Out of Sight: NO SUDDEN MOVE

Steven Soderbergh’s small and satisfying No Sudden Move gets by on style and the sheer propulsive pleasure of plot. His filmmaking is so slick and precise that he can serve both at once. He’s a master of aesthetic detail — here a 50’s period piece shot with vintage anamorphic lensing and modern digital sheen — and of storytelling. Together the images pop with meaningful blocking and striking compositions, while the tight compelling story unfolds and unfolds and unfolds. The screenplay sets up an Elmore Leonard-style schemes-within-schemes Detroit crime caper that locates that town’s mid-century power structures: cops, cars companies, and mobsters. Then it watches as one little scam grows out of control simply because it pops off and cuts across all three lines of influence. We start with low-level criminals (Don Cheadle, Benicio del Toro, Kieran Culkin) hired to help watch the family of an accountant (David Harbour) as he’s forced at gunpoint to go to the office and take some car component designs out of a safe. It’s not so simple. The intelligence of Ed Solomon’s screenplay, beyond the clever wit to the dialogue and clockwork connections between people, is to catch all the characters in the middle of their own complicated lives, with unexpected interpersonal variables and cross-conflicts. This is just one more thing to throw a wrench into so many plans. Soon we have murder and infidelities and home invasion and bags of money and calls up the chain of command. Everyone needs to get their hands on this problem, ostensibly to solve it to their liking, but really to try to come out a little richer. 

Along the way, we get a little wiser to the corruption floating through Detroit at the time, and Soderbergh sharply draws our attention to the futility behind the characters’ competing goals. They scurry around, and there’s always someone higher up to swoop in to wave a gun, to make new deals, or to propose a better scam on top of the other scams. It’s the kind of crime picture that can introduce new big name actors to step in with a complication an hour or an hour and a half into the proceedings and it feels like yet another pleasurable twist. The large, well-cast ensemble — also including Brendan Fraser, Julia Fox, Jon Hamm, Amy Seimetz, Noah Jupe, Frankie Shaw, Bill Duke, and more surprises throughout — expertly navigates the twists and turns by being locked in on their own particular duties and struggles. Some show marvelous in-over-their-heads exasperation, while others are rattled and sidelined, and still more think they’re in total control. Maybe. Maybe not. Some are too smart for their own good; others can’t even grasp how behind they are. There’s no sudden move out of this when the motor city’s most corrupt are out to stop forward progress. This trust-no-one caper is briskly, crisply entertaining on a scene by scene level as it adds up to yet another of Soderbergh’s pleasurable genre experiments, and a recapitulation of his oft returned-to maxim: “When the person in charge won't get to the bottom of something, it's usually because they are at the bottom of that something.”

Connection Lost: ZOLA and PVT CHAT

Two recent indie dramas, Zola and PVT Chat, build character studies with an unusually frank, open, and realistic understanding about sex and disconnection in our modern world. They’re both built from internet culture and as such have an understanding about the ways in which modern lives can become nesting dolls of fictions and identity. Sometimes it gives you control over your mind and body; other times it cedes that control to others. Our new ways of connecting with one another can breed new disfunction and separation, even from our true selves.

This idea becomes a quasi-comic semi-thriller for director Janicza Bravo, who wrote Zola with Slave Play’s Jeremy O. Harris. The movie, a mix of lurid based-on-true events and self-reflective humor, plays as tossed off and eccentrically personal as a Twitter thread. Fittingly, just such a viral story is what it’s based on. We meet our narrator Zola (Taylour Paige) as she meets her match: an energetic young woman (Riley Keough) who becomes a fast friend. Big mistake. She invites her on a road trip to Tampa where a weekend performing at a lucrative strip club will make them big bucks. Bigger mistake. It’s the past-tense of the narration — borrowed from the flurry of vernacular tweet speak and played off with buzzing alerts and time stamps in iPhone fonts — that gives the movie a gloss of wry melancholy, while the present-tense buzz of suspense and incident keeps the episodic one-thing-after-another on the right side of compelling. The story soon grows to include a pimp (Colman Domingo) and a boyfriend (Nicholas Braun) and a host of strange Floridians in and around the sex work trade. The film is full up of the kind of off-beat detail and memorable personalities that imply dark emotional undercurrents and strange backstories simply by casting memorable faces and expert actors to inhabit them.

