Category: Film Reviews by Amy

The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (PG-13)

Coriolanis Snow grows from an ambitious teenager into the guy who will one day be Donald Sutherland in The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, a prequel to the Katniss-era Hunger Gameses based on the book by the same name.

In the movie’s main timeline, Coriolanis (Tom Blyth) is a high school senior or something who is trying to win a big scholarship that will not only cover his university tuition but also get money to his family. The Snows were once a big noise in the Capitol, the ruling city of Panem, the dystopia where all this business is set. But then there was a rebellion and both of Coriolanis’ parents died and now they are sort of shabby gentry with Coriolanis and his big-sister-like cousin Tigris (Hunter Schafter) living with their grandmother (Fionnula Flanagan) in an apartment they can’t quite afford. On the day when Coriolanis expects his winning of the Plinth Prize to be announced, the school’s head Casca Highbottom (Peter Dinklage, who seems like he’s really trying) tells the top students that they have one more task before anyone’s getting any scratch. They will all become mentors for competitors in the upcoming Hunger Games, a death match ritual featuring children from the 12 Districts the Capitol rules.

The Hunger Games, now in their 10th year, are not the hot-ticket reality show Super Bowl-like blowout they are in the later movies. Their ratings have declined so much the ruling government seems on the fence about whether they should still have them. Dr. Volumnia Gaul (Viola Davis), a games designer and bio-weapons designer and general nutcase, is really insistent that they continue and I think hopes the mentors will jazz them up a little. Though why exactly is unclear. As viewed in this movie (and actually, in the whole series), the Hunger Games seem like a waste of time (and an easy target for dissenters) for this authoritarian regime that seems to be having enough trouble just keeping itself out of civil war.

Anyway, victory by the competitors in the games will mean victory for the students competing for the Plinth Prize. And “victory” doesn’t necessarily mean being the last gamer standing. It can also mean having a competitor with a compelling story who gets people to tune in. Lucky for Coriolanis, his mentee is Lucy Gray Baird (Rachel Zegler, having fun with what she’s given). When Lucy Gray’s name is called during the reaping, she responds with a knowing smile. As she walks to the podium, surrounded by whispers, in a fancy Belle Epoque-y dancing girl dress, she stops to put a snake down a girl’s back and then she sings a defiant little song into the mic. A member of a tribe of traveling musicians, she’s known for twangy folk tunes and boyfriend seducin’. So much more personable than the girl with tuberculosis!

Snow quickly figures out how to play the publicity game element of the Hunger Games, helping to develop some of the elements — donate to your favorite player! — that will become an important part of the Games in the later years. Also giving hints to what the Games will become is a theatrical weatherman named Lucky Flickerman (Jason Schwartzman) who is trying to make this show all it can be.

Dinklage might be the guy doing more Serious Acting than this movie warrants, but Schwartzman seems to be the guy really finding a tone and leaning all the way in with it. His Lucky doesn’t exactly fit with the vibe of the rest of the movie, but he’s definitely the film’s most entertaining element.

This movie falls somewhere between “the dark education of a could-go-either-way Coriolanis Snow” and “a guy who starts off as an ambitious opportunist remains ambitious, sees opportunities.” As the Games progress, Coriolanis’ desire to have Lucy Gray be successful for his own goals turns into actual desire for Lucy Gray. They are, for a while, in love. Or either one or both of them is playing a long con to use the other for their advancement in this morally bankrupt society. Or life is complicated and both things are true. Intellectually, I like that the movie lets you read the story it’s telling in a few different ways. In fact, the more I thought about the way this movie’s character motivations were constructed, the more interesting I found it.

After the fact.

In the moment, sitting in the theater, this made for some very slow, boring storytelling. I know who Snow is going to become and this movie doesn’t really give me a reason to care how he got that way. And I feel like I’m watching the teen soap operaversion of Hunger Games dystopia — it’s all smaller, snottier and more high school. The big scary Panem Capitol and its rulers don’t even seem quite as all-powerful and authoritarian here as in the original movies — they are basically every familiar aristocracy of rich jerks you’ve ever seen anywhere, from Gossip Girl to, like, real life.

I’ll give the movie this: It’s visually interesting in a “huh, neat” kind of way, with its riff on a past that sort of fits with the future we see in the original films. But “huh neat” is not enough to sustain two hours and 37 minutes of movie. C+

Rated PG-13 for strong violent content and disturbing material, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Frances Lawrence with a screenplay by Michael Lesslie and Michael Arndt (from the book by Suzanne Collins), The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is two hours and 37 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by Lionsgate.

The Holdovers (R)

A grumpy classics teacher is forced to babysit the kids left at a Massachusetts boys school for the Christmas holiday in 1970 in The Holdovers, a movie directed by Alexander Payne.

Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) is the most “Paul Giamatti character” of Paul Giamatti characters. A classics professor who eats and sleeps his job, he is a surly tyrant to his students, difficult with the school’s headmaster (Andrew Garman) and just sort of awkward around everyone else.

After handing out a bunch of D and F grades on a test to his students, berating them about their performance and general intelligence and assigning them homework during the break, Paul finds out that he will also be working over vacation. The teacher who had been expected to stay at the school to watch the handful of boys who weren’t going home weaseled out of the assignment and the headmaster, still mad that Paul wouldn’t pass an important donor’s son, makes Paul do it. Not only do the boys have to stay at school but they must all move to barrack-like lodgings in the infirmary because the heat will be off in their normal dorms. And Paul has decided that they need a regular schedule of outdoor exercise (in the Massachusetts winter) and study. And they all have to eat together in the school dining hall, where food is cooked by Mary Lamb (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), who warns Paul not to expect anything too great because there won’t be any new shipments of ingredients until the new year.

