Between his collaborations with Guy Ritchie and last year’s Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, Hugh Grant has seemingly had a ball playing villains recently. The trend continues with the new A24 chiller Heretic, in which Grant plays the deferential and droll Mr. Reed, who may not be as kindly as he initially appears. After reaching out to the LDS Church for more information about their cause, Mormon missionaries Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East) are summoned to his house one rainy evening. While Mr. Reed says his wife is just in the kitchen making pie, the Sisters begin professing their faith in an attempt to convert but are met with prickly retorts about the nature of religion and belief. As the conversation between the three continues, Barnes and Paxton get the creeping feeling that they were invited into Reed’s home under false pretenses.

The writing and directing team of Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, who were behind last year’s Adam Driver-fronted sci-fi stinker 65, at least start off with much better footing for Heretic. We spend a little time with Barnes and Paxton before arriving at Reed’s home, their candid conversations serving as a nice contrast to the professional front they have to put up when their duty begins. As we slowly learn, Reed is also putting up a front that gradually deteriorates and the three performers are terrific at guiding their characters believably through the transition. Grant, of course, rose to prominence playing coiffed charming leads in romance movies but here, he uses his charisma as bait for an elaborate trap that doesn’t fully reveal itself until late in the runtime.

Without giving too much away, the gist of Reed’s plan involves trying to get the missionaries to question their fundamental beliefs, which he does with Reddit-ready rhetoric about organized religion and philosophy. It’s perfectly okay that Grant’s character isn’t as clever as he thinks he is but the main problem with Heretic is that the movie itself isn’t as clever as it thinks it is. Some of the dialogue and the exchanges are thought-provoking and illuminating but when the talking stops and the time for action arrives, Beck and Woods can’t see the forest for the trees. The more convoluted the situation gets and the more plot elements that are introduced, the less interesting the initial gambit becomes. This feels like a story that Beck and Woods developed without having a conclusion in mind at the outset.

Faithful to its raison d’être, Heretic has an immediately alluring look courtesy of cinematographer Chung Chung-hoon. Once the Sisters spend a little time at the house, Reed informs them that his house has timed lights which can click off mid-conversation without warning. Despite the sudden changes in brightness, the faces of the three performers are always lit with just the right levels to exude dread and insecurity. The set design also aids in the illusion of a cozy living room that becomes more worldly and sophisticated as Reed’s machinations arise. While most of the editing works well, there are several cuts involving violence that seem oddly clipped and obscure their narrative impact. It’s possible Beck and Woods were at one point trying to skirt an R-rating but the confusing cutting during a few key scenes feels like it was left over from a PG-13 iteration.

For at least the first half, Heretic is watchable due to the trio of terrific performances that are ever-shifting to reveal new details about who these people are and what makes them tick. As Reed keeps making excuses as to why the two girls must stay in his house, Barnes becomes more suspicious of his motives than Paxton does. Where Paxton also tends to sidestep Reed’s barbs about the folly of religious practices, Barnes is more game to return the volleys and refute his points. As it turns out, Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East were both raised Mormon, although neither of the actresses are currently members of the church. Perhaps the film was developed with their shared past in mind but Heretic could’ve used more time in the oven before sharing it with the masses.

Score – 2.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing only in theaters is Red One, a Christmas adventure starring Dwayne Johnson and Chris Evans, following the North Pole’s Head Of Security and the world’s most infamous bounty hunter on an action-packed mission to rescue Santa after he’s been kidnapped.
Also coming to theaters is A Real Pain, a family dramedy starring Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin, involving a pair of mismatched cousins who reunite for a tour through Poland to honor their beloved grandmother.
Streaming on Netflix is Emilia Pérez, a French musical starring Zoe Saldaña and Selena Gomez, telling the story of a feared cartel leader who enlists a lawyer to help her disappear and achieve her dream of transitioning into a woman.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

In the spring of 2020, popular YouTube comedian Julie Nolke started a sketch series called “Explaining The Pandemic To My Past Self”, in which a version of herself a few months in the future checks in with herself in the past. Being a tumultuous pocket of time, there’s a lot to go over and the comedic conceit is centered around just how much can change in a short period. The new coming-of-age dramedy My Old Ass from writer/director Megan Park, expands this premise out to feature length and in the process, stretches out the amount of time between the two versions of the same person. In doing so, it speaks more broadly to the desire everyone has to use fantastical foresight to have more control over the future of their personal lives. The potential poignancy of the scenario seems like it would be easy to mine for pathos, so it’s strange that this movie fumbles the weightier aspects of its story.

