Category: Film Reviews by Amy

More movies from Barbie summer

It was the summer of women! — so declared the discourse, thanks largely to the excellent box office of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie movie and the success of Beyonce and Taylor Swift tours. With a film version of Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour hitting theaters Oct. 13, it’s likely going to be the fall of women too, at least box-office-wise. But these aren’t the only lady-led summer/fall movies. Here are a few more female-forward films from recent months worth catching up with.

• Bottoms (R) Released on VOD last week, this high school sex comedy didn’t do Barbie box office numbers but it won a lot of praise — released in theaters on Sept. 1, it currently has a 93 percent on Rotten Tomatoes (for whatever that’s worth). Bottoms stars Rachel Sennott (who co-wrote it with director Emma Seligman, who also wrote and directed 2020’s Shiva Baby, in which Sennott starred) and Ayo Edebiri (best-known for the TV show The Bear). The movie has almost a throwback quality for its strict social division of “populars” and everybody else — PJ (Sennott) and Josie (Edebiri) are best friends and fellow awkward nerds waiting it out for college, where they feel like they’ll have a better shot at coolness and having sex. But then they accidentally find themselves in a position to help cheerleader Isabel (Havana Rose Liu), the girl Josie is crushing on, get away from her meatheaded football player boyfriend Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine). PJ and Josie sort of stumble into the idea that presenting themselves as tough badasses (which they are extremely not) will win over not just Isabel but also Brittany (Kaia Gerber), the girl PJ is lusting over. Thus do they start a girls’ fight club, nominally a means of teaching self-defense, but soon, inadvertently, a way of pulling attention and power away from the football-player-dominated school. The movie is sweet for how it walks its familiar movie high schooler-types through familiar lessons about friendship, honesty and finding genuine intimacy versus just trying for random hook-ups. Even when the comedy feels a bit not-fully-baked, Sennott and Edebiri make it work. B
• Golda (PG-13) Another late-summer release (Golda hit theaters on Aug. 25, VOD in recent weeks) is this Helen Mirren biopic about Golda Meir, Israel’s prime minister from 1969 through 1974. The movie gives us a “newspaper clippings and characters introduced with identifying chyrons” play-by-play of Meir during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. It’s all fine in the same way that having Helen Mirren read the Wikipedia entries about this point in history would probably be fine but the movie doesn’t have much to say about Meir as a person or this slice of history. I feel like we’re more watching the “Mirren does Golda, Liev Schreiber does Kissinger” makeup and costuming of it all than getting some new window onto the people or the times. B-
• Polite Society (PG-13) Technically this movie got its U.S. release in late April, but I saw it on Peacock (where it still lives) in the summer. It’s written and directed by Nida Manzoor, creator of the excellent TV show We Are Lady Parts, also on Peacock (watch it!). This action comedy has a slight Jane Austen-y quality but a modern setting: Two British-Pakistani sisters, the college-age Lena (Ritu Arya) and the teenage Ria (Priya Kansara), have big dreams. Ria wants to be a stunt woman and practices martial arts so she can make videos where she says “I AM the Fury” before delivering a spinning jump kick. Lena recently left art school and spends her days being discouraged — though Ria is determined to get her back making art. The girls’ mother, Fatima (Shobu Kapoor), scores the family, including dad Rafe (Jeff Mirza), an invitation to a party held by community fancy person Raheela (Nimra Bucha). The true purpose of the party is for Raheela to find a wife for her handsome, dopey son Salim (Akshay Khanna), giving off some Mr. Bingley vibes. When he and Lena appear to hit it off, Ria is certain there’s something more sinister about him. She ropes her high school mates into various schemes to try to expose Salim as unfit for her beloved sister, but meanwhile her parents and Salim’s mother continue to push the couple together. This movie is a top to bottom delight, from the sisterly relationship which occasionally devolves into martial arts fights to Ria’s friendships, one of which is borne out of a school-time battle. By the time Ria finds herself fighting a true villain — a marvelous villain — we can believe this girl has taught herself to be “the Fury” even if the movie is also letting her do some slightly superhuman moves. A+
• Nimona (PG) Any list of my favorite movies of the summer will surely include this animated film, which appeared on Netflix at the end of June. Based on a graphic novel, this movie features Nimona (voice of Chloë Grace Moretz), a shape-shifting girl of undetermined age, befriending Ballister Boldhart (voice of Riz Ahmed), a fallen knight in a futuristic-medieval-y world whom everyone thinks has killed the queen he was sworn to protect. Ballister came from the commoner class, not the nobility like other knights and his friend/comrade-in-arms/sweetheart Ambrosius Goldenloin (voice of Eugene Lee Yang), a descendant of a legendary hero. Ballister is trying to prove his innocence and find the real queen assassin, but Nimona is in this partnership for his general troublemakerness, which she regularly tells him is “metal.” As a kid movie (older kids, for some of the scarier battle scenes and violence; Common Sense Media labeled it 11 and up), this is a plucky adventure with good lessons about friendship and not prejudging people. For the grown-ups in the audience, there’s plenty of humor, smart visuals and general sweetness to enjoy. A
• Theater Camp (PG-13 ) A July release that stretches the brief just a little in the sense that it’s more an ensemble than woman-character-led, the movie’s action kicks off with Joan Rubinsky (Amy Sedaris) having a stroke during a kids’ production of Bye Bye Birdie. The longtime owner and director of a theater camp, Joan lands in a coma for the summer, leaving her goofy, would-be influencer son Troy (Jimmy Tatro), who knows very little about theater, to run the camp. While he weighs whether or not to sell it, the staff struggles to put together the summer’s productions, including an original piece about Joan’s life. Longtime friends Rebecca-Diane (Molly Gordon, also from Shiva Baby) and Amos (Ben Platt) are particularly in the spotlight in this part of the tale. Bottoms’ Ayo Edebiri also appears here as a new counselor who knows nothing about theater — at one point she literally asks the kids to explain what her class is supposed to be about. This movie works best as a fun collection of scenes — Edebiri’s character asking the kids to explain stage combat, Amos’ self-serious criticisms of the desperately eager campers, the very jazz-hands Still Joan production — but can be a little pokey as a narrative. Available on Hulu, it’s a solid low-effort comedy to watch that doesn’t require 100 percent of your constant attention. B
• Love at First Sight (PG-13) This very straight down the middle Netflix rom-com about two attractive young adult people — American Hadley Sullivan (Haley Lu Richardson) and Brit Oliver Jones (Ben Hardy) — meeting cute and then slowly falling in happily-ever-after draws most of its charm from Richardson, who brings the same real-person energy to this as she does to better movies like Support the Girls or The Edge of Seventeen. This movie also gets some solid help from a supporting cast that includes Rob Delaney playing Hadley’s dad, Sally Phillips as Oliver’s mom and Jameela Jamil, who doesn’t annoy me like she does The Internet, as a kind of Greek chorus narrator type. Acceptable “whilst doing other things” watching with moments of genuine charm. B-

Featured photo: courtesy photo.

Nia Vardalos and her My Big Fat Greek Wedding players travel to Greece for a vacation wherein they occasionally shoot some scenes for a movie in My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 — at least that’s what seems to be happening here.

Toula Portokalos (Vardalos) and her husband Ian Miller (Jon Corbett) are both dealing with the recent deaths of their respective fathers and their first year of empty-nesterdom with daughter Paris (Elena Kampouris) in her first year of college. Toula’s mother, Maria (Lainie Kazan), also seems to be dealing with memory loss, putting a further strain on the wider family, which is seeing its older generation fade away.

To fulfill a promise to her father and perhaps to recapture some of that family togetherness, Toula decides to go to Greece to find her father’s boyhood friends. She is joined by Ian and Paris as well as Toula’s brother Nick (Louis Mandylor), Aunt Voula (Andrea Martin), Aunt Frieda (Maria Vacratsis) and Aristotle (Elias Kacavas), the young man Frieda and Voula are trying to push Paris together with. They meet Victory (Melina Kotselou), the young mayor of Toula’s father’s island village, who has arranged a village reunion to bring residents back to the basically empty town. One of the village’s few residents is Alexandra (Anthi Andreopoulou), an old woman who knew Toula’s father back in the day and who has quasi-adopted Qamar (Stephanie Nur), a Syrian refugee who is secretly dating Christos (Giannis Vasilottos). Their relationship is secret because Christos’s father, Peter (Alexis Georgoulis), insists that Christos only marry a Greek woman.

(Side note: Stephanie Nur, who doesn’t get a whole lot to do here, is also solid in the goofy but low-effort watchable Paramount+ show Special Operations: Lioness. I hope the visibility of these two “meh” endeavors helps to push her into bigger, meatier roles.)

Every scene here has the kind of loose, first-attempt feeling of something that the actors have just discussed. It’s like “in this scene, everybody in the family is asleep and then a goat wanders into the house. Now — action!” The 2002 original My Big Fat Greek Wedding definitely had a “little indie that could” feel to go with its winning charm but this feels rougher, somehow. Vardalos is credited as both the writer and director here but there is much more of a “wacky setup, wacky reaction” almost improv feel to each scene than I remember from the first movie.

And yet.

Somehow, genuine emotion works itself into all the loosely stitched together scenes in this movie. Real stuff about parents getting older and kids finding their life and how family changes over time manages to add sweetness — occasionally, bittersweetness — to this story and these characters we’ve seen age from the baby-faced people we are reminded of in the opening credits to the middle-aged and older people we see in this movie. The movie doesn’t have the same fresh and lived-experience feel that the original does but this quality does give it charm.

And, of course, there’s Andrea Martin — always fun and always leaving you wanting more. C+

Rated PG-13 for suggestive material and some nudity, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Written and directed by Nia Vardalos, My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 is an hour and 31 minutes and is distributed by Focus Features in theaters.

Featured photo: My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3

More sharks eat more people in Meg 2: The Trench, a sequel to 2018’s The Meg.

Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham) is headed back to the ocean for a deep water exploration and brings along Meiying (Sophia Cai), the now teenage daughter of Suyin (Li Bingbing), the lady scientist who I guess married Jonas after the events of the first movie but sadly died before the events of this movie, probably of reading the script for this sequel. Meiying is eager to be involved with the family business of ocean exploration — her uncle Jiuming (Wu Jing) now runs the research at the Mana One, an oil-platform-like scientific facility near the Mariana Trench. He’s received funding from businesswoman Hillary Driscoll (Sienna Guillory, whom the movie so badly wants to be Parker Posey) and somehow he’s able to justify keeping a megalodon, one of the giant dinosaur sharks from the last movie, as a little pet.

Most of the major characters, and a few that we won’t miss when they get eaten, load into two submarines to head down into the Mariana Trench and explore. They find sharks, sure, but also a far more unexpected creature — man!

That man is represented by Montes (Sergio Peris-Mencheta), the leader of a gang of sketchy dudes who are performing some sort of mining operation in the deep. Attempting to get rid of those goody-goody scientists, Montes detonates the mining explosives and now it becomes a race for everyone to survive the intense pressure, the hungry animals and the violence-perpetrating bad guys in the deep of the ocean and get back to the surface.

In its final third or so, Meg 2 gets very dumb/much better with more man vs. other man vs. trench-creature face-offs, the introduction of a giant octopus and lots of people being eaten, to include in a shot from inside a shark’s mouth when we get to see it chomp down on some vacationers. This, I thought during that shot in particular, this should have been the whole movie — terrible CGI and loathsome characters being eaten. Instead the movie spends a laughable amount of time trying to, like, set up motivations, tell us a little story about corporate greed destroying the environment and let us get to know the characters (inartfully, but still it wastes time on this). I am not here for character development; I am here for big, goofy-looking sharks chomping on people. “More goofy sharks in this goofy shark movie, please” is what I thought for most of the movie. C

Rated PG-13 for action/violence, some bloody images, language and brief suggestive material, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Ben Wheatley with a screenplay by Jon Hoeber & Erich Hoeber and Dean Georgaris, Meg 2: The Trench is one hour and 56 minutes long and is distributed by Warner Bros. It is available for rent or purchase via VOD.

Featured photo: Meg 2: The Trench

Two lifelong besties do the kind of brutal (psychological) violence to each other that only two middle school girls can do in You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah, an Adam Sandler family production.

The girl having the titular bat mitzvah in her friend group’s season of bar and bat mitzvahs is Stacy Friedman, played by Sunny Sandler, the younger of Adam Sandler’s two real-life daughters. His older daughter Sadie plays Ronnie Friedman, Stacy’s older sister, and their genuine sibling chemistry — unwavering support while also threatening to murder each other — is one of many endearing elements of this comedy. Stacy and Lydia Rodriguez Katz (Samantha Lorraine) have long been best friends, planning their spectacular “today you are a woman” bat mitzvah parties for years. But then, as can happen in the seventh grade, there are shake-ups in friendships. Lydia becomes friendly with a group of popular girls. She doesn’t seem to think much of it but Stacy becomes both jealous and eager to get herself included, especially since those popular girls hang out with Andy Goldfarb (Dylan Hoffman), the boy who makes the world go slow-mo for Stacy.

At first Stacy and Lydia seem to fit in, but then Stacy has a menstrual product mishap in front of the whole popular-girls-and-cute-boy crowd that Lydia seems to join the populars in laughing at. Horrified, Stacy declares her love for Andy dead — but not so dead that she doesn’t become enraged when she sees Lydia kissing him later. Thus does Stacy shout to Lydia the movie’s title: “You are so not invited to my bat mitzvah.” This seeming break in their friendship does not, however, lead to an end of hostilities between Lydia and Stacy, with Stacy eventually (accidentally) burning it all down over her hurt at what she sees as Lydia’s betrayal.

Adam Sandler plays the Friedman girls’ father, Danny, with his Uncut Gems wife Idina Menzel playing Bree, Danny’s wife and the girls’ mother. Rounding out the Sandler family on screen is Adam Sandler’s real-life wife, Jackie Sandler, who plays Lydia’s mother, Gabi, in the midst of a divorce from Lydia’s father, Eli (Luis Guzmán). With fun small roles — Sarah Sherman as Rabbi Rebecca and Ido Mosseri as DJ Schmuley, the must-have party DJ — the movie has an overall chummy feel. Lots of good-natured yuks and a general sense of good will toward all. Which is sort of your standard Adam Sandler Netflix fare, except for the young-teen-girl on young-teen-girl angst and destruction and love and loyalty. Those elements have some surprising sharp edges that can take you right back to the lunch room and the kids who are too cool and the close friends with whom there’s been a falling out. And even though the movie knows we know how not a big deal in the scheme of one’s whole life the slights and upsets that torment Stacy are — and how ridiculous her response is — the movie doesn’t belittle the bigness of these kids’ emotions.

You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah is a charmer of a gentle growing-up comedy with just enough “thank God I’ll never be 13 again” tartness to give it some genuine emotional moments. B+

Rated PG-13 for some crude/suggestive material, strong language and brief teen drinking, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Sammi Cohen with a screenplay by Alison Peck and Fiona Rosenbloom, You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah is an hour and 43 minutes long and is streaming on Netflix.

Featured photo: You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah (PG-13)

A recent college grad accidentally forms a symbiotic relationship with superpower-bestowing alien tech in Blue Beetle, a DC Comics movie that isn’t, story-wise at least, necessarily a piece of any particular DC franchise but probably will get absorbed in the new DCU if it does OK, box-office-ally speaking.

I mention this because if you didn’t watch The Flash or can’t remember the whole deal with Black Adam, that’s fine, none of that business is part of this movie.