Mary, the head of the dining services, is stuck at the school in a different way — her son Curtis was a student but recently died in Vietnam. She feels like she needs to stay in this place, the last place they were together, at least for this, her first Christmas without him.

Eventually, the handful of boys is whittled down to just one — Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa), a boy who was told at the last minute by his mother that he needed to stay at school so she and her new husband could have a honeymoon. Deeply resentful and heartbroken about this, Angus is also generally having a hard time. He’s been kicked out of a few previous schools and doesn’t have close friends at this one. He’s mourning the loss of his father and is angry about how his mother has moved on. And Angus and Paul have the natural irritation for each other that two people with a lot of the same qualities can easily have.

Three people trying, sometimes failing, to deal with the stuff life has thrown at them is the core of this movie and these three people forming an unlikely, temporary family unit makes up the bulk of what moves the story along. This very familiar kind of tale plus the very conscious 1970s vibe of the movie (right down to the “film” hisses and pops that kick off the movie’s audio) and the “everything you expect from a Paul Giamatti character” nature of Paul shouldn’t work, it should feel like the most done of “it’s been done” movies. And yet, for me, it all came together. That was a nice, kind movie — was my reaction, which sounds damning but wasn’t. It all coalesces — the core three performances, the little moments each actor gets to show you into the layers of their character, the most sitcom-like humor. The Holdovers was quietly charming and tartly gentle. B+

Rated R for language, some drug use and brief sexual material, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Alexander Payne with a screenplay by David Hemingson, The Holdovers is two hours and 13 minutes and is distributed in theaters by Focus Features.

Featured photo: The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.

The Marvels (PG-13)

Captain Marvel, Ms. Marvel and Monica Rambeau team up, much to Ms. Marvel’s teenage-fangirl glee, in The Marvels, a mostly fun adventure movie in spite of some Marvel Cinematic Universe “did you do your homework?”-ing.

I came to this movie slightly more prepared than usual with these Marvel movies that have TV series tie-ins, having seen — and absolutely loved — the Ms. Marvel series all about high schooler Kamala Khan (Iman Vellani), a comics-making, Avengers-loving Pakistani-American girl from Jersey City. I did not see the Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson)-centric Secret Invasion or WandaVision, where I gather we meet the grown-up Monica Rambeau (Teyonah Parris). But it’s fine; the movie recaps enough about who everybody is and their relationships to each other — like, for example, that Monica still thinks of Captain Marvel (Brie Larson) as Aunt Carol Danvers, best friend of her mother, the late Maria Rambeau (Lashana Lynch), who died during the five years Monica was Blipped away.

Monica has superpowers now and works for Nick Fury at the S.H.I.E.L.D.-in-space-like S.A.B.E.R. Carol/Captain Marvel is still traveling the universe looking to help people, basically alone except for her cat, Goose, who is a tentacle-mouthed Flerken. Kamala is still in Jersey, still in high school, still making comics when she should be doing homework — as her loving and rightfully suspicious mother Muneeba (Zenobia Shroff) reminds her.

Muneeba, Kamala’s dad Yusuf (Mohan Kapur) and Kamala’s older brother Aamir (Saagar Shaikh) are deeply confused when, after a crashing noise upstairs, Captain Marvel comes down from Kamala’s room. At the same time Kamala finds herself floating in space, where Fury, watching from a space station, had expected to see Monica, who is suddenly on the strange planet where we had just seen Carol. It seems that some kind of space-time-portal-thingies have entangled Carol, Kamala and Monica and whenever they use their powers, they change places. This phenomenon has something to do with the bangle (one identical to the one Kamala wears) that Dar-Benn (Zawe Ashton), our antagonist, has dug up and put on. Dar-Benn, a Kree warrior/leader person, is trying to use the power she gains from the bangle to transport, via wormhole, resources from other planets to her people’s dying homeworld, Hala. From a Skrull planet, she steals the atmosphere. From another planet, she attempts to steal the water. From Earth’s solar system, she intends to steal the sun.

(OK, so — Skrull, Kree, Flerken, Blip? Translation: The first two are warring aliens who appeared in Captain Marvel and other MCU properties, a Flerken is a cat that’s really an alien and the Blip was the whole Thanos thing. And, Thanos? Look, I don’t feel like this is anybody’s MCU entry point but if it is maybe just take notes for post-film Wikipedia-ing. It took catching a bit of Captain Marvel for me to remember “oh, yeah, Hala is a thing we know.” Meanwhile, we are introduced to a brand new planet, Aladna, and an alien people who communicate largely through song and I feel like, if we want to pile on the lore, why not go with new, delightfully weird lore like that?)

Monica and Carol haven’t reconnected since Monica was a child and of course everybody seems a little uneasy about bringing teenage Kamala to intergalactic battles. But the three women eventually realize that their tangled powers mean they need to work together.

The movie has some fun with the powers-tangling concept. The scene that sort of introduces the three superheroines to each other features a prolonged fight with the three swapping places throughout, occasionally pulling bad guys with them, which is how the Khan family ends up fighting Kree and how Goose ends up at the family home, at one point eating some Khan family knick-knacks. It’s choreographed for maximum fun, with the three characters figuring out the rules and what their powers are and who they’re fighting. Later we get a training montage of the three learning how to use the position swaps so they can mount a fight against Dar-Benn.

I also appreciate that the movie pulls the Khans into the adventure, as Kamala’s family was so central to her story. Plus Shroff’s Muneeba is great and I found myself wishing that the movie had given her some superhero-ing of her own. Muneeba’s “you’re not allowed to go on a space adventure” protectiveness also helps to root Kamala’s character in her teenagerness.

The chemistry between the three women is nice too. We don’t get some antagonism-for-the-sake-of-antagonism shoved into the relationships. Instead, we get Carol and Monica reckoning with their past and all three of them learning to work together and value each other’s contributions. It’s a small thing but it keeps the movie relatively light and fun.

The Marvels mostly keeps its head above the Kree/Skrull-ness MCU soup but it does feel like a struggle. The whole business of Dar-Benn’s planet and Captain Marvel’s past feels like it gets in the way of really setting this movie free to be the buddy-adventure it wants to be. B

Rated PG-13 for action/violence and brief language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Nia DaCosta with a screenplay by Nia DaCosta and Megan McDonnell and Elissa Karasik, The Marvels is an hour and 45 minutes long and distributed by Walt Disney Studios in theaters.

Featured photo: The Marvels.

Priscilla (R)

The 14-year-old girl who eventually becomes Mrs. Elvis Presley (at 21) and then the ex-Mrs. Elvis (at 28) gets her story told in Priscilla, a movie written and directed by Sofia Coppola and based on Priscilla Presley’s autobiography Elvis and Me.

Priscilla Beaulieu (Cailee Spaeny) is a ninth grader when we first see her in 1959, drinking a soda in a diner in West Germany where her father, who is in the Army, is stationed. She is bummed at having recently moved to West Germany and not yet having any friends. Adult soldier Terry West (Luke Humphrey) approaches her at the diner and delivers the following information: he’s seen her at the diner before; he and his wife are friends with Elvis Presley (Jacob Elordi), and would she like to go to a party and meet Elvis.

Now, look, kids, if a strange man comes up to you and says something like this, run and tell a trusted adult. Which is the opinion of Priscilla’s dad (Ari Cohen) and mom (Dagmara Dominczyk) at first. Who is this Terry and his wife, why are they taking her to meet Elvis, why would Elvis — a 24-year-old mega-star serving in the Army for two years — want to meet this barely teenage child? But eventually they relent, I guess because they think mopey Priscilla needs some excitement.

From the jump, Elvis gives off what I found myself thinking of as “vampire boyfriend” vibes. There’s a sort ofEdward from Twilight way to how he instantly takes a shine to Priscilla for no particular reason (or, maybe I should say, no non-sketchball reason). He says he likes talking to her, though she doesn’t really talk when they’re together (which, perhaps, you know, is a feature not a bug). She is dazzled, as any girl would be, by the attention of this high-wattage star and sucked in, as any young teen girl would be, by his wounded puppy pose — his stories of being lonely, like her, in Germany and being sad about the recent death of his mom. He’s grieving, he needs me, she says to her parents when they object to her seeing Elvis again. From the perch of “I remember the TV movie based on Elvis and Me”-years-old, I laughed at all of Elvis’ emo nonsense and his “you’re the most special girl” and “you’re more mature than your years” (barf) performatively gentle wooing of Priscilla. But, especially in this Sofia Coppola sourball confection, you can see how all of this goes straight to the heart of a lonely young girl. And how the kind of love and devotion she gives to him is exactly what a controlling narcissist who has surrounded himself with yes men would want. Nancy Sinatra and Ann-Margaret — two of the many women he’s linked to throughout his relationship with Priscilla — aren’t going to put him first or change themselves to suit him, the way he demands of Priscilla.

But Priscilla, wowed by Elvis, longing for his world and attention, which is indeed so much more exciting than high school, hangs on — staying in touch via phone and letters after he leaves Germany and eventually going to visit him at Graceland. There and then later on a trip to Las Vegas, they share a bed but don’t have sex. Elvis insists they wait until he decides the time is right — which turns out to be their wedding night when she is 21 years old, after years of living with him in Graceland, where she often gets left behind when he goes to make movies and have affairs. As he explains to her, the woman who is going to be with him needs to be understanding.

Here in 2023, it’s easy to identify what Elvis is doing as grooming: taking young, doesn’t-know-herself Priscilla and molding her into the wife who will ignore his cheating, put up with his absences, allow herself to be controlled down to her eye makeup by his whims, eternally be waiting for him and forgive his angry, sometimes violent outbursts. Sofia Coppola really highlights the heartbreaking nature of their relationship as we see any natural confidence or sass in Priscilla get swallowed up by the Elvis of it all. But the movie doesn’t paint Priscilla as dumb — naive, maybe, and too willing to trade everything for the happy moments. This movie is quite reminiscent of Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, with a girl who is suddenly in a rarefied life trying to figure out what to do with herself in ornate rooms and opulent clothes, surrounded by people who act very much like a royal court.

In the movie’s final third, there is something very Coppola in the way Priscilla (spoiler alert if you’ve never seen a People magazine) finds her way out. And like many a Coppola movie, we’re seeing all of this both from Priscilla’s point of view and also at a remove. We can see how she’s feeling but we never quite get to hear from her why she makes the decisions that she does. It’s frustrating — but in a way that feels intentional and also kind of enjoyable for what it leaves for us to understand based on vibes. The movie doesn’t look down at Priscilla but it does give the sense of a woman who can look back at this relationship and see what it was (real-life Priscilla Presley is an executive producer of the movie). And the whole thing gets pulled together in a well-done final sequence with maybe one of the best needle drops of recvent memory. B+

Rated R for drug use and some language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Written and directed by Sofia Coppola (based on Priscilla Presley’s Elvis and Me, written with Sandra Harmon), Priscilla is an hour and 53 minutes long and is distributed by A24 in theaters.

Featured photo: Piscilla.

Pain Hustlers (R)

Pain Hustlers (R)

Our medical system is broken is the big takeaway from Pain Hustlers, a fictional tale of pharmaceutical salespeople framed as a documentary.

Liza Drake (Emily Blunt) is an exotic dancer working the lunch shift to attempt to make enough money to cover her and her teen daughter Phoebe’s (Chloe Coleman) bills. After losing that job because she has to rush to get Phoebe out of some high school trouble, Liza calls Pete Brenner (Chris Evans), a pharmaceutical salesman who offered her a job a day earlier he was unsuccessfully trying to woo a doctor at her club. She shows up with a probably inflated resume and he inflates it further before introducing her to Dr. Jack Neel (Andy Garcia), the head of the drug company that is at the moment circling the drain. Their spray-under-the-tongue fentanyl-based pain medication can’t crack into the market currently dominated by a fentanyl lollipop. Liza gets a one-week tryout — get a doctor to prescribe the spray and she’s got a job with extremely good commissions; fail and she’s out. At the last minute of the work week Liza gets Dr. Nathan Lydell (Brian d’Arcy James) to prescribe the drug to one patient — and she gets him on the hook for more prescriptions by signing him on to the company’s speaker program, a thing she created as she pitched him. Pharmaceutical speaker programs are, as Pete explains to us, a common way to thank high-prescribing doctors wherein doctors get money for giving speeches to other doctors and the whole lavish event, with food and booze and drug reps in tight dresses, is paid for by the pharmaceutical company. Though Liza and Pete begin their program on a shoestring, they are able to get Lydell prescribing and then expand their reach to other doctors, first in Florida and then spreading nationwide. Along the way, Liza gets a series of promotions and is able to improve life dramatically for herself and Phoebe — moving from a motel to a waterfront apartment and getting Phoebe into a private school.

Of course, growing a market means that these drugs, meant for cancer patients in extreme pain, need to constantly find new customers and at higher doses, so the company starts pushing doctors to prescribe to other kinds of patients and then offering reps higher commissions on more potent versions. Though Liza desperately needs hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash to pay for a brain surgery for Phoebe not covered by their insurance, she starts to worry that they’re not just helping suffering cancer patients but addicting people.

Blunt does a good job at giving us a rounded portrait of a woman who is trying to work her way out of poverty and is neither a saint nor an amoral cutthroat about how she does that. She hungers for respectability and the security but she isn’t willing to live with going beyond the gray area of doing, as Pete says, 67 in a 65. And Blunt and Evans have a nice chemistry as co-conspirators.

Not unlike Hustlers or The Big Short, Pain Hustlers gives you a con, with its entertaining build and its inevitable fall with a bit of bounciness, but it doesn’t completely look away from the idea that it all came at the expense of people who just wanted to not be in pain and live their lives. B-

Rated R for language throughout, some sexual content, nudity and drug use, according to the MPA at filmratings.com. Directed by David Yates with a screenplay by Wells Tower (and based loosely on the New York Times magazine article by Evan Hughes), Pain Hustlers is two hours and two minutes long and distributed by Netflix, where it is streaming.

Five Nights at Freddy’s (PG-13)

The animatronic mascots at an abandoned family restaurant get murderous in Five Nights at Freddy’s, a horror movie based on a video game franchise.
Which I’ve never played — to me this is just a movie with not-bad bones: animatronic mascots forgotten and slowly decaying, abandoned riff on a Charles Entertainment Cheese-like establishment, a night watchman who has just enough trauma and sleep issues that maybe he could be hallucinating.

Mike (Josh Hutcherson) is that security guy, taking an exceptionally terrible job at this obviously haunted/cursed/just sad long-closed restaurant. He will accept basically any employment to remain a viable guardian for his young sister Abby (Piper Rubio), orphaned/abandoned after the dissolution of their family due to the long-ago kidnapping of Mike’s young brother Garrett (Lucas Grant). Having blamed himself for the kidnapping for decades (Garrett went missing on a family camping trip and Mike is certain he must have seen the kidnapper), Mike uses a variety of sleep aids to push him back to the memory of that moment. So he sleeps but never rests and works the night shift while trying to care for his quiet, troubled-seeming sister — a perfect recipe for a guy who isn’t sure what to believe when the animatronics at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza start to act sentient.
The movie doesn’t really pay off on either the fun or the creepiness of this setup. Instead we get a movie that can’t seem to figure out how dark it wants to be mixed in with a child custody plot and the appearance of Police Officer Vanessa (Elizabeth Lail), whose whole deal makes less sense the more we learn about her. C-

Rated PG-13 for strong violent content, bloody images and language throughout, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Emma Tammi with a screenplay by Scott Cawthon and Seth Cuddeback & Emma Tammi, Five Nights at Freddy’s is an hour and 50 minutes long and is released by Universal Studios. It’s in theaters and streaming on Peacock.

Old Dads (R)

Bill Burr plays a version of himself as a Gen X-er raising a young son in a millennial and zoomer world in the Netflix comedy Old Dads.

Jack Kelly (Burr) has a son in preschool and another kid on the way with wife Leah (Katie Aselton). He lives in a nice suburban house in Los Angeles and has recently sold the profitable T-shirt business he owned with fellow Xers and longtime friends Mike (Bokeem Woodbine) and Connor (Bobby Cannavale). He has what appears to be a nice life and yet he is filled with a rage at the annoyances of the modern world, most of which he expresses in a “you know what’s wrong with your generation?” rant. His aggravation seems particularly acute in dealing with zoomer Aspen Bell (Miles Robbins), the new head of the T-shirt company where Jack, Mike and Connor still have to work (and behave) to cash in on their equity.

There is comedy to be mined in generational differences and raising a child as a parent in their 40s or 50s versus 20s or 30s — the difference between, for example, how an older parent would relate to a peer-aged teacher versus a younger teacher, or how older and younger parents might approach managing their kids. But the movie goes more for the low-hanging fruit of just mocking the performatively progressive upperclass Angeleno. We don’t really get a Gen X-versus-Millennials showdown or one guy’s experiences as an older parent.

It’s more just an angry audience surrogate ranting at the very online.
A bigger problem for Old Dads is that all of the life-stuff Burr addresses here — raising kids as a person in middle age, overcoming general knee-jerk anger, generational differences, marriage stuff, the times in which we live — is addressed much more sharply, smartly and funnily in Burr’s own standup, a lot of which is also available on Netflix. If you want Burr’s angry-Northeasterner take on all that, done with humility and nuance and self-awareness, seek those shows out. If you’re just looking for a comedy with adults swearing and an occasional moment of sitcom-y “ha, funny,” sure, Old Dads has that. Just not as much of that second part as I would have liked. C+

Rated R for pervasive language, sexual material, nudity and brief drug use, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Bill Burr and co-written by Bill Burr & Ben Tishler, Old Dads is an hour and 44 minutes long and distributed by Netflix, where it is currently streaming.

Expend4bles (R)

Even Jason Statham is not strong enough to carry the lifeless fourth outing of a jokey action series in Expend4bles.

It gives me no pleasure to say that, because I generally like this series and the “action stars of previous decades super-group” philosophy around which it’s built.

Here, Statham’s Lee Christmas is basically the center of the story after Barney (Sylvester Stallone), head of the CIA freelancer group The Expendables, is sidelined during a failed mission to get nuclear whatevers from Libya before bad guy Rahmat (Iko Uwais) can steal them for badder guy Ocelot, a mystery villain Barney battled in the past. Gina (Meghan Fox) takes over running the Expendables show with their CIA handler Marsh (Andy Garcia) taking a more hands-on role as they pursue Rahmat.

Lee, pushed out of the group for a nonsense reason, tries to go it alone to chase Rahmat and Ocelot, turning for some assistance to Decha (Tony Jaa).
In addition to Stallone and Statham, Dolph Lundgren and Randy Couture are among the original expendables still in play. Terry Crews, Jet Li and Arnold Schwarzenegger sit this one out along with the last film’s additions, which included Wesley Snipes, Antonio Banderas and Ronda Rousey. Instead, we get Fox, Curtis Jackson (aka 50 Cent), Jacob Scipio and Levy Tran who do not have the sparkle of those OG members.

Also missing here is an overall sense of fun. We don’t get any cutesy surprise cameos a la Chuck Norris in the second movie or Harrison Ford in the third — and of course no Bruce Willis, who appeared in the first two. This kind of 1980s/1990s action star wattage was a load-bearing element of those earlier entries and its lack here leaves the movie an overall shakier structure (outside of Jaa, a star who rose in the aughts and who is a nice addition).

Strip those things away and issues that have probably always been there are more keenly felt. Such as, this isn’t the snappiest dialogue ever written and the actors speak it as though this is the first time they’ve ever seen these lines. The story doesn’t, at all, make sense and yet it’s nearly not bonkers enough.

Perhaps new to this movie is how slow everything feels. Sure, there’s punching and kicking and explosions, but it feels like we’re getting these elements delivered in more of a low-flow stream than the non-stop punch-splosion you’d want. C

Rated R for strong/bloody violence throughout, language and sexual material, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Scott Waugh with a screenplay by Kurt Wimmer & Tad Daggerhart and Max Adams, Expend4bles is an hour and 43 minutes long and distributed by Lionsgate and is available for rent or purchase via VOD.

Strays (R)

Reggie, a good-natured rube of a small fluffy dog voiced by Will Ferrell, has the sudden realization that his owner is garbage in Strays, a live-action, extremely-R-rated dog adventure comedy.

Reggie (voice of Ferrell, doing peak Elf-ish Ferrell) thinks he’s playing a challenging game of fetch when his dirt-bag human Doug (Will Forte) drives him miles away from their home, throws a ball and then drives away. Reggie retrieves the ball and always manages to return, much to the annoyance of Doug, who never wanted a dog and only kept Reggie in the breakup with his girlfriend to be a jerk. Reggie just wants Doug to acknowledge that he, Reggie, is a good-boy dog.

But during a particularly far-afield game of fetch, Reggie realizes in telling French bulldog Bug (voice of Jamie Foxx), Hunter (voice of Randall Park) and Maggie (voice of Isla Fisher) about Doug that Doug is in fact a terrible owner. Reggie decides to hurt Doug by taking away the one thing that Doug truly cares about in life — one R-rated piece of Doug’s anatomy. Bug, a stray dog, and Hunter and Maggie, dogs with laissez faire owners, decide to travel with Reggie to find Doug and see if Reggie really will, uhm, get him where it hurts.

I had few expectations for this movie beyong hoping that it would be not too boring, maybe even mildly entertaining. And it clears that bar of extremely mild entertainment. Most of the humor is based on dog behavior — eating gross stuff, sniffing other dogs’ bums, humping things — and most of it is fine, not particularly smart but not aggressively off-putting. Pre-existing Will Ferrell-ness helps to make Reggie a character we can project personality. Occasionally the movie has a funny bit (there is a runner about an invisible fence) or a cute cameo and I found myself often thinking “ha” without actually laughing. C+

Rated R for pervasive language, like seriously, and crude and sexual content (also, really and a lot) and drug use, like this is rated R don’t let the dogs fool you, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Josh Greenbaum with a screenplay by Dan Perrault, Strays is an hour and 33 minutes long and is distributed by Universal Studios. It is available for rent or purchase and it is streaming on Peacock.

Featured photo: Pain Hustlers.

Killers of the Flower Moon (R)

Oil-rich members of the Osage Nation become targets for con men in 1920s Oklahoma in Killers of the Flower Moon, a Martin Scorsese-directed and -cowritten movie based on the non-fiction book by David Grann.

Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) returns stateside from serving in the Army in World War I to live with his uncle William King Hale (Robert De Niro) at his cattle ranch in Oklahoma. Call me uncle or King, Hale says to Ernest, which gives you a sense of how Hale thought about himself and his importance. Calling himself the “King of the Osage Hills,” Hale has learned the Osage language and has positioned himself as the friend to his Osage neighbors, who have grown rich due to the discovery of oil on their land. More than 2,000 people, and their legal descendants (who can be Osage or white), have headrights to the oil money. Their wealth has attracted all manner of scammers, from the guys overcharging for family photos to the government that hands out money in a conservatorship for fully grown adults under the guise of helping them manage their money. Hale would be one of those scammers, with his “I speak your language” shtick being a very thin veneer over his greed and racism. Also among the scammers are the white men who marry into Osage families to get a piece of the oil rights — particularly if their wives should meet bad ends.

When Ernest meets unmarried Osage woman Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone) while working as a driver, Hale encourages him to court and marry her to get their family connected to her family’s headrights to the oil money. When Ernest marries Mollie, she gains a husband but over time loses her sisters and mother, Lizzie Q. (Tantoo Cardinal), to either suspicious illnesses or violence. Mollie also struggles with her health — she has diabetes. Hale is able to help her receive the relatively new medicine that is insulin but strangely (a-hem) it seems to be making her sicker.

Meanwhile, we see Ernest and Hale work to get other people out of their way, from Osage people Hale figures out how to make money from to others who could implicate him in his crimes. It takes a long time and a lot of deaths before the pleas of Mollie and others in the tribe to the federal government to send someone to investigate the murders of Osage people are answered in the form of FBI agents led by Tom White (Jesse Plemmons).

Killers of the Flower Moon has what I think of as the Gangs of New York problem. Here, like with that Scorsese film, the central Leonardo DiCaprio story is significantly less interesting than all the stuff around it. The story of the Osage Nation — its history, the tensions between generations, how the money changed the culture, the relationship with the federal government, the Osage relationship to the white people drawn to the area by the money — is infinitely more compelling than the story of this one shifty dirtbag and his huckster dirtbag uncle, particularly when you’re comparing the can’t-look-away magnetism of Lily Gladstone to DiCaprio or even De Niro. She absolutely commands your attention and gives Mollie a depth and complexity, and everything gets a little dimmer when she’s not on the screen.

Comparatively, Ernest and his uncle just seem like grifters — and not particularly clever ones. The star wattage of DiCaprio (and some gross but fascinating teeth) and De Niro (who looks like he’s cosplaying Harry Truman) don’t make the characters feel any more substantial. They feel like petty criminals who stumbled into a big score. The way their criminality is supported by a whole crooked, racist system of who has legal rights, justice and opportunity in 1920s Oklahoma is probably the most interesting element about them.

You get the sense from the movie that Scorsese knows that the central crime and its criminals aren’t as compelling as these other factors — especially the Osage people. According to all the stories I’ve read about this movie, he started off wanting to make a movie from the FBI point of view (or, really, BOI — Bureau of Investigation, as it was then called) and then shifted perspective to focus more on the Osage and Mollie’s story. That’s a good decision and how earnestly he’s made it becomes particularly clear with the movie’s final scenes — the final shot literally puts Osage people at the center and fills the screen with their story. But there are elements that we either get to see only briefly or don’t really see at all. We never really get an explanation of what the marrying white men arrangement does for Mollie and her sisters, why they agree to marry these men even though they sort of always suspect that the men are after them for their money. The movie gets us close to Mollie but it never quite lets us see through her eyes, to understand from her perspective.

All that said, this movie works more than it doesn’t. Gladstone is, as expected, great. Maybe we never quite break through on understanding Mollie but Gladstone does a lot with what she’s given — her still face just considering a person or situation can say more than a soliloquy. And while she doesn’t have a lot of scenes with Cardinal’s Lizzie, I feel like you get a lot about their mother-daughter dynamics from what we do get.

DiCaprio makes a good villain — sometimes a little too good; the movie doesn’t quite sell me on why Mollie stays with Ernest — and has not a trace of that DiCaprio glamour. De Niro isn’t the star here but he gives some heft and personality to a weaselly character.

There is also a lot of technical craft and beauty to this film, which creates a visually interesting world and then moves through it, like, Scorsesily. I felt his eye on this in a way that wasn’t as self-referential as, say, The Irishman but was like a showcase for his skill — with putting people in vistas, with moving through space. This movie is three hours and 26 minutes long but it doesn’t drag or feel excessively flabby to me. There is an energy to this movie that helps keep your attention throughout.

Killers of the Flower Moon is solid drama movie fare, made exceptional by Gladstone’s performance. B+

Rated R for violence, some grisly images and language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Martin Scorsese with a screenplay by Eric Roth and Martin Scorsese (based on the nonfiction book of the same name by David Gann), Killers of the Flower Moon is three hours and 26 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by Apple Films.

Featured photo: Killers of the Flower Moon.

Spooky movie night

Give yourself some scares with these new movies

By Amy Diaz
[email protected]

Here are a few new spooky films for your Halloween season movie night viewing pleasure/terror.

The latest in the Conjuring cinematic universe and a sequel to 2018’s The Nun, The Nun II (R) has Taissa Farmiga returning as Sister Irene in 1956 Europe. Sister Irene works at a convent where apparently no one knows she was the lady who fought the nun-garbed demon Valak. She is friends with nun-in-training Debra (Storm Reid), an American whose father sent her to the convent because it’s better than 1950s Mississippi.

Meanwhile, Maurice (Jonas Bloquet), a guy the movie reminds us was in the first Nun, is working at a French boarding school. He has a sweet flirtation with teacher Kate (Anna Popplewell, Susan Pevensie all grown up), and is kind to her shy daughter, Sophie (Katelyn Rose Downey). Oh, and also he’s possessed and has been dragging the demon Valak through Europe like a rat infecting the continent with the plague. As he’s moved west, religious people have met supernaturally bad ends. After a priest bursts into flames in France, Sister Irene is asked by the Vatican to go investigate. Sister Debra tags along and they make an excellent paranormal investigative team. More Sisters Irene and Debra, please, Conjuring universe!

