Category: Film Reviews by Amy

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.

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.

Give yourself some scares with these new movies

By Amy Diaz
adiaz@hippopress.com

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

Robert McCall takes his polite butt-kicking to Italy in The Equalizer 3, a movie that I hope was both a solid paycheck and a nice vacation for everybody involved.

I mean, sure, horrible violence is a big part of this movie but also the Italian coast looks lovely.

This movie doesn’t mess around and jumps right in to McCall (Denzel Washington), mid-butt-kick, at a Sicilian vineyard estate owned by what we find out is some kind of criminal guy who walks onto the scene to find the grounds just littered with gorily dead henchmen. The criminal guy doesn’t fare so well either, though just as McCall is about to make a clean getaway, criminal guy’s young son shoots him in the back. McCall slowly bleeds out as he drives away from the vineyard, onto a ferry, off the ferry and toward, well, who knows, because he passes out. Local police officer Gio (Eugenio Mastrandrea), who later tells “Roberto” to call him Joe, takes Robert to local doctor Enzo (Remo Girone), who patches Robert up and lets him sleep it off in his lovely Italian apartment off a lovely central plaza.

(One might ask, is it weird that the people in this town who seem wary of other violent strangers immediately and warmly accept gun-shot stranger Robert? I mean, this is a movie about a nearly 69-year-old man who can waste literally any opponent of any age or strength level so why go pulling at threads.)

As Robert recovers, he finds himself enjoying the peace and serenity of this cliffside town — Altamonte — with its picturesque streets and its friendly people and its flirty barista (Gaia Scodellaro). When mafia types, led by Marco (Andrea Dodero), show up and start pushing people around, Robert hangs back, giving them glares, but not involving himself until they’ve burned down a business and harassed Joe and his family. Then Robert is compelled to politely explain — well, politely and with a little literal arm twisting — that he likes Altamonte and Marco should take his criminal activity elsewhere. Marco is compliant during the arm-twist-y, nerve-pokey part of the conversation but then later in the street he yells to his henchmen he’s going to murder that American blah blah blah — hope your affairs are in order, Marco.

As part of Robert’s peaceful Italian existence, he had called CIA agent Emma Collins (Dakota Fanning) to tell her about the drugs and money at the Sicilian vineyard. Though Robert didn’t tell her who he was, she used the information to uncover a smuggling operation that had obvious terrorist ties. The two threads of this story come together in Vincent (Andrea Scarduzio), Marco’s brother and the head of their crime family. Collins and her team come to Italy, which puts the squeeze on Vincent’s operation but he’s pretty focused on finding Robert and teaching the people of Altamonte a lesson about standing up to the mob.

Washington is solid here. He knows the work and executes it with precision. Even at under two hours, The Equalizer 3 isn’t without a little flab, mostly in the form of showing us Robert recuperating and underlining how charming the town is. But it doesn’t really get in the way of this movie’s purpose, which is letting Washington absolutely mow down bad guys. It’s the movie’s purpose and kinda all there is to the movie. And that’s fine. That’s why you’re here and the movie knows this and doesn’t try to do a whole lot more. B-

Rated R for strong bloody violence and some language (i.e. the reason you’re watching this movie), according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Antoine Fuqua with a screenplay by Richard Wenk, The Equalizer 3 is an hour and 49 minutes long and is distributed by Columbia Pictures in theaters and for rent or purchase on VOD.

Reptile (R)

Benicio Del Toro plays a police detective with a vexing murder to solve and an outdated kitchen to remodel in Reptile.

You can understand why he looks like a guy in need of a nap and a strong cup of coffee.

Tom (Del Toro) is called to the scene of murdered real estate agent Summer (Matilda Anna Ingrid Lutz). Boyfriend and fellow agent Will Grady (Justin Timberlake) is the one who found her and the natural initial suspect. But soon other suspects surface — Summer’s ex (Karl Glusman), a shifty guy who blames Will for his family’s financial ruin (Michael Pitt).

As mentioned, at the same time, Tom and his wife, Judy (Alicia Silverstone), are redoing their kitchen. They previously lived in Philadelphia, where Tom also worked as a police officer but got tangled up in scandal when his partner was found to be corrupt. Judy seems determined to help Tom find some peace in this new job and hometown.

