Category: Film Reviews by Amy

The Menu (R)

Diners at an exclusive, multi-thousand-dollar-per-diner restaurant realize their evening is about more than foams and locally sourced seafood in The Menu, a thriller that’s probably more cute than clever but does leave you hungry for a really good [spoiler alert].

Let’s just say the food item in question isn’t quite the Chef grilled cheese sandwich but it’s in that vein and I will be thinking about it long after I stop thinking about the rest of the movie.

Hawthorne is the kind of restaurant that patrons have to wait months to get a reservation for and then can get to only by taking a boat out to a secluded island where only a dozen customers are served per night. Before even getting to the restaurant, front-of-house manager Elsa (Hong Chau) takes the diners on a tour of the island and the restaurant’s gardens and chicken coop and smokehouse — the base camp of bull—- mountain, as Margot (Anya Taylor-Joy) observes. Of all the guests, she is the least impressed by all the artisanal nonsense of the restaurant. And she’s the date of the guest who is most obsessed with the idea of each dish’s umami and presentation and Instagramability, Tyler (Nicholas Hoult). She is not, we quickly understand, the date he was supposed to bring, and when she and another guest, older man Richard (Reed Birney), recognize each other and then pointedly look away from each other, we can guess pretty quickly how she came to be with Tyler. Richard is there with his wife, Anne (Judith Light). Other guests include three finance bros (Mark St. Cyr, Arturo Castro, Rob Yang); a restaurant critic (Janet McTeer) and her editor (Paul Adelstein); a past-his-prime movie star (John Leguizamo) and his assistant (Aimee Carrero), and an older woman (Rebecca Koon).

Chef Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes) commands great respect — or something — from his kitchen staff, who snap to attention and “yes, chef” him loudly when he gives an order. The dishes come out, one by one, each with a story (and accompanying title card), and each one gets a little more conceptual and insane than the next. When a taco course comes out featuring a chicken thigh with small scissors stuck it (to go along with a story about Slowik stabbing his abusive father in the thigh) and tortillas laser-printed with the guests’ various misdeeds, the guests realize that the uneasiness they’ve felt all evening was the correct emotion.

What if Jigsaw from Saw went to culinary school and started to take food really seriously while still wanting to mess with people — is what I’m getting from this movie. Yes, the title cards are funny and there are a few genuine laugh-out-loud moments, often juxtaposing the la-di-da nature of foodie talk with menace or outright violence. But the customers are more monied sadsacks than monsters and the kitchen staff come off as either either dead-eyed cult members or wild-eyed lunatics. Which, fine — but the movie spends a lot of time on speechifying and seeming to have characters believe they’re making a point about class and the shallowness of high-end foodie culture. The movie acts like it’s saying something but really every statement of purpose boils down to “people suck,” which kind of takes the air out of that part of the movie and makes it feel more like window dressing to the suspense than a clever message. It is, as Paul Hollywood would say poking his thumb into these sections of the movie, underbaked.

We are also boxed in to only rooting for Taylor-Joy (well, maybe her and Judith Light, who is able to do great things with the tiniest of looks or motions). This is by design but the movie doesn’t give her much more than “Girl You Root For” as a character or personality. Fiennes, as the Big Bad, doesn’t get a whole lot more than that — his character basically delivers Chef Julian’s whole deal during one of many pre-course monologues — but he does seem to be having fun with this Great Man gone off the rails.

For all this, I enjoyed The Menu — it’s gleeful about its different kinds of villainy and really relishes, ha, sending up needless extravagance and foodie culture. B

Rated R for strong/disturbing violent content, language throughout and some sexual references, according to the MPA at filmratings.com. Directed by Mark Mylod and written by Seth Reiss and Will Tracy, The Menu is an hour and 47 minutes long and distributed by Searchlight Pictures in theaters.

Featured photo: Ralph Fiennes in The Menu.

New York Times reporters Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor investigate reports of sexual harassment and assault by Harvey Weinstein in She Said, a movie based on the real-life investigation and the subsequent book by the same name.

When we first meet Twohey (Carey Mulligan) she’s investigating allegations against then candidate Donald Trump — while also going to OB appointments as her pregnancy progresses. Kantor (Zoe Kazan) is covering refugees, while also juggling her two girls’ schedules with her husband, who is also a reporter. Kantor gets a tip about allegations of sexual misconduct, possibly years of misconduct, by Weinstein and starts looking into it, making calls and finding women with stories who can’t talk or won’t talk on the record out of fear of damaging their careers or because of non-disclosure agreements signed years ago. Twohey joins her on the investigation when she returns to work from maternity leave, still sort of reeling from what the movie depicts as postpartum depression.

The paper’s editors — including Rebecca Corbett (Patricia Clarkson) and Dean Baquet (Andre Braugher) — believe in the story but know that hefty on-the-record corroboration is needed. Twohey and Kantor chip away at the process of finding documents to back up the stories about settlements, charges that are dropped, HR complaints and the many non-disclosures. They also search for women with a story to tell about Weinstein, hoping they can find at least one who will go on the record, talking to the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow and Rose McGowan and Ashely Judd (who appears in the movie as herself). They also talk to former assistants who have spent years carrying the trauma of their interactions with Weinstein. The more they investigate, the more Twohey and Kantor are told that Weinstein himself will be coming for them, having shut down all previous attempts to tell these stories.