As Zola falls deeper into the unfortunate and dangerous events of this wild weekend, the movie remains committed to her perspective — aside from one briskly funny side-step into an alternate version of events. Through freeze-frames and overlapping dissolves, Bravo highlights the woozy confusion and destabilizing falling sensation of getting so much further in over your head than you’d ever imagine. The dance between dark intent and light comedy adds to the wobbly tone — in a good way. And then Paige’s lead performance is so breezily wounded, both traumatized and above it all in a dazzling surface of openness and charm underneath which churns a self-flagellating what-did-I-get-myself-into? mixed with a how-do-I-survive-this? Throughout, constant selfies and posts, Vines and ads, flow through the character’s lives, building images to which they can’t or won’t conform. The movie explodes outwards even as it falls inwards. And wrapping its events in its telling somehow makes Zola’s plight more bearable even as it gets squirmingly suspenseful and ends abruptly. We know she’ll make it out; and we know she’ll reclaim the story — and her body — as her own.
 

Ben Hozie’s PVT Chat is more restrained, like its obsessive lead character. He is Jack (Peter Vack) a young man who makes his living gambling on internet blackjack. Between rounds, he cruises sex chats for cam girls. His favorite is Scarlet (Julia Fox), not just because she’s attractive and good at dirty talk, but because he finds himself wanting to have normal conversations with her. In a weird way, they start to play out like awkward dates. Sure, he’s paying for her time, but his addiction to the sensation starts to get conflated with real affection. She actually likes him, right? he wonders. As we follow him through his daily life — chatting with his landlord and a handyman; attending a friend’s art show; playing round after round of cards — he becomes increasingly interested on the moments he gets an alert that his favorite cam is live. The movie captures a sense of the digital and the tangible intermingling, where the unreality of a virtual connection starts to take on qualities that feel present in his life. One can feel the erotic potential in their relationship despite the fact they’ve never met; it’s clear memories of her still buzz in his head as the handheld shots follow along behind him down his routine New York City streets. We get a sense he might be a loner, but for how engaged and animated he is talking to this girl he’s never met in the flesh. Yet when a woman he knows in real life invites him over, he remains distracted. Why focus on the one he can actually be with, he seems to unconsciously decide, when he can chat with the one he can’t.

The movie is clear-eyed, and the performers trust their director and the material enough to expose themselves for the sake of the project. It’s unflinching, yet generous. It’s observant, but doesn’t exactly judge. It eventually opens up to take in Scarlet’s perspective, and seeing behind the screens from her side is a productive reminder that the connection and disjunction flows both ways. Their relationship is so transactional, despite the fact that they can push that aside in the moment. Their relationship is entirely intangible, computer-moderated, digital bits. And yet they’re in each other’s heads all the time. They share ideas about art, about life. He likes when she takes control; and yet it’s all verbal. He likes giving himself into her force willingly, even as he pries into her life and starts to think maybe, just maybe, he could actually find where she lives. That plot element dances on the edge of creepiness, and the movie knows it. The movie’s cheaply framed and presented realism underlines the blurred lines — emotional, physical, psychological, sexual — in these lives, and the actors complement the spare style with bare displays of their character’s obsessions and aimlessness. By the surprisingly bittersweet conclusion it’s clear that this is a connection that will need some distance to remain healthy, even if it means having to pretend there’s still that space where they can look and talk, but can’t actually touch.

False Flag: AMERICA: THE MOTION PICTURE and THE FOREVER PURGE

One of the worst movies of this, or any, year is America: The Motion Picture. It’s an ugly, loud, obnoxious, endlessly puerile, painfully unfunny, repugnantly self-amused experience. The animated picture — stiffly composed in a style that appears copy-pasted from some unholy dated amalgamation of faux-anime and semi-Flash cheapness — is a broad goof on American know-nothing historical ignorance. It turns the revolution into a pastiche of half-remembered names and excessive comic book violence with bold-faced names turned into action figures smashed haphazardly together. Beginning with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln (Will Forte) by werewolf Benedict Arnold (Andy Samberg), the colonies’ revolution against the British is assembled Avengers style by dumb bro braggart George Washington (Channing Tatum). He wanders the land getting everyone from Samuel Adams (Jason Mantzoukas) and Thomas Edison (Olivia Munn) to to join the cause. Eventually Geronimo and Paul Bunyan show up, too. (The tone is set early when a group shot of founders at Lincoln’s funeral includes MLK and Lin-Manuel Miranda. Okay, that last one made me almost smirk.) This slipshod burlesque is an idiot’s tale told with facile fury and scattershot politics. It’s a queasy mix of lazy liberal bromides (a pile of AK-47s are wheelbarrowed in from Y’all Mart) and conservative bloodlust. At times it’s parodying blind American exceptionalism; other times it just is that. Sometimes it puppets its figures for left-wing critique; other times it’s the worst ahistorical points scoring. But I suppose some of this might go down easier if it landed even one good joke. Most of the time I sat there stupefied that anyone, let alone the marquee names attached, actually spoke the flat, nasty nincompoopery that passed for dialogue in its thinly sketched goofs.

