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Reviews of what’s out now

New In Theaters

Odd Bird

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My Penguin Friend

by Hope Madden

An old fisherman who’s never recovered from an unendurable loss saves the life of a little penguin. They become best friends. It’s a true story that was clearly designed by the movie gods, but luckily it fell into the hands of director David Schurmann, whose work may lean crowd-pleasing but never glossy or self-indulgent.

My Penguin Friend doesn’t need it. Though Act 1, introducing the tragedy that will haunt Joao (Jean Reno, a heartbreaking delight), does go a bit over the top in its cinematic tendencies, Schurmann and team settle into a more natural rhythm by the beginning of the second act.

Reno’s a broken, sunken old man who doesn’t go into town and hasn’t talked with his old fisherman friends in so long they barely remember. His wife Maria (Adriana Barraza, underused but as nuanced and authentic as ever) co-exists but the emptiness of their home is its own character.

Schurmann doesn’t rely on an imposing score or even a seasoned cast to manipulate our emotions, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t do it. It’s what he does not show in Act 1 that haunts Reno’s eyes and the surface of the ocean outside Joao and Maria’s window. Schurmann reminds us of what none of us could bear to see just often enough to make your breath catch for the fear that Joao might have to live through the heartbreak again.

Which would be unbearable if the film didn’t also offer the levity, goofiness and undeniable cuteness of this penguin who befriends Joao, baffles scientists, and swims 5000 miles from Argentina to Brazil every year or so to hang out and watch TV on the sofa with his buddy.

It’s about the dearest thing you’re ever going to see, which just about makes up for the fact that most of the ensemble has never acted and it shows. Any stretch of narrative without Reno feels twice as long as it is, but there is no denying the heartbreaking charm whenever he and Barraza are onscreen.

There are plenty of flaws that keep My Penguin Friend from really singing, but it’s not enough to dampen the joy to be found with this odd couple.

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Vault Vamp

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Borderlands

by Hope Madden

I want very much to love that Cate Blanchett keeps making Eli Roth movies. Maybe I could find that love if Roth would put her in something he knows how to make—a horror film—instead of trapping her inside a genre he can’t seem to figure out himself.

Borderlands is Roth’s big screen adaptation of a popular video game, a Mad Max style fantasy that follows low life bounty hunter Lilith (Blanchett) to a vile planet of opportunists and thieves on a quest to retrieve the kidnapped daughter of a mogul (Edgar Ramírez).

But daughter Tina (Ariana Greenblatt, Barbie) doesn’t want to be rescued and soon, begrudgingly, Lilith becomes part of Tina’s ragtag band of misfit heroes (along with Kevin Hart, Jamie Lee Curtis, Florian Munteanu and the voice of Jack Black).

That’s a good cast, top to bottom. Black and Blanchett co-led Roth’s 2018 misfire The House with a Clock in its Walls. It wasn’t a big miss. It was a fine if unremarkable adaptation of the John Bellairs novel for kids. But Blanchett and Black were fun.

This go-round, Black’s limited to pointless annoyance as he voices robot sidekick Claptrap. Blanchett is glorious, naturally, cutting an imposing video game figure with sly wit and grace. Greenblatt’s a bit of fun, Hart’s underused. But the cast is not the problem.

Roth feels out of sorts. The action is not compelling, the comic timing is way off, there’s little chemistry among his merry band, the stakes feel low, surprises are few, meaningful transitions from one set up to the next don’t exist, the FX are not great.

There are two main action set pieces (that’s not nearly enough, by the way) that could have amounted to something interesting: one with a car and a giant piss field monster and the second with an underground tunnel full of lunatics. Roth can’t generate either the exhilaration or the comedy the first calls for. The second comes closer—it’s a horror set up, truth be told, and that should be an easier fit for the filmmaker—and it’s a natural video game fit. It’s the closest he comes to excitement, but it’s belabored, its end an utter disappointment.

Like the film.

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Growing Up Fast

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It Ends With Us

by George Wolf

In the years since the It Ends With Us novel was released, author Colleen Hoover has admitted that her main characters were just too young. That mistake has been corrected for the film adaptation, although leaving behind the Young Adult trappings isn’t quite so easy.

