) and Agnes of God (1985), among other "message movies."

Despite his surname, Jewison was not Jewish. He and his family were Protestants. Jewison had an expansive cinematic eye and a progressive social consciousness regarding human rights.

I rewatched the last scene of Fiddler on the Roof (Anatevka) recently and was put in mind of the many film depictions of the persecution of Jews -- the list is long and no doubt informed by the prominence of Jewish filmmakers in Hollywood.

But that's not to say the depictions are trifling; they do reflect the horrors of history. And that record might in turn inform America's affinity for Israel -- although other political matters are part of it, too.

Even so, it's difficult watching the last scene of Fiddler as the bereft residents of Anatevka march out of their burned-out village after a visit by the tsar's cossacks and not imagine similar scenes of pain and devastation in Gaza.

A friend of mine who describes herself as almost reflexively pro-Israel said to me yesterday, it's all so awful. It cannot be why we're on this planet.

I agree -- on both counts.

Radical

 

Especially for educators, Radical will resonate loud and long after the credits roll.

Set in a desperately poor Mexican town across the border from Brownsville, Texas, Radical is Christopher Zalla's heartwarming account of a zealous 6th-grade teacher (an amazing Eugenio Derbez of CODA) who comes to a distressed, under-resourced and under-inspired school where the students rarely graduate, lost to the harsh realities of criminality and poverty. Those students followed most closely in the picture are delightfully authentic; we care deeply about them and their families, their fates.

Derbez's Sergio Juarez is imbued with spirited confidence in the rightness of his unorthodox approach to teaching, his faith in the children's potential, so much so that he makes a convert of the battle-worn school director, played by Daniel Haddad, and their friendship is one of the movie's bonuses.

But as is the case with most of these inspirational true tales, events involving governmental corruption and parental shortsightedness threaten to derail Sergio's good work and douse the fire he has lit in his young charges.

Yes, the story is a bit familiar, but its heart is enormous and its optimism so welcome in these cynical days.

Killers of the Flower Moon

 

Martin Scorsese's engrossing masterwork Killers of the Flower Moon takes the true story of the murder of members of the wealthy Osage tribe in Oklahoma in the 1920s and turns it into a study of corruption, greed and white supremacy.

The picture's 206-minute running time covers about a dozen bloody years, when white settlers on Osage land overflowing with oil find ways to insinuate themselves into tribal affairs in hopes of eventually making themselves rich. Standing between the schemers and the tribe's money are laws prohibiting non-tribal members from inheriting oil rights ... except through marriage.

Robert De Niro, Scorsese's longtime collaborator, is William "King" Hale, the prime schemer and uncle to returning doughboy Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio), a slow-witted young man with no demonstrable talent who goes to work as a cab driver.

Through this job, he meets an unattached Osage woman named Mollie, played by the remarkable Lily Gladstone, whom he is encouraged by his uncle to woo, as Mollie's mother is sickly, her older sister a destructive alcoholic, and her other sisters already married. Mollie herself is suffering from diabetes. King tells Ernest if he marries Mollie and lets "nature" take its course her family's great wealth will one day be his, or rather theirs.

The plan progresses. Members of Mollie's family are slowly killed off by ghostly figures, leaving her only support Ernest, who claims to love her more than he does money, and King.

More than 20 Osage members are murdered, and the federal government dispatches investigators led by Tom White (the ever-reliable Jesse Plemons) to ferret out the killers.

Scorsese weaves into the tapestry of this "gangland" tale much historical and cultural context about the Osage people, and it is in those passages -- some staged as newsreel footage and others as dreams and fantasy -- that the director offers his most elegiac imagery.

Most notably for me was a field-burning scene late in the picture that depicts the event giving the picture and its source material its meaning. It is chillingly emblematic of the destruction of not only Osage people but all Native American tribes.

Joan Baez: I Am a Noise

 

Directors Miri Navasky, Maeve O'Boyle and Karen O'Connor's touching and illuminating documentary Joan Baez: I Am a Noise is only secondarily a musical retrospective. 

