Category: Film Reviews by Amy

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.

The pizza-loving turtles dream of a Ferris Bueller-like high school experience and hope heroics that go viral will help them get it in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, a delightful animated movie.

Delightful movie and delightfully animated — Mutant Mayhem has a sketchbook visual style that can give us the individual scribbles coloring in a moon and can give the turtles the kind of heft that at times almost looks claylike. It’s a nice nod to the characters and their (Dover, N.H.!) comic book beginnings and it makes for a visual experience with a real stickers-on-a-boom-box, skateboard-art energy that fits with the urban setting of the story. And it’s nice that this elevated approach to animation is part of a very kid-friendly tale.

If you’ve seen any TMNT property before, you know the basics: Ooze from a lab made it into the sewers and turned 20-something rat Splinter (voice of Jackie Chan) and baby turtles Leonardo (voice of Nicolas Cantu), Donatello (voice of Micah Abbey), Michelangelo (voice of Shamon Brown Jr.) and Raphael (voice of Brady Noon) into mutants that eventually grow big, can talk and, when Splinter decides they need to learn to defend themselves, learn martial arts. Now teenagers, the turtles live with Splinter, their dad, in the sewer, where he says they must stay to be safe from humanity. But the turtles take lots of side trips on their shopping runs for toilet paper and Cool Ranch Doritos, gazing longingly at a movie-in-the-park screening of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and wishing they too could go to high school.

When an errant, turtle-thrown ninja star hits the helmet of human teen April O’Neil (voice of Ayo Edebiri), the turtles find themselves going after her scooter, which was stolen while she was distracted with yelling at them. April finally gets a good look at the turtles and, after a bit of screaming, the gang chats over pepperoni pizza. The turtles are shocked that a human accepts them; April points out that she’s probably more inclined to see beyond their exterior weirdness because they helped her get her scooter back. Thus begins a plan: April is trying to track down the villain Superfly (voice of Ice Cube), whose series of crimes have led to a curfew and a canceling of her school’s prom. If the turtles help her take down this criminal and she records it, they will all become heroes and the turtles will find the danke schoen of their dreams — at least, this is the plan.

Turns out Superfly is a literal fly — a mutant housefly at the head of a gang of mutants (bat, frog, rhino, cockroach, Seth Rogen-voiced warthog, etc.) from the same lab that made the turtles’ ooze. This makes the turtles’ job to defeat the bad guys and go viral saving the day a lot more complicated than they’d planned.

Superfly and Splinter both have a deep distrust of humanity and a desire to keep their found families safe — this element adds just enough depth to the overall story to give older audience members something to hang on to (in addition to the previously mentioned truly delightful animation). But overall this movie feels very kid-accessible, in the best way. April O’Neil isn’t a polished newsperson — she’s a writer for her high school paper with a sole unfortunate stint on her school’s TV network that she’s trying to live down. She has her own insecurities and awkwardness but she can also execute a good “eye roll, teenage boys” when the turtles are getting a little too high on their own supposed crime-fighting awesomeness. And the turtles do have a very young teenagerness to them, all full of bravado, big if vague dreams, emotions they don’t quite have a handle on and general kid-like goofiness. Yes, their adventures do eventually take them to a superhero-standard “save the city” place but a lot of their goals involve basic acceptance — Michaelangelo’s desire to join the high school comedy improv club, for example.

Some of the mutant-on-mutant violence might be scary for some of the youngest kids — as might some of the human-on-mutant violence (there is a secondary team of villains who are humans and led by a character voiced by Maya Rudolph). But my mid-elementary-school-age-and-up kids seemed to get into this movie’s bouncy humor and action, lots of big laughs from them and plenty of laughs from the adults in the audience. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem has an overall enjoyable scrappy sensibility. B+

Rated PG for sequences of violence and action, language and impolite material, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Jeff Rowe and Kyler Spears with a screenplay by Seth Rogen & Evan Goldberg & Jeff Rowe and Dan Hernandez & Benji Samit, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is an hour and 39 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by Paramount Pictures.

Featured photo: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem.