Lily Bloom (Blake Lively) is now in her mid-30s, and meets Dr. Ryle Kincaid (now late 30s – a much more logical age for any neurosurgeon not named Doogie Houser) on the roof of his Boston apartment building. Lily’s up there to reflect on the recent death of her father, while Ryle (Justin Baldoni, who also directs) is headed up to blow off some steam – our first clue that he has a temper.

He’s a chisled, forever stubble-faced playboy, while she’s the flower shop owning “girl you take home to Mama,” so their relationship takes time to build. This patience works in the film’s favor.

Baldoni and screenwriter Christy Hall (fresh off the smartly provocative Daddio) layer the present day romance with effective flashbacks to teenaged Lily (Isabela Ferrer) and her first love, Atlas Corrigan (Alex Neustaedter). Back then, they helped each other cope with violence at home, but his Marine commitment pulled them apart after graduation.

So imagine the surprise when Atlas (Brandon Sklenar) turns out to be the owner of the hot new restaurant that Lily’s bestie Allysa (Jenny Slate) loves. Jealousy only adds fuel to Ryle’s dangerous behavior, which pulls Lily into an all-too-familiar cycle of disfunction.

Lively’s committed performance goes a long way toward easing the awkwardness of the contrivances at play. She allows us to feel Lily’s caution, which makes her desperate feelings of guilt resonate when the “accidents” begin to happen.

Slate is always a treat, but the slightly kooky best friend character seems a bit forced here, as does Baldoni’s reliance on interchangeable pop songs to continue the conversation.

This is a conversation worth having, and the film does manage some moments of poignancy. It also wisely chooses Atlas to serve more as a reminder to Lily than her savior. But nearly every issue the film addresses – such as the circumstances that make it difficult for women to leave abusive relationships – are raised and lowered with an efficient tidiness that betrays the story’s beginnings.

It End With Us still has YA in its blood, after all. It’s older, wiser, and has learned some hard lessons, but ultimately finds comfort in the string-pulling formula they love back home.

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Summer Lovin’

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The Beautiful Summer

by Eva Fraser

Set in Turin, Italy, complete with stunning shots of architecture and natural landscapes, The Beautiful Summer, written and directed by Laura Luchetti, gives a sun-stained window into a love story between two women: Ginia (Yile Yara Vianello) and Amelia (Deva Cassell). It takes place in 1938 when Mussolini’s fascist regime grew more powerful and restrictive by the day. Ginia, a seamstress at an atelier in the city, and Amelia, a figure model for painters, have a chance meeting that sparks a relationship of infatuation, jealousy, companionship, desperation, and love. 

There are several things that this film does well, but the lack of connection and follow-through creates a problem. 

One aspect that The Beautiful Summer gets right is its portrayal of emotion as something that can change with every passing moment. The film doesn’t shy away from the nuances of the progression of a relationship, especially one that is not socially acceptable in the time period. Cinematographer Diego Romero captures all of these moments beautifully and leans into the natural landscape to create symbolism and little vignettes that deepen the story. 

This film is consistently underlined with desire, although ambiguous and confusing, with men acting as conduits for the electricity between Ginia and Amelia. Sometimes, cryptic messaging can be beneficial and enticing for the audience, but The Beautiful Summer overuses this device, weakening the plot.

Two key aspects that were more ambiguous than they should have been were the time and setting. Ginia and Amelia fall in love right before the Second World War, which would seemingly add more stakes to their relationship, but it is only hinted at with some soldiers in one of the sequences and one of Mussolini’s speeches playing in the background. Perhaps this is intentional— the nature of their story causes everything else to take a backseat— but it is not a compelling enough reason. 

The Beautiful Summer generally lacked clarity and served as an experiential rollercoaster: emotional highs plummeting to disorienting lows. Furthermore, the film swathed itself in clichés that made its originality invisible. A young, impressionable, innocent girl meets a mature, extroverted, flirty woman. What could possibly happen next?

Although it was off to a promising start, The Beautiful Summer got lost in the heat of the moment and took too long to warm back up.

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Blame It on the Fame

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Girl You Know It’s True

by Rachel Willis

Simon Verhoeven’s biopic on Milli Vanilli’s meteoric rise and devastating fall is the subject of his latest film, Girl You Know It’s True. The film opens by stating that this is not only based on a true story but on several true stories. As much as we want our truth to be objective, we’re reminded that the retelling of events is often based on memory—a faulty, frequently contradictory, wholly subjective experience.

