Category: Film Reviews

Alan Ritchson is always good for an Alan Ritchson type

Playing into that one character you always play might not be the way to blaze a path to an Oscar, but it does seem to be a good strategy for earning a regular paycheck.

Take, for example, Alan Ritchson, traveling butt-kicker Reacher in the Prime Video series Reacher. In addition to playing a large man who has a code and beats up bad guys in that series (which ends its fourth season this week; a fifth season is expected, according to Wikipedia), Ritchson plays a large man who has a code and beats up bad guys in Runner, released in theaters last week, less than two months after the release of Motor City, another movie where he plays a large man who has a code and beats up bad guys.

Hank (Ritchson), who has a “big guy” name, as Owen Wilson’s Ben says, is a courier, running things both legal and legal-status-unknown around Brisbane, Australia, where he lives and works on his sobriety. He is charged with picking up a medical package at the airport, which is where he meets Ben, who explains that he, Ben, is part of the medical package. The item is a secured cooler keeping a liver viable for a sad little girl who needs a new liver and Ben is the guy who knows how to keep it at the right temperature and knows the code to open it.

Things immediately start to go wrong with this assignment as Hank realizes that he and the aggressively chatty Ben are being followed by two SUVs full of bad guys. Soon the shooting and car chasing and occasionally some punching and kicking get underway as Hank and Ben try to race the organ to an out-of-town hospital before it loses viability while a cartel boss’s desperate, sweaty son (Rodrigo Santoro) attempts to hijack it for his mother’s own use.

Just to really hammer home that all of the violence Hank and Ben participate in is For A Good Cause, we see the sick kid and her mother regularly and we spend a little too much screentime on Hank’s sad backstory with his own sad sick daughter. And if that doesn’t do it for you, the movie really underlines the Extreme Danger and Extreme Heroism by scoring a lot of the action with music that feels like it was maybe left over from some Angel Studios’ biblical epic’s battlefield scenes. (Angel, which I know largely for its Christian and Christian-adjacent films, is this movie’s distributor and apparently has also started to release some less overtly faith-based movies. TBD on what all that means.)

Not unlike other movies I talk about here, Runner piles on a lot of unnecessary story elements for its characters — Santoro’s character has a difficult relationship with his mother! Hank is still sad about his failed marriage! These little extras aren’t needed because this movie’s core — overly talkative regular-guy Ben and strong silent type Hank — is very charming. They have good “guys who become buddies doing a task” chemistry, their respective skills help give energy and the right amount of humor to the action scenes. When the movie just gets out of their way, turns down the score and lets them do their things — Ritchson’s Reacher variant, Wilson’s Owen Wilson variant — we in the audience get the fun popcorn time the trailer promises.

In July theatrical release Motor City (available for rent or purchase), Ritchson, playing Vietnam vet and lunch-box-toting factory worker John Miller, is less crackling but still fun to watch. This action-revenge movie of few words lets 1970s production design, costuming and songs do most of the talking. Moments after Miller proposes to girlfriend Sophia (Shailene Woodley), cops are blasting smoke bombs into their home. Sophia and Miller end up under arrest, with police pulling bricks of cocaine out of his car, the car that hours earlier was briefly stolen from him. As we see in flashbacks, before she was with Miller, Sophia was the girlfriend of drug muckety muck Reynolds (Ben Foster) and now Reynolds, with the help of dirty cop Savick (Pablo Schreiber), is getting Miller out of the way. Miller goes to jail and Reynolds goes to Sophia, re-endearing himself to the woman who felt so betrayed by Miller. When she discovers Reynolds’ treachery and he gets violent, Miller’s friends (played by Lionel Boyce and Amar Chadha-Patel) break Miller out of prison to rescue Sophia.

Motor City is aggressive about its stylishness, from its slo-mo-enhanced action choreographed to Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain” to every choice made with Woodley’s hair. It is very self-consciously Doing A Thing, which I found entertaining mostly and kind of endearing even when it felt like it tipped into A Little Much territory (which for me was when “Nights in White Satin” appeared on the soundtrack). For me, this movie boiled down to the appeal of Alan Ritchson and how he dances through his fight scenes with balletic precision, taking just enough punches so we don’t think he’s a robot.

Ritchson, of course, isn’t the only actor playing his standard character and serving up action in recent releases.

Ryan Reynolds plays that one Ryan Reynolds character who is here a fighter pilot during the Top Gun-era Cold War in Mayday, an Apple TV movie. Troy (Reynolds) is tasked with operating the camera on a spy mission over Soviet territory. When his plane is shot down, he winds up behind enemy lines and is found by Nikolai (Kenneth Branagh), an American-culture-loving former KGB agent who insists on Troy calling him “Nik” and is delighted to have real-life Maverick in his house. When Troy nixes Nik’s suggestion that they just wait out the end of the Cold War safely in Nik’s cabin, the two have to work together to get Troy to safety without Nik being arrested for being a traitor. Chasing them down is Volkov (Marcin Dorocinski), a glasnost-hating KGB agent hoping to use this situation to return the U.S.S.R. to its former hardline glory.

That all of these characters seem more naive than they should be for who they are is probably my biggest beef with this otherwise good-natured, goofy caper-like movie. There is some silliness to the “Russians are people, just like us!” elements of Troy’s journey. But Branagh’s heft helps to cut Reynolds’ patter-based glibness and the result is a highly watchable light bit of comedy.

Also playing his one character is Jason Statham in Mutiny, an August release that showed up last week on VOD for rent or purchase. Statham is Cole Reed, a former British military guy and also former British cop who is now the bodyguard for a shipping magnate Tibu (Ramon Tikaram), who treats Cole like family and buys him a fancy watch and is the stand-in for Cole’s cop father, who died during a police raid or something and Cole feels responsible and this is way too much backstory for a movie that was trying to sell itself by boasting it had the same director as Plane. Plane got right to the Plane of it all. Mutiny takes too long to get us in an actual ship on the actual water. The action kicks off on dry land when Tibu, who is about to sell his company, is ambushed. Cole nearly gets him to safety but Tibu is shot and has just enough time to say “take care of my crappy adult son” (not an exact quote) before dying. Cole then seeks the men who killed his beloved employer, which leads him to sneaking onto a cargo ship. Also on the ship is Angie (Annabelle Wallis), the third mate, who has her own irrelevant backstory. These are the good guys on the ship; everybody else (captain played by Roland Møller plus a bunch of henchmen I couldn’t keep straight) is a bad guy. What Cole and Angie, separately at first and then together, discover is that the ship is part of a human trafficking operation and some of the refugees aboard this particular ship are in dire need of medical attention. To get the help they need, Cole and Angie will need to kick, punch, shoot and stab their way through the bad guys.

There is one particularly fun scene of balletic hand-to-hand combat featuring Statham near the movie’s end. It stood out to me for how much more interesting it was than most of the action that preceded it. Statham does a lot of his Statham thing but the movie doesn’t have the fun this kind of action-focused affair should have. We are watching Mutiny for Mutiny, and all that implies in terms of sassy one-liners and creative violence, not a rumination on father-son relationships and not a study of the different ways human traffickers can be bad. A movie like this can put its characters in scary settings with bad people, and those characters should take it seriously, but the movie where a guy fights another guy with a giant hook shouldn’t take itself so seriously or weigh itself down.

I feel like recent Amazon Prime Video release The Runner also had action-entertainment potential, but it just doesn’t work, I think this is in part because the movie has no faith in itself or in lead Gal Gadot. In a movie that feels like smooshed together bits of other movies, Gadot plays Maia, a London prosecutor and single mom to diabetic kid Noah (Rory Wilmot). She drops her son off at school and then goes on a run before a big day in court where she’s meant to question the one witness who can put away the criminal on trial. Early in her run, she gets a call on Noah’s phone from a man (Damian Lewis) saying he has Noah and needs her to do exactly what he says if she wants to see her son alive again. Naturally, the task is killing the witness and she has about an hour to run a needlessly far distance to his hotel (no Uber in London?) and get the job done before Noah dies of the diabetic coma Damian Lewis (called simply “The Caller” on IMDb) has put him in.

Most of the action is Maia running through the city while talking to Damian. Along the way she tries to figure out how to tell someone what’s happening. This story feels like a copy of a copy of some similar movie that would have starred, for example, Jason Statham, but the movie never figures out a clear lane to stick to — is Damian Lewis a creepy sadist who gets his kicks from this or a professional just doing a task? Is Maia just a regular-lady mom trying to save her son or does she have some weird violent past? Or is Gal Gadot just so unsuited for this part, however well she might physically sell the action elements, that the movie doesn’t know how to compose her character? I vote for that option. One of the many signs of the movie’s total lack of faith in Gadot is the strange close-ups, shaky cams, slo-mos and other camera effects applied to Gadot, particularly in scenes where you might need an actor to convey an emotion. You get the sense that either Gadot couldn’t portray, like, panic or rage, or the moviemakers decided to add the character’s emotions in post. Either way, it highlights the overall limpness of her performance and adds to the “cheap story told cheaply” feel of the whole endeavor.

Featured photo: Motor City.

A look at new Netflix flicks

Two new Netflix releases don’t demand your close attention but are acceptable relax-the-brain watches.

The Whisper Man feels like a study in contrasts. With its cast featuring Robert De Niro, Adam Scott, Michelle Monaghan and Michael Keaton, this movie about a retired detective (De Niro) joining the search for a possible copycat to the serial killer he put away years earlier is not nearly as fresh and compelling as it should be. But I also think all those people and their ability to bring top-shelf acting abilities to well-liquor material makes this grim and moody endeavor feel meatier than it would be with lesser talents.

To recommend the movie as a lazy-day crime drama is Scott as Tom Kennedy, author and overwhelmed recent widower and sole-parent dad to Jake (Acston Luca Porto), a kid whose mother’s death has left him with an imaginary friend and a fear of stairs. Why not relocate to a creepy multi-floor Victorian that had previously been (and is maybe still?) occupied by squatters? I feel like better real estate decision-making on Tom’s part could have saved him, and us, a lot of grief. Tom is retired detective Peter Willis’s (De Niro) estranged son, and so when Jake suddenly goes missing Tom immediately remembers his father’s super-disturbing case catching The Whisper Man, a serial killer who preyed on lonely young boys. Tom and Peter’s very strained relationship is one of the better parts of the story, as is Peter’s brothers-in-detective-ing partnership with Amanda (Monaghan), the detective working a new set of similar murders who asks Peter for help even before his grandson is was taken.

While the movie’s slow beginning suggests one of those grim eight-hour prestige crime series, there is a “get down to business” energy in the middle part of this movie as Peter and Amanda, and, on his own, a frantic Tom, try to figure out the connection between the old killings and the new killings and race to save Jake. But this movie spends too much time setting up a lot of, like, Chekov’s leaky-roof situations whose payoff is not nearly clever enough or expeditious enough to make up for the slog of showing us all the elements of the magic trick before the movie slowly performs it.

For a much peppier Netflix watch there’s Raygun: Breaking Badly,part of the Untold series of sports docs. This particular entry sympathetically tells the story of Dr. Rachael Gunn, aka Raygun, an Australian Olympic competitor in break dancing in the 2024 Paris games. By the looks of the Google search results, I am not the only person who searched “Baz Luhrmann Raygun movie” — because how is this story not a spiritual sequel to Lurhmann’s Strictly Ballroom just waiting to be made? Among the talking heads are Rachael’s sweetly supportive if befuddled parents and two fellow Australian B-girls talking delicious amounts of smack — all who read as straight out of Central Casting: Luhrmann division.

Rachael and her husband and coach Sammy Free are a cute, if somewhat in their own world, couple, both enamored of each other and of breaking, a style of dance they seem to maybe 45 percent understand. Rachael competed and frequently won in Australia, so it wasn’t really until she took her moves outside Oceania that she started to suspect how “not strictly breaking” her dancing was compared to the other dancer-athletes she’d be competing with. Who among us would be able to give up being an Olympian in Paris even if we realized, kinda too late, that actually we had no idea what we were doing? In the doc, Raygun walks us through her breaking career from her initial interest in this style of dance to the Olympics and into the horrors of going internet viral. Throughout she comes off as a friendly, enthusiastic, dorky lady who seems to have chosen — chosen correctly, for the sake of her personal sanity — to try to stay focused on the positive parts of her experience.

There is a “Raygun is bad for the break dancing community” element to her story that I’ve seen other reviews mention and that this documentary doesn’t really address in any meaningful way. I do think this doc does sell the idea that athleticism and skill are a big part of breaking — Raygun didn’t have skills at that level but her competitors clearly did. I feel like we’re watching Raygun show up ready to play her best game of T-ball not understanding that she’s playing baseball with MLB all-stars, which can make her seem sorta clueless but not necessarily, to my viewing, disrespectful to the game. And the documentary does work that Olympic magic of making me suddenly very interested in a competitive realm I’d never considered before. Time to rent 2007’s Planet B-Boy?

Featured photo: The Whisper Man.

A look at Coyote vs. Acme and Paw Patrol: The Dino Movie

“It’s a limited number of signs,” as a sign held up by Wile E. Coyote explains regarding his verbal communication style, is one of the many good jokes of Coyote vs. Acme(in theaters) and probably a not unfamiliar situation in a world where human people and cartoons, some of whom do not talk, coexist.

After all, a limited number of signs is really all you need when two characters’ relationship is largely one individual (Coyote) devising overly complicated traps, often disguised with birdseed, to catch the other (Road Runner), who is never fooled and always runs off with a “meep meep” right before the trap somehow spectacularly blows back on Coyote. But when Wile E. Coyote brings his woes to human lawyer Kevin Avery (Will Forte) in non-animated Albuquerque, more detailed communication becomes necessary.

Kevin is part of the strip mall law firm of Avery, Jones & Maltese (a fun nod to old school Looney Tunes animators). His specialty is filing nuisance suits against the Acme corporation for injuries to Tunes from Acme’s cartoon products line. The plaintiff gets tossed a $200 or $300 payout and nobody has to set foot (or paw or hoof) in a courtroom. But Coyote’s mountain of defective Acme products could add up to a massive payday, which gets Acme lawyer Buddy Crane (John Cena) and even Acme CEO Foghorn Leghorn (voice of Eric Bauza, who does most of the Tunes in this movie) involved, terrifying the “we always settle” Kevin. The size of Coyote’s lawsuit also threatens to uncover bigger corporate malfeasance on the part of Acme.

We get a lot of the Looney Tunes greats in cameos big and small in this movie — Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny hanging out at a Carrot Festival, Tweety Bird forced to work for Acme, a mention of the court case Sylvester vs. Gonzales — but the Wile E. Coyote/Road Runner relationship is at the core, and it’s surprisingly sweet. It’s also fun that this movie, long-delayed by corporate nonsense, has such a plucky story to tell about standing up to a seemingly unbeatable corporation. And it delivers this message with a lot of goofy Looney Tunes antics, using the rubbery, indestructible nature of the Tunes as both part of the movie’s humor and part of the story’s plot.

As for the humans, Forte fits in well with the Tunes, delivering that Looney quality in his performance as an exasperated, always-on-the-back-foot character. Likewise, Cena is a perfect live action version of a cartoon villain, all too-massive smiles and perfect jaw line. Lana Condor, Tone Bell, Luis Guzman and Martha Kelly slide nicely into the high-joke-density toon-filled world, all doing a good job at giving just enough but not getting in the way of the cartoon hijinks.

While Coyote vs. Acme has some multi-generational appeal — cartoon fun for kids, nostalgia and sticking-it-to-The-Man (who is in this case a rooster) for older viewers — other recent animated release Paw Patrol: The Dino Movie(also in theaters) is more geared toward its core audience. The movie is essentially a long episode of Paw Patrol.That’s an 88-minute (according to Wikipedia) episode, with no commercials or pausing-the-TV for bathroom breaks and no toys for young Paw Patrol fans to play with during less interesting parts and also the Dinos of the title are movie-screen-sized, which seemed to, at first, fully freak out one of the kids in the theater where I saw this movie. All of which doesn’t make this movie inappropriate for Paw Patrol-fan-aged movie-goers, but these are things to consider when deciding whether this is a movie to see in theaters or wait to watch on a more manageable TV-sized screen. Also, the movie did not, at least through the first part of the credits, play the “no job too big, no pup too small” theme song, which felt like kind of a letdown.

Otherwise, this fully animated tale of the talking pups and their human boy leader Ryder (voice of Henry Bolan) finding an island filled with dinosaurs — and, as bad-guy Mayor Humdinger (voice of Ron Pardo) notices when he sees a report about it on TV, diamonds — is standard, crayon-colored, good-natured Paw Patrol content. We get introduced to a new pup, Rex (voice of Hayden Chamberlain), who has been stranded on the island for a while and helps take care of the dinosaurs. Wikipedia, and my own vague memories, indicated that both this pup and the general concept of the pups meeting dinosaurs has existed in Paw Patrol TV episodes, not unlike the plots of previous Paw Patrol movies. Fully new or not, this pup and his habitat are an opportunity for the existence of new Paw Patrol toys, which you might think of as “great, more plastic crap in my house” or “great! A new easy-to-find gift item!” — both valid opinions. The core pup in the spotlight for this movie is Marshall (voice of Carter Young), the Dalmatian firefighter pup who is tired of being thought of as “the clumsy one.” For adults, there are some nice voice cameos — Terry Crews, Fortune Feimster, Bill Nye. It’s all completely fine, for what it is, without really offering much for viewers outside the “all is Paw Patrol” phase of life.

Featured photo: Reacher, from season one of Reacher. He is possibly even larger now.

The End of Oak Street and more shorties

Here’s to the under-two-hour movie.

I hung in there with The Odyssey’s nearly three-hour run time, I can stick with and enjoy a longer movie.

But I truly appreciate a movie that can get in and out in an economical 100 or so minutes, which is what Aug. 14 theatrical release The End of Oak Streetand many of the other movies mentioned here manage. Short, fun, occasionally funny, unapologetically goofy-action-packed, not an IP or a sequel — with that and its “kids on bikes” scenes, it has a real throwback feel.

It is also set in 1982 suburbia, so you get a lot of that faded late ’70s vibe. Denise (Anne Hathaway) and husband Greg (Ewan McGregor) also feel sort of faded as a couple. When they aren’t trying to fight quietly at a neighborhood block party, they are openly yelling in the family home, which Greg deals with by taking nips from a garage whiskey bottle and Denise handles by writing a book about a wife yearning to leave her family. The teenage Audrey (Maisy Stella) and tween Brian (Christian Convery) have definitely picked up on the couple’s problems.

After a night or two of seeing a bright light suddenly appear and vanish just outside the house, the family members see one bright light — maybe lightning, they wonder — that seems to cause the power and phones and water to go out. When the parents go outside the next day, they don’t see downed power lines but they do hear strange noises and see what at first Greg thinks might be the family dog and then realizes, when he gets a good look, is a large, feathery raptor of the dinosaur variety. The couple manages to make it back inside before getting eaten — not all of their neighbors are as lucky — and immediately start boarding up windows and trying to figure out how much food they have.

As we and they eventually figure out (and as the trailers give away), their neighborhood has been lifted out of our time and plopped back millions of years ago. How will they survive and is there a way back will be their chief questions — well and Brian will also keep looking for his dog and maybe Denise is wondering if she and Greg are still divorce-bound.

There is a fair amount of goofballery in this movie that the movie and the characters take absolutely seriously but that I think we are meant to laugh at. The southern California golden light and the bikes and the ancient-seeming station wagons gives this a very Steven Spielberg-lite feel but there is a B movie quality to some of the creature antics.

Hathaway is not “important movie Oscar contention” good here but she does a good job as the mom character in this sort of thing — think Dee Wallace in E.T. or JoBeth Williams in Poltergeist.

McGregor is equally enjoyable if a less steady member of Team Run Away From Dinosaurs in his role as Greg. McGregor has a way of playing this “regular” guy as just off kilter, with a sort-of-a-screw-up energy. Here, he ups the goofiness of any scene he’s in about 17 percent, even when he’s playing it dead seriously.

The audience in my screening included at least one group of movie goers who decided to have fun, give some “yay!”s to a scene where a dinosaur gets whacked with a sledgehammer and when the family dog shows up. I feel like this is the appropriate spirit in which to see and enjoy this movie, which feels like a throwaway “ha, nice” little August treat of a movie.

Also debuting last week was Don’t Say Good Luckon Netflix. “However much we as a culture appreciate Melanie Lynskey, we need to appreciate her much much more” and “Sunny Sandler has some serious acting chops” are two thoughts I had repeatedly throughout this dramady about a teenage girl dealing with both her role in the school play and the grave illness of her mother. Sandler, daughter of Manchester’s own Adam, plays Sophie, who learns that her mother’s cancer has returned via a butt-dial by her father, Ted (Max Greenfield, taking it to 11 with his decent-guy dad), right before she goes onstage to audition for a supporting role in her high school’s production of Waitress. Absorbing the news while she sings, she gives a performance that makes teacher-director Mrs. Parker (Stephanie Beatriz) consider her for the lead. Meanwhile, at home, mom Elizabeth (Lynskey) and Ted try to put on a good face for Sophie and her two younger brothers, even though Elizabeth seems to be getting sicker. Sophie is also dealing with standard but still heartbreaking teenage drama including a rupture with her longtime best friend Carolyn (Scarlett Estevez) and Sophie’s crush on her costar Jack (Jack Champion).

Steve Buscemi and Bebe Neuwirth show up as Elizabeth’s parents, doing good, heart-tugging work. Even Jon Lovitz impresses with a small role as a worker at Ted’s deli. Everybody here is note-perfect, down to the other kids theater-kid-ing it up on the production of the play.

Sandler is definitely a strong talent in her own right. I thought she did good work in teen comedy You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah (also on Netflix, also worth a watch) and this movie proves that wasn’t a fluke and that she is growing into a compelling actress with range.

Lynskey, of course, adds fabulous to everything she’s in. Here, she reminds me a bit of Rachel McAdams in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret in how Lynskey, as McAdams did, is able to convey a lot of her character’s own emotions and inner struggles through interactions with the daughter who is really more the movie’s focus (that movie is currently streaming on Prime Video, and available via rent or purchase).

Don’t Say Good Luck is a top shelf coming-of-age + light comedy + weepiness cocktail. I almost feel like this movie is wasted as a streaming release but I’m not sure that a mother-daughter-focused film like this could make it in the current cinema-outside-your-house environment. Let’s just count ourselves lucky that we get it at all.

There are several earlier 2026 releases now available for a home watch.

Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Passwas a July theatrical release and is now on VOD for rent or purchase, which feels bad for the film industry but great for me because this movie is one of the dumbest things I’ve seen in a while, I say with the highest level of compliment and respect.

This endeavor comes from the The State and Wet Hot American Summer players (David Wain directed; he and Ken Marino cowrote; The State is streaming on Paramount+ and Wet Hot American Summer is available for rent or purchase). Kansas hairstylist Gail Daughtry (Zoey Deutch) and high school sweetheart fiance Tom (Michael Cassidy) are just a few weeks out from their wedding and, on the way to a cookbook reading by Jennifer Aniston, flirtily talk about their respective celebrity sex passes. Gail decides on Jon Hamm, Tom immediately says Tilda Swinton. After meeting Aniston and deciding that she’s swell, Tom changes his pass to her, which Gail laughs off while she waits for Tom to run back and get his coat from the signing. When he doesn’t return to the car, she goes to look for him and finds that he has, indeed, used his “pass.” Gail is horrified and not sure what to do or whether to go ahead with her wedding and decides to go with coworker Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley) to a convention headlined by “King of the Whip Curl Remy Fontaine” (Thomas Lennon) in Los Angeles. Gail and Otto also decide that, what with Jon Hamm living in Los Angeles, this is her opportunity to try to use her pass, level the infidelity playing field and maybe save her relationship. But due to an accidental suitcase swap with some gangsters (including Joe Lo Truglio) who stop to take a fan pic with Henry Winkler — Vinnie Barbarino himself, as one gangster later says, a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it example of why this is a movie to watch sans phone — Gail is soon being hunted by an international terrorist with perfect skin (Sabrina Impacciatore) even while on her own quest.

There are so many reasons to enjoy this excellent gleeful-stupid movie. There’s John Slattery playing a hard-up version of John Slattery. There’s an Old West bar fight. There are a zillion tiny throwaway lines, sight gags and facial expressions that have been calibrated just right. There are a fair amount of extremely game famous-es showing up to wink at the camera (in at least one case, literally). And throughout there’s a pretty fun, cleverly executed riff on a quest tale. This is the kind of brilliant-stupid that has made me always at least a little excited to show up for a project from these guys and Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is a particularly well-crafted dumb good time.

Much as with Obsession, a horror movie I recently reviewed,Tuner (a May theatrical release available for rent or purchase) feels like a strong contender for a Best Sound Oscar nomination, one that makes excellent use of both sound design and sound editing. Niki (Leo Woodall) works as a piano tuner with his uncle-like mentor Harry (Dustin Hoffman). Once a talented piano player, Niki now has hyperacusis, which he describes as being allergic to sound and which you should definitely not look up if you’re a person who tends to freak out about any new medical thing you learn about. He wears ear plugs all the time and an extra pair of sound-dampening headphones most of the time, and is generally a rather keep-to-himself sort of guy. But then at a job at a music school he meets piano player and composer Ruthie (Havana Rose Liu) and even their mutual awkwardness — due to Niki’s condition and Ruthie’s upcoming deadline for impressing a composer she wants to intern for — can’t hold back their chemistry.

Their budding relationship comes at a stressful time for Niki. Harry is sick and his wife Marla (Tovah Feldshuh, excellent as always) tells him they are tens of thousands of dollars in medical debt. Shouldering the business alone and desperate to find more cash quickly, Niki decides to call Uri (Lior Raz), the owner of security company Niki met while tuning a piano at a fancy house. Well, “met” might not be as accurate as “caught trying to break into a safe.” Seems that while Uri and his guys install security systems, they also return to the odd house to steal, as one guy explains, the stuff (watches, jewelry and other items hidden in safes) their rich clients have so much of they won’t notice if it’s missing. Niki’s hypersensitivity to sound means that he can also hear things like the click of the metal tooth sliding into the correct numbered spot in a safe lock. So he opens the safe to stop Uri’s men from the loud drilling. Uri knows an excellent business opportunity when he sees it.

Tuner is sort of a combination heist movie, a romance between two prickly people and a character study of Niki in his attempt to eke out a new life for himself after suffering the medical setback that took away his music career. Each part of this movie is engaging and well drawn and flows together nicely. Woodall is good at showing the constant underlying tension of Niki as he moves through his day. He acts like he is always near a wince, like his pain level is perpetually at a 4 and he’s trying to muscle through the day, the conversation, the general noise of the city.

Havana Rose Liu is also in Power Ballad, another May release now available for rent or purchase. Her role here is much smaller, as the girlfriend of Danny Wilson (Nick Jonas), a one-time boy band star now trying to make it as a solo musician. Rick Power (Paul Rudd), the lead singer of a band that predominantly plays covers at weddings, meets Danny at his friend’s posh wedding and after Danny sings a song with the band, he and Rick end up hanging out that evening. They talk music, they play music and they drink a lot. At one point Rick plays Danny a song he’s been working on for years and Danny joins in playing it with him. And, like, if you didn’t know you were watching a John Carney movie (he directed and co-wrote this), you would know by this scene that so lovingly depicts the creation of a song. Carney also wrote and directed Once (RIP Glen Hansard), Begin Again, Sing Street and Flora and Son, all movies that I enjoy and that would be very handy if you ever had to explain “yeah, but like what is music really?” to an extraterrestrial.

Six months after this music-filled night, Rick hears that song, his song, while he’s walking through a mall. After looking it up, he learns that the song “How To Write a Song Without You” is a massive hit and has reenergized Danny’s career. Rick’s daughter Aja (Beth Fallon) asks if they’re rich now, presuming Rick has some sort of credit on the song. But of course he doesn’t and can’t prove to anyone, not his wife Rachel (Marcella Plunkett) nor his band mates nor a lawyer, that he wrote the song. Apparently, they’ve had to endure a lot of “Rick makes guitar face and sings at us” over the years. Rick sort of drives himself crazy over what to do about this unacknowledged creation of his and what exactly he’s looking for.

It’s very fitting that a John Carney movie centers itself on a song — what it means, what it means to make it, what it means to let it out in the world. It’s a specific kind of nerding out about music (and creation in general) that I find very enjoyable. Power Ballad is thinner, I think, than some of his other movies but still a solid story with good performances from Jonas and from Rudd, looking more beat up and even, gasp, a little more weathered than he usually does, which fits the role perfectly. If you’ve never seen a John Carney movie before, sure, this one is good, but definitely check out those others: Once (rent or purchase), Begin Again (streaming on Tubi and Amazon Prime Video and a few things that may or may not be real like Howdy and Lionsgate+, as well as rent or purchase), Sing Street (Starz, rent or purchase) and Flora and Son (Apple TV, rent or purchase).

Also streaming now is the May 29 release Pressure, which is on Peacock (as well as rent or purchase). This is a movie about the weather forecast for D-Day in 1944 — like, that’s it, that’s the movie. The overly confident American guy Irv Krick (Chris Messina) brags about predicting the weather for David O. Selznick and says the planned invasion day — June 5 — would be sunny and fair. The British guy, a Scot named James Stagg (Andrew Scott), direly predicts storms with massive waves and suggests putting off the invasion for a couple of weeks. Preposterous, says British Army General Bernard Montgomery (Damian Lewis). What am I supposed to do, yells a tense U.S. Army General Dwight Eisenhower (Brendan Fraser). There there, says Kay Summersby (Kerry Condon), a British Mechanised Transport Corps Lieutenant and Eisenhower’s private secretary, as Wikipedia says (Wikipedia says other things too, rabbit hole at your leisure).

