Few people have translated to film the unique and powerful way that music brings people together better than writer/director John Carney. His films Once, Begin Again and Sing Street aren’t exactly musicals, in the traditional sense, but they all involve characters who are transformed by their musical experiences with one another. As one may imagine, they all also feature terrific original songs too, with Once‘s “Falling Slowly” even picking up an Oscar for Best Original Song in 2008. In these ways, his new film Flora And Son fits in very nicely with the rest of his filmography, retaining the traits of Carney’s other work while breaking the mold some with characters that have a bit more of an edge to them. The movie is ultimately as earnest and sweet as the other entries in what could be considered his “Music Cinematic Universe” but I appreciated that he made the main players here a bit more messy.

The titular character in Flora And Son, played by Eve Hewson, is a single mother in Dublin trying her best to keep her troubled teenage son Max (Orén Kinlan) out of trouble. Money’s tight and jobs are scarce but after leaving her babysitting gig one day, Flora finds a beat-up acoustic guitar that she fixes up at a local guitar shop to give to Max for his birthday. It turns out he doesn’t care to learn guitar, favoring hip hop and electronic music instead, so Flora decides to take initiative herself and start guitar lessons online with California-based teacher Jeff (Joseph Gordon-Levitt). It’s a development that comes to the surprise of her ex Ian (Jack Reynor), whose rock and roll days as bassist in a band seemed to be behind him but could return if it means getting closer to his son Max.

One of the ways Flora And Son expands on the music-centric inclinations of Carney’s previous output is the way that he depicts how technology can shorten the distance between people trying to make a connection. In a funny montage, Flora scrolls through various YouTube guitar tutors and is turned off by their ostentatious openers and tiresome theatrics. She admits to Jeff that the reason she chose him as a virtual guitar teacher is because he seems more authentic than the rest of the “posers” out there on the Internet. Remote learning certainly existed before the pandemic and certainly still has its obstacles but Carney reminds us how miraculous it is that we can communicate with others across the planet in real time. When you bring music into the equation, the connections can become that much more inspiring and soul-strengthening.

Carney’s films are often hopelessly romantic and Flora And Son is no exception. Though Hewson and Gordon-Levitt initially communicate through their respective laptops, it doesn’t take long for movie magic to depict them in the same setting, even though they’re not actually physically present with one another. It’s a smart directorial choice, allowing the two actors to break out of the limitations of a computer screen and occupy the same shared space. The duo have an easy chemistry with one another and relay their fears and dreams with heart-on-one’s-sleeve abandon. Gordon-Levitt has a bit of a softie persona as is and while it’s undoubtedly a welcome sight to see him singing his heart out with an acoustic guitar, it’s also exciting to see Hewson’s character soften her edges some as the movie progresses.

I’m also encouraged by how Flora And Son drives home how relatively easy it is for anybody to engage with music creation in one way or another. Though Max turns down the guitar, Flora finds out later on that he’s been making beats and crafting verses in GarageBand, a music program that comes pre-installed on all Apple computers. When he unplugs his headphones and plays a track of his through a set of Genelec speakers, Flora sees her son in a new light and even starts improv singing a hook over the music bed. It opens up a new world for them and also opens the door for some reconciliation with Flora’s ex-husband Ian too, who has been adrift in life after giving up his music. Flora And Son knows that life as a professional musician isn’t for everyone but even a little bit of musical expression in one’s life can be massively rewarding.