Of course, certain parts of the story are not in dispute. The duo that put the face to the group were Rob Pilatus (Tijan Njie) and Fab Morvan (Elan Ben Ali). Both were recruited by producer Frank Farian (Matthias Schweighöfer) after they were seen dancing by his live-in business partner, Milli (Bella Dayne).

After the initial agreement to work together, this is where the story gets interesting. Even those who know the tale will be drawn into the elaborate ruse Farian puts together – fusing vocals and performers, stealing songs from other artists to use as singles for his newest “project.”

While Farian’s role in Milli Vanilli’s story is critical, it’s Ali and Njie who tie it all together. Both embody the characters they play with naivety and enthusiasm – often in equal measure. Their deal with the devil is understandable. And anyone paying attention to music at the time is aware that while this arrangement may have been the most egregious in terms of deception, there were plenty of shady deals going around in record studios.

And while there’s no sympathy for Frank Farian, Schweighöfer does manage to imbue him with some compassion. Instead of coming across as a one-note villain, there’s a bit of humanity to the character.

The film excels at blending humor and tragedy into Rob and Fab’s story. That news reports would interrupt coverage of the United States’s war in Iraq to cover the “lip-syncing scandal” is the height of cultural absurdity. The tragedy comes in the fact that while this was a team effort, just as Rob and Fab were the faces of the group, so they were the scapegoats of its demise.

No one disputes that Rob and Fabrice were complicit in the deceit, but the price they paid seems too heavy compared to the producers, managers, and studio execs who claimed they were just as shocked by the news as everyone else. Their pockets were lined with the dollars of those fans who felt betrayed.

It’s an intriguing story that is as fascinating now as it was then.

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Uneasy Money

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The Instigators

by George Wolf

Go ahead, Affleck, Damon and company. Say those words I like to hear.

“It’s a heist movie.”

Apple TV’s The Instigators is indeed a heist movie. There’s a plan, a snag, a hostage, a manhunt, and plenty of interesting characters well played by plenty of veteran talents. Director Doug Liman, coming off the rollicking good ride that was Road House, assembles all the parts with precision.

The sum just needs to be a little more fun.

Casey Affleck and Chuck MacLean provide a script that finds former Marine, Rory (Matt Damon), confiding in his therapist, Dr. Donna (Hong Chau), about his downward spiral and desperation for cash.

Rory finds an opportunity for acquiring exactly the $32, 400 he needs by teaming with alcoholic ex-con Cobby (Affleck) to pull a job for local goon Mr. Besegai (Michael Stuhlbarg). The guys simply need to rob the Boston mayor’s (Ron Perlman) big election night soiree at the yacht club, and they’ll get a slice of the take.

Not so fast, Massholes. Things go haywire, which sends the boys running from Besegai’s henchmen (Alfred Molina, Paul Walter Hauser), the cops and the mayor’s enforcer (Ving Rhames) while Rory reaches out to Dr. Donna for some affirmations.

Damon and Affleck create a nice pair of contrasting criminals. Damon’s forthright, note-taking approach to the heist often runs afoul of Affleck’s jaded pro, while Chau’s Dr. Donna won’t let any active felonies derail her from working on Rory’s emotional growth.

The stellar ensemble also gets plenty of room to sharpen the edges of their respective supporting characters. But even with witty dialog inside an ever-evolving fugitive journey, nothing ever becomes as outright funny as you’re hoping it would.

Like Rory, The Instigators seems most interested in getting the job done in a timely and competent manner. That’s fine, and you could find plenty of worse ways to spend 90 minutes. But if might have been nice to take Cobby’s approach and get a little reckless once in a while.

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Lonely in Your Nightmare

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Ganymede

by Hope Madden

Have you ever seen A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy’s Revenge? Because you should, especially if you find yourself intrigued by the plot synopsis for Colby Holt and Sam Probst’s LGBTQ+ horror Ganymede.