On her 18th birthday, Elliott (Maisy Stella) takes a boat with her friends Ro (Kerrice Brooks) and Ruthie (Maddie Ziegler) to a nearby island, where they plan on celebrating with psychedelic mushrooms. After drinking the spiked tea, Elliott’s friends go off on their own “typical” trips and while Elliott waits for the effects to kick in for her, a future version of herself (played by Aubrey Plaza) appears out of nowhere. Though initially skeptical, teenage Elliott soon feels convinced that she’s not just hallucinating but is actually being reached across time by her future self. After imparting some bits of wisdom about their family and their future career, the 39-year-old version of Elliott gives a vague but stern warning before she disappears to avoid anyone named Chad. Sure enough, a boy named Chad (Percy Hynes White) starts working at Elliott’s family’s cranberry farm and she has to decide whether to ignore her own advice or pursue a relationship with him.

One of My Old Ass‘s major miscalculations is in sidelining Aubrey Plaza for the majority of the movie, as younger and older Elliott primarily spend the story communicating via phone by voice or text. Even though they don’t look especially similar to one another, Plaza and Maisy Stella have a fun rapport with one another and I’m not sure why Megan Park doesn’t feature them on-screen together much. Oddly, Maddie Ziegler’s character isn’t present much in the film either, a shame since Park directed her and Jenna Ortega to great effect — drastically different subject material aside — in her previous feature The Fallout. Stella and Percy Hynes White certainly have enough chemistry to make the romantic thrust of the narrative work but there isn’t much about watching their mutual crush develop that feels unique to this movie.

Outside of the relationship between Elliott and Chad, Park also spends time fleshing out Elliott’s relationship with her family, particularly her mom and her younger brother (played by Maria Dizzia and Seth Isaac Johnson, respectively). While the screenplay does its best to imbue these bonding moments with heartfelt meaning, the sentiment just doesn’t land as well as it does in other coming-of-age tales like Dìdi from just a couple months ago. Where that film had a distinct sense of time and place that directs the protagonist’s evolution, My Old Ass grasps at millennial touchstones with era-specific music cues and a flashback sequence evoking a mid-aughts pop music heartthrob. It’s a cute scene but it doesn’t ultimately tell us much about the character or why this particular memory is important to her.

Despite this, My Old Ass is amiable enough and with a runtime under 90 minutes, it certainly doesn’t outstay its welcome. There are nuggets of wisdom to be found about the passage of time and how Gen Z is dealing with growing up. My favorite scene involves Elliott confessing to Ro that she has a crush on Chad, when she’s previously only seemed to be interested in pursuing relationships with girls. The pacing of the conversation is considered but comedically compelling all the same; Ro reminds her that she told her to use labels when they’re useful but to ditch them when they no longer feel useful. I wish Megan Park was able to string more scenes like this one together to give the kick My Old Ass in the pants it needed to make a bigger impact.

Score – 2.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is Joker: Folie à Deux, a musical thriller starring Joaquin Phoenix and Lady Gaga, which finds the protagonist of Joker institutionalized while awaiting trial for his crimes and falling crazy in love with a fellow inmate.
Also playing in theaters is White Bird, a coming-of-age period drama starring Ariella Glaser and Orlando Schwerdt, about a troubled young student who is struggling to fit in at his new school after being expelled for his treatment of a disfigured student at his previous school.
Streaming on Netflix is It’s What’s Inside, a horror comedy starring Brittany O’Grady and James Morosini, following a group of friends who gather for a pre-wedding party that descends into an existential nightmare when an estranged friend arrives with a mysterious game that awakens long-hidden secrets, desires, and grudges.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

It’s been 6 years since the last Deadpool movie but quite a bit has happened in that time gap, perhaps most consequentially for the franchise: the acquisition of 21st Century Fox by Disney. For those unaware: Fox owned the film rights to Fantastic Four and X-Men characters like Deadpool, while Sony technically still retains the rights to Spider-Man and his affiliated characters. Moving past the mergers and acquisitions business talk, the effect on the Marvel Cinematic Universe is that it now has its first R-rated movie of the series in the fitfully amusing and mercilessly metatextual Deadpool & Wolverine. It’s a team-up that comic book fans will no doubt be giddy about, given the history between the characters on the page, but one that could leave casual superhero movie fans confused with how convoluted the plot has to get to finally bring them together.

6 years after Deadpool 2, Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) has retired his mercenary cowl and works as a used car salesman with his equally checked-out friend Peter (Rob Delaney). In the middle of a surprise birthday party, Wilson is abducted by agents of the Time Variance Authority and is brought to Mr. Paradox (Matthew Macfadyen), a bureaucrat character similar to Mobius from the Disney+ series Loki. Paradox tells Wade that their universe is collapsing due to the death of Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) in another timeline, which prompts Wade to suit up once again and nab a Wolverine variant from the multiverse to save his world. During their mission, they run up against the powerful mutant Cassandra Nova (Emma Corrin), who seeks the power to destroy other universes at will.

