Author: Amy Diaz

Amy Diaz is the executive editor and writes about movies and compiles the Kiddie Pool column. Reach her at [email protected].

Will & Harper (R)

Will Ferrell and longtime friend Harper Steele take a road trip across America in the sweet, hopeful documentary Will & Harper.

Harper Steele was a Saturday Night Live writer, eventually becoming head writer, with Ferrell and is a writer on many of Ferrell’s more delightfully weird projects like the Lifetime movie A Deadly Adoption, the Spanish-language Casa de mi Padre and the charming Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga. In 2022, Harper sent an email to Ferrell and others coming out as a trans woman. The responses, at least from Will, Harper’s sister and others we meet in this doc, were positive — though we learn Tim Meadows’ initial response was based on his belief that Harper was basically doing a bit (which feels like an occupational hazard for those in the comedy universe trying to make any big personal announcement).

Before transitioning, Harper had been a regular cross-country traveler with a particular fondness for greasy spoons and dive bars. Can she still visit these places now, especially with the current political climate of the country? To find out, she and Will hit the road together, well aware that Will’s famous face will smooth the way but also provide her kind of a testing of the middle-American waters.

Often, but not always, what they find is people who are generally welcoming and even touching at times as they explain exactly what they are doing — visiting the kinds of places Harper has always loved now that she’s transitioned. A bar in Oklahoma becomes kind of a love-fest, with a group of Native men singing for Harper. They are given a large welcome at an Indiana Pacers game — but only later do they discover that the governor who was part of the event was Eric Holcomb, signer of anti-trans bills. A steak dinner in Texas gets weird, though the true vitriol seems to come out later online. In fact generally the true vitriol seems to come out online — though Harper points out that that stuff takes a toll too, a garbage bag of insults and smears that she hauls around in her mind all the time.

Talking about things — the struggles Harper has gone through to get to this happier place, her fears, Will’s questions — also makes up a big part of the movie. The two of them talk with a blend of emotional honesty and vulnerability and, of course because it’s these two, pretty solid comic timing. It makes for a sweet rumination on friendship as well as a raw but hopeful look at how Harper found her full self in late middle age. A

Rated R for language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Josh Greenbaum, Will & Harper is an hour and 54 minutes long and distributed by Netflix, where it is streaming.

Rez Ball (PG-13)

A high school basketball team tries to rally after tragedy in Rez Ball, a winning sports story based on the nonfiction book Canyon Dreams: A Basketball Season on the Navajo Nation by Michael Powell.

Nataani Jackson (Kusem Goodwind) is the star player of the Chuska Warriors, a high school basketball team from New Mexico. He is barely hanging on after losing his mother and sister in a car accident but even his best friend Jimmy (Kauchani Bratt) doesn’t realize how dark a space he’s in until Jimmy and the rest of the team learn that Nataani has died by suicide. They are heartbroken and also sort of lost as to how to continue their season without Nataani.

Coach Heather Hobbs (Jessica Matten, who I last saw in Dark Winds; streaming now on Amazon Prime!) seems a little lost in her own life — recently dumped, looking but unable to find her next-step job. She resets the team, and by extension herself, by reaching out to a former coach (Ernest Tsosie III) and getting the boys to play the quicker-to-shoot and faster-in-general “rez ball”-style game that will help to tire out opponents. Jimmy, deep in grief and dealing with his mother (Julia Jones), who is struggling with alcoholism, is maybe the hardest to bring around but also the player with the most potential leadership ability.

This movie hits many of the standard beats — team working to bring itself back, playoffs, a rival team — but it tells that story with details that feel specific to these characters and their world. And Rez Ball is filled with excellent performances — from small roles, like Dallas Goldtooth (Reservation Dog’s Spirit) as a sports announcer and Ryan Begay as Nataani’s heartbroken father, to Matten and Jones and all the boys on the team. A

Rated PG-13 for thematic elements including suicide, teen drug/alcohol use,language and some crude references, according to the MPA at filmratings.com. Directed by Sydney Freeland with a screenplay by Sydney Freeland and Sterlin Harjo (creator of the excellent Reservation Dogs; go watch Reservation Dogs on Hulu!), Rez Ball is an hour and 51 minutes long and is distributed by Netflix, where it is streaming.

His Three Daughters (R)

Three women bristle around each other in a New York apartment as they wait out their father’s final moments in His Three Daughters, a quiet movie packed with bittersweet humor and first-rate performances.

Oldest sister Katie (Carrie Coon) comes from Brooklyn, where she lives with her family that includes a teenage daughter she is clashing with. Christina (Elizabeth Olsen) is the mother to a young toddler and lives somewhere on the West Coast. They return to their father’s apartment, where he lives with Rachel (Natasha Lyonne), the daughter of his second wife, who he has raised since she was little. He is her father, she is his daughter, as Rachel explains at one point, as much as he is the father of Katie and Christina, but you can tell they’ve never entirely thought that.

