Author: Amy Diaz

My annual cheerleading for the Oscars

By Amy Diaz

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Go, Oscars! Yay, the movies! Huzzah for a beloved form of entertainment that feels like it’s, you know, Going Through It right now! I will never give up on the Oscars even in what feel like the oddball years like this one where the movies felt fewer and quieter. And thus, when the Oscar telecast begins — Sunday, March 2, 7 p.m., on ABC and Hulu — I will be planted in front of my TV. And here’s what I’ll be cheering for:

• Conclave for the win! Of the nine out of 10 of the Best Picture nominees I’ve seen, Conclave (available for rent or purchase and streaming on Peacock), the stand-out cast movie about cardinals picking a new pope, is my favorite. And it features Isabella Rosselini in, like, three scenes for which she was also nominated in Supporting Actress (and is maybe my fave in that category). If Conclave can’t win, my next pick would be The Substance(available for rent or purchase and on Mubi), featuring Demi Moore’s excellent comic performance as a performer willing to go to sci-fi lengths to stay in the spotlight (Moore definitely being my pick in the Lead Actress category). The other films in the category in the general order of my wanting them to win: Nickel Boys (available for purchase), the tale of two boys stuck at a segregated reform school in 1960s Florida; Wicked(available for purchase), the gem-colored adaptation of the musical; Anora(rent or purchase), a dramady about an exotic dancer and her relationship with the goofy son of a rich, shady Russian family; A Complete Unknown (in theaters), a biopic of Bob Dylan’s early years as a performer; The Brutalist(purchase), the story of an architect trying to recover from World War II; Dune: Part Two (rent or purchase and streaming on Max), a movie about Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya and sand, and Emilia Pérez (streaming on Netflix), a crazy musical that is problematic in multiple ways but might still get Zoe Saldaña a Supporting Actress win. I haven’t seenI’m Still Here yet — a movie about a Brazilian family living through a military coup in the 1970s.

• Make it Sing Sing’s night! Colman Domingo, the standout in my opinion in the Lead Actor category, would be the big win for this movie, which totally deserved but didn’t get a Best Picture nod. The excellent and hopeful story of an acting troupe in Sing Sing Correctional Facility, Sing Sing (available for rent or purchase) is also nominated in Original Song and Adapted Screenplay, where it would also be my pick to win.

• Yay to animation! The Animated Feature category is solid, even if I might have swapped out something — Inside Out 2 (rent, purchase and on Disney+) maybe — for Transformers One (rent, purchase and Paramount+), a surprisingly pretty and smart origin story. My pick here is the sweet, lovely The Wild Robot (for rent or purchase and streaming on Peacock), though I won’t be mad if Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (Netflix) or the beautiful, contemplative, wordless Flow (rent, purchase and streaming on Max) takes it. I haven’t seen Memoir of a Snail(rent, purchase and on AMC+).

• Hurray for accessible documentaries and international films! Once upon a time, nominees in what is now the International Feature category would seem to appear from nowhere and then not be available for viewing until deep into the summer. But now, many of those movies and this year’s Documentary Feature nominees — which didn’t include critical faves like the bittersweet Daughters (Netflix), the charming Will & Harper (Netflix), which also deserved a song nomination, and Dahomey(purchase, rent and streaming on Mubi and which is still on my to-watch list) — are available to watch now. In Documentary (confession: these are also on my to-watch list), the readily available nominees are Black Box Diaries (Paramount+), a Japanese journalist’s investigation into her rape accusations; Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat (rent, purchase and on Kino Film), about the “U.S. government’s jazz ambassador program in Africa,” according to the film description, and Sugarcane (Hulu), a look at the abuse of children at an Indian residential school in Canada. Porcelain War, about three artists in Ukraine, is at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston on Feb. 27 and is slated to screen elsewhere in the Boston area in March. No Other Land does not yet have U.S. distribution and doesn’t appear to be viewable at home in the U.S.; a New York Times story from Feb. 19 said this documentary directed by Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers will self-distribute in U.S. theaters.

In International Feature Film, nominees include Flow, Emilia Pérez and I’m Still Here as well as (also on the to-watch list) The Girl With the Needle (rent, purchase and on Mubi), loosely based on the true story of a Danish serial killer in the early 20th century, and The Seed of the Sacred Fig (rent or purchase), about a lawyer and his family in Iran.

• Let’s hear it for Kieran Culkin. I hope the road trip dramady A Real Pain (rent, purchase and on Hulu) wins for both of its too-few nominations — Supporting Actor (for Culkin) and Original Screenplay. My runner up Original Screenplay might be The Substance or it might be September 5(rent or purchase), about the terrorist attack at the 1972 Olympics and ABC Sports’ coverage.

