Working Man: SHELTER and MUTINY

I love that both 90-minute Jason Statham action thrillers released this year are one-word titles, and that they’re each a verb that could also be a noun. It speaks to the steady, sturdy reliability of Statham’s career as an action star. Of course he’ll be thrown into a predicament wherein he has to verb all the nouns until the villainous are dead and the innocent are safe. In Shelter, he’s an ex-military man who has to protect a little girl from a paramilitary conspiracy that wants him dead. In Mutiny, he’s an ex-military man who has to protect human trafficking victims from a corporate conspiracy that wants him dead. Let it not be said that Statham pictures lack range. They’re adept at finding infinite varieties of the same basic plot particulars. He’s been the star of these mid-budget action flicks for about 25 years now. Most of them are somewhere between good and pretty good. At this point it’s safe to say he’s had a longer run of quality control than most stars of his ilk.

I like Shelter’s emotional appeals, with Statham as a man living in exile on a remote British isle to hide from the special forces of which he used to be part, and now forced to care for a friend’s niece after a tragedy leaves her washed up on shore. It’s not exactly novel to see the tough guy melt a little under paternal figure pressures. But the tentativeness with which he plays it, and the deep, reasonable, suspicion the girl holds onto makes it all the more satisfying as they learn to trust each other. He hits some notes of warmth and sensitivity through his usual terse man-of-action gruff competence. And she, played with an unforced naturalism by Bodhi Rae Breathnach, the older girl in Hamnet, is neither too phony adorable nor too ready for violence. The movie’s a happy medium. Director Ric Roman Waugh (Angel Has Fallen) keeps the emotions handled with a light touch while pushing the momentum up. It jumps through some Bourne-adjacent set-pieces with determined hit men in the field and officials in suits stalking around control rooms. It races to exciting, melancholic conclusions, delivering exactly what you’d want from the premise in exactly the right proportions. You can trust Statham to do the right thing, even if it hurts. 

Mutiny is less outwardly emotional, but just as efficient and in a necessarily more contained plot. It’s largely set on a boat and uses every part of the vessel before it’s done. It uses our sense of Statham’s screen presence well. He first turns up at night, backlit in silhouette behind the wheel of a truck. Just from the shape of his head we know it’s him. How’s that for brand recognition? And even though he’s the driver of a vehicle that just purposely hit another, we just know he has a good reason. He’s out for justice. There’s never any doubt. The movie flashes back for some slightly convoluted setup to get his mild-mannered security guard on a cargo boat and in the know of the bad guys’ plot. But once he realizes that these guys murdered his nice CEO boss (suspend your disbelief!) and have shipping containers full of humans to sell, he knows he needs to take them all down. Director Jean-François Richet (Plane) makes crisp, clean use of the setting, and leans on Statham’s persona to fill in the gaps. We just believe he could navigate the tight turns and large pipes, the anchor and the harpoon gun. There are some thinly sketched characters around him, from a slimy captain to a sympathetic third-mate (Annabelle Wallis) to a navy vessel on the phone. But it’s largely his show and it’s fun to see him punch and stab his way through 20 villainous guys. He knows what his audience wants and just keeps delivering.

Girls Meet World: ROOMMATESand DON'T SAY GOOD LUCK

Wordsworth said the child is the father of the man. Consider the case of Adam Sandler. His early movies were certainly childish. They were boyish goofs, crude, rude, and ultimately harmless. They could be fun, too! That at their laziest they grew to become excuses to hang out with buddies on the studio’s dime is just symptomatic of those adolescent impulses. But time marches on. He’s a dad of two grown daughters now. They’re both actresses and he’s used his clout to help get them started. I’m glad he did. They give nepo babies a good name, with screen personas that are winningly sensitive and open-hearted. The older, Sadie, has a slightly distant and deeper vein of irony she’ll play around with. The younger, Sunny, has a more closely-held tremulous innocence. They’re similar instruments playing slightly different notes in the same timber. Their movies also happen to be the most emotionally intelligent Sandler’s Happy Madison productions has made. Turns out these children helped remake the man. It’s clear he’s proud of his daughters, and it’s nice that he holds their screenplays to a higher standard than his own. He co-starred with them in the charming tween comedy You’re So Not Invited to My Bar Mitzvah and they co-starred with him in the shaggy belated Happy Gilmore 2. The parent-daughter material of each elevated the projects, taking the former to terrific and the latter to passable. This summer has each daughter starring in her own movie, each without her father in the cast. Sadie Sandler has college comedy Roommates. Sunny Sandler has high school drama Don’t Say Good Luck. Both films are from terrific indie directors and are fitted perfectly to their strengths. Each has a nicely textured balance between emotional honesty and well-earned laughs, though in different proportions. 

Roommates is an unusually thoughtful college comedy, getting something truthful about friendship struggles into the usual moves for such a picture. It has crude humor, raucous parties, bad behavior, and other expected hijinks. But it also has a sharp understanding of the subtle shifts of power and insecurity in the pressure cooker setting of a freshman dorm room. Sadie Sandler plays a shy girl who never really made friends in high school, pinning her hopes on meeting new people at college. Her roommate (Chloe East) is a confident loose cannon, who wears revealing clothes and boldly struts toward whatever, and whomever, she wants. Sandler is drawn toward her charisma, wanting to be friends, but also a little nervous about her unpredictability. The movie is directed with a bright studio comedy aesthetic married to a perceptive attentiveness to character dynamics. Filmmaker Chandler Levack, whose indies I Love Movies and Mile End Kicks are similar sweet-and-sour character comedies about particular cultural spaces (the video rental store and music journalism, respectively), brings her casually insightful eye to a glossier studio product. She gets really terrific performances out of the cast—both the collegiate pals and adult figures (Natasha Lyonne, Nick Kroll, Janeane Garofalo, Carol Kane). Sandler makes an intensely sympathetic figure; we see why she’d want to go along out of her comfort zone, but it makes each little heartbreak all the more impactful. But it’s East—you might recognize her as one of the trapped missionaries in Heretic or Sammy’s Christian girlfriend in The Fabelmans—who makes the most out of what a lesser comedy would make a mere whirling dervish of party girl energy. Instead she brings out a brittle fragility just barely hidden beneath the bravado. It’s something her impressed new roomie easily misses until it’s too late. The movie gets a little broad and silly at times—the finale and frame story are especially goofy—but it never loses that believable core. 

Although it’s ultimately a tearjerker of a drama, Don’t Say Good Luck has some traditional high school comedy moves. It has warmly funny theater kid supporting players, some wise supportive teachers, and a sweet sentimental family life to surround Sunny Sandler’s main character. She’s a teenager excited to get the lead role in her school musical production of Waitress and is prepping for a hectic practice schedule. And then her mom gets a potentially fatal diagnosis. The movie becomes a breezy movie of usual high school problems consistently undercut by jackknifing emotional intrusions. Sudden jabbing grief cuts deep into what should be quotidian teenage concerns, making every usual problem—crushes, homework, friend drama—both heightened by her emotional rawness and diminished in comparison to the literal life and death problems at home. It’s a potent mix, getting some laughs in amid the gut-punch dramatic moments. As the mother, Melanie Lynskey brings such a deep well of maternal energy channeled into a fluttering between fear for herself and care for her family. And it’s all the more moving for her underplaying the lines that a heavier hand would’ve turned mawkish. Similarly, the movie as a whole, benefits from a gentle lived-in look and tone. It’s not a simple movie of Brave Suffering or a mere march through realistic misery. It’s just charmingly real in a polished studio movie way, refreshingly honest about the rough edges and crosscurrent pressures of its believable situations. As the mother’s condition worsens and the show’s opening night grows closer, you can start to see the outlines of moving moments ahead. But when it steers hard into them, it pays off with a succession of lump-in-the-throat scenes that are deeply felt and honestly portrayed. (If you’re already aware the songs in Waitress are moving, just wait for the climactic deployment here.) Director Julia Hart (Stargirl) knows how to make a small-scale, big emotion, broadly appealing movie, and trusts her cast to pull it off with subtle, but no less devastating, impact. She knows it’ll feel good to have such a genuine cry. 