In the Nightmare sequel, everything young Jesse Walsh sees around him—his gym teacher’s S&M outfit, the neighborhood bar where men make out with other men in the stairwell, shirtless frenemy Ron Grady—all seem to be pointing him toward his own homosexuality. Meanwhile, a shadowy menace stalks his nightmares, clearly a representation of the terror and horror he associates with the sexual orientation he’s unwilling to recognize.

If that’s not how you read that film, rewatch it because it’s clearly there in every frame.

Holt and Probst are not hiding their agenda behind slasher antics to maximize audience size. High school wrestler Lee Fletcher (Jordan Doww) buries his feelings and repeats the mantra I’m neither gay nor bisexual, I’m straight and heterosexual. But he knows the truth, and his parents—the honorable Big Lee Fletcher (veteran talent Joe Chrest) and tradwife Floy (Robyn Lively)—suspect it. But they all know that the fear of God is enough to turn the boy straight.

Except, of course, that it’s not. And when Lee finds himself drawn to sweet, out-and-proud Kyle (Pablo Castelblanco, the dearest kid), a repugnant, demonic image begins to stalk him. Seriously fundamentalist preacher Pastor Royer (David Koechner, solid) comes to the rescue with his own recipe for salvation.

The filmmakers, working from Holt’s script, juggle societal pressure, family trauma and damaging fundamentalist beliefs with a genuine tenderness for adolescence. A film that sometimes bares its budget gets a boost from Koechner, and the vulnerability Castelblanco brings to his darling character keeps tensions very high.

Doww, on the other hand, struggles to find a whole human inside this smothered, denied young man. Chrest is wasted with an underwritten cliché of a role and Lively’s character arc needed more development, particularly as it relates to Paster Royer.

But there is a refreshing boldness in Ganymede. The conflict between Kyle and Lee parallels those between the ordinary high school students and Carrie White. The idea that homosexuality is somehow abnormal is now the utterly backwards and ridiculous notion and those who cling to it are hypocrites and bullies.

So, give Ganymede a chance. And then, if you like it even a little bit, give yourself the gift of Freddy’s Revenge, no matter how many times you’ve already seen it. That movie was ahead of its time.

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Killer Concert

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Trap

by Hope Madden

You have to feel for a guy who’s built his career on trick endings. If he delivers another twist, he’s nothing but a gimmick. What if he just makes a thriller, no tricks, no twist, no gimmick? It can be done, right? Other filmmakers do it.

In the case of Trap, M. Night Shyamalan trades in twists and surprises for contrivance and predictability.

Josh Hartnett is Cooper, the awesome dad who sprung for floor seats to take his daughter Riley (Ariel Donoghue) to see her hero, Lady Raven (Saleka Shyamalan). But—you’ve seen the trailers—the whole concert is a trap. Cooper’s a serial killer and the Feds know he’ll be there, so they’ve descended on the show to smoke him out.

It is a compelling idea—sort of like the sting operation at the beginning of the 1989 Al Pacino/Ellen Barkin thriller Sea of Love. Except on a larger scale, with twenty thousand innocent lives at stake. I mean, cinematically it’s not a bad scheme, but in terms of law enforcement, feels sketchy.

Still, with a premise like that, the real star is the writing. How on earth is Shyamalan going to get his characters out of this?

With a lot of convenient opportunities for exposition, unreasonably handy opportunities for possible escape, and a heavy reliance on the idea that the moviegoing audience has not been to a lot of concerts.

Hartnett’s great. He’s an excellent choice for a serial killer: physically imposing but somehow bland, likeable without being memorable. Shyamalan’s camera emphasizes his height one moment, his Good Guy Jim smile the next.

Donoghue’s believable as the star struck pre-teen and Alison Pill shines late in the movie as her mother. Marnie McPhail feels unsettling real as that mom who will not drop it, and Jonathan Langdon charms as the vendor who talks to much and doesn’t have to work that hard.

Saleka Shyamalan struggles. She writes and performs all the Lady Raven songs, which seem reasonable enough as pop hits to me but, let’s be honest, I would have no idea. She comes up lacking in stage presence as the pop diva, though, and even more so as an actor.

But it’s the writing that lets you down the most. He can’t nail it every time, and when M. Night hits—The Sixth Sense, Unbreakable, Signs, The Visit, Split—it’s worth all the misses. Trap is a miss. It’s not his worst, just middle of the pack, but a disappointment nonetheless.