On top of the difficult relationship they’ve clearly always had, they are now all dealing with grief — Rachel by getting and staying high, Katie by being angry at that and pretty much everything else Rachel does, and Christina, who we get the sense is always a little woo-woo, by what feels like aggressive meditation and forceful positivity. Katie and to some extent Christina sort of poke at Rachel about the fact that she will get their father’s large rent-controlled apartment to herself when he’s gone. Benjy (Jovan Adepo), Rachel’s boyfriend, urges her to stand up for herself and the fact that she has been with her father through his illness, taking care of him and keeping him company. And everybody seems to agree that Christina is, as Benjy said, not on this planet. These are three big personalities squished together in an apartment — big personalities with a lot of feelings they don’t know how to manage. It’s claustrophobic, it’s darkly funny and it’s occasionally throat-grabbingly sad.

There’s an almost stage-play quality to some of the elements of this movie — the mostly-in-one-apartment setting, the conversations between sisters — but with the best that an indie movie has to offer in the way it can study characters or root an insular space in a larger setting. The movie often gives us long, close shots of the women as they’re talking or just sitting and thinking. They don’t have the space to get away but we get the space and the time to really watch them — and to watch the excellent performances that Olsen, Coon and Lyonne are giving. The women give you so much with facial expressions and looks — the hard set of Coon’s face, Lyonne’s big-eyed gazes, Olsen’s ability to look quiet and neutral and also sort of crazed and at the end of her emotional rope. The movie can organically have them deliver monologues about their dad and also fight saying almost nothing and it all reads as believable. The movie also gets the balance of humor, dark humor and sadness just right. A

Rated R for language and drug use, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Written and directed by Azazel Jacobs, His Three Daughters is an hour and 41 minutes long and is in theaters and streaming on Netflix.

Transformers One (PG)

Before they were Optimus Prime and Megatron, the rival Transformers from Cybertron were Orion Pax and D-16 in Transformers One, an animated origin story for the Transformers and perhaps for a new approach to the franchise.

And while these Transformers are animated and lacking in the PG-13-ness of Michael Bay’s whole weird Megan Fox live-action deal, the movie is probably right at the edge of what I’d show to younger Transformers fans (think older elementary school-aged or so), what with all the robot-on-robot violence and characters being sliced in half and whatnot. I definitely heard some concerned squeaks from kids in the theater during some of the scarier parts. One of the too-cool-for-elementary-school kids I saw the movie with, while declining to call the movie scary, did say there were some creepy parts.

The animated nature of the movie does, however, allow for what feel like fuller, more complete personalities for the Transformers than some of the live-action movies. While we are still dealing with actor voices and separately generated images, these Transformers feel more, I don’t know, nuanced? We’re watching Orion Pax and his good buddy D-16 on their journeys to becoming Optimus and Megatron and I felt like the movie did a good job of showing those character arcs.

When we start out, Orion Pax (voice of Chris Hemsworth) and D-16 (voice of Brian Tyree Henry) are miners looking for Energon, the Transformers’ energy source, which used to flow freely on Cybertron but has become harder to find since the Primes died during a conflict years earlier. (And if that all sounds like nonsense words, maybe just: “robots search for glowy blue stuff.”) But Orion firmly believes he and his friend are more than meets the eye, despite their lowly social status and inability to transform. To prove that, he tricks D-16 into joining a big race that only transforming Transformers have ever competed in. They don’t win, but their moxie attracts the attention of Sentinel Prime (voice of John Hamm), the big noise hero and leader of their massive city-state. He promises them that they’ll become role models, but a jealous competitor sends them to the garbage transfer room, where B-127 (voice of Keegan-Michael Key), who is called B, or maybe “Badassatron” if he can make that nickname stick, is ecstatic see other people for once. When it turns out some of the trash contains information that could help Sentinel Prime find a path to more Energon, Orion, D-16 and B think they’ve found their ticket out of the garbage room and begin a quest.

Eventually they join up with Elita-1 (voice of Scarlett Johansson), make it to the surface, learn a bunch of surprising information and are ready for a fight that eventually tears our core duo apart.

Spoiler alert, I guess? Except that Megatron v. Optimus Prime is probably the base level of information everybody has going in about the Transformers.

And if that’s all you know going into this movie, that’s probably fine. This is a pretty standard, easy-to-follow story about how people respond to discovering injustice — with a call for revenge or a call for, like, a more perfect union. If you are a bigger fan (or a parent who has had Transformer toys and cartoons injected into your life), you’ll appreciate the “hey it’s Starscream” and the “ha, the boombox guy.” And I think either way, viewers can enjoy this story that makes Transformers more individual characters than just the CGI marvels most are in the live-action movies. And I appreciated the effort put into the vocal work — Hemsworth allows you to hear that deep Optimus voice emerge from Orion’s more happy-go-lucky youngster while Henry turns D into a villain more in the Magneto vein, someone with justifiable anger who makes some good points.