Dino Might: THE END OF OAK STREET

We used to regularly have big summer special effects pictures with a light touch, lots of surprises, and a neat conclusion. The End of Oak Street makes it look so easy you’ll wonder why they've gone the way of the...well....dinosaur. If only all of its ilk were so simple and satisfying. Writer-director David Robert Mitchell’s working with an irresistible premise delivered quickly and confidently. It’s thin, but pays out with big results. The idea is this: a block of suburban Michigan is zapped from 1982 back to prehistoric times. The escalation is expertly handled from the early quotidian unease (maybe it’s just a power outage!), to the slow reveals (oh, it’s definitely not!), to the climactic tumbling out of variables that are both surprising and inevitable. We follow one family (mom Anne Hathaway, dad Ewan McGregor, and two teenagers) as they try to survive dinosaurs roaming their neighborhood. How do they get out of this predicament when their neighbors are getting chomped, and there seems to be no way home? The suspense is obvious here, but it’s no less exciting to see enormous creatures wandering down the asphalt, rummaging in trash cans, slipping through the forest, and towering over homes. What kid in a dinosaur phase hasn’t looked out the car window and wondered what that’d look like? The movie has the energy of imaginative wonderment driven into lean, effective survival thriller plotting. 

The movie has a playful mean streak and a sentimental core, a fun mix that works like jet fuel for its sequences’ thrills. No one’s safe from getting chomped, and the movie’s love of its lead family makes us flinch with every close call. Every time an enormous creatures comes stalking through the background of a shot is as effective as the last. (Watch out!) And each solution leads to another problem in fine roller coaster style. I enjoyed its overall sense of one-thing-after-another that works through every complication with gusto. And I appreciated the seriousness with which the characters take their dilemmas. They have doubts and stress, they slip and flail, they trial and error, they might even wet themselves when an enormous reptile is repeatedly slamming its head into the front door. But they also are animated by a clear love of one another that gets only tighter the more their lives threaten to slip away. That’s consistent with Mitchell’s strength with actors. He’s gotten earnest authenticity out of everything from awkward teen dramedy (The Myth of the American Sleepover) to arty horror (It Follows) and zany conspiracy thriller (Under the Silver Lake). And it’s consistent with the ease he has establishing widescreen mood and space while delineating high concepts. That’s enough on which to hang a quick and exciting genre picture. No need to load it up with extra metaphors or complicated twists. Just set it up cleanly and clearly, populate it with believable types, and let the blood start pumping. It may not be especially deep, but it’s a lot of fun. 

Web Sight: SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY

Spider-Man: Brand New Day is the most straightforwardly entertaining Marvel movie in quite some time. It has no multiversal shenanigans or television tie-ins. It’s just a story about colorful characters colliding in the concrete canyons of New York City. Turns out Spidey’s at his best when he’s swinging between skyscrapers. That’s not to say the movie is without its Cinematic Universe trappings. It gets cluttered up with cameos and references and gives over most of its plotting in the back half to what is effectively a backdoor pilot for future comic book storylines with another character entirely. And yet it works pretty well, dovetailing with Peter Parker (Tom Holland) struggling with identity, while fueling some clever action sequences. We get lots of vignettes of crime-fighting, an attempt to stop a hijacked tank rumbling through the streets, a couple psychic chase scenes, and even some hopping among ninjas. Best is one that zips up, down, around, out, and through the top levels of a towering building while Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) and Punisher (Jon Bernthal) alternately help and hurt our main hero. It does a good job juggling variables, and heights. Finally we get one of these MCU Spider-Man movies getting the full vertiginous effect out of his hometown. Even the establishing shots of magic hour skylines or twinkling nighttime windows have some much-needed specificity that the increasingly hermetic green screens and volume video walls lacked in previous entries. (It doesn’t always feel like New York, but it generally feels like a real city streets. Progress!) Is it setting the bar too low to say this one always looks and plays out like a real movie?

It helps that the focus is on Spider-Man himself, even in the midst of all the walk-ons, foreshadowing, references, and loose threads. He’s center stage here; other heroes are clear supporting players in his story. He’s put through an emotional trial, grieving a death from the previous film, as well as recovering from the aftermath of the spell that caused everyone to forget Peter Parker. The citizens still love Spidey, but he’s never been more alone. He’s in constant action, and losing his sense of self. The balance between those ideas is held well in Holland’s body language. He’s a believably more mature and stressed superhero than his high school days. And it’s held in the tone and style, which director Destin Daniel Cretton is well-equipped to pull off from his experience with both outsized acrobatics (Shang-Chi) and small character studies (Short Term 12). He gets good milage out of the chemistry with Zendaya’s MJ, strained by her not knowing their history but sparkling all the same. And he digs into a mysterious quasi-villain played by Sadie Sink, who gets some terrific scenes, even if they often wink and nod in the direction other movies might take. (If they stick to their burgeoning metaphors in later entries, they might be onto something.) The movie is doing a lot, and suffers a bit for it, but it’s intending more of a sampler platter to go along with its core Spidey splash panels. It also manages to not devolve into CG nonsense for its climax, finding instead character-driven motivations and payoffs to root its effects. It’s all pretty entertaining. I’d almost forgotten what it was like to enjoy one of these. 

Coming Home: THE ODYSSEY

Christopher Nolan loves to play with time. Think about the dual timelines of Oppenheimer, the three speeds of Dunkirk, the backwards-and-forwards in Tenet, the dream levels in Inception, and relativity in Interstellar. So of course a part of Homer’s Odyssey that appeals to him is structural. Here’s a story that starts with an absence: Odysseus is gone. It’s been twenty years since he left for the Trojan War and, though his wife and son have long ago heard that the conflict has ended, he’s yet to return home. The son (Tom Holland) sneaks away from his mother (Anne Hathaway) and heads out to discover what happened to his father (Matt Damon). The story of his father’s leaving is told by a blind old man (John Leguizamo). An explanation of what happened during that absence is partially filled in by anecdotes from those who were at Troy and since made it home. It’s also filled in with Odysseus’ recollections of his travels, recounted on a remote island to a mysterious woman (Charlize Theron) as the words of a broken man slowly reawakening to his own memories. There’s also, in a nod to the original work’s oral tradition, a bard (Travis Scott) who gets the first words in the film: A face. A fleet. A war. A man. It’s his “sing to me of a man of twists and turns…” The movie feels suitably big and sprawling. The big budget’s on the screen. But because of its winding and familiar narrative, and the ways in which the telling holds back the emotions, Nolan’s typical momentum here draws slack as Odysseus’ crew gets lost and the chronology aligns. 

It ends up one of Nolan’s most straight-forward narratives, a recounting of several of the epic poem’s most famous sequences: the Trojan horse, encounters with giants, sirens, sea monsters, a witch, a cyclops, the dead. It’s given the full over-sized Nolan effect. The cast is jam-packed with recognizable faces doing solid work in every small role. The frames of IMAX film stock are towering and detailed with extras and effects. The landscapes and waterways are vast and real. (We’re never far from the roar and expanse of the wine-dark sea.) The soundtrack pounds away with repetitive deep bass and tense strings. And the film stretches to nearly three hours, winding its long way to the expected climactic homecoming confrontation. Along the way, the film smooths over some of the original text’s thornier elements, while introducing new notes of darkness and ambiguity (or muddling) all its own. Nolan makes the gods largely absent, but the monsters very real, and the effects of each moral failing fraught. It becomes a down-beat journey through a movie about loss and disappointment, about suffering the consequences of one’s actions and struggling to find honor and acceptance in troubled times. It finds uneasy answers, opting to give a bit of relational hope in its final moments even as the larger picture of civilization seems poised to topple. It evokes a certain amount of melancholy to have ancient Greeks talk about “living in ruins.” This Odysseus is full of regrets, feeling deeply the poems early lines that promise “he could not save [his people] from disaster…” In bringing this ancient story back to life, Nolan seems to be making a case for recognizing the damage in breaking old societal bonds for short-term gains, and how it leaves us all lost, fighting back to level from disaster. That may not be fully Homer, but it’s definitely now. How’s that for playing with time?