In terms of plot mechanics, Deadpool & Wolverine is most akin to DC’s The Flash from last year, which expected viewers to not only know everything that’s happening in the DCEU but also have background knowledge of both completed and uncompleted projects involving the characters. Without spoiling anything, it’s enough to say that audiences going into this movie who don’t have a firm grasp on both the MCU and the Fox run of superhero films over the last 25 years will face challenges keeping up with this storyline. The amount of prerequisites for Marvel movies has been steadily rising since Nick Fury uttered those famous final words after the end credits of Iron Man in 2008 and the now collegiate-level requirements border on farce.

But behind the fourth-wall breaks and the winks to the camera — I mean those both literally, as self-referential humor is a big part of Deadpool’s schtick — there are fundamental story issues with Deadpool & Wolverine that the movie would prefer we laugh and shrug off. I doubt I caught every single Easter egg that director Shawn Levy and company threw my way but I never felt out of the loop with the multi-layered jokes that come at a machine gun pace. What I struggled with were fundamental questions like “why are the heroes doing what they’re doing right now?” or “what does this villain actually want?” I think Levy wants us to forget about pesky things like character motivation and narrative inertia but most MCU movies have excelled at prioritizing these basic filmmaking aspects while still including some laughs along the way.

Having said all of this, I laughed numerous times during Deadpool & Wolverine, which is packed with cameos that mostly don’t just last for a few seconds but actually figure into the plot in more consequential ways. There are plenty of profane one-liners that few in the business can rattle off with as much cheeky aplomb as Ryan Reynolds. Even some of the ironic needle drops worked for me, although some felt like they were straining too hard for laughs. It could be argued that the whole film strives too hard to get a reaction from the audience and borders on desperation at times. If this were a pure send-up of the superhero movie genre that wasn’t beholden to the obligations of being one itself, it could’ve worked as a pure comedy but as an entry in the MCU, Deadpool & Wolverine feels too shallow to leave an impact.

Score – 2.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing only in theaters is Trap, a psychological thriller starring Josh Hartnett and Ariel Donoghue, which involves a father and his teen daughter who attend a pop concert, only to realize they’ve entered the center of a dark and sinister event.
Also coming to theaters is Harold And The Purple Crayon, a fantasy comedy starring Zachary Levi and Lil Rel Howery, adapting the classic children’s picture book about an imaginative boy who is able to conjure up anything that he is able to draw with his magical drawing utensil.
Streaming on Netflix is Saving Bikini Bottom: The Sandy Cheeks Movie, an animated adventure starring Carolyn Lawrence and Tom Kenny, which further spins off the SpongeBob SquarePants series to give the subtitular Texas-based squirrel her own time to shine in the spotlight.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

This summer, one Shyamalan simply isn’t sufficient. While M. Night Shyamalan has the concert-set thriller Trap due out this August, his daughter Ishana Night Shyamalan has struck first blood with The Watchers, a supernatural horror offering based on A.M. Shine’s breakthrough novel. Though she’s worked as second unit director on her father’s recent films Old and Knock At The Cabin, while also writing and directing a handful of episodes for the Apple TV+ series Servant, this is Ishana’s first time writing and directing for the big screen. Her directorial debut displays promise from the outset with a tantalizing hook and properly spooky atmosphere but eventually comes undone with inconsistent pacing and telegraphed third-act developments.

The Watchers centers around Mina (Dakota Fanning), a young American stuck in the haze of her troubled past while working at a pet shop in Ireland. Tasked with delivering a prized parrot to a customer hours away from the store, Mina finds herself lost in the deep Irish forest with a broken down car. Soon night falls and worrisome noises draw her to the only building in the area and a woman called Madeline (Olwen Fouéré), who is standing by the open door offering Mina shelter. The situation doesn’t get any less strange when Madeline demands that Mina stand with her, along with two other lost forest dwellers Ciara (Georgina Campbell) and Daniel (Oliver Finnegan), in front of a one way mirror so the quartet can be observed by an unseen entity. Can the four of them find their way out of the woods before the creatures they call “The Watchers” penetrate their bunker?

Like her father’s most memorable movies, Ishana Night Shyamalan’s The Watchers has a high-concept premise perfect for an enticing teaser trailer, which fittingly debuted before fellow Warner Bros release Dune: Part Two earlier this year. From a marketing perspective, it’s fortunate that the clip features the most accomplished stretch of filmmaking front-and-center. The four members of “The Coop”, the characters’ name for the enclosure they find themselves in, kill time playing records and DVDs until the sun goes down and ritual dictates that they gather in front of the glass to be “watched”. It’s a juxtaposition between mundane domesticity and paranormal ceremony previously employed by similarly grabby entertainments like Lost and 10 Cloverfield Lane.