It is primarily an exploration of the spirit of an 82-year-old woman who has been both gifted with a heavenly voice and social consciousness and tortured by demons she's never fully understood.

The film is bookended by Baez's preparation for a final tour after many years of absence from the stage and includes family footage mostly shot by her father, a Mexican immigrant who was an accomplished physics professor. Baez recounts being plagued by depression and anxiety as a child, conditions she would struggle with for the rest of her life and the cause of which is suggested but not firmly established.

Her public story is familiar to many -- her relationships with Bob Dylan, whom she introduced to public audiences in the early '60s, and anti-war activist David Harris, whom she would marry and with whom she had a son, Gabriel. Many already know of her participation in Civil Rights protests in the South and world peace campaigns all over the country.

Less familiar would be the parts of her story that involved her sisters -- Pauline and Mimi -- and their varying degrees of closeness and distance, support and resentment, and the impact her parents would have on both her success and her despondency.  

Themes of personal and familial unhappiness course through this riveting picture, which incorporates live and recorded performances by Baez and footage of her social justice work. 

Though she no longer has the clarion soprano of her youth, her voice is still lovely and her convictions have not waned, despite the fierce battles she has waged to maintain her sanity and emotional wholeness. 

A scene of Baez dancing barefoot to a drum squad in a Paris street is so joyful we forget for a minute her struggles with stifling sadness, most achingly portrayed in passages and drawings from her childhood journals. 

Hers has been both an incredibly public and private existence that has enriched the world in incalculable ways. The picture is a loving and vital tribute to a remarkable woman.

Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal

 

Season 1of Netflix's Murdaugh documentary featured no people of color in any substantial way in running down the events of the murders and the earlier boat crash.

Season 2 prominently features a Hispanic woman who worked as the Murdaugh's housekeeper and an African American woman who was caretaker to Alex Murdaugh's parents.

These are longstanding roles in the South, especially where there were strict divisions between the white, wealthy propertied class and those who worked for them -- poor whites and people of color -- with the latter often being exploited and manipulated by the former.

The Creator

 

Gareth Edwards' The Creator presents two minds to audiences.
One is concerned with the threat of unbound technological advancement, and the other the benign hybridization of humans and machines.

Both of these themes have been explored numerous times in film and television and, I feel, with more impact (Spielberg's A.I.: Artificial Intelligence [2001] and Alex Garland Ex Machina [2014]).

The apocalyptic world that Edwards has created with co-writer Chris Weitz is set decades in the future with humans and machines on two different continents. The machines inhabit "New Asia" and the humans, a militarized America, where the president is a uniformed officer. Yes, the socio-political messaging here is pretty heavy.

John David Washington plays Joshua, an Army sergeant on undercover assignment in New Asia, married to Maya (Gemma Chan), a human raised by A.I., who is pregnant with the couple's first child.

They are living peacefully in an A.I. enclave when a gigantic, floating American vessel drops bombs on the village just as Maya, who did not know Joshua was a spy, tries to join the A.I. forces in fighting back. Joshua and Maya are separated, and Maya presumed dead.

Five years later, Joshua is part of a mission led by Colonel Howell (Allison Janney) to locate and capture a device that could neutralize all American weaponry. Joshua discovers the device is actually a simulant child (Madeleine Yuna Voyles). After the rest of the mission team is killed, Joshua takes charge of the child / weapon.

Predictably, Joshua and the child, whom he names Alphie, develop a bond as they try to elude Howell's forces who are determined to destroy her. During their flight, Joshua learns from a simulant fighter (Ken Watanabe) that Maya may be alive, and Joshua sets out to find her.

Edwards' visual effects artistry is on display in nearly every frame of this picture, particularly in the robots and simulants. But the movie's reliance on familiar narrative tropes and some anachronistic dialogue (Get in! This will be hellafun!) kept it from becoming a fully immersive experience.