Jaime Reyes (Xolo Maridueña, bringing his floppy-haired goofballness from Cobra Kai) is a recent college graduate who gets several bites into his celebratory taco homecoming dinner before his sister Milagro (Belissa Escobedo) lays out an assortment of the family’s difficulties: they’ve lost the family business (an auto body shop), dad Alberto (Damian Alcazar) has had a heart attack and the family house — where mom Rocio (Elpidia Carrillo), Nana (Adriana Barraza) and Uncle Rudy (George Lopez) also live — is being sold out from under them. Some of this misfortune seems to be due to the gentrification spearheaded by the Kords, a wealthy family in Palmera City (kind of a Miami-ish/ Los Angeles-y city of gleaming futuristic buildings and neighborhoods of Mexican Americans who are being shoved around by banks and developers).

As it turns out, pricing people out of their communities is only one of many crummy things Victoria Kord (Susan Sarandon) is up to. She’s building a militarized force of augmented humans with a bit of tech that can snap in to soldiers’ spines and gear them up with weaponry and armor. She’s also digging up alien tech, the Scarab, a blue-beetle-y-looking device that can bond with humans, to make those devices even more powerful. Her niece, Jenny Kord (Bruna Marquezine), disagrees with this direction of the company and wants the family business to focus less on weaponry, like her father wanted before he disappeared. When she spots the Scarab in Kord labs, she hides it in a takeout box and tries to rush it out of the building. On the way, she runs in to Jaime, who came looking for her after she offered to get him a job (to replace the house-cleaning job he lost by standing up for Jenny to her aunt Victoria). She gives him the box and tells him to rush out. At the urging of his curious family, he opens the box. Several members of the family handle the blue beetle but it’s Jaime that the Scarab chooses to bond with.

That bonding leads to Jaime being covered in armor, shot into space, accidentally slicing a bus in half and slamming back down to Earth, creating a second hole in the roof of the family house.

Before Jaime gets to the “great power, great responsibility” portion of superhero-power-acquirement, Victoria and a bunch of henchmen — led by Scarab-bonding-hopeful Carapax (Raoul Max Trujillo) — show up at the family home to attempt to get the Scarab back.

Jaime’s battles are, sure, against racism — he’s told that delivery people use the back when he shows up at Kord headquarters for a job interview, Victoria rather snootily tells him to “ándale” when she fires him and refers to her head scientist as “Dr. Sanchez” (Harvey Guillen) despite his regular reminders that that’s not his name. But the battle Jaime fights is largely one to protect his family — who in turn aid him when he has to face off against Victoria, who has no problem killing him to get the Scarab back. The movie maybe has some wider “the community” ideas but those never really get fleshed out. Nor exactly do the personalities of his family — beyond Rudy’s role as comic relief and Nana’s surprise experience with anti-imperialist revolution. Jaime’s sister Milagro feels like she should be a bigger character than she is; she’s sort of positioned as his closest confidant within the family but the movie’s use of her just sort of peters out.

There are other elements of Blue Beetle that just feel messy — half finished or thrown in without a lot of thought. Jenny’s whole back story — her missing father who was himself a sort of secret-identity superhero — and her relationship with Jaime feels like a bunch of tasks (love interest, sequel setup, narrative shortcut to getting superhero tech to regular people) just shoved into a character who doesn’t really have a lot going on separate from Jaime’s storyline. Something about Sarandon’s portrayal of the villain feels not quite there — like the movie couldn’t decide if she was a cackling fairy tale witch or a more banal hyper-capitalist. The actress herself seems confused and I found a lot of her performance to just feel flat.

Also, it feels like an already overused dig to say that a movie’s dialogue sounds like it was written by A.I. — but wow did this movie’s dialogue feel like what would happen if you smooshed every superhero cliché and dialogue tic into a Blue Beetle mold. The trailer seemed to suggest that this movie came with some sharper humor and less plasticine human interaction, but I think this was largely just because it was giving us George Lopez’s best lines.

Blue Beetle ultimately felt like it had some good ideas and some nice framework for character relationships set up by Jaime’s family but it just wasn’t sure what to focus on. C+

Rated PG-13 for sequences of action and violence, language and some suggestive references, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Angel Manuel Soto with a screenplay by Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer, Blue Beetle is two hours and seven minutes long and is distributed in theaters by Warner Bros.

Featured photo: Blue Beetle.