Transformers One is also visually winning, adding both warmth and beauty to these metallic characters and their world. B+

Rated PG for sci-fi violence and animated action throughout, and language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Josh Cooley with a screenplay by Eric Pearson and Andrew Barrer & Gabriel Ferrari, Transformers One is an hour and 44 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by Paramount Pictures.

Didi (R)

Young teens young-teen it up the summer before high school in Didi, a sweet, charming, only occasionally traumatic story written and directed by Sean Wang.

Based on his background as a Taiwanese-American who grew up in the Bay Area, as he describes in various media reports, Wang seems to be riffing on his own experiences for the experiences of Chris Wang (Izaac Wang) in the summer of 2008, all MySpace and Facebook and awkwardness everywhere. Chris, called Wang Wang by his friend group, is both kind of a mess and totally fine in that very specific young teen way. He gets along horribly with his big sister Vivian (Shirley Chen) who is about to leave for college. He is embarrassed by and sassy to his mom Chungsing Wang (Joan Chen) while politely semi-ignoring his paternal grandma Nai Nai (Zhang Li Hua), who lives with the family. Not living with the family is Chris’s father, who is working in Taiwan — a state of things that seems to irk everybody even as they are all resigned to it. Chungsing in particular seems frustrated with how this has all worked out for her. The movie spends a fair amount of time with Chungsing, a painter whose artistic ambitions have taken a backseat to raising her kids and caring for her hypercritical mother-in-law. We also in small ways get to see Vivian, her relationship with these two women and how she fits in with this family that she is moving a day’s drive away from for college.

But of course Chris is the movie’s true focus. We see him attempt to date a girl he has long been interested in, have falling-outs with his friends and attempt to impress an older group of skater kids — a lot of which plays out on MySpace and Facebook and via AOL Instant Messenger. Along the way, there is a lot of asking YouTube for advice — on how to kiss, on how to shoot a skater film. It’s all very cute and traumatizing in that “watching through your fingers” way as Chris tells a very boy-based, girl-horrifying story on a group date or fronts like he can handle various party intoxicants only to wind up puking in the bathroom. Mixed in with the standard teenage stuff are Chris’s struggles with what it means for him to be Asian — which comes with its own microaggressions even in this culturally diverse environment — and to be an American-raised kid with American desires even as his mother and grandmother have their own different (from Chris and from each other) cultural expectations and experiences. The movie does a great job of pulling this all in while still keeping the story very much on his specific life, his specific feelings and his difficult time communicating his feelings particularly to his friends. (Rather than say he was embarrassed or explain what he’s feeling he tends to just block his friends on AIM.) And all the stuff with his family seems equally well-drawn — the sibling relationship, with its horribleness and its supportiveness, is wonderfully spot-on. Excellent performances all the way around in this very solid movie. A

Rated R for language throughout, sexual material, and drug and alcohol use — all involving teens, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Written and directed by Sean Wang, Didi is an hour and 33 minutes long and distributed by Focus Features. It is available for rent or purchase and in theaters.

At the Sofaplex 24/09/19

Going Varsity in Mariachi (PG)

The mariachi band of Edinburg North High School in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas struggles in the 2021-2022 school year to continue the school’s legacy of high-scoring teams at mariachi competitions in this thoroughly charming documentary. In the tradition of great sports stories, the team here is facing some challenges. This is the first fully in-person school year since Covid with all the everything that came with that, the team has a lot of younger or less experienced members and even longtime coach Abel Acuña is struggling with burnout. We get the story of individual kids — the hyper competent Bella, Abby who dreams of a future teaching mariachi, Drake who is sort of figuring himself out but finds that mariachi deeply matters to him. But we also get a wider story of how and why mariachi has become such an important part of the south Texas high school experience. This is a charming, absolutely winning doc. AStreaming on Netflix

Daughters (PG-13)

It’s hard not to start redesigning the American carceral in your head while watching Daughters, a documentary recently added to Netflix. The focus of the story, though, is not The System but a small group of girls, who range in age from just about elementary school through teens, and their incarcerated dads. Born from a program aimed at building up Black girls’ confidence, the Date With Dad program requires the dads to attend 10 weeks of classes before an in-prison dance with their daughters. For a few hours, the dads, dressed in suits, get to hug, dance with and talk to their daughters in person — often the first time that’s happened in years due to limited in-person visits.