Jesse Plemons

 

Jesse Plemons does not have a Hollywood-handsome face and is paunchy. I don't think I've ever heard him in a role where his Texas accent was not present. He will likely never play Hamlet -- though I think that could be quite a performance. He's not a method actor but appears to invest himself fully into his characters -- men who would quite likely -- were they real -- look like him. He's done comedy, family drama, period pieces, psychological thrillers -- film and television. He's won awards and will surely win more. He's as solid and appealing an actor as any I can think of and if film distributors DO NOT include him in the trailer for a picture -- no matter how small his part -- they're absolutely crazy. Plemons is in Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon as FBI agent Tom White. He is one of the few younger members of the Friday Night Lights television series cast to go on to build a substantial career.

Dumb Money

 Film and television director Craig Gillespie's Dumb Money is a spirited companion to Adam McKay's The Big Short (2015) as it recounts the phenomenal climb of the price of stock for video game and accessories retailer Game Stop and the response of Wall Street insiders to the threat the stock's success posed to their lucrative short positions, that is, they were betting on Game Stop's failure as more video gaming moved online.

Leading the charge for Game Stop stock was Massachusetts financial analyst and amateur trader Keith Gill (Paul Dano), who through his YouTube channel Roaring Kitty inspired the unprecedented bull run by others fired up by Gill's unvarnished deliver and transparency.

The screenplay by Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo, based on the book by Ben Mezrich, covers a lot of ground as it tracks Gill's journey with Game Stop, a handful of inexperienced traders from all walks (America Ferrera, Myha'la Herrold, Anthony Ramos, Talia Ryder) and the hedge-fund brokers (Seth Rogen, Vincent D'Onofrio, Nick Offerman) who were betting on Game Stop's financial collapse.

"Dumb Money," a disparaging term that refers to the capital managed by amateurs, does not have The Big Short's cheekiness but it does have the earlier film's anti-greed ethos and the added kick of a fully extended middle finger to billionaire schemers who shut out the common person and those who allow them to do so.

It Lives Inside

 

Director Bishal Dutta's It Lives Inside has been positioned in the horror genre market by the same folks who greenlighted Jordan Peele's game-changer Get Out (2017).

Dutta's nifty little assimilationist's nightmare is not as polished as Peele's stellar pictures are but it is a cultural curio that is well worth a look by fans of scare fests that also serve as social commentary. (The aforementioned Get Out.)

Megan Suri stars as Samidha (Sam), an Indian-American high schooler who is alienated from her Asian heritage, much to the disappointment of her mother, Poorna (Neeru Bajwa), a cultural purist who refuses to speak English, prepares only tradition desi dishes and hosts holiday celebrations. Sam's father, Inesh (Vik Sahay) is more tolerant of their daughter's explorations and is a buffer between Sam and Poorna.

When Sam's friend Tamira (Mohana Krishnan), who has turned into a bit of a walking zombie, starts carting about a jar with dark markings on it, Sam works even harder to put distance between them. One afternoon, Tamira asks Sam for help with the entity she says is trapped in the jar, something she retrieved from the home of another Indian-American student who was killed along with his family in their home. Sam sends Tamira away.

Sam's kind teacher Joyce (Betty Gabriel of Get Out) urges Sam not to turn her back on her friend because the children of immigrants should stick together.

This is not a persuasive argument for Sam, who does reject her friend and accidently breaks the jar. The entity is released, and, as is the way with such stories, all hell breaks loose in the form of an ancient soul-eater, the Pishach. Tamira disappears and people start dying.

Dutta and co-writer Ashish Mehta fold much cultural significance into Sam's battle with her own identity and the demonic presence that seems to feed on the fear and uncertainty of its host.

The spirit might be read as the struggle many children of immigrants face while trying to find their place in a country that is not always accommodating or welcoming, that often demands conformity and threatens rejection.

This Is It Remembered

 

According to headcounters, about 1/4 of the people on the planet were not alive when Michael Jackson was ... but I would wager many of them know his music, if not the man.

The rumors, the charges, the trials, the (startling) physical metamorphosis, and the death might, for some, overshadow Jackson's importance to popular culture worldwide.

No shortage of material about Jackson -- warts and all -- is available for those who aren't familiar. I think the most fascinating document is the film that was released just months after Jackson's death -- This Is It. It's a record of his rehearsals for an upcoming tour.

I watched this engrossing picture three times over the course of its opening weekend in October 2009.

