Category: Film Reviews by Amy

A newly minted 18-year-old is suddenly confronted with her 39-year-old self in My Old Ass, a very sweet coming-of-age comedy.

Elliot (Maisy Stella) has gone to the woods with her two best buddies to celebrate her birthday by taking mushrooms. Her friends seem to be seeing euphoric discos; Elliot is stuck sitting by the campfire complaining nothing is happening. And then Elliot (Aubrey Plaza) shows up. Old Elliot is bemused by Young Elliot, who is initially shocked but then wants to know, like, what stocks to buy so they can be rich in 20 years and what awesome things might happen to her. Old Elliot is wary of messing with the future too much but she does tell Young Elliot to spend more time with her family, to please wear her retainer and to stay away from anyone named Chad. Elliot doesn’t know a Chad — until she meets her dad’s summer worker on the family cranberry farm and he is, of course, Chad (Percy Hynes White).

Elliot, who has always been attracted to women, is shocked to learn she’s attracted to the potentially troublesome Chad. While dealing with this confusion, she is also approaching the big life change of heading to college. She has always been eager to leave her family’s farm and small town but now that it is a reality she finds herself full of conflicting emotions.

My Old Ass thinks a lot about last times — the last time you do a thing and whether you know when you’re doing it that it is the end of something. Some lasts sneak up on you — the last time Elliot’s mom (Maria Dizzia) rocked a toddler Elliot to sleep. Some, like the last times Elliot is suddenly encountering as she prepares to leave for college and have her “life start,” as she says, are clearly last times and she has to deal with all the bittersweetness of them while in the middle of them. My Old Ass approaches this — life transitions, what we miss and how we deal with it all — with genuine emotion and melancholy-tinged sweetness while also being funny and having just the right touch when it comes to the older-self-talks-to-younger-self aspect of the story. Great performances all around help sell the realness of this world, with special kudos to Stella. A

Rated R for language throughout, drug use and sexual material, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Written and directed by Megan Park, My Old Ass is an hour and 29 minutes long and distributed by Amazon MGM Studios. It is available for rent or purchase and is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

The Substance (R)

Demi Moore gives a very good, frequently quite funny performance in the goofy body horror The Substance.

Aging star Elisabeth Sparkle (Moore) attempts to recapture the “best version” of herself with an underground treatment called the Substance. The neon green serum does not lift and tighten — it pushes a whole new younger, flawless version of yourself out of you, violently, creating a seam down the back that this new person has to sew up. The operating rule of the Substance is seven days on, seven days off — the perfect Substance-created version of yourself gets to be for seven days while the older you sleeps. In seven days, you must switch back. Both versions are “you” and the younger version needs a “stabilizer” (fluid syringed out of the older version’s back) to continue existing.

Sue (Margaret Qualley), Elisabeth’s “best version,” is able to win a spot as the host of the exercise show Elisabeth was just fired from and is quickly getting spots on billboards. When Elisabeth reawakens she is both proud of what her alter has accomplished and, very quickly, jealous. Later Sue’s carelessness with the seven-day-switch rule has immediate and disturbing consequences for Elisabeth.

The Substance has lots of tight shots gleefully highlighting the grossness of the human body even before the movie’s final third, when what feels like a tidy dark comedy horror about beauty, age and media takes a hard left turn into total bonkers territory. Like so bonkers that the movie pushes past where you think it will stop, enters a new realm of absolute lunacy and then keeps going, so that actually by the end I kinda respected the whole crazy circus of gore the movie became. What holds it together throughout is Moore, who really does some solid work here with both the desperation Elisabeth feels (and that the Substance exacerbates) and the movie’s comedy. B+

Available for rent or purchase and streaming on Mubi.

The 4:30 Movie (R)

Kevin Smith makes his The Fabelmans with The 4:30 Movie, a nostalgia-rich tale of teenage friendship and love and ye old 1980s pre-stadium-seating movie theaters.