LaKeith Stanfield, Rosario Dawson, Owen Wilson and Tiffany Haddish all board Haunted Mansion, a particularly strong ride-to-movie translation.

This is basically the ride — all wacky paintings and expanding rooms and floating candelabras — with the story serving as the car on a track that takes us from the murderous ghost bride to the head (Jamie Lee Curtis) in the crystal ball.

Doctor Gabbie (Dawson) and her son Travis (Chase W. Dillon) move to an old house outside of New Orleans to make a fresh start after some unspecified difficulty in New York. Sure, the house is a fixer-way-upper, but, Gabbie tries to reassure Travis as spooky things happen behind her, a vanilla-scented Yankee Candle and a little work and this mansion will feel like home. And then a spooky thing appears behind Travis and Gabbie says oh heck no, grabs him and runs out of the house.

When Father Kent (Wilson), an alleged priest with a real “surfside cabana bartender” vibe (i.e. an Owen Wilson vibe) seeks out New Orleans tour guide Ben (Stanfield), we pretty quickly figure out that just running out of the house did not solve Travis and Gabbie’s issues with ghosts. Before he was the depressed leader of a historic walking tour, Ben was an astrophysicist working on a camera that could capture “ghost particles,” which for the purposes of this movie pretty much just means “ghosts.” Kent offers Ben a nice payday to go to Gabbie’s house and photograph the spooky stuff floating through her would-be bed and breakfast. Ben thinks this whole endeavor is goofy — so goofy that he goes ahead with it, making “click” noises at the appropriate time, even though his camera is out of batteries — but he shows up and takes the money. And then he leaves and puts it all behind him.

So he thinks.

As Gabbie and Father Kent know and Ben quickly learns, the house’s ghosts are, as Gabbie describes, like bedbugs — once you step in the house they cling to you and you can’t get rid of them. Ben, having actually captured a photo of a ghost in his own living room, decides to take photographing them seriously. Eventually psychic medium Harriet (Haddish) and historian Bruce (Danny DeVito) also end up at the house, making for a Scooby Gang that decides to investigate the house’s history in an attempt to rid it of its most malevolent of spirits.

Along the way, there’s some stuff about grief, there are some indications that some ghosts are more well-intentioned than others and there are a fair amount of “ghosts do the darnedest things” visual gags that are more ghosty visual cleverness and/or jump scares than actual horrors. Which is probably why my 11-year-old was adequately entertained and not scared by the movie (though she wasn’t a fan of the more “feelings”-centered moments).

“Adequately entertaining” is probably the most accurate way to describe this movie overall. It is staffed with talented people (including writer Katie Dippold, who also did 2013’s buddy comedy The Heat and 2016’s “Ghostbusters but ladies” — which I enjoyed and which this feels a lot like, tonally). Stanfield brings way more to this movie than it probably deserves but he does help make this movie overall not a chore to watch. Haddish and DeVito sort of sprinkle on their individual brands of funny — the movie isn’t a laugh riot but no one element becomes so “Johnny Depp in later Pirates of the Caribbean movies” that it’s tiresome. It’s light, enough fun to complement the air conditioning that would be the main reason to see this in a theater and many-ages enough that you could entertain a tweens-and-up audience. B-

Rated PG-13 for some thematic elements and scary action, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Justin Simien with a screenplay by Katie Dippold, Haunted Mansion is two hours and two minutes long and distributed in theaters by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.

Featured photo: Haunted Mansion.

The blond, permanently tip-toed Stereotypical Barbie visits the decidedly un-pink human Real World of Los Angeles in Barbie, another win for director and co-writer Greta Gerwig.

In Barbieland, pink — particularly that very specific Barbie hot-pink — abounds, with a pink wardrobe ready for Barbie (Margot Robbie) in her Dream House closet at the start of every day, perfect to wear while driving around in her pink car, waving to her other friends named Barbie, a bunch of Kens and the occasional one-off, like Ken’s skittish friend Allan (Michael Cera) or the discontinued pregnant Midge (Emerald Fennell). Except for our heroine, the Barbies of Barbieland have empowering jobs — President Barbie (Issa Rae), Scientist Barbie (Emma Mackey), Writer Barbie (Alexandra Shipp), Lawyer Barbie (Sharon Rooney), a whole slate of Barbie Supreme Court justices, a mermaid (Dua Lipa) — which, as the narrator (Helen Mirren, who is just chef’s kiss with every line delivery) informs us has helped the girls and women of the Real World reach their full feminist potential and solved all the problems of sexism forever. The Kens of Barbieland are all just sorta Ken — Ken’s job is “Beach” and there seem to be opposing Ken cliques, of which Ken (Ryan Gosling), who is in love with Barbie (Robbie), and Ken (Simu Liu), seem to be the leaders. Gosling’s Ken is particularly desperate for Barbie’s affection and notice. Whereas Barbie finds Ken to be a kind of unnecessary accessory.

All the Barbie empowerment doesn’t apparently come with a lot of introspection, because when Barbie suddenly has thoughts of death, she doesn’t know what to do with them. The thoughts of death seem to quickly metastasize into other problems, like morning breath, cellulite and, most horrifying of all, flat feet. Barbie goes to see Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon), a Barbie permanently in the splits with a “kid just learning to use scissors” hair cut, to get advice on what to do. Weird Barbie tells Barbie that the answer is to find the girl who is playing with her and whose sadness must be leaking to Barbie’s subconscious. With the help of this girl and Mattel, Barbie will be able to fix the ruptured membrane between Real World and Barbieland. To accomplish this, Barbie will have to go to the Real World, a trip that involves several wardrobe and Barbie vehicle changes. Because he doesn’t seem sure he can exist without her, Ken tags along.

Most of this plot is revealed in the trailer and it’s fun to go in not knowing a whole lot more. I’ll give these extra notes: In the Real World, Barbie meets Gloria (America Ferrera) and her sullen middle-school-ish daughter Sasha (Ariana Greenblatt) and Ken discovers the Patriarchy, which may or may not have something to do with horses and Sylvester Stallone in fur coats.

I came into this movie a hardcore Greta Gerwig fan; I think her Lady Bird and Little Women are basically perfect movies. But I’d argue as much as this predisposed me to like this movie, I was also worried that this wouldn’t be up to that Gerwig standard.

Well, it is and I loved it — loved it so much I seriously considered watching it again immediately. Loved it so much I looked up the price of the official Gloria doll (it’s $50, which would be worth it if I could figure out how to send it back in time to my 9-year-old self). Loved it in a way that is both un-ironic and deeply appreciative of how wall-to-wall weird this movie is. Barbie is deliciously weird, even in its genuine emotional moments, right up until its very last second. And I loved, like those other Gerwig movies, that this movie tells a story of a mother-daughter relationship, this time going surprisingly deep in a short amount of screentime on the mother’s perspective.

If I can start making some Oscar picks now: Of course I choose Gerwig to get a director nod and a screenplay nod along with her partner (in this screenplay and in life) Noah Baumbach. I also put forth Ferrera, for a good all-around performance plus maybe two scenes that had me worrying I was about to cry in a packed movie theater. (I also did a fair amount of big out-loud guffaw laughing.)

And for Best Actor let me suggest Gosling, who is just absolutely going for it with his needy, addled, emotional Ken. He is so thoroughly game for anything in this role and absolutely appears to be having a ball.

Robbie by comparison can at times seem flatter than her supporting characters — but I think this is intentional and it ultimately pays off with what the movie is trying to do with her character. She’s able to bring genuine emotion and humanity to her character while still having a doll-like rigidity (both physically and in her thinking), at least for a while.

In smaller roles, Mirren is note perfect, Rhea Perlman has a great part that is surprisingly touching and Will Ferrell as the head of Mattel takes his The Lego Movie character Lord Business and pushes it to an even weirder place.

The movie also looks amazing, both in its set design and in the way the characters move through Barbie Land. Similar to how the Lego movies use the visuals of the Lego toys, their movements and their accessories to give layers to the jokes and the way the world is built, this movie uses Barbie’s physicality, the elements of her dream houses and fashions and fun little notes about how kids play Barbies both for humor and to build its characters. It’s fun but also smart and it makes you appreciate the work that went in to this movie while still making it look seamless. A+

Rated PG-13 for suggestive references and brief language, according to the MPA at filmratings.com. Directed by Greta Gerwig with a screenplay by Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, Barbie is an hour and 54 minutes long and distributed in theaters by Warner Bros.

Oppenheimer (R)

Cillian Murphy is the titular physicist who becomes the “father of the atomic bomb” in Oppenheimer, a three-hour biopic and meditation on nuclear weapons from Christopher Nolan.

The movie loops around, primarily in three time frames: J. Robert Oppenheimer (Murphy) as he builds his career as a noted physicist, pushing the field into new realms of theoretical physics, and becomes the head of the U.S. efforts to build an atomic bomb; Oppenheimer in the early 1950s facing a hearing to keep his Atomic Energy Commission security clearance, and Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.), a professional opponent of Oppenheimer’s in the post-war years, facing his own U.S. Senate confirmation hearing.

In the security hearing, Oppenheimer faces criticisms for some of his pre-war connections to communist party groups, including his affair with Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), a party member he dated before and during his marriage to Kitty (Emily Blunt), who was herself married to someone else when their relationship started. In those 1930s scenes, we also see Oppenheimer and other scientists follow the news about German scientists and their experiments with nuclear fission. When the U.S. enters World War II and decides to build its own atomic weapons program, Lt. General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) charges Oppenheimer with running the overall program and setting up the Los Alamos, New Mexico, middle-of-nowhere lab/makeshift town where all of the country’s efforts to build the weapon will converge and where, out in the desert, the weapon can eventually be tested. Scientists will need to be in New Mexico for the duration, and the existence of a town allows them to bring their children and wives, many of whom also have scientific backgrounds.

For all that the scientists are sort of dazzled by the puzzle of building an atomic bomb, it’s really the “we have to make one before the Nazis do” motivation that gets many of the scientists past their unease with the weapons. Oppenheimer is driven by both the science and the Nazi-beating but beyond that his feelings about the weapons he’s building seem more complicated.

In the Strauss hearing scenes, we see how Strauss’ attempts to torpedo Oppenheimer’s influence in the scientific community and the U.S. nuclear weapons program (where Oppenheimer seems to want to go slower than the ever-one-upping of the arms race) after the war lead to his own political problems. Downey gives a solid performance here but I’m not entirely sure why this layer was added. In addition to a needless padding of the runtime, it adds an element of earnestness and naiveté about politics that feels sorta goofy in this movie that already has a fair amount of “oh no, is our horrible invention going to be horrible for humanity?” silliness. On the one hand, the movie paints a fairly complex picture of a time (the 1930s) when pro-labor efforts, the fight against fascism in Spain, domestic social issues and the American communist party slosh around together, and when women play this sort of one-step-forward three-steps-back role, with highly educated women chafing against the homemaker role marriage seems to shove them in. And we see bits of scientists wrestling with the idea that developing the atomic bomb is an existential necessity (especially the scientists who are refugees of Nazi aggression) but also an existential threat.

But then we get elements that feel more black-and-white (sometimes literally going to black-and-white footage) and take us to, like, West Wing: Mid-Century and seem to suggest that these people who have been through a depression, international political upheaval, war and into the McCarthy era are unaware that cynicism, pettiness or moral compromise exist in politics.

All that said, Murphy gives a wonderfully agonized performance as an Oppenheimer who is self-aware and yet also self-deluding. He does a good job of showing us a man who is permanently shaken by what he’s done.

And the movie looks great — the explosions it makes so much of in the trailers are actually not as impressive as the vastness of the New Mexico desert and the way it shows us Los Alamos popping up from nothing. That part of the story — the pre-war scientific and political landscape through the Trinity test — is really well-drawn, with lots of texture and details you want to dig in to (like the women who get a chance to work in Los Alamos because they already have security clearances via their husbands, or the small professional world of the pre-war physicist community and their various alignments to the U.S./U.K., the Nazis or the Soviets).

Oppenheimer could have benefited from a cleaner, more streamlined approach to its story but it is nevertheless packed with good performances and standout bits of story. B+

Rated R for some sexuality, nudity and language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Christopher Nolan with a screenplay by Christopher Nolan (based on the book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin), Oppenheimer is three hours long and is distributed in theaters by Universal Studios.

Featured photo: Barbie.

Four 20-somethings road trip through China in the soft-hearted comedy Joy Ride.

Attorney Audrey (Ashley Park) and artist Lolo (Sherry Cola) have been best friends ever since Audrey’s adoptive parents (Annie Mumolo, David Denman) excitedly approached Lolo’s parents (Debbie Fan, Kenneth Liu) to ask if the girls — the only two Asian girls in their hometown of White Hills — could play together. Thus began a best friendship that lasted through elementary and high school and well after college.

Audrey is up for a big promotion at work, one that hinges on her closing a deal with a Chinese company. She speaks conversational Mandarin, she tells her boss (Timothy Simons) — but really this woman raised by American parents doesn’t speak Chinese. Though Lolo’s genitalia-based art isn’t the image Audrey wants to project professionally, she asks Lolo, a truly fluent Chinese speaker, to join her when she travels to China to act as a translator for Audrey’s meetings. Lolo’s cousin Deadeye (Sabrina Wu), an awkward K-pop megafan, unexpectedly tags along. In China, Kat (Stephanie Hsu), Audrey’s college roommate who has become a big star of Chinese TV, also joins the group.

The foursome spends a night drinking with Chao (Ronny Chieng), the man Audrey is trying to close a deal with. He wants to know more about Audrey and her ties to China. Lolo lies and says Audrey is close with her Chinese birth mom. This leads the gang on a frantic quest to find Audrey’s birth mother, which sends them to a more rural region of China and through a series of unexpected detours due in part to an American drug dealer and a Chinese basketball team stacked with hotties.

For a movie with some impressively explicit sex scenes, Joy Ride is cute and huggable in its whole friendship vibe. Lolo and Kat have a frenemy relationship as dueling best friends of Audrey, who is wound tight and feels that she doesn’t fit in anywhere (not white like “everybody else” in their American home town but not connected to her Chinese heritage like Lolo and Kat). Deadeye is eager to find friendships IRL, having previously only made good buddies via K-pop fan sites. The various discomforts of the group seem like the discomfort of their relative youth, trying to figure out who they each are and what they want. It’s all ultimately very sweet, and while I did at times feel like some of the jokes could use another pass to make their comedy and their observations sharper, I enjoyed spending time with these characters. Park may be the central character but the excellent Hsu and Cola are the standouts.

Joy Ride isn’t perfect but it is a light and fun bit of friendship, road trip comedy. B

Rated R for strong and crude (and unapologetic! and totally giddy!) sexual content, language throughout, drug content and brief graphic nudity, according to the MPA on filmratings.com (where you can see a crude-but-cute alternate title for this movie). Directed by Adele Lim with a screenplay by Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao, Joy Ride is an hour and 37 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by Lionsgate.

Insidious: The Red Door

(PG-13)

The Lambert family returns in Insidious: The Red Door, the fifth Insidious movie, which picks up on events of the second movie.

The third and fourth movies were both prequels — a fact remembered thanks to Wikipedia because even though I’ve seen and liked all of these movies I forgot basically everything about them other than Rose Byrne and Patrick Wilson. Quick recap: Father and son Lambert both have the ability to astral project into a demon-y realm called The Further, and sometimes demon-y beings try to follow them back.

It’s been a decade since the second movie and the Lambert family isn’t doing great. We first see Josh Lambert (Wilson) at the funeral for his mother. Renai Lambert (Byrne) and the kids — Dalton (Ty Simpkins), Foster (Andrew Astor) and Kali (Juliana Davies) — are with him but leave in a separate car because Renai and Josh have split up. Josh has a difficult relationship with the moody Dalton, who is headed to college. Renai suggests that Josh drive Dalton to school so they can spend time together.

What we know from the movie’s start that the oldest two Lambert dudes don’t is that Josh and Dalton have been hypnotized to forget the previous Insidious movies. So everything about The Further, their journeys to this place and the demons that plagued them there and followed them into the world has been sort of erased. Sort of. They’ve been left with enough shadows of what happened to feel uneasy and foggy.

Once at school, an art teacher’s assignments have Dalton starting to draw and remember the Further. Dalton makes friends with Chris (Sinclair Daniel), a girl mistakenly assigned to room with him for just long enough that she gets dragged into his whole spooky deal. Meanwhile Josh also has flashes of the Further and its denizens. The more father and son remember, the more the demon-y world starts to bleed into our own.

It takes about two-thirds of the movie for the characters to catch up to where we are at the movie’s start. Wilson is engaging as always and there’s some cute stuff between Dalton and Chris as they investigate Dalton’s growing strangeness, but the movie just takes way too long to ramp up. And then it feels a bit like we race to the finish. I wish the movie could have found some way to better balance that mix of when the characters aren’t and then are up to speed, and bring the whole family, including Byrne, who brings such a good exasperated energy, back together faster. C

Rated PG-13 for violence, terror, frightening images, strong language and suggestive references, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Patrick Wilson with a screenplay by Scott Teems, Insidious: The Red Door is an hour and 47 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by Screen Gems.

Featured photo: Joy Ride

Harrison Ford breaks out the hat and the whip to take another whirl as the titular archaeologist in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.

It’s 1969 and Professor Henry “Indiana” Jones (Ford) is a full-blown “hey kids, turn that music down!” grump who is retiring from his job of teaching antiquities to bored young boomers at a New York City college. He lives in a city apartment alone — he and Marion have split up and the movie also sidelined their Shia LeBeouf son, basically undoing most of the 2008 Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull stuff. On the day of his retirement, Helena (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) appears in his class. He doesn’t recognize her at first but she later reminds him that she is the daughter of his old friend Basil Shaw (Toby Jones) — and Indy’s long-estranged goddaughter.

In the movie’s opening scenes, we see Basil and Indy attempt to steal back some stolen antiquities from the Nazis in the waning days of World War II. Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen) isn’t interested in the “lance that pierced Christ’s side,” the principal historical item the Nazis have been charged with finding. What he wants is Archimedes’ dial, an advanced mechanism designed by the Greek mathematician from the 200s BC. As we eventually learn, Voller and Shaw both theorize that the dial may have some time manipulation abilities.

Back in the present, Shaw the father has died and Helena is in search of the dial for the archaeology of it all, she tells Indy, but later we learn she’s actually a shady dealer in stolen antiquities.

Voller and a team that is a mix of his own goons and CIA agents are following Helena as he also looks for the dial. The U.S. government is essentially indulging Voller in this dial thing; he’s now a Wernher von Braun type for NASA ― help us get to the moon and we won’t be so picky about any activities during the war.

When Helena asks Indiana to help her with her desire to retrieve the dial, he turns her down, but a shootout and chase has him wanted for murder and worried about the trouble Helena has gotten herself into. As Helena begins her quest to sell the dial, Indiana follows her to Morocco, setting up some familiar chases through Middle Eastern streets, where Helena is being hunted both by a local mobster and by the Nazis. She gets help in her schemes from young teenager Teddy (Ethann Isidore), Helena’s, like, conman intern.

My vague memory is that I liked Kingdom of the Crystal Skull better than a lot of people did. It was the kind of “hey, childhood stuff, fun!” we were just starting to get served up and I think the novelty of it plus the “OK time at the movies for the whole family” quality won me over.

I think Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is probably a better movie but now, after so much everything-old-is-new-again IP, less exciting. And yet, if Crystal Skull was the Star Wars prequels, Dial of Destiny is The Force Awakens. It doesn’t give you a brand new thing in the familiar universe; it basically gives you the original thing again, all the stuff you like and expect, right down the middle, no deviations, but with enough real skill to pull it off. We get Indy, a lady and a kid; multiple chases through exotic locales; the Nazis — Dial of Destiny plays all the hits. We get some fun cameos, some nice callbacks and scenes of Indy and Helena walking into an ancient cave that have a vaguely amusement park ride entrance feel. It’s all perfectly fine, very “Indiana Jones movie.” It also reminded me of that odd spot these franchises — your Indiana Jones and Star Wars — are in in that they are basically adventure movies for all ages (or, you know, a lot of ages; there are Nazis and guns and skeletons), not quite kids’ movies but also not not kids movies. You get the sense that the movie worked to add just enough violence to make it to PG-13 so that grown-ups unaccompanied by kids would still buy tickets.

Harrison Ford is also fine — perhaps he, like the movie itself, is not crackling with energy the way the first set of movies did way back in the 1980s. (I mean, most of us who can remember the 1980s probably aren’t crackling with energy either.) But he gets the job done and reminds you of why you like the character.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny doesn’t dim the luster of the series and is fun enough, even if it is longer and at times adds some unnecessary “hat on a hat” elements to its action. B

Rated PG-13 for sequences of violence and action, language and smoking, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by James Mangold and written by Jez Butterworth & John-Henry Butterworth and David Koepp and James Mangold, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is distributed in theaters by Walt Disney Studio Motion Pictures and is two hours and 34 minutes long.

Featured photo: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Wes Anderson puts a diorama in a music box, festoons it with vintage curios and surrounds it with a model train set in Asteroid City, maybe the most “Wes Anderson movie about Wes Anderson vibes” ever? But I feel like I think that at every Wes Anderson movie lately so who knows.

A 1950s black and white television narrator (Bryan Cranston) introduces us to the stage play and its playwright (Edward Norton) that are the origins of the teleplay that becomes the full Santa Fe sunset color palette of a live-action, er, situation we’re watching in this movie, which is written and directed by Anderson (who has a screenplay credit and shares the “story by” credit with Roman Coppola). Sometimes we’re watching the playwright, sometimes we’re with the actors performing the play but mostly we’re in Asteroid City, the name of the play and the name of its setting. Asteroid City is a small clump of buildings in the southwestern desert. A diner, a bus stop, a gas station and motor inn make up the bulk of the town — as well as a complex astronomical government facility built near the site of an ancient crater caused by an asteroid (which is also still there and available for close-up viewing during the posted hours).

In the 1950s, Auggie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzmann), his teenage son Woodrow (Jake Ryan) and his three young daughters — Andromeda (Ella Faris), Pandora (Gracie Faris) and Cassiopeia (Willan Faris) — have come to Asteroid City for Woodrow to accept an award for his science project. But their car has a rather spectacular breakdown causing the family to be stuck there, which leads Auggie to call his father-in-law, Stanley (Tom Hanks), to come and get the girls. Stanley agrees to do so if Auggie will finally, three weeks after the fact, explain to the children that their mother, Stanley’s daughter, has died.

Also arriving for the young scientist event are movie star Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson) and her teen daughter Dinah (Grace Edwards) as well as other teen inventors, a bus full of school children and their teacher and a group of singing cowboys who miss their connecting bus. Wes Anderson regulars Tilda Swinton as a scientist and Jeffery Wright as a military general are also in Asteroid City as well as the likes of Hope Davis, Liev Schreiber, Maya Hawke, Steve Park, Matt Dillion, Steve Carell and Seu Jorge. Most of the assembled show up for the science awards ceremony as well as the nighttime viewing of an astronomical event but then find themselves quarantined by the government when an alien shows up to borrow the city’s asteroid. (The alien is, uhm, quite the thing — from the actor, who I won’t spoil, who plays the alien to its odd The Fantastic Mr. Fox appearance. I’m not sure how I feel about it or a very puppety roadrunner who occasionally wanders through Asteroid City but these are capital C Choices and, I guess, if you’re already doing all of this odd business, might as well really go for it with the alien.)