Moving Pictures: LUMIÈRE LE CINÉMA! andMINIONS & MONSTERS

We can always count on the French to do their part in keeping cinephilia alive. Thierry Frémaux takes us back to the dawn of the movies with his documentary Lumière, Le Cinéma! The form of the film couldn’t be more simple. The effect could not be more illuminating or entrancing. It’s a collection of late-19th century short films by the Lumière brothers, played one after the next without interruption. Frèmaux narrates, contextualizing and analyzing what we see. This is part of his ongoing project of researching and restoring the Lumières’ works. Those pioneers of cinema are perhaps best known today for two films: The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station and Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon. The apocryphal story of the audience leaping out of the way of the oncoming train has taken on a position as the mythic Birth of Cinema. You don’t need to think of the imaginary audience. Look at what’s really there on screen. The documentary realism of the camera’s witness of both machines and people locate these two shorts squarely in the time of the industrial revolution, and set a standard for the camera as observer that carries us through today. Together these shorts tell us a helpful story about the appeal of the movies. They provoke strong reactions. They take us places we may never go and show us people we’d never meet. 

The magic of these formative images is compounded by the truth of their making and their context within a body of work. Not content to repeat those greatest hits, Frèmaux’s patient pace and thorough explanations take us through more formative moments captured on shimmering celluloid—early comedic conceits, gymnastic stunts, home movies, anthropological travelogue. What an expansion of our understanding of their contributions! We see people behaving so naturally in front of the camera, our only opportunity to see people who have no context for what it means to be recorded in this way. We see machines in all their new might, whirring gears and moving parts. We see a window into an old world ending, and a new one arriving. Here’s cinema—the personal and the mechanical, the head and the heart, the documentary and the fantasy—as it’s born. Frèmaux, as artistic director of the Cannes Film Festival, already helps shape contemporary film culture. With this film he pays reverence to the early black and white frames that got us here. To let these shorts wash over you is to clean out your eyes and see moving images afresh.

But what if, when you saw the workers leaving the factory, there were a couple Minions there, too? If you, like me, are already laughing imagining a couple of those goggle-eyed, overalls-wearing, mostly-hairless squishes waddling out alongside turn-of-the-century factory workers, then you get the appeal of Minions & Monsters. The seventh entry of an animated series usually spells creative exhaustion. Instead this movie is the best one yet, and by quite a large margin. Pierre Coffin, director, co-writer, and voice of the eponymous little guys, has taken the opportunity to proudly place his creations as shimmering, glowing stars in the Hollywood firmament. The movie follows a heretofore untold tribe of the Minions who, lost on their centuries-long quest to find a Big Boss to serve, end up in 1920s Hollywood. After a raucous slapstick tumble through the streets, during which they interrupt the filming of a Charlie Chaplin, a Harold Lloyd, and a Buster Keaton film, they end up impressing the heads of a studio with their silliness and pluck. It makes perfect sense they’d be instant silent comedy stars themselves. 

They have an inexhaustible persistence of juvenile spirit, and a seemingly immortal capacity to take and enact cartoon pain and just keep going. There’s always destruction ahead of them and unintended chaos behind them. Popular comic conceits in any time! But, with their Minionese language, they’re left behind in the transition to talkies. Hoping to make a creature feature comeback, a trio of Minions filmmakers summon some cute, but dangerous, Lovecraftian monsters to play the antagonists. So they’re risking the end of the world, or at least Los Angeles. But they’re making cinema! There’s something so pure about these particular Minions’ drive to create movie magic it’s easy to root for them. So it’s a movie about The Movies, a mad jumble of references and influences done as bouncy cartoony joyousness for showbiz history, riffing on countless classics in a gleeful and affectionate way. (You’ll never forget Minion Charles Foster Kane’s dying word.) And it also appreciates the act of creativity’s dual purpose as personal satisfaction and community building. Isn’t nice when a movie loves being a movie? And this one wears it with genuine lightness. Here’s a celebration of moviemaking through being every kind of movie. It’s ultimately an animated slapstick comedy, a satirical period piece, a western, a monster movie, a let’s-put-on-a-show picture, a fantasy, a robot movie, a UFO movie, a behind-the-scenes movie-within-a-movie, and, of course, a Minions movie. Here they’ve risen to their highest potential, unleashed to be a pure mad gag-a-minute delight from first frame to last. To be a real cinephile is to recognize that, to paraphrase Ratatouille, great movies can come from anywhere. And isn’t that why we keep going?

Double Deutch: VOICEMAILS FOR ISABELLE and GAIL DAUGHTRY AND THE CELEBRITY SEX PASS

Here’s an interesting case study in modern movie distribution. Sony has two comedies starring Zoey Deutch this summer. You might recognize her from supporting roles in Zombieland: Double Tap or Juror #2 or Nouvelle Vague or from confusing her with Haley Lu Richardson. She can make for a sweet and believable center of a movie when given the chance. Of her two starring roles this year, one’s in a straightforward romantic comedy with a traditional blend of charm and sentiment. It’s sturdy crowd-pleasing, pushing all the right buttons. The other’s in an arch alt-comedy riff that transposes The Wizard of Oz into a goofy R-rated joke. It’s deliberately niche, a cult item at best. Which one has been sent straight to Netflix via Sony’s deal with the streamer, and which hit theaters through their boutique Sony Pictures Classics label? Both could’ve found an audience on the big screen. But it’s strange to find the broadly appealing picture is the one you can play from the couch right now. 

If you did you’d find Voicemails for Isabelle is a reasonably effective version of its kind. Deutch plays an aspiring chef trying to survive a tough kitchen run by Nick Offerman. She calls her sister all the time to share the details of her life. They’ve done that since childhood since the younger girl is housebound with an illness and lives vicariously through her big sister’s adventures. When the sister dies, Deutch keeps calling, but the number has been reassigned to the new phone of a yuppie (Nick Robinson) who falls in love with the mystery caller. So he doesn’t message her to let her know it’s now a wrong number just to continue eavesdropping on her life. Eventually he has to meet her. From the premise you can already see the broad strokes of where the plot will go—manipulated Meet Cute to dating montages to revelation to reconciliation. The leads are charming with some sweet chemistry. It gives just enough sparkle to the familiar beats. But where the movie really lifts above routine is the sister relationship, fleshed out in early flashbacks and then lingering throughout the movie as a glossy but honest expression of grief and mourning. Writer-director Leah McKendrick has a light and often routine movie here, with pop music and little quips throughout. It tilts toward glossy phoniness, but remains sensitive with attention to the sisters. It’s the most believable relationship in the movie, and hits hard when gone. That makes the lightness of the surrounding movie all the more of an uplift, and a fantasy. 

Far stranger, though, is Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass. Writer-director David Wain’s penchant for absurdity and vulgarity is an acquired taste. I quite like his loopy rom-com parody They Came Together, commune satire Wanderlust, and his raunchy man-child comedy Role Models. This one isn’t in that league.  Maybe it’s the ugly digital look, and awkward combination of high-concept winking, sitcom punchlines, and occasional violence and flatulence.(Maybe it’s the severe lack of Paul Rudd, the star of all those earlier pictures.) Regardless I found Gail Daughtry more theoretically funny than actually funny, with the kind of humor you watch silently registering the technical forms of the jokes while rarely rising to level of actual enjoyment. Deutch plays Gail, our Dorothy. The red shoes are a tip off. She’s a naive Kansan hairdresser about to marry a dopey guy next door. They jokingly discuss the hoary concept of the celebrity sex pass. He has a crush on Jennifer Aniston. She’s hot for Jon Hamm. Well, turns out the fiancé actually goes and hooks up with Aniston, which really gets Gail mad. When she’s off on a work trip to L.A. her buddy (Miles Gutierrez-Riley) convinces her to seek out Hamm and do the deed. True to Oz, she meets a collection of misfits on her trip: an absent-minded agent-in-training (Ben Wang), a paparazzo whose heart’s not in it (Ken Marino), and a cowardly John Slattery. There’s also a wicked mob boss (Sabrina Impacciatore) and her flunkies. The whole tone is pitched at a preposterous broad shtick, like a straight John Waters. The actors are committed to the straight-faced absurdity, and there are a few real laughs along the way. (I liked the assistant whose only threat is that he’ll “make you sick!”) But it’s so conceptual and airless that it never fully comes to life. 