To make matters worse, the movie lacks not only a sense of wit or perspective, but also anything approaching a good or even watchable aesthetic choice. The whole project from Archer alum Matt Thompson and Mortal Kombat screenwriter Dan Callaham has South Park flatness and JibJab movement. Its images are eye-meltingly unpleasant, down to the frequent face-exploding, blood-spurting gore, and the sound is a constant screech of noise and vulgarity. The politics in these awful drawings are roughly similar, a wild mess that’s neither here nor there. This is an unsteady, deeply irritating feature length mix of Adult Swim loopy edginess randomness and sub-Family Guy vulgarity for vulgarity’s sake choked in self-impressed referentiality. (Though, to call the movie sub-Family Guy is like calling a Porta Potty sub-outhouse. And that’s still too flattering.) The movie is as fruitlessly deranged as it is pointlessly exhausting, and as boring as it is convinced its excesses will be entertaining. Instead it’s a movie for anyone who thought the boisterously prejudiced Team America: World Police was too subtle and polite. Of all the problems we have as a country, a lack of vulgar folks willing to treat our history as a choose-your-own-adventure is not one of them.

Far better the dystopia of The Purge to, ahem, attempt a purge of our nation’s ills. In that world, you’ll recall, the New Founding Fathers decreed a yearly holiday where all crime (including murder, the warnings always helpfully remind) is legal. The movies have, at best, been a vibrant stew of high-minded allegorical social commentary smuggled and shouted through low-down exploitation thrills—even if it’s never quite as high or low as it could be. At least they have spirit. They have a keen understanding of the societal breakdown they display, how a free-crime night indulges the worst impulses of the worst among us, and inflicting the most pain on the most vulnerable. The prequel, The First Purge, showed us how the whole thing was manipulated by wealthy conservatives as a way to let the rabid white supremacists and assorted right-wing extremists in their base attack women, the poor, and people of color. Now, with The Forever Purge, the series takes us past the end of The Purge to find die-hard Purgers, calling themselves Real Americans and True Patriots as they mount flags on their trucks and load their machine guns, getting fed up with their limited hours of impunity and just keep the chaos rolling. One neo-Nazi grins at the sound of gunfire; that’s American music, he says. It’s a smart escalation of the stakes, since sunrise is no longer the safety it was in entries past. Now the danger goes and goes, and grows and grows. When will it end? (Maybe the Purgers will storm the capital.) This isn’t only a movie about survival, but about escape from the worst of us.

The movie shifts the setting out of the big cities and into a small rural Texas town full of rich white ranchers (Will Patton, Josh Lucas) and Mexican laborers (Ana de la Reguera, Tenoch Huerta). Eventually, as the rioters start hijacking the city, we follow a sympathetic group of innocents as they try to flee with their lives. There’s horror inherent in the premise, fitting the place the series started, though as it’s aged the scariest aspect is how plausible they’ve started to play, how thin the line between the rhetoric of the Purgers and our actual right-wing rioters and their enablers. There’s even an overt line late in the picture about the pro-Purge party watching the monster of their own creation and indulgence rampage out of their control. Scarily familiar. But Forever tilts more toward action sequences, away from the horror of jump scares and even dialing back on (some) of the gore. Instead the picture favors chases and standoffs and shootouts — the better to match the west of its setting. Screenwriter James DeMonaco, the voice behind every one of these movies, continues to modulate its ideas, build its world, and find new avenues to have it reflect urgent topical concerns while putting its stock characters, and our country, through the wringer. 

