Author: Amy Diaz

A teen uses location services, street cams and Colombian Taskrabbit to search for her mother in Missing, a lightweight thriller.

June (Storm Reid), 18, is on eyeroll-whatever terms with her mother, Grace (Nia Long), as Grace heads from their L.A.-area home to vacation in Colombia with her boyfriend Kevin (Ken Leung). The vacation falls on Father’s Day, a tough time as June’s dad James (Tim Griffin) died when she was little. June is no more interested in Kevin’s awkward beginnings of some discussion about his feelings for her mom than she is in Grace’s blah blah blah about safety. She just wants Grace out the door so her friend Veena (Megan Suri) can come over with a big box full of cheap booze purchased with the money Grace Venmo-ed June “for emergencies.” I guess needing booze for the friends hanging out at your parent-free house for a week, culminating in a rager the night before mom is slated to return, is, like, a hosting emergency. The only oversight June has is a brief visit from Heather (Amy Landecker), her mother’s friend, who seems a little too fond of Kevin.

The Sunday morning Grace is set to arrive, a hungover June wakes up late and rushes to the airport to meet her. She waits — and waits and waits but neither her mother nor Kevin get off the plane. When June calls the hotel in Colombia she is able, with some help from some quick Google translations, to figure out that while Kevin and Grace are no longer there, their suitcases and other items still are. June calls the embassy but finds it closed and the hotel won’t send her the security footage over the internet. Via the Colombian version of Taskrabbit, she hires Javi (Joaquim de Almeida) to go to the hotel to get the footage. He doesn’t find that but does find other clues to where the couple may have gone.

As Missing’s present-day scenes begin, June and her friends are watching Unfiction, a true crime show. Using some of the techniques of that show, Veena and June figure out how to find street footage that might give more information about her mother’s trip and even her relationship with Kevin. Against the advice of Agent Park (Daniel Henney) at the Embassy, who is all “evidence we can use in court,” June worms her way into Kevin’s Gmail account and starts to learn more about her mother’s boyfriend. She also gets access to the location services that give her more clues about where they really went.

Some of the same people involved in this movie were also involved in Searching, a 2018 movie seen almost entirely through a variety of screens (phone, computer, etc.) where John Cho searches for his teen daughter. Though this movie isn’t quite as stuck to screens, we are learning and searching and seeking largely through June’s computer searches and phone calls with occasional news reports and “live” scenes worked in. The movie edits these pieces together in a way that keeps things moving. I wouldn’t say this particular puzzle is super-complicated or all that twisty — there are several twists that the movie drops enough clues on that it feels a little pokey how long it takes June to figure them out. But Reid, who carries the action with her worried face, is a compelling enough lead character that the movie never really feels slow.

Missing maybe makes little nods toward saying something about our constant surveillance, our very unprivate notions of privacy and the true crime industrial complex. But mostly it is a fun enough thriller that moves along at a brisk enough pace. B

Rated PG-13 for some strong violence, language, teen drinking and thematic material, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Nick Johnson and Will Merrick with a screenplay by Will Merrick & Nick Johnson, Missing is an hour and 51 minutes long and is distributed by Sony.

Featured photo: Missing

Plane (R)

Plane go crash in Plane — a movie that will never be criticized for being too complex.

Right from the jump, this movie won me over by letting Gerard Butler, who plays Trailblazer Airline pilot Brodie Torrance (I mean, HA! with that name), just be Scottish and not try to hide his accent. That always weighs these goofy action movies of his down; Plane keeps the story relatively light so we can focus on what really matters — an airplane doing crashy things.

Brodie and co-pilot Dele (Yoson An) are flying from Singapore to wherever, I forget, not important, with a small flight crew and 14 passengers, including Gaspare (Mike Colter), who is being returned to the U.S. in handcuffs. He was wanted for a homicide — something that happened when he was in his teens — and was finally caught after a decade and a half in the French Foreign Legion. Also, some corporate jerk tells the pilots not to worry about the big storm in their path, they should just fly above it — not around it, though, because that would cost slightly more in fuel.