• Watch Hard Truths! The Mike Leigh-written and -directed Hard Truths (rent or purchase) received no Oscar nominations but it did get a slew of nominations elsewhere, including the Indie Spirit Awards (for International Feature Film). The movie, whose story admittedly can sound like a real bummer (a woman struggles with fear, anxiety and depression in a way that basically throws a cloud over the lives of everyone around her) is actually a great watch with excellent performances, especially from Marianne Jean-Baptiste. Also nominated in Indie Spirit categories but not Oscar are Amy Adams for the dark, funny, early-childhood-grind movie Nightbitch(Hulu); June Squibb for the thoughtful and funny Thelma (rent, purchase and on Hulu); Justice Smith in I Saw The TV Glow (rent, purchase and streaming on Max), what feels like a cautionary tale about rewatching the likes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer; Janet Planet, nominated for First Feature (rent, purchase and on Max), a great tale mother-daughter tale, and My Old Ass(Amazon Prime), nominated for screenplay, a bittersweet movie about an 18-year-old meeting her decades-older self. None of these movies are Oscar nominated but Oscar nominations are just one list (which you can find via the Oscar landing page at abc.com) among several great lists (Indie Spirit Awards at filmindependent.org and Screen Actors Guild Awards at sagawards.org, to name two) of movies you may have missed and can now catch up on. Yay movies!

Featured Image: Conclave

A Complete Unknown (R)

A Black teen with a promising future is derailed when he’s sent to a Florida reform school in the 1960s in Nickel Boys, the Oscar Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay nominee based on the Colson Whitehead novel.

Elwood (Ethan Herisse) is 17 but already attending college and taking part in civil rights protests. While walking to school one day, he takes a ride from a man who is subsequently pulled over and charged with having stolen a car, which means Elwood is now in trouble for having stolen a car even though he didn’t know the man at all. He’s sent to reform school Nickel Academy, where he’s told working hard will earn early release. This turns out to be extremely untrue; Nickel is a segregated hellscape where the Black kids, some of whom look like they’re barely old enough to be out of preschool, are beaten, tortured and assaulted and used as unpaid labor. Meanwhile, the white kids do some labor but they also play football and are called “mister.” Elwood hangs on to the idea that his loving grandmother, Harriet (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), will work with a lawyer to get an appeal and get him out of there. In the meantime he tries, with varying results, to stay clear of some of the more bullying kids and the more sadistic adults. He has help with this when he befriends Turner (Brandon Wilson), a kid with more time at Nickel and nobody waiting for him on the outside. Turner seems to both admire and be deeply wary of Elwood’s belief that justice for them, for the wrongs they suffer, is possible. We also jump to the future, decades later in New York City, and see the burden that these boys, now men, carry with them from what happened to them at Nickel.

Nickel Boys jumps around a bit in time, going back and forth between the 1960s and the adult futures of the characters. It also starts with a presentation of Elwood’s life that feels very much like memories — partly remembered moments, faces, sounds. Scenes are often shot from his point of view or, later, from Turner’s point of view. Which means sometimes we’re feeling what’s happening from the point of view of a terrified, somewhat naive Elwood and sometimes we’re seeing him react. And we’re sometimes looking directly at the horrors of Nickel and sometimes just seeing parts of it — a glimpse of a boy who has been beaten, for example. This approach, along with historical photos and news clips of normal life, help to build the horror of this alternate, medieval world happening in the middle of 1960s America. Helping to build all of this are the great performances all around. Herisse gives us Elwood as he comes to better understand what he’s up against at Nickel and formulate a new plan to deal with it. Ellis-Taylor also helps to place Elwood’s story in the larger context of history and how she hoped better things for him than the circumstance he was forced into. A Available for purchase on VOD.

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (R)

Renée Zellweger’s Bridget Jones is once again a single lady but this time has kids and a welcome amount of maturity in Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, the fourth Bridget Jones movie but possibly the truest one to the characters since the first one.

Bridget Jones and Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) really did, finally at last, live happily ever after. They have a lovely house in London and two lovely kids — Billy (Casper Knopf) and Mabel (Mila Jankovic). And their usual suspect circle of friends: longtime buds Shazzer (Sally Phillips), Jude (Shirley Henderson) and Tom (James Callis) as well as work buds Miranda (Sarah Solemani) and Talitha (Josette Simon) and even, as the kids call him, Uncle Daniel (Hugh Grant) — onetime Mark rival Daniel Cleaver. But then four years before the start of this movie, Mark, on a humanitarian mission, is killed and Bridget Darcy is suddenly a widow. After attending a memorial outing for Mark and getting barraged with advice about moving on and jumping back into dating, a frazzled but determined Bridget decides that she will in fact make an effort to live and be a part of the world. She tries out dating again with the much-young Roxster (Leo Woodall). She heads back to work. She actively advocates for her son, reserved like his dad, with his science teacher Mr. Wallaker (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who dings Billy’s grade for adding “heaven” to an illustration of the levels of the atmosphere. Because this is Bridget Jones, she also worries about her appearance, tries some not-entirely-legal lip plumper, reacquaints herself with her shapewear and says yes to way too many things at her kids’ school. She also turns to gynecologist Dr. Rawlings (Emma Thompson) for advice about everything when she probably needs a therapist, which is really just an excuse to slide the droll and awesome Thompson into a few scenes telling Bridget to just carry on.