Score – 3.5/5

Coming to theaters this weekend:
The Creator, starring John David Washington and Gemma Chan, is a sci-fi action thriller set in a future where humans are at war with artificial intelligence, in which a former soldier finds a robot in the form of a young child who holds the key to a world-ending weapon.
Saw X, starring Tobin Bell and Shawnee Smith, is a horror sequel that takes place weeks after the events of the original Saw, where the Jigsaw Killer travels to Mexico after learning of a potential “miracle” cure for his terminal cancer.
PAW Patrol: The Mighty Movie, starring Mckenna Grace and Taraji P. Henson, is an animated sequel in which a magical meteor crash lands in Adventure City and gives the PAW Patrol pups superpowers, transforming them into The Mighty Pups.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Shiva Baby writer and director Emma Seligman teams back up with its star Rachel Sennott for Bottoms, another sex comedy that’s paradoxically weirder and somehow more mainstream than Seligman’s 2020 debut. As co-writers this time, Seligman and Sennott have created a vision of modern high school life so farcical that it occasionally makes John Hughes High from Not Another Teen Movie seem authentic by comparison. The football players are effeminate wimps who dance to “Total Eclipse Of The Heart” during chore time, while the cheerleaders forgo choreographed routines in favor of wet T-shirt displays. A prominently-displayed poster in the hallway implores “You’re prettier when you SMILE! He could be looking at you right now!” My advice for those going into this movie is don’t take it too seriously because it certainly doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Bottoms stars Sennott as PJ, a brash but awkward high schooler who spends almost all of her time with the comparatively more reserved Josie (Ayo Edebiri) as they pine for a pair of cheerleaders. PJ fancies Brittany (Kaia Gerber), while Josie has a thing for Isabel (Havana Rose Liu), though neither of the girls have the social currency to make the relationships happen. A so-called violent altercation with star quarterback Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine) causes Josie to lie to their principal about a self-defense class that she runs with PJ, one that they subsequently start when they get the sense it could draw Brittany and Isabel in. Loosely supervised by their teacher Mr. G (Marshawn Lynch), the program quickly devolves into a “fight club” where classmates like Hazel (Ruby Cruz) use the opportunity to vent their frustrations through fisticuffs.

The central conceit of Bottoms plays with Gen Z’s concepts of masculinity vs. femininity and spectrum sexuality but its treatment of the material harkens back to pervy throwback comedies from Animal House to Revenge Of The Nerds. Anyone going into this film expecting something more buttoned-up because it depicts a generation some perceive as “perpetually offended” might be surprised how far the humor goes in places. There were a couple jokes involving sexual assault and suicide that I thought tested the boundaries of good taste and even though my laughter was laced with nervousness, I laughed nonetheless. Some of the seemingly one-off bits also set up running jokes, as when Josie uses shorthand with the school janitor to ask him to paint over presumably often-written homophobic slurs on her and PJ’s lockers.

Though it’s not as strong a film as Booksmart, Bottoms feels like even more of a spiritual successor to Superbad than Booksmart does in hindsight. Sennott channels the loudmouth desperation of Jonah Hill’s Seth, while Edebiri echoes a placid sweetness similar to that of Michael Cera’s Evan. Like Hill in Superbad, Sennott occasionally pushes her character into places of unpleasantness that can make her difficult to root for at times but her comedic sensibilities remain strong regardless. Edebiri continues her superb streak of summer successes with a winning combination of brains and charm that flourishes most during the movie’s myriad scenes of improvisation. But the biggest surprise is Lynch, the former NFL running back whose comedy career may have begun the day he repeated the phrase “I’m here so I won’t get get fined” to the media leading up to Super Bowl XLIX. He has a great knack for delivery and I hope directors continue to find ways to use “Beast Mode” in comedies down the road.

Like her 78-minute feature debut Shiva Baby, Seligman paces Bottoms breathlessly, barely allowing for any character development and sometimes stepping over jokes that could use a little more screen time. There’s a subplot involving a conniving footballer played by Miles Fowler that is such a cliché that the excuse Sennott and Seligman would likely come up with about how it’s making fun of said cliché doesn’t quite cut it. The film works best when it briefly subverts teen comedy beats rather than relying on them for the narrative, as when a female classmate proclaims “I’m going to reverse-stalk my stalker!” after Josie delivers an impassioned speech. At the end of the day, the most important aspect of a comedy is the strength of its jokes and more often than not, the laughs in Bottoms are tops.