The storm will not let itself be flown over and even at 40,000 feet the airplane gets tossed about and eventually struck by lightning. The electrical stuff goes out, the plane has to make an emergency landing and the Captain-Sully-esque Brodie manages to sort of crash-land it (with lots of sheared off trees and bumps and skids) onto an unknown island. Though, as Dele explains, probably not an uninhabited island — he’s pretty sure they’ve crashed down on a lawless island run by let’s just say Bad Guys.

With no way to radio out, Brodie decides to go in search of someplace with a telephone — and he takes Gaspare with him as a way to keep an eye on him. Thus are the rest of the crew and the complainy passengers left with the titular Plane to be found by the Bad Guys, who know ransom potential when they see it.

Meanwhile, in New York City, a room full of corporate people who I don’t think get names take direction from Scarsdale (Tony Goldwyn), a guy whose whole deal is handling crises by talking tough and having mercenaries on speed dial.

I won’t say this movie has no unnecessary details. We learn that Brodie has a daughter, we learn some details from his past, it’s New Year’s Eve — none of this matters at all. The movie could slice these bits out and it would be fine and might improve some of the draggy moments when the plane isn’t crashing or Brodie and Gaspare aren’t fighting the Bad Guys. I did enjoy the moments when this movie called Plane is basically doing Plane — Brodie and Dele say words like “thrust” and “landing gear” and “radar” to each other and we see the plane take off or climb in altitude. These moments don’t really get us any closer to the fireworks factory of airplane-centric action or Gerard Butler-centric violence, but they do underline the theme of this movie, which is, to be clear, “plane” and nothing more.

This movie is so just “plane” that it almost defies ranking. You absolutely get “plane” and absolutely nothing else. Do I wish it were maybe a little more fun, a little more self-aware about how it is a Gerard Butler movie called just “Plane”? Sure, but nevertheless this nonstop service to “movie your eyes can watch while your brain takes a rest” gets you where you need to go. B-

Rated R for violence and language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Jean-Francois Richet, Plane is an hour and 47 minutes long and distributed by Lionsgate in theaters.

A Man Called Otto (PG-13)

Tom Hanks plays the neighborhood grump in A Man Called Otto, a movie about a man lost in grief and depression.

But, like, whimsically!

After being forcibly retired from his decades-long job, Otto (Tom Hanks) now has more time to police neighborhood rules about parking and recycling and to grow increasingly despondent over the recent death of his wife, Sonya. (We see her in flashbacks as a young woman played by Rachel Keller; young Otto is played by Truman Hanks, son of Tom and Rita Wilson). He decides to “join you,” as he says, speaking to Sonya’s headstone, turning off the electricity and phone service to his tidy townhouse. But new neighbors, the very pregnant Marisol (Mariana Treviño) and her husband Tommy (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo), distract Otto from his plans with their terrible attempts at parking a trailer. He fusses at them and then grumps that he’ll do it himself, getting in their car and parallel parking it — which is how he meets their young daughters, Luna (Christiana Montoya) and Abbie (Alessandra Perez), who are strapped in the back and instantly amused by grumpy Otto. Marisol also seems to find Otto and his prickliness kind of amusing and she barges past it to give him food by way of saying thank you and asking for more neighborly favors — an allen wrench, a ladder, a ride to the hospital when Tommy falls off the ladder. Against Otto’s will at first, Marisol and her family befriend Otto and, because Marisol is a naturally outgoing person, she pulls Otto back into the life of his neighborhood. She makes him part of a cat rescue, and thus does Otto end up with a cat. She seems to inspire his reaching out to Malcolm (Mack Bayda), a neighborhood teen who turns out to have been a student of Sonya’s. And even though Otto seems to continue seeking ways to “join Sonya” he also seems, little by little, more tethered to the wider world.