Director Everardo Gout dutifully stages the looming menace of the moment — motorcycles roaring up on a dark highway; a theater basement full of staked vampire cosplayers; a border wall as towering trap lit up by break lights — and keeps the proceedings fast-paced and frantic. By the end, Americans are trying to flee violence at home by crossing borders. Cities burn at the hands of folks fed a big lie that killing those who upset them will restore their old sense of hegemonic power. And in the middle a prejudiced rancher grows to respect the Mexicans as they help each other survive. (In action, that’s not quite as pat as that sounds.) Here’s a movie to match our precarious moment (all the more prescient considering its original release date was last summer). It somehow nurtures a small kindling of hope even as it finds increasingly dire reasons to despair. This is a series that makes its political points with shotgun satire and sledgehammer slogans. But, given the tenor of the times, that feels just about right.

Now This is Zooming: F9

It’s now common knowledge that the Fast & Furious series has become something of a superheroic fantasy. It began as a simple street racing thriller. Now this is a group of films in which multiple people have had perilous falls safely broken by the hood of a car, and a rollover accident down the side of a mountain rarely amounts to more than a brief need to shake your head and carry on. It’s a tangle of call backs and retcons, a comic book soap opera of knotty gearhead melodrama and splash panel surprises. It’s gone so far and away over the top that it’s still there even as it dips ever so slightly back to just plain over the top. That at their best they remain legible mission movies — a diverse ensemble of heroes assemble to go to the place and fight the guys to get the things before the countdown clock reaches zero — is part of their charm. The latest is F9, and it manages to be super satisfying on both levels, even if it’s no threat to the title of franchise best. (Maybe the fact this big crowd-pleasing spectacle will be the first such picture for many a vaccinated audience member this summer will help ease that distinction.) The whole endeavor has proven to be a sturdy, well-oiled machine. We get the thrills, personalities, effects, and stunts you’d expect as the gang gathers to once again drive real fast to save the world from nefarious international baddies bent on messing stuff up for everyone real bad or something. It’s nice to see them again, and in a movie a little more worthy than the last couple. The series once again balances its complicatedly simple plotting with earnest Hallmark card sentiment, genuine affection for its characters, and old fashioned serial cliffhanger motivations. It’s a good time, if you can grin at the sight of a car swinging across a chasm on a rope stuck to its front tire or deploying an enormous electromagnet or rocketing into the air on a jet engine. It’s the ninth one. Aren’t you ready for that by now?

Par for the course the movie takes our usual players — Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese, Ludacris, Jordana Brewster, Nathalie Emmanuel — and returning recurring supporting players and adds a striking woman (Anna Sawai) and muscle man (John Cena) and cameos (fresh and familiar) to scurry around a new glowing gizmo MacGuffin. It also brings in an estranged sibling heretofore unmentioned and a scene from six movies back gets retconned for the second time. But it’s all for the sake of the fast paced action ramped up and amped up with careening variables and whiz-bang complications. So it’s just plain fun. The outsized action is capably staged by returning director Justin Lin, responsible for most of the series’ high points thus far, who lets the movie in on the grinning joke and satisfaction without letting it get too self-amused. It’s just as often letting characters shake their heads at where they’ve ended up as we might be in the audience. Lin knows what the fans want is a story that delivers on genuine affection for its family of friends who make up our plucky heroes, and sends them through their paces making cars do things they never could. He also provides some flashbacks — a number throughout, and they’re aptly more a textural piece with the series’ earliest entries — to smooth over belated connective tissue and ground the characters’ self-awareness to understand the escalation their lives and talents have undergone without ever quite puncturing the reality, so to speak. It’s all just too fast to have time for anything but good times. It careens past its sometimes-dodgy exposition with high spirits and smash-bang, thrillingly ridiculous action craft. Unlike, say, the sometimes overly schematic Marvel movies, this is a series that matches its characters’ sense of flying by the seat of their pants and making it up as they go along, improbably surviving. That they keep getting away with it is a huge part of the fun.