The process of working up to the event seems to give the dads new perspectives on their roles in their children’s lives; the dance itself seems to emotionally devastate everybody, driving home to the men how important it is for their children that they get home and stay home. Title cards explain that 95 percent of the men who have participated in the program over the past 12 years and been released have not returned to prison. You can feel the ripples into the past (the men discuss and consider their relationships with their fathers) and into the future, as these smart, capable young girls struggle with their fathers’ absences. The star of the doc is Aubrey, a very bright, very ambitious girl when we meet her at 5 years old who is trying to stay connected to her father. It’s a sweet gut-punch of a movie. A Streaming on Netflix.

Uglies (PG-13)

Joey King, who is, we’re told, a real uggo in a shiny future dystopia, eagerly awaits the plastic surgery that every 16-year-old in her post-climate-apocalypse society receives in this movie based on a YA book by Scott Westerfield. I realize that “people in their natural state aren’t ugly” is part of this movie’s whole deal but it’s hard to take seriously the idea that this cast of “teenagers” (i.e. twentysomethings with perfect skin) who would look at home in high-end perfume ads are awkward normies in need of improvement. Nevertheless, that physical perfection will lead to perfect civic harmony is what their society, which is maybe run by a scientist played by Laverne Cox (who is at least having some fun here), has taught these kids. So Tally (King) is psyched to join her friend Peris (Chase Stokes) in the city where the newly prettified people go for a life of neverending parties. But then she meets fellow “uglie” Shay (Brianne Tju) and learns about the Smoke — a wilderness settlement of unsurgeried “regular people” led by David (Keith Powers), a revolutionary hottie.

Uglies feels like a copy of a copy of teen dystopia stories like the Divergent and Delirium book series. I feel like there was a way that this movie, with its beautiful movie stars made “regular” mostly with bad wigs, could have had some fun. But it’s too by the numbers and too focused on delivering unnecessary world-building exposition that ultimately doesn’t help the whole thing make sense. C Available on Netflix.

Rebel Ridge (TV-MA)

Giving Jack Reacher vibes, Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre) is an ex-Marine who travels light and finds himself in a fight with the police department of a small Louisiana town after two cops knock him off his bicycle and take the $36K in cash he was carrying in part to bail his cousin out of jail. Aggressive asset seizure and high bails for minor crimes are part of the townwide corruption scheme led by police chief Sandy Burne (Don Johnson) but Terry isn’t initially super concerned with this; he’s just trying to keep his cousin from ending up in the same jail as the men his cousin testified against a few years earlier. But of course, the police don’t realize they’re up against a man with a particular set of skills, and Terry — with help from courthouse clerk/future lawyer Summer (AnnaSophia Robb) — is soon putting his military training in violent if non-lethal problem solving to use.

Unlike Reacher, Rebel Ridge is a bummer. It’s a depressing slog through racism and corruption where even the “good people” are more or less powerless to do anything — though exactly why they’re powerless doesn’t entirely make sense. The movie isn’t smart enough to truly examine the serious issues it’s dealing with nor is it enough fun to make you want to excuse it. And it’s way too long. C Available on Netflix .

Greedy People (R)

Will (Himesh Patel) and Terry (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), newly partnered police officers in a South Carolina island town, cover up one accidental death with a conspiracy that racks up a body count and threatens to set them against each other. Will and his pregnant wife, Paige (Lily James), are new to town. On his first day of work, Will’s attempt to follow up on a police call ends with the death of Virginia Chelto (Traci Lords), wife of Wallace Chelto (Tim Blake Nelson), the town’s wealthiest man. For reasons that don’t entirely hold up, Will and Terry decide that the only way out of this situation is to stage a robbery — which includes taking the many stacks of cash they find in the house. The scheme snowballs and pulls in Chelto’s secretary/mistress Deborah (Nina Arianda), a sketchy masseuse (Simon Rex), his mom (Neva Howell) and men known as The Irishman (Jim Gaffigan) and The Colombian (José María Yazpik). Only Will and Terry’s supervising officer (Uzo Aduba), who is herself going through it, seems to suspect something bigger is going on.

Greedy People never quite gets the mix of “dark” to “comedy” right in this dark comedy — is it a thriller with a few notes of silliness or a comedy with some sinister moments? The movie doesn’t decide and as a result the solid cast doesn’t always feel well-used. C+ Available for rent or purchase.

Trap (PG-13)

M. Night Shyamalan wrote and directed this reverse-heist-type thriller that is goofier than it realizes but more fun than its one-trick trailer makes you think it will be. Josh Hartnett plays Cooper, the Dad-est Dad to ever use slang wrong and ask about daughter Riley’s (Ariel Donoghue) rocky relationship with some former friends. They are attending a Taylor-Swift-ish girlie’s pop concert — Lady Raven, played by Shyamalan’s daughter Saleka Shyamalan — where Cooper notices an extremely heavy police presence. He chats up a merch vendor and learns that it’s all in service of catching vicious serial killer The Butcher, whom they believe will be at the concert. And they are right because Cooper is The Butcher (spoiler but not really; the trailer gives it away). Without tipping his hand to the unknowing Riley, Cooper MacGyvers his way through the concert to try to find out what security measures are in place and what they know about him — very little, in terms of his appearance, but a lot about his psychology thanks to a profiler played by Hayley freaking Parent Trap Mills, which is quite awesome.