Not all of the Bridget Jones sequels made sense or felt true to the characters as they were set up in the first movie way back in 2001 but this one really does feel like we’re catching up with those original characters who have grown and changed but also still care for each other. The friend chemistry with Bridget and her three OG buds feels exactly right, as does her relationship with Daniel and the way Hugh Grant has aged Daniel, maturing him in some ways but very much not in others. Bridget and Mark’s relationship, freed of the middle two movies’ need to keep them apart for nonsense reasons, finally feels like the relationship we’d expect them to have — both what they had before Mark died and how Bridget feels now. Bridget is still deeply in love with Mark, and aware that she will always be deeply in love with Mark and always be with him, to some degree, because of their kids. And she is deeply in love with their family, a family that is still actively keeping him a part of it even as they try to move on without him. She comes to terms, over the course of the movie, with the idea that she can love Mark in this way, always be his Mrs. Darcy, and still make new connections, fall in love again without leaving him behind. It’s sweet and grown-up and unexpectedly romantic. B+ Streaming on Peacock.

One of Them Days (R)

Roommates Dreux and Alyssa have just nine hours to make $1,500 in rent or get kicked out of their apartment in One of Them Days, a very middle-of-the-road-but-in-a-good-way action-on-a-clock comedy.

On the morning of the first of the month, landlord Uche (Rizi Timane) tells Dreux (Keke Palmer) and Alyssa (SZA) that he never received their rent money, which Alyssa’s boyfriend Keshawn (Joshua David Neal) was supposed to deliver to Uche, and that if they don’t come up with the money by 6 p.m. he’s evicting them. When attempting to get the money back from Keshawn doesn’t work — he’s “invested” it in a line of T-shirts he plans to sell — they attempt to figure out other ways to get $1,500 including donating way too much blood and getting a payday loan. Meanwhile, at 4 p.m. Dreux has an interview with the corporate office of the diner franchise she works for as a waitress; she’s hoping to secure a manager job that could dramatically change her fortunes. Later in the movie, after the women sell a seemingly abandoned pair of Air Jordans, local tough guy King Lolo (Amin Joseph) informs them that they have until 8 p.m. to get him $5,000 for those sneakers, which were his. Thus does the movie regularly count down until potential catastrophes as Dreux and Alyssa find themselves in increasingly desperate and ridiculous situations.

This is a perfectly fine movie with a few moments of standout comedy and very good friends-for-life chemistry between SZA and Keke Palmer. Their chemistry probably does most of the work of making this movie the fun hang that it is and pulling all the characters and wackiness (Janelle James as a phlebotomist on her first day, Keyla Monterrosa Mejia as an unsympathetic payday loan office) together into something that has moments of real heart. B In theaters and available for rent or purchase.

Dog Man (PG)

“Supa cop” Dog Man captures and recaptures and recaptures again the villainous cat Petey in Dog Man, a brightly-colored animated movie based on the graphic novels by Dav Pilkey.

Dog Man (who doesn’t talk but Peter Hastings provides the Dog Man noises) is born when the head of a very smart police dog is sewn onto the body of a not-smart police man with top-notch martial arts skills after both are injured in an explosion. Now containing the best attributes of both man and dog, Dog Man becomes a hero — making friends with kids, playing piano for old people, generally solving crimes and capturing Petey (voice of Pete Davidson). Capturing Petey a lot because this super smart cat keeps escaping from cat jail. Eventually, Petey’s many escapes get the mayor (voice of Cheri Oteri) so mad that she demands that the police chief (voice of Lil Rel Howery) kick Dog Man off the case. Dog Man is mad he can’t go after Petey but he accepts the assignment to keep an eye on Flippy (voice of Ricky Gervais), an evil fish who is dead and definitely not coming back to life unless someone exposed him to Living Spray at the Living Spray Factory and who would do that, that’s just crazy talk.

Meanwhile, Petey, after having a falling out with his assistant who wants to be paid in money rather than bottle caps or chocolate coins, decides to make his own assistant by cloning himself. He didn’t quite realize, however, that one of the steps of cloning was to wait 18 years until the clone matured into an adult, which is how Petey ends up with Li’l Petey (voice of Lucas Hopkins Calderon), an adorable, adoring kitty version of himself who calls him Papa.

As with the Pilkey books, the movie is humor-rich, with smart visuals that have a hand-drawn askew-ness and clever written elements like spelled-as-spoken words such as “supa” and “OhKay” that all fit with Dog Man’s existence as a comic book by kids George and Harold, the main characters of Captain Underpants. Also like the books, the movie has moments of real heart, such as in Petey’s relationship with Li’l Petey, which is strongly impacted by his own difficult relationship with his father (voice of Stephen Root). This is the kind of story where buildings come alive and turn into lumbering monsters, one of which farts, but also where a character considers the harms of generational trauma and how to break the cycle. But don’t worry, the movie accomplishes its emotional tasks without losing the kid audience! The movie does all its smart emotional stuff under the cover of robots like 80HD and a series of inventions called the “Somethingerother 2000” and pratfalls and dog face licks and just general silliness that don’t slow down the things that keep kids engaged. A In theaters.

Featured Image: Nickel Boys (R)

The ABC Sports crew covers a terrorist attack at the 1972 Olympics in West Germany in September 5, a swift, tense re-creation of the historical event.