But maybe more than any of this, the movie is about the vibe — the particular rosey gold of the desert sun, the arts-and-craft-y quality of the distant mushroom cloud from regularly detonated atom bomb tests, the bright pastels of the landscape, the sign on the diner advertising 50-cent ham plates. The dollhouse-like motor inn cabins, the symmetrical quality to even asymmetrically arranged shots, the scenes of Scarlett Johansson as a 1950s actress that almost look like movie stills. There’s grief and optimism and sadness and shy bits of romance packed around the rotary phones and film cameras and Pontiacs. It’s all just sort of lovely to be in even if I also felt like I wasn’t watching a story so much as being told about a story. Like a particularly lovely macaron, it’s surprising at times that all this prettiness is a very fragile confection made of quite a bit of air. B

Rated PG-13 on appeal for brief graphic nudity, smoking and some suggestive material, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Wes Anderson with a screenplay by Wes Anderson, Asteroid City is an hour and 45 minutes long and distributed in theaters by Focus Features.

No Hard Feelings (R)

You ask “what would it look like if a 1980s sex comedy was also really bleak” and I answer No Hard Feelings, an alleged comedy starring Jennifer Lawrence.

Maddie Barker (Lawrence) is just barely getting by in Montauk, one of those fancy Long Island places where the real estate market is set by the millionaires and billionaires who summer there while the principal employment for the actual locals is tourism-based. Maddie is behind in paying the taxes on the house her mother left her and doesn’t know how she’ll catch up once her car — which she uses for her second job as an Uber driver — is repo-ed. Tips from her bartending job aren’t enough to pay all the bills, so Maddie desperately scans the used car listings for anything that will keep her earning. What she finds is an odd listing for a Buick. The “price” of the car is to date Percy Becker (Andrew Barth Feldman), a Princeton-bound 19-year-old. Percy’s extremely wealthy parents, Allison (Laura Benanti) and Laird (Matthew Broderick), are worried that their sheltered, quiet, loner son will sink in school if he doesn’t arrive with some life experience. They tell Maddie they will give her the Buick if she befriends and “dates” (in all aspects of the word) Percy to help get him out of his shell.

Maddie dives into the assignment, showing up at Percy’s volunteer job at the local animal shelter to try to sexy-talk him into going back to her house. He mistakes it for a stranger-danger kidnapping and maces her. She manages to get him to ask her on a date where he, unlike her usual hookups, is more interested in getting to know her than rushing into bed. Despite their age difference — Maddie is 32 to Percy’s 19 — Percy warms to the idea of a real relationship with Maddie. And though she hates the rich Montauk crowd and finds Percy’s helplessness aggravating, Maddie starts to feel some kind of genuine friendship for him as well.

No Hard Feelings feels like it could have been a spiritual descendant to your Can’t Buy Me Love-type 1980s capitalism-based rom-com. And for a while I thought maybe I could just go with it sort of like I would with an Overboard, where an on-the-page icky premise can lean into zaniness or a fairy tale-like quality. But this movie is oddly jarring, frequently juxtaposing the “wacky antics” of this kind of comedy with the actual grim reality of a kid whose parents feel they need to/have the right to buy him a girlfriend or of a woman who feels she has to hang on to the family house at all costs. Jennifer Lawrence doing some fairly solid physical comedy melts into a scene where an emotionally traumatized Percy (his high school years were rough, we’re told) seems clinically depressed. “Ha ha yikes” is the frequent mood of this movie.

The movie also gives us quite a bit of the real hopelessness of Montauk economics, not just Maddie’s struggles to stay solvent in a town being taken over by the ultra-rich but her pregnant friend Sara (Natalie Morales) and Sara’s husband Jim (Scott MacArthur) trying to figure out how to get by once their baby comes. She’s a teacher who waitresses in the summer, he owns a business involving some kind of boating-related tourism, and yet they can’t afford to move out of his parents’ house. Their scenes with Maddie provide lightness — and often then go grim.

If this movie has a bright spot — not something I’d go so far as to call a saving grace but a bright spot — it’s that it serves as a reminder that Lawrence is good at broad comedy. This is not a movie I’d put on her highlights reel but maybe this forgettable misfire will get her a stronger comedy that can take advantage of her skills. C-

Rated R for sexual content, language, some graphic nudity and brief drug use, according to filmratings.com. Directed by Gene Stupnitsky with a screenplay by Gene Stupnitsky & John Phillips, No Hard Feelings is an hour and 43 minutes long and distributed in theaters by Columbia Pictures.

Featured photo: Asteroid City