Whimsical suicidal ideation and performative grumpiness — sounds fun, right? There are moments when this movie feels right on the edge of “yikes, really?” and I think it’s only the American Treasure Tom Hanks-iness of Tom Hanks that keeps it from sliding over. Even so, there’s a lack of nuance and a flatness to the characters that really gets in the way of this movie reaching the emotional depths it’s shooting for. Hanks (actually, Hankses, because I’d include Truman’s portrayal) never really seems to calibrate Otto exactly right. There is often a collection of quirks and brow furrows standing in for a multi-dimensional person.

So, on the one hand, there’s a really too-sweet, too-greasy overall uneasy quality to this. But there are still some genuine moments and some nice scenes of relationships — Otto and Marisol, particularly the way he helps to build her up at the right moments but also Otto and Malcolm (those scenes do a better job filling in one of Otto’s big life disappointments than the eventual exposition about it do), Otto and the cat, and Otto and Reuben (Peter Lawson Jones) and Anita (Juanita Jennings), a neighborhood couple that had been longtime friends but from whom he had been estranged.

I’ve never seen the Oscar-nominated 2012 Swedish original A Man Called Ove on which this movie is based so I can’t offer a comparison. I think this variation is probably fine, offering some emotionally satisfying moments even, if you don’t think too hard about what’s actually going on. B-

Rated PG-13 for mature thematic material involving suicide attempts, and language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Marc Forester with a screenplay by David Magee (based on the screenplay of A Man Called Ove by Hannes Holmes, which was based on the book by Fredrik Backman), A Man Called Otto is two hours and six minutes long and distributed by Sony in theaters.

The Whale (R)

Brendan Fraser gives a legitimately very good performance — for which he has received awards nods including Golden Globe and SAG nominations — in the very frustrating The Whale, a Darren Aronofsky movie based on a play.

Charlie (Fraser) teaches English remotely to college students. Because his laptop camera is “broken” they hear his voice but don’t see him in his apartment, where he is nearly immobile on his couch, breaking out in sweats and suffering from wheezing and sudden pains in his chest. As Liz (Hong Chau), his friend and a nurse who regularly checks on him, explains, Charlie has dangerously high blood pressure and congestive heart failure and will likely not live beyond the week. He has gotten to this state from extreme weight gain, which we learn has happened since the death of Charlie’s longtime boyfriend. Realizing he’s at the end of his life, Charlie reaches out to Ellie (Sadie Sink), his teenage daughter whom he hasn’t really seen since the breakup of his marriage to her mom, Mary (Samantha Morton). He basically bribes Ellie, with money and the promise of doing her English homework, to hang out with him so he can get to know her.

As the days tick down, Thomas (Ty Simpkins), an eager little missionary with connections to a church Liz’s family belongs to, regularly stops by Charlie’s house, hoping to “save” him, even if Thomas doesn’t seem entirely sure what that would mean. Liz meanwhile seems to both hope she can convince Charlie to go to a hospital and be somewhat resigned to the fact that Charlie isn’t going to stop his rapid decline.

If you’ve heard about this movie at all, it’s probably because Fraser is sort of wrapped in prosthetics to make himself appear extremely obese and there has been, you know, discourse about that whole thing. This movie’s approach to Charlie and his weight does not, as Roxanne Gay in her New York Times article and others have pointed out, exactly radiate respect for Charlie as a fully worthy human. Fraser will have some moment of heartbreaking sweetness where Charlie talks about his love for his daughter, but then the movie lingers on Charlie in the shower in a way that made me want to tell the movie to knock it off.

And yet, this, the sort of body horror aspect infused into the story, is not the movie’s only, or even its biggest, problem. Fraser’s performance really does come through but it occasionally gets crowded out by the stageyness of the movie. There are times when you can all but hear someone reading a stage direction as a character unnaturally walks to a door or stares out a window. Samantha Morton’s lines are so play-ish, so not-how-people-talk that it frequently pulled me out of her scenes. Because Fraser and Chau (who also got a SAG nod) are pretty capable at sounding like humans, it is even more noticeable when Simpkins’ Thomas sounds like he’s doing a chunk of dialogue as part of an audition. The religion aspect of the story and the way he fits into it is just not smoothly integrated and sticks out as nuggets of “bigger meaning” — much in the way the news reports about the 2016 presidential primaries do (just no, movies, to using 2016 as thematic shorthand).

And then there’s Sink, making Ellie a teenager sort of vibrating with rage — at the father who left her, at the mother with whom she’s in constant struggle, at the school where she’s not thriving. It can be good and get to the part of Charlie’s choices that he hasn’t really dealt with. But it can also be “angry Rory Gilmore,” which just pulls the whole man’s-struggle-with-depression into a place of thin melodrama.

Fraser and Chau deserve their accolades from this movie. They did good work, but The Whale is exhausting. C+

Rated R for language, some drug use and sexual content, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Darren Aronofsky with a screenplay by Samuel D. Hunter, The Whale is an hour and 57 minutes long and is distributed by A24 in theaters.

Featured photo: Plane

A terrifying giant doll becomes even more terrifying thanks to some A.I. programming in M3gan, a lively thriller coming in at a brisk hour and 42 minutes.

Gemma (Allison Williams) is a toy designer who becomes the guardian for her tween-ish-aged niece Cady (Violet McGraw) after Gemma’s sister and brother-in-law die in a car accident. Cady, who was in the car with her parents at the time, is understandably distraught about both the traumatic accident and their deaths. Gemma, who is unsure about this whole parenting thing, decides that she can cross two tasks off her to-do list — cheer up Cady and beta test a new toy — by introducing Cady to M3gan, a 4-foot-tall doll who will bond with its primary user and learn how to relate with that particular child. Previously, Gemma had helped develop toy company Funki’s Purrpetual Petz, a sort of toothy-Sonic-plus-Furby creation that looks nightmarish but has impressive tech (we later learn that Gemma has programmed it to listen to its kid owners and collect data — but of course). It is also sort of chef’s-kiss perfect in how annoying it is portrayed as — it makes realistically parent-aggravating noises and has all of these dumb app-based features.

M3gan (voice by Jenna Davis; Amie Donald does the doll action, according to Wikipedia), which will be a kid’s best friend, surrogate parent and gentle nag about teeth brushing all rolled into one, also seems like a just awful product and one of the great aspects of this movie is that most people’s reaction to seeing the doll for the first time is to be instantly creeped out by it. For some reason, though, it isn’t until a therapist points out that Cady is transferring all of the grief-bonding that should be happening with Gemma to the doll, that Gemma starts to get a little concerned. She tries to get Cady to take some breaks from M3gan, but by then her silicone creation has started to get sassy.

Again, it is really quite delightful that this movie never tries to get us to think maybe M3gan is a good idea. From the first moment we meet the first prototype (whose face melts! It’s great!), the movie makes it clear that this poorly-thought-out toy will be some kind of horror show, even if we don’t know at first what kind. When I first saw the trailer for this movie, I probably thought something like “ugh, what ridiculous nonsense.” After seeing it, though, my reaction is “What ridiculous nonsense! 10 out of 10! Four stars! No notes!” Like the brutal artificial intelligence it portrays, it feels like this movie guessed the potential response to it and absolutely leaned all the way in. Is it all intentional, what a snort-laugh hilarious movie this frequently is? I think probably. Williams has such a great “ha! What?” energy the whole time and everyone is so appropriately, un-horror-movie wigged out by M3gan that I feel like M3gan knows it’s chosen gothicly silly over scary and that that choice was correct. B+

Rated PG-13 for violent content and terror, some strong language and a suggestive reference, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Gerard Johnstone with a screenplay by Akela Cooper and a story by Akela Cooper and James Wan, M3gan is a delightful hour and 42 minutes long and is distributed by Universal Studios.

Featured photo: M3ghan

The Fabelmans (PG-13)

Steven Spielberg directs and co-writes this movie adaptation of what appears to be his childhood in The Fabelmans, a very sweet story of a boy and his camera.

Look, I’m going to use words like “sweet” and “cute” and I mean all of them sincerely even though I realize there may be a damning-with-faint-praise quality to them. But this is a sweet tale of a movie-loving Boomer’s childhood and I think you just have to go with that kid’s-eye-view approach.

We meet Sammy Fabelman (Mateo Zoryan as a very young child; Gabriel LaBelle as a teen) as he waits in line with his parents to go see his first movie, Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth. He’s anxious about the experience and his mother, Mitzi (Michelle Williams), explains the magic of it all while his father, Burt (Paul Dano), explains the science that makes a series of photos move. It is the dichotomy that will follow Sammy through the movie — an artistic, emotional, searching mother and a quiet, rationality-focused father. Little Sammy isn’t thinking about that, though; he’s focused on the on-screen train crash. Later, he asks for a train set for Hanukkah and then almost immediately recreates the movie scene. Burt gets mad that Sammy would be so rough on such an expensive train set; Mitzi suggests that Sammy crash the train just once more and film it with the family’s home movie camera so he can watch it again and again. Thus we see the first film of a young Steven — I mean, Sammy — projected inside his closet and featuring the crash depicted with close-ups and from multiple angles.

We catch up with teen Sam as he makes movies with his buddies for a Boy Scout patch. He shoots an elaborate Western, figuring out special effects to make the gunshots look real. Later, he films what feels like a Saving Private Ryan precursor with some 50 kids, squibs, dust kicked up to look like explosions and an emotional arc for a central character. But at the same time, he’s also filmed something else during a family vacation. Without quite realizing it, he captures a romance between Mitzi and Ben (Seth Rogen), Burt’s best friend and a sort of adopted uncle. Once a pianist with big dreams, Mitzi seems to struggle with the narrow role of housewife and need something more from her life.

The Fabelmans feels like two things. One is a collection of events significant to Sam — not his life story, exactly, but more the moments that stand out, the moments he might discuss if giving an extended interview about his life. The other is Mitzi’s story as filtered through Sam. I think because Williams is a skilled actress, because she can bring complexity even when her character is going big, that is the more compelling story, for all that the Sam-focused moments are cute and often kind of mirror iconic bits of Spielberg’s filmography. The movie gives us Sam’s view of Mitzi but also is able to imply what parts of that view are the “only part of a story” any kid gets of their parent and also suggests how each of the Fabelman kids (Sam has three younger sisters, as Spielberg did, according to Wikipedia) have a different portrait of Mitzi.

There is something very sweet and earnest about the story we get here, with a lot of information delivered very plainly and upfront, very text, but just enough richness to the details of the story to make it pull you in. B+

Rated PG-13 for some strong language, thematic elements, brief violence and drug use, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Steven Spielberg with a screenplay by Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner, The Fabelmans is two hours and 31 minutes long and distributed in theaters by Universal Studios and via VOD for rent or purchase.

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (PG)

Down to his last life, the swashbuckling cat Puss in Boots ponders mortality while heading out on a quest for a fallen star and its one wish in Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, a mostly exciting animated adventure story/hour and 40 minutes of kid entertainment.

I say “mostly exciting” because there were some moments of fidgeting when I took my kids to this movie. Yay to swashbuckling, “how much longer is this movie” to characters working out their inner turmoil.

After liberating a governor’s gold (and wigs and fancy clothes) and fighting an earthen giant, Puss (voice of Antonio Banderas) finds himself waking up from his eighth death and thus he is entering the ninth (and final) of his cat lives. Shaken by approaching death — as personified by the bounty-hunting Big Bad Wolf (voice of Wagner Moura) — Puss decides to take his doctor’s advice and retire from adventuring, finding a home at Casa Luna, where the most dangerous characters are the health department officials chasing Mama Luna (voice of Da’Vine Joy Randolph) and her way-too-many cats. Having left his boots and sword behind and sporting a David Letterman beard and a collar that says “Pickles,” Puss is spending his days wallowing in self-pity and being friended at by Perrito (voice of Harvey Guillén), a small lonely dog pretending to be a cat to hang out with the Casa Luna crowd.