Tom and Judy — Del Toro and Silverstone — are actually kind of a great couple, with Judy a willing and eager sounding board for Tom’s discussions of the case and considering of theories. I could imagine a procedural where she becomes his sort of unofficial partner in solving cases. That’s not exactly what we get here — we get just enough to see how entertaining something like that could be.

There are a lot of other layers to the way the crime and the movie unfolds and all of it is moderately successful but way too slow. Slice off a good half hour and you might have an energetic who-done-it, but as is, no amount of good performances or fun (if predictable) twists helps inject the kind of liveliness and tension this movie needs. C+

Rated R for language, violence and some nude images, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Grant Singer with a screenplay by Grant Singer & Benjamin Brewer & Benicio Del Toro, Reptile is two hours and 14 minutes long and distributed by Netflix, where it is streaming.

Featured photo: The Equalizer 3.

The pups of the Paw Patrol get superpowers and spiffy new outfits and vehicles — each sold separately— in the feature-length animated Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie.

You (or really, your kids) don’t need to be knowledgeable in Paw Patrol lore to get the movie’s premise: Human child Ryder (voice of Finn Lee-Epp) is the leader of a team of puppies who can talk and ride around in vehicles serving as their community’s emergency response. It is, as the movie itself says, weird but go with it. The pups are police dog Chase (voice of Christian Convery); fire dog Marshall (voice of Christian Corrao); construction bulldog Rubble (voice of Luxton Handspiker); recycling dog Rocky (voice of Callum Shoniker); water rescue dog Zuma (Nylan Parthipan); airplane-flying dog Skye (voice of Mckenna Grace), who was the first core-team girl dog and the pup who gets the backstory in this movie, and Liberty (voice of Marsai Martin), another girl dog who first showed up in the first movie. In the TV show, the pups live in Adventure Bay — in the movies, the action is in Adventure City, which is similar but with tall buildings.

The movie’s first big mission for the pups is putting out fire at a junkyard where someone has stolen a giant crane with a magnet on it. The pups save the day, of course, but the missing big magnet suggests further plots afoot. Victoria Vance (voice of Taraji P. Henson), a mad scientist, plans on using the magnet to help catch a meteor that she’s discovered has some sort of power source in it. Rather than pull the meteor to her, she ends up sending it right to the heart of Adventure City and right into the Paw Patrol’s Ultimate City Tower Playset, which retails for $109.99 at Target — I mean, the Paw Patrol’s headquarters, where it smashes through the tower and onto the city’s main street, sending out pulses of energy. The Patrol takes it to their Aircraft Carrier HQ, where Skye accidentally causes the meteor to crack open and reveal seven crystals. The crystals attach themselves to each pup’s pup tag and give each pup a different power, leading them to rename themselves the Mighty Pups.

Victoria Vance wanted those powers for herself. But before she can recover the crystals, she’s sent to jail for causing the meteor to crash into the city and finds herself sharing a cell with Mayor Humdinger (voice of Ron Pardo), the (former? who knows) mayor of Foggy Bottom and schemer whom the Paw Patrol are frequently having to foil.

An aside: so many questions from the scene at Adventure City’s prison, which is disturbingly large for this city where “giant magnet theft” is one of the top crimes. And yet, despite its size, a lady mad scientist is sharing a cell with a man and his cats (Mayor Humdinger has a team of non-talking kitties who are neither as skilled nor as interested in human direction as the Paw Patrol)? Doesn’t matter — we don’t stay long in Baby’s First Arkham Asylum as Humdinger and Vance team up to break out and steal the Paw Patrol’s crystals for themselves.

Along the way, we get some backstory on Skye, who is frustrated at being the smallest of the pups. And Liberty is tasked with leading a team of Junior Patrollers — three fuzzy younger puppies who want to be on the Paw Patrol some day. Their small-dog can-do spirit helps underline the Skye storyline, gives Liberty something to do and adds yet more toy-able characters.
As with all Paw Patrol content, there is no reason to subject yourself to this movie if you aren’t watching with kids. So the main question is probably what kids is this movie for? The movie is bigger, louder and more explosion-y than the TV show and has a few pup-in-peril scenes. Maybe for ages 4 and up, depending on your kid’s temperament (Common Sense Media gives it a 5+ rating) and ability to stick it out for 90 minutes in one location. There was a point, probably somewhere around the 50-minute-to-an-hour mark, where the theater where I saw this movie seemed to fill with fidgeting, walking around and light chatter — the “bathroom o’clock” that happens when a movie loses some of the kids.

Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie is actually similar to a run of “the pups get superpowers” stories on the TV show itself. It isn’t breaking any new ground but it is a perfectly fine, familiar adventure with these familiar characters. B-
Rated PG mild action/peril, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Cal Brunker with a screenplay by Cal Brunker and Bob Barlen, Paw Patrol: The Mighty Movie is an hour and 32 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by Paramount Pictures, where it is preceded by the colorful short Dora and the Fantastical Creatures.

Spy Kids: Armageddon (PG)
A new set of spy parents turn to their kids for help in defeating a bad guy in Spy Kids: Armageddon, a clever reboot/rebirth of the movie series.

As with previous generations of spy kids, siblings Tony (Connor Esterson) and Patty (Everly Carganilla) Tango-Torrez don’t know that parents Terrance Tango (Zachary Levi) and Nora Torrez (Gina Rodriguez) are spies. Tony’s biggest life concern is finding ways to foil his parents’ tech restrictions and get more time playing video games. Younger sister Patty doesn’t like all of his sneaking and cheating to get what he wants, though she does participate by, for example, making a map of all the floor squeaks in the hallway between the kids’ rooms and the family’s media room. This comes in handy after Tony wins (by cheating) a new game called Hyskor, which he downloads to the family’s network so he and Patty can play.

What he doesn’t realize is that his early access to the game is part of a plan by developer Rey Kingston (Billy Magnussen) to hack into the Tango-Torrez system and steal the Armageddon Code, a program that Terrance and Nora use in their OSS spy work to break into any network in the world. Kingston’s plan is to use the Armageddon Code to plant a virus in every computerized system in the world. Once in control, Kingston will force everybody to play Hyskor to do things like access their ATM or drive their smart car. The difference between Kingston and every other tech mogul trying to force their product on everybody all the time is that Kingston plans to use Hyskor to gamify teaching people to make better choices so that they will help heal the world. It’s an interesting take on the “villain was right” school of Wants to Rule the World motivations. And it’s an interesting component to Patty’s belief, as she learns about spying, that her parents’ kicky-punchy-explodey means of saving the day has long-term negative consequences and that truth and peace are a better approach to all situations than deception and butt-kicking.

Patty and Tony find out about their parents when Hyskor characters — an Aztec-giant-made-from-a-cardboard-box-looking robot called the Heck Knight and some minions with Aztec or conquistador stylings — come smashing into their home. Nora sends the kids off in a supercharged go-kart to a safe house, where they learn the rules of spying, get gadgets and a cool spy suit, and receive some spy training. Soon, the bad guys are also after Patty and Tony, who agree to help OSS, the organization their parents work for, to find their parents, who are being held at Kingston’s lair.

When I say the Heck Knight has a sort of cardboard-box-y look, I mean it in the best possible way. The movie, smartly, gives its bad guy an affinity for late 1990s video games, which allows for a certain amount of purposeful B-movie-ness in the way everything looks. It also sort of kid-ifies the scariness factor — like this is a monster-type thing we need to defeat but it’s not going to give anybody (anybody maybe 8 and up, at least) nightmares.
There is an overall good-heartedness to the action adventure here, which makes it solid family viewing. B

Rated PG for sequences of action, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Robert Rodriguez and written by Robert Rodriguez and his son Racer Rodriguez, Spy Kids: Armageddon is an hour and 37 minutes long and available on Netflix.

The Roald Dahl Collection
Wes Anderson has directed and adapted four Roald Dahl stories as short films streaming now on Netflix: The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (39 minutes) and three 17-minute films — The Swan, Poison and The Rat Catcher.

All of the films have a PG rating, but I probably wouldn’t show them to kids. They definitely lean in to the darker side of Dahl’s storytelling. The movies contain some combination of Benedict Cumberbatch, Dev Patel, Ben Kingsley, Richard Ayoade, Ralph Fiennes (playing, among other characters, Dahl himself) and Rupert Friend. As you might expect from the Dahl-Anderson combination, the movies are a delight (a dark delight, but still) of artful wordiness and artful physical design. Everything from the position of people and things in the frame to the tactile nature of all the items in the scene — a typewriter, a notebook, a cup of tea — is purposeful and grabs at least a little piece of your attention. In The Rat Catcher, Fiennes’ character (the titular rat catcher) even “holds” items like a tin of poison or a ferret, neither of which are actually there but the combination of narration (sometimes by Fiennes’ Dahl and sometimes by characters in a scene) and the way the actors work pantomime the missing item makes even these things feel like some of Anderson’s self-conscious props. The sets and backgrounds are often presented as pieces wheeled in or music box-like mechanisms that fold and unfold. It all gives the films a bit of a live theater vibe, which adds to both the oddness and the charm of the stories.

Of the short films — which are all darker in tone than The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar — I think The Rat Catcher was my favorite, with its creepy performance by Fiennes and its elements of stop-motion animation. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar likewise feels like Cumberbatch having fun with fourth-wall-breaking and his intensity. The movies all have the feel of someone saying, “Have at it, do your thing” to Anderson and him fully embracing that challenge. B

Rated PG for things like violent material, thematic elements, peril, language and smoking, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Wes Anderson, who also wrote the screenplays, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, The Rat Catcher, Poison and The Swan are streaming on Netflix.

Flora and Son (R)
A young woman and her teenage son find a way to talk to each other in Flora and Son, a movie from writer-director John Carney of Once fame.
And Begin Again. And Sing Street. And like those movies, Flora and Son uses music as a way out, a way for characters to unstick themselves from their turmoil and the parts of their lives that don’t work and find new ways to be. And, like those movies, Flora and Son is so much sweeter, funnier and more charming than expected.

Dublin-based Flora (Eve Hewson) is just a whisper over 30 but seems stuck in her young adulthood — perhaps because she had 14-year-old Max (Orén Kinlan) when she was a teenager. Max is perpetually in trouble and constantly angry at Flora. Flora is constantly angry at the world, easily has her temper triggered by Max and is still raw over the end of her relationship with Ian (Jack Reynor), Max’s dad, who is now living elsewhere with another woman. Flora tries to make up for forgetting Max’s birthday by getting him a gift — or rather by finding a guitar in the trash and paying to have it somewhat fixed. Max is not impressed — and over the course of the movie we learn that this may be in part because he already makes music, but largely dance music with a laptop. Flora decides on a lark to learn to play the guitar herself and finds online lessons from Jeff (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a musician living in the Los Angeles area. Their first lesson goes all kinds of yikes with Flora flirting with Jeff and eventually asking him to play for her without his shirt on. She apologizes and convinces him to try again, and over time their lessons create a bond between them as he not only teaches her guitar but they find themselves working on one of his songs together.

One day Flora comes home to Max blaring music and is incensed — until she realizes it’s his original dance track. Together, they flesh it out, with her adding vocals to go along with his rap. While they both seem hazy on life trajectory, over music they can collaborate.

Even that description doesn’t quite capture the pleasant surprise of a movie that Flora and Son is, with characters starting out as potentially one-dimensional figures — the party-girl mom, the aimless dad, the juvenile delinquent. But, thanks not only to the way the story develops but also to solid performances all around, they quickly become more complex than that — and music doesn’t “save” them in some fairy tale way but just kind of pushes them outside their ruts in life and in their relationships with each other. A

Rated R for language throughout, sexual references and brief drug use, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Written and directed by John Carney, Flora and Son is an hour and 37 minutes long and is distributed by Apple Films on Apple TV+ as well as in theaters. Want to check out other Carney works? 2007’s Once is available for rent and is currently streaming on the Roku channel. 2013’s Begin Again is on Netflix and available for rent. 2016’s Sing Street is on Tubi, Pluto TV and Vudu and is available for rent.

Dumb Money (R)
The internet’s hype of the GameStop stock results in huge paper fortunes for everyday investors in Dumb Money, a movie based on the book The Antisocial Network by Ben Mezrich. Which I kinda want to read now, because I feel like this story of “here is a weird thing that happened” is probably better-suited to nonfiction narrative where there isn’t some cinematic pressure to Say Something About The World We Live In.

After one of those “I’ll bet you wonder how I got here”-like flash forwards, the movie begins in the autumn of the Pandemic Era, with Keith Gill (Paul Dano) a financial analyst living in Brockton, Mass. When he isn’t working or taking care of his young daughter with wife Caroline (Shaliene Woodley), he, as a hobby, posts videos to a Reddit forum about investing. Calling himself Roaring Kitty (and also “Deep Value” with a word between Deep and Value but one day this movie will be edited for TV, so mostly the movie calls him Roaring Kitty), Keith shows his balance sheet and talks about why he likes specific stocks. Recently, he has been hot on GameStop, the video game store that he feels has been undervalued by Wall Street professionals. As he talks up GameStop, his viewers follow his lead, with their purchases pumping up the price. Eventually, GameStop becomes not just a tip several people are taking but a cause — because the stock is being short-sold by a hedge fund run by Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogen) and because the increase in stock price is giving ordinary investors, many of them investing via the Robinhood app, crazy returns, there is a “stick it to the rich” attitude about the stock. Buy and hold — or “HODL” or “diamond hands” etc. as The Internet says — even though the first to sell would be hugely rewarded. Because one middle-class guy in his basement and one rich guy in his Miami mansion are only so compelling, we also get a peek into the lives of several of those regular-folks investors: Marcus (Anthony Ramos), who works at a GameStop; Jenny (America Ferrera), a single mom nurse; college students Harmony (Talia Ryder) and Riri (Myha’la Herrold), who are six figures in debt because of their college loans. We also meet Keith’s brother Kevin (Pete Davidson), who is largely here for comic relief and to call Keith a nerd. On the rich bro side, we also meet even richer-than-Gabe hedge fund manager Ken Griffin (Nick Offerman) and Robinhood founders Baiju Bhatt (Rushi Kota) and Vlad Tenev (Sebastian Stan), who particularly gives off a tech-guy snake oil salesman vibe.

Dumb Money has good details about this very odd point in history — all the pandemic things, the emptiness of roads and public transportation, the mask etiquette, the way a claim of “essentialness” could help a business stay open (GameStop can open its doors to the public because it sells computer mice). It’s interesting, even at this short remove, to remember just how weird this all was and how hot emotions were running about so many things. And the details about how this odd financial flash mob played out are also interesting in the “huh, interesting” sense. But the movie seems to feel a need to Say A Thing about all of this in a way that this story doesn’t really lend itself to. This story doesn’t feature a triumphant ending with all the struggling people coming out on top. Some do, some don’t. Nor are the guys the movie paints as the predatory rich particularly punished. The facts of the ending very much reminded me of the end of Burn After Reading, when the J.K. Simmons character asks “what did we learn” with no particular answer other than not to do whatever it was they did again. It’s a shrug of an ending, which is also what happens here — with a lot of “no charges filed after an investigation”-type end title cards.

Dumb Money has the feel of one of those HBO TV movies where the point is more in the accurate recounting of events than the story told. And, like those movies, it will be perfectly fine to view some lazy day from your couch. B-

Rated R for pervasive language, sexual material (which I think is just this one particularly dumb “Margot Robie in a bathtub to make you pay attention to this financial discussion” scene) and drug use, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Craig Gillespie and written by Lauren Schuker Blum & Rebecca Angelo, based on the book, Dumb Money is an hour and 45 minutes long and is distributed by Sony Pictures Entertainment.

Featured photo: courtesy photo.

A retired-ish Hercule Poirot is asked to attend a Halloween seance and ends up at the scene of a murder in A Haunting in Venice, a surprisingly fun entry in Kenneth Branagh’s Poirot series.

It’s 1947 and Hercule (Branagh, who also directs) has retired to a lovely home on a canal in pre-cruise ship Venice, Italy. He’s hired Vitale (Riccardo Scamarcio), a former police officer bodyguard, whose whole job is to keep away the crowds that line up outside Poirot’s house hoping he will solve a mystery for them. Poirot has told him to turn away all comers, and the guard does until mystery writer Ariadne Oliver (Tina Fey) shows up. Sort of a less successful, American Agatha Christie type, Ariadne is an old friend of Hercule whose last few books have been meh-ly received and who is now investigating the work of a medium, Joyce Reynolds (Michelle Yeoh). The medium is obviously a fake but Ariadne can’t figure how she’s pulling the cons she is, with seances full of spookiness and facts that would seemingly be impossible for her to know. Help me spot her con, Ariadne asks Hercule, inviting him to a seance that night at a palazzo that is considered to be cursed. And, as it happens, that night is Halloween.

That palazzo, a one-time orphanage where legend has it that children were once left to die during a plague, is hosting a Halloween party for this current generation of war orphans. After the spooky puppet show and some bobbing for apples (which in 2023 — a bunch of kids putting their whole faces in the same pot of water? — is legitimately horrifying) a group gathers for a seance. Thus do we get our “everyone’s a suspect” murder mystery party:

• Desdemona (Emma Laird) and Nicholas (Ali Khan), Joyce Reynolds’ assistants.
• Rowena (Kelly Reilly), an opera singer and the home’s current owner. She has commissioned this seance because her daughter Alicia (Rowan Robinson) died months earlier and Mrs. Reynolds has told Rowena that her daughter is trying to reach her.
• Dr. Leslie Ferrier (Jamie Dornan), formerly the doctor of Rowena’s daughter who is still deeply disturbed from his experiences in the war.
• Dr. Leslie Ferrier (Jamie Dornan), formerly the doctor of Rowena’s daughter who is still deeply disturbed from his experiences in the war.
• Olga (Camille Cottin), Rowena’s longtime housekeeper and family caretaker.

und out the gathering. Rather quickly, Poirot spots some of Mrs. Reynolds’ fakery. But she doubles down, speaking as Alicia and claiming that someone there killed her. The seance ends — but soon it is Mrs. Reynolds who is found murdered and, in classic Hercule style, Poirot locks the gates to the palazzo and vows to find “ze killah” while a storm rages outside, preventing the police from getting to the house.

This is the first one of these Branagh Poirot endeavors that doesn’t feel like the Poirot mustache is doing 50 percent of the movie’s work. In the past, these things have felt like they were mostly mustache, stunt casting and production design — with everything else, including story and the creation of believably human characters, a very distant concern. Here, the movie conveys a nicely haunted setting with haunted characters even before its particular mystery starts. The world, the city and everyone here is coming out of the calamity that was World War II. That puts the movie on a different footing than the “rich people with secrets” setup in the past two movies. And the casting here while still a bit stunt-y (Fey, Yeoh) doesn’t get in the way. The other movies felt like flat Hercule Poirot cartoons and this movie feels like it has characters with a bit of depth. And Branagh tells his story with off-kilter camera angles and a generally disorienting visual approach to what we’re seeing and whose eyes were seeing it through. There is genuine dread. The movie doesn’t ever make you think it’s a ghost story per se but it does allow at times for a sense of the unsettlingly unexpected — maybe this house really is filled with the spirits of vengeance-seeking children or maybe our hero Poirot is experiencing a diminishment of his intellect, an even scarier prospect. This movie builds itself out of its juxtaposition of vibes — the sunny loveliness of Venice, the omnipresent darkness of the recently ended war. The result is a Haunting with a little heft. B

Rated PG-13 for some strong violence, disturbing images and thematic elements, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Kenneth Branagh with screenplay by Michael Green (based on the Agatha Christie novel Hallowe’en Party), A Haunting in Venice is a thoroughly enjoyable hour and 41 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by 20th Century Studios.

Featured photo: courtesy photo.