I almost feel like She Said isn’t quite about what it seems to be about. The trailer sells the idea that the movie is some John Grisham-meets-All the President’s Men high-pressure race to get Weinstein and go after the “whole system” or something — the trailer sort of feels like it’s just one explosion short of a Michael Bay movie. And there are moments in the movie itself where we get some real TV-exposition-style lines of the “what? Sexual harassers getting away with it?” variety that feel kind of silly coming from fully grown women in 2016 and 2017 who work in national media.

But the actual story, the meat of the movie, is more about the unglamorous work of investigating — a lot of phone calls and searching for documents and showing up at the doors of people who don’t want to talk — paired with the pushing-a-boulder-up-a-mountain quality of trying to work while parenting. Specifically, I think, of trying to work while being the mother of in Megan’s case a new baby and in Jodi’s case two young kids. The limitations, the constant sense of being behind and running late and keeping it all together with tape. At one point Jodi gets a pivotal call and, to get the time and quiet to have the conversation, she essentially bribes her daughter with Netflix time. That moment felt incredibly well done and true to life, as do scenes where Megan tries to find her work self again while swimming through her postpartum struggles. It captures the “backwards and in heels” aspect of what was involved for these two specific reporters to work this investigation and goes to the movie’s larger themes about women, the situations they have to deal with and the choices they make.

When the movie just lets itself be about this, about the work and Jodi and Megan and the way they try to honestly foster relationships with the women hurt by Weinstein without over-promising or being false about their motivations, She Said is absolutely riveting. The core duo of Mulligan and Kazan bring a lot that is unsaid to their characters, with facial expressions and little moments that fill their characters out and make them people. Mulligan even gets one really good explosion, a “had it with All Of This” moment, that is just a chef’s kiss. Clarkson is also solid; I wish she’d had even more to do.

She Said occasionally seems to get tangled up in the needs of a conventional movie versus the still-developing story that its characters are enmeshed in. But when it works, when its elements all come together, it’s thoroughly captivating.

Featured photo: She Said.

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (PG-13)

Marvel says goodbye to Chadwick Boseman, his T’Challa and his version of Black Panther while expanding the ideas of Wakanda and its place in the world in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, a lovely, complex entry in the more thoughtful side of the MCU.

The movie opens on a desperate Shuri (Letitia Wright), sister to King T’Challa and Wakanda’s scientific genius, trying to save an off-screen T’Challa who is dying from illness. His death seems to not only shake her emotionally but sever some connection to her culture and family’s sense of spirituality. She sinks into extreme rationality and guilt about not being able to cure her brother.

We jump forward a year, when Queen Ramonda (Angela Bassett) has become Wakanda’s leader. With T’Challa dead and the country’s Black Panther protector gone (the flowers that make new Black Panthers were destroyed by Michael B. Jordan’s Killmonger in the first movie), Ramonda has to fight off international attempts to obtain the country’s all-powerful element, vibranium. At the United Nations, Ramonda endures the insincere disappointment by Western countries who want Wakanda to willingly share (or just give up) their vibranium — while at the same time those countries try to steal vibranium via military raids.

Plan B when Wakanda’s Dora Milaje (the country’s army of female warriors) prove to be more than equal to fighting off those raids is for Western nations to find their own vibranium elsewhere. A machine designed by Riri Williams (Dominique Thorne), the Shuri-level genius who is still a college student in Boston, looks for vibranium in the oceans — and finds it in the Atlantic. But much like other things “discovered” by Western nations, this vibranium has been long claimed by another nation.

K’uk’ulkan, also called Namor (Tenoch Huerta Mejía), is the king of a people who live in Talokan, a nation under the ocean. Once living in Central America, the Talokanian ancestors escaped the colonizing Spanish and their diseases with the help of a plant that, similar to the flower Wakanda used for Black Panthers, offered extraordinary strength and an ability to live under the water. The people moved into the sea where their vibranium-dependent city has kept them safe for centuries. But now that the wider world knows about vibranium and its potential, Talokan is at risk and Namor blames Wakanda and T’Challa’s push for openness.

I like how this movie can be both about T’Challa and the grief over his (and Boseman’s) loss and about the unintended consequences of his response to Killmonger’s argument that the prosperous and powerful Wakanda owes something to the oppressed elsewhere in the world. Like Wakanda before the first movie, Talokan has chosen to hide its power from the rest of the world in response to colonialism and theft of resources. But Wakanda’s openness has made Talokan vulnerable. Does this make them natural allies, natural enemies or something else? I rewatched a bit of 2018’s Black Panther and that movie has a well-defined purpose and clarity of mission that this movie doesn’t. But this movie’s murkiness largely works, as some of the questions here are just messier and the overall story feels more contemplative.

Of course, we get great performances all the way around — including from returning players Danai Gueria, as the badass Dora Milaje general; Lupita Nyong’o as Nakia, who has been working as a school headmistress in Haiti, and Winston Duke as M’Baku, the leader of a Wakandan tribe. Bassett and Wright do an excellent job of giving us the weight of grief — a weight they each carry in a different way. Mejía offers a nuanced Namor — not a villain but not a saint either. The movie’s actual villains — represented by someone who I guess is one of the Disney+ Marvel TV show characters (it’s hard to keep up) — are the predatory U.S. and European powers and their plans for vibranium, which don’t seem great based on the CIA director’s near cackled “I dream about it,” a response to the question of what the U.S. would do if it had vibranium.