It’s never an easy thing to follow up on such a persuasive pitch with a narrative that cleverly unpacks the opening gambit and that’s where The Watchers predictably falters. The more we learn about the titular observers, the less interesting the story at large becomes. Instead of focusing on the troublesome and tense aspects of sharing a confined living space with three other strangers, Shyamalan decides to press forward with the more generic horror elements of her tale instead. It’s not necessarily that the reveal of who The Watchers are is disappointing but as a director, Shyamalan can’t exactly figure out where she wants to take things from there. Once the bird flies the proverbial coop, it doesn’t land in territory we haven’t seen dozens of times before.

That’s not to say that the film doesn’t have appealing aspects. It’s exceptionally well shot by cinematographer Eli Arenson, who beautifully captures both the haunting beauty of the Irish countryside and the chilly interiority of The Coop. The shots of Mina and the others interacting with the one way mirror are aided by gorgeous computer-generated effects that gorgeously render reflections that point to the movie’s theme of doubles and competing halves of one’s identity. It’s also nice to see Dakota Fanning in a starring role again after a smaller part in last year’s The Equalizer 3. Even if her character’s personal journey isn’t quite as interesting as the supernatural elements at play, Fanning makes Mina a protagonist with whom it’s easy to sympathize. The Watchers isn’t the strongest start for Ishana Night Shyamalan but there are still seeds of a promising storyteller to watch for.

Score – 2.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing exclusively in theaters is Inside Out 2, an animated sequel starring Amy Poehler and Phyllis Smith following the personified emotions of a teenage girl as new feelings like Anxiety and Envy enter the mix.
Screening at Cinema Center is Tuesday, a fantasy drama starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Lola Petticrew about a mother and her terminally ill daughter as they’re visited by a size-altering macaw that’s the personification of death.
Streaming on Hulu is Brats, a documentary about the Brat Pack, a group of young actors who frequently appeared together in coming-of-age films in the 1980s, and the impact on their lives and careers.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

In divisive times, it’s heartening to know that even the most gargantuan of monsters can put their differences aside and come together for the greater good. Case in point: after 2021’s Godzilla vs. Kong, we now have Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, a MonsterVerse entry whose title promises a team-up as opposed to a conflict between the two mythical brawlers. Indeed, the collaboration does happen and manifests itself in another memorable CGI smackdown but the road to get there is still more cumbersome than it needs to be. Returning from Godzilla vs. Kong, director Adam Wingard has the requisite sense of play when it comes to the battle sequences but he doesn’t have the knack for weaving in plausible pathos for the human characters. The cast is streamlined a bit more this time, and they’re certainly capable of carrying a convincing narrative, but the writing is far too bland to care about nearly anything happening in the story.

With the events of Godzilla vs. Kong behind them, Godzilla and Kong have established a truce of sorts, with the former remaining on the surface and the latter residing in the subterranean space known as Hollow Earth. While continuing to raise Jia (Kaylee Hottle), Dr. Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall) is tasked with monitoring the activity of the two creatures and keeping them separated. The peace is disrupted by a distress signal emanating from Hollow Earth, which causes Godzilla to go on the move for more nuclear energy to gobble up and Kong to venture further into uncharted regions of his new home. Andrews recruits podcaster Bernie (Brian Tyree Henry) and veterinarian to the monsters Trapper (Dan Stevens) to travel down to Hollow Earth to suss out what is making the titular titans act so unpredictably.

Various characters and actors have come and gone in the MonsterVerse franchise — the overqualified cast of Godzilla: King of the Monsters surely wasn’t going to stick around forever — and at this point, most of the humans in Godzilla x Kong are carryovers from Godzilla vs. Kong. The notable exception is Dan Stevens as Trapper, described by Dr. Andrews as “the weirdest vet in the world” and clothed in Hawaiian shirts to presumably give off Ace Ventura vibes. Reuniting with Adam Wingard ten years after tongue-in-cheek thriller The Guest, Stevens makes the most of his goofy character and is easily the most watchable of the human characters. The mother-adopted daughter dynamic between Dr. Andrews and Jia was one of the human highlights of Godzilla vs. Kong but the dialogue between them this time is very one-note and even the comic relief from Bernie wears out its welcome here.

The storytelling in Godzilla x Kong is basically separated into thirds and above the portions involving the humans and Godzilla, the most compelling section is the one that finds Kong venturing deeper into Hollow Earth. There are a menagerie of simian creatures, including a cute sidekick named Suko and an insidious tyrant named Skar King, who make up what is essentially its own Planet Of The Apes narrative squished between two other storylines. As one would hope, the visual effects are top-notch throughout and especially during the battle scenes but I also appreciated how expressive the ape characters were during the Hollow Earth scenes. Whether it was achieved through motion-capture or entirely through special effects, the faces and body language of the apes tell the most interesting story to be found in Godzilla x Kong.

Is it too much to ask, then, that Wingard finds something more worthwhile for the other characters to do while Kong moves the story along? Recent Oscar winner Godzilla Minus One is obviously going for a different sort of kaiju movie than what the MonsterVerse is trying to achieve but even still, it’s tough to see the big guy being treated like such an afterthought this time around. Kong: Skull Island and Godzilla: King of the Monsters made a case for standalone narratives for these iconic monsters but in his two outings, Wingard has yet to make the case that he’s the guy who can balance the spectacle and sentimentality in these stories. These MonsterVerse movies continue to be a dominating force at the box office and while they deliver on foundational terms, it’s also not wrong to expect more from them.

Score – 2.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Opening in theaters is The First Omen, a supernatural horror film starring Nell Tiger Free and Sônia Braga following a young American woman who is sent to Rome to begin a life of service to the church but encounters a darkness that causes her to question her faith.
Also playing only in theaters is Monkey Man, an action thriller starring Dev Patel and Sharlto Copley about an anonymous young man who unleashes a campaign of brutal vengeance against the corrupt leaders who murdered his mother.
Premiering on Apple TV+ is Girls State, a companion documentary to 2020’s Boys State which follows teenage girls from Missouri navigating a week-long democratic experiment learning how to build a government from the ground up.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

An adaptation of a Broadway musical which was based on a movie that was adapted from a book, the 2024 version of Mean Girls can’t help but feel intrinsically derivative. When Rosalind Wiseman penned the parent’s guide Queen Bees and Wannabes (the basis for the 2004 comedy classic) in the early 2000s, I doubt she suspected the cultural cache that her work would eventually generate. But several reworkings later, we now have what could’ve been a worthwhile Gen Z remake of the original film but is instead something more frustratingly myopic. It’s both a beat-for-beat redo of the story from 2004’s Mean Girls and a full-fledged musical, the former of which is bound to generate disappointed déjà vu and the latter of which has been side-stepped in the marketing as it was for Wonka last month.

Once again, our way into the cutthroat high school setting of Mean Girls is through Cady Heron (Angourie Rice), a bright teen who has been homeschooled her whole life until she moves to the States from Africa. She is befriended right away by social outcasts Janis (Auliʻi Cravalho) and Damian (Jaquel Spivey), who give her the skinny on the cliques and hierarchies that rule their school. Cady inadvertently catches the attention of fiercely popular Regina (Reneé Rapp) and is taken into her group of similarly materialistic girls known as The Plastics. But things get complicated when Cady falls for the handsome Aaron (Christopher Briney), who recently ended a relationship with Regina. When Cady decides to pursue Aaron, even though fellow Plastics Gretchen (Bebe Wood) and Karen (Avantika) advise against it, a rift occurs in the coveted clique.

Whether the movie likes it or not, Mean Girls will lead to inevitable comparisons to its predecessor, likely beginning with the fresh lineup of new actors. The 2004 comedy is impeccably cast, with a career-best performance by Lindsay Lohan and breakout roles for now-bonafide movie stars Rachel McAdams and Amanda Seyfried. As Cady, Angourie Rice invokes a similar naiveté as Lohan and while she doesn’t quite nail the transformation into loathsome sociopath, she nonetheless renders an immensely likable protagonist at the outset. On the flip side, Reneé Rapp is mostly a bore as the villainous “queen bee”, which is ironic since she played the role in the stage musical for 2 years. When it comes to the singing and dancing, the talent is there but her performance lacks the alluring deviousness that McAdams used to make Regina George an iconic character.

While directors Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr. do what they can to make the musical numbers pop visually, the songs in Mean Girls don’t add much depth to the plot and don’t musically stand out much from one another either. Penned by Tina Fey, the 2004 film is bolstered by an endless string of memorable quips but the lyrics in these musical interludes just aren’t up to the level of that original screenplay. Auliʻi Cravalho, still probably most famous for playing the title character in Moana, leads the movie’s best number “I’d Rather Be Me” and comes closest to justifying why this movie should have song breaks embedded in it. Her soaring vocals do call to mind an interesting paradox: how can a character like Regina, who obviously sees herself as superior to the theater kids, belt out Broadway-ready numbers?

If you try to ignore the show tune elements — which audience members who go into this movie not knowing it’s a musical will no doubt be doing — there are some lateral moves from the first film that are hit-and-miss. Fey returns not only as the screenwriter but as math teacher Ms. Norbury, who gets some additional zingers this time around; when she finds out Cady is homeschooled, she sarcastically remarks “that’s a fun way to take jobs from my union.” Bebe Wood is uncanny at capturing the timbre and cadence of Lacey Chabert’s work as Gretchen in the 2004 movie but at the end of the day, it’s merely imitation. Avantika brings more unique obliviousness to her Karen but it still feels like it’s leaning on the work Seyfried initially created. Mean Girls is a so-so update on an excellent comedy that never really needed a makeover in the first place.

Score – 2.5/5

New movies coming this week:
Playing only in theaters is I.S.S., a sci-fi thriller starring Ariana DeBose and Chris Messina involving US and Russian crews of astronauts aboard the International Space Station who begin to turn on one another when conflict breaks out on Earth.
Also coming to theaters is Freud’s Last Session, a psychological drama starring Anthony Hopkins and Matthew Goode which depicts the fictional meeting of the minds between psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and literary scholar C. S. Lewis as they debate the existence of God.
Streaming on Netflix is The Kitchen, a science fiction drama starring Kane Robinson and Jedaiah Bannerman set in a dystopian future London in which all social housing has been eliminated but a community known as The Kitchen refuses to abandon their home.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

There’s no mistaking the goofy sports biopic Next Goal Wins for anything other than the latest brainchild of filmmaker Taika Waititi. Ten years ago, few outside of the New Zealand film community knew his name but two Thor movies and multiple Oscar nominations later, Waititi has built up his own brand of idiosyncratic comedy that has seemed to resonate with audiences. He’s the first face that graces the screen in his newest film, doing double duty as both a hippie priest character and the occasional narrator for the story we’re about to see. With silly facial hair in unison with a silly accent, Waititi lays out the plight of the underdogs that we’ll be expected to cheer on for the next hour and a half. Though Waititi the actor sets up the groundwork, Waititi the director and co-writer doesn’t follow through with committed and focused storytelling.

Based on a 2014 documentary of the same name, Next Goal Wins centers around struggling soccer coach Thomas Rongen (Michael Fassbender), who hasn’t been the same since the divorce from his ex-wife Gail (Elisabeth Moss). At the risk of being fired by his boss Alex (Will Arnett), he reluctantly accepts a position head coaching the woeful American Samoa soccer team, notable for being on the losing end of a brutal 31–0 defeat during a World Cup qualifier. Upon landing in the island territory, Rongen is greeted by the ever-jaunty club manager Tavita (Oscar Kightley) and introduced to the flailing players that make up their national team. The goal for the season, which is to score a single goal during a game, is sent down from the Football Federation American Samoa and Rongen sets about getting the squad up to snuff.

Throughout Next Goal Wins, Waititi demonstrates that he wants to have it both ways; he wants to lampoon underdog sports comedy tropes but embrace them when the story calls for it. Perhaps that’s why some of the humor fitfully works during the story but by the film’s conclusion, it doesn’t feel all that significant. Waititi fills his film with a colorful cast of characters that he doesn’t feel the inclination to develop much, outside of transgender player Jaiyah Saelua. Played by newcomer Kaimana, Saelua has bonding scenes with Rongen that predictably break down his prejudices around gender identity while building up his ardor for coaching the pitiable group. I understand why Waititi chose to focus solely on Saelua but unfortunately, it’s at the expense of almost all of the supporting cast.

Fassbender, who also stars in recently-released Netflix thriller The Killer, is simply better suited to play a stoic assassin in that movie as opposed to playing the hot-headed soccer coach that he portrays in Next Goal Wins. He’s an immensely talented actor and I appreciate him trying to stretch his acting chops into more comedic terrain but he’s just not a good fit for this role. In addition to his scenes with Saelua, there are sparks in the brief moments between Fassbender and Moss but they don’t get nearly enough screen time to develop their relationship. There’s also a teased-out bit about Rongen’s past that is supposed to play like a big character revelation towards the ending but it all feels too obvious. Kightley fares much better as the perpetually optimistic manager, who also has to wear different hats around the sparsely-populated island as the cameraman for a show and waiter for a beachside restaurant.

It probably helps that Kightley is channeling the same kind of goofball energy that Waititi infuses in his films both as a performer and a director. Fans of the filmmaker’s earlier work like What We Do in the Shadows and Hunt for the Wilderpeople will no doubt find bits that work within Next Goal Wins. The movie’s finest occurs early on when Rongen is in the process of being fired; in an attempt to console him, an ex-colleague played by Rhys Darby tries to guide him through the 5 stages of grief with the help of an overhead projector and transparency slides. Rongen also demonstrates a streak of unintentionally parroting big speeches from movies like Any Given Sunday and Taken. There’s plenty of Waititi’s signature quirk in Next Goal Wins but not enough genuine pathos to balance out the field.

Score – 2.5/5

More movies coming to theaters this weekend:
The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, starring Tom Blyth and Rachel Zegler, is a prequel to 2012’s The Hunger Games which focuses on future Panem president Coriolanus Snow as he mentors a tribute for the 10th annual Hunger Games.
Trolls Band Together, starring Anna Kendrick and Justin Timberlake, is the third installment in the Trolls franchise centering around Poppy and Branch as they work to rescue one of Branch’s brothers after he is kidnapped by a band of pop star siblings.
Thanksgiving, starring Patrick Dempsey and Addison Rae, is a seasonal slasher following a mysterious serial killer, known only as “John Carver”, who comes to Plymouth, MA with the intention of creating a carving board out of the town’s inhabitants.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

When it comes to Hollywood math, only one sequel doesn’t quite square the equation and so, nine years after vigilante actioner The Equalizer, we have a trilogy capper in the form of The Equalizer 3. Only somewhat less unnecessary than the 2018 follow-up that preceded it, this final chapter is the shortest of the three films, even though it doesn’t always feel like it due to the uneven pacing from returning director Antoine Fuqua. Though this does have some of the brutal violence that’s come to define this series, The Equalizer 3 is also the least action-heavy in the trilogy but at least it’s in favor of a more contemplative character study about a hitman coming to terms with his life of murder. The movie luxuriates in its coastal Italian setting with gorgeous cinematography from Robert Richardson and tries to capture the nuances of Italian culture when it’s not indulging in farcical stereotypes.

We open in Sicily, where one-man wrecking machine Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) is waiting for a mafia boss at his winery with a dozen of his bodyguards dead throughout the compound. McCall finishes his business there after the kingpin arrives there but sustains a bullet wound in the back during the action that ensues, leaving him scrambling near the Amalfi Coast. He’s taken in by a friendly doctor named Enzo (Remo Girone) back to his quaint home town of Altamonte, where McCall takes time to recover from his injury and, in the process, finds a soft spot for the kind people who have welcomed him there. Despite the peaceful locale, trouble brews under the surface as mob enforcer Marco (Andrea Dodero) shakes up local restaurant owners for money and crosses McCall in the midst of his misdeeds.

When McCall inevitably dispatches Marco and his accompanying thugs, the aftermath triggers involvement from a young CIA agent played by Dakota Fanning, who travels to Italy to sniff McCall out. Washington and Fanning previously worked together for Tony Scott’s Man On Fire when Fanning was just 9 years old and aside from the novelty of the reunion, the two have a fun cat-and-mouse energy that gives The Equalizer 3 a boost from time to time. Unfortunately, her character’s presence also comes with strings attached in the form of a superfluous subplot steeped in the Syrian drug trade that makes the story more complicated than it needs to be. There’s a stretch in the middle of the film where Denzel disappears from the movie entirely and alternating scenes of interrogation and tough guy intimidation temporarily render the narrative indecipherable.

Naturally, this movie needs Denzel and apart from the scant scenes of savage score-settling, The Equalizer 3 finds a bit of a groove in McCall reckoning with the violent life that he’s led. The first two films find his character trying to pass the time and distract himself by working at a hardware store or as a Lyft driver but this entry feels like a proper “retirement” installment. Though action movies from earlier this year like Fast X and Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One had detours in Italy, this movie actually finds purpose in the location and goes a bit deeper than the picturesque scenery. McCall strikes up a kinship with a waitress played by Gaia Scodellaro, who serves as his guide around the village as he gets to know the shopkeepers and street merchants in the area. He feels as though he could live the rest of his life there and Fuqua adds some elegant touches that make us believe it.

Conversely, the antagonistic forces in The Equalizer 3 couldn’t be implemented much more inelegantly than they are. Marco is really the only villain with even a trace of a personality to him and when he’s offed, it’s up to his big brother and his attaché of goons to pick up the slack. This series isn’t known for its richly-rendered baddies but at least Fuqua and recurring scribe Richard Wenk had the good sense to give the over-the-top villain of the inaugural entry a fittingly ridiculous name of Teddy Rensen. None of the faceless thugs here come close to the menace that Marton Csokas creates in his performance as Rensen in The Equalizer or that Pedro Pascal does for The Equalizer 2, which is problematic for a concluding chapter. If you’re not going to have a strong villain, at the very least don’t have a scene of henchmen chewing on pasta and gulping wine as they stand around a table trying to figure out how to deal with the protagonist like they do here. Fans of Denzel Washington can at least celebrate the fact that The Equalizer 3 means the equation is complete and the venerable actor can lend his considerable talents elsewhere.

Score – 2.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is The Nun II, a supernatural horror film starring Taissa Farmiga and Jonas Bloquet about a strong evil that haunts a town in 1950s France as word gets out that a priest has been violently murdered there.
Also coming to theaters is My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3, a romcom sequel starring Nia Vardalos and John Corbett which finds the Portokalos family on a trip to Greece for a family reunion after the death of one of their beloved family members.
Streaming on Amazon Prime is Sitting In Bars With Cake, a dramedy starring Yara Shahidi and Odessa A’zion which follows two best friends in their 20s navigating life in L.A when one of the pair receives a life-altering diagnosis.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Back in April, Evil Dead Rise brought its respective franchise back from a lengthy hiatus for more gruesome thrills at the hands of demonic entities and possessed persons alike. At 97 minutes, it doesn’t give the audience much to hold onto when it comes to empathetic characters but its lean-and-mean delivery makes up for the gaps in pathos. Now we have Talk To Me, another tightly-paced and properly brutal supernatural horror outing with some strong instincts for tension that doesn’t quite add up to much. Comparatively, the Evil Dead movies have their own mythology that is either called back to or explained in each entry but the internal logic of Talk To Me starts to get muddled halfway through. It’s certainly a film that sticks the landing in its final moments but its willingness to play fast-and-loose with the rules of this world takes too much away from the final product.