Back in Action: NOBODY and WRATH OF MAN

The lizard-brained appeal of the shoot-‘em-up Nobody is a little misjudged. It stars Bob Odenkirk, the great sketch comedian of Mr. Show turned wry and soulful character actor star of Better Call Saul, as a suburban family man in a rut. An early montage shows us his daily routine of coffee and commute and office work filling spreadsheets. His wife won’t sleep with him. His son doesn’t respect him. Day after day. This is interrupted by a pair of semi-bumbling thieves who break into his home and steal just a few trinkets. Feeling emasculated for failing to stop the robbery, he roams the city looking for trouble, eventually beating up some shady characters on a city bus with surprisingly adept combat moves. Turns out he’s a former secret agent retired in protected obscurity. Also turns out he just beat up some guys connected to a Russian mobster, who sends dozens of anonymous goons after him, leaving this humble middle-aged dope no choice but to send his wife and kids away while he goes full John Wick. (That the screenplay is from Wick scripter Derek Kolstad should be no surprise.) The result is a movie in which a mid-life crisis of masculinity is solved by violence—waves and waves of shootings and stabbings and all sorts of things to make a faceless, personless baddie’s body go splat. I’ll admit the action, staged by director Ilya Naishuller (whose previous actioner, the woozy POV-shot Hardcore Henry was repellently violent), takes on a passable jolt, and the dumb retribution logic plays out with some dopey spirit. But I couldn’t shake the fact that the whole amoral shape of the thing was like someone traded American Beauty’s portrait of male-pattern ennui’s sex fantasies for violence, then dropped the clumsy satire for overplayed needle drops and self-satisfied slow-mo. Odenkirk is smartly restrained and underplayed throughout, though. And the shoot outs and explosions and car wrecks have a stupid satisfaction to them. But the whole arc of the picture — better living through mass murder — leaves a nasty aftertaste.

Far better to see a movie that knows how deadly serious its pulp plotting is. I’d be loath to say a thriller as unremittingly dark and unsparing as Wrath of Man is a moral work, but it has a code and a perspective that understands there is no such thing as good violence or a righteous kill. It’s too stark and unflinching, lean and mean, to be anything but impressed by the emptiness with which it leaves every character involved. There’s something ominous to its undertow, crisp crime plotting that will be drug under by its poisonous grasp. Here men’s schemes are what opens that Pandora’s box. They’re pitiless; their crimes run cold; blood oozes and splatters like tar. It stars Jason Statham in one of his chilliest performances, his tight musculature crafted into a stone-faced determination. He’s a new hire at an armored truck company that has recently been targeted by a team of robbers who blocked off a road, blew out the side door, and gunned down the drivers. Statham is silently hyper-confident, keeps to himself, and seems to be way more talented than the job requires as the movie’s introductory passages draws him into his co-worker’s world of jargon and joshing. You can tell he’s up to something. As the movie steadily widens its scope, sidestepping to show us other groups of men, we see this armored truck depot is the hub of criss-crossing plots: two teams of thieves looking for a big score, a man-on-the-inside working to help one of them, some cops who may or may not be onto something. And Statham? He’s on his own, out for revenge. You can tell when he calmly, precisely guns down some potential robbers without breaking a sweat, and then follows it up with the faintest flicker of disappointment. These weren’t the thieves he was looking for. The movie’s unflinching grimness and deliberate forward motion matches Statham’s, as his vengeance works itself into mythical, or perhaps Old Testament, dimensions through the dark rumblings of fatalism, the taciturn brutality of its sparingly deployed concussive violence, the score full of low, slow strings and thunderously rolling drums.

The film untangles its deceptively knotty plot with razor-sharp simplicity and focused tension. Revelations drop into  a sturdy structure that thuds each new variable into place with equal parts inevitability and surprise. Moving backwards and forwards in time, and moving in different groups of dangerous men on a direct collision course with each other, the heat steadily builds to a boiling point, spilling over in a clever and tragic escalating climax. The way there finds in its long set-up and clockwork payoffs a merciless logic and calculated futility. We get the sense all of these guys need to take action in response to their circumstances (they were wronged, or greedy, or bored), but know deep down all this danger won’t get them much of anything in return. It’s a fallen neo-noir world past saving, but something must be done anyway. The big ensemble of enjoyable character actors (Holt McCallany, Josh Hartnett, Jeffrey Donovan, Scott Eastwood, and on and on) keep the personality on a low simmer, the kind of hard-bitten pulp dialogue that curlicues with just enough flair, a mixture of hollow macho posturing and gruff molasses-drip dialogues of heavy seriousness. The film matches this tone with its own self-seriousness: chapter headings, drawings of snakes and devils in the open credits, a well-deployed use of a gravely Johnny Cash lament in a violent montage, restraint in patient wide-shots and smartly withheld reveals. But that seriousness finds a good match in the mood and craft of the picture, which imbues what could be affectations with a level of tightly controlled artfulness that elevates what could in lesser hands devolve to mere shoot-‘em-ups. Here every shot counts, and hurts.