But then Goldilocks (voice of Florence Pugh) and Mama (voice of Olivia Coleman), Papa (voice of Ray Winstone) and Baby (voice of Samson Kayo) Bear show up looking for Puss in Boots to hire his thieving skills. He convinces them that the legendary Puss in Boots is dead but overhears their plan to steal a map from Jack Horner (voice of John Mulaney) that will lead them to a fallen star, which can grant one wish. Puss decides to search for the star by himself, tailed, like it or not, by Perrito. He learns, of course, that such a map is a prize for several thieves, including his old rival/romantic interest Kitty Softpaws (voice of Salma Hayek).

Eventually, the characters are in a sort of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World scenario, withJack Horner and his collection of magical items and hired henchmen chasing Goldi, and the Bears chasing wary reluctant partners Kitty and Puss, who are joined by eager Perrito, who soon names their trio “Team Friendship.” The wishing star lies deep in the Dark Forest, which is filled with psychological obstacles set up specifically for whoever holds the map; thus does the good-hearted Perrito get a path filled with flowers and rainbows while Puss gets a kind of hall of mirrors featuring reflections of his own bravado.

The Last Wish is largely full of questing, silliness and occasional moments of Dreamworks-y tartness (a put-down session that includes some bleeps). Banderas makes full use of his vocal talents —that blend of overinflated ego, dramatics and, in this movie, vulnerability — to craft Puss, who is selfish and vain but also kind and ultimately sort of lovable. There is also some sweetness going on with the Goldilocks and Bear family storyline. When we initially meet them they are basically a gang of thieves, but Coleman gives Mama a kind heart and Pugh makes Goldi more than just a pushy low-rent Cinderella, as Baby calls her.

The Shrek universe, of which this is a part, was always one of the better aspects of Dreamworks Animation, and this Puss in Boots tale is a solid, entertaining entry. B+

Rated PG for action/violence, rude humor/language and some scary moments, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado with a screenplay by Paul Fisher and Tommy Swerdlow, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish is an hour and 40 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by Universal Studios.

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (PG-13)

Detective Benoit Blanc is invited (maybe?) to a murder mystery weekend (with a real murder?) in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, a fun sequel that takes the comedy at least as seriously as the mystery.

Blanc (Daniel Craig) is one of the guests who meet at the dock for a boat to take them out to the Greek island where tech bro Miles Bron (Edward Norton) has a big, elaborate, weird home and has planned a big, elaborate, weird weekend for his friends circa early spring 2020. The friends include politician on the rise Claire Debella (Kathryn Hahn); Bron’s company head scientist Lionel Toussaint (Leslie Odom Jr.); faded model and leisurewear company owner Birdie Jay (Kate Hudson) and her assistant Peg (Jessica Henwick); influencer Duke Cody (Dave Batista) and his girlfriend Whiskey (Madelyn Cline), and former friend to them all Andi Brand (Janelle Monae). Andi was until recently business partner with Miles but was, as the others explain, Eduardo Saverin-ed out of the company. We don’t know the cause of the break, exactly, but it seems that Miles got the friends in their split — possibly because, as we learn, all of the friends have some financial stake in Miles’ friendship.

At first, the assembled crowd — delighted to take a break from the isolation and masks of the early pandemic — believes that Benoit Blanc, the world’s greatest detective, is with them to add authenticity and a bit of challenge to the promised mystery game. Miles is always whisking his friends away for a theme weekend and his invitations come this year in ornate mystery boxes. But once the party arrives at the island, we learn that Miles is as surprised to see Benoit as everyone else was (well, almost everyone else — clearly someone reset their invitation box and sent it to him, Benoit posits to Miles). Why has one of the guests arranged for Benoit to come to what is supposed to be just a carefree weekend away? Why has Andi shown up for a weekend with frenemies? And is someone using the murder mystery theme to plot a real muhrr-derrr?

This is a mild spoiler but stupidity plays a big role in the central mystery of Glass Onion and I truly appreciate that, both for the wider messaging and for how clever the movie is about turning the conceit of the cunning Moriarty-like killer on its head. This movie is fun, at times even goofy. It (or maybe I should credit writer/director Rian Johnson) really enjoys sending up the different flavors of rich person — the careless rich, the cynical rich, the head-up-its-rear techie rich. But it is a handcrafted bespoke goofiness; the movie’s fun is all specific and organic to the story it’s telling and the characters it’s building. Perhaps it was Norton’s presence that initially got me thinking about Wes Anderson movies and how everything is perfectly crafted and intentional down to the grains of sand. This feels similar, not in tone but in its purposefulness.

Also having a specific blast is, well, everybody involved. Hudson is lively and so good at being a very particular kind of daft. Hahn is, well, Hahn but just always brings a certain martini-with-lime quality to everything. Monae gets a heavier lift than the others and does some really fun stuff with it. And Craig, much like Chris Evans in the last movie, seems to be enjoying shaking off his franchise and playing everything just a little sillier.

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is a thorough pleasure. B+

Rated PG-13 for strong language, some violence, sexual material and drug content, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Written and directed by Rian Johnson, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery is two hours and 19 minutes long and is available on Netflix.

The Banshees of Inisherin (R)

Two former friends become strange enemies in The Banshees of Inisherin, a quirky comedy with a dark and melancholy heart.

Pádraic (Colin Farrell) stops to get Colm (Brendan Gleeson) for their regular walk to the pub for a pint in 1923 on an island off the Irish mainland. Pádraic can see Colm sitting in his house but Colm ignores his knocks and, when Pádraic finally does run into Colm, Colm tells Pádraic that he doesn’t want to talk to him any more. After what’s implied to be years, probably decades, of friendship, Colm has decided he doesn’t like Pádraic, whom he thinks is “dull.” Colm wants to spend his time writing music that will be remembered through the centuries, like Mozart, and just being a nice guy doesn’t get you remembered.

Pádraic is shocked — he doesn’t understand Colm’s request for silence from him. Pádraic’s sister Siobhán (Kerry Condon) tries to get Colm to knock it off and Pádraic recruits the local priest to try to talk to Colm. But Colm is determined to have nothing more to do with Pádraic and threatens to start cutting off his own fingers and throwing them at Pádraic if he ever speaks to him again.

It’s a strange and gruesome threat but it’s a strange and gruesome island. Siobhán gets a piece of mail that has been opened “in the heat,” the mail woman tells her on the grayest of days — we and Siobhán know that the woman is desperate to hear any news of anything. Pádraic’s pal after Colm dumps him is Dominic (Barry Keoghan), a young man who has a troubled home life with his father (Gary Lydon), who is the local police officer. One of Siobhán’s few visitors is Mrs. McCormick (Sheila Flitton), a black-clad widow who might very well be a banshee herself. One of the other regular visitors inside the family home is Jenny, Pádraic’s beloved pony, despite Siobhán’s demand that he keep his animals outside. While gunshots and cannon fire from the mainland occasionally suggest that the island is a refuge, there is lots of evidence that it is also something of a prison keeping these people trapped in lives without a lot of choices.

Despair, civil war and wacky pony comedy — The Banshees of Inisherin is very much an unexpected mix of tragedy (Dominic’s truly horrific abuse at the hands of his father, Siobhán and Pádraic’s grief over the deaths of their parents, Colm’s feelings of despair and meaninglessness) and laugh out loud moments of comedy. There are times when the residents of the island have a real “what a bunch of characters” feel and you could see a version of this movie that was all cutesiness and charming affectations. But the more performative aspect of their lives seems to be, more than anything, the coping mechanism for the problems people have — the uncertainty of the outside world, the stucked-ness of the island. It is occasionally a little jarring to go from thick brogues and a vaguely witch-like neighbor to child abuse and self-mutilation. But it works? I mean, but it works. Sometimes the question mark pushes its way in there but then the truly heartfelt “you can see all the years piling on” performances, particularly of Farrell and Gleeson, push the questions away and give you real people having internal struggles. B+

Rated R for language throughout, some violent content and brief graphic nudity, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Written and directed by Martin McDonagh, The Banshees of Inisherin is an hour and 54 minutes long and distributed by Searchlight Pictures, for rent or purchase via VOD and on HBO Max.

Featured photo: Puss in Boots: The Last Wish