Score – 3.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing exclusively in theaters is A Haunting In Venice, a new Hercule Poirot mystery starring Kenneth Branagh and Kyle Allen, in which the famed detective has another case to solve after a séance he reluctantly attends produces a murder.
Streaming on Netflix is Love At First Sight, a romantic comedy starring Haley Lu Richardson and Ben Hardy about a couple passengers who spontaneously begin to fall for each other on their international flight from New York to London.
Premiering on Amazon Prime is A Million Miles Away, a true story starring Michael Peña and Rosa Salazar which tells the tale of the first migrant farmworker to ever travel to space.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Sony takes another shot at adapting a popular PlayStation series for the big screen with Gran Turismo, a stock sports biopic to go along with their stock action-adventure Uncharted from last year. This year’s offering inherently has a bit more going for it, as the racing genre naturally translates to the cinematic and tying the video game to real-life events also hits Hollywood’s penchant for true stories. There are some reliably exciting race sequences in the film, and some augmented effects that help unpack the mechanics of the sport, but the narrative itself is frustratingly frictionless. Outside of the actual race scenes, director Neill Blomkamp isn’t able to develop or sustain authentic stakes for his characters, instead relying on ineffectual antagonists that get shuffled around chumps like at the bottom of a leaderboard.

The film begins with marketing executive Danny Moore (Orlando Bloom) pitching an idea to Nissan International that involves getting the best Gran Turismo gamers in the world behind the wheel of actual race cars. Soon enough, GT Academy is born and Moore has to find someone who can turn these virtual motorists into qualified competitors on the racing circuit. Enter Jack Salter (David Harbour), a gruff, washed-up former driver who would rather take a chance on bedroom dwellers than suffer the arrogance of affluent posers who think they can buy their way into the sport. An online tournament is held and 9 sim racers are selected for the Academy; among them is Cardiff-based Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe), whose father Steve (Djimon Hounsou) was a notable pro footballer. Despite their differences in temperament and skill set, Jann and Jack weave through the obstacles of the international racing scene together.

The mentor-mentee relationship between Jack and Jann is just one of the many tropes Gran Turismo indulges in its narrative but Harbour and Madekwe give everything they can to characters that are routinely underwritten. The pair is also saddled with repetitive and derivative dialogue at every turn; if I had a dollar for every time Jack barked some variation of “this isn’t a video game; this is real life!”, I’d have enough to buy my own Nissan GT-R sports car. Despite this, their performances are about the only thing worthwhile off the track in the movie and the scenes where their characters find ways to relate their experiences to one another are the clear high points. Bloom, on the other hand, is playing to the rafters with every line and lends zero discernible personality traits to his already paper-thin character.

Where Gran Turismo fails as an underdog sports movie is giving the audience a sense of how the protagonist actually works his way up from the bottom to be a champion. This seems like a given but the actual “how” behind a video gamer turning into a pro racer leaves plenty to examine in ways that an okay boxer turning into a great boxer in another story would be self-evident via training montage. Sure, Gran Turismo has montages where Jann deftly avoids the chopping block at the Academy and seems to progress as an actual racer but the movie never really delves into what prepares him for expertise in this world outside of knowing the tracks from the game. Too often, Blomkamp sidesteps process in favor of platitudes and keeps us out of the driver’s seat when it comes to involving us in Jann’s evolution.

With its central theme of partnership in racing and a climax set during the 24 Hours Of Le Mans race, it seems inevitable to compare this movie to 2019’s Ford v Ferrari, which smokes Gran Turismo in every category. But the most important way that film succeeds in comparison is that it works hard to convey the sensation of how it feels to be behind the wheel of one of these powerful vehicles. For all of its footage of competition and cars zooming by, Gran Turismo feels comparatively artificial and less tangible, likely due to the sometimes jerky CG effects in the sequences where cars collide with one another. The film is based on a video game and, at times, simply feels like watching a video game play out. For fans of the Gran Turismo franchise, that may be enough to rev up their engines but most moviegoers will feel like they got stuck with a lemon.