Trap does not stand up to even a little bit of thought about the “but why”s of it all, but it has moments of dark fun and Hartnett is clearly having a good time juggling Mr. Happy Normal Guy with unhinged psychopath. B- Available for rent or purchase.

Longlegs (R)

FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) helps to track a serial killer who she seems to have some sort of connection to in this vibesy horror movie. Actually, Longlegs (Nicolas Cage), as the possible killer calls himself in coded letters to the police, doesn’t personally himself kill anybody. But little notes found at crime scenes have FBI agents Carter (Blair Underwood) and Browning (Michelle Choi-Lee) pretty certain he is somehow involved in what otherwise appear to be family annihilation murder-suicides. Harker is brought into the investigation when she shows herself to have, er, good hunches? Her abilities are rated by the FBI as something more than an educated guess if not quite psychic-ness. After viewing all the case files, she heads home to work on decoding Longlegs’ letters — a task made easier when he apparently breaks into her home and leaves a sort of rosetta stone to his code. I think one of his notes is just “down low, too slow” which is funny but also stupid and what’s the point of the code again?

Look, there are few things as ham-on-cheese-on-yet-more-ham than Nicolas Cage, made up to look like some kind of Norma Desmond-meets-Willy-Wonka nightmare, whisper sing-song-voice saying “hail, Satan,” but all of that seems to be happening in a separate movie from the grim, gray investigation plus childhood trauma movie that the rest of the cast is in. Monroe in particular is so grim and affectless that I found myself having a hard time paying attention to her character. This movie hits for me about half the time and even then it’s a see-saw between “old-fashioned investigative tactics” and “evil dolls,” “profiling the method of the killer” and “the actual Devil.” C+ Available for rent or purchase.

The Deliverance (R)

Lee Daniels directs this horror movie where we start off thinking the big evil might be generational traumas and the systematic stresses of poverty but nope, it’s a literal demon. Ebony (Andra Day) has moved her three children into a house with her mother, Alberta (Glenn Close, chewing it up), so Ebony can help Alberta with her cancer treatments and Alberta can help Ebony with her kids. Everybody’s doing a terrible job — Ebony is a caring mother but also verbally and physically abusive with her kids and can’t let go of the hurt Alberta caused by being that way with her (among other childhood traumas). Social worker Cynthia (Mo’Nique) is pretty sure it’s time to remove Ebony’s kids from her home — and that’s before they start acting super weird and the youngest son shows signs of possession. And then Bernice James (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), who had been skulking around the home, shows up to tell Ebony that her house is also home to some kind of ancient evil and maybe Bernice can help her with a “deliverance” — a Pepsi to the Coca-Cola of exorcism, I guess.

The often “is this problematic?” first chunk of the movie with its focus on societal ills really takes a hard left turn into “Demons!” in a way that the movie does not know how to smooth together or connect with anything but the most obvious “this is a metaphor” duct tape. I appreciate what it’s attempting to do but The Deliverance doesn’t make all of its ideas work in a way that feels coherent. Glenn Close’s character, for instance, really makes the most of her high gothic Hillbilly Elegy-with-extra-cheese performance but it often feels like it’s happening in another movie. C Available on Netflix.

Immaculate (R)

American nun Cecilia (Sydney Sweeney) finds herself “immaculately” pregnant in this movie where you could probably edit in scenes from The First Omen and I wouldn’t notice. When Cecilia comes to the secluded nun retirement nursing home in Italy, she barely knows the language and is just that day taking her religious orders. She has a roomie with an older sister vibe, Sister Gwen (Benedetta Porcaroli), who smokes and is maybe the first person to suggest that they bail on this sketchy place when odd things start to happen (such as, for example, the pregnancy).

Sweeney is perfectly good at walking the line between being a wide-eyed innocent and being not so wide-eyed that she can’t still pull off some of the Final Girl action. The overall plot and the movie’s ultimate villain are all bonkers — so much so that I wished we got more of that bonkers, bigger and earlier, and spent less time walking around ye olde Italian convent with the spookiness just out of view. C+ Available for rent or purchase and streaming on Hulu.

The Union (PG-13)

Halle Berry is Roxanne Hall, a spy for a blue-collar spy organization called The Union — they aren’t Yale know-it-alls, boss Tom Brennan (J.K. Simmons) explains, they’re people who come from backgrounds where they know how to get things done on time and under budget. When all U.S. agents, law enforcement and military have their identities burned, Roxanne needs help getting back the hard drive with that info before it gets into the wrong hands (just don’t ask questions about all of this). The first trustworthy person who comes to mind? Mike McKenna (Mark Wahlberg), her high school boyfriend who still lives in their New Jersey hometown and now works construction, welding stuff and working on beams high in the air — which becomes one of his particular skills when he is recruited/kidnapped into working for The Union.