These Olympics are at the dawn of live-via-satellite coverage, we are told, with all the news networks sharing windows on one satellite. Working with a six-hour time difference between Munich and the east coast of the U.S., the ABC sports crew put together packages of sports as well as live sporting events broadcasts. These share screen time with stories from ABC News, such as on-site Peter Jennings (Benjamin Walker) interviewing David Berger (Rony Herman), an American-born Israeli weightlifter, about competing in Germany as the country tries to separate new West Germany from its Nazi past. Then, early, Munich time, in the morning on Sept. 5, the TV crew hears gunfire. They scramble to send out staff and with the help of translator Marianne (Leonie Benesch) they put together that shots were fired in the Olympic Village and that Israeli athletes have been taken hostage. ABC Sports head Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) demands that the story stay with Sports, and not New York-based ABC News, and works with Geoffrey (John Magaro) to feed as much news and live footage as possible to on-air anchor Jim McKay (shown here in the real-world footage). They build the live coverage capacity as they’re airing it — sending Peter Jennings to a neighboring Olympic Village dorm building to report what he’s seeing in the Israeli rooms and pushing a studio camera out onto the lawn to get live shots of the building and the terrorists who occasionally step onto the balcony. Even the word “terrorists” becomes something of a spur-of-the-moment addition to the coverage, according to the movie — Peter Jennings uses “Palestinian guerillas,” guessing before there’s confirmation that the group Black September may be involved. Roone decides to go with terrorists, which is how the German police refer to the hostage-takers.

As they maneuver cameras and solder telephone wires to get Peter’s reports live on air, the team, in particular Roone, are laser-focused on the “how” of what they’re doing, only slowly realizing that, for example, Olympic village rooms have TVs that receive the ABC broadcast. Thus, they realize, does their ability to offer live coverage outstrip the inexperienced German police’s ability to take that coverage into account with their own plans to attempt to rescue the hostages.

September 5 is a tight retelling of the roughly day-long stand-off mostly focused on how the Sports crew is both watching history and making history for how they are telling the story and how it sets the template for future news coverage. There is no “we’re doing it for the ratings” mustache twirler here, it is just kind of a story of people trying to make the right decisions based on the limited information they have and the sometimes at-odds desires to get the story (and get it first) and not to cause harm. While the movie has solid performances all around, I can see why it is the movie’s no-slack-in-the-rope story that garnered the movie its one Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. B+ Available for rent or purchase.

Nosferatu (R)

A young couple are terrorized, in different ways, by the demonic Count Orlok in Nosferatu, a remake of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu that is full of vibes.

Like, this film looks creepy-beautiful — even the scenes of, say, a coffin full of rats have a kind of grotesque loveliness. This movie reminded me a lot of Maria (which is on Netflix), its nomination-mate in the Best Cinematography category of this year’s Oscars (Nosferatu also got nods for costume design, hair and make up and production design — again, all praise for the look of the thing). Both Nosferatu and Maria (Angelina Jolie’s biopic of Maria Callas) are beautiful to look at and cast a spell that puts you in the art-book-worthy worlds they create. But I fell asleep multiple times during Maria, and Nosferatu crept along in a way that eventually stopped building tension and just had me wishing we’d get to the vampire factory already.

Newly married goofus Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) travels to Transylvania for a document signing with Count Orlock (Bill Skarsgård, looking like a living corpse) that even in the 19th century feels like it should have been an email. Melancholy-afflicted Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp), his wife, afraid at home, is wrapped up in foreboding, with moments of mania and what seems like possession. Herr Knock (Simon McBurney), Thomas’s boss, maneuvers for Orlock to, I guess, drain the life out of Thomas so Orlock can come and be with Ellen, who he first seduced years ago somehow. The movie hits all the beats, looks great doing it, but doesn’t push beyond. I feel like, with the plague, the dread of a mysterious plague ship, the inability of science (such as it is) to help Thomas or Ellen, the movie had all kinds of places to dig into something more, to make this story terrifying and relevant. Instead, the “innovation” here seems to be a few boobs shots. C+ Available for rent and in theaters.

Back in Action (PG-13)

Mild-mannered suburban parents are actually former super spies in Back in Action, a one-notch-above-average older-kid family comedy.

Matt (Jamie Foxx) and Emily (Cameron Diaz) were once fighting dudes on airplanes but now they are parents to sassy teen Alice (McKenna Roberts) and computer kid Leo (Rylan Jackson), who both just think their parents are standard-issue uncool Olds. But then Matt and Emily catch 14-year-old Alice and her fake ID at a club and when club muscleheads try to give them some trouble Alice is shocked to watch her parents lay waste to the thick-necked bros. Also shocked is Chuck (Kyle Chandler), Matt and Emily’s old boss who thought they were dead before their “Boomers fighting” video goes viral. If he can find them, so can all the various baddies who might be looking for them, he says right before he’s shot on their front porch. Thus must Matt and Emily grab their kids and go on the run to find a hidden MacGuffin item that they think might buy them some protection. Matt hid the item at the home of Emily’s mom — former MI6 agent Ginny (Glenn Close), with whom Emily has always had a difficult relationship.