Valak, like many a Conjuring universe baddie, is often a “messing with you” presence; the first half of this movie is a fair amount of unnatural creaks in the shadows and jump scares that come from a sudden, brief appearance of the Nun. But the movie picks up steam and is compelling enough thanks to some fun Catholic saint lore and Farmiga’s performance. These movies have something that while not a ha-ha sense of humor is also not not a sense of humor. There’s a humanity to the stories and to Farmiga’s characters. Still in theaters, the movie is also available for rent or purchase. B-

The Blackening (R) hit theaters in June but is on VOD and also streaming via Starz. It riffs on horror movie tropes (a cabin in the woods, sketchy-seeming locals) and considers what it means to be Black (in America and in horror movies). A group of friends from college, with their various histories and romantic connections, heads to a house in the woods to spend Juneteenth weekend together. But when Lisa (Antoinette Robertson), Allison (Grace Byers), Dewayne (Dewayne Perkins), King (Melvin Gregg), Nnamdi (Sinqua Walls), Shanika (X Mayo) and Clifton (Jermaine Fowler) get to the house, they can’t find their buddies Morgan (Yvonne Orji) and Shawn (Jay Pharoah) anywhere.

They do find a creepy game room and an even creepier racist board game called The Blackening, which they are invited/forced to play by a masked killer.
This is a very solid ensemble and the movie gives dimensions to the relationships between the members of the friend group. While perhaps not a true horror aficionado’s brand of scary — there are more laughs than scares — it’s a mix of comedy and horror that I appreciate. B+

Similarly, Totally Killer (R), streaming now on Amazon Prime Video, plays with 1980s slasher- and teen-movie tropes. Teen Jamie’s (Kiernan Shipka) mom, Pam (Julie Bowen), is murdered on Halloween in 2023, possibly by the never-caught “Sweet Sixteen Killer” who murdered three of her high school friends in the days leading up to Halloween 1987. Devastated and afraid of the Sweet Sixteen Killer herself, Jamie ends up in a time machine built by her friend Amelia (Kelcey Mawema). She goes back to 1987 just before the killings and meets teen Pam (Olivia Holt) and her friends, who call themselves the Mollies because of their intense Molly Ringwald fandom and who are, in the specific style of late 1980s teen girls in movies, horrible. Jamie is sort of appalled that her mother is such a Heather, but she needs to stop the killer. And she needs to fix the time machine, busted during its travels, so she won’t get stuck in John Hughes hell. She turns to teen Lauren (Troy Leigh-Anne Johnson), Amelia’s mom, who was the first to work on the time machine plans and is surprisingly chill about someone from the future showing up needing help.

This movie is very fun, with a nice balance between time travel foolishness, Gen X versus Gen Z teens and the slashing, which is very much of the large-knife-and-red-corn-syrup-everywhere school of horror. Shipka makes a solid main character who can pull off both the “the ’80s were weird, man” and the killer-fighting moments — sporting a very fun Can’t Buy Me Love-ish white cropped fringe jacket. B

Hulu’s Slotherhouse (PG-13) also has way more laughs than scares — starting with its killer, which cracked me up every time it was on screen. Sorority girl Emily (Lisa Ambalavanar) is eager to unseat Brianna (Sydney Craven) as sorority president and so, to pump up her social media likes, she “adopts” a sloth, whom she names Alpha. Alpha is a little shy of standard teddy bear size and has a real “janky sloth puppet stretched over Teddy Ruxpin frame” look. Alpha is awesome and really sets the tone for this movie, which I would describe as, like, Cocaine Bear but dumber.

While Emily basks in her newfound fame and gains supporters, nobody seems to notice that sorority girls are going missing. Also, nobody seems to realize that Alpha can scroll Instagram or drive a car.

The humans play it mostly straight, largely obsessed with the sorority drama, with the increasingly psychotic Alpha really hamming it up while plotting revenge on the humans who she blames for removing her from her beloved Panamanian jungle. The methods of Alpha’s murders are increasingly hilarious, as very game actors have to be terrified by and wrestle with this discount-bin midway-prize of a creature. As the movie throws off all cares in the final third, Alpha grows bolder, taking a selfie with one victim and doing a little “come at me, bro” dance with another. It’s glorious. I don’t know, A+? OK, OK, B.

Pet Sematary: Bloodlines (R) This Paramount+ movie, billed as a prequel, required me to do some early-in-the-film Googling to figure out what I was supposed to know and who I was supposed to remember. College-age-ish Judd Crandall (Jackson White) and girlfriend Norma (Natalie Alyn Lind) are the familiar names, along with recently home from the Vietnam War Timmy Baterman (Jack Mulhern) (it’s 1969). Judd and Norma are getting the heck out of Ludlow, Maine, when we meet them — except of course, they don’t. A crow, the evilest of birds, hits their car windshield and when they get out to investigate they see a sketchy dog in the road. Hey, that’s Timmy’s dog, let’s walk him back to Timmy’s house, says Judd, a dummy. The world’s most “at best, I have rabies” dog eventually bites Norma so badly that she needs to go to a hospital; Timmy, who also seems like a dog with rabies, doesn’t show much sympathy. Because, of course, it wasn’t an alive Timmy but Timmy’s deceased body that came home from the war, and Timmy’s dad, Bill (David Duchovny), buried him in the cursed land behind the Pet Sematary for the purposes of resurrecting him. The movie can’t seem to decide whether the cursed land resurrection thing is something everybody knows about or a big secret — it seems to be both?