The cast here is fine — we also get Jackie Earl Haley, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje and Evil’s Mike Colter — and the movie is on paper the correct blend of dumb and action. But there is also a flatness, like the movie wasn’t entirely sure what to do after it came up with its concept and anchored its stars. Meanwhile, those stars, Wahlberg and Berry, have a good buddy relationship, one perhaps best portrayed in what I’m pretty sure, based on the “Rock ‘N Jock B-Ball Jam” shirt Wahlberg is wearing, are real photos of the two in the 1990s, when various internet stories say they met. I wish the movie — with some smarter writing, and a Berry-Wahlberg mix that was a little heavier on the Berry — could have found something better to do with it. C Streaming on Netflix.

Young Woman and the Sea (PG)

A mild but solid movie, Young Woman and the Sea is tailor-made for post-Olympics-summer viewing, specifically to be watched with a young athlete/athletics-appreciating kid. Based on the real life of swimmer Trudy Ederle, it shows progressive-for-early-20th-century mom Gertrude Ederle (Jeanette Hain) insist that her young daughters Trudy (Daisy Ridley as an adult) and Meg (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) learn how to swim, even though swimming isn’t good for girls and our delicate girl bodies or something. Her stubborn husband Henry (Kim Bodnia) initially refuses to give her the money for their lessons. Gertrude makes her own money and pays for their lessons at the girls-only pool next to a boiler room, and eventually Trudy and Meg both learn to swim, with Meg becoming such a strong swimmer that she starts to win competitions. Trudy proves herself to be even better and finds herself on the Olympic team for the 1924 Paris Olympics — though in a pre-Title IX world the female athletes had terrible accommodations and no ability to train on the long sea voyage to France. After underwhelming at the Olympics and facing the prospect of arranged marriage to some employee of her father’s at the family butcher shop, Trudy decides to attempt another challenge: swimming across the English channel.

This is fairly standard sports movie stuff — thrill of victory, agony of defeat, women can do sports — but it’s made from quality material and it makes for a good low-effort, family-friendly watch. B- Available on Disney+.

The Instigators (R)

Matt Damon and Casey Affleck are two thieves who participate in a poorly planned heist in this sparkless Apple TV+ movie.

Rory (Damon) and Cobby (Affleck) are part of a crew led by Scalvo (Jack Harlow), an idiot. Besegai (Michael Stuhlbarg), a person who clearly hasn’t considered the uncertain nature of electoral politics, has hired them — at the behest of yet another layer of criminals — to rob the certain-to-be-stuffed-with-graft-money safe of the reelected mayor of Boston (Ron Perlman). Every detail about the heist, from the route into the hotel to the number of civilians they’re likely to encounter, has been meticulously planned, they’re told. But, of course every one of those details is pretty much wrong and the plan quickly goes off the rails. Rory and Cobby are soon on the run from a massive amount of law-enforcement as well as a fixer (Ving Rhames) looking to steal back something more precious than money.

The Instigators has some good ideas and a good cast (which includes Hong Chau as Damon’s character’s therapist) and plenty of fun with the Boston of it all, but like many an Apple property, it feels inert. You can see where the money has been spent and what the plan is, but all the quality ingredients fail to come together to create a tasty dish. C+ Streaming on Apple TV+.

Jackpot! (R)

The premise of Amazon Prime Video’s Jackpot! is darkly cute and makes more sense to me than, say, all of the Purge movies ever did: After a mid-2020s great depression, California creates a grand lottery. When a winner is picked, that person’s name is broadcast across the state, and if you can find and murder that person in a 12-hour period after their win you get the money. If they make it through alive they get the money. Murder of that one person is legal but guns are off limits.

When Katie (Awkwafina) accidentally plays and wins the lottery, she finds herself having to use her stage-fighting skills to fight off all the Los Angeles denizens looking to kill her and take her ticket. She agrees to let Noel (John Cena), a sort of professional lotto-winner bodyguard, help keep her safe in exchange for a percentage of her billion-dollar win.

The premise is fine and Awkwafina and Cena have nice buddy chemistry but the movie doesn’t go as big or as silly as it needed to to make this the R-rated action comedy it was clearly trying to be. C+ Amazon Prime Video

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (PG-13)

Winona Ryder brings Lydia Deetz back to the infamous ghost house in Connecticut in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, a Tim Burton-directed sequel to his 1988 movie.