His Kryptonian Cousin: SUPERGIRL

Supergirl got dinged for the same exact things that have made other—better received!—superhero movies underwhelming over the last decade. It’s thinly imagined, visually sludgy, narratively limp, and loaded with gobs of bland special effect chaos trying to gin up excitement. For a comic book movie its locations and populations are as sparse and overfamiliar as its story. Hop across the galaxy and everywhere looks the same, listens to American songs, and is inhabited by human (or human-ish) people. But what somehow punches through this blandness is Supergirl herself. We met Milly Alcock’s Supergirl when she crashed into the end of last year’s Superman to pick up her super-dog Krypto from big cousin Clark Kent. She made a fast fun impression with a disheveled and irreverent youthful energy. Now starring in her own movie, Alcock continues along those lines, playing the 23-year-old Kara’s sense of cosmic displacement as a version of post-collegiate malaise. It’s a fetching combo befitting a melancholy lark. It has just enough going for it to make its all the more disappointing to watch it fall into cliche—cartoony violence, gentle quips, pop music cues, and an overall dilution of a fun take on a cool character through monotonous moves. 

Supergirl is pretty super, though. She knows her powers, and her responsibility, but she’s trying to dull the senses and ignore her calling. She preferred checking out to stepping up. We catch her touring planets with red suns, since they sap her invincibility and allow her to get drunk. Yet we see she has good core virtue. In finely rendered pulp backstory we see the destruction of her home planet Krypton through the eyes of her father. (David Krumholtz plays him, radiating compassion while emoting through a nonsense language.) He instills in her a goodness that her stumbling can’t erase. And it’s there when she needs it when an orphaned girl asks for help getting revenge on space pirates who killed her family. The movie really is that simple, a single arrow shot straight to its target. But the movie doesn’t quite match that potential, giving her a rote plot of meager spectacle and moral muddle to enact. (How does she spend the whole movie preaching against vengeful violence and then—spoiler!—kill the villain after she could easily have taken him to space jail?) Throughout, from story beats to set design, it makes the expected choice every time. It’s the sort of movie where even the surprises aren’t that surprising. Alcock is so lovable, and her backstory so sympathetic, that it’s easy to root for her. But it’s hard to keep one’s interest afloat when she’s punching bad guys in slow motion in the middle of a swirling cloud of CGI. It’s enough to make one wish she could fly off into a better movie. Critics and trolls pretending this is a calamity are mistaken. It’s just more of the same.

Child's Play: TOY STORY 5

Toy Story 5 could’ve been a smartly updated retelling of the original’s replacement anxieties. You'd think being directed and co-written by WALL-E's Andrew Stanton, who has a writing credit on the whole series so far, would help. Pitched as toys versus tech, it starts with the dolls and figurines in Bonnie’s room freaking out about a new addition: a tablet. The Leapfrog knockoff Lilypad instantly captures the 8-year-old’s days, leaving the toys in the dust. Unfortunately, Lilypad (Greta Lee) never becomes much of a distinct character, with little personality and a character arc that’s foreshortened in two quick reversals late in the game. So, instead of the inciting incident kicking off jostling egos among the familiar faces of returning characters facing off against the interloper, cowgirl Jessie (Joan Cusack, a delight and given all the best moments) takes it upon herself to get Bonnie better friends than the mean girl cyberbullies the tablet attracts. This sends her off hither and yon in an attempt to save their kid’s feelings, and of course Buzz (Tim Allen) and Woody (Tom Hanks) give chase. But the whole thing feels much more cramped and less detailed than the series usually manages. It’s a bland working-over of over-worked tech fears that ends up being more of a pat on the head for harried millennial parents—saying it’s okay to give them tech as long as you check in on their social media messages once in great while. It never takes off into a clever kids’ adventure or engaging object lesson that it could be. 

There is a neat distinction drawn between gaming and playing and the greater social benefit of the latter—it’s nice to see Bonnie make a real friend—but the movie is so focused on the kids’ emotional well-being that it forgets to be much of a toy story. The classic ensemble doesn't even get much in the way of dialogue, punchlines, or story, and the new characters are one-note jokes. My struggling interest finally gave up sometime between Jessie using web-connected toys to manipulate two kids into a play date and a fleet of drones carrying the main cast of plastic beings off to the rescue. I guess I just don’t think toys should be doing all that. This entry in the venerable series—hitherto Pixar’s best!—takes it too far away from neurotic playthings and pushes well past the suspension of disbelief into making them meddling Defenders of Real Childhood. I missed the interest in the frictions and eccentricities of the toy’s personalities and the existential questions about one’s purpose. Here there’s just too little room for interest in their toy society when there’s more time spent on didactically weighing in on ours. Even attempts to connect to the series’ most moving moments—consciously echoing lines and scenes from earlier pictures’ highlights—plays as hollow repetition instead of enriching the emotional texture. Compared to the aesthetic and thematic complications of the previous sequels, which somehow manage to push the detail of the animation and psychology of the characters while maintaining a consistent look and tone in the childish whimsy, this one is all too thin and simple.

Out There: DISCLOSURE DAY

Disclosure Day barely functions as legible paperback thriller plotting, but it is a feast for Steven Spielberg auteurists. It’s a layered work of visual thinking and thematic exploration that’s a buffet of recurring ideas and preoccupations from throughout his oeuvre. And all that plays out as a backdrop for a pretty flimsy central narrative. It makes the movie a totally fascinating experience, and a sometimes distancing one, an open-hearted intellectual and intuitive exercise keeping a chintzy chase picture afloat. Put simply: it’s a MacGuffin chase for stolen government secrets. (There’s also a magic stick, the properties of which shift for the needs of the plot.) The hidden truths within are as follows: aliens exist and the government is covering it up. That’s a little underwhelming after his Close Encounters' transcendent finale of music and science, and E.T.’s fleeting intergalactic friendship, and War of the Worlds’ harrowing invasion and biological protection. Spielberg’s been here before. In Disclosure Day, the characters are ideas. We have Josh O’Connor as a man with a backpack full of USBs containing leaked footage. He’s Technology: research, math, the hard facts. We have Emily Blunt as a TV weatherperson, usually reading the forecasts but now fearful as she finds herself becoming a conduit for brain-scrambling languages and interpersonal connection. She’s The Media: communication, empathy, the messenger. Together they make both halves of the whole message from outer space. They have to avoid the shadowy suit (Colin Firth) who doesn’t want the secrets out. He’s the System. To short-circuit his private army, our heroes need help along the way from another whistleblower (Colman Domingo) who’s orchestrating the big reveal. He’s building a simulacrum from which to trigger their latent memories. He’s Art. The chase also involves a lapsed nun (Eve Hewson). She’s Philosophy, Theology. “You haven’t lost your faith in God,” she’s told by a wise elder nun (Elizabeth Marvel). “You’ve lost your faith in people.” 

So it is that the movie’s about alienation in all senses of the word. It’s set in our modern world where we suspect that there’s more to the official story about most everything, but many aren’t convinced the truth will make a difference. It’s Spielberg spinning a metaphorical web so quickly and masterfully, with such a vivid mess of intentions and references, that it can’t help but skate over some yawning plot holes in the process. His fluid camera teases and traverses spaces, separates and joins perspectives, locked into who sees or knows what and when, easily slipping between perceived realities. It’s a movie that’ll be far too open-hearted for the incorrigible pedantic quibblers in the audience. Spielberg is using the raw materials of his most crowd-pleasing popcorn pictures to make something deep and strange. But it’s an honest movie, and one that risks silliness at most every turn. And, sure enough, the characters are flatly representational and all the running around doesn’t add up to much for which it’s worth investing. But in the high-gloss B-movie mess of it all, Spielberg’s really making a movie about the power of movies to show us what’s really important—a fiction that takes us to deeper truths. This one opens in media res with a smeary digital image—an elbow to the ribs from our master filmmaker—that’s immediately contextualized as diagetic camerawork at a cheap phony wrestling match. It’s a parodical muscle man in red and another in blue playacting conflict for a cheering, jeering, invested crowd. The real conflict happens in the shadow behind them—a confrontation between the leaker and the forces who wish to stomp out his message. 

The movie’s wandering chase sequences and flat exposition then build up to a finale that’s all about listening. It has some of his crisp cross-cutting and Movie Star awestruck gazes and some screens-within-screens of CG effects. But the emotionality rests entirely on a TV reporter played by Courtney Grace, a relatively unknown actress who pulls it off with astonishing work as she narrates for her audience through an array of heightened confusion, wonder, bewilderment, and context collapse. It’s a moving moment of processing the unimaginable in real time. It’s not so much about what she, and we, see in those moments. (What’s actually there teeters on the edge of silly cliche.) It’s about the human connection in that moment, bound together by something real, for once. Spielberg wants us to really listen, to understand each other. To hear a truth is the start of enlightenment. He believes it to the point of transcendence—math and art, mind and heart, The Fabelmans of his own making. It’s that reconciliation that breaks down our all-too-human isolation, between nations, between individuals, and within our own heads. He thinks we need to believe—in a higher power, in the potential to move beyond our selfish fears, in the transformative possibilities of witnessing together. He believes in cinema. He believes in UFOs. He wants to believe. He’s our greatest living filmmaker. His movies are usually airtight and precisely calibrated to function at a high level, on multiple levels, while pleasing crowds. This one dares to fall apart in personal, idiosyncratic moments that resolve in ways only Spielberg’s instincts could pull off. The real disclosure here is his own. 

He's the Man: MASTERS OF THE UNIVERSE

I agree with the filmmakers behind the new Masters of the Universe that there’s something a little embarrassing about adults wanting to seriously play with action figures, especially if we’re talking something as silly as 80’s cartoon hero He-Man. Put away childish things and all that. Here’s a story about a scantily clad muscle man with a big sword. He lives in the mythical kingdom of Eternia. He defends it alongside sidekicks with enormous fists or retractable necks. One’s a talking tiger. They’re constantly fighting an evil skeleton man named Skeletor who almost, but never quite, wins. I recognize it has a lot of nostalgia for people of the micro-generation for whom Saturday mornings imprinted its discount fantasy fiction, adventure serial charms. It’s all pretty silly. But if you’re going to do it, just do it. Be embarrassing and it’ll be fun. Director Travis Knight (mostly of stop-motion Laika movies) is almost there. It’s certainly better than the late-80’s live-action attempt, which spent its time in our world, hedging its bets. This one starts in a charmingly artificial CG Eternia and takes the backstory just seriously enough to get some emotive tropes going amid the phoniness. It makes some smart moves. It’s bright and fantastical. It has vibrant, colorful effects. It has an epic orchestral score including a screaming electric guitar part for Queen’s Brian May. (Flash Gordon much?) It has a stacked straight-faced supporting cast (Idris Elba, Camila Mendes, Alison Brie, and so on) in cartoony costumes. It has a naive beefcake leading role (Nicholas Galitzine’s been hitting the gym) and a plot that actually wants to engage in discourse about modern masculine ideals. Poor little Prince Adam is sent to Earth for his protection, but memories of his home realm cause him to search for a portal where he’ll become the He-Man he’s meant to be. 

It’s a pretty standard hero’s journey, and the plot moves are predictable, but have a Saturday matinee appeal. And yet the movie’s held back by its embarrassment. It keeps sheepishly joking about its lore, teasing its cartoon jargon and juvenile naming conventions and toyetic tech. It also has a nervous tick in the dialogue in the back half that undercuts the boys’ adventure spirit with smarmy double- or (worse still) single-entendres out of all that. That’s too bad. It’s Mattel’s second attempt at making a movie out of a product line. Their first was Greta Gerwig’s Barbie. This one nearly achieves the masculine to that film’s feminine. It’s about a fantasy world with a porous literal and ideological boundary separating it from ours. It’s about messages kids receive from these plastic figures, albeit these of muscles and violence, and from our current culture’s competing poles of toxic masculinity and bland corporate culture. (The latter teeters on the edge of cynical confusion.) And then it substitutes a false maleness of might-makes-right for a more empathetic and understanding sense of justice and duty. (It even has the male equivalent of the America Ferrera monologue.) There’s a lot to like. It was clearly not made unthinkingly. There’s craft and passion here. And it has a ripped guy in a leather skirt that shows off his massive thighs and rippling abs. And he punches a skeleton man into dust. So why’s the movie embarrassed to be exactly that? I wanted to have fun, but the movie kept shrinking from its fullest expression. 

Dad Jokes: POWER BALLAD and THE BREADWINNER

Sometimes you just want to go to the movies and see a light story about plausible people in slightly implausible scenarios adjacent to real life. Like if your life had a sprinkling of movie magic over it, you might stumble into something like this, too. That’s something that Irish writer-director John Carney seems to understand well when he gets the formula exactly right in building his light dramas that are lifted to something closer to transcendence through the power of music. It was there in his intimate, casual street-busker romance from 2006, Once, and in his 80s coming-of-age garage band musical from 2016, Sing Street. And it’s there again in his latest: Power Ballad. (I guess he gets it right exactly once every ten years.) It stars Paul Rudd as an expat American singer-songwriter working as the front man to a wedding band. He gave up his dreams of stardom to settle down in a Dublin suburb with an Irish wife and daughter. But he never stopped writing. This is the part that is definitely believable. 

The slight fantasy of the movie is that his band gets a gig at the reception for the childhood best friend of a former boy band member. Wouldn’t you know it that the fading celeb (played by an aptly cast Nick Jonas) is planning a comeback and is in town to write his new album? He shows up at the wedding, jams with the band, and connects with Rudd. They have fun buddy chemistry as they share some works in progress with each other and part ways feeling good about meeting a simpatico artist. Six months later, Rudd hears one of his songs over the speakers at the local mall. The star stole his song. Carney explores the ramifications with a degree of generosity to both men, and watches as the one’s anger and the other’s guilt keep them apart. But the movie’s light tone and strain of good humor—not to mention the great original songs—make some kind of happy ending inevitable. That might keep the movie’s scope, and emotional range, small, but there’s something so deeply satisfying about watching a well-oiled sentimental script go through its paces with likable leads and catchy tunes. It’s the John Carney special. 

Even lighter and less substantial is The Breadwinner. But that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t satisfy in its own way. Starring and co-written by standup comedian Nate Bargatze, it’s a down-the-middle sitcom of the sort that comics of his observational, family friendly kind would do all the time in the 80s and 90s on TV and the big screen. As such, it has a throwback, even retrograde, premise. He’s a husband, a father, and a well-meaning oaf. His wife (Mandy Moore) has a great business opportunity, care of a sequence in which the Shark Tank judges play themselves. (I'd say part of the fantasy here is that her invention would even get a deal.) Now she has to leave for two weeks to launch her product, which means he needs to be the sole parent to their three adorable daughters. Hijinks ensue. If you’re already imagining burnt toast, laundry shenanigans, and driving the wrong way to school, you have the right idea. It might seem a little unusual to imagine a dad so far out of the loop these days. But this isn’t a movie about all dads; it’s a movie about this dad. And Bargatze makes a believably unaware guy. His standup works because of its low-key befuddlement, like an affable guy who’s slowly learning about how to process his own life. Though obviously his observational style relies on some intelligent comprehension, he knows how to approach everyday problems with an unassuming gee-didja-notice? attitude. He has the right slightly stunned look to sell the well-meaning confusion. 

He brings to the movie that sense of middle class bewilderment, and a gooey sentimentality about the love of family that draws a guy out of his bubble of privilege and into fuller responsibility. It helps that the kids are so cute, and the jokes are actually pretty funny—bolstered by a supporting cast including Will Forte, Colin Jost, Kate Berlant, Zach Cherry, Kumail Nanjiani. It has all the charms of the throwbacks it’s copying, with a little Everybody Loves Raymond here, a little Home Improvement there. But it has mercifully none of the gender anxiety the premise might provoke. He genuinely doesn’t mind that his wife has to be the main breadwinner and wants to help her. He’s just not used to doing without the valuable co-parenting work she’s been providing. It feels, if not exactly true to life, true to some lives. Like the Adam Sandler movies of twenty years ago, it’s cleanly shot, stuffed with silly asides, and loaded up with product placement. (Thanks, Toyota, KFC, and Walmart, I guess.) It's not vulgar or crass, just sweet and gentle. We don’t get live action comedies in theaters much, and certainly not family friendly ones. It’s nice to remember what it’s like to be in room of people chuckling along with one that gets the job done. 

