Category: Film Reviews by Amy

A 1970s late night talk show host really monkey-paws his prayer for ratings on Late Night with the Devil, a fun shaggy horror movie.

We’re told that the movie we’re watching is a combination of the show as it was aired and behind-the-scenes footage for the presumably final episode of Night Owls with Jack Delroy, a nighttime show in the 1970s that could never quite knock Johnny Carson off his perch as the king of late night. Host Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) earned his best ratings on the night his wife Madeleine (Georgina Haig) came on the show shortly before she died of cancer. Since then, he’s been in personal and professional turmoil. We also get some “the 1970s, man, they were wild” footage of riots and upheaval, mixed in with some “news” footage about a satanic cult.

All of which brings us to Halloween night in 1977, which also happens to be the start of sweeps week — which, fond sigh, kids, ask your grandpappies about the stunts and special guest stars TV shows broke out for those ratings-significant periods in the TV year. For Jack’s desperate ratings grab, he’s planned a Halloween show all about the hot topic that is the occult, featuring psychic Christou (Fayssal Bazzi), magician-turned-skeptic Carmichael Haig (Ian Bliss), parapsychologist June Ross-Mitchen (Laura Gordon), her patient Lilly (Ingrid Torelli) and a singer that we’re all pretty sure is going to be bumped for time. June’s book, Conversations with the Devil, is about Lilly, the sole survivor of the satanic cult mentioned in the intro footage, who June claims is possessed by a demon.

The show starts with the kind of borderline corny comedy one associates with this particular time in TV — Jack offers a mostly “meh” comedy monologue, he does some banter with/light ribbing of Ed McMahon-ish sidekick Gus McConnell (Rhys Auteri), a band juices up the jokes with musical moments, and it all happens in front of an appropriate stripes-and-mustard-tones set.

Christou is the first guest, offering some clumsy cold reads with messages from people who have crossed over. Right before his time ends, though, he is struck by what is perhaps a “real” supernatural moment — he drops his vaguely Spanish magic-y person accent, he grabs his head in pain and his eyes roll back. The audience seems shocked, Jack isn’t quite sure what’s going on and producer Leo Fiske (Josh Quong Tart) is delighted that this moment of spookiness might attract viewers and attention.

I am here for this vibes-based horror. Rubber bats and goofy costumes in the audience mix with behind-the-scenes sweaty desperation and “it’s all an act” jadedness that help make the setting as regular and “nothing to see here” as it gets — until maybe it isn’t. What if Dick Cavett but sweatier and maybe possessed — it’s sort of a weird concept but it works and is mostly a fun-ride take. (The ending is abrupt and has a “we’ve only got the set for one more day, just go with what we have” not-quite feeling that, honestly, fits with the movie’s mood even if it doesn’t quite satisfy storywise.)

David Dastmalchian is exactly perfect in the lead role. He’s both sorta famous — he’s a real “he’s literally in everything” guy (his IMDb includes Marvel, DC, TV, Oppenheimer) — and not so well-known that he can’t sink into the sad, desperate mess that is Jack Delroy. B

Rated R for violent content, some gore, and language including a sexual reference, according to the MPA at filmratings.com. Written and directed by Cameron Cairnes and Colin Cairnes, Late Night with the Devil is an hour and 26 minutes long and distributed by IFC Films. It is available on AMC+ and for rent or purchase.

The First Omen (R)

The “all” in “it’s all for you” is a long ramp-up prequel to the action of the original The Omen in The First Omen, a movie that is a baroque operatic shriek but isn’t quite as fun as that implies.

I found myself thinking a lot about Evil during this movie, the series that just started its fourth and final season. It is airing on Paramount+ and it is a Robert and Michelle King joint (they of the The Good Wife television universe). Evil is a chocolate fudge sundae with extra cherries for a certain kind of dogma-fascinated lapsed Sunday school kid, thoroughly gleeful in its dark goofiness. It is a kick and a half and if you haven’t checked it out, run, don’t walk. This season’s endgame seems to be Antichrist-focused, not unlike this movie — is that a spoiler? If you aren’t aware that demon-children is the territory this movie is playing in, I’m not sure why you would watch it. It’s not a traditional horror in the sense of The Nun movies. It feels to me very much like Evil, very much Catholic school kids misbehaving with apocryphal church lore, but louder and without the sense of humor. (Evil has Andrea Martin in the supporting role of a demon-fighting nun, if you need another reason to check it out.)

Here, we’re following Margaret (Nell Tiger Free, best-known probably as the second Myrcella Baratheon from Game of Thrones), a young American novitiate showing up in early 1970s Rome to work at a Catholic convent/girls’ orphanage and school and take her vows and become a fully fledged nun. She’s been brought over by Cardinal Lawrence (Bill Nighy), a mentor since she was a child growing up in her very own nun-run girls’ school/orphanage institution. She was a “bad kid” back then, but Cardinal Lawrence helped put her on the right path, Cardinal Lawrence is the best — I’m sure the movie will prove this to be true!

She is sharing a room with fellow novitiate Luz (Maria Caballero), who has decided to spend her last days pre-veil trying out decolletage and disco. She gets Margaret to join her for a night on the town, and though Margaret is fuzzy the next morning, Luz assures her that nothing too untoward happened.

Margaret is rather fuzzy at her new job too, where she can’t understand why all the other nuns are so mean to Carlita (Nicole Sorace), an admittedly odd child made all the odder by her regular isolation from other kids. Margaret feels protective toward Carlita, and when Father Brennan (Ralph Ineson) shows up telling her that Carlita is part of a larger conspiracy, she might not immediately believe him — but she doesn’t completely discount him either.

This movie revs up slowly before barrelling toward a bonkers conclusion, all wheels flying off and motor on fire. Like a wild roller coaster you ride after waiting in a two-hour line, the finale helps you to forget a bit how much the beginning of this endeavor seemed to crawl. Well, the very beginning firmly plants us in the realm of “The Devil,” but then we slow-walk it through a novitiate’s quiet yet unsettling adventures in Rome to get back to that point.

That said, the bulk of the movie is not a lunacy drought. The movie is filled with devil imagery and so much gore, much of it centered around childbirth. The movie even brushes up close to Saying Something about female power, both in the church and in the wider world, which would have been a bit of clever fun in this kind of horror movie (and very Evil).

The movie does have a lot going for it and a lot of that — how the story comes together, how the movie walks the tightrope between terror and ridiculousness — is due to the skill of Free. She is very good at hitting the exact right notes with Margaret, who goes from sincere to scared to worried about her own mental state to determined.

The First Omen doesn’t exactly hit a bull’s-eye for me in either the genuinely scary or delightfully unhinged targets, but it is enough of a near miss for both that I had a decent time. Also, seriously, watch Evil. B- (for The First Omen; the TV show Evil is an A+ with a chef’s kiss).

Rated R for violent content, grisly/disturbing images, and brief graphic nudity, according to the MPA on filmratings.com, and some real House of the Dragon birthing-body horror stuff that you can not unsee, according to me. Directed by Arkasha Stevenson with a screenplay by Tim Smith & Arkasha Stevenson and Keith Thomas, The First Omen is two hours long and distributed by 20th Century Studios. The movie is now available for rent or purchase and is streaming on Hulu.

At The SOFAPLEX

The Last Stop in Yuma County (R)

Bank robbers, locals and folks passing through unfortunately intersect at a dusty diner in 1970s-ish Arizona in The Last Stop in Yuma County, a decently fun movie whose whole vibe is “tension plus heat and dirt.”

Charlotte (Jocelin Donahue) is the only one working behind the counter at the diner on the day that the air conditioning goes out and the fuel truck is late to fill up the empty pumps at the gas station across the road where owner Vernon (Faizon Love) has to tell people that they can wait in the diner for the truck or try to make it 100 miles to the next station.

A kitchen knife salesman (Jim Cummings) decides to wait it out, as do an older couple on a road trip (Gene Jones, Robin Bartlett). Charlotte and the knife salesmen are trying to act normal in the stuffy diner because that’s what fellow patrons Beau (Robert Brake) and Travis (Nicholas Logan) have told them to do. The knife salesman had absolutely no chill when he got a glimpse of Beau and Travis’ car and realized it and they fit the description of bank robbers who got away from a robbery earlier that morning. Soon Beau is holding them at gunpoint — as well as everybody else who happens through the diner, whether they know it or not — and waiting for the fuel truck and an escape route to show up. Will that happen before Charlotte’s husband, Charlie (Michael Abbott Jr.), the local sheriff, figures out that things are squirrelly at his wife’s diner?

“Waiting for the other shoe to drop” is basically what the movie is all about, especially as other people enter the picture, such as Charlie’s hapless deputy and a young couple eager to either emulate or steal from the robbers. There is maybe too much waiting and too little shoe, with a climax that is only momentarily exciting. This movie is fine if you happen by it but nothing I’d go out of my way to seek out. C+ Available for rent or purchase.

The Beekeeper (R)

Jason Statham is a beekeeper in the dumb and awesome The Beekeeper.

Adam Clay (Statham) is a beekeeper who protects the hive (a thing he says eleventy billion times here) in both the literal sense and the “government agency with dumb name” sense. Literally, he keeps bees on the property of Eloise Parker (Phylicia Rashad), a nice lady who was nice to him. In the other sense he’s recently retired from The Beekeepers, an outside the normal order of things group of government assassins. So when Eloise takes her own life after being scammed out of every penny she has, Adam and his particular set of skills killer-robot marches through every level of the organization of scammers, blowing stuff up and demolishing every henchman put in front of him. Working a parallel investigation into what happened to Eloise is her daughter, FBI agent Verona Parker (Emmy Raver-Lampman), who is also awesome and if somebody wants to do an equally dumb spinoff movie about her, I promise to buy tickets.

I didn’t actually see this movie in a theater; I saw it at home on a day I specifically was looking for something fun and stupid to watch, and this movie super fit the bill. It is exactly, 100 percent, completely what you think you will get based on the phrase “Jason Statham in The Beekeeper,” said in that “in a world” voice. It’s all punching, all ka-booming, all threats and violent comebacks to dumb taunts. It is, when you need this sort of thing, perfect. B+ Available for rent or purchase.

Featured photo: Late Night with the Devil

A young girl is stolen from a “place of abundance” and introduced into the harsh world of post-apocalyptic Australia in Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga, a downbeat and fairly unnecessary origin story for the character played by Charlize Theron in Mad Max: Fury Road.

I mean, I assume it’s Australia, because of the accents and the Mad Max of it all.

As we learned in Fury Road, Furiosa (Alyla Browne as a kid, Anya Taylor-Joy as an older angrier girl) grew up in the “green place” in a world (or, at least, an Australia) that was otherwise a war-torn, resource-scarce desert. Due to some technical difficulties at the theater I went to, I missed the first few minutes of the movie and started watching as young girl Furiosa is thrown over the seat of some marauding grungy dude’s motorcycle. Her mother (Charlee Fraser) goes after her, both to save Furiosa and to prevent the three grungy bikers who are stealing her away from telling anybody about their hidden fertile land. With the help of a resourceful Furiosa, her mom is able to eventually kill all the kidnappers before they can tell the secrets of the “place of abundance” as they describe it. But she can’t get to Furiosa before the girl is taken to Dementus (Chris Hemsworth, thoroughly de-handsomed with some fun prosthetics), the biker gang leader. Furiosa won’t give up her homeland’s location, even when he is torturing her mother, but Dementus decides to keep her around, perhaps hoping that one day she might lead him there.

Eventually Dementus hears about another “place of abundance” — the Citadel run by Immortan Joe (Lachy Hulme), the skull-face-breathing-mask guy from Fury Road. Dementus decides he and his gang will take it over but his first attempt fails in the face of Joe’s overwhelming force of War Boys. He hatches a craftier scheme to gain control of Gasland, one of the wasteland fortresses and the source of fuel for Joe’s empire. Eventually, Dementus makes a deal with Joe for him (Dementus) to run Gasland in exchange for Joe getting Furiosa as one of his eventual brides. Furiosa is still a kid, mostly non-talking, when this deal is made, and after a few days of watching a childbirth and trying to dodge Joe’s creeper sons (Josh Helman, Nathan Jones) she runs off and hides among the mechanics at the Citadel, posing as a boy.

Years later, when she has grown into Taylor-Joy, Furiosa becomes a worker on a newly crafted War Rig. After a battle with raiders during the initial run, the truck’s driver Praetorian Jack (Tom Burke) realizes: that Furiosa is a badass during a fight, that Furiosa is a girl and that he rather likes this badass girl. They do food-for-fuel runs together, with Furiosa hiding her rage toward Dementus until his growing recklessness puts him in direct conflict with Immortan Joe — and eventually with her.