That it comes from writer-director Guy Ritchie marks potentially a new era in his filmmaking. After all, he began in the 90s as part of the post-Tarantino fast-talking genre movie crowd, with jumpy and jumbled crime pictures like Snatch and Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels that rattled chronologically and pictorially. Those early films of his are energetic and youthful, but also empty, callow contraptions. His exercises in style were then well-served as directorial eccentricities in massive Hollywood branded blockbusters — two Sherlock Holmes, a Man from UNCLE, a King Arthur, an Aladdin. He often enlivened what duller hands would’ve turned out perfunctorily, taking his quick-cut flashiness and scrappy chatter to glossy spectacles. With Wrath of Man, he’s come full circle with a sense of an aged master, older and wiser, confident in his narrative chops and control of tone. He entrusts a thick layer of menace to a talented cast and crew of ace craftspeople. Every shot is well-judged and clear. Every sequence is economical and thrilling. He rarely goes out of his way to accomplish in two shots what could be done in one. Thus it becomes an exercise in control, taking his interest in underdogs and rivalries, ambition and deception, fatalism and determination, and drawing them out in a mechanically impressive scrambled chronology told with an atypically heavy pace. It’s a two-hour crescendo of sustained suspense and dread, promising and delivering clever realizations and anyone-goes violence. It builds. It escalates and modulates. It finds new depths to dig as it wrestles with the darkness at the heart of these men’s plans, the way wrath animates yet hollows out everyone around it. Here’s a film that look on the evil men do — in so many forms — and feels sick from the weight it carries, before exploding outward in intense genre thrills.

Human Boys from the Deep: LUCA

As gentle and lovely as a seaside breeze, and as fragile and fleeting as a summer friendship, Pixar’s Luca is a magical animated movie. So many American animators claim Miyazaki as an inspiration, but here’s the rare film that proves it in action. In ways reminiscent of the Japanese master, director Enrico Casarosa (of the short La Luna) and his talented team have made a film aware to subtle shifts in character dynamics, legible to even a small child, but stirring in the detail, compassion, and earnest emotion, with which it’s carried out. And it’s one with nature, keyed into the dappling sunshine and soft tides, the waves lapping the beach and the drops of dew and rain slowly dropping on cobblestone streets. Within these sights, the story follows a timid young sea monster (Jacob Tremblay) who is curious about land. He falls into a quick companionship with a slightly older sea monster boy (Jack Dylan Grazer) who, shockingly to our young protagonist, lives in an abandoned lighthouse in a bay overlooking a charming cliffside Italian village. When out of water, these sea creatures look human, and the boys have fun learning to play like people do. Flipping their fins got them this far. Sure, the villagers in a small-town mid-century Italian paradise — with exquisite rustic architecture and period detail from crackling radios to apt movie posters — hate the mythical beasts of the sea, but they have gelato and bikes and plenty of pasta. The boys are going to like it here, if they can stay. Dazzling Pixar craft makes the movie a consistent stunner of light and movement as the boys try on life in this new place. The look of the film is a soft cartoony embellishment that’s rounded and cozy, befitting the swooning picturesque setting and sophisticated simple wackiness motoring the plot.

The picture remains causal and loose as far as these types of stories go, with the goals and stakes relatively small, but oh-so-big for those involved. The boys think they want a Vespa. They must avoid the younger boy’s parents (Maya Rudolph and Jim Gaffigan), who figure out blessedly quickly what’s happened. They all must hide their identities and thus even the tiniest splash of water, no small feat by the beach. With Pixar’s typical clockwork plotting and mad-scramble climaxes done up here in a beautifully underplayed mood, the movie navigates a sweet whimsy. There’s strong melancholy in swift and impactful moments that never loses the overall childlike wonder, with soft but strong laughs and rubbery cartoony gags stretching the adorable character designs in fancifully well-designed slapstick. When a daydream finds a herd of wild Vespas roaming the countryside, or a bike crash ends with a halo of fish swimming around one’s head, or an eccentric uncle from the deep goes on about whale carcasses, the movie shows off its fantasy with quick shorthand strokes. And it has good fun watching the boys scramble around water to avoid capture, though of course the surly cat named Machiavelli smells something fishy. A fast friendship with a sweet underdog girl (Emma Berman) is a good sign; that her dad is a one-armed fisherman is maybe less so.

The consistent charming invention on display always returns to the boys’ shifting emotions, plugged into their perspective to an attentive and sensitive degree. Despite potential dangers and disappointments, the movie keeps things in perspective. This sunny and well-paced movie is always tenderly attuned to the dynamics of friendships, with the boys’ giddy good-natured playfulness, brash inquisitiveness, and nervous energies making for a fizzy boyish chemistry. And their evolving understanding of themselves and those around them makes this the rare coming of age story that understands such a process happens not all at once, in one momentous summer, but by testing and attempting, by forging new connections, stepping safely out of your comfort zone, discovering new talents, and learning how to be yourself. That Luca arrives at the same well-earned bittersweet teary-eyed character beats by the end that you’d expect of Pixar’s best should be no surprise. But it’s all the more impactful for slipping in naturally and honestly as an outgrowth of getting to know these characters, springing out of their smallest shifts of mood and maturation. The result is as bittersweet, sunny, and satisfying as a perfect summer day.

Block Party: IN THE HEIGHTS

At a moment when so many feel isolated, disconnected, left behind by the vagaries of a difficult year and a stratified society increasingly emphasizing everyone-for-themselves lonely responsibility, here’s a story of a neighborhood. It’s disappearing, in the process of getting priced out by gentrification, and in danger of losing its distinctive personality. That’s New York City for you. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s pre-Hamilton musical In the Heights tells this story, inhabiting the world of Washington Heights, where the Latin music flows  in melodious Spanish lyrics and salsa rhythms, and the food simmers as the people dream—some yearning for escape up the ladder of success, while others find comfort in the world they and their neighbors have built for themselves, a little bit of their home countries carried over into their American dream. The movie adaptation, scripted by the stage production’s co-author Quiara Alegría Hudes, is as broad and generous and alive as it is specific and well-observed. It’s a constant delight in its unfolding, a musical that leaves you feeling for the characters as much as humming the tunes on the way out.

All told, it builds to a moving expression of communal spirit and togetherness in a fountain of color and movement and dance, bringing each member of the cast to center stage for winning spotlight. The story — textured and swirling — takes place during a heat wave, and circles the concerns of a wide ensemble of characters. We meet Usnavi (Anthony Ramos), a young bodega owner who hopes to return to the Dominican Republic someday. He’s crushing on the pretty young stylist (Melissa Barrera) who enjoys her gossipy co-workers at the salon (Daphne Rubin-Vega, Stephanie Beatriz, and Dascha Polanco), but would prefer to be a fashion designer. Usnavi’s business-minded best friend (Corey Hawkins) is interested in the cute college girl (Leslie Grace) back for the summer visiting her entrepreneur father (Jimmy Smits). Elsewhere is the undocumented teenager (Gregory Diaz IV) and his alcoholic father (Marc Anthony), a sweet elderly woman (Olga Merediz) who plays abuela to the entire block, and a snow-cone vendor (Miranda) who harbors a resentment of the ice cream truck. They’re all interconnected, even when they don’t want to be.

As the intersecting dreams and dramas play out against the sizzling sidewalks and easy flow of the hip-hop merengue, the musical numbers strut out in broad, bold studio style, a modern Arthur Freed slick spectacle with a little break-dancing here, a little Gene Kelly there, a little Busby Berkeley everywhere. Director Jon M. Chu brings the sense of movement and space that made his Step Up 3D so beautifully expressive, and commits, with that series’ choreographer Christopher Scott, to showing the full glory of dancers in perfect synchronicity and deeply felt emotive power. Here a community pool becomes a glorious watery number Esther Williams would recognize, the side of a fire escape becomes the site of a couple so in love they could float up the wall, a subway becomes a tunnel of ghostly memories, and an apartment courtyard becomes a “carnaval del barrio.” The best numbers go on and on and I felt I could revel in their joyous eruption of togetherness for hours. The movie succeeds by tapping into the show’s empathetic imagination, proudly sensitive and sentimental befitting its pounding backbeat, but wise to cast a somewhat hard-edged eye on the limits of the American dream. After all, this neighborhood is slipping away, but the traditions will live on for those who dare to keep them alive. This movie loves this place and these people too much to let it go away unnoticed, and throws a massive block party of a musical to celebrate. What a well-timed ecstatic burst of a lively tribute to the restorative power of community connections.