Lydia (Ryder) is now grown up and trading on her teenhood in the ghost house by working as a talk show host/psychic medium who visits other haunted houses to commune with their ghosts. Across town (New York City I think), her stepmother Delia (Catherine O’Hara) has transitioned from sculpture to video and performance art. At a fancy girls’ school, Lydia’s daughter Astrid (Jenna Ortega) is enduring taunts due to her mother’s ghosty fame. The three Deetzes come together when Delia learns that her husband, Charles, has died (from a decapitation, which is helpful for reasons you’re free to Google). They return to the family’s legendarily haunted country house to bury Charles and clear out and sell the house.

Delia’s artsy-chic funeral is interrupted by Lydia’s sorta-boyfriend/sleazy manager Rory (Justin Theroux, doing an excellent job at being very slappable) proposing to marry Lydia two days hence, on Halloween. Astrid and Delia do not like Rory, Lydia even seems to not like Rory. But he bullies her into saying yes. And perhaps she’s vulnerable from the loss of her father, from the death of Astrid’s father and the subsequent difficult relationship between mother and daughter, and from the disturbing Beetlejuice sightings she’s been having lately. Meanwhile, Astrid storms off and meet-cutes Jeremy (Arthur Conti), a local boy reading Dostoevsky.

And then meanwhile meanwhile: Beetlejuice (Michael Keaton) is working a desk job in the afterlife. His ex-wife Delores (Monica Bellucci), who had been boxed away in multiple pieces, reconstitutes herself with help from a staple gun and goes around sucking the souls out of the dead, making them, uh, deader. Wolf Jackson (Willem Dafoe), an action star in life, has become some kind of detective in the afterlife and is trying to find Delores. And a headless Charles Deetz wanders around, trying to get to the great beyond.

“More things!” feels like the approach in this movie. Astrid’s dad was a constantly-on-the-go activist! Astrid is also socially conscious maybe! Lydia’s crappy boyfriend won’t let her take medicine! Deliah has to postpone her art show! Astrid wants to travel! Lydia has no confidence for no particular reason! I feel like we could have gotten to the Beetlejuice factory faster and with more impact if we had sliced some of these characters (Delores, Wolf Jackson) away and given the remaining characters, Astrid in particular, more depth and personality. Astrid pretty much begins and ends at “surly teen.”

The movie’s climax features a musical scene that feels like it was created by somebody who was told about the “Day-O” scene in the 1988 movie and then made their own aggressively “look at how wacky this is” version with a different song. I found it flat and sparkless in a way that very much mirrored the movie overall. We’re getting a kind of second-hand, recreation-of-the-original version of the Beetlejuice story, not one that feels like a new adventure with familiar characters. Actually, Lydia in particular doesn’t even feel like the same character. In 1988, Lydia was a proto-Daria gothy teen with opinions and spunkiness; here, she’s kind of a mushy drip.

Beetlejuice Beetlejuice has moments of visual cleverness but the weirdness, silliness and fun of the Beetlejuice universe feels muted. C+

Rated PG-13 for violent content, macabre and bloody images, strong language, some suggestive material and brief drug use, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Tim Burton with a screenplay by Alfred Gough & Miles Millar, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is an hour and 45 minutes long and distributed by Warner Bros.

Featured photo: Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.

Alien: Romulus (R)

A rag-tag group of humans is no match for a ship full of previously dormant aliens in Alien: Romulus.

Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and Andy (David Jonsson), her android “brother” that her father programmed, are desperate to get off their dark and dreary mining colony and head to a sunny new terraformed human outpost elsewhere. But Wyland-Yutani Corporation, the evil company that runs everything, has reset the number of hours required for a trip to a better life and now Rain has to wait five to six more years.

But! A group of Rain’s friends and hostile acquaintances have spotted a derelict ship floating above the planet. They believe the ship has the cryopods and the power to get them to the sunny green outpost, if only they can steal those things. For that, they need Andy, whose androidness will help them use the ship’s computers to find what they need.

Rain is reluctant at first but decides to participate in this one shot at a better life, joining up with friendly guy Tyler (Archie Renaux), jerky guy Bjorn (Spike Fearn), Tyler’s sister Kay (Isabela Merced) and pilot Navarro (Aileen Wu). They travel to the ship in a plucky little space craft only to discover that’s no moon, it’s a space station — the “ship” is a two-part Wyland station with sides named Romulus and Remus. As a landing party starts to go through the ship, they realize it’s not so much “decommissioned” as they thought but abandoned. Because they don’t know they’re in an Alien franchise movie, they go poking around in the dark — first looking for cryopods and then looking for extra power for the crypods, not paying attention to the general creepiness until, in one flooded room, Bjorn thinks he sees Something In The Water.

The movie plays all the hits when it comes to the Alien aliens — we get the big one with the creepy drippy teeth, the whack-a-mole-ish chest popper, the face sucker. And we get some not bad imagery either — people in a small shaft of light surrounded by darkness, the ship rising up off the stormy planet to the sunlight space, red or blue lights for no particular reason other than giving the scene an extra creepiness boost. I also appreciated the general griminess of this movie — this is not a Star Trek-ian sanitized space but a “corporations are jerks who exploit the working class” scuffed up version of a space future.