In Fury Road it was Theron doing the big, interesting performance; here it’s Hemsworth. Not unlike Mad Max, Dementus lost his family — a stuffed animal that belonged to his long-gone children is always strapped somewhere to his person. He seems to cause chaos and suffering not for any particular thrill but because it’s something to do. Likewise, his interest in seizing power seems more like a nonchalant troll than an ambition for leadership. Hemsworth, the actor, seems to enjoy the scruffy unprettiness of his character.

His general rightness for the role unfortunately highlights the “not quite” fit of Taylor-Joy with the Furiosa role. Or maybe it’s the role that’s just not that exciting. Something about the character just doesn’t quite have the same pull as in Fury Road.

Also not quite standing up to the predecessor for me are the visual elements. Though one of Furiosa’s more successful components, they don’t quite smack you in the face the way they did in Fury Road. I do think the fact that we’ve seen this desert wasteland and the mutant-like people who populate it before — all dirt-caked and weird hats and the whole War Boy body paint thing — reduces the wow factor. Also, you know, it’s more sand. The second Dune maybe filled my “the beautiful wasteland of sand dunes” needs for a while.

I said about Fury Road that it was a B movie with first-class movie visuals, and that is true here. The B-movie-ness pokes through constantly and it’s a not unfun aspect of the movie. I don’t know if it’s a sense of humor, exactly, but the movie definitely has a smirky quality that when paired with the stop-motion-y-speedy-closeup thing does give you that overall “schlocky in a good way” vibe. At 90-ish minutes, this would be kind of a bummer romp — all despair and ruin but with hints of camp. At its actual two-hour-and-nearly-30-minute run time, it’s got more of a saga feel, yes, but in the slog sense rather than the “sweeping epic adventure and drama” sense. I feel like this movie, like the cobbled together cars in it, should get me in the audience all revved up and “ha, let’s go, crazy racers!” Instead, I felt more grumpy, more “OK, movie, tick tock, let’s go.” C+

Rated R for sequences of strong violence and grisly images, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by George Miller and written by George Miller and Nick Lathouris, Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga is two hours and 28 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by Warner Bros.

Featured photo: Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga

Apes together strong, sometimes, in Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, the fourth movie in the reboot series that started with Rise of the Planet of the Apes in 2011.

A title card and a throwback scene to the funeral for Caesar, the Andy Serkis mo-capped chimp leader from the first three movies, reminds us that humans have been pandemic-ed into near oblivion, with most of the remaining people unable to speak and intellectually limited. Now, many (ape?) generations removed from that initial multi-decade struggle, apes live in all kinds of settlements, including, for the chimps we first encounter, as a clan in a small village where they smoke fish and raise eagles. Wikipedia and an appearance mid-movie by the Griffith Observatory suggest that this all takes place in Southern California. Noa (Owen Teague), a chimp who seems like an almost-but-not-quite adult, has to find an eagle egg for his special big boy ceremony the next day. When an encounter with a human stealing fish from the smokehouse leads to the breaking of the egg he had found, Noa sets off that night, in the dark, to find another one. Noa really needs that egg now because his dad, Koro (Neil Sandilands), is the head of the raptor raising operation and Noa doesn’t want to disappoint him.

The nighttime egg hunt leads Noa to cross paths with a raiding party from a different ape community. They don’t see Noa but they do find his horse and send it running so they can follow it and get to Noa’s village.

When Noa returns, the village is on fire, his buddies Anaya (Travis Jeffrey) and Soona (Lydia Peckham) and his mom, Dar (Sara Wiseman), are being herded together and tied up and his dad is trying to rescue the eagles from their nest-house atop a burning tower. Noa helps his dad but then they both have to fight Sylva (Eka Darville), the gorilla who is head of the raiders. This is all for Proximus Caesar, Sylva says before using his cattle prod-like weapon to cause Noa to fall from the tower. Noa wakes up the next morning, buries his father and sets off in search of his stolen clan.

Eventually Noa makes it to the “kingdom” of Proximus (Kevin Durand), who Wikipedia says is a bonobo. Proximus has a large work camp outside some kind of human-made bunker and is kidnapping clans to serve as a workforce to help him pull open the giant doors of the bunker, which he hopes is filled with treasures. Seeing as the bunker is in the cliff next to a beach and he’s had to build a sea wall to keep the beach from being flooded, his “kingdom” isn’t very big. But Proximus lives pretty large, spending most of his time in a ship beached on this part of the coast where he has a dining room, captured-ape servants and a pet human, Trevathan (William H. Macy), who, unlike the feral people we see by a watering hole out in the wild, can talk and read, specifically read Proximus stories about ancient Rome.

By the time Noa makes it to Proximus, he also has a human traveling companion. A woman he first calls Nova (Freya Allen) — a name bestowed by orangutan Raka (Peter Macon), a follower of a sort of religious sect based on the true stories of the original Caesar — began following him on the road. At first he thought she was just scavenging food but later he realizes there’s more to her than appears.

Trailers and the fact that she’s wearing a tank top on the movie poster suggest Nova has a whole deal independent of Noa’s “get the clan back” quest. I know this is exactly the wrong way to watch this movie, but I found myself wondering about the details — how many years are we post-pandemic? Are the humans we see in comical fur-bikini-type get-ups virus-impaired survivors from the before times or newly born-in-the-wild people? Do the apes in various colonies and villages and kingdoms have any communication with each other? Or trade?

I fully admit none of these things matter. But the movie left me wondering these things I think because the onscreen action was all very medium-at-most compelling. Where I found myself thinking “this might be one of the top five movies about war I’ve ever seen” during the War for the Planet of the Apes I didn’t feel as pulled in by this one. Were there no previous, very excellent trilogy, I might feel more excited by this movie. But it did not stand up to the comparison.

That said, Kingdom isn’t bad. It is fine, perfectly cromulent, a decent product. It has “blockbuster-flavored seasoning” sprinkled throughout, with references not just to its previous films but elements that call to mind other cinematic universe-type stories. It doesn’t wow, but it doesn’t offend. There are moments when interesting nuggets poke through. No particular performance stands out; no one gives the sort of startling humanity to their motion captured, CGI-ed characters that Serkis gave to Caesar. But then again, maybe it’s the comparison that makes the perfectly serviceable work of Teague, Macon and Durand seem totally acceptable but unremarkable. B

Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of sci-fi violence/action, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Wes Ball and written by Josh Friedman, Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes is two hours and 25 minutes long and distributed in theaters by 20th Century Studios.

Featured photo: Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes

Ryan Gosling says “I’ll save you, movie!” in The Fall Guy, a rompy movie with nods to the 1980s TV show.

Gosling brings the soft-serve swirl of good-humored goofiness and slightly winky competence from 2016’s The Nice Guys to the role of Colt Seaver, a crackerjack stunt man. Colt has found professional success by being a stunt man for Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a megawatt star with an even more blinding ego. Personally, Colt has found romantic success with Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt), a camerawoman with directing dreams. When the movie starts, the two are working together on a Tom Ryder movie — but not for long. Colt has a devastating accident and, humiliated and unable to deal with what he sees as a professional failure, he disappears, even from Jody.

A year and a half later he is working as a valet when Gail (Hannah Waddingham), Tom’s producer and fixer, calls to Colt to get him to come to Australia to work on Tom’s new movie. Jody, who is directing, asked for him in particular, Gail says. When Colt shows up on set, he quickly finds that this is not true. But, with the head of the stunt department, Dan Tucker (Winston Duke), who is also Colt’s longtime friend, insisting that Colt is the only stuntman available, Jody reluctantly agrees to let him stay to work on Metalstorm, a sci-fi alien love-story something.

That’s all kind of a lot of setup that feels like it takes a lot of time to get to the real reason Colt has been called to Australia: Tom is missing and Gail wants Colt to find him before someone notices he is gone and the movie is stalled.

So while Colt is working with Jody, who sees new story possibilities for Tom’s Metalstorm character now that Colt is around to do more thrilling stunts — with Tom’s face to be pasted on digitally in post — and Colt is trying to find a way to make up with the woman he still loves, Colt is also doing some basic detectiving of the “look for clues, go see a guy at a club” variety.

For me, the movie has the most mission clarity during the “Colt Seaver, stunt man detective” scenes. Elsewhere, it felt like there was a lot of piling on of Things: rom-com-iness, meta commentary on movies, stunt man process-y stuff (which I also liked), Emily Blunt’s whatever she’s doing with Jody, Hannah Waddingham doing like 1980s businesswoman, a bit of buddy business between Colt and Dan. It’s a “three songs playing at once” effect to have all of these things happening at once, at the same volume, in one scene. When Colt is looking for clues or trying to find a guy who last saw Tom and the movie’s other elements are more packed in around that, things seem to click together better.

That said, I basically liked those other elements. I just wished they’d been put together a bit better. Blunt’s Jody has perfectly fine chemistry with Gosling’s Colt; Dan and Colt have some good buddy moments; there is, in classic movie fashion, a bit with a dog. It’s all fine, and without Gosling this would have been a perfectly satisfactory Netflix-movie type outing. Gosling elevates it all. He brings a sparkle, a tonally perfect approach to the movie’s humor and an energy that helps the movie transcend some of its overstuffed-combo-platter feel. B

Rated PG-13 for action and violence, drug content and some strong language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by David Leitch and written by Drew Pearce, The Fall Guy is two hours and six minutes long and distributed by Universal Studios.

Featured photo: The Fall Guy.

Tennis and sex get all tangled up in the lives of three promising tennis players in Challengers.

Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) is the true star athlete of the trio, getting endorsements from Adidas as a teen and having the world in awe of her skills. She decides to go to Stanford, even though it means waiting a few years until she turns pro, and the crowds at the university turn out for her wearing “The Duncanator” T-shirts.

Fellow tennis player Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor) thinks the reason she’s going to Stanford is to build up anticipation for her pro career. While Patrick’s longtime friend and doubles partner Art Donaldson (Mike Faist) is wowed by Tashi’s game play, Patrick is more wowed by the Zendaya-ness of Tashi. When they first meet — at a party thrown by Adidas for Tashi at a multiday tennis tournament — both boys ask for Tashi’s phone number, basically at once, in front of her. Tashi says she isn’t a homewrecker, though she does show up at their shared hotel room later that night and makes it clear that she attracted to both boys — and we see that there is a strong something between the two of them as well. She declares that she will give the winner of the next day’s match between Art and Patrick her phone number. Patrick wins and we see her dating him while she’s at Stanford and he’s on tour.

But that was years earlier. The movie starts with Tashi as a coach and wife to Art and with the men preparing to meet once again on the court after years of not really speaking. Tashi is as laser-focused and aggressive as a coach as she once was as a player — coaching being really her only way onto the court. As the trailers give away, she suffers a devastating injury before she is able to turn pro.

This movie serves you a lot of sexiness. Some of it feels like perfume ad sexiness, a lot of skin and close-ups of hot people and implied nudity (as well as actual nudity, all of the dude variety, which is a nice change of pace) without a whole lot of emotional impact. The movie does have fun with the melodrama of those moments, though — Challengers has sort of a smirky sense of humor throughout that keeps everything grounded.

The real heat is actually in the tennis, both the literal game played between Patrick and Art that winds through all the movie’s flashbacks and the figurative games related to the friendship between the two men and their mutual desire for Tashi as well as Tashi’s hunger for competition in general. Actually, Tashi is all tennis — the volley, the quick decisions for how to respond, the attempts to psy-ops your opponent, the excitement of being in the mix of things. Even when she can’t play the sport of tennis anymore she seems pretty eager to bring the vibes of tennis into her life, no matter how messy it makes things.

Zendaya brings a crazy intensity to Tashi that makes this movie compelling even when it feels like a prep school soap opera. It’s a fun soap opera with characters I enjoyed watching, especially when they’re being less-than-great people. You believe that these two at-times goober-y dudes would fall hard for this woman who extremely out-classes them both in tennis and in life. Zendaya is even able to make you believe that the talented but frustrated Tashi enjoys the strange dynamic of her relationships with each man.

The movie may have the plot points of a sexy drama but it has an energy that almost makes it feel like an action movie — and I think the Art-Patrick tennis game and the way the movie shoots it is a big part of that. I don’t really know anything about tennis but the movie keeps giving us the emotional backstory to this game, which plays as a friends-turned-rivals showdown, that makes each point have some resonance. B+

Rated R for language throughout, some sexual content and graphic nudity, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Luca Guadagnino with a screenplay by Justin Kuritzkes, Challengers is two hours and 11 minutes long and distributed in theaters by United Artists.

Featured photo: Challengers.

Guy Ritchie does an Inglourious Basterds by way of Operation Mincemeat and gets The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, which is based on a true story from the nonfiction book by Damien Lewis.

As with the 2021 Netflix film Operation Mincemeat, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare gives us a young Ian Fleming (Freddie Fox) during World War II, working here for a senior officer “M” (Cary Elwes), getting mixed up in wartime spycraft that uses cunning and misdirection to defeat a seemingly better-situated German military. In this case, the plan — Operation Postmaster — is to destroy the ship that supplies the German U-boats that are making it difficult for the British to get food and military reinforcements from America. The ship is in the Spanish-controlled port of an island off the Atlantic coast of Africa. Gus March-Phillips (Henry Cavill), a British officer known for breaking rules and not following orders, is charged with putting together a small crew to sail to the port and blow up the ship — but, like, quietly and unofficially in a way that won’t put the British in open conflict with Franco’s Spain. His basterds include Anders Lassen (Reacher’s Alan Ritchson, playing the same kind of mountain-sized butt-kicking robot here), Geoffrey Appleyard (Alex Pettyfer), Henry Hayes (Hero Fiennes Tiffin) and Freddy Alvarez (Henry Golding — who is my fave in this movie’s collection of “men who could be the next James Bond”). In the port town, British agents Heron (Babs Olusanmokun) and Marjorie Stewart (Eiza Gonzáles) wine and dine and generally distract and pull information from the various Nazis, the ickiest of whom is Heinrich Luhr (Til Schweiger). When the night of the big event arrives, Heron also enlists the help of local Kambili Kalu (Danny Sapani, who also feels like a pretty good Bond candidate).

There is an overall shagginess that slows the movie down and a flatness to the characters that I feel is not uncommon when you’re dealing with a real-world story filled with lots of real people you don’t want to leave out. There is nothing particularly new here; the movie has a “serviceable cover of a decent radio hit” feel overall.

But the group of rascalness-inclined heroes makes for a mostly fun bunch of people to hang out with for two hours. The caper elements are probably the movie’s most interesting and while I wish they were maybe a little sharper, they provide enough energy to keep the last part of the movie in particular buzzing along. B-

Rated R for strong violence throughout and some language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Guy Ritchie with a screenplay by Paul Tamasy & Eric Johnson & Arash Amel and Guy Ritchie based on a book of the same name by Damien Lewis, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is two hours long and is distributed in theaters by Lionsgate.

Abigail (R)

A kidnapping gig goes hilariously wrong for a group of criminals in Abigail, a horror movie?

I mean, Abigail has the fixings of a horror movie — big creepy house with passageways and cobwebs and a gang of untrustworthy types who don’t know each other and a “maybe the killer is in here with us!” situation. But this movie is laugh-out-loud hilarious and wonderfully hammy.

The “no names” rule by boss Lambert (Giancarlo Esposito) is why the gang of kidnappers calls each other Joey (Melissa Barrera), Frank (Dan Stevens, chewing all the scenery as he does what feels like a Nic Cage impression), Rickles (William Catlett), Sammy (Kathryn Newton), Peter (Kevin Durand) and Dean (Angus Cloud). They didn’t even all know that the person being kidnapped is a child, Abigail (Alisha Weir), or who her father is. Joey, a nurse charged with taking care of Abigail, promises the young girl she’ll keep her safe and get her back to her father as soon as the ransom is paid. Abigail appreciates that and tells Joey she’s sorry about what is about to happen to her.

A shaken Joey goes back to the group — who is this girl’s father and what kind of trouble are we in?

The trailers to this movie spell out exactly what kind of trouble the group is in and it is delightfully bonkers. We first see Abigail as she dances ballet to “Swan Lake” and she spends much of the movie in a ballerina outfit, bringing big M3gan vibes to everything she does. The criminal characters mostly play it straight — they are after all being picked off one by one — while still acknowledging the unreality of their situation. The movie nicely blends the tropes of a haunted house-style horror and an unreliable criminals caper with its silly-but-great central premise for an overall fun time. There are some jump scares and a significant amount of explodey, chunky gore but otherwise this is definitely a horror movie that delights in the campiness of its genre more than its frights. B,maybe even a B+ for the overall sense of glee

Rated R for strong bloody violence and gore throughout, pervasive language and brief drug use, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett with a screenplay by Stephen Shields and Guy Busick, Abigail is 106 minutes long and distributed in theaters by Universal Studios.

Featured photo: The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.