Namor isn’t quite the electrifying antagonist Killmonger was and, though cool, the watery Mesoamerican wonderland of Talokan isn’t quite as thrilling as the Afro-futurism of Wakanda (as with Aquaman’s Atlantis in the DC universe, making bright and majestic-looking stuff under water is just tough). And, despite its two-hour-and-41-minute runtime, there is a slight “sudden stop” quality to the movie’s final conflict (perhaps because of the nature of “the true villain is colonialism”). Wakanda Forever is nevertheless a deeply touching movie that holds your attention with enough Dora Milaje fighting action to add some pep. A-

Rated PG-13 for sequences of strong violence, action and some language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Ryan Coogler with a screenplay by Ryan Coogler & Joe Robert Cole, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever is two hours and 41 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures.

Featured photo: Wakanda Forever.

Enola Holmes 2 (PG-13)

The case-solving younger sister of Sherlock Holmes returns in Enola Holmes 2, a very satisfying second chapter of this story.

Enola (Millie Bobby Brown) is trying to break out as a working detective on her own but her would-be clients seem surprised to see how young and female she is — is her brother (Henry Cavill) available? Just as she’s about to abandon Victorian London to return to the family home in the country, young girl Bessie (Serrana Su-Ling Bliss) shows up to hire Enola to search for her sister. Sarah Chapman (Hannah Dodd), a big sister-type whom Bessie lived with and worked at the match factory with, has gone missing, and Bessie dearly wants her back. Enola quickly takes the case, going undercover at the factory and trying to figure out what secrets Sarah had uncovered just before she disappeared.

As Enola digs into her case, Sherlock has a stumper of his own, and the two frequently cross paths, especially once Enola gets tangled up in the death of another matchgirl.

And then there’s Tewkesbury (Louis Patridge), the noble Enola befriended during her search for her vanished mother, Eudoria Holmes (Helena Bonham Carter) in the first movie (Eudora, you may remember, turned out to be a suffragette who had been cleverly siphoning family money to pay for the cause). Tewkesbury is now a progressive member of the House of Lords. Enola might not return his letters but she has been watching him walk to Parliament fairly regularly even if she won’t admit to having more than friend-y feelings for him.

Enola Holmes 2 is a big, yummy slice of cake — pretty and tasty frosting, lots of flavorful sponge and a thin layer of tartness in between the layers. There is actual there there in terms of the history — a real Sarah Chapman organized a strike of matchgirls over working conditions in 1888. And we have nice further development in terms of character relationships — Enola and Sherlock’s oddballs-with-mutal-respect-and-affection, Enola and Eudoria’s daughter-mother bond, Enola and Tewkesbury’s growing romance. We also get the beginnings of some canonically important Sherlock relationships as well, one with a really nice bit of backstory. It’s all well drawn, with each mini story getting just enough depth, just enough little moments that we can enjoy the characters as well as their adventure.

Brown remains the excellent star at the center of this solar system. She makes Enola plucky without being cartoonish and believable in her blend of confidence and occasional moments of uncertainty.

It was a joy to get to know these characters in the first movie and just as much fun to revisit them. I don’t usually say this but here’s hoping for Enola Holmes 3. A

Rated PG-13 for some violence and bloody images, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Harry Bradbeer with a screenplay by Jack Thorne (based on the books by Nancy Springer), Enola Holmes 2 is two hours and 10 minutes long and is available on Netflix.

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (TV-14)

Weird Al Yankovic gets a — biopic I guess? with the excellent Weird: The Al Yankovic Story, which is streaming on the Roku Channel of all places, a fact which is kind of perfect, tonally.

Little Alfie Yankovic (Richard Aaron Anderson as a kid, David Bloom as a teen and a super game Daniel Radcliffe as an adult) grew up loving Mad magazine and the Dr. Demento (Rainn Wilson) radio show and sneaking Hawaiian shirts. His parents (Julianne Nicholson, Toby Huss) just wanted him to stop doing all the things he wanted to do and being the way he was so he could grow up and get a sensible job at the factory, like Al’s dad. But Al fell in love with the accordion and dreamed of one day writing his own lyrics for other people’s songs. Even after getting caught at a polka party as a teen — you know how teens like to peer pressure each other into playing polka — and incurring his father’s extreme wrath, Al never gave up. He moved out and started playing his music for audiences and eventually saw enormous success, even when he moved from parodies to writing completely and totally original songs, as the movie emphatically and repeatedly states, like “Eat It.”

Other things that happen in Weird Al’s life: He has a passionate relationship with Madonna (Evan Rachel Wood, who is having a blast), he is offered the role as the new James Bond, he sells more albums than The Beatles, he is an international assassin maybe. And through it all, what he really wants is the love of his father, whose violent reaction to accordions comes with a surprising backstory.

Weird is both the dumbest movie I’ve seen in a long time (and I mean that as a compliment) and possibly the only correct way to make a biopic of a living person. It isn’t just Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, it’s Walk Hardest — so committed to its own delightful stupidity that you can’t help sharing in the delight. This movie contains a requisite dark period where Weird Al basically turns into Jim Morrison. There is a running subplot involving Pablo Escobar. There is a Gallagher reference (kids, ask your dorkiest grandparent).Thomas Lennon has a small part as a door-to-door accordion salesman who is basically The Music Man’s Harold Hill. And everybody here, including the oddly buff Daniel Radcliffe, is playing everything absolutely unblinkingly straight. It is marvelous, in that it is a marvel to behold this much unfiltered ridiculousness in one movie, one Roku movie produced by Funny or Die Productions (which made a trailer for a Weird Al biopic as a bit nearly a decade ago).

Everyone here is a delight, from Conan O’Brien as Andy Warhol to Quinta Brunson’s Oprah Winfrey, but it is truly Radcliffe who wins the Just Going For It award. He is earnestly unhinged and it is great. A

Rated TV-14. Directed by Eric Appel and written by Weird Al Yankovic and Eric Appel, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story is an hour and 48 minutes long and is available on the Roku Channel.

Featured photo: Enola Holmes 2

Till (PG-13)

Mamie Till-Mobley, mother of the murdered child Emmett Till, is the focus of Till, a close-up portrait of a woman’s rage and grief.

Mamie Bradley (Danielle Deadwyler), as Till-Mobley (who died in 2003) is known for most of the movie, is worried from the moment she sends her only child, Emmett Till (Jalyn Hall), on a train to visit cousins in 1955 Mississippi. He has grown up in Chicago and even though the city is hardly free of racism, he doesn’t have experience with the dystopian apartheid of the South and the deadly consequences of running afoul of its hellish social conventions.

A sunny, friendly, baby-faced 14-year-old, Emmett seems to be generally enjoying himself with his cousins, even when he’s helping them pick cotton. While at a store buying sweets, he tells the clerk, who we later learn is Carolyn Bryant (Haley Bennett), that she looks like a movie star and later whistles at her. He thinks he’s being charming, we see a sweetly goofy kid, she goes for her gun. A few days go by and he and his cousins think the incident will come to nothing and don’t even tell their parents, Mamie’s uncle (John Douglas Thompson) and aunt (Keisha Tillis). But then men, including Carolyn’s husband, show up at the house and kidnap Emmett while holding his cousins at gunpoint.

When Mamie finds out Emmett is missing, she wants to hurry to Mississippi to find him, but family help her connect with the local chapter of the NAACP and Rayfield Mooty (Kevin Carroll), who tries to get political officials and the media involved in Emmett’s disappearance. When Emmett’s body is found, Mamie, nearly shattered already, insists on having him returned to Chicago and on seeing him. Emmett’s face and head are horribly disfigured and he is bloated from being in a river. Mamie decides that Emmett’s funeral will be open casket and she brings newspaper and magazine photographers in to take pictures of Emmett’s body to show the world what happened to him.

An extended trailer for this movie mentions the fact that we don’t actually see Emmett being murdered — an effective and possibly more emotionally devastating choice. While the movie shows us Emmett’s body and what seeing him does to Mamie, other family members and the larger public, it keeps the focus on Mamie, her heartbreak and her relationship with Emmett. The movie never lets us forget that he is a child and he is her child and it doesn’t waste a minute with sensationalizing his lynching or trying to get us to understand his murderers or the society that protects them. That sounds like kind of an obvious thing — that the murdered child and the effect of his murder on his mother would be the center of this story — but it feels so Hollywood-standard for a Civil Rights era movie to filter Black stories through some kind of white character that this “a movie about Mamie that puts Mamie at the center” approach makes Till feel innovative.

And Deadwyler’s performance absolutely holds us in her experience throughout the movie. She puts us in Mamie’s emotions, from the worry and dread that come with sending Emmett to Mississippi through the ocean of grief after his death and the anger that I think would completely consume most people. It’s not always easy (I think especially if you have kids and can call up worry about them with zero effort) to be with her in that headspace, but it is so well done, her feelings are so well examined and shown (not told), that when characters praise her out loud it almost feels unnecessary. Just making it through the day as a woman who has lost so much seems like an exceptional feat — and this movie makes us feel the effort this requires of her. When we see her doing so while being able to serve as an advocate for justice, Mamie displays an almost superhuman strength. A

Rated PG-13 for thematic content involving racism, strong disturbing images and racial slurs, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Chinonye Chukwu and written by Michael Reilly & Keith Beauchamp and Chinonye Chukwu, Till is two hours and 10 minutes long and distributed in theaters by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures.

Featured photo: Danielle Deadwyler and Jalyn Hall in Till.

Black Adam (PG-13)

Dwayne Johnson is the magnetic core of the “too many items on the menu” comic book adaptation Black Adam, an entry in DC’s Extended Universe.

We meet Black Adam (Johnson) — who is, to oversimplify, a “Shazam”-type — as well as the Justice Society, presented as a good guy Suicide Squad (also directed by Viola Davis’ Amanda Waller). The team is led by Hawkman (Aldis Hodge), who is sorta cool and rich, and includes Dr. Fate (Pierce Brosnan), Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell) and Atom Smasher (Noah Centino), a new-guy superhero whose funnest attribute is that his uncle, the previous Atom, is played by Henry Winkler. We also learn about Intergang, a group of criminal mercenaries occupying Kahndaq, a country presented as the vaguely Middle Eastern. And, rounding out the DCEU business, there is a mid-credits scene that is, in my opinion, some complete nonsense.

The movie also talks vaguely about colonizers, oppression, freedom, the idea of being a hero versus being protector and why it is bad to murder people. And, it seems like the movie can’t decide whether it’s deadly serious or quippy and so it does both.

In the movie’s present, Adrianna Tomaz (Sarah Shahi), a professor in the oft-invaded and oppressed Kahndaq, is desperate to find an ancient Kahndaq artifact, a blue-ish iron-y crown that can give its wearer godlike powers (of demonic origin). She wants to rehide it so Intergang and other baddies will never find it. But one of her shifty compatriots, Ishamel (Marwan Kenzari), has other plans. Adrianna finds the crown in an ancient tomb just as Intergang arrives and demands it at gunpoint.

Certain she is going to die, she does some on-the-fly translating to call on Kahndaq’s ancient protector, and the muscle-y Adam (Johnson) appears. He lays waste to nearly all of the Intergang group and allows Adrianna and her comic relief brother, Karim (comedian Mohammad Amer), to get away. Later, Adrianna introduces Adam to her young son, Amon (Bodhi Sabongui), a big fan of superheroes who has some advice for Adam on how to improve and capitalize on his image in this modern world.

Amanda sends in the Justice Society to neutralize Adam because of some secret ancient texts that suggest he isn’t the public-protecting superhero that legend paints him as. When the Justice Society arrives in Kahndaq, they discover that “international stability!” isn’t exactly an electrifying rallying cry and maybe oppressed people aren’t so concerned with what happens to their oppressors.

Or, I mean, that’s an element that is mentioned and that I found kind of interesting — justice and prioritizing the global peace vs. more direct protecting of one’s people. But for all that the movie throws it out there, the Big Ideas are kept kinda vague.

Like a kid sprinkling Fruit Loops and M&Ms on top of a Nutella and potato chips Eggo sandwich, the movie drops those nuggets of “saying something” on top of an overstuffed pile of comic book lore: this character and their relationship to that character and the magical this thing, created by the wizard-y those guys. We don’t get a whole lot of time with any one element and most of it is just told directly to us in flashback or exposition dump. While I’ve often wanted superhero movies to skip the origin stories and get right to the superheroing (not unlike how the MCU handled Spider-Man), Black Adam skips any kind of context about these people or groups. Watching Black Adam isn’t a whole lot different, experience-wise, from reading the character’s Wikipedia page. You get plenty of raw data but not a lot of emotional connection to characters or their quests.

Dwayne Johnson is a top-notch action movie player — he is one of my favorite parts of the whole Fast & Furious experience at this point. Black Adam doesn’t use his talents nearly enough and doesn’t give him a solid story. It never really settles on who it wants Black Adam, the man or the movie, to be. C

Rated PG-13 for sequences of strong violence, intense action and language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra and written by Adam Sztykiel and Rory Haines & Sohrab Noshirvani, Black Adam is two hours and four minutes long and distributed in theaters by New Line Cinema.

Ticket to Paradise (PG-13)

The charms of and genuine good will between George Clooney and Julia Roberts do most of the work in the rom-com Ticket to Paradise.

Long-divorced couple David (Clooney) and Georgia (Roberts) have a deeply antagonistic relationship, bickering all the time — including throughout the college graduation ceremony of their daughter Lily (Kaitlyn Dever). They seem delighted to walk swiftly away from each other at the airport after saying goodbye to Lily, who is vacationing in Bali with her buddy Wren (Billie Lourd). After the post-college pre-life trip, Lily is slated to start work at a prestigious law firm.

But is law really Lily’s dream, or something her parents have talked her into? When she meets Gede (Maxime Bouttier), a local seaweed farmer, she starts to doubt her whole life plan. Thus, some two months later, do David and Georgia find themselves on a plane to Bali to stop their daughter from marrying Gede and derailing her big career.

There is, of course, all kinds of baggage. A similar post-college engagement between David and Georgia, followed quickly by the birth of Lily, derailed Georgia’s career plans. Though divorced more than a decade, David and Georgia are clearly still angry about how their relationship ended — and maybe even that it ended. David is currently unattached and Georgia is maybe not looking for forever with her boyfriend Paul (Lucas Bravo), an airline pilot.

Roberts and Clooney are good separately — clunky exposition scenes where they tell various stories of their relationships to other people work because they are such watchable actors. Together they crackle and spark — they’re great scene partners whether their characters are fighting or flirting. Their plan to break up Lily and Gede allows for a fair amount of charmingly executed scheming and gentle capers.

The rest of the movie is a flat fountain soda, watered down in flavor and generally lacking in effervescence. Everything that isn’t based on Roberts’ and Clooney’s star power and chemistry is tepid at best. The story feels like so much warmed over “haven’t we seen this before” and the romance between the youngs is fairly spark-free. Lourd, whose oddball neglected-rich-kid character is interesting, doesn’t get nearly enough to do to really bring anything to the movie.

Clooney and Roberts and the beauty of Bali carry this movie further than it has any right to go, but it ultimately underwhelms. C+

Rated PG-13 for some strong language and brief suggestive material, according to the MPA at filmratings.com. Directed by Ol Parker with a screenplay by Daniel Pipski, Ticket to Paradise is an hour and 44 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by Universal Studios.

Featured photo: Dwayne Johnson in Black Adam.

The infectious nature of violence is the real boogeyman in Halloween Ends, the allegedly final installment in the Laurie Strode/Michael Myers rebooted-ish Halloween series.

This movie is also about the awesome recent career of Jamie Lee Curtis. She served up Laurie in the last movie, 2021’s Halloween Kills, largely from a hospital bed, which feels like a pretty rad way to collect your franchise check. Since restarting the Halloween franchise with Halloween in 2018, where she got to play a gun-toting revenge-seeking prepper, she’s been in Knives Out and played Deidre Beaubeidre in Everything Everywhere All At Once. Curtis is, at 63, living the life and even though these Halloween movies aren’t setting the world on fire for me they have, in total, given me a new appreciation for Curtis for being able to get fun work in movies past the age when Hollywood usually allows women to have that. (Also, for what it’s worth, they’ve made some good money at the box office.) “Good on ya, Jamie Lee Curtis” might actually be my strongest takeaway from this trilogy as a whole.
We’ve had a little time jump since Halloween Kills, which I guess took place in 2018 (the same in-universe night, I think, as 2018’s Halloween). It’s now four years later. Laurie Strode (Curtis) is still dealing with the death of her daughter (Judy Greer) at the hands of Myers at the end of the last movie. She lives with her granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) still in the same death-town of Haddonfield, Illinois, but now in a proper house in a regular neighborhood. She’s decorating for Halloween, writing about surviving all the Michael Myers violence and even awkwardly flirting with Frank (Will Patton), longtime friend and police officer. But even in happy moments she finds herself buried in the grief of the Myers killings. People blame her for all the death and destruction and she feels that the evil and violence of those actions have spread, not just to the Halloween Kills vigilante mob but to crimes perpetrated through the town over the last four years. One of the most gruesome, which we see in the movie’s opening scenes, happens in 2019 and features college-ish-aged Corey (Rohan Campbell), called in to babysit for a boy when his parents go to a Halloween party. The kid tries to scare Corey by locking him in the attic, but what happens next leaves Corey pegged as a new town boogeyman.
In the present day, Laurie sees Corey getting picked on by some high school kids and feels sorry for him. She takes him to the hospital to be treated by Allyson, who takes an instant liking to Corey. It is once again Halloween time and the tentative new couple goes to a party, where there are masks and angry townsfolk and instances of casual violence. Michael Myers (James Jude Courtney as “The Shape”), not seen since 2018, lurks in the corners but does he see in Corey prey or something else?
Look, I’m not going to pretend that this movie is super deep. It is still mostly stabbing and screaming and masked figures doing a power walk after running-in-terror victims. But there’s some “what is the nature of evil” and “how does hate spread” musings, often delivered by Curtis, between all of that, which gives the movie at least the veneer of thoughtfulness. We also get fountains of stage blood and some pretty gleeful squish noises, so I don’t feel fans of the seasonal classics will be disappointed. I did also appreciate the overall lo-fi quality of the movie, with its out-of-time setting (from clothes to hair to the fact that the whole town is glued to the rock radio station, there is still a general late-1970s/early 1980s vibe) and its quip-free, linear-plot-development no-nonsense approach to the story. There is almost something wistful about the whole endeavor, like you can feel a bittersweetly smiling Curtis saying “aw, I’m going to miss all this knife-welding.”
Halloween Ends ultimately feels like it’s delivering vibes more than a scary story, but if you’re in the mood for Halloween-season fare, I feel like you could do worse. C+
Rated R for bloody horror violence and gore, language throughout and some sexual references, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by David Gordon Green and written by Paul Brad Logan & Chris Bernier & Danny McBride & David Gordon Green, Halloween Ends (sure it does) is an hour and 51 minutes long and is distributed by Universal Studios in theaters and via Peacock.

Featured photo: Jamie Lee Curtis in Halloween Kills.

Amsterdam (R)

John David Washington, Margot Robbie and Christian Bale are Americans who enjoy liberation in post-WWI Europe but find themselves tangled up in intrigue in pre-WWII New York in Amsterdam, a movie written and directed by David O. Russell that backs into a piece of history called the “Business Plot.”

Spoiler alert if you decide to dive down the Wikipedia rabbit hole of the nutty incident that is the Business Plot before seeing this movie.

In World War I, medical doctor Burt Berendsen (Bale) joins a mostly African-American Army regiment that has suffered from dangerously hostile and disrespectful leadership by white officers. Aspiring lawyer Harold Woodman (Washington) makes a deal with Burt that if Burt actually works to help the troops and keep them alive Woodman will try to keep Burt alive. When most of the regiment, Burt and Harold included, end up in a French hospital with injuries, the friendship deepens and grows to include Valerie (Robbie), an American working as a nurse.

Valerie takes the men with her to Amsterdam, where two “businessmen”— Henry Norcross (Michael Shannon), in US Naval intelligence as a chyron tells us, and Paul Canterbury (Mike Myers), really MI6 — offer to help the men receive medical treatment for their wounds and in Burt’s case an unlimited supply of glass eyes to replace the eye he lost. In exchange, Norcross and Canterbury might one day need some kind of favor from Burt and Harold, maybe a favor similar to the kind of information-passing favors Valerie did during the war. In Amsterdam the men get a rest — not just from war but from all of the constraints they suffer from at home, such as the antisemitism lobbed at Burt (including from his tony in-laws) and the deadly racism that plagues Harold and would make his romance with Valerie impossible.

Eventually Burt returns home to his wife Beatrice (Andrea Risenborough). He’s kicked out of his fancy Park Avenue medical practice because he brings veterans in for treatment — all veterans regardless of race. Eventually, Burt and Harold join forces to help veterans try to get the care and the benefits they deserve.

Which brings us to the now of the movie: 1933. Burt and Harold agree to perform an autopsy of their beloved former general when his daughter (Taylor Swift) suspects that he’s been murdered. But then she is murdered, pushed into the street by a man who points the finger at Burt and Harold. They must find out who killed the general and his daughter in order to clear their name.

A story of interwar hopefulness and romance is folded into a crime caper and it all comes together in a tale of the international political storm of the 1930s. And it’s long. And feels it.

Amsterdam meanders around, spending some time being a comedy about the buddyship of Burt and Harold, with characters played by Chris Rock and Zoe Saldana, then spending some time in a whirl of crime and early spycraft, in storylines filled with shady people with shady motives. The movie doesn’t have time to settle into any one groove. I have liked John David Washington in everything I’ve seen him in but here, like most of the people in this movie, he’s so busy ferrying the story from this moment to the next that he doesn’t really get to do much with his character. Bale goes big with his character and Robbie is, I dunno, fine, but with the vast list of movie chores for everybody to tick off it almost doesn’t even matter who we think they really are. Everybody gets a few nice moments but nobody really gets to build layers.

I appreciate the goodness that this movie seems to want to advocate for — one of its messages is “you know what’s better than war? Love and mutual respect,” which is, you know, accurate and laudable and even kind of sweet in its earnestness. But the buffet of styles and tones and everything made it too easy for whatever was the point of all this to get lost along with any really standout work from the actors. Amsterdam needed to get where it was going quicker, with more bounce and with a lot less of everything else. C+

Rated R for brief violence and bloody images, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Written and directed by David O. Russell, Amsterdam is two hours and 14 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by 20th Century Studios.

Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile (PG)

A family moves to New York City and finds a singing crocodile living in their brownstone in Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile, a live-action musical whose songwriters include The Greatest Showman’s Benj Pasek and Justin Paul.

I mention this because the songs here had the same unremarkable-to-me feel that the Greatest Showman songs did. But now every kid who has ever dipped a toe in a theater class can bust out “This Is Me,” so my personal tastes don’t necessarily serve as a gauge of wider success. I still wouldn’t listen to that movie’s album but I do own it thanks to my kids — the same kids whom I can see wanting the album of original songs for this movie. The songs, sung by Shawn Mendes, who is Lyle’s singing voice, were half of what my kids seemed to enjoy most about the movie.

The other half was the action scenes, and with a series of people unexpectedly discovering a crocodile, there’s plenty of the wacky, chase-y, adults-screeching action that seems to resonate with kid audiences.

When we first meet Lyle, he is a gecko-sized crocodile living — and singing — in a cage in the back of a pet store. Not-so-great showman Hector P. Valenti (Javier Bardem), desperate for a new act, takes Lyle home and teaches him the movie’s first original song in hopes that they can take the performance on the road. By the time Lyle is a preschooler-sized crocodile, Hector thinks he’s ready and sets up a show, backing the expenses with the inherited brownstone he and Lyle have been living in. But when the curtain rises, Lyle can’t make a sound, and Hector loses his house. He goes on the road to earn cash and leaves Lyle, telling him to pretend he’s stuffed if anybody visits his attic home.

When the Prim family — mom (Constance Wu), dad (Scoot McNairy) and lonely eighth-grader Josh (Winslow Fegley) — moves in, they have no idea that anyone lives in the building other than themselves and the downstairs apartment dweller, Mr. Grumps (Brett Gelman). Then Josh pokes around the attic and discovers Lyle. The two become friends and Josh learns that Lyle can sing. Later Josh’s parents each discover Lyle and, after some screaming, realize the crocodile is not just friendly and tuneful but has the ability to help them work through their various adult existential stuff.

That stuff includes the father’s difficulties with his new class of chatty private-school kids and the mom’s sadness about Josh growing up plus a whole lotta baggage about her marrying Josh’s dad after the death of Josh’s mom and her, I guess, continued uneasiness with her stepmother status? Whatever the exact source of her troubles, it’s something that required just enough talking between adults that kids — mine and others in the theater where I saw the movie — were moving around, chatting, going to the bathroom, all the standard behaviors of a young audience that has lost interest in a movie. The movie comes in at around an hour and 45 minutes and I feel like the adult chatty parts could have been tightened to the “fireworks factory” faster, which in this case is a great escape from the city zoo. The hijinks of that did seem to reel younger audience members back in and leave my kids with an overall positive opinion of the movie.

And “overall positive” would probably be my judgment as well. It’s fine, with a few cute lines and some campy business from Bardem, who is not Hugh Grant in Paddington 2 but seems to be enjoying himself. The physicality of the animated Lyle in an otherwise real world is good enough; a scene of him dancing with Constance Wu is cute and well-executed. The movie doesn’t dazzle but nor does the animation get in the way. Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile is a serviceable, pleasant-enough family viewing experience. B-

Rated PG for mild peril and thematic elements, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Josh Gordon and Will Speck with a screenplay by Will Davies (based on the book by Bernard Warber), Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile is an hour and 46 minutes long and is distributed in theaters by Columbia Pictures.

Featured photo: Amsterdam.

Bros (R)

Billy Eichner plays a man who is perfectly happy by himself, absolutely doesn’t want a relationship but uncertainly navigates a possible romance with the very handsome Aaron in Bros, a sweet, genuinely laugh-out-loud funny rom-com co-written by Eichner.

I feel like I’ve seen a run of movies lately where I think “ha, funny” but don’t actually have the spontaneous reaction of laughing. That I actually out-loud laughed is one of the delights of this movie.

And Eichner, of course, gives his character Bobby the mix of clever dialogue and solid delivery that allows for plenty of comedy. Bobby is working to open a museum of LGBTQ+ history in New York City; he has a popular podcast, a solid group of friends and all the casual hookups he wants. He has no need for some conventional-style coupledom, he emphatically explains. But when he sees Aaron (Luke Macfarlane) at a club, he finds himself not just awkwardly flirting but interested enough to be hurt when Aaron seems to walk away from him. He is excited when he and Aaron go on a date but seems sort of pre-angry at the rejection that he thinks is coming from Aaron. Bobby keeps setting Aaron up to tell him that Bobby is not Aaron’s type, but Aaron, who is also wrestling with an unfulfilling career choice, is intrigued by and attracted to the confident Bobby.

This is not your standard Hollywood romance, Billy and Bobby (both Eichner and his character) argue, because gay relationships and the relationship dynamics are different from straight relationships. The movie works to examine that, while also, with a bit of a wink at the Hallmark movie conventions, hitting a lot of the classic romance beats. (Macfarlane has a baker’s dozen of Hallmark movie credits on his filmography, with names like The Mistletoe Promise and Sense, Sensibility and Snowmen.) We get real — or real enough — people navigating relatable emotional stuff with specifics to the community Eichner is portraying, which is always a solid recipe for creating an appealing story.

Even the slightly stilted moments — including some of Eichner’s performance, which at times reminded me of Jerry Seinfeld’s Seinfeld Jerry — work because the movie is able to root itself in believable characters who give some dimension to their rom-com-trope-ier elements. Guy Branum is a standout in the movie’s supporting cast but there are lots of note-perfect smaller roles and cameos, including the always excellent Bowen Yang.

And then surrounding all of that are just pleasurable moments of fun — from your Debra Messing cameos to your jabs at online culture. The office politics of Bobby’s museum, Aaron’s skill at dealing with what he calls weird rich people — it all makes for some highly enjoyable silliness.

Bros mixes just enough tartness and broad comedy, plus some moments of honest introspection, to balance the sweetness of its swoony romance. B+

Rated R for strong sexual content, language throughout and some drug use, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Nicholas Stoller and written by Billy Eichner & Nicholas Stoller, Bros is an hour and 55 minutes long and distributed in theaters by Universal Studios.

Featured photo: Bros.

Don’t Worry Darling (R)

A sunny mid-20th-century suburb has a dark side, obviously, in Don’t Worry Darling.

Alice (Florence Pugh) and Jack Chambers (Harry Styles) are a blissful-seeming young couple living in a Palm Springs-like desert town full of beautiful mid-century ranches, palm trees and other blissful-seeming couples, including Alice’s neighbor and best friend Bunny (Olivia Wilde, who also directed) and her husband Dean (Nick Kroll), that they regularly hang out with for cocktails and cigarettes. When Alice rushes to greet Jack at the door after his day working for the secretive Victory Project, he is delighted to see her and not just because she has a drink for him in her hand and a steak on the table.

But there is some fraying in the pastel fabric of this company town. What is the Victory Project, the place the husbands leave for in a herd of Cadillacs driving into the desert every morning? Is it top-secret weaponry, as one wife speculates? And why is big boss Frank (Chris Pine) such a creepy cult leader about not just whatever they’re doing out there but the town itself? Alice starts to really consider these questions after her friend Margaret (Kiki Lane) cracks up and loses her young son out in the desert — with Alice’s questioning much to the dismay of Jack, who seems to be on the cusp of big advancement.

Don’t Worry Darling is both better and worse than you probably think it is. You may have heard about this movie’s behind-the-scenes drama (Vulture has a whole roundup if you want to spare yourself the Googling; the Olivia Wilde/Harry Styles stuff, the various actor kerfuffles). All that and the intense coverage of it prepared me for a mess, which this movie isn’t. But, as a fan of Booksmart, Wilde’s first directorial outing, I was also hoping for something with that movie’s charm and cleverness, which this movie doesn’t have. So let go of all your expectations, is I guess what I’m saying.

Pugh does a good job of giving us both the around-the-edges wariness of living in a too-perfect paradise and the increasing anxiety of a person afraid that they’ve been caught in a really dangerous trap but can’t convince anyone else of that. She is highly watchable even when the story doesn’t exactly hold together or seems to be fluffing up the demonstrations of dread because it doesn’t have a lot else to do. It’s clear early on that there’s going to be a “Thing” about this desert oasis. But the movie takes a while to reveal the Thing and then doesn’t do much beyond deliver that (kinda predictable) revelation. Even if you can just go with what’s happening and don’t ask questions about the mechanics (though I couldn’t help but nitpick the mechanics), the delivery of the Thing isn’t sleek enough to smooth out all the bumps, from “wait, what?” plot elements to the performances (Styles doesn’t give much until the movie’s final moments, Wilde feels a notch out of phase with the rest of the movie but Pine seems to be digging into his weirdo character with two spoons). Don’t Worry Darling feels like it’s stalling more than building tension and then hurries through what feels like the important bits, perhaps because it wants us to focus on the message and themes about this woman in a very stylish cage more than some precisely constructed story. I feel like this movie would have been stronger if it could have delivered both. C+

Rated R for sexuality, violent content and language, according to the MPA on filmratings.com. Directed by Olivia Wilde with a screenplay by Katie Silberman, Don’t Worry Darling is two hours and two minutes long and is distributed in theaters by New Line Cinema.

Featured photo: Don’t Worry Darling.