Author: Amy Diaz

House of Gucci (R)

The family behind the Gucci fashion company faces scandal and murder in the 1980s and 1990s in House of Gucci, a movie that doesn’t live up to the promise of its trailer.

The trailer is great, buzzy, maybe just this side of camp, and gives you many of the best lines and displays the “all in” performance by Lady Gaga. The movie — really gave me an appreciation of whoever cut the trailer.

The movie starts in the 1970s, I think, with Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga) meeting Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver), a law student whose father, Rudolfo (Jeremy Irons), owns half of Gucci along with his brother Aldo (Al Pacino). Maurizio has grown up wealthy but otherwise doesn’t seem involved in Gucci. When Patrizia fails to make a good impression with Rudolfo, Maurizio breaks away from his father (and his money). He goes to live with Patrizia’s family, working for her father’s trucking company, and the two get married.

When Aldo calls Maurizio to congratulate him on his wedding, Patrizia sees an opening to get Maurizio back into the family fold — and possibly to connect with some of that Gucci wealth. Maurizio isn’t entirely comfortable with how Patrizia advises him to play Aldo and his son, Paolo (Jared Leto under so very much makeup), against each other but he seems OK taking advantage of the outcomes, which are more wealth and power in the family business. But the more Patrizia pushes, the more Maurizio seems to grow disenchanted with her.

This movie has some real “but why?” casting (Leto, definitely, but also Irons and Pacino) and some Joey Tribbiani School of Italian Accents accent-work. But Lady Gaga is giving 110 percent all the time, swinging at every pitch, throwing lots of stuff against the wall to see what sticks — all the cliches for just absolutely diving into this thing whether it’s any good or not. I don’t know that the result is a great performance but she’s great to watch. The movie is significantly less interesting when she’s not on screen. I don’t think the story does a particularly great job of making Patrizia into a fleshed out human and not just a cartoon but I think Gaga’s performance does paint a more complex — or at least just compelling — character.

House of Gucci had me thinking about two TV shows. One is Succession, for the way I didn’t actually root for any of the characters. They all seem unlikable, dangerously selfish and the kind of people you’d just generally steer clear of (as portrayed in this movie, I know basically nothing about the real life Guccis). But that’s fine — the way this movie is built, I didn’t find myself needing a hero and got some good soap opera entertainment watching these screw-ups betray each other. If anything, this movie needed to lean in to the jerkishness of these characters more.

The other TV property is the Ryan Murphy-verse of American Crime Story — a series with reenactments of big public crimes and scandals (or Feud, with its focus on golden age of Hollywood gossip). I’ll admit, I’ve probably read more recaps of these shows than I have actually watched them but I found myself wondering why this project didn’t go that route. It would seem to have all the sudsy elements — business machinations, family betrayals, a rocky marriage — to sustain some six to eight episodes. Here, storylines feel like they are being truncated — Paolo and Aldo spend the last hour or more separated from the Patrizia/Maurizio action — even though the movie is more than two and a half hours long (and feels it).

I’m not sorry I watched House of Gucci, particularly for everything to do with Lady Gaga (her character’s so-of-the-times hair, her wonderful glamorous-tacky wardrobe). I kept waiting for the movie to really take off, really go for the moon with its general craziness, but it frequently felt bogged down. Lady Gaga and the trailer are a solid B+, everything is maybe generously a B-.

Rated R for language, some sexual content, and brief nudity and violence, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Ridley Scott with a screenplay by Becky Johnston and Roberto Bentivegna (based on a book by Sara Gay Forden), House of Gucci is two hours and 38 minutes long and distributed in theaters by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures.

Belfast (PG-13)

Belfast of 1969 is seen through the eyes of a young boy in Belfast, a semi-autobiographical story written and directed by Kenneth Branagh.