Score – 2/5

More movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is The Hill, a sports biopic starring Dennis Quaid and Colin Ford about the real-life journey of baseball player Rickey Hill and his struggle with a degenerative spinal disease as his fights to join Major League Baseball.
Premiering on Netflix is You Are So Not Invited To My Bat Mitzvah, a family dramedy starring Sunny Sandler and Samantha Lorraine about a pair of best friends whose plans for their respective coming-of-age parties are threatened by middle school drama.
Streaming on Hulu is Vacation Friends 2, a buddy comedy sequel starring Lil Rel Howery and John Cena about a couple who meets up with another couple while on vacation in Mexico and sees their friendship take an awkward turn when they get back home.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Christopher Nolan has often spoken of the influence that fellow British director David Lean has had on his films before but the careers of the filmmaking giants are continuing to mirror one another in intriguing ways. Like Lean, Nolan started small with low-budget mysteries like Memento and Insomnia, graduating to genre-defining classics Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, similar to the way Lean delivered a pair of all-timer Dickens adaptations with Great Expectations and Oliver Twist. If Dunkirk was Nolan’s The Bridge on the River Kwai, then it stands to reason that Oppenheimer would be his Lawrence of Arabia, an epic biopic sprung from a similarly complicated and tortured soul. Like that film, Nolan’s latest is both a state-of-the-art technical marvel as well as a propulsive and poetic character study of the highest order.

In the finest performance of his already consummate career, Cillian Murphy portrays titular theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer throughout an almost 40 year span of his life. He studies at Harvard and the University of Göttingen in Germany before teaching quantum physics at Berkeley. It’s there he meets fellow professor Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett) and young member of the Communist Party Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), the latter with whom he engages in a hot-cold tryst. After becoming aware of his brilliant contributions to the field, General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) visits Oppenheimer to confer about the Manhattan Project. Recruiting scientists Edward Teller (Benny Safdie) and Robert Serber (Michael Angarano), among many others, Oppenheimer sets up shop in Los Alamos to develop a weapon that could either light the sky on fire or secure lasting world peace.

Anyone who has seen one of Nolan’s movies before knows that the chronology naturally cannot be that simple and the director casts these bespoke biopic beats on a timeline that whips back and forth like a clotheslined sheet during a storm. Nolan frames the main narrative against two hearings at different points in history that would affect Oppenheimer’s legacy: one involving the continuation of Oppenheimer’s government security clearance and another involving the Senate confirmation hearing of Atomic Energy Commission head Lewis Strauss, played by Robert Downey Jr. The latter storyline is shot in black-and-white, which helps to delineate it from the rest of the action visually but also dramatically, as it’s removed from Oppenheimer’s subjective perspective. It’s also notable as Oppenheimer is the first feature to implement black-and-white photography within an IMAX presentation.

Collaborating again with cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema and editor Jennifer Lame, Nolan crafts another densely-packed epic that bears every signature touch that he’s showcased thus far in his oeuvre. He throws his audience in the deep end right away but trusts that they’ll catch up with the fast-paced dialogue, which is organically comprised of both heady scientific concepts and well-placed historical markers. The breakthrough here is the sound design, which has received well-deserved criticism over his past few features. Nolan’s penchant for keeping Tom Hardy’s mouth covered rendered much of his dialogue in both The Dark Knight Rises and Dunkirk to be either difficult to understand or downright unintelligible, where Tenet suffered from both issues despite Hardy’s absence. There are several key moments of sound mixing and editing in Oppenheimer that are downright brilliant and will have you on the edge of your seat.

Nolan is no stranger to qualified ensemble casts but this may just be the most impressive assembly he’s gathered for any of his projects to date. The frame is packed with familiar faces, including Nolan favorites Kenneth Branagh and Gary Oldman, who consistently make the most of their screen time and imbue their characters with distinct qualities that make them unforgettable. I was particularly struck by Benny Safdie, who made a name for himself as co-director of anxious thrillers like Good Time and Uncut Gems, but continues to make a case for himself as a unique screen presence. Even characters that are underserved, like Emily Blunt’s Kitty Oppenheimer, are given scenes that allow them to grab hold of the film and not let go until they’re ready. As someone who saw and very much enjoyed Barbie, I would encourage all to engage in the Barbenheimer double feature but if you only have time to see one, give it to Oppenheimer.