This movie is not as cute-fun as the various Spy Kids movies that have done this general “secret spy parents” concept but more fun than the Mark Wahlberg movie (2023’s The Family Plan) that did this on Apple TV+. It is a perfectly cromulent movie for families in the PG-13 range, with fun-enough “parents are lame” and “teens, ugh” jokes, that benefits from the natural charisma of Jamie Foxx and Cameron Diaz even if their couple chemistry never really ticks above “sure, whatever.” It does, however, serve as a good reminder that it’s enjoyable to see Cameron Diaz in movies. B- Streaming on Netflix.

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 (PG)

Sonic and his increasing number of friends take on another angry hedgehog-thing in Sonic the Hedgehog 3.

In the second movie, Sonic (voice of Ben Schwartz) added Tails (voice of Colleen O’Shaunghnessy) and, spoiler I guess, eventually Knuckles (voice of Idris Elba) to his found family, which also includes humans Tom (James Marsden) and Maddie Wachowski (Tika Sumpter). Now they will all be tasked with taking on Shadow (voice of Keanu Reeves), another hedgehog-or-whatever treated shadily by the humans who harbors all sorts of grudges. He is working with Professor Robotnik (Jim Carrey), grandfather to Dr. Robotnik (also Carrey), to build a weapon and enact vengeance, yada yada. Mostly, this movie is Carrey physical comedy, cartoon character sassy jokes and occasional battles. I was neither particularly delighted nor demoralized by all of this while my kids seemed to have fun and I suspect that is kinda the point. The deeper into Sonic lore we go, the more it is about the world of characters and their doo-dads and magical gem things and, sorry, Sonic, Marvel has already used up all that space in my brain. I care less than I did back in the first Sonic when we were more about the Sonic-James relationship. But for the youngs, this mythology stuff seemed great — particularly in the credits scenes that they reacted to with a “Captain Marvel’s pager!” level of excitement to the appearance of a new character. So, like B- for the “kid entertainment for your dollar” ranking? In theaters and available for rent or purchase.

Featured Image: September 5

Questlove codirects Ladies and Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music, a very Questlove-y documentary about the role of music in Saturday Night Live throughout the decades.

And by “Questlove-y” I mean wonderfully insightful about the music, not afraid of addressing controversy and exquisitely edited — see also his 2021 doc Summer of Soul (… Or When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised). Get a taste of what you’re in for with the six-ish-minute intro, which has been floating around online featuring a mashup of interviews and performances from 50 years of the show’s history. The doc proper keeps the energy going, with a look at the technical aspects of how a performer approaches an SNL appearance, the role that music has had in the show and some of the more memorable performances including the “riot” that wasn’t during a performance by punk band Fear, Sinéad O’Connor’s protest against the Catholic Church, Rage Against the Machine’s tumultuous appearance (as told by Tom Morello, a guy with a fair amount of insight into the music history presented here as well), Ashlee Simpson’s technical difficulties and more. Talking heads from Lorne Michaels, Justin Timberlake, Andy Samberg, Jimmy Fallon, Jack White and others don’t slow things down and help to give both context and, especially from the behind-the-scenes crew, some nice dirt on how the show and the musical elements come together. A must watch for fans of SNL, Questlove and music in general. A Streaming on Peacock and, like, however else you get your NBC. Summer of Soul, which is also awesome, is available on Hulu/Disney+, Tubi and for purchase.

Sing Sing (R)

Colman Domingo is my pick of the five actors nominated for a Lead Actor Oscar this year for his role in Sing Sing, a feature film based on the real-life Rehabilitation Through the Arts program at Sing Sing Correctional Facility.

Domingo, Paul Raci and Sean San Jose act alongside formerly incarcerated men who participated in the program and are here playing, more or less, themselves. These men clearly know how to draw from their experiences to present an entirely raw wallop of emotion that radiates out from them even when all they’re doing is just standing there. Domingo plays John, an author and one-time student at the Fame high school, who helped to found the theater program at Sing Sing. John says he has proof that he didn’t commit the crime he was convicted of and is hopeful that an upcoming hearing will lead to his release. Perhaps it’s his knowledge of his innocence and his belief that eventually he will be able to present his case to someone who will accept and believe his evidence that keeps him relatively optimistic. He writes plays, he helps scout new members for the program’s productions and he seems to work hard to hold up the men for whom the program is something of a life raft.

Divine Eye (Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin, a real-life program alum) is a new member who goes through the process of breaking down his prison defenses in order to perform in productions as varied as Shakespeare and a new comedy written by the group’s director Brent (Raci) that includes time travel, cowboys and gladiators. The tough-guy-ness that keeps them alive (and may have also brought them to the prison in the first place) is chipped away and the theater program becomes a place where they can all become vulnerable.

The actors here — both the RTA guys and the civilian actors — get to the heartbreak of the men’s situation (which includes the sense that, had they had an outlet like this for their emotions before they committed crimes or fell into a life of violence, they might not have made the choices that they did). Domingo in particular is excellent as the guy who believes in what he’s doing, has hope for the future, can find joy in the moment — until he can’t. The movie manages to mix moments of levity, moments of “let’s put on a show” goofiness and moments of devastation in a fully captivating way. A Available for rent and purchase.

