Author: Amy Diaz

Till (PG-13)

Mamie Till-Mobley, mother of the murdered child Emmett Till, is the focus of Till, a close-up portrait of a woman’s rage and grief.

Mamie Bradley (Danielle Deadwyler), as Till-Mobley (who died in 2003) is known for most of the movie, is worried from the moment she sends her only child, Emmett Till (Jalyn Hall), on a train to visit cousins in 1955 Mississippi. He has grown up in Chicago and even though the city is hardly free of racism, he doesn’t have experience with the dystopian apartheid of the South and the deadly consequences of running afoul of its hellish social conventions.

A sunny, friendly, baby-faced 14-year-old, Emmett seems to be generally enjoying himself with his cousins, even when he’s helping them pick cotton. While at a store buying sweets, he tells the clerk, who we later learn is Carolyn Bryant (Haley Bennett), that she looks like a movie star and later whistles at her. He thinks he’s being charming, we see a sweetly goofy kid, she goes for her gun. A few days go by and he and his cousins think the incident will come to nothing and don’t even tell their parents, Mamie’s uncle (John Douglas Thompson) and aunt (Keisha Tillis). But then men, including Carolyn’s husband, show up at the house and kidnap Emmett while holding his cousins at gunpoint.

When Mamie finds out Emmett is missing, she wants to hurry to Mississippi to find him, but family help her connect with the local chapter of the NAACP and Rayfield Mooty (Kevin Carroll), who tries to get political officials and the media involved in Emmett’s disappearance. When Emmett’s body is found, Mamie, nearly shattered already, insists on having him returned to Chicago and on seeing him. Emmett’s face and head are horribly disfigured and he is bloated from being in a river. Mamie decides that Emmett’s funeral will be open casket and she brings newspaper and magazine photographers in to take pictures of Emmett’s body to show the world what happened to him.

An extended trailer for this movie mentions the fact that we don’t actually see Emmett being murdered — an effective and possibly more emotionally devastating choice. While the movie shows us Emmett’s body and what seeing him does to Mamie, other family members and the larger public, it keeps the focus on Mamie, her heartbreak and her relationship with Emmett. The movie never lets us forget that he is a child and he is her child and it doesn’t waste a minute with sensationalizing his lynching or trying to get us to understand his murderers or the society that protects them. That sounds like kind of an obvious thing — that the murdered child and the effect of his murder on his mother would be the center of this story — but it feels so Hollywood-standard for a Civil Rights era movie to filter Black stories through some kind of white character that this “a movie about Mamie that puts Mamie at the center” approach makes Till feel innovative.

And Deadwyler’s performance absolutely holds us in her experience throughout the movie. She puts us in Mamie’s emotions, from the worry and dread that come with sending Emmett to Mississippi through the ocean of grief after his death and the anger that I think would completely consume most people. It’s not always easy (I think especially if you have kids and can call up worry about them with zero effort) to be with her in that headspace, but it is so well done, her feelings are so well examined and shown (not told), that when characters praise her out loud it almost feels unnecessary. Just making it through the day as a woman who has lost so much seems like an exceptional feat — and this movie makes us feel the effort this requires of her. When we see her doing so while being able to serve as an advocate for justice, Mamie displays an almost superhuman strength. A

Rated PG-13 for thematic content involving racism, strong disturbing images and racial slurs, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Chinonye Chukwu and written by Michael Reilly & Keith Beauchamp and Chinonye Chukwu, Till is two hours and 10 minutes long and distributed in theaters by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures.

Featured photo: Danielle Deadwyler and Jalyn Hall in Till.

Black Adam (PG-13)

Dwayne Johnson is the magnetic core of the “too many items on the menu” comic book adaptation Black Adam, an entry in DC’s Extended Universe.

We meet Black Adam (Johnson) — who is, to oversimplify, a “Shazam”-type — as well as the Justice Society, presented as a good guy Suicide Squad (also directed by Viola Davis’ Amanda Waller). The team is led by Hawkman (Aldis Hodge), who is sorta cool and rich, and includes Dr. Fate (Pierce Brosnan), Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell) and Atom Smasher (Noah Centino), a new-guy superhero whose funnest attribute is that his uncle, the previous Atom, is played by Henry Winkler. We also learn about Intergang, a group of criminal mercenaries occupying Kahndaq, a country presented as the vaguely Middle Eastern. And, rounding out the DCEU business, there is a mid-credits scene that is, in my opinion, some complete nonsense.

The movie also talks vaguely about colonizers, oppression, freedom, the idea of being a hero versus being protector and why it is bad to murder people. And, it seems like the movie can’t decide whether it’s deadly serious or quippy and so it does both.

In the movie’s present, Adrianna Tomaz (Sarah Shahi), a professor in the oft-invaded and oppressed Kahndaq, is desperate to find an ancient Kahndaq artifact, a blue-ish iron-y crown that can give its wearer godlike powers (of demonic origin). She wants to rehide it so Intergang and other baddies will never find it. But one of her shifty compatriots, Ishamel (Marwan Kenzari), has other plans. Adrianna finds the crown in an ancient tomb just as Intergang arrives and demands it at gunpoint.

Certain she is going to die, she does some on-the-fly translating to call on Kahndaq’s ancient protector, and the muscle-y Adam (Johnson) appears. He lays waste to nearly all of the Intergang group and allows Adrianna and her comic relief brother, Karim (comedian Mohammad Amer), to get away. Later, Adrianna introduces Adam to her young son, Amon (Bodhi Sabongui), a big fan of superheroes who has some advice for Adam on how to improve and capitalize on his image in this modern world.

Amanda sends in the Justice Society to neutralize Adam because of some secret ancient texts that suggest he isn’t the public-protecting superhero that legend paints him as. When the Justice Society arrives in Kahndaq, they discover that “international stability!” isn’t exactly an electrifying rallying cry and maybe oppressed people aren’t so concerned with what happens to their oppressors.

Or, I mean, that’s an element that is mentioned and that I found kind of interesting — justice and prioritizing the global peace vs. more direct protecting of one’s people. But for all that the movie throws it out there, the Big Ideas are kept kinda vague.

Like a kid sprinkling Fruit Loops and M&Ms on top of a Nutella and potato chips Eggo sandwich, the movie drops those nuggets of “saying something” on top of an overstuffed pile of comic book lore: this character and their relationship to that character and the magical this thing, created by the wizard-y those guys. We don’t get a whole lot of time with any one element and most of it is just told directly to us in flashback or exposition dump. While I’ve often wanted superhero movies to skip the origin stories and get right to the superheroing (not unlike how the MCU handled Spider-Man), Black Adam skips any kind of context about these people or groups. Watching Black Adam isn’t a whole lot different, experience-wise, from reading the character’s Wikipedia page. You get plenty of raw data but not a lot of emotional connection to characters or their quests.

Dwayne Johnson is a top-notch action movie player — he is one of my favorite parts of the whole Fast & Furious experience at this point. Black Adam doesn’t use his talents nearly enough and doesn’t give him a solid story. It never really settles on who it wants Black Adam, the man or the movie, to be. C

Rated PG-13 for sequences of strong violence, intense action and language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra and written by Adam Sztykiel and Rory Haines & Sohrab Noshirvani, Black Adam is two hours and four minutes long and distributed in theaters by New Line Cinema.

Ticket to Paradise (PG-13)

The charms of and genuine good will between George Clooney and Julia Roberts do most of the work in the rom-com Ticket to Paradise.

Long-divorced couple David (Clooney) and Georgia (Roberts) have a deeply antagonistic relationship, bickering all the time — including throughout the college graduation ceremony of their daughter Lily (Kaitlyn Dever). They seem delighted to walk swiftly away from each other at the airport after saying goodbye to Lily, who is vacationing in Bali with her buddy Wren (Billie Lourd). After the post-college pre-life trip, Lily is slated to start work at a prestigious law firm.

But is law really Lily’s dream, or something her parents have talked her into? When she meets Gede (Maxime Bouttier), a local seaweed farmer, she starts to doubt her whole life plan. Thus, some two months later, do David and Georgia find themselves on a plane to Bali to stop their daughter from marrying Gede and derailing her big career.

There is, of course, all kinds of baggage. A similar post-college engagement between David and Georgia, followed quickly by the birth of Lily, derailed Georgia’s career plans. Though divorced more than a decade, David and Georgia are clearly still angry about how their relationship ended — and maybe even that it ended. David is currently unattached and Georgia is maybe not looking for forever with her boyfriend Paul (Lucas Bravo), an airline pilot.

Roberts and Clooney are good separately — clunky exposition scenes where they tell various stories of their relationships to other people work because they are such watchable actors. Together they crackle and spark — they’re great scene partners whether their characters are fighting or flirting. Their plan to break up Lily and Gede allows for a fair amount of charmingly executed scheming and gentle capers.

The rest of the movie is a flat fountain soda, watered down in flavor and generally lacking in effervescence. Everything that isn’t based on Roberts’ and Clooney’s star power and chemistry is tepid at best. The story feels like so much warmed over “haven’t we seen this before” and the romance between the youngs is fairly spark-free. Lourd, whose oddball neglected-rich-kid character is interesting, doesn’t get nearly enough to do to really bring anything to the movie.

Clooney and Roberts and the beauty of Bali carry this movie further than it has any right to go, but it ultimately underwhelms. C+

Rated PG-13 for some strong language and brief suggestive material, according to the MPA at filmratings.com. Directed by Ol Parker with a screenplay by Daniel Pipski, Ticket to Paradise is an hour and 44 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by Universal Studios.

Featured photo: Dwayne Johnson in Black Adam.

The infectious nature of violence is the real boogeyman in Halloween Ends, the allegedly final installment in the Laurie Strode/Michael Myers rebooted-ish Halloween series.

This movie is also about the awesome recent career of Jamie Lee Curtis. She served up Laurie in the last movie, 2021’s Halloween Kills, largely from a hospital bed, which feels like a pretty rad way to collect your franchise check. Since restarting the Halloween franchise with Halloween in 2018, where she got to play a gun-toting revenge-seeking prepper, she’s been in Knives Out and played Deidre Beaubeidre in Everything Everywhere All At Once. Curtis is, at 63, living the life and even though these Halloween movies aren’t setting the world on fire for me they have, in total, given me a new appreciation for Curtis for being able to get fun work in movies past the age when Hollywood usually allows women to have that. (Also, for what it’s worth, they’ve made some good money at the box office.) “Good on ya, Jamie Lee Curtis” might actually be my strongest takeaway from this trilogy as a whole.
We’ve had a little time jump since Halloween Kills, which I guess took place in 2018 (the same in-universe night, I think, as 2018’s Halloween). It’s now four years later. Laurie Strode (Curtis) is still dealing with the death of her daughter (Judy Greer) at the hands of Myers at the end of the last movie. She lives with her granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) still in the same death-town of Haddonfield, Illinois, but now in a proper house in a regular neighborhood. She’s decorating for Halloween, writing about surviving all the Michael Myers violence and even awkwardly flirting with Frank (Will Patton), longtime friend and police officer. But even in happy moments she finds herself buried in the grief of the Myers killings. People blame her for all the death and destruction and she feels that the evil and violence of those actions have spread, not just to the Halloween Kills vigilante mob but to crimes perpetrated through the town over the last four years. One of the most gruesome, which we see in the movie’s opening scenes, happens in 2019 and features college-ish-aged Corey (Rohan Campbell), called in to babysit for a boy when his parents go to a Halloween party. The kid tries to scare Corey by locking him in the attic, but what happens next leaves Corey pegged as a new town boogeyman.
In the present day, Laurie sees Corey getting picked on by some high school kids and feels sorry for him. She takes him to the hospital to be treated by Allyson, who takes an instant liking to Corey. It is once again Halloween time and the tentative new couple goes to a party, where there are masks and angry townsfolk and instances of casual violence. Michael Myers (James Jude Courtney as “The Shape”), not seen since 2018, lurks in the corners but does he see in Corey prey or something else?
Look, I’m not going to pretend that this movie is super deep. It is still mostly stabbing and screaming and masked figures doing a power walk after running-in-terror victims. But there’s some “what is the nature of evil” and “how does hate spread” musings, often delivered by Curtis, between all of that, which gives the movie at least the veneer of thoughtfulness. We also get fountains of stage blood and some pretty gleeful squish noises, so I don’t feel fans of the seasonal classics will be disappointed. I did also appreciate the overall lo-fi quality of the movie, with its out-of-time setting (from clothes to hair to the fact that the whole town is glued to the rock radio station, there is still a general late-1970s/early 1980s vibe) and its quip-free, linear-plot-development no-nonsense approach to the story. There is almost something wistful about the whole endeavor, like you can feel a bittersweetly smiling Curtis saying “aw, I’m going to miss all this knife-welding.”
Halloween Ends ultimately feels like it’s delivering vibes more than a scary story, but if you’re in the mood for Halloween-season fare, I feel like you could do worse. C+
Rated R for bloody horror violence and gore, language throughout and some sexual references, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by David Gordon Green and written by Paul Brad Logan & Chris Bernier & Danny McBride & David Gordon Green, Halloween Ends (sure it does) is an hour and 51 minutes long and is distributed by Universal Studios in theaters and via Peacock.

Featured photo: Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween Kills.

Amsterdam (R)

John David Washington, Margot Robbie and Christian Bale are Americans who enjoy liberation in post-WWI Europe but find themselves tangled up in intrigue in pre-WWII New York in Amsterdam, a movie written and directed by David O. Russell that backs into a piece of history called the “Business Plot.”

Spoiler alert if you decide to dive down the Wikipedia rabbit hole of the nutty incident that is the Business Plot before seeing this movie.

In World War I, medical doctor Burt Berendsen (Bale) joins a mostly African-American Army regiment that has suffered from dangerously hostile and disrespectful leadership by white officers. Aspiring lawyer Harold Woodman (Washington) makes a deal with Burt that if Burt actually works to help the troops and keep them alive Woodman will try to keep Burt alive. When most of the regiment, Burt and Harold included, end up in a French hospital with injuries, the friendship deepens and grows to include Valerie (Robbie), an American working as a nurse.

Valerie takes the men with her to Amsterdam, where two “businessmen”— Henry Norcross (Michael Shannon), in US Naval intelligence as a chyron tells us, and Paul Canterbury (Mike Myers), really MI6 — offer to help the men receive medical treatment for their wounds and in Burt’s case an unlimited supply of glass eyes to replace the eye he lost. In exchange, Norcross and Canterbury might one day need some kind of favor from Burt and Harold, maybe a favor similar to the kind of information-passing favors Valerie did during the war. In Amsterdam the men get a rest — not just from war but from all of the constraints they suffer from at home, such as the antisemitism lobbed at Burt (including from his tony in-laws) and the deadly racism that plagues Harold and would make his romance with Valerie impossible.

Eventually Burt returns home to his wife Beatrice (Andrea Risenborough). He’s kicked out of his fancy Park Avenue medical practice because he brings veterans in for treatment — all veterans regardless of race. Eventually, Burt and Harold join forces to help veterans try to get the care and the benefits they deserve.

Which brings us to the now of the movie: 1933. Burt and Harold agree to perform an autopsy of their beloved former general when his daughter (Taylor Swift) suspects that he’s been murdered. But then she is murdered, pushed into the street by a man who points the finger at Burt and Harold. They must find out who killed the general and his daughter in order to clear their name.

A story of interwar hopefulness and romance is folded into a crime caper and it all comes together in a tale of the international political storm of the 1930s. And it’s long. And feels it.

Amsterdam meanders around, spending some time being a comedy about the buddyship of Burt and Harold, with characters played by Chris Rock and Zoe Saldana, then spending some time in a whirl of crime and early spycraft, in storylines filled with shady people with shady motives. The movie doesn’t have time to settle into any one groove. I have liked John David Washington in everything I’ve seen him in but here, like most of the people in this movie, he’s so busy ferrying the story from this moment to the next that he doesn’t really get to do much with his character. Bale goes big with his character and Robbie is, I dunno, fine, but with the vast list of movie chores for everybody to tick off it almost doesn’t even matter who we think they really are. Everybody gets a few nice moments but nobody really gets to build layers.

I appreciate the goodness that this movie seems to want to advocate for — one of its messages is “you know what’s better than war? Love and mutual respect,” which is, you know, accurate and laudable and even kind of sweet in its earnestness. But the buffet of styles and tones and everything made it too easy for whatever was the point of all this to get lost along with any really standout work from the actors. Amsterdam needed to get where it was going quicker, with more bounce and with a lot less of everything else. C+

Rated R for brief violence and bloody images, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Written and directed by David O. Russell, Amsterdam is two hours and 14 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by 20th Century Studios.

Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile (PG)

A family moves to New York City and finds a singing crocodile living in their brownstone in Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile, a live-action musical whose songwriters include The Greatest Showman’s Benj Pasek and Justin Paul.

I mention this because the songs here had the same unremarkable-to-me feel that the Greatest Showman songs did. But now every kid who has ever dipped a toe in a theater class can bust out “This Is Me,” so my personal tastes don’t necessarily serve as a gauge of wider success. I still wouldn’t listen to that movie’s album but I do own it thanks to my kids — the same kids whom I can see wanting the album of original songs for this movie. The songs, sung by Shawn Mendes, who is Lyle’s singing voice, were half of what my kids seemed to enjoy most about the movie.

The other half was the action scenes, and with a series of people unexpectedly discovering a crocodile, there’s plenty of the wacky, chase-y, adults-screeching action that seems to resonate with kid audiences.

When we first meet Lyle, he is a gecko-sized crocodile living — and singing — in a cage in the back of a pet store. Not-so-great showman Hector P. Valenti (Javier Bardem), desperate for a new act, takes Lyle home and teaches him the movie’s first original song in hopes that they can take the performance on the road. By the time Lyle is a preschooler-sized crocodile, Hector thinks he’s ready and sets up a show, backing the expenses with the inherited brownstone he and Lyle have been living in. But when the curtain rises, Lyle can’t make a sound, and Hector loses his house. He goes on the road to earn cash and leaves Lyle, telling him to pretend he’s stuffed if anybody visits his attic home.

When the Prim family — mom (Constance Wu), dad (Scoot McNairy) and lonely eighth-grader Josh (Winslow Fegley) — moves in, they have no idea that anyone lives in the building other than themselves and the downstairs apartment dweller, Mr. Grumps (Brett Gelman). Then Josh pokes around the attic and discovers Lyle. The two become friends and Josh learns that Lyle can sing. Later Josh’s parents each discover Lyle and, after some screaming, realize the crocodile is not just friendly and tuneful but has the ability to help them work through their various adult existential stuff.

That stuff includes the father’s difficulties with his new class of chatty private-school kids and the mom’s sadness about Josh growing up plus a whole lotta baggage about her marrying Josh’s dad after the death of Josh’s mom and her, I guess, continued uneasiness with her stepmother status? Whatever the exact source of her troubles, it’s something that required just enough talking between adults that kids — mine and others in the theater where I saw the movie — were moving around, chatting, going to the bathroom, all the standard behaviors of a young audience that has lost interest in a movie. The movie comes in at around an hour and 45 minutes and I feel like the adult chatty parts could have been tightened to the “fireworks factory” faster, which in this case is a great escape from the city zoo. The hijinks of that did seem to reel younger audience members back in and leave my kids with an overall positive opinion of the movie.

And “overall positive” would probably be my judgment as well. It’s fine, with a few cute lines and some campy business from Bardem, who is not Hugh Grant in Paddington 2 but seems to be enjoying himself. The physicality of the animated Lyle in an otherwise real world is good enough; a scene of him dancing with Constance Wu is cute and well-executed. The movie doesn’t dazzle but nor does the animation get in the way. Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile is a serviceable, pleasant-enough family viewing experience. B-

Rated PG for mild peril and thematic elements, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Josh Gordon and Will Speck with a screenplay by Will Davies (based on the book by Bernard Warber), Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile is an hour and 46 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by Columbia Pictures.

Featured photo: Amsterdam.

Bros (R)

Billy Eichner plays a man who is perfectly happy by himself, absolutely doesn’t want a relationship but uncertainly navigates a possible romance with the very handsome Aaron in Bros, a sweet, genuinely laugh-out-loud funny rom-com co-written by Eichner.

I feel like I’ve seen a run of movies lately where I think “ha, funny” but don’t actually have the spontaneous reaction of laughing. That I actually out-loud laughed is one of the delights of this movie.

And Eichner, of course, gives his character Bobby the mix of clever dialogue and solid delivery that allows for plenty of comedy. Bobby is working to open a museum of LGBTQ+ history in New York City; he has a popular podcast, a solid group of friends and all the casual hookups he wants. He has no need for some conventional-style coupledom, he emphatically explains. But when he sees Aaron (Luke Macfarlane) at a club, he finds himself not just awkwardly flirting but interested enough to be hurt when Aaron seems to walk away from him. He is excited when he and Aaron go on a date but seems sort of pre-angry at the rejection that he thinks is coming from Aaron. Bobby keeps setting Aaron up to tell him that Bobby is not Aaron’s type, but Aaron, who is also wrestling with an unfulfilling career choice, is intrigued by and attracted to the confident Bobby.

This is not your standard Hollywood romance, Billy and Bobby (both Eichner and his character) argue, because gay relationships and the relationship dynamics are different from straight relationships. The movie works to examine that, while also, with a bit of a wink at the Hallmark movie conventions, hitting a lot of the classic romance beats. (Macfarlane has a baker’s dozen of Hallmark movie credits on his filmography, with names like The Mistletoe Promise and Sense, Sensibility and Snowmen.) We get real — or real enough — people navigating relatable emotional stuff with specifics to the community Eichner is portraying, which is always a solid recipe for creating an appealing story.

Even the slightly stilted moments — including some of Eichner’s performance, which at times reminded me of Jerry Seinfeld’s Seinfeld Jerry — work because the movie is able to root itself in believable characters who give some dimension to their rom-com-trope-ier elements. Guy Branum is a standout in the movie’s supporting cast but there are lots of note-perfect smaller roles and cameos, including the always excellent Bowen Yang.

And then surrounding all of that are just pleasurable moments of fun — from your Debra Messing cameos to your jabs at online culture. The office politics of Bobby’s museum, Aaron’s skill at dealing with what he calls weird rich people — it all makes for some highly enjoyable silliness.

Bros mixes just enough tartness and broad comedy, plus some moments of honest introspection, to balance the sweetness of its swoony romance. B+

Rated R for strong sexual content, language throughout and some drug use, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Nicholas Stoller and written by Billy Eichner & Nicholas Stoller, Bros is an hour and 55 minutes long and distributed in theaters by Universal Studios.

Featured photo: Bros.