First, I wanted to see if there were any signs of illness captured on film. Aside from his gauntness, he didn't appear to be ailing.

Then, I watched it to think about the choices made by veteran TV and video director Kenny Ortega in compiling what would be Jackson's last performance.

Finally, I watched it to be astounded, once more, by the preternatural artistry that defined Jackson from his childhood.

I left the last viewing having affirmed something that really didn't need affirmation -- we are all more than one thing.

In the case of Michael Jackson, this may have been truer than it was for most of the rest of us. Tragically so.

A Haunting in Venice

 

Actor / director Kenneth Branagh's latest Hercule Poirot mystery -- A Haunting in Venice -- is a predictably entertaining picture with those anticipated Agatha Christie twists and misdirections and some added spookiness, presumably an early nod to Halloween.

Poirot (Branagh) has retired to Venice to tend a garden, eat pastries and avoid crowds wanting to contract the famous Belgian detective for some private sleuthing.

It's there he is found by mystery writer Ariadne Oliver (a cheeky Tina Fey), who invites her old friend to attend a seance at a local villa that will be conducted by a celebrated medium, Mrs. Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh), at the request of the villa's owner. Oliver suspects Mrs. Reynolds is a fraud but has not been able to figure out her gimmick. Poirot is, of course, skeptical but agrees to attend, reluctantly.

Stories of a child-killing physican at the villa have given rise to the legend of vengeful spirits murdering residents. The seance is being held to settle some unanswered questions.

Assembled for the seance are the mother (Kelly Reilly) of a young woman (Rowan Robinson) whose dead body was pulled from the canal, presumably a suicide; the girl's former boyfriend (Kyle Allen) and the villa's housekeeper (Camille Cottin). Also present are the battle-scarred doctor who retrieved the girl from the water and his young son, played by Jamie Dornan and Jude Hill, respectively, both of whom starred in Branagh's award-winning Belfast (2021).

Christie fans will no doubt wonder about the suggestion of horror hoo-doo but the story, which feels a bit more contained and claustrophobic than others, stays true to the spirit of the great writer's work and provides some satisfying surprises.

Outlaw Johnny Black

 

Michael Jai White's Outlaw Johnny Black is witty and culturally insightful but suffers from some distracting production design and casting choices that might be intentionally slipshod to be read as parodic of Hollywood Westerns, but they might actually be signs of the movie's lack of polish.

White stars as the title character, a fugitive gunslinger on a 25-year hunt for Brett Clayton (Chris Browning), a fast gun who shot and killed Black's father (Glynn Turman), a rodeo marksman and preacher.

When the film opens, Black has followed leads to the town of Cheyanne (sic) where through a series of outlandish events he gets charged with the murder of the town sheriff.

Black is saved from hanging by two Indians (white actors cast in the roles) he'd earlier rescued from a mob. He resumes his quest and soon meets a preacher (co-writer Byron Minns) on his way to the town of Hope Springs (as in "eternal") to take over the church of a recently killed minister and to meet and marry the beautiful Bessie (Erica Ash).

[Both White and Minns are veteran television and film actors. Outlaw Johnny Black is their second feature film collaboration; their first was Black Dynamite (2009), which was adapted into a successful animated series.]

Over the course of an eventful evening, the preacher is shot with an arrow, Black assumes his identity and leaves for Hope Springs, a town that seems to be run by Blacks, except for law enforcement. While there he meets and falls for Bessie's sister Jessie (Anika Noni Rose).

Disputes, mistaken identities and buried "treasure" lead to the (inevitable) showdown between townspeople and wealthy rancher and resident bad guy Tom Sheally, played by Barry Bostwick, who wants to take over the town and will burn it down if he doesn't get it.

The picture is overly long (2 hours 15) and is hit-and-miss but includes sharp commentary on disunity, fraud and the criminal taking of Black-owned property by the powerful.

The Nun 2

 

Titles like "The Nun 2" strike me at first as a studio placeholder used until something better is offered but then nothing ever is.

I understand the marketing purpose of using numbers in titling sequels and prequels (dayquels? nightquels?) but I wish studios would give more thought to individualizing the chapters in a franchise.

I do like that this branch of the popular Conjuring movies (a half-dozen pictures by now) went for something different in 2018 with The Nun, even if the demon-possession plotlines and the jump scares are pretty standard fare.

In The Nun series, Taissa Farmiga plays Sister Irene, which this former Catholic schoolboy thought was an interesting naming choice considering the story is set in 1956, before the Vatican let nuns keep their birth names.

Irene is a Vatican-trained and endorsed exorcist, another progressive move for the famously conservative Roman Catholic Church of the '50s. But, then, who am I to cavil about sensible narrative choices in a picture about a devil nun seeking the gouged eyeballs of a third-century saint.

Irene, who is living quietly in a convent when the story opens, is contacted after a priest in France is immolated by the evil sister Valek. Church sleuths figure the spirit is after St. Lucy's eyes because with them she would be unstoppable in her pursuit of, well, it's not entirely clear what but let's assume its world domination.

Irene is joined in her righteous crusade by a spunky novice at the convent named Debra (Storm Reid). Debra is having a crisis of faith that sounds mostly like bitterness about her father ordering her into a nunnery. Irene proposes that facing a fallen angel will square away all of Debra's doubts.

The pair eventually find themselves at a girls boarding school that was once a monastery and is likely where they will find the holy relic Irene will use to send the demon "back to hell" -- a line anyone who has seen a horror flick will surely anticipate. The caretaker at the school, a young hunk named Maurice (Jonas Bloquet), who was in the previous film, seems to be unwittingly transporting the demon from place to place. Must he die for the world to be free of Sister Valek? Meh.

Michael Chaves' The Nun 2 is diverting with some solid scares but the story seems to lack conviction beyond keeping the Conjuring franchise moving forward.

Theater Camp

 

Like the world it depicts with such goofy joy, Theater Camp is a celebration of creative collaboration and sends a glitzy affirming message to all those kids picked last for sports.

Co-directed by Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman, a first feature for both, Theater Camp was co-written by Gordon, Lieberman, Noah Galvin (who plays Glenn, the stage manager with the big secret) and Ben Platt (Tony-winning star of Dear Evan Hansen). It's a sometimes grainy mockumentary about a financially strapped summer stock program in the Adirondacks for young thespians, "Adirond Acts," that is on the verge of being shut down.

The camp has been shepherded, more or less responsibly, by two women -- Rita (Caroline Aaron) and Joan (Amy Sedaris). Joan falls into a coma just before camp opens, and her clueless son, Troy, played by the eternal Bro Dude Jimmy Tatro, takes over for his mother. Troy doesn't get theater and so is dismissed by the camp's crew, who, except for Glenn, are as clueless as Troy in their own ways. But Troy persists until faced by the inevitable.

Gordon and Platt play Rebecca-Diane and Aaron, former lovers and now devoted friends and collaborators (perhaps modeled after Gordon and Lieberman) who are committed to keeping the camp going despite being blind to their own deficiencies and vanities and perhaps using the camp to hide from their inadequacies.

The large cast is a delightful smorgasbord of drama types, some gifted, others not; they will undoubtedly be familiar to theater nerds in the audience. The "drama" of Theater Camp is in the "inside baseball" chatter and chaos surrounding staging live performance, with the legendary queerness of musical theater on full display in heels and feathers.

And to that latter point, I can imagine some reactionaries questioning the propriety of having such young Out and Proud characters in the story. I suspect Galvin and Platt, both openly gay, would argue many kids today are owning their sexuality when they first recognize their attractions. Theater Camp, perhaps both in the film and in real life, is telling them you're safe here.

And that, along with all of the great lines, terrific songs and the fact that they didn't invert the "e" and "r" in Theater, is welcome indeed.

The Equalizer 3

 

Antoine Fuqua likes directing pictures about bad good men or men who aren't sure which they are, as Denzel Washington's Robert McCall describes himself when asked by a doctor tending to the wounds McCall sustained in Equalizer 3's opening sequence.

In either case, Fuqua's protagonists are often engaged in quests that are partly vengeance and partly redemption.

Washington, who is almost 70, reprises his role as an anal-retentive killing machine who finds himself in a beautiful village on the Amalfi coast of Italy after methodically neutralizing a drug-smuggling operation in Sicily. The mafioso in picturesque Altamonte terrorize the people and cow the police for reasons that aren't made clear until the final reel.

McCall is ambivalent about playing avenging angel as he settles into life in the village and meets the criminal "cancer" (Andrea Scarduzio) that's intent on turning the town into his base of operation.

A former Marine and black ops asset, McCall passes along information about the drug-smuggling in Sicily to a junior CIA agent named Emma Collins, played by Dakota Fanning. Collins tracks McCall to the village. She is both challenged and intrigued by the mysterious informant.

When it becomes clear that peace will not come to the village without his help, McCall, with his trademark precision, takes on the Mob with slasher intensity.

The body count might lead some to compare the Equalizer franchise to the much more cartoonish John Wick series, but the ethos at work in the former is much more righteous, in a twisted Hollywood way, than the latter. Both McCall and Wick are lethal assassins, but McCall is indeed a decent human being, while Wick is more of a determined victim of unsavory circumstances brought on by his former underworld occupation.

Equalizer 3 underscores what the two previous pictures established -- nothing is deadlier than a good man pissed off.

Past Lives

 

Director Celine Song's quietly iridescent feature film debut Past Lives is the kind of movie cinephiles love -- unpretentious, stunningly beautiful stories that are driven by characters we care for deeply.

In Past Lives, Song, with masterful visual eloquence, tells the story of a young Korean immigrant woman, Nora (an enchanting Greta Lee in her first lead role), who reconnects with her childhood sweetheart Hae Sung (an endearing Teo Yoo) after nearly 20 years of separation.

Since the two were schoolmates in Seoul, Nora has moved to New York to become a playwright. She has married Arthur, a white Jewish American writer (the ever-wonderful John Magaro) she met during a residency in Montauk, and she has become a Korean-American, a distinction that grows more salient as this involving story unfolds.

Arthur has come to love Nora deeply but accepts that he might not be whom she was meant to be with, in keeping with the Buddhist belief in fated destiny. Magaro (a personal favorite of mine since his delightful turn as Charlie in The Big Short) plays Arthur's fear and uncertainty with brilliant understatement. We feel and fear for him.

For his part, Hae Sung has pined for Nora, whom he knew as Na Young when she was a girl. After an initial attempt to reconnect with her 12 years after her departure, Nora insisted that they not continue their regular Facetime conversations. The wounding for Hae Sung was deep, and he was unable to let go of the possibilities that slipped away.

When Hae Sung finally makes the trip to New York City -- reputedly for vacation but actually to see Nora / Na -- 12 years after their last conversation, the meeting is fraught with the awkwardness on can imagine. This scene of the old friends' initial meeting is lovely, wistful and, yes, quite sad.

The film is deliberately paced and structured around the interactions among its three principal characters who epitomize what is (mostly) good in (most) human beings -- tenderheartedness and ambivalence, uncertainty about our decisions but resolve to see through our commitments, be they fated or not.

Song's film, one of the best I've seen this year, matches the hope and heartache at its center with breathtaking photography of both cityscapes and those dimly lit, intimate spaces where people have difficult exchanges about which the outcomes are uncertain.

Blue Beetle

 

Puerto Rican director Angel Manuel Soto's Blue Beetle feels a bit like a retread, but it is so sweetly pimped-out that audiences are not likely to care -- which will do wonders for the DC Universe's limping feature film franchise.

Xolo Maridueña (Cobra Kai) lends abundant charm to the role of Jaime (pronounced Hy-me not Jay-me) Reyes, who returns to fictional Palmera City (think a Southwest version of Gotham City or Metropolis) after having graduated from college.

He returns to the loving embrace of his partly undocumented Mexican immigrant family -- Damián Alcázar as father Alberto, Elpidia Carrillo as mother Rocio, Adriana Barraza as Nana, Belissa Escobedo as sister Milagro, and George Lopez as Uncle Rudy. They're all full of fire and vinegar and optimism, but it's Rudy who delivers copious amounts of lunacy, wisdom and, not coincidentally, skepticism.

The family bears news that they are being forced out of their home by the locally headquartered, voracious weapons manufacturer Kord Industries, which has essentially ghettoized Latino residents onto a slip of land the people call the Keys.

The corporation is headed by the viperous CEO Victoria Kord (a delectably evil Susan Sarandon), whose rebellious niece Jenny (Bruna Marquezine) steals Victoria's secret weapon, alien technology known as "the Scarab," which ends up first in Jaime's possession and ultimately taking possession of him, turning the affably innocent kid into the ultimate fighting machine.

Even though the Blue Beetle series has a long history, this telling turns the story of a minor league superhero into not just a cautionary tale about those historically cozy bedfellows -- private industry and the Pentagon -- but a welcome take on cultural annihilation and the spirits that are awakened in the face of existential threats, even when those threats are backed by the government.

Note to Soto -- this viewer is eagerly anticipating Nana's freedom fighter backstory -- ¡Abajo los imperialistas!

Passages

 

Ira Sachs' psychological drama Passages is only in the loosest sense about a "love triangle" because the three principals -- Tomas, Martin and Agathe -- are not actually in love. It would be more accurate to say they are in love with notions, and not necessarily romantic ones. They are a mess, individually and collectively.

Tomas (Franz Rogowski) is a self-indulgent German filmmaker living in Paris with his patient and enabling husband, Englishman Martin (Ben Whishaw), when they meet a young French woman Agathe (Adèle Exarchopoulos) at a night club. Tomas, apparently bored with the predictability of his life with Martin, goes to bed with Agathe for no reason other than he wanted to.

Martin takes the news of Tomas's encounter with Agathe with an equanimity that Whishaw plays with such weary acceptance that it must be his character's usual response to his husband's flights and attention-seeking.

For her part, Agathe, a school teacher, breaks up with her boyfriend in the first minutes of the film with a curt dismissal that would be imperious coming from an older woman, but with the 20-something Parisian, it seems just callow and wounding.

It's not clear why Tomas and Martin are still together considering how indifferent Tomas is toward Martin's existence, except in the ways it affirms his own.

And it's hard to pity Martin for being in an increasingly toxic relationship with Tomas; the source of his spiritual weakness is a mystery. The trio's damage is confounding but seems rooted in sexual expressiveness, which Sachs stages in lengthy scenes among the principals.

While its story is a bit sour and distancing, Passages is refreshing in that it doesn't try to salvage its characters from their bad choices. That's not to say Tomas, Martin and Agathe are not better off by the end of the picture but it does leave open what their next chapters will be like and if they will be substantially different from what we have just witnessed.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem

Jeff Rowe and Kyler Spears' Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is as family-friendly as a Seth Rogen and Jeff Goldberg-written / produced film can ever be without it turning into something completely out-of-character for the highly bankable moviemakers.

The four angsty adolescent turtle-boys of the title -- Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael and Donatello -- are aching to explore the world of the humans (a familiar plotline in youth-market entertainment products) in hopes of showing that mutants are not that different from them. Everybody loves Beyonce!

The actors voicing the quartet -- Micah Abbey, Shamon Brown Jr., Nicolas Cantu and Brady Noon -- are joined by The Bear's MVP Ayo Adebiri as high school journalist April on a crime-fighting expedition. They venture out of the sewers over the objections of the turtles' adoptive father, the sensei rat Splinter (voiced by Jackie Chan), who warned them the humans can't be trusted.

While above ground, the turtles get to display their martial skills while battling a group of fellow mutants led by the mouthy Superfly (Ice Cube) as an ol' skool gangster intent on destroying the humans and freeing the mutants, and an evil mastermind (Maya Rudolph) who is eager to get her hands on the "ooze" that makes the turtles so special.

Rowe and Spears' Ninja Turtles, the latest in a host of related products in the venerable franchise, displays Rogen and Goldberg's long-standing fascination with youth and popular culture, and their humor and humanity to great gritty effect.