You’re Cordially Invited (R)

The overly involved father of a bride and pushy sister of another bride find themselves sharing a double booked wedding venue in You’re Cordially Invited.

A single dad since his wife died, Jim (Will Ferrell) wants recent college graduate daughter Jenni’s (Geraldine Viswanathan) special day to be perfect, even if he thinks she’s way too young to marry Oliver (Stony Blyden). Meanwhile, Margot (Reese Witherspoon), a reality TV producer wants her baby sister Neve (Meredith Hagner) to have her dream wedding to Dixon (Jimmy Tatro), an Army National Guard medic and exotic dancer. Both Jim and Margot book the same weekend at a small inn, which can really only do one wedding at a time, on Palmetto Island in Georgia. Because Margot and Neve eventually feel bad for Jenni, they offer to share the hotel, making everything a little crappier for everyone. When slights trigger mutual animosity, both Jim and Margo turn to various degrees of sabotage.

This is an intensely stupid movie — an intensely stupid movie that I had to pause at one point because I choke-laughed so hard I thought I might need medical help. The movie also features a very dumb but enjoyable bit with an alligator, and “Islands in the Stream” is used twice for solid comic effect (as is Peyton Manning). To some degree I feel like the whole thrill here is watching Ferrell and Witherspoon play their standard characters — kooky and tightly wound, respectively — but with the “improbable nuttiness” turned up to 11 and a whole lot more swearing. That sounds hacky, and maybe it is hacky, but they win, they got me. Just ignore the 11th-hour attempt at rom-com-ery; the movie doesn’t seem to think much of it either. B Streaming on Prime Video.

Featured Image: Ladies and Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music (TV MA)

A Complete Unknown (R)

Timothée Chalamet is Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, a biography of Mr. Robert Zimmerman from his 1961 arrival in New York through 1965 when he “goes electric” at the Newport Folk Festival

This is an extremely straight-down-the-middle look at Dylan as he comes to New York City, befriends an ailing Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) and buddy Pete Seeger (Edward Norton), becomes a big noise in the folk music community and then itches against the fame and the expectation that he stay in a strict musical lane. Along the way he meets and has relationships with (fictional) folk music fan/artist Sylvie (Elle Fanning) and with fellow folk singer Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro) — both women who the movie doesn’t do a lot for in terms of fleshing them out and making them more than reaction shots to whatever Dylan is doing. (Baez as a character feels particularly underserved.) Bob enjoys the money and to some degree the fame but he doesn’t like the getting-chased-out-of-bars side of fame or the part where people basically just want more “Blowin’ in the Wind” from him.

There are some nice elements to this movie that has the heavy lift of “introducing” Bob Dylan even though if you are inclined to see this movie you probably have your own built-in opinions of the man and his music. We get a bunch of standard biopic-rooted-in-time stuff, like Walter Cronkite delivering the news flash that JFK has been killed and snippets of the civil rights movement. And there is a fair amount of reaction to the news of the day that feels overly earnest. But I think generally the movie’s presentation of Dylan and his role in the capital S Sixties works — before he was Mr. Nobel Prize for Literature, Bob Dylan was just a talented, ambitious, annoying 20something trying to make it in the music business and also figure out his role in the culture, which was much more “mono-” than it is now. I also like the way the movie dips into the struggle between “old” folk and the “new” folk of the 1960s and how record companies were trying to bring in the kids but also keep whatever the old audience was with covers of classic folk songs. Folk can’t just be all Dust Bowl music, Sylvie argues, which helps inspire Dylan to write more about the Now (1960s). It’s a nice if stagey way to illustrate how today’s urgent issues become tomorrow’s nostalgia and helps to put us back there with Dylan in the 1960s headspace. At some point this tips into what basically becomes an argument about folk authenticity — “electric guitars!?!” — which is the same bummer to wade through as any argument about authenticity. And it feels like more of a stall in the movie’s energy than a lead-up to a dramatic climax. But overall I think the movie (and the Chalamet of it all) does do a good job of showing how Dylan’s lyrics and unpretty voice felt fresh for the time. B Available in theaters.

The Brutalist (R)

Adrian Brody gives a solid performance in The Brutalist, a movie with a three-hour-and-34-minute runtime.

There is a 15-minute intermission, which is either thoughtful of the movie or exhausting, depending on how you feel about what you’re watching and how much Coca-Cola Freestyle you drank in the movie’s first two-hour-ish chunk.

We meet Hungarian Lázló Tóth (Brody) as he arrives in America in 1947. Once a well-regarded architect of the Bauhaus school, Lázló survived the Holocaust with basically nothing, only finding out that his wife Erzébet (Felicity Jones) has also survived when he arrives in Philadelphia. There he meets up with long-ago-immigrated-to-America cousin Attila (Alessandro Nivola), whose last name is now Miller and who has a Catholic wife and has himself converted or something — adding a layer of tension to the relationship between the cousins. Lázló lives in a small back room at their furniture shop and is meant to help up the design game of the shop while working to get Erzébet and their niece Zsófia (Raffey Cassidy) out of what is now a Soviet-controlled country.