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Rebel Rebel

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Kneecap

by Hope Madden

There’s a reason Richard Peppiatt’s Kneecap was nominated for Sundance’s Innovator Award, and it’s not just the way scribbles, illustrations and on-screen text mirror the film’s bold, bird-flipping tone. It’s the way the director—co-writing with his leads—fictionalizes the Irish band’s origin story to embrace Ireland’s rebellious, bird-flipping history.

“Every word spoken in Irish is a bullet fired for Irish freedom.”

It’s 2019 and activists in the North of Ireland are hard at work making the Irish language an official national tongue. But there’s nothing official, nothing hard working about the way two hedonistic youths put it to use in their hip hop.

Less than Orange v Green, less even than the familial tensions that drive a great deal of the story, the conflict between respectability and the anarchic spirit of the Irish is what fuels Peppiatt’s film.

Móglaí Bap (playing himself), along with best pal Mo Chara (also as himself), learned the language at the knee of his father (Michael Fassbender), who happened to be an IRA bomber that would disappear or die—no one’s sure which—not too many years into those lessons.

Here lies the fiction, no doubt. But it’s a brilliant way to layer in the history of a land’s volatile spirit. Peppiatt and his co-conspirators have no interest in sanitizing this hero’s journey. Before Kneecap could become the hip hop revolutionaries that galvanized the island’s youth around the native language by rapping only in Irish, they had to become a trio. And that couldn’t happen until Mo Chara could meet disinterested music teacher JJ (actual bandmate DJ Próval), an Irish translator sent to his aid after his drug arrest.

It merits remarking that all three bandmates make fine actors. Mo Chara is mischievously charming and DJ Próval comes off as a veteran. Their unlikely camaraderie is infectious, amplified by the audacious energy that propels the film.

Peppiatt takes a band’s origin story, wraps it in cultural trauma, globalizes it and creates a rebel song the North of Ireland can be proud of.

Winner of the audience award at Sundance this year, Kneecap is a hard film not to like. As utterly and unapologetically Irish as the film is, it is also blisteringly universal. Every culture is built on our stories. Every story needs a language.

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Madame Robinson

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Last Summer

by Matt Weiner

The word “provocative” gets thrown around a lot in art, but French director Catherine Breillat has at least earned it over her storied career.

Last Summer, Breillat’s first film since 2013’s Abuse of Weakness, lives up to the label with an age-gap stepmother/stepson romance that dispenses with titillation to become a sharp, complicated and morally fluid examination of its leading lovers.

Anne (Léa Drucker, without whom none of this would work) is a successful middle-aged lawyer with a comfortable bourgeois life—business owner husband Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin), two adorable young children who enjoy their horseback riding and trips to the cabin—just the sort of luxurious ennui that’s ripe to be upended.

And upended it is, when Pierre’s wayward son from a first wife comes to stay with the family after troubles at his boarding school. Théo (Samuel Kircher) is a stranger to his father almost as much as he is to Anne, but it falls to her to integrate the rebellious 17-year-old into the family.

Casual secrets and moments of raw openness between Anne and Théo quickly progress from emotional intimacy to a passionate affair. It’s a salacious premise, and the adaptation, written in collaboration with Pascal Bonitzer, is a natural fit for Breillat’s boundary-pushing explorations of sexuality.

Breillat’s rewrite of the Danish original takes almost sadistic pleasure in the unresolved ambiguity and hypocrisy on display from Anne. Drucker gives a performance that credibly swings from feminist advocate to abuser to… well, something Breillat leaves up to the audience to decide.

Last Summer is also a far more artful way of grappling with complex subjects like abuse and agency than Breillat’s blunt interviews on Harvey Weinstein in the wake of the #MeToo movement.

Anne is a compelling subject, and Last Summer refuses to condemn her as a one-note monster. In many ways, she is all the more fascinating for the way she seems unable to come to terms with her own deeply flawed behavior and actions toward Théo.

It can be an intense artistic exercise to bear the full force of Breillat’s provocations with none of the pitch-black humor of the similarly confrontational May December. There’s no clear-cut legal satisfaction here, by design. Breillat’s unsettling study of Anne and her motivations is ultimately an artistic one—and all the wallowing in moral uncertainty that goes along with that.