Author: Amy Diaz

CODA (PG-13)

High school senior Ruby discovers her talent for singing but she is conflicted about leaving her family to go to music school in CODA, a sweet and extremely charming coming of age story.

Unlike her mom Jackie (Marlee Matlin), dad Frank (Troy Kotsur) and older brother Leo (Daniel Durant), Ruby (Emilia Jones) is hearing (the “child of deaf adults” of the movie’s title). Ruby works with her dad and brother on their fishing boat, often serving as the one to negotiate the price for the day’s catch, before heading to school.

On a whim — and as an excuse to hang out around Miles (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo), a fellow senior she’s crushing on — Ruby joins the school’s choir. Though able to belt out Motown classics on the fishing boat, Ruby is shy singing in front of other students, particularly since she was bullied for the way she talked as a child and is still picked on for her family generally. But choir teacher Bernardo Villalobos (Eugenio Derbez) pulls her past this and helps her let loose her love of singing and her natural talent. He also picks Ruby and Miles to sing a duet at an upcoming recital — leading her to break out of her shell with him as well.

As she finds her footing in choir, the family’s fishing business grows more precarious. Their earnings for each catch are decreasing and government oversight is increasing. Leo wants to start a co-op with the other fishermen that will get them better prices but Frank is uncertain about getting involved with the hearing fishermen. Leo also struggles with the family’s reliance on Ruby to interpret, as does Ruby. She wants to pursue singing and the possibility of getting in to Berklee School of Music, which Bernardo says he will help her apply for. But she also feels obligated to help her parents.

Delightfully, the movie builds a relationship between Ruby and her family that features her fierce love of them as well as her thorough (and realistic) teenage “mom!” annoyance — when they play music too loud as they pick her up from school (her dad loves the loud bass of rap), when they have a wonderfully (purposefully) awkward conversation with Miles, when her mother gets on her about how she’s dressed. It’s so perfectly teenage-parent, so much meaning-well and love and delighting at her embarrassment and “gah, back off” all rolled up into the moment. Likewise, Ruby’s loving sibling relationship with Leo is highlighted by a series of excellent insults (not one of which I can repeat in print). Because of the movie’s well-drawn relationships and fully realized characters, CODA feels as much like a family coming of age as much as it is the story of Ruby’s coming of age. Not only is Ruby making decisions about her life and what she wants to do; each member of the family is taking steps in new directions in a way that also feels very real.

There are excellent performances all the way around in this movie — Jones but also Kostur, Durant and Matlin. And it was really a joy to watch Derbez in this kind of role. I mostly know him from big, broad comedies but here he hits the right note as a caring and talented teacher.

CODA is a joy throughout. A

Rated PG-13 for strong sexual content and language and drug use, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Written and directed by Sian Heder (and based on a French film from 2014 called La Famille Bélier), CODA is an hour and 51 minutes long and is distributed by Apple on Apple TV+. CODA is screening in theaters (in Massachusetts as of Aug. 31) and on Apple TV+.

Candyman (R)

An artist living in a recently gentrified Chicago neighborhood finds himself and his work tied up in local lore in Candyman, a sequel to the 1992 horror movie.

Anthony McCoy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), whose name comes with backstory for people who have seen the original movie (I haven’t), has recently moved with his girlfriend, Brianna (Teyonah Parris), to an airy apartment in the gentrifying neighborhood of Cabrini-Green, the onetime home of housing projects (that were the setting of the first movie). He is blocked, artistically, presenting pieces to an art gallery operator that are just riffs on earlier work. After Brianna’s brother, Troy (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett), tells a story about a series of murders involving a woman named Helen Lyle, Anthony decides to dig into the history of the area, hoping he’ll find some inspiration.

He meets William (Colman Domingo), a longtime resident, who tells Anthony about the legend of Candyman, a presence who appears after saying his name in a mirror five times and who then kills those who summoned him. But the legend isn’t just a local boogeyman tale; the more Anthony digs in to the story the more he learns about the various men who are considered to be the figure’s origin, all the way back to Daniel Robitaille (Tony Todd) in the 19th century — all killed by police or lynch mobs. This investigation of Candyman takes Anthony’s work in strange directions and seems to be messing with his head. He is also having an extremely bad reaction to a bee sting. Anthony’s deteriorating mental and physical states have Brianna concerned. And then acquaintances of the couple start dying.