Score – 4.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is Haunted Mansion, a horror comedy starring LaKeith Stanfield and Tiffany Haddish about a single mother and her son who hire a former paranormal investigator turned tour guide after they move into a mansion that they discover is haunted.
Also playing in theaters is Talk To Me, a supernatural horror film starring Sophie Wilde and Alexandra Jensen about a group of friends who learn how to conjure spirits using an embalmed hand but unleash terrifying supernatural forces in the process.
Streaming on Apple TV+ is The Beanie Bubble, a comedy biopic starring Zach Galifianakis and Elizabeth Banks about a frustrated toy salesman who collaborates with three women on what would become the biggest toy craze in history.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

When Mission: Impossible – Fallout was released in 2018, many immediately heralded it as a new apex for the long-running action spy franchise and one that would be difficult to supersede. 5 years and 1 global pandemic later, we have half of a sequel that is already 163 minutes on its own, with a concluding chapter coming next summer. That Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One doesn’t top its predecessor could be seen as a disappointment, but given that it’s a stronger action outing than just about anything else in the genre that’s been released in theaters this year, there’s still plenty to celebrate. Even more than usual, Tom Cruise seems to have put everything he has into this particular entry and his mind-boggling work ethic comes through every second he’s in frame.

This time around, superspy Ethan Hunt (Cruise) is on the hunt for two halves of an interlocking key that seems to be crucial for controlling The Entity, an all-powerful AI that has outgrown its intended use and is headed towards sentience. After retrieving the first portion of the key from returning Mission agent Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson), Hunt bumps into professional pickpocket Grace (Hayley Atwell) while attempting to recover the other half-key. She forms an uneasy alliance with Hunt, along with IMF cohorts Luther (Ving Rhames) and Benji (Simon Pegg), when he promises her protection from Gabriel (Esai Morales), a menacing mastermind who has a history with Hunt and appears to be working on behalf of The Entity.

After beginning with a tensionless and series-worst cold open, Dead Reckoning Part One finds its footing once Cruise steps out from the shadows and even more so when he pairs back up with Rebecca Ferguson, with whom he has effortless chemistry on-screen. Since appearing first in 2015’s Rogue Nation, she’s done other franchise films like Dune and series like Apple TV+’s Silo but she’s always a most welcome presence in these movies as a fearless foil for Cruise’s Hunt. Along with Atwell and Morales (both quite good in their respective roles), other newcomers include Pom Klementieff, playing against type as a ruthless assassin, and Shea Whigham, playing to his strengths as a gruff enforcer on Hunt’s tail. Henry Czerny returns from a long series hiatus, having last appeared in the first Mission: Impossible film, and he does what he can to rekindle the seething intensity he brought all those years ago.

Like Ferguson, director and co-writer Christopher McQuarrie is also returning to this franchise for the third time but he still hasn’t been able to top the high water mark that is Rogue Nation. Dead Reckoning Part One has the well-designed car chases and death-defying stunts that you’d hope for but they don’t flow together as organically as they did in McQuarrie’s previous two efforts. More importantly, the story just isn’t there this time around; I’m more dubious of Fallout‘s convoluted plotline than most but at least the narrative itself is engaging on a fundamental level. Hunt vs. artificial intelligence may seem like a relevant pitch, given how prevalent generative AI seems to be in our current cultural conversation, but its permutation here feels underdeveloped and, at times, a bit silly.

Along with other recent blockbusters like Fast X and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Dead Reckoning Part One continues the recent trend of big summer movies concluding with substantial cliffhangers, though at least the Mission: Impossible series has the courtesy of denoting that with “part one” in the title. While this chapter certainly moves along more briskly than its hefty runtime would suggest, I find it hard to believe that McQuarrie and his co-writer Erik Jendresen couldn’t have written a more concise story upon which to hang these action sequences and cast of characters. In addition to what I would expect would be even more thrilling scenes of gravity defiance, Part Two should also shed more light on the shared past between Hunt and Gabriel, along with more clues about how The Entity came to be. If McQuarrie can tap back into the elegant storytelling he’s demonstrated before, it could make for a strong stopping point for this superlative series.

Score – 3.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is Barbie, a fantasy comedy starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling following a pair of less-than-perfect dolls as they are expelled from the utopian Barbie Land and go on a journey of self-discovery to the real world.
Also coming only to theaters is Oppenheimer, an epic biopic starring Cillian Murphy and Emily Blunt telling the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist who helped develop the first nuclear weapons on the Manhattan Project.
Streaming on Netflix is They Cloned Tyrone, a sci-fi comedy starring John Boyega and Jamie Foxx about a series of eerie events that thrusts an unlikely trio onto the trail of a nefarious government conspiracy.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup