Going Varsity in Mariachi (PG)
The mariachi band of Edinburg North High School in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas struggles in the 2021-2022 school year to continue the school’s legacy of high-scoring teams at mariachi competitions in this thoroughly charming documentary. In the tradition of great sports stories, the team here is facing some challenges. This is the first fully in-person school year since Covid with all the everything that came with that, the team has a lot of younger or less experienced members and even longtime coach Abel Acuña is struggling with burnout. We get the story of individual kids — the hyper competent Bella, Abby who dreams of a future teaching mariachi, Drake who is sort of figuring himself out but finds that mariachi deeply matters to him. But we also get a wider story of how and why mariachi has become such an important part of the south Texas high school experience. This is a charming, absolutely winning doc. AStreaming on Netflix
Daughters (PG-13)
It’s hard not to start redesigning the American carceral in your head while watching Daughters, a documentary recently added to Netflix. The focus of the story, though, is not The System but a small group of girls, who range in age from just about elementary school through teens, and their incarcerated dads. Born from a program aimed at building up Black girls’ confidence, the Date With Dad program requires the dads to attend 10 weeks of classes before an in-prison dance with their daughters. For a few hours, the dads, dressed in suits, get to hug, dance with and talk to their daughters in person — often the first time that’s happened in years due to limited in-person visits.
The process of working up to the event seems to give the dads new perspectives on their roles in their children’s lives; the dance itself seems to emotionally devastate everybody, driving home to the men how important it is for their children that they get home and stay home. Title cards explain that 95 percent of the men who have participated in the program over the past 12 years and been released have not returned to prison. You can feel the ripples into the past (the men discuss and consider their relationships with their fathers) and into the future, as these smart, capable young girls struggle with their fathers’ absences. The star of the doc is Aubrey, a very bright, very ambitious girl when we meet her at 5 years old who is trying to stay connected to her father. It’s a sweet gut-punch of a movie. A Streaming on Netflix.
Uglies (PG-13)
Joey King, who is, we’re told, a real uggo in a shiny future dystopia, eagerly awaits the plastic surgery that every 16-year-old in her post-climate-apocalypse society receives in this movie based on a YA book by Scott Westerfield. I realize that “people in their natural state aren’t ugly” is part of this movie’s whole deal but it’s hard to take seriously the idea that this cast of “teenagers” (i.e. twentysomethings with perfect skin) who would look at home in high-end perfume ads are awkward normies in need of improvement. Nevertheless, that physical perfection will lead to perfect civic harmony is what their society, which is maybe run by a scientist played by Laverne Cox (who is at least having some fun here), has taught these kids. So Tally (King) is psyched to join her friend Peris (Chase Stokes) in the city where the newly prettified people go for a life of neverending parties. But then she meets fellow “uglie” Shay (Brianne Tju) and learns about the Smoke — a wilderness settlement of unsurgeried “regular people” led by David (Keith Powers), a revolutionary hottie.
Uglies feels like a copy of a copy of teen dystopia stories like the Divergent and Delirium book series. I feel like there was a way that this movie, with its beautiful movie stars made “regular” mostly with bad wigs, could have had some fun. But it’s too by the numbers and too focused on delivering unnecessary world-building exposition that ultimately doesn’t help the whole thing make sense. C Available on Netflix.
Rebel Ridge (TV-MA)
Giving Jack Reacher vibes, Terry Richmond (Aaron Pierre) is an ex-Marine who travels light and finds himself in a fight with the police department of a small Louisiana town after two cops knock him off his bicycle and take the $36K in cash he was carrying in part to bail his cousin out of jail. Aggressive asset seizure and high bails for minor crimes are part of the townwide corruption scheme led by police chief Sandy Burne (Don Johnson) but Terry isn’t initially super concerned with this; he’s just trying to keep his cousin from ending up in the same jail as the men his cousin testified against a few years earlier. But of course, the police don’t realize they’re up against a man with a particular set of skills, and Terry — with help from courthouse clerk/future lawyer Summer (AnnaSophia Robb) — is soon putting his military training in violent if non-lethal problem solving to use.