Lázló arrives in the U.S. with not just the psychological trauma of all he’s experienced but also a broken nose that has left him with severe pain — all of which leads him to eventually turn to heroin for relief. When we finally meet Erzébet and Zsófia, they also carry around the scars of their ordeal. Erzébet’s long starvation has left her unable to walk and she uses a wheelchair when she first arrives. She also takes pills for pain in her legs that, when it strikes, leaves her screaming. Zsófia, who we first see in the movie’s opening scenes being interrogated by the Soviets and who was a child when Lázló last saw her, has been so traumatized she doesn’t speak.

And then Lázló meets rich psychopath Harrison Van Buren Sr. (Guy Pearce) and his terrible son Harry Jr. (Joe Alwyn). Harry hires Lázló and Attila to turn his father’s messy study into a proper library for his fancy first editions. What Lázló creates is such a modernist piece of art that it eventually gets a feature in Life magazine, but Van Buren’s initial reaction is just to yell at everybody and refuse to pay. Eventually Van Buren realizes that he has stumbled on a genius and ensnares Lázló into building this ridiculous community center that will serve as a monument to Van Buren’s dead mother. It is immediately clear that Van Buren is very much a not-good guy but his lawyer, Michael (Peter Polycarpou), offers to help Lázló bring over his wife and niece and Van Buren offers Lázló a chance at regaining some of his past life as an architect, so Lázló begins the project that we see become an obsession for nearly a decade.

I realize it is deeply unsophisticated to complain about a well-made movie being too long — as though you’re admitting that your baby brain has been so TikTok broken it can’t hold complex thoughts. And, maybe, but also at some point the tonnage of a movie gets in the way of all the things a movie can accomplish. And The Brutalist — which really feels at least 40 minutes not just too long but too long without good reason — does attempt some interesting things. The production design and cinematography (both of which received Oscar nominations in this 10-nomination-receiving movie, including for Best Picture) are excellent, really putting the emotion on screen via colors and shapes and the way stone and shadow play such a big role in what we’re watching.

There is also a narrative that we’re used to in this kind of movie — where the refugee from the horrors of World War II comes to America and then just buckles down on the making of a new life and more or less assimilates — that this movie brilliantly argues with. In The Brutalist Lázló suffers in a way that feels more messy and genuine, can’t just close the door on the past and, as we eventually learn, works out some of his suffering through his architecture. And no amount of American hustle changes the fact that he was once a big deal with a full life of his own and is now at the mercy of the increasing awfulness of the racist, classist Van Buren to claw a little bit of that back. Likewise, Erzébet was a professional woman with a career as a foreign correspondent and isn’t here for everything’s-great-now housewife. Strong performances all around (even to a degree from Jones, I guess, saddled with another thin and thankless wife role) help break these people out of what you expect of them and give you something horrific but real. B In theaters.

Featured Image: A Complete Unknown (R)

An exotic dancer gets caught up in the rich-kid-nonsense of the son of a wealthy Russian family in Anora.

Ani (Mikey Madison), the titular Anora, dances at a strip club where one of her special talents is a working knowledge of Russian, even if her accent isn’t the best. When young Russian goofus Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn) comes in, she is sent out to dance for him. He gives her his cell number and she agrees to some hang-out time outside the club. Eventually their arrangement stretches into a week-long girlfriend experience, with Ani traveling to Las Vegas with Vanya and his entourage. Vanya doesn’t want to return to Russia, where it sounds like he will have to work and won’t be able to just get high and play video games all day. He suggests that he marry Ani and thus become a U.S. citizen and thus not return. Despite seeming like she’s worldly enough to see the pitfalls in this, Ani says yes and they head to a Vegas wedding chapel.

Vanya is 21 and Ani is 23. You act 25, Vanya tells her. Really, she acts like a 23-year-old who sees a ray of economic light and he acts like a 14-year-old for whom there have never been any consequences for his careless actions. Madison does a good job of giving us this very young woman who’s in way over her head and struggling to do the best she can with what she, at least for a little while, believes could be a real marriage and a real chance at a better future for herself. In its second half, the movie does feature segments that read more as kind of a comedy of errors with Vanya’s father’s American-based henchmen trying to find and hold onto Vanya while they “fix” what they see as yet another mess he has made. This part of the movie has its charms, with Yura Borisov, Karren Karagulian and Vache Tovmasyan playing workers in this family operation who have to deal with the increasingly enraged Ani and the increasingly petulant man-child Vanya. But I don’t know that this “Chris and Paulie in the Pine Barrens” comedy entirely fits with what otherwise feels like a portrait of Ani. I will also say that, for me, this movie had expectations working against it — it has been nominated for, like, every movie award this season. I enjoyed it fine, it is worth a watch, but there are visible seams and rough patches (Vanya’s parents, when they show up, feel very underbaked) I didn’t expect based on all the accolades. B+, I guess, but credit the + mostly to Madison.Available for rent or purchase.

A Different Man (R)

Sebastian Stan plays an actor with facial differences in the at-times comic, at-times sad A Different Man.

Edward (Stan) gets a role in what appears to be a human resources video about working with employees who have differences in facial structure or appearance. It’s only about a minute of screentime, but it’s an acting credit at least for struggling actor Edward, who has facial tumors. When he meets his new neighbor, a playwright named Ingrid (Renate Reinsve), her initial reaction is a gasp, though she later becomes friendly with him. Meanwhile, he agrees to take part in a new clinical trial, taking a drug that causes extreme pain. His skin begins to slough off his face and after a particularly dramatic skin peeling he discovers that his face is now, well, Sebastian Stan’s differences-free “normal” face. Basically disowning his old self, Edward becomes Guy, a Stan-ily handsome successful real estate salesman who tells Ingrid and others that Edward is dead.

Years later, he sees a notice for an audition specifically looking for an actor with facial differences for a play called Edward, written by Ingrid. He auditions and gets the part, which he plans to play while wearing a mask that looks like his old face. But then Oswald (Adam Pearson) shows up. Oswald has facial differences similar to Edward’s but he also has the confidence, positivity and personability — and charming English accent — that Edward never did. “Guy,” the real Edward, watches as Oswald eventually plays Edward better than Edward does and then becomes the life of the afterparty as well.

Is there anything more irritating than someone who can take your particular set of lemons and make wildly popular lemonade out of them? Stan is excellent as someone who realizes the limitations of “normality” and is torn between clearly admiring Oswald and kind of hating him for how much better he is at living their life. It’s a quiet, confused rage and Stan wears it very well, simmering and boiling over in a way that makes no sense to the other characters. Adam Pearson, who does have neurofibromatosis and facial differences in real life, does a good job of differentiating Oswald from Edward. Oswald seems to move through the world matter-of-factly, presenting himself openly and then pushing people to see him fully. The movie doesn’t show us the work this takes from Oswald but that kind of fits with our point of view, which is Edward’s point of view, which is of this guy who lights up a room and gets the girl, something that even “Guy” can’t quite pull off. B+ Available for rent or purchase and streaming on Max staring Jan. 17

Flow (PG)

A cat keeps on keeping on through floods, storms and hostile lemurs in Flow, a beautiful, watercolor-esque, dialogue-free animated story.

Wikipedia says the animation was done with computer graphics, which you can see, particularly in the way water is rendered, with a look that is sometimes almost photorealistic. But the animals themselves often have a picture book watercolor-painted look — vibrant in their color and well defined but with a softness. We follow the adventures of a black cat, who at the beginning of the movie spends its nights sleeping in a bed in a house surrounded by outdoor cat statues. We never see the artist who left one statue half-finished on their workbench, nor any other people in this world full of human structures and human items, like bottles or a mirror, but that otherwise gives the sense of humans being long absent.

The cat is chased by a pack of dogs for a while, before a sudden rush of water floods the forest where the cat is living. The cat eventually hops on a boat that floats by and finds a capybara also living there. They continue to float, meet other animals along the way and run into the dogs from the beginning of the movie a few times — with one dog seeming to be particularly attached to the cat and the group as a whole.

The movie is ultimately more meditative than plot driven, with the soft music and lovely visuals taking you more to a place of float-along wonder. I don’t know that it is action-packed enough to hold a young audience but it held me through all of its beautiful scenes of watery paradises and big eyed animals. A Available for rent or purchase.

Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (PG)

The cheese-loving inventor Wallace and his much smarter dog Gromit face off against the super criminal penguin Feathers McGraw in Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl.

Since Wallace and Gromit helped put away Feathers for stealing the blue diamond, the wordless, devious penguin has been locked in “prison” (a penguin exhibit at the zoo). Meanwhile, Wallace (voice of Ben Whitehead) has continued to invent — mostly semi-terrible gadgets like the automatic jam-on-toast applier and robotic dog-patter. But then, to “help” Gromit, he invents Norbot (voice of Reece Shearsmith), a garden gnome robot who is extremely overzealous about tidying up — he mows down Gromit’s newly planted tree and flowers and trims the hedges into squares. Gromit is annoyed but the neighbors are delighted and ask Wallace to hire Norbot out, which he does. The local news team shows up to do a story on this invention, which Feathers happens to see on TV. Feathers hacks in to Norbot’s operating system, turning his core setting from “good” to “evil.” Norbot then creates his own army of gnome robots to enact Feathers’ dastardly plan.

The animation here is fun, the usual Aardman look of clay creations in a world full of tactile items like a book with paper pages — such as Gromit’s copy of A Room Of One’s Own by Virgina Woof. Authority figures — Wallace, police chief Mackintosh (voice of Peter Kay) — are pleasantly clueless while brainier figures like Gromit and the young police officer P.C. Mukherjee (voice of Lauren Patel) know there’s trouble afoot. In Aardman style, there are “wrong’uns” and meanness without cruelty, making it very friendly for a wide range of ages, including older kids who can enjoy the overall goofiness. A Streaming on Netflix.

Featured Image: Anora