But these elements are kind of it in terms of what makes this movie any different than your standard college-student (the rough age of everyone here) slasher fare. Replace “empty space station” with “college campus at the start of a holiday weekend” and “cryopods” with “booze in the dean’s office” and you’ve basically got the same movie.

The androidness of Andy gets a subplot — Rain treats him like a sweet kid brother but he turns into a hypercompetent calculating, somewhat malignant presence after an attempt to give him a security codes upgrade also programs him with a whole new prime directive. Their relationship gives Rain something more to care about than just not getting skewered by an Alien tail, but it doesn’t push the movie beyond the horror standard — the Rain/Andy relationship isn’t all that different from the big sister/little sister duo at the center of the recent Scream movies for example.

Alien: Romulus is ultimately not substantial enough to deliver on the promise of its above-average visuals and its remaining franchise cred. C+

Rated R for bloody violent content and language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Fede Alvarez and written by Fede Alvarez and Rodo Sayagues, Alien: Romulus is an hour and 59 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by 20th Century Studios.

Featured photo: Alien: Romulus.

Harold and the Purple Crayon (PG)

Zachary Levi is a sort of child-man whose magical crayon can create anything from airplanes to pie in Harold and the Purple Crayon, a mostly live-action movie.

I guess the book features a Harold who is sort of a PJ-wearing toddler. In the movie, we see that toddler transition to a non-specific-age adult guy (Levi), who hangs out in his two-dimensional world crafting things with his crayon and talking to his friends — Moose (Lil Rel Howery), Porcupine (Tanya Reynolds) and Narrator (voice of Alfred Molina), the “old man” who created Harold and his world.

When the Narrator stops talking to Harold, he decides to go to the Real World and look for his Old Man. He draws a door that says “Real World” and steps through, finding himself a Zachary Levi-ish three-dimensional human in a one-piece outfit. He’s accompanied by Moose, who becomes Lil Rel Howery in a brown fleece — though occasionally in times of stress he “mooses out” briefly. Porcupine doesn’t make it to the real world right away but when she does she is a British girl with a purple mohawk.

After hugging the first old man he sees and realizing there is more than one old man in the real world, Harold draws himself a tandem bike to make it easier for Moose and him to go search for his specific Old Man. Late-for-work single mom Terry (Zooey Deschanel) accidentally rams into them and, grateful that these two oddballs aren’t litigious, offers them a ride. The ride turns into a somewhat wary offer to stay in the attic of her detached garage for a night after her elementary-school-age son Mel (Benjamin Bottani) reminds her that his late dad always said they should help people who need it. Mel also likes that Harold and Moose are instantly accepting of his invisible friend Carl, kind of a lizard platypus dragon creature, Mel tells them.

Though Terry would like Harold and Moose to exit their lives quickly, Mel is excited to help them on their quest to find the old man — and he thinks these new friends might help cheer his mother up. They head to the library, where snooty librarian Gary (Jemaine Clement), fully absorbed with trying to get his epic medieval fantasy novel published, half-heartedly assists Mel because he hopes to impress Terry. But then he sees Harold “draw” an airplane into existence, puts together the whole “Harold plus purple crayon” thing after finding the original book in the children’s section and decides to try to get some of that crayon and its world-building magic for himself.

I feel like there is material to work with here — Harold’s imagination-powered crayon, the way imaginary characters (like Mel’s Carl or Gary’s book’s knights) provide something for people working through sadness or difficulties, the parental-like relationship between an author and his character and what it means for a character when the author is no longer there for him. But I think these concepts become less kid-engaging the more live-action the movie becomes. There are a lot of scenes where everybody on screen is an adult — maybe not terribly mature but still grown-up adult actors not being silly enough to make up for that for a child audience. Moose and Porcupine are fun characters, Levi is fine, Deschanel is sort of a wet blanket like all of these thankless mom roles but the movie overall was missing the magical something that keeps kids watching and not poking their siblings or going to the bathroom as the runtime wears on. The pacing is also off — the movie drags, feeling way longer than its 92 minutes. We spend more time than I think we need to worrying about Terry and her hopes and dreams (kids don’t care about mom dreams) and rush through set-piece scenes such as a final battle involving Gary in crayon-created knight mode.

Harold and the Purple Crayon isn’t terrible but it also isn’t there yet — the concepts and characters feel like they still need some development, especially if the goal is to really enchant a child audience. C+

Rated PG for mild action and thematic elements, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Carlos Saldanha with a screenplay by David Guion & Michael Handelman (based on the books by Crockett Johnson), Harold and the Purple Crayon is an hour and 32 minutes long and distributed in theaters by Columbia Pictures.

Featured photo: Harold and the Purple Crayon.

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