Big Screen Scares: OBSESSION and BACKROOMS

The YouTubers have arrived. We’ve occasionally had filmmakers emerge from amateur efforts on that site, for better (the Filipou brothers’ scary Talk to Me and Bring Her Back are massive leaps beyond their channel’s horror shorts) and or worse (Chris Stuckmann’s Shelby Oaks is a dull, cliched, irritating horror film). Now 2026 seems to be doing its best to say there’s perhaps more promise to be plucked from those ranks of creators, like television and music videos and theater before it. Funny that so far they’re all horror, which has often been a calling card for new indie voices. It’s been mere months since play-through poster Markiplier’s independent adaptation of the video game Iron Lung turned a big profit in theaters. I found the movie a bit repetitive and disorienting, but was quite impressed by how it was effective on its own terms. He played to his strengths making a one-location movie in which he essentially sits at the controls and plays the game. Now we have two more YouTuber film debuts: Curry Barker’s Obsession and Kane Parsons’s Backrooms. Judging them on formal control and narrative ambition, it’s clear that they could be two big new talents. 

Barker’s Obsession has a simple premise: what if there was a magic wand that gave you one wish? He has this device fall into the hands of a young man (Michael Johnston) who has a crush on a girl (Inde Navarrette). He can’t quite bring himself to admit it to her, even though she’s given him multiple opportunities. Maybe he’s shy. Maybe he’s self-conscious. Maybe he’s stressed. Maybe he’s afraid of rejection. Maybe it’s a toxic stew of all of these things. He can’t be honest with himself; how could he be honest with another? He doesn’t entirely believe the magic wand—a One Wish Willow he finds by happenstance in a witchy novelty shop. But that doesn’t stop him from using it to wish the girl would “love him more than anything in the world.” Anyone whose ever read, or even heard of, “The Monkey’s Paw” can guess where this is going. She becomes demonically obsessed with him with occasionally unpredictable results (like duct taping his front door shut from the inside while he sleeps). And, dud that he is, he likes her obsessiveness. Mostly. For a while. (The tape thing gives him slight pause). 

Barker gives the movie a great creepy crawling pace and lets the two lead performances wiggle around in the premise’s discomforts. He shoots in a boxy aspect ratio and glides the camera with an eerie otherworldliness as the actors play out the inevitable tragedy. Navarrette in particular does well signaling otherworldly devotion and dissociative trauma in the same wide-eyed glances. It’s clear that the movie is aware the young man is the villain, and the girl is trapped in his wishful delusion. She’s not really in love with him, and there are weird supernatural cracks in the intensity of her clinginess. Eventually it erupts in horror gore—but the sense of surprise is pretty much gone. The shallowness of its insights catch up to it. I’m sure it’ll be a great, provocative watch for people who’ve never had thoughts about male entitlement, unhealthy relationships, or wishes-gone-wrong before. For the rest of us, it’ll be admiring the filmmaker’s chops while wishing the script had a little more meat on the bone. 

Parson’s Backrooms is an even more impressive feat. As a work of sustained mood and space it’s incredible. He builds one of those great movie places and gets a little lost in it. But who can begrudge that? I was completely enveloped by its sense of a porous boundary between the reality and surreality of its premise. To be on its wavelength practically demands leaning in to try to see around the next corner as the camera slowly turns. Based on a series of YouTube shorts he made in his teenage years—Parsons is still only 20!—it concerns those eerie liminal spaces that were all the rage in meme horror some years back. Have you ever been alone in an empty office building or a back hallway in a mall that’s been almost, but not entirely, cleared of furniture? Now imagine a maze of those rooms, inconsistently lit, with distant muffled footsteps, and an increasingly surreal sense of architecture. Halls go nowhere, doors open onto stairs, stairs lead to doors, doors lead to ramps, ramps lead to rooms that narrow to another door. You get the picture. All of it is set to ominous low rumbles and the buzz of florescent lights. It is unsettling, but pulled forward by an inquisitive momentum. What is this place? I was uneasy, but also didn't want to leave.

That’s the same sensation, and compulsion, for the lead character, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor. He’s the owner of a struggling discount furniture store who discovers, late one night, that he can step through a wall in the basement and end up in this befuddling place. And then he just has to know more. The movie’s at its best as it follows these excursions, sometimes in creepy clean digital photography, sometimes in fuzzy Blair Witch-style VHS found footage aesthetics. (It’s set in a strangely convincing 1990—15 years before the director’s birth, another unsettling realization.) I honestly could’ve watched Ejiofor and his two employees, camcorder in tow, explore this space for the entire runtime. The camera creeps along with them, sending shivers with each half-glimpsed shadow in the darkness just beyond our perspective. But the movie moves perhaps too quickly to broaden the scope and jumps to some big character shifts when the mystery of the moment was enough. There’s also a therapist (Renate Reinsve) who worries that her client has lost it in delusions describing the backrooms, and has odd flashbacks implying her own traumatic backstory. She goes looking for him. Then there’s a guy in a white lab coat (Mark Duplass) who seems like he’s going to explain things, but mercifully doesn’t know much more than we do by that point. To Parson’s credit, there is no answer, but that does leave the movie saying only: Huh, look at this place. Weird, right? But, hey, this is a weird place worth seeing! 

Weathering with You: PRESSURE

Pressure is a movie for people who’d rather doze off in a movie theater instead of falling asleep on the couch in front of the History Channel. It’s a World War II drama about the last three or four days of planning for D-Day. The epic moment is narrowed down to just a few rooms through the limited perspective of the meteorological team. At first they think it won’t be stormy weather. Then they do. The top weatherman is played by Andrew Scott. He has a nice pregnant wife at home and now he’s sequestered with the top brass barking at him to make a call. Is he sure? It’s a prediction. He’s a little worried that they don’t know how weather forecasts operate. He goes against the other top weatherman in the room (Chris Messina). General Eisenhower—a growling Brendan Fraser—looks at him with skepticism, then reluctant agreement that still bubbles up with skepticism. A storm could ruin all their planning and maybe even tip the course of the war. Damian Lewis plays a general whose reaction to hearing about the impending bad weather’s potential for delaying his invasion plans is to rant that they should just start “taking Kraut lessons now!” Scott has a great stiff upper lip and slightly teary eyes that sell the stress of being the naysayer in a situation like this. It’s a movie that, if nothing else, will make you say, yeah, I guess it would be a lot of pressure to tell the assembled Allied Commanders whether or not their closely guarded plans will be stymied by high winds. 

There’s just not much going on here beyond the obvious. First Scott has to argue it’s about to storm and the leaders growl. It’s sunny outside! They begrudgingly respect him when it starts raining a few hours later. A key scene comes late in the picture where Scott has decided that the weather is about to change. Eisenhower yells something like: “You say don’t go when it’s sunny, and to go when it’s storming!” Something tells me the real guy knew a little bit more about how weather works. But here’s a movie that’s desperately stretching to make drama out of its little corner of a massive event. I don’t doubt there was actual drama here, but the movie doesn’t much find it. Going deeper into the actual process of collecting data for their forecasts, instead of glossing over it with montage, might’ve helped. Instead we have little montages of devices and charts followed by broad scenes of flat dialogue and pat, easily resolved tensions. Director Anthony Maras has assembled a fine cast, dressed them in period costumes and set them in convincingly historical rooms. It looks and moves and sounds like a proper prestige picture, all surface polish. But screenwriter David Haig, adapting his own stage play, seems to trust the subject matter to do the heavy lifting. The movie ends with an abridged combat sequence that mostly reminds viewers of Saving Private Ryan’s much more successful balance of the personal stakes in the epic terror of combat in this very historical moment. I wanted to like a talky movie about WWII strategy. But this is a flat foregone conclusion of a movie. 

Robbin' Good: I LOVE BOOSTERS

Rapper-turned-writer/director Boots Riley has a lively imagination and a righteous sense of social satire. Together those qualities make for movies that are electric and chaotic in equal measure. His first feature was the unpredictable 2018 comedy Sorry to Bother You, in which a Black call center employee gets big bucks for deploying an unctuous “White Voice.” That hook soon spun off into wild flights of fancy that slowly diluted its emotional punch in favor of vulgar shocks. Now, nearly a decade later, we have Riley’s second film: I Love Boosters. It has more focus, and even tighter control over the filmmaking fundamentals. It’s a riotous, candy-colored story of have-nots versus a have. It also indulges in bits of magical realism until they take over and turn the movie’s heightened reality into nesting dolls of metaphorical unreality. Yet if it gets less funny as it gets more fantastical, Riley never loses interest in double, triple, quadruple underlining every satiric point. It helps ground all of its interests that the characters are such big, likable personalities. The film’s snappy start introduces us to the Boosters: a lovable group of shoplifters who sneak expensive designer clothes and accessories out of department stores for the reselling. Steal from the rich and sell at a discount to the poor. “Fashion forward philanthropy,” one says. Their ringleader is Keke Palmer, one of our most appealing leading ladies in another of her bubbly, appealing underdog roles. She has an easy, relaxed charisma and a hustling forward momentum. Her accomplices are Zola’s Taylour Paige and Mickey 17’s Naomi Ackie. They give the trio a loose, charming chemistry as they enact increasingly unlikely daring midday heists. Their determination and their friendship dovetail nicely. 

One step ahead of getting caught, and two steps ahead of bill collectors, they’re a scrappy, working class counterpoint to the stylish villain of the picture. From a leaning luxury apartment in the middle of San Francisco, a billionaire fashion designer demands her underlings find these thieves who threaten her retail empire, and further commands her Chinese sweatshops ignore safety and work harder for less to make up for her losses. Demi Moore plays her as if every line was a speech bubble in a political cartoon. She comes across as blend of Cruella de Vil and Miranda Priestly—but somehow both more evil and more believable. Riley has such a clear, totalizing vision for the movie. It has broad, almost cartoonish stylistic curlicues—editing as punchline, pop-art titles, background sight gags, Palmer hallucinating a literal ball of stresses—and then, by the second half, gives way to total fantasy. You might not expect from the small-scale opening that it’d build to a largely stop-motion action finale—let alone a supernatural creature that’s merely a minor side-character or a sci-fi device that operates at the speed of plot. But that’s Riley for you. The movie doesn’t have much of a sense of who its characters are beyond ideas in the points its scoring. But it’s fast and funny and they careen through an increasingly crowded ensemble and convoluted plot. The story’s mechanics lose a few springs and gears in the hard turns, and a finale that wraps up with a flourish of wishful thinking. But the vibrant colors and coordinated gestures and cartoon logic and vulgar jokes build to bold conceits. In an increasingly bland, homogenized cinematic landscape, I’m glad we have Riley out there making movies so distinctive, delirious, and committed to shouting sharp satiric points with style. 

Cowboy and Alien: THE MANDALORIAN AND GROGU

Star Wars has always been a pulp genre melting pot. You know the litany of influences: westerns, samurai adventures, medieval fantasies, small-town drag races, WWII dogfights, creature features, space opera action serials. In the unique stirring of George Lucas’ mind, the whole production becomes a sui generis construction, a blend of his interests that’s uniquely personal for something so outsized. It’s also been a central pillar of our last several decades of pop culture production. Every science fiction fantasy blockbuster is downstream of its innovations, and the trouble with non-Lucas attempts to extend his world is getting the mix wrong. You shouldn’t make a Star Wars movie out of copying Star Wars; you should go back to the source code. What made for fun with The Mandalorian, the first live-action Star Wars television show, when it debuted on Disney+ seven years ago, was its success in making cinematic images roughly congruent with the movie series, while bottling it up in the roving bounty hunter episodic structure of so many TV westerns of yore. It had a setup to run for years. But given the sluggish pace of modern TV production we’ve only had two more seasons and a handful of vaguely connected parallel series since. We’ve also had a franchise increasingly incapable of getting a movie out of pre-production. So it is that Disney decided to get a Star Wars-shaped thing in theaters for this Memorial Day. Getting a supersized episode of the show off the ground seemed the quickest way to do so. 

Show-runner Jon Favreau helms it himself. It’s not exactly a fourth season of the show. Instead, it’s a two-hour tide-me-over. It looks like an episode of the show, although that says a lot about how TV has gotten glossier and movies have gotten flatter. Nothing much of consequence happens, but we do get to hang out with the eponymous Mandalorian bounty hunter and his tiny green Force-sensitive "Baby Yoda" ward Grogu. They’ve become iconic for a reason, with clean silhouettes and archetypal simplicity. When they first step into frame in an elaborate opening action sequence, there’s a pop of excitement. Just like in the show, they’re off on a mission that branches into side quests then weaves back into the original goal. Every twenty to thirty minutes the minor objective and setting changes while building to one overarching major objective for a climax. We fly to a snow planet to a beach planet to a swamp planet to a city planet and back again. Some locations are neatly imagined with fun whimsical details like a trip to a new location: space Chicago crawling with gangsters and fixed fights. Other locales, like goopy underground tunnels in a Hutt den, are blurry brownish-green eyesores. Favreau, a veteran of this sort of thing through Iron Man and Zathura and Cowboys & Aliens, gives the movie a bland professionalism that dutifully pushes fans' buttons. It’s very familiar and largely unsurprising, cramped and small, but manages some diverting appeal from time to time. 

For long-term fans of the whole franchise, it’s recognizably similar to the small-scale stories tossed off as comic book one-shots or short stories in anthologies during the 1990s Expanded Universe of multimedia spin-offs. Realizing that helps tamp down expectations and allows the movie its best chance of working for you. It’s a light, inessential doodling in the margins of the main storylines. Stormtroopers get shot. We meet lots of little aliens with funny voices. Sigourney Weaver appears for a few moments, barely longer than she’s in the trailer. A couple minor characters from a different show get killed off. X-wings swoop in at the last second. It has all the noises and lights you’d expect from the franchise. Ludwig Göransson’s score bangs and wails with suitable techno-spaghetti western flair. Mando looks cool as takes down waves of bad guys. Grogu’s puppeteered for maximum affecting cuteness and growing power. And yet for this we go to the theater? It can’t help but feel like a diminishment of the franchise from a mythic cycle to just another thing to see. When shows like the literate, political Andor and the vibrant, kinetic Maul: Shadow Lord have kept the series’ vitality alive through streaming, it’s a shame going back to the movies for this universe feels so inconsequential and small.

Pop Goes Her Heart:BILLIE EILISH: HIT ME HARD AND SOFT (LIVE IN 3D) and MOTHER MARY

James Cameron approaches a Billie Eilish concert like he does deep sea creatures or the Titanic wreckage. He’s gone to see it and wants to tell us: huh, would you look at that? The cinematographic curiosity ends at the level of procuring the footage. His documentaries—Aliens of the Deep, Ghosts of the Abyss, and now this—are chronicles of interesting sights presented with cutting edge technology. In the case of Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D), it’s a pretty standard concert movie in form. We see her perform songs largely uncut, with lights and lasers and pyrotechnics and, of course, her own charismatic performance in the center of the dazzle. These are intercut with lots of obtrusive closeups of weeping fans, and sequences that cut away to behind-the-scenes moments that are interesting only as far as a skimming the surface of the rigamarole of modern stardom can be. Eilish is undeniably a great stage presence and her music is largely catchy and earnestly felt, whether upbeat dance bangers or slow-tempo confessional ballads. What Cameron does in the film’s best moments is set up his tech and let it capture her in action. He shot in the high frame rate 3D he’s been developing with his Avatar movies. Here that format’s hyper-detailed deep focus and lack of motion blur somehow looks natural. Concert movies are perhaps its ideal use case. Paired with booming sound the crystalline images take on a real immediacy. It captures every sweep of the light show and climaxes with a dazzling dimensional clarity to the typical end-of-concert confetti blizzard.

If the movie fails to cohere much as a movie per se—the interviews are too shallow, the behind-the-scenes too sparing, the focus a little too scattered, the performances a little too chopped up—it’s still quite a tech demo, and a decent look at a star in this particular moment of her career. For a more in-depth view of her story and personality along with musical performances, there’s R.J. Cutler’s documentary Billie Eilish: The World’s a Little Blurry. For a more straightforward concert movie, there’s Robert Rodriguez’s Happier Than Ever. (Now having worked with both Cameron and Rodriguez, one wonders if she’d like to make Alita: Battle Angel 2 happen.) This particular movie simply shows why she’s one of our most appealing pop stars. She has great songs sung well, and great stage swagger, comfortable in her typical Kevin Smith-style jersey and shorts. And the movie’s at least a little bit about the parasocial dynamic of modern music fans. It looks at the tearful fans who talk about her with unrestrained awe—pure and earnest. One boy says she’s better than therapy. At the end a girl is crying as the camera pushes in on her. From off screen we hear Cameron’s chipper question: “How’d you like the show?” Duh. 

A scarier look at modern pop stardom is in the spooky, folkloric Mother Mary. Writer-director David Lowery takes his penchant for making movies that feel like eerie campfire stories and turns it on a diva in crisis. She’s Mother Mary, played by Anne Hathaway in a startlingly complicated portrayal that’s both imperious showbiz razzle-dazzle surface and deeply wounded vulnerability churning beneath. In need of a new dress right away, she attempts to reconcile with an old friend (Michaela Coel) who used to be her chief designer and visual collaborator before some unspoken falling out, or maybe betrayal. But it turns out the wound in their friendship has come to haunt them both in the intervening years. The movie proceeds as a two-hander between the women as they talk it out in a cold, dim, drafty barn, spending their time alternately needling and needing each other. Their conversation, bleeding inevitably toward magical realism, is interrupted for elaborate concert flashback sequences that exist with blinding spotlight on Mother Mary in impressive regal headdress and sequined bodysuits, surrounded by impressive implication of screaming fans in the dark, illuminated by flashing lights. 

The whole production is a cohesive design. The songs are euphoric modern pop at its best. These could be Swift or Gaga or Eilish. They’re catchy and pulse-pounding and match the darkness in her character. Written by producer Jack Antonoff, responsible as anyone for the sound of the last decade, and Charli XCX, whose party-girl brattiness is also a key tone for hit modern music, the songs’ verisimilitude goes a long way toward selling the movie’s gnarled low-key fantasy. But they wouldn’t work so well if not for Hathaway’s performance. She’s credible as a pop star toggling between performative persona and raw interpersonal nerve. And this performance bounces so perfectly off of Coel’s steely wounded pride and confident control. Together their shared haunting winds its way to inevitable surrealist metaphors that threaten to overwhelm the simplicity with literalness cloaked as ambiguity (and vice versa). But this is a Lowery film through and through. He makes Hollywood pictures shaped like art house films (The Green Knight, A Ghost Story, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints), compelling hooks populated with movie stars told with a slow-drip mood. And he makes art house films inside Hollywood pictures (Pete’s Dragon, The Old Man and the Gun, Peter Pan & Wendy), broadly appealing movie star movies with a sadder, slower mode inside. Mary is more the former. It’s a talky, haunted, elliptical movie about the psychosis of stardom. 

Playing Games: THE SUPER MARIO GALAXY MOVIE and MORTAL KOMBAT II

Video game fans in general seem quite appreciative of the latest wave of video game movies. They’re slavishly devoted to their inspirations’ iconography and gameplay, and seem to have built their stories out of the same dynamics that take you level to level with the barest connective tissue between sequences. That’s certainly the case with Illumination’s The Super Mario Galaxy Movie which, unlike the Sonic’s attempts to build actual movies out of the run-fast simplicity of the side-scrolling games, is content to build out settings and characters first and foremost. It returns us to the Mushroom Kingdom where Princess Peach and Toad go off to search outer space for the missing Princess Rosalia. In their absence, Mario and Luigi are supposed to take care of the castle. Wouldn’t you know it? That’s when Bowser Jr attacks and knocks them into a cosmic journey of their own. The movie was clearly worked out backwards from which places and peoples from the Nintendo world the filmmakers wanted to highlight. Here’s a spaceport. Here’s a casino shaped like a cube in which every side has its own gravity. (That one’s kinda neat.) Here’s a giant bee. Here’s a hellish amusement park. There’s no rhyme nor reason to the stops on the journey, and rather than building characters arcs or dramatic tension or adventurous momentum, it accumulates a sense of just one thing after another. It even weirdly skimps on the first film’s most popular element — Jack Black’s Bowser. He gets an undernourished plot and the only time he’s even close to singing a song to follow up his absurdly popular “Peaches,” the movie cuts him off for a joke. Still, the movie is quickly paced and easy to look at. It has the rounded edges and pleasant colors and Pavlovian sound effects that’ll flatter fans of all ilks. 

A far more unpleasant experience is Mortal Kombat II, which once again saves for the very end everyone’s favorite part of the game—the theme song. The journey there is bone-headedly simple. The Mortal Kombat tournament starts up again. Several challengers have to outlast a guy with a big hammer. None do. Until one does. For fans of the classic arcade fighting game that might be enough to see the character strut out in live action again. But for a franchise that’s indebted to both cheap-o Hollywood fantasy filmmaking and vintage Hong Kong fighting pictures, this entry is woefully under imagined. Despite adding Karl Urban to play fan favorite Cage, the characters in this sequel to a reboot might as well be a flat pile of pixels. The choreography feels perfunctory and repetitive. The escalations and resolutions of the fights feel arbitrary. And every sequence appears to have been shot on a tiny set in which almost everything on the frame, including parts of the actors, is some sort of digital effect. It’s so flat and claustrophobic that even the typical ponderous exposition about the fate of the world feels small. It makes one yearn for the comparatively classical cornball charms of the original Paul W.S. Anderson adaptation from the 90s, the only one of these movies close to good. Sure, that one was cheaply made and narratively simplistic, too. But at least its effects and action had energy and atmosphere. (And it put the theme song first, starting things on literally the right note.) This one’s just endless bland repetition.

Who's Bad: MICHAEL

Basically no one involved in Michael wanted to make an honest story of Michael Jackson’s life. That’s not unusual for a biopic officially approved by a cautious estate. (It happened to Bob Marley and Freddie Mercury recently.) But the details of Jackson’s life are so darkly troubled that not even the emptiest hagiography turning a deliberate blind eye to the worst of his eccentricities and criminality can fully escape the gravitational pull of the freak show tragedy of his tabloid final decades. We simply know the story too well. And anyone paying attention knows its contradictions and complications are far more fascinating than an easy greatest hits skim can do justice. Here’s a movie that tells the story of a talented little boy whose abusive father makes into a song-and-dance star as part of a sibling band. As a young adult he goes solo and becomes a superstar while awkwardly, eventually, extricating his own ambition from his family ties. Along the way he makes some of the catchiest, grooviest, and most successful, pop music of the 20th century. That’s all undeniably true. But here’s also a movie with Peter Pan fantasies, predatory adults, a backyard zoo, plastic surgery, pain medication, and a pet chimpanzee. It has a scene where the emotionally stunted Jackson makes his security guard take him to a toy store and, while waiting in line, is interrupted by a starstruck mother who makes her reluctant young son get an autograph. And this is the version that isn’t going to get into his psychological problems or abuse allegations? It’s like someone left in all the signifiers while leaving out what they signified. It’s a glossy, up-tempo celebration ominously pointing at the tragedy that’s on the cutting room floor. 

Director Antoine Fuqua directs a capable, anonymous production that’s supposed to be nonstop music and recreations of iconic moments from concerts and music videos. That’s all faithfully recreated here. Jackson is played by his nephew Jaafar, who has the look and the moves with an eerie impression of the fluttery high speaking voice and belting singing tone. The supporting cast, from the rest of the Jackson 5 to Motown’s Berry Gordy and beyond, are completely anonymous. (You can’t even tell the brothers apart, while Colman Domingo’s father figure is a vivid, cartoonish, presence.) There’s little attempt to make Jackson himself a character; he’s just a fragile boy pushed along by the march of time. Forget about interrogating a scene like when he, a grown man, grumbles that his adult siblings would rather go have sex with their girlfriends than stay home and play Twister with him. He’s just too pure. (Sure.) The movie is entirely and naively shallow surface. It has the notes. It has the rhythm. It has the dances. It has the costumes. But all those are so empty that they can’t stop the oddities and ugly implications from fighting their way up from beneath the glossy surface. We can’t forget who we’re watching, and where it’s all headed, even as the movie is convinced it isn’t telling that story. It ends on a high note—Jackson in 1988 freed at last from his father’s grasp, on a solo tour singing a big hit—and this text: “His Story Continues.” Given where it’s headed, that feels like a threat.