Ben David (Austin Zajur) gets up the courage to ask Melody Barnegat (Siena Agudong), a girl he likes but ghosted after he got nervous when they kissed, to the 4:30 screening of what sounds like a middling detective movie — their local theater in suburban New Jersey isn’t playing Poltergeist II, the current hot ticket. The screening will come in the middle of a day of movies Ben has planned with his friends, dork Belly (Reed Northup) and dork-who-wants-so-badly-to-seem-greaser-cool Burny (Nicholas Cirillo). Belly seems perfectly happy for Ben but Burny is clearly nervous about how it will change the friendship dynamic. In addition to friend friction, obstacles to Ben’s romantic movie moment include a power-drunk cineplex owner (Ken Jeong), assorted burnout theater employees and Ben’s and Melody’s parents.

From the lingering shots of the post-rotary push-button desk phone to jokes about the surely-finished-forever Star Wars trilogy, The 4:30 Movie is all about the gooey nostalgia for a very specific late 1980s time and place and for the impact it had on Smith’s life. Actually, just how Fabelmans-y this movie is becomes ever more apparent as the movie goes on, culminating in a fun little credits scene. This much Kevin Smith-itude might not be for everyone but I thoroughly enjoyed it. B

Available for rent or purchase.

Two women visit a tech billionare’s luxury private island retreat but worry there might be something sinister beneath all the gourmet meals and free-flowing Champagne in Blink Twice.

Even if you didn’t know this is a horror movie, isn’t “tech billionaire” the giveaway that something sinister is afoot?

Frida (Naomi Ackie) and her roommate Jess (Alia Shawkat) work as waiters at a high-end function thrown by Slater King (Channing Tatum), the billionaire, who we see Frida Googling earlier, watching a video of him apologizing for unspecified bad behavior. After their work is done at the event, Frida and Jess change into fancy attire and sneak in, posing as guests. They meet Slater himself when he helps Frida up after she takes a tumble in her high heels and Frida and Jess end up hanging out with Slater’s crew. Eventually, this starstruck duo joins Slater’s group on a trip to Slater’s island, where he has chickens and lives simply or some billionaire nonsense.

When they get there, along with other women Sarah (Adria Arjona), Camilla (Liz Caribel) and Heather (Trew Mullen), Frida and Jess discover that nicely appointed rooms featuring white bikinis and flowy white beach wear have been prepared for them. There is also a group of dudes who are part of the proceedings, including Haley Joel Osment playing a bitter divorcee and Christian Slater playing what I can only call “the Christian Slater character” a.k.a. the other tell that this island has sinister elements.

The most spoiler-y thing I’ll say about how this story unfolds is that it features characters (women, naturally) being reminded several times to smile. Even in circumstances that are not strictly “horror”-y, this reminder isn’t exactly benign. In this way, Blink Twice could be part of a super depressing double feature with Woman of the Hour in the way it comments on how women use smiles and giggles in a not-always-successful attempt to not get murdered.

Blink Twice is a truly disturbing horror movie — worth a watch but not a spooky Halloween fun entry in the genre. With a thankful swirl of dark comedy, it sets up an extreme situation that gets to some very (unfortunately) relatable fears about dynamics between men and women and between the owns-an-island rich and everyone else. Solid performances all around — Channing Tatum, already well-documented as good at serving up goofballness — does a good job giving something much darker. Ackie and Arjona make their characters believable and believably skilled (and not) when it counts. And then there’s Geena Davis, who at some level is the personification of Gen Z-and-younger views of second and third wave feminism I think? The disturbing implications about her character are just one of many of this movie’s smart choices. B

Rated R for strong violent content, sexual assault, drug use and language throughout, and some sexual references, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Zoë Kravitz and written by Zoë Kravitz and E.T. Feigenbaum, Blink Twice is an hour and 42 minutes long, distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures and available for rent or purchase.

Girl Haunts Boy (PG)

A 1920s adventure-seeking girl haunts a grief-enmeshed 2020s boy in the light-touch ghost-rom-com Girl Haunts Boy.

Teenager Bea (Peyton List, tough girl Tory of Cobra Kai) is hit by a car — and teaches us all the origins of the phrase “it’s a doozy” — after pocketing half of an ancient Egyptian ring-set she sees at a museum on a school trip in the 1920s. A hundred years later, teenager Cole (Michael Cimino, the Victor of Love, Victor) moves into Bea’s house with his recently widowed mother (Andrea Navedo) and finds Bea’s half of the ring. He puts it on and suddenly he can see and hear her and she has someone to talk to after decades alone.

Bea and Cole become friends with a side of Maybe Something More even though she can’t make physical contact with humans or leave the general vicinity of the ring. And bringing some extra helpings of com to this rom-com is Lydia (Phoebe Holden), also a high schooler, who has a YouTube channel about the supernatural and senses that Cole has something spooky happening with him.

Girl Haunts Boy feels very middle-of-the-road streaming-Christmas-movie in both its quality (of writing, of ghosty special effects) and its emotional depth — but that isn’t really a dig. This feels perfectly serviceable as teen romance programming and didn’t pain me, as a grown-up, to watch it either. This might be the best possible programming to watch with your young teen as it only requires maybe 30 percent tops of your attention to get the gist. You can goof around on your phone, they can goof around on their phone and technically you’re still doing an activity together. C

Rated PG for mild thematic elements and language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Emily Ting with a story by Dustin Ellis, based on the book by Cesar Vitale, Girl Haunts Boy is an hour and 40 minutes long and is streaming on Netflix.

Wolfs (R)

George Clooney and Brad Pitt have delightful irritated-buddy chemistry that feels like the whole reason for being for Wolfs, a lightweight crime comedy thing.

When a man — legally speaking, but more of a boy really — jumps off the bed, crashes into a bar cart and lies in a puddle of blood in the swank hotel room of the district attorney (Amy Ryan), she calls for help. An unnamed man, listed as [ ] in her phone, calls her back. George Clooney, as [ ], arrives all leather jacket and deep reassuring voice, ready to make it so she was never in the hotel room and the kid (Austin Abrams) had nothing to do with her. He is about to start his work when there is a knock at the door and another cool, reassuring man walks in — Brad Pitt — ready to help the district attorney out of her situation, which was viewed by hotel security cameras in the room by Pam (Frances McDormand). Eventually, Pam calls and tells the two men to work together to clean up the situation, and with deep annoyance and distrust, they begin to do so — cleaning out the hotel, giving the district attorney an alibi and a change of clothes, loading up the body.

Except, about that body, some mix of the drugs he’s on and the chaos of the situation meant they never really did a complete check of his pulse and the body is still a living, if unwell, person. And he is in possession of four large bricks of some kind of drug that these reluctant partners realize somebody is going to come looking for. Eventually these two are driving the kid around the city, with various underworld stops as they try to clean up the original mess without creating bigger problems with criminal types such as “The Albanians,” “The Croatian” and whoever the kid’s friend Diego is working for.

But really, this movie is about Clooney and Pitt, affectionately bickering and lightly picking on either other. Pitt’s character ribs Clooney’s for being old, Clooney’s treats Pitt’s as kind of a know-nothing. It’s cute, occasionally fun and very light. I don’t understand the economics of this kind of movie — big-deal stars in a big-deal-seeming movie that is released on a streamer most people probably have because it came with their phone — but the home viewing element does do this movie the favor that the hangout nature of things is enough. Their nitpick-y banter is charming, or at least charming enough, and if you like either or both of these actors this movie is a fine venue to hang out with them. B

Rate R for language throughout and some violent content, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Written and directed by Jon Watts, Wolfs is a breezy hour and 48 minutes long and is available on AppleTV+.

Caddo Lake (PG-13)

A swampy lake on the Texas-Louisiana border becomes a nexus of mystery in the twisty thriller Caddo Lake.

During drought, the Caddo Lake recedes to reveal more of the muddy marshy woods that surround it. Teenager Ellie (Eliza Scanlen) can still use the family’s motorboot to get around their small, lake-centered town, using it to get to a friend’s house to stay in the days after a fight with her mother (Lauren Ambrose). Though she and her mom aren’t on great terms, she still hangs out with Anna (Caroline Falk), her 8-year-old stepsister and the daughter of Ellie’s mom’s husband (Eric Lange), the family peacemaker.

Twenty-something Paris (Dylan O’Brien) works construction around the lake and seems to be a constant worry to his father (Sam Hemmings). Paris’ mother died in a car accident near the lake a few years earlier and Paris is obsessed with a mysterious medical condition she had that may have had something to do with the accident.

After a family gathering and another fight between Ellie and her mother, Ellie once again storms out of the family home. What she doesn’t realize is that Anna has followed her, taking a skiff, and the next day can’t be found anywhere. Meanwhile Paris is seeing and hearing odd things near the lake. Do the strange things he’s encountering have something to do with Anna’s disappearance?

The “what” of the “what’s going on” here isn’t terribly surprising but the movie unfolds its story with enough skill that I held on to the action. Paris and Ellie (and Scanlen and O’Brien) and their twin obsessive searches for the mystery of the lake make for compelling enough action. B-

Rated PG-13 for some disturbing/bloody images, thematic elements and brief strong language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Written and directed by Logan George and Celine Held, Caddo Lake is an hour and 39 minutes long and distributed by New Line Cinema. It is streaming on Max.

An aspiring actress in 1978 Los Angeles goes on The Dating Game where one of the bachelors is a serial killer in Woman of the Hour, a movie about real-life killer Rodney Alcala directed by and starring Anna Kendrick.

Cheryl (Kendrick) reluctantly accepts her agent’s offer to be a contestant on The Dating Game because it will get her seen and earn her a paycheck. Intercut with scenes of her preparing for the episode, we see scenes of Rodney Alcala (Daniel Zovatto) throughout the 1970s meeting and murdering women across the country. Sometimes it seems like he’s close to getting caught but — as you learn when you dive down the Wikipedia rabbit hole — aliases, moving and the general non-centralized nature of ye olde law enforcement means he is mostly free to kill again even after arrests and periods of incarceration.

The Dating Game episode itself isn’t terribly exciting — Rodney’s appearance on the show is just a weird footnote to his life. And a story line about a woman in the audience at the show who recognizes him doesn’t add the urgency that I suspect is the reason for being for the character. What the movie does do chillingly well is show all the times Cheryl — all the female characters really but especially Cheryl — has to negotiate what is happening in the moment between her and some man. Look too angry or act too brainy with some men, and it could lose her a job. Rebuff an advance and maybe she loses a friend or maybe the man in question becomes violent. It’s well done, the subtle shifts she tries to make to placate men whose anger could be dangerous — professionally, socially or even physically. The tension in this movie is all in whether the woman in any given scene can pull it off, can use self-effacing giggles and light humor to get away from someone she realizes could be dangerous. Can she pull it off and what happens when she has to acknowledge out in the open that she’s in danger — boo, there’s your depressingly real spooky season scare. B-

Rated R for language, violent content, some drug use and a sexual reference, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Anna Kendrick with a screenplay by Ian McDonald, Woman of the Hour is an hour and 35 minutes long and distributed on Netflix.

The Wild Robot (PG)

A robot gains heartbreaking emotions due to the “crushing obligation” of parenting a gosling in The Wild Robot, a beautiful and beautiful-looking animated movie based on the book by Peter Brown.

Roz (voice of Lupita Nyong’o), as the robot is eventually called, is a bipedal Siri-like entity meant to solve problems and do tasks for its human customers. After crashing onto a forest-covered island, Roz finds her only potential customers are animals whose language she eventually learns to speak but who mostly just think she is a death-bringing monster. And she does accidentally crush a nest housing a bird and most of its eggs, but one egg survives. After securing the egg from Fink (voice of Pedro Pascal), a fox looking for a meal, Roz also accidentally becomes the gosling’s maternal figure once the egg hatches. A possum mother, Pinktail (voice of Catherine O’Hara), who has seen it all with her regular litters of half a dozen or more, informs Roz that her task now is to feed the little chick daily, teach it how to swim and teach it to fly to prepare it for the fall migration. Fink takes pity on Roz/sees a way to get some easy food and a protector, and helps her find eats for the little goose and even helps her pick a name for him, Brightbill (voice of Kit Connor). They build a house and become something of a family, with Roz learning patience and how to teach Brightbill to swim and eventually how to fly. Along the way, Roz becomes increasingly attached to Brightbill, even though all her efforts are aimed at helping him live without her.