We’re kind of shuffling through the remainders when it comes to finding new stories to tell about World War II, was my thinking while watching this movie — through really, it’s more like “new stories based on the people we know” because there are I’m sure tons of fascinating stories from parts of the war that aren’t just the tippy top of the military command in Europe. Here, we get a nice bit of “here’s the role the weather played in Allied landing in France” and my response was “huh, how about that.” I don’t know that it warrants a full movie and this movie isn’t doing anything particularly thrilling with its tale. I feel like Fraser, with Ike’s balding head and a perpetual look of indigestion, is doing the big performance and Scott is really trying to do a subtle-ish performance and we have the lady character who seems like she’s been elected mom-wife of everybody and we get a stirring rendition of a historical speech (Eisenhower’s address to the troops on D-Day). This isn’t that far, structurally, from a Darkest Hour or The King’s Speech. It’s not as well done as those movies but it’s not actively bad. It’s lightly fine, and probably OK-enough for a watch with your most history-loving parent.

Also based on a true story is March release Tow (available on Prime Video or rent or purchase). Amanda Ogle (Rose Byrne) got dealt some bad hands by life, made some mistakes, did some self-medicating and got on the wrong side of a tough economy, which is how she winds up sleeping in her 1991 Toyota Camry in present-ish day Seattle while trying to find a job with her veterinary assistant license. She gets a job at a fancy dog spa but it is quickly imperiled when, after the interview, she sees that her car has been stolen. After two calendar days, police find the car and it is towed to a lot where she can pick it up for the low cost of $270-some. Why do I have to pay to get my own stolen car back, she asks, not catching a break from the towing company and leaving with the knowledge that every day it sits in the lot, the car will cost her an extra $50 to spring. She files a lawsuit and gets a judge to order the release, without fine, of her car, but by this time some 20-ish days after it was impounded, the towing company has sold it. She turns to Kevin (Dominic Sessa), a lawyer at a nonprofit firm, to help her fight the company as she tries to keep herself safe and sober, eventually landing a semi-permanent spot at a shelter run by Barb (Octavia Spencer). There she meets others dealing with homelessness and other issues including the pregnant Nova (Demi Lovato) and Denise (Ariana DeBose), who, like Amanda, is struggling to keep up a relationship with her kids who live with their father. Amanda’s kid Avery (Elsie Fisher), who lives in Utah, is clearly desperate to have a relationship with Amanda but isn’t sure if Amanda, whose drinking and other problems have gotten in the way of her being a reliable parent, is truly able to be someone Avery can count on.

Bryne gives a strong performance of someone who, despite having taken many blows by life, is still actively fighting to improve her situation. She is able to show us the messy parts of Amanda along with her toughness and her deep love for Avery. It helps to pull the movie through some of the moments that feel a little “television movie about a Very Serious Issue,” making Amanda a person rather than the personification of an Issue. Likewise, the supporting characters help to ground the movie in something like human people. And you can enjoy your righteous anger at the whole concept of “$50 a day to get your stolen car back” with Corbin Bernsen playing the humanity-free personification of a predatory business in his role as the towing company’s lawyer.

Featured photo: The Last House.

The Last House joins a vaguely defined but fun genre

I think I like this genre that seems to be “horror or sci-fi or something?” — Backrooms, Disclosure Day and last Friday’s Netflix release The Last House seem to fit in that nicely fluid category. I think the mishmash helps to make the movie interesting and watchable in a way that a more straightforward jump-scares-and-slasher affair wouldn’t be, at least for me, even when it’s imperfect.

The Last House begins with a regular family in a suburb in coastal Washington state doing regular life stuff: Parents Jason (Wagner Moura) and Anne (Greta Lee) talk about the problems a repair guy found with their home’s chimney cracks and foundation and worry about money, kids Ruth (Riley Chung) and Graham (Noah Alexander Sosnowski) call each other stupid. The family heads out to get a Christmas tree, even though it has started raining, but when they try to open the door, it won’t open. Nor will the back door. Nor will the windows, even when Jason tries to smash them open. After some frantic “what is happening” — but no calling the police because phones and internet are down — the family notices that their neighbors are also looking out their front windows, unable to get outside. With some signs-in-windows communication, the neighbors learn that this spreads streets away and Jason and Anne decide to put on a good face for the kids, sit tight and stay safe.

What happens next is — well, if you’re old enough to read this, you know what happens next because we all lived it six years ago as this movie gives strong Covid lockdown vibes. The family takes stock of the supplies they have. They dig out things to amuse themselves with (with no internet they end up relying on the two DVDs the family still has, 1982’s Annie and 1997’s Air Force One). They give up on the idea of “sticking to a school routine” pretty quickly (extremely relatable!). Anne starts a countertop garden.

From their windows, the family, especially Ruth, observes some strangeness out in the world. It suddenly rains a lot more, and the rain “looks different,” Ruth says. She also starts to draw pictures of the odd creature-like shapes she sees in the rain. Her parents, who are trying to keep their freakout under wraps from the kids, just sort of shush these observations while dealing with things like the knowledge that an older neighbor couple has run out of food and their own family dog has run out of medicine.

This built in shorthand that the movie gets to use for its vibe-building — putting you back in the emotions of the pandemic — could be considered either a cheat or an economical way to put you in the characters’ mindset, and I think both of those opinions are fair. It worked for me largely because of the Lee and Moura performances and the sometimes prickly way they related to each other. The way the movie balances existential panic and the unexpected joy of family time is nicely played.

The “horror or sci-fi or something” of it all feels less solid, and the deeper the movie goes into that, the less it holds together, both as a compelling thing to watch and as a story with sense-making internal logic. There is both that Netflix-y “remember this thing that happened 10 minutes ago” tendency of over-explaining and some handwaving about the mechanics of everything that is happening, especially as we get into the final act, which still has a bit of an “action goes here, details TK” feel.

Speaking of the “horror…?” genre, Obsession, another one of this year’s “tiny budget, big box office” success stories, is now streaming on Peacock (it is also available for rent or purchase). Obsession’s big scary thing is the deep emotional immaturity of lead male character Bear (Michael Johnston). He is so incapable of expressing his thoughts, feelings and desires that when his crush/co-worker Nikki (Inde Navarrette) comes out and asks him if he likes her, he just sputters something about them being good friends. Cursing himself, he makes a wish: that Nikki would love him more than anyone else in the world. Specifically, he makes a wish using a One Wish Willow, a crystal-store novelty purchase that is supposed to grant the one wish he makes before breaking the little willow branch. Bear seems aware of the monkey paw possibilities of this item, making his wish particularly poorly verbalized. But, moments later, Nikki appears, asking to go home with him to his house and flirting with him, but doing it erratically enough that even the desperate Bear wonders what is wrong. And even though part of him believes “dude, Nikki is crazy,” Bear mostly doesn’t care and is just happy to have her suddenly latch herself to him.

Despite some jump scares and odd Nikki smiles and skittery walking, the movie doesn’t feel Horror horror to me, more sort of meanly funny with a side of “you get what you deserve, dummy.” (There is grossness and gore, which picks up as the movie goes along.) Bear is both a lump of bozo and a guy that has stolen the agency of the girl he claims to love. Nikki is broken? Or being psychically held hostage and tortured? You kind of wish the movie would let us see more of her righteous rage.

I didn’t exactly enjoy the movie but there are elements that make me relatively satisfied with having watched it. I’ve seen other critics call out the sound design, and the way the movie uses sound is maybe its biggest special effect, the thing that truly sells some of its weirdest moments. And I am rather impressed with how unlikeable Obsession lets Bear be — I am not exactly rooting for the thing that is tormenting him but I am never rooting for Bear.

Whilst on Peacock, I checked out another spring theatrical release, You, Me & Tuscany(also available for rent or purchase). I think seeing it on a streaming service I’m already paying for is possibly the correct way to see this middling romance confection that feels like less a thing you watch and more a thing you have on. Everybody is very pretty or charming or both in this movie about Anna (Halle Bailey, still reading a little bit like a Disney princess), a culinary school dropout who spends her time drifting between housesitting assignments in New York City, pretending to live the life of her rich clients. After getting fired from a job for wearing the client’s couture, she meets Italian charmer Matteo (Lorenzo de Moor), who tells her all about his Tuscan villa. Coincidentally, she has a plane ticket to Tuscany, for a trip she planned to make with her mother before her mother passed away. Anna decides to take that trip and, when she learns that she’s showed up with no hotel reservations during the middle of a popular festival week, she decides Matteo “practically invited” her to stay at his villa and breaks in. Through a series of misunderstandings, Matteo’s mother (Isabella Ferrari) and grandmother (Stefania Casini) believe Anna is Matteo’s new fiancee and Anna, eager not to get arrested, goes along with it. She winds up meeting the whole family, including Matteo’s cousin/adopted brother Michael (Regé-Jean Page), a tall handsome winemaker, as she describes him, who she is even more attracted to than almost-one-night-stand Matteo.

There is nothing surprising about the events here, beautiful people in beautiful clothes in beautiful Italian settings in a story with dialogue that all feels maybe one step up from Netflix rom-com. But it’s pretty to look at and basically inoffensive — though for a movie that talks a lot about food and Anna’s onetime love of cooking, it’s pretty below average on showing us glamour shots of Italian cuisine. I don’t know that Bailey and Page have chemistry, per se, but he is very handsome and, at least twice, he is wet and shirtless and maybe that is close enough to chemistry.

Also on Peacock, among the tonnage of Saturday Night Live content, is Lorne (also a spring release, also now available for rent or purchase), a documentary nominally about Lorne Michaels, creator of Saturday Night Live, a 50-year-old TV show helmed by a man creeping up on 82 years. Lorne the man seems like he is A Lot, both as a person to have to wrangle for interviews and a person to have as your boss, but Lorne is a fun hang, with SNL luminaries past and present talking about knowing and working for him. As much as we get biographical details about Michaels — born in Canada, left SNL after five years only to come back five seasons later, owns dogs? — the doc gives us the rhythm of the show, both throughout a week of putting it together and throughout the seasons and the flow of cast members. SNL is a bit of a factory that has to put out its product, ready or not, through strong cast and writer years and weaker ones, with great material and with sketches that make Michaels forlornly sigh. It has its winners and its losers and its rebuilding periods. I found the legacy aspect of the story this documentary tells — what the show has been and the uncertainty of what it will be once Michaels is gone — as thoughtful as the stories from John Mulaney and Maya Rudolph and the like are funny.

Featured photo: The Last House.