Our heroine of Talk to Me is Mia (Sophie Wilde), a temerarious teenager whose mother’s suicide years prior puts her at a distance with her father Max (Marcus Johnson) and drives her to cheap thrills in her South Australian suburb. Mia’s best friend Jade (Alexandra Jensen) takes her to a party one night, where a pair of brash blokes bring out the preserved hand of a medium that they say can conjure otherworldly spirits. If an individual grabs hold of the hand and utters the titular phrase, the ghost appears and if they follow up with “I let you in,” the participant allegedly becomes possessed by the apparition. When Mia experiences the “game” for herself, she becomes consumed with the prospect of communing with his deceased mother but invites other evil inside of her in the process.

With a plot that combines dangerous séances with a cursed totem passed among teens, Talk To Me seems to take numerous cues from contemporary horror hits It Follows and Hereditary. Aside from having more meat on the bone thematically, those two movies also had more clearly defined boundaries in place for their supernatural story elements. Talk To Me starts out with a firm grip on how its spirit world works but starts to loosen up as it goes along, even though the mood and atmosphere itself is always appropriately tense. There’s a plot detail involving the lighting and extinguishing of a candle near the embalmed hand that renders the plot too messy in regards to how and why spirits are able to appear.

In their feature directorial debut, co-directors and twin brothers Danny and Michael Philippou strike up individual moments of otherworldly terror borne from meddling with the wrong forces. In particular, Jade’s younger brother Riley (played by Joe Bird) has a couple scenes of facial and cranial trauma that would make Hereditary and Midsommar director Ari Aster grin creepily with delight. Like those two films, Talk To Me is also distributed by the tastemakers at A24, who have made a habit of producing grabby, and sometimes misleading, trailers for their horror selections. Those who walked away disappointed from artsy fare like It Comes At Night or Lamb needn’t have those concerns with Talk To Me, arguably one of the most immediate and least esoteric horror movies under the A24 banner.

The Philippou brothers began their collective creative career under the moniker RackaRacka, piloting a YouTube channel awarded for its mercurial brand of horror comedy videos. Aside from a very occasional moment of levity, as when a carful of teens belts out Sia’s “Chandelier” in unison, Talk To Me doesn’t delight in the same kind of comedic flourishes present in recent horror entries like M3GAN or last year’s Barbarian. While certainly not every horror film needs to have comedy in it, the Philippou twins at least have demonstrated the skill set to potentially include some laughs in future films, should they continue down the path of horror. Despite some eerie effects work and an engaging central performance by Wilde, Talk To Me never quite gets a handle on what it wants to say.

Score – 2.5/5

New movies coming this weekend:
Opening in theaters beginning Wednesday is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, an animated superhero film starring Micah Abbey and Shamon Brown Jr. continuing the saga of the titular Turtles as they go on a hunt for a mysterious crime syndicate.
Coming to theaters starting Friday is Meg 2: The Trench, a sci-fi actioner starring Jason Statham and Wu Jing about a research team who, once again, encounters colossal prehistoric sharks on an exploratory dive into the deepest depths of the ocean.
Screening at Cinema Center is Earth Mama, a drama starring Tia Nomore and Erika Alexander involving a pregnant single mother, with two children in foster care, who embraces her Bay Area community as she fights to reclaim her family.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup

Arriving with not-so-lightning speed towards the end of the DC Extended Universe’s cinematic run, The Flash is a project that’s technically been in the works since the 1980s and is finally bolting into theaters. Based around the lauded Flashpoint comic book storyline, the movie’s narrative integrates time travel and multiverses in ways that should be inspired but ultimately end up just creating a confusing mess. Even if one goes into the film with knowledge of the myriad storylines from this Universe, along with general knowledge from other superhero lore, there’s a good chance audience members will have issues keeping up with the leaps in continuity and logic that this film makes. Despite some winning performances and some of the most consistent humor in a DCEU entry so far, The Flash is too little too late.

The Flash opens with Barry Allen (Ezra Miller), now a full-time member of the Justice League as The Flash, in the midst of handling a speedy clean-up for Batman (Ben Affleck) during a particularly messy car chase. After that bout of crime fighting, Barry works to clean up grocery store footage that will exonerate his father Henry (Ron Livingston) after the wrongful conviction of his wife’s murder. In frustration one night, The Flash discovers that he is able to run so fast that he can travel faster than the speed of light and, in doing so, effectively travel through time. Hurt over his mother’s murder years prior, he jets back in time with the intent of preventing her death but his