And though it isn’t particularly subtle, this portrayal of parenthood feels well-observed, blending the “crushing obligation” as Roz calls her new responsibility and heartbreaking preparations for independence with the moments of sweet cuddliness. Its jokes about parenthood are along this vein — and manage to be funny, for both kids and parents amazingly, without sliding into hokiness. This story of family and eventually community is told with some exceptional animation. It has a rich storybook look that plays up the beauty of its natural setting, with color and light helping to underline the emotions. A

Rated PG for action/peril and thematic elements, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Written and directed by Chris Sanders (based on the book by Peter Brown), The Wild Robot is an hour and 42 minutes long and distributed in theaters by Universal Studios. It is also available for rent or purchase.

It’s What’s Inside (R)

College buddies get together on the night before one gets married in It’s What’s Inside, a twisty dark-comedy thriller.

Longtime couple Shelby (Brittany O’Grady) and Cyrus (James Morosini), social media influencer Nikki (Alycia Debnam-Carey), punk-ish Brooke (Reina Hardesty), hippie-ish Maya (Nina Bloomgarden), goofball Dennis (Gavin Leatherwood) and groom Reuben (Devon Terrell) were all buddies in college and have stayed close-ish since. Forbes (David Thompson) was also part of that group but was kicked out of college after a raucous party that involved his high school-age sister Beatrice (Madison Davenport) getting drunk and aggressively hitting on Dennis. He went to California to become a tech bro but has returned to attend this party and brought with him one of his famous party games. As trailers suggest, the game involves a perception shift, one that would seem particularly risky in this group of people with past, current and unrequited romantic attachments, but then perhaps that is also the appeal.

It’s What’s Inside plays with the vibe, story beats and setting (the weird-art-filled mansion of Reuben’s late mother) of a horror movie but is solidly in thriller territory, injecting a sense of naughty humor into the movie inside of jump scares. The movie asks a little more of its cast than standard horror movie run-and-scream and I think they all deliver well enough, which is an impressive little accomplishment. B-

Rated R for pervasive language, sexual content, drug use and some violent content, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Written and directed by Greg Jardin, It’s What’s Inside is an hour and 44 minutes long and is streaming on Netflix.

House of Spoils (R)

Is chef Ariana DeBose going crazy because of toxic restaurant culture or because she’s trying to open a fine dining eatery in a haunted house? — is the central question of House of Spoils.

Specifically, the upstate New York-or-something house where she is living and restauranting is perhaps haunted by witches, including the ghost of the witch who used to own the property and tended a witchy garden. A witchy garden with some good greens, as DeBose’s character, who I think is just called Chef, discovers. She also discovers that, as she says, some garden items are tasty friends and some are foe that send her to the bathroom with digestive troubles. This new restaurant’s owner, Andres (Arian Moayed), grows increasingly worried about the crazy eyes DeBose is developing, especially since the last chef he tried to get to open the restaurant went bananas and ran off into the forest. But the more DeBose borrows from the witch’s garden, the more culinary success she has — though is she going to nurture people with earthy greens and roots or is she about to witch-poison all her diners?

Along the way, she is awful to her sous chef, Lucia (Barbie Ferreira), saying things as horrible and sexist as any male chef would say even though DeBose’s chef has also experienced the pressures of that kind of kitchen under her previous famous-chef boss. She is also tormented by rabbits (as many a gardener is) and by an infestation of sometimes real, sometimes not, bugs, and is maybe being followed by the witch’s ghost and also maybe just facing some really unrealistic expectations for her food. Certainly all of the fancypants high-end micro-green-placed-with-tweezers dishes are pretty unappetizing-looking, perhaps a commentary on food so elevated it’s lost all food qualities of nourishment and comfort.

Probably because I expected basically nothing of House of Spoils, I had fun with it. Some of the Points We’re Making are a little more spelled out than they need to be, but overall the movie has a light touch with its mix of horror and psychological suspense, all covered in flakes of a dark sense of humor. DeBose does a good job of riding the line between exacting, unjustifiably harsh and exhaustion-borne “going a little bit nuts.” I enjoy how, not unlike the holiday movie arms race between various streamers, this burst of October spooky-tinged movies pushes the ideas of horror off into weird and fun directions. B

Rated R for language and some violent content, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Written and directed by Bridget Savage Cole & Danielle Krudy, House of Spoils is an hour and 41 minutes long and streaming on Amazon Prime Video.

The town of Jerusalem’s Lot, Maine, suddenly has a surprisingly high mortality rate in Salem’s Lot, a straight down the middle horror story based on the Stephen King novel.

Late 20something, early 30something author Ben Mears (Lewis Pullman) returns to the small town of Jersusalem’s Lot in 1975. He grew up in The Lot until age 9 when his parents died in a car accident. He has returned to research a book on something — the town, his parents’ death, the creepy house at the top of the hill? Unclear. What we do learn while he scrolls through microfiche at the town library is that Susan (Makenzie Leigh), a local girl who went to college in Boston but came back to help out her family, is way more interested in Ben than in whatever local weenie her mom is trying to set her up with. Susan yells over to Ben that she’ll be at the drive-in that night, indirectly asking him to hang out with her, which he does.

Also new in town is Mark (Jordan Preston Carter), an elementary schooler who is basically just a Chekov’s gun of skills and knowledge — he’s a fan of classic monster movie monsters, likes to build things, is knowledgeable about Harry Houdini and escape tricks.

Meanwhile, Mark’s new school buddies, brothers Danny (Nicholas Crovetti) and Ralphie (Cade Woodward), are walking home when they run in to another new resident, R.T. Straker (Pilou Asbæk), the co-owner of an antiques shop who has a funny accent and wears odd old-timey clothes. The boys super wisely decline Straker’s offer of a ride but he looks after them menacingly.

Straker has a giant heavy crate shipped to him from Europe and pays some men to take it to the big creepy house on the top of the hill he has recently purchased. The crate is filled with dirt, the men discover, after a slat at the bottom cracks. They run off, Ralphie goes missing shortly thereafter, Danny gets sick after going to look for Ralphie in the middle of the night, another person gets sick after working in the graveyard at night. What could be causing all of this trouble? Is it the world gone mad, as the given-up sheriff (William Sadler) and the depressed, alcoholic priest (John Benjamin Hickey) think? Is it an aggressive form of anemia, as Dr. Cody (Alfre Woodard) diagnoses?

Naw. It’s vampires.

Matt Burke (Bill Camp) figures out “vampires” a few minutes into talking with one “sick” acquaintance and then tells everybody it’s vampires and then everybody is pretty all in on the vampires idea, especially after Mark shows up at the church with a bag of stakes matter-of-factly filling a thermos with holy water in preparation for doing battle. This movie is not, for the most part, jokey-joke funny but it does have a lightness and oftentimes a real brevity in going from “what’s happening” to “vampires.” And we get, at least for a while, a fun Scooby gang of Matt, Mark, Susan, Dr. Cody, the priest and Ben trying to fight the vampires. Individually no particular character is blowing anybody away with their charisma, but they form a good monster fighting team, not all of whom make it, thus providing (ha) stakes.B-

Rated R for bloody violence and language, according to the MPA at filmratings.com. Written and directed by Gary Dauberman and based on the Stephen King novel of the same name, Salem’s Lot is an hour and 54 minutes long and is distributed on Max.

Hold Your Breath (R)

Sarah Paulson is a mother losing her mind in Depression/Dust Bowl-era Oklahoma in the Hulu horror movie Hold Your Breath.

Margaret (Paulson) is trying to keep her daughters Rose (Amiah Miller) and Ollie (Alona Jane Robbins) alive on their dusty, barren farm, where they have barely enough hay to keep the cow giving milk. Her husband has left to work on a construction project and a younger daughter has died from scarlet fever. Now it is the dust that could kill Margaret’s girls — she shoves fabric in the cracks in her house and makes the girls wear masks when outside but the dust still makes its way in.

The dust and something else? Rose tells Ollie a story about “The Grey Man” who killed his family and then himself died in the flames, becoming dust. If you don’t wear a mask, you might breathe him in and do terrible things — is the story’s warning. Ollie asks a question about Margaret having breathed in the Grey Man — no, Rose tells her, Mommy was just a little off from not sleeping and grief over their baby sister. Thus do we know that Margaret isn’t entirely stable and that the real horrors of their situation easily blend with stories.

Hold Your Breath is largely about what disaster and grief can do to people, how real dangers can become outsized and how reality can become hard to discern. All of this makes for some very solid, relatable horror where you don’t need magical boogeymen to be terrified. B+

Rated R for violence/disturbing images, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Karrie Crouse and Willaim Joines, with a screenplay by Karrie Crouse, Hold Your Breath is an hour and 34 minutes long and distributed by Searchlight. It is streaming on Hulu.

Joaquin Phoenix returns as the scrawny Arthur Fleck, a sad man who set Gotham aflame with his violent chaos as Joker a few years earlier, in Joker: Folie à Deux, a movie where Lady Gaga is also present.

Apparently the time between the events of Joker and now has, in the world of the films, been spent with the authorities of Gotham — such as assistant district attorney Harvey Dent (Harry Lawtey) — trying to figure out if Arthur is sane enough to stand trial. Arthur’s lawyer, Maryanne Stewart (Catherine Keener), wants to argue that as a result of childhood abuse Arthur has split personalities and the “Joker” is a protective alter. The Joker killed people but Arthur isn’t criminally responsible, is her argument. A somewhat zonked out Arthur doesn’t seem to have an opinion on this or anything really until a chance meeting with Lee — Harleen Quinzel (Lady Gaga) — an inmate at the more mental-health-focused side of Arkham. He is instantly enamored with her, and she with him, and they engage in a romance of dream-sequence musical numbers and occasional real-life (maybe) meetings that lead to Lee being the queen fan of Joker’s supportive public. With Lee’s encouragement, Arthur lets the Joker come out more — but he isn’t ultimately any more comfortable as the poster boy for societal discontent than he is as the damaged Arthur.

This movie doesn’t seem to fully invest itself in any one thing. The Lee/Arthur relationship feels like it could be something, but it deflates before we really get a whole lot of “Deux” out of their “Folie à Deux.” I could live with how little we get of Harleen and her personality and motivations if the movie did something interesting with her in Arthur’s story, but it doesn’t.

I also wondered for a while if the movie was trying to subvert the expectations of the last movie. The last movie was all modern red-pill-internet bleakness in a fancy “gritty 1970s film” wrapping; there were times when I wondered if this movie was trying to say “all that stuff you thought was so cool was actually really horrible and sad.” But the movie seems only half in with this idea.

While the movie tells us that Lee loves the fame aspect of it all, we don’t really see that either. Most of the media about Arthur and his crimes — a book, a TV movie — feels very off screen. We never know what, if any, role Lee has in the Joker mythology. There’s a mention of her doing a lot of interviews. Is she just a Joker cheerleader, an entertaining focal point for the Joker-loving malcontents in her own right or is she, like, the Yoko of his legend?

And if the movie is trying to Say Something about crime as entertainment or how we filter our stories through the beats of movies, it doesn’t really stay with that either. I didn’t love the first Joker, but I understood the story it was telling and how it wanted to tell it. Here I feel like the movie had its centerpieces — Joker but sad! Lady Gaga! Surprise, it’s a musical, sort of! — but didn’t know how to construct a story around those. I feel like there is an interesting story here about the After of a burst of societal anger and violence. What becomes of the leader, what becomes of his followers when the leader doesn’t live up to their ideal, what fills the vacuum left by the original focal point of all that energy? But there’s also a lot of unnecessary junk getting in the way of that.

Which brings us to this movie’s final moments. After what felt like a forever of watching the movie search for a purpose for its visuals of Gaga in Harley Quinn makeup or the duo on a ’70s-style variety show — elements that feel like they haven’t yet made the jump from “idea board” to “part of the story” — we get to the very end when the movie bows out with a “ha made you look” beat of self-satisfied cleverness that made me think “shut up, movie.” Well, things other than “shut up” but “shut up” is the only one that can be printed in a newspaper. This is maybe this sequel’s greatest failing — when it’s not boring, it’s needlessly annoying. C-

(I thought about going lower but there isn’t even an “interesting failure” aspect about this movie. It’s solidly in forgettable “meh” territory. Its most lasting impact is probably forcing me to learn how to make the “à” character — alt 0224, my fellow character map aficionados.)

Rated R for some strong violence, language throughout, some sexuality, and brief full nudity, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Todd Phillips with a screenplay by Scott Silver & Todd Phillips, Joker: Folie à Deux is two hours and 18 minutes long and distributed in theaters by Warner Bros.