Other questions: Why hire Pam Grier to play one of those in-the-know townsfolk, Pam flippin’ Grier who is awesome professionally, and then barely use her? Why construct a whole 1600s-set flashback that doesn’t really offer new information? Bloodlines threw a lot of elements in the mix but didn’t seem to have a clear idea what it wanted to do with them other than get to an end point that could plausibly hook in to the original story. This is a movie that needs to simplify and add context — look in the mirror and take a few things off, to borrow from Coco Chanel, but then put different things on. Be a whole different movie, I guess, is what I’m saying. For the King completists, people do say “sometimes dead is better” a few times, so I guess you’ve got that. D+

A more successful riff on Stephen King is The Boogeyman (PG-13), which hit theaters in June and is now available for rent or purchase and is streaming on Hulu. Based on a King short story, the movie gives us traumatized family psychologist dad Will Harper (Chris Messina), teen Sadie (Sophie Thatcher) and younger kid Sawyer (Vivien Lyra Blair). The family is just barely getting back to normal life, with Sadie and Sawyer returning to school for the first time after the sudden death of their mom. After a crummy first few minutes at school, Sadie returns home to change just as Will has started taking to Lester Billings (David Dastmalchian), a drop-in patient whose desperation convinces Will to talk to him — until Lester starts talking about his three children whom he definitely didn’t murder. Will goes to call the police and Lester (possibly accompanied by Something) wanders around the house, eventually winding up in a closet where Sadie finds him, having hung himself. Or Something.

Sadie brushes aside the possibility of “or something” until Sawyer, already scared of the dark to such a degree that she cuddles with a lightball and sleeps in a bed surrounded by even more lights, starts to see a Something herself. Eventually Sadie tries to investigate the Something and what exactly happened to Lester’s family.

This movie does a good job of giving you the vibe of two familiar fears: the kid fear of a monster lurking in the dark and the parent fear that they won’t realize their kid is in danger until it’s too late. Even though this Boogeyman likes to “play with its food,” as a character played by Marin Ireland explains, all the creaking boards and flickering lights actually do a better job at putting you in a scary mindset than they often do in these movies. B

Grief also permeates Talk to Me, released in theaters this summer and available for purchase or rent on VOD. Mia (Sophie Wilde) is still deeply traumatized after the death of her mother two years earlier from a drug overdose — was it intentional, accidental or something else? This uncertainty eats at Mia and, combined with her sadness, keeps up a barrier between Mia and her father, Max (Marcus Johnson). She turns to her friend Jade (Alexandra Jensen) and Jade’s family — younger brother Riley (Joe Bird) and mom Sue (Miranda Otto). But there is friction in her relationship with Jade, who is dating Daniel (Otis Dhanji), a boy Mia once liked.

Mia drags Jade and Daniel to a party like one she’s seen on social media, where participants hold a plaster-looking hand and say “talk to me,” apparently summoning a person who has died. “I let you in” allows that dead person to enter, for 90 seconds, the living. The experience, as Mia and others portray, is a rush that all these teens record on their phones to post — and really is this movie just a horror movie for parents about the dumb things kids will do for social media clout? Mia becomes obsessed with the feeling and, when one kid appears to have reached her mother, desperate to increase her interaction with the other side. Naturally, things go wrong when Riley, despite being too young as almost everyone agrees, is allowed to hold the hand and the thing that he lets in doesn’t seem to leave.

This is the kind of horror movie where if you removed the supernatural element it would still basically work as a character study of a person sinking into their pain and making all the wrong decisions. Ultimately Talk to Me felt more sad than scary to me, but it does a good job creating the unease of not knowing whether a ghost or the person’s own mind is driving the horror. B-

In Hulu’s No One Will Save You (R) main character Brynn (Kaitlyn Dever) has also lost her mother and now lives alone in her hometown, where she gets dirty looks from passers-by and is spit on by the wife of the chief of police. She spends her time making a scale model of a more idyllic town and teaching herself the fox trot, never saying a word to anyone. Actually, one of the gimmicks of this movie is that, with one exception, no words are spoken at all.

One night Brynn wakes up to sounds of someone in her house. But then she hears the visitor “talk” and realizes that whatever is downstairs, it’s not human. She tangles with it and gets a look at what appears to be an alien. The next morning, terrified, she tries to get into town, where she sees signs of destruction similar to what happened at her house. She also sees some humans with pulsating things in their necks and suddenly making very alien-like sounds. As night falls, even stranger-looking aliens appear.

This hour-and-a-half movie really hangs on how captivating Dever can be running and fighting and hiding and trying not to scream — and she is! Dever, so good in comedies like Booksmart and Rosaline, is just as compelling in this role. No One Will Save You has that “playing with an idea” feel of a Twilight Zone episode. There is a nice bit of psychological horror blended with the sci-fi thrills. B

The Mill is listed as “science fiction” and “thriller” but its tale of corporate worker Joe (Lil Rel Howery) strikes me as a very particular kind of modern horror. Mallard, a sort of Amazon/Apple everything company, is represented by a pleasant Siri-ish voice that tells Joe he’s being tasked with learning how to reach his goals and live up to his potential. What that actually means is that, after woozily waking up in a dirt cell with a push-operated grist mill in the center of it, Joe has to push the stone mill in 50 rotations each day to meet a quota. If he doesn’t meet his quota, if he has the fewest rotations of all the other unseen (but heard in their screams) workers or if he refuses to make any rotations, he will be terminated. Joe’s not sure what “termination” means but he can infer from the bloodcurdling screams of others picked for termination that it is not good.

The pushing of the mill is pointless busywork and the whole operation is run with corporate efficiency that only cares about “productivity” (regardless of whether the work produces anything) and doesn’t care if people have spouses or children, like Joe’s expectant wife Kate (Karen Obilom), whom he is desperate to get back to or at least to prevent from being “onboarded” as a “coworker.”

The Mill is compelling, at times darkly funny (Joe is at one point given a pen with his name on it as a token of appreciation) and genuinely scary in the sense that situations with no one to appeal to can feel scary. Howrey is able to give Joe depth and fill in a personality beyond just a man being tortured by his employer. B

Featured photo: Slotherhouse

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