The opening scene is an encapsulation of Buddy’s (Jude Hill) life in 1969: he’s a young boy — young enough to be learning multiplication tables, old enough to have a crush on the girl who is often the head of the class — whom we meet playing knights with a homemade sword and a trash can lid as a shield. He’s called home by his mother (Caitríona Balfe), a call that is repeated down the street by neighbors and cousins and a slew of people that have known the family as long as any of them can remember. Heading home in the middle of this busy street full of friendly hellos, Buddy suddenly finds himself stuck between two quickly approaching gangs about to battle and riot. His mother rushes out to grab him, using his shield to protect them both from thrown rocks, and then pushes Buddy and his older brother Will (Lewis McAskie) under the table in their home as she crouches by the window watching the chaos outside. This neighborhood, as we learn, is a mix of Catholics and Protestants, and has lived peacefully, but now there are barricades, soldiers and a local gang that is pressuring Catholics to move out and Protestants (like Buddy’s family) to become active in their cause.

Buddy’s dad (Jamie Dornan) is eager to keep himself and his boys, particularly teen Will, out of all this and to try to exist in peace. But this task is harder because he is only home every other weekend, spending most of his time in England, where he works in construction. He sees no good future for the family in Belfast and wants them to move to England. Buddy’s mother, meanwhile, doesn’t want to leave everyone and everything she’s ever known and the community that she feels cares for and supports her boys.

We see all of this from a kid’s perspective, both figuratively (the attempts to talk to the girl he has a crush on are at least as important to Buddy as the social unrest) and literally, as many scenes show us the world (predominately in black and white) from Buddy’s height or peering-around-a-corner location. It works as a way to tell this story and helps to put us in Buddy’s situation — terrifying things are happening but this is also a rosy memory about childhood.

This also allows us to see Buddy’s story without always putting all the weight of a scene on child actor Jude Hill. The movie gives us a nice balance of Hill’s genuinely strong performance with the performances of the grownups around him, including his grandparents, played by Judi Dench and Ciarán Hinds. We get to see a slice of the prickly relationship between his parents, Dornan and Balfe, but we don’t know their whole story, in the way we seldom really know the story of our own parents’ relationship, particularly during our childhood.

I suppose I could quibble with some of the choices the movie makes with its use of black and white and occasional color (which appear when the family is watching a movie or live theater — a hint maybe that we’re seeing young Kenneth Branagh experience the world of acting), or its occasionally overwhelming, Van Morrison-heavy soundtrack. But these elements weren’t really flaws. This movie is fairly immaculately crafted, with the kind of compelling specificity that comes with someone telling their story. A

Rated PG-13 for some violence and strong language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Written and directed by Kenneth Branagh, Belfast is an hour and 38 minutes long and distributed by Focus Features in theaters.

FILM

Venues

AMC Londonderry
16 Orchard View Dr., Londonderry
amctheatres.com

Bank of NH Stage in Concord
16 S. Main St., Concord
225-1111, banknhstage.com

Capitol Center for the Arts
44 S. Main St., Concord
225-1111, ccanh.com

Cinemark Rockingham Park 12
15 Mall Road, Salem

Chunky’s Cinema Pub
707 Huse Road, Manchester; 151 Coliseum Ave., Nashua; 150 Bridge St., Pelham, chunkys.com

Dana Center
Saint Anselm College
100 Saint Anselm Dr., Manchester, anselm.edu

Fathom Events
Fathomevents.com

The Flying Monkey
39 Main St., Plymouth
536-2551, flyingmonkeynh.com

LaBelle Winery
345 Route 101, Amherst
672-9898, labellewinery.com

The Music Hall
28 Chestnut St., Portsmouth
436-2400, themusichall.org

O’neil Cinemas
24 Calef Hwy., Epping
679-3529, oneilcinemas.com

Red River Theatres
11 S. Main St., Concord
224-4600, redrivertheatres.org

Regal Fox Run Stadium 15
45 Gosling Road, Newington
regmovies.com

Rex Theatre
23 Amherst St., Manchester
668-5588, palacetheatre.org

The Strand
20 Third St., Dover
343-1899, thestranddover.com

Wilton Town Hall Theatre
40 Main St., Wilton
wiltontownhalltheatre.com, 654-3456

Shows

• House of Gucci (R, 2021) screening at Red River Theatres in Concord on Thursday, Dec. 2, and Thursday, Dec. 9, at 3:30 & 7 p.m. (vaccinated guests) as well as Friday, Dec. 3, through Sunday, Dec. 4, at noon, 3:30 and 7 p.m.

• Belfast (PG-13, 2021) screening at Red River Theatres in Concord on Thursday, Dec. 2, at 3:30 & 7 p.m. (vaccinated guests) as well as Friday, Dec. 3, through Sunday, Dec. 5, at 1, 4 & 7 p.m.

• 21+ “Christmas Vacation Ugly Sweater Party” will be held on Thursday, Dec. 2, at all Chunky’s locations. The event will start at 7 p.m. in Manchester and Pelham and 8 p.m. in Nashua. The PG-13 1989 movie will screen during the event, where people who wear ugly Christmas sweaters get extra prizes. Tickets cost $5.99. (Take notes — there will be a 21+ Christmas Vacation trivia night on Thursday, Dec. 16, at 7:30 p.m. in Manchester.)

• The Metropolitan Opera Live — Eurydice Saturday, Dec. 4, 12:55 p.m. at the Bank of NH Stage in Concord. Tickets cost $26.

• Gremlins (PG, 1984) will screen at Regal Fox Run on Saturday, Dec. 4, at 1 p.m. Tickets cost $5.

• National Theatre Live The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time A broadcast of a play from London’s National Theatre, screening at the Bank of NH Stage in Concord on Sunday, Dec. 5, at 12:30 p.m. Tickets cost $15 ($12 for students).

• Elf (PG, 2003) A family-friendly screening will happen Wednesday, Dec. 8, at all three Chunky’s locations — 6 p.m. in Manchester and 7 p.m. in Pelham and Nashua. On Thursday, Dec. 9, at 7 p.m. at all three locations there will be a 21+ Elf screening.

Featured photo: House of Gucci. Courtesy photo.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife (PG-13)

Finn Wolfhard, Mckenna Grace and the spirit of the late Harold Ramis star in Ghostbusters: Afterlife, a distant sequel to the 1980s Ghostbusters movies.

Ramis was Egon Spengler in those movies, the most nerd-minded of the Ghostbusters. Here, the movie opens with Egon, seen in shadowy profile and from behind, running from some supernatural thing and holding a clearly full ghost trap. He meets some kind of end at the claws of a spooky something — but his adult daughter, Callie (Carrie Coon), believes he has died of a heart attack.

Callie is not super broken up about her father’s death; he abandoned her family as a child, she says. But as she is being evicted from her apartment, she decides to take her two children —15-year-old Trevor (Wolfhard) and 12-year-old Phoebe (Grace) — to the rickety farmhouse where Egon had been living. In the middle of Oklahoma, the town would seem to be unremarkable except for a mine (that secretly houses an ancient temple) and loads of scientifically inexplicable earthquakes.

Trevor doesn’t care about any of that but he is quickly interested in the local drive-up restaurant and roller-skate-wearing server Lucky (Celeste O’Connor). Phoebe is interested in the strange seismic activity and in the odd devices she finds lying around her grandfather’s home. She finds a science buddy in Gary Grooberson (Paul Rudd), her summer school teacher who keeps his class busy with VHS movies like Cujo so he can spend his time monitoring the town’s earthquakes on his geological equipment. Together with Podcast (Logan Kim), a fellow student of Phoebe’s who is always working on getting audio for his show, Grooberson and Phoebe investigate old equipment Phoebe finds, with Grooberson explaining its 1980s origins.

Along the way, Phoebe finds herself communicating — first via a chessboard and then through the movement of items throughout the home — with the grandfather she never knew but quickly feels a lot of commonality with.

This movie has moments of charm, most of them related to nostalgia and good will toward Harold Ramis, but it’s not nearly as charming as it thinks it is. Without getting into the whole thing of the 2016 remake of Ghostbusters (where the Ghostbusters were ladies and I thoroughly enjoyed it), this movie shows more reverence to the source material — too much reverence, in my opinion. In my review of 2016 Ghostbusters, I compared it to the joyful Star Wars: The Force Awakens. This movie feels more like Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, where the canon of the previous movies doesn’t get out of the way enough to have fun in the present. This movie is at its best when it boils down to the oddball foursome of the confident Lucky, the tries-to-be-cool Trevor, the self-assuredly nerdy Phoebe and the podcast-star-wannabe Podcast realizing they have to actually fight supernatural beings to save the town and possibly the world. These personalities are maybe not actually big enough to carry the whole film, but they are at least sort of organic together. When a bunch of original Ghostbusters stuff is layered on top of this, we just get what feels like “nostalgia product,” like we’re watching the movie version of one of those reissued 1980s toys you sometimes see at Target.

A bigger problem is that Ghostbusters: Afterlife is short on a sense of fun. The original movies and the 2016 reboot realized the inherent goofiness of the movie’s premise and its non-horror-film approach to the whole ghosts thing. Here, the zaniest energy is coming from Paul Rudd, who is an entertaining character but isn’t central enough to carry the energy of the movie on his own. I almost felt like this movie — which is rated PG-13 and very much feels like a movie for teens and up — maybe should have skewed younger if it was going to play things this straight and gone for more of a tween-friendly/whole-older-family film. Ghostbusters: Afterlife feels like it has a good premise and some interesting ideas but it needed to be smarter or sillier to really stand on its own. C+

Rated PG-13 for supernatural action and some suggestive references, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Jason Reitman with a screenplay by Gil Keenan & Jason Reitman, Ghostbusters: Afterlife is two hours and four minutes long and is distributed by Columbia Pictures in theaters.

King Richard (PG-13)

Richard Williams is a man with a 78-page plan for turning his daughters Venus and Serena into tennis superstars in King Richard, a middle-of-the-road biopic with a solid Will Smith performance.

Richard Williams (Smith) will tell anybody who listens about his big and detailed plans for his two young daughters. He and wife Oracene (Aunjanue Ellis) work long hours at their jobs and then spend their off hours pushing Oracene’s three older daughters at schoolwork and Venus (Saniyya Sidney) and Serena (Demi Singleton) at schoolwork and on the tennis courts, even if those courts are in a rundown Compton, California, park. But Richard spends his time at his job going through tennis magazines to find coaches, later traveling to pitch each one with homemade brochures about his daughters. His ask is big: for these famous (and expensive) coaches to take on his daughters for free. But the exchange is a piece of their future earnings, which Richard confidently believes will be astronomical.

Eventually the undeniable talent of the girls is able to get them coaches, first Paul Cohen (Tony Goldwyn), who only coaches Venus much to Serena’s disappointment, and then Rick Macci (Jon Bernthal), who brings both girls — and their sisters and parents — out to Florida to live and train. What the coaches may not realize at first is that in taking the Williams girls they are also taking on Richard, who is nearly as confident in his own abilities to coach and manage the girls’ careers as he is in their greatness.

While Venus and Serena are the big names, Richard, as the title implies, is the movie’s focus. But though the movie is a biopic, I’m not sure how thoroughly we know him by the end of the movie. We see how he pushes his daughters but we don’t ultimately feel like we know the man himself outside the tennis context. Is he a self-promoter, is a question the movie asks but doesn’t really answer. The movie drops in biographical information — his upbringing in a racist southern town and a father who was absent as he got older; Richard and Oracene having both been athletes in their youth; Richard’s other children, whom Oracene mentions during a fight. But it both seems to be more interested in the personality of the man than a Wikipedia-like recounting of facts and feels more slight on that interior stuff than I was expecting. (And the movie still goes through a lot of timeline, resulting in a more than two-hour runtime.) The result is a totally fine performance by Will Smith, one that I can completely see in the mix for awards-season discussion but that didn’t have me thinking “role of a lifetime!” either.

I can see why in this story about two very young athletes you’d pick the adult to make the movie about. But everything we see of the girls and the pressures they’re under (the movie gives us quite a few scenes of other tennis children berating themselves when they lose), especially in this moment of wider cultural conversation about top-level sports and mental health, makes their situations seem like the more interesting story. This movie only really covers the earliest stages of Venus’s career and I ended the movie wishing I knew how they felt about Richard’s plan and the course of their careers.

King Richard seems like a perfectly adequate prestige fourth-quarter film but for a movie about such dynamic and culturally significant athletes it is lacking a certain bit of sparkle. B

Rated PG-13 for some violence, strong language, a sexual reference and brief drug references, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Reinaldo Marcus Green with a screenplay by Zach Baylin, King Richard is two hours and 18 minutes long and is distributed by Warner Bros. in theaters and on HBO Max through Dec. 19.

FILM

Venues

AMC Londonderry
16 Orchard View Dr., Londonderry
amctheatres.com

Bank of NH Stage in Concord
16 S. Main St., Concord
225-1111, banknhstage.com

Capitol Center for the Arts
44 S. Main St., Concord
225-1111, ccanh.com

Cinemark Rockingham Park 12
15 Mall Road, Salem

Chunky’s Cinema Pub
707 Huse Road, Manchester; 151 Coliseum Ave., Nashua; 150 Bridge St., Pelham, chunkys.com

Dana Center
Saint Anselm College
100 Saint Anselm Dr., Manchester, anselm.edu

Fathom Events
Fathomevents.com

The Flying Monkey
39 Main St., Plymouth
536-2551, flyingmonkeynh.com

LaBelle Winery
345 Route 101, Amherst
672-9898, labellewinery.com

The Music Hall
28 Chestnut St., Portsmouth
436-2400, themusichall.org

O’neil Cinemas
24 Calef Hwy., Epping
679-3529, oneilcinemas.com

Red River Theatres
11 S. Main St., Concord
224-4600, redrivertheatres.org

Regal Fox Run Stadium 15
45 Gosling Road, Newington
regmovies.com

Rex Theatre
23 Amherst St., Manchester
668-5588, palacetheatre.org

The Strand
20 Third St., Dover
343-1899, thestranddover.com

Wilton Town Hall Theatre
40 Main St., Wilton
wiltontownhalltheatre.com, 654-3456

Shows

• House of Gucci (R, 2021) screening at Red River Theatres in Concord on Tuesday, Nov. 23, at 7 p.m.; Wednesday, Nov. 24, and Thursday, Nov. 25, at 3:30 & 7 p.m.; Friday, Nov. 26, through Sunday, Nov. 28, at noon, 3:30 & 7 p.m.

• National Theatre Live No Man’s Land A broadcast of a play from London’s National Theatre, screening at the Bank of NH Stage on Sunday, Nov. 21, at 12:30 p.m. Tickets cost $15 ($12 for students).

• Paths to Paradise (1925) and Hands Up! (1926) Silent film with live musical accompaniment by Jeff Rapsis, on Sunday, Nov. 28, at 2 p.m. at Wilton Town Hall Theatre. Admission is free; $10 donation suggested.

• The Metropolitan Opera Live — Eurydice Saturday, Dec. 4, 12:55 p.m. at the Bank of NH Stage in Concord. Tickets cost $26.

• National Theatre Live The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time A broadcast of a play from London’s National Theatre, screening at the Bank of NH Stage on Sunday, Dec. 5, at 12:30 p.m. Tickets cost $15 ($12 for students).

• An evening with Chevy ChaseA screening of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989, PG-13) plus Q&A with audience on Saturday, Dec. 11, 7 p.m. at the Cap Center. Tickets start at $59.50.

Featured photo: Ghostbusters: Afterlife. Courtesy photo.