Unlike Reacher, Rebel Ridge is a bummer. It’s a depressing slog through racism and corruption where even the “good people” are more or less powerless to do anything — though exactly why they’re powerless doesn’t entirely make sense. The movie isn’t smart enough to truly examine the serious issues it’s dealing with nor is it enough fun to make you want to excuse it. And it’s way too long. C Available on Netflix .
Greedy People (R)
Will (Himesh Patel) and Terry (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), newly partnered police officers in a South Carolina island town, cover up one accidental death with a conspiracy that racks up a body count and threatens to set them against each other. Will and his pregnant wife, Paige (Lily James), are new to town. On his first day of work, Will’s attempt to follow up on a police call ends with the death of Virginia Chelto (Traci Lords), wife of Wallace Chelto (Tim Blake Nelson), the town’s wealthiest man. For reasons that don’t entirely hold up, Will and Terry decide that the only way out of this situation is to stage a robbery — which includes taking the many stacks of cash they find in the house. The scheme snowballs and pulls in Chelto’s secretary/mistress Deborah (Nina Arianda), a sketchy masseuse (Simon Rex), his mom (Neva Howell) and men known as The Irishman (Jim Gaffigan) and The Colombian (José María Yazpik). Only Will and Terry’s supervising officer (Uzo Aduba), who is herself going through it, seems to suspect something bigger is going on.
Greedy People never quite gets the mix of “dark” to “comedy” right in this dark comedy — is it a thriller with a few notes of silliness or a comedy with some sinister moments? The movie doesn’t decide and as a result the solid cast doesn’t always feel well-used. C+ Available for rent or purchase.
Trap (PG-13)
M. Night Shyamalan wrote and directed this reverse-heist-type thriller that is goofier than it realizes but more fun than its one-trick trailer makes you think it will be. Josh Hartnett plays Cooper, the Dad-est Dad to ever use slang wrong and ask about daughter Riley’s (Ariel Donoghue) rocky relationship with some former friends. They are attending a Taylor-Swift-ish girlie’s pop concert — Lady Raven, played by Shyamalan’s daughter Saleka Shyamalan — where Cooper notices an extremely heavy police presence. He chats up a merch vendor and learns that it’s all in service of catching vicious serial killer The Butcher, whom they believe will be at the concert. And they are right because Cooper is The Butcher (spoiler but not really; the trailer gives it away). Without tipping his hand to the unknowing Riley, Cooper MacGyvers his way through the concert to try to find out what security measures are in place and what they know about him — very little, in terms of his appearance, but a lot about his psychology thanks to a profiler played by Hayley freaking Parent Trap Mills, which is quite awesome.
Trap does not stand up to even a little bit of thought about the “but why”s of it all, but it has moments of dark fun and Hartnett is clearly having a good time juggling Mr. Happy Normal Guy with unhinged psychopath. B- Available for rent or purchase.
Longlegs (R)
FBI agent Lee Harker (Maika Monroe) helps to track a serial killer who she seems to have some sort of connection to in this vibesy horror movie. Actually, Longlegs (Nicolas Cage), as the possible killer calls himself in coded letters to the police, doesn’t personally himself kill anybody. But little notes found at crime scenes have FBI agents Carter (Blair Underwood) and Browning (Michelle Choi-Lee) pretty certain he is somehow involved in what otherwise appear to be family annihilation murder-suicides. Harker is brought into the investigation when she shows herself to have, er, good hunches? Her abilities are rated by the FBI as something more than an educated guess if not quite psychic-ness. After viewing all the case files, she heads home to work on decoding Longlegs’ letters — a task made easier when he apparently breaks into her home and leaves a sort of rosetta stone to his code. I think one of his notes is just “down low, too slow” which is funny but also stupid and what’s the point of the code again?
Look, there are few things as ham-on-cheese-on-yet-more-ham than Nicolas Cage, made up to look like some kind of Norma Desmond-meets-Willy-Wonka nightmare, whisper sing-song-voice saying “hail, Satan,” but all of that seems to be happening in a separate movie from the grim, gray investigation plus childhood trauma movie that the rest of the cast is in. Monroe in particular is so grim and affectless that I found myself having a hard time paying attention to her character. This movie hits for me about half the time and even then it’s a see-saw between “old-fashioned investigative tactics” and “evil dolls,” “profiling the method of the killer” and “the actual Devil.” C+ Available for rent or purchase.
The Deliverance (R)
Lee Daniels directs this horror movie where we start off thinking the big evil might be generational traumas and the systematic stresses of poverty but nope, it’s a literal demon. Ebony (Andra Day) has moved her three children into a house with her mother, Alberta (Glenn Close, chewing it up), so Ebony can help Alberta with her cancer treatments and Alberta can help Ebony with her kids. Everybody’s doing a terrible job — Ebony is a caring mother but also verbally and physically abusive with her kids and can’t let go of the hurt Alberta caused by being that way with her (among other childhood traumas). Social worker Cynthia (Mo’Nique) is pretty sure it’s time to remove Ebony’s kids from her home — and that’s before they start acting super weird and the youngest son shows signs of possession. And then Bernice James (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), who had been skulking around the home, shows up to tell Ebony that her house is also home to some kind of ancient evil and maybe Bernice can help her with a “deliverance” — a Pepsi to the Coca-Cola of exorcism, I guess.
The often “is this problematic?” first chunk of the movie with its focus on societal ills really takes a hard left turn into “Demons!” in a way that the movie does not know how to smooth together or connect with anything but the most obvious “this is a metaphor” duct tape. I appreciate what it’s attempting to do but The Deliverance doesn’t make all of its ideas work in a way that feels coherent. Glenn Close’s character, for instance, really makes the most of her high gothic Hillbilly Elegy-with-extra-cheese performance but it often feels like it’s happening in another movie. C Available on Netflix.
Immaculate (R)
American nun Cecilia (Sydney Sweeney) finds herself “immaculately” pregnant in this movie where you could probably edit in scenes from The First Omen and I wouldn’t notice. When Cecilia comes to the secluded nun retirement nursing home in Italy, she barely knows the language and is just that day taking her religious orders. She has a roomie with an older sister vibe, Sister Gwen (Benedetta Porcaroli), who smokes and is maybe the first person to suggest that they bail on this sketchy place when odd things start to happen (such as, for example, the pregnancy).
Sweeney is perfectly good at walking the line between being a wide-eyed innocent and being not so wide-eyed that she can’t still pull off some of the Final Girl action. The overall plot and the movie’s ultimate villain are all bonkers — so much so that I wished we got more of that bonkers, bigger and earlier, and spent less time walking around ye olde Italian convent with the spookiness just out of view. C+ Available for rent or purchase and streaming on Hulu.
The Union (PG-13)
Halle Berry is Roxanne Hall, a spy for a blue-collar spy organization called The Union — they aren’t Yale know-it-alls, boss Tom Brennan (J.K. Simmons) explains, they’re people who come from backgrounds where they know how to get things done on time and under budget. When all U.S. agents, law enforcement and military have their identities burned, Roxanne needs help getting back the hard drive with that info before it gets into the wrong hands (just don’t ask questions about all of this). The first trustworthy person who comes to mind? Mike McKenna (Mark Wahlberg), her high school boyfriend who still lives in their New Jersey hometown and now works construction, welding stuff and working on beams high in the air — which becomes one of his particular skills when he is recruited/kidnapped into working for The Union.
The cast here is fine — we also get Jackie Earl Haley, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje and Evil’s Mike Colter — and the movie is on paper the correct blend of dumb and action. But there is also a flatness, like the movie wasn’t entirely sure what to do after it came up with its concept and anchored its stars. Meanwhile, those stars, Wahlberg and Berry, have a good buddy relationship, one perhaps best portrayed in what I’m pretty sure, based on the “Rock ‘N Jock B-Ball Jam” shirt Wahlberg is wearing, are real photos of the two in the 1990s, when various internet stories say they met. I wish the movie — with some smarter writing, and a Berry-Wahlberg mix that was a little heavier on the Berry — could have found something better to do with it. C Streaming on Netflix.
Young Woman and the Sea (PG)
A mild but solid movie, Young Woman and the Sea is tailor-made for post-Olympics-summer viewing, specifically to be watched with a young athlete/athletics-appreciating kid. Based on the real life of swimmer Trudy Ederle, it shows progressive-for-early-20th-century mom Gertrude Ederle (Jeanette Hain) insist that her young daughters Trudy (Daisy Ridley as an adult) and Meg (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) learn how to swim, even though swimming isn’t good for girls and our delicate girl bodies or something. Her stubborn husband Henry (Kim Bodnia) initially refuses to give her the money for their lessons. Gertrude makes her own money and pays for their lessons at the girls-only pool next to a boiler room, and eventually Trudy and Meg both learn to swim, with Meg becoming such a strong swimmer that she starts to win competitions. Trudy proves herself to be even better and finds herself on the Olympic team for the 1924 Paris Olympics — though in a pre-Title IX world the female athletes had terrible accommodations and no ability to train on the long sea voyage to France. After underwhelming at the Olympics and facing the prospect of arranged marriage to some employee of her father’s at the family butcher shop, Trudy decides to attempt another challenge: swimming across the English channel.
This is fairly standard sports movie stuff — thrill of victory, agony of defeat, women can do sports — but it’s made from quality material and it makes for a good low-effort, family-friendly watch. B- Available on Disney+.
The Instigators (R)
Matt Damon and Casey Affleck are two thieves who participate in a poorly planned heist in this sparkless Apple TV+ movie.
Rory (Damon) and Cobby (Affleck) are part of a crew led by Scalvo (Jack Harlow), an idiot. Besegai (Michael Stuhlbarg), a person who clearly hasn’t considered the uncertain nature of electoral politics, has hired them — at the behest of yet another layer of criminals — to rob the certain-to-be-stuffed-with-graft-money safe of the reelected mayor of Boston (Ron Perlman). Every detail about the heist, from the route into the hotel to the number of civilians they’re likely to encounter, has been meticulously planned, they’re told. But, of course every one of those details is pretty much wrong and the plan quickly goes off the rails. Rory and Cobby are soon on the run from a massive amount of law-enforcement as well as a fixer (Ving Rhames) looking to steal back something more precious than money.
The Instigators has some good ideas and a good cast (which includes Hong Chau as Damon’s character’s therapist) and plenty of fun with the Boston of it all, but like many an Apple property, it feels inert. You can see where the money has been spent and what the plan is, but all the quality ingredients fail to come together to create a tasty dish. C+ Streaming on Apple TV+.
Jackpot! (R)
The premise of Amazon Prime Video’s Jackpot! is darkly cute and makes more sense to me than, say, all of the Purge movies ever did: After a mid-2020s great depression, California creates a grand lottery. When a winner is picked, that person’s name is broadcast across the state, and if you can find and murder that person in a 12-hour period after their win you get the money. If they make it through alive they get the money. Murder of that one person is legal but guns are off limits.
When Katie (Awkwafina) accidentally plays and wins the lottery, she finds herself having to use her stage-fighting skills to fight off all the Los Angeles denizens looking to kill her and take her ticket. She agrees to let Noel (John Cena), a sort of professional lotto-winner bodyguard, help keep her safe in exchange for a percentage of her billion-dollar win.
The premise is fine and Awkwafina and Cena have nice buddy chemistry but the movie doesn’t go as big or as silly as it needed to to make this the R-rated action comedy it was clearly trying to be. C+ Amazon Prime Video