I think I generally like where this movie starts out, the various issues it sets up: Anthony’s artistic block, Brianna’s career ambitions, Brianna’s current status as the breadwinner of the couple and how that clearly bugs Anthony, the gentrification of the neighborhood they now live in. And I like where the movie seems to be wanting to go with its overall message. But in the middle, the movie seems to wander a bit and lose the threads at times.

The movie is tightly focused on Anthony at first but somewhere around the two-thirds point it just sort of drops him as a person we’re in the mystery with, which makes his story feel unfinished. Not that a movie like this needs to make perfect sense but there are elements that felt like they needed more explanation — or maybe just a more organic explanation. Frequently it feels like plot points connect in that “puzzle pieces smashed together” sense, resulting in information having to be told to us rather than more naturally revealing itself.

I’m a sucker for this particular kind of horror, though, one that puts dread and spookiness ahead of gore (though this movie has gore). And this movie has a great visual style, particularly in the way it uses shadow puppets to illustrate exposition — they are both eerie and very pretty. Candyman may not perfectly click together for me with its plot but it delivers on atmospherics. B-

Rated R for bloody horror violence, and language including some sexual references, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Nia DaCosta with a screenplay by Jordan Peele & Win Rosenfeld and Nia DaCosta, Candyman (that’s six; do computer screens count as mirrors?) is an hour and 31 minutes long and is distributed by Universal Pictures in theaters.

FILM

Venues

Cinemark Rockingham Park
15 Mall Road, Salem
cinemark.com/theatres/nh-salem

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

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

Shows

• Stripes (R, 1981) 40th anniversary screening at Cinemark in Salem and Regal Fox Run in Newington on Thursday, Sept. 2, at 7 p.m.

• The Green Knight (R, 2021) screening at the Red River Theatres in Concord Friday, Sept. 3, through Monday, Sept. 6, at 3:15 p.m. and 6:30 p.m.

• Stillwater (R, 2021) screening at the Red River Theatres in Concord Friday, Sept. 3, through Monday, Sept. 6, 12:30, 3:45 and 7 p.m.

• Together (R, 2021) screening at the Red River Theatres in Concord Friday, Sept. 3, through Monday, Sept. 6, at 1 p.m.

• Backdraft (R, 1991) 30th anniversary screening on Sunday, Sept. 5, at Cinemark in Salem at 3 p.m. and Regal Fox Run in Newington at 3 and 7 p.m., and on Wednesday, Sept. 8, at both locations at 7 p.m.

• The Alpinist (PG-13, 2020) screens on Tuesday, Sept. 7, at 7 p.m. at AMC Londonderry and Cinemark in Salem.

Featured photo: CODA. Courtesy photo.

Reminiscence (PG-13)

There are millions of stories in the drowned city and Hugh Jackman is privy to many of them via his special memory machine in Reminiscence, a stylish and boring film noir.

Nick Bannister (Jackman) is like a PI of your mind. With the help of his coworker/longtime friend Watts (Thandiwe Newton), he hooks his clients up to a mind-visualization-thingy to help them go back to a memory — the memory of a person who is no longer around, the memory of where they last saw something they lost, the memory of happier times. (While they remember, Nick can also see the memory.) And the past seems like the place where people find more happiness than in the present (which is sometime in the nonspecific future), where rising seas have half-submerged the city of Miami and people seem to be forever sloshing through water. Some sunken buildings have become a kind of Venice-y city of water taxis; some places are behind dams but still constantly damp. There was a war, troubles at the border and now people seem to live in a kind of haunted state.

When Mae (Rebecca Ferguson), styled as sort of a live-action Jessica Rabbit, comes into Nick’s business, she isn’t looking to dwell in some dry and sunny past — she just wants to go back a day or two to figure out where her lost keys are. But something about her captivates Nick and he finds himself hanging out in her memory, watching her sing an American songbook classic “Where or When,” a song that takes him back to happier days. He quickly falls in love (or lust or plot contrivance) with Mae, only to find himself bereft when she suddenly vanishes. Where did she go? Why hasn’t she contacted him? Who was she really? These are the questions that drive Nick back through his own memories even though there is a danger in always lingering in the past.

Reminiscence is very pretty to look at with its watery city, where daytime heat is so hot that people now sleep during the day and live their lives at night. It is the perfect setting for this kind of tale — all grizzled detective-type, mysterious lady, shady and desperate people in a fallen world. Unfortunately, this particular tale just never clicked together for me. I found myself way more interested in all the peripherals — the wars, the soggy state of the world, the public transportation that is suddenly everywhere, the nighttime existence, the state of the justice system, Thandiwe Newton’s character — than I ever was in Jackman’s and Ferguson’s characters, who have very superficial “hot people in a perfume commercial” chemistry but very little person-to-person chemistry. The stylized setting, all 1930s gumshoe grit, is also fun but requires a lot of mental effort to tamp down all the “but why” and “but what about” questions it gins up — a state of things that I feel wouldn’t be so pronounced if the central plot and its core relationship was more interesting.

Reminiscence has potential but it quickly turns into a slow and tedious soggy slog. C

Rated PG-13 for strong violence, drug material throughout, sexual content and some strong language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Written and directed by Lisa Joy, Reminiscence is an hour and 56 minutes long and distributed by Warner Bros. in theaters and on HBO Max.

Paw Patrol: The Movie (G)

Human boy Ryder and his team of talking pups head to the metropolis of Adventure City to put an end to Mayor Humdinger’s tomfoolery in Paw Patrol: The Movie, a more fancily animated, feature-length adventure of the Nick Jr. series’ characters.

This movie is roughly three-Paw Patrol-episodes in length — “one Paw Patrol” being a standardized unit of time measurement in my house as it likely is in many houses for whom Paw Patrol is on regular TV-watching rotation. As several special episodes of the show have, this movie introduces a new pup character in a kind of extended universe location. Most episodes of the show take place in Adventure Bay, a vaguely northern California-ish town on the ocean (where there are sometimes pirates) and that is within driving distance of a snowy mountain range and a jungle and sometimes they fly to a London-like city-state called Barkingburg that has a monarchy. Also there’s a dinosaur land, I think? I’m not always watching super closely; I am not the intended audience.

This movie is the first time, as far as I can remember, that the Paw Patrol (as the six core pups and the human, elementary-school-ish aged boy Ryder are known) has ventured to Adventure City. Ryder (voice of Will Brisbin) is the leader of this rescue-team of pups: police dog Chase (voice of Iain Armitage), fire dog Marshall (voice of Kingsley Marshall), bulldozer-driving dog Rubble (voice of Keegan Hedley), recycling/fix-it dog Rocky (voice of Callum Shoniker), water rescue dog Zuma (voice of Shayle Simons) and pilot dog Skye (voice of Lilly Bartlam), who was the only girl pup for a while. Even if you’ve never seen the show, you’ve probably still seen the pups — as the movie itself jokes, pretty much any kid item (lunch boxes, band-aids, T-shirts and, of course, so many toys) has a licensed Paw Patrol version. Each pup has their own special vehicle and their own colors — so that whatever your toddler-through-elementary-schooler’s interest/favorite color, there is a pup (and accompanying merchandise) for them.

Mayor Humdinger (voice of Ron Pardo, who also does the Cap’n Turbot voice) is the series’ most frequent baddie — though like all the “villains” of Paw Patrol he is not so much bad as inept, inconsiderate and vain. Here, he and his band of self-absorbed cats have apparently relocated from Foggy Bottom (the town he’s usually referred to as the mayor of) to Adventure City, where he has become the mayor sort of by accident. Now, this dog-disliking buffoon is poised to cause all sorts of mayhem in the city, from locking up every dog his henchmen (voiced by Randall Park and Dax Shepard) can find to trying to make the subway more adventurous by adding a shoddily constructed roller coaster loop-the-loop. This is why Liberty (voice of Marsai Martin), a friendly neighborhood helper-pup who lives in Adventure City, calls on the Paw Patrol to come and save the day.

Some of the TV show’s episodes will have a particular pup as the focus; here, that’s Chase, who is given a backstory of being found and adopted by Ryder when he was a young, scared pup wandering Adventure City. Returning to the city brings up all sorts of anxieties and the movie has a subplot about Chase learning to face his fear. This isn’t Sesame Street-level “learning to deal with emotions” stuff. When my kids first started venturing beyond PBS Kids’ programming to watch Paw Patrol I found the show loud and shallow when it came to messaging. But it’s fine, the pups are nice and nice to each other, and consideration for friends and the greater public is a much-lauded quality in the show. And it’s 30 minutes of entertainment/distraction, which is always appreciated.

This movie hits all those similar points to me, which is to say, this movie didn’t wow me (which, I suspect, who cares if it wows anybody over the age of 8 or 9) but is totally fine. The “dealing with fear” stuff is unobjectionable, if very thinly drawn. Humdinger is goofy rather than evil. Liberty is a solid additional Paw Patrol member/licensable character. She is a spunky, can-do pup (they’re all spunky, can-do pups), and she gets a spiffy motorcycle (and, yes, both a toy and a Halloween costume for her character are already available for purchase). My kids watched the movie with interest throughout. While I (a person seeing this movie for work) stayed awake through the whole movie, you (a parent who just needs a break) could definitely sleep while your kids watched it (either in one of those big reclining theater chairs or in the comfort of your own couch, as it has been released simultaneously in theaters and on Paramount+). Or read a magazine, or catch up on dishes — just as you probably do while your kids watch the Paw Patrol TV show.

Paw Patrol: The Movie “basically the show, but three times as long” is probably the best review, heck the only review, it needs. B

Rated G. Directed by Andrew Hickson and Cal Brunker with a screenplay by Billy Frolick and Cal Brunker & Bob Barlen, Paw Patrol: The Movie is an hour and 28 minutes long and is distributed by Paramount Pictures in theaters and on Paramount+.

FILM

Venues

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

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

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

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

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

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

Shows

• Gremlins (PG, 1984) at Rex Theatre on Wednesday, Aug. 25, 7 p.m.with a portion of the proceeds going to Motley Mutts Rescue. Tickets $12.

• Back to the Future (PG, 1985) screening at Chunky’s in Manchester, Nashua and Pelham on Wednesday, Aug. 25, at 7 p.m. Tickets cost $4.99.

• 21+ Screening of Back to the Future (PG, 1985) at Chunky’s in Manchester, Nashua and Pelham on Thursday, Aug. 26, at 7 p.m. Tickets cost $4.99 and a Back to the Future themed cocktail will be for sale.

• Together (R, 2021) screening at Red River Theatres in Concord Friday, Aug. 27, through Sunday, Aug. 29, at 1, 4:15 & 7:30 p.m.

• Stillwater (R, 2021) screening at Red River Theatres in Concord Friday, Aug. 27, through Sunday, Aug. 29, at 12:30, 3:45 & 7 p.m.

• Womanhandled(1925) andGo West (1925) silent film Westerns with live musical accompaniment by Jeff Rapsis, on Sunday, Aug. 29, 2 p.m. at Wilton Town Hall Theatres. Screenings are free but a $10 donation per person is suggested.

• Theater Candy Bingo on Sunday, Aug. 29, at 6:30 p.m. at Chunky’s in Pelham. Admission costs $4.99 plus a box of candy.

• The Shakedown (1929), a silent film with live musical accompaniment by Jeff Rapsis, on Thursday, Sept. 9, at 6:30 p.m. at the Flying Monkey in Plymouth. Tickets start at $10.

• Clifford the Big Red Dog (PG, 2021) sensory-friendly screening, with sound lowered and lights up, on Saturday, Sept. 18, 10 a.m. at O’neil Cinema in Epping.

• Hedwig and the Angry Inch (R, 2001) at Rex Theatre on Tuesday, Sept. 21, at 7 p.m. with a portion of the proceeds going to Motley Mutts Rescue. Tickets cost $12.

• National Theatre Live Follies,a broadcast of a play from London’s National Theatre, screening at the Bank of NH Stage in Concord on Sunday, Oct. 3, at 12:30 p.m. Tickets cost $15 ($12 for students).

• National Theatre Live Cyrano de Bergerac, a broadcast of a play from London’s National Theatre, screening at the Bank of NH Stage in Concord on Sunday, Oct. 17, at 12:30 p.m. Tickets cost $15 ($12 for students).

• Frankenweenie (PG, 2012) at the Rex Theatre on Sunday, Oct. 17, 7 p.m. with a portion of the proceeds going to Motley Mutts Rescue. Tickets cost $12.

• The Nightmare Before Christmas (PG, 1993) at the Rex Theatre on Monday, Oct. 18, 7 p.m. with a portion of the proceeds going to Motley Mutts Rescue. Tickets cost $12.

Featured photo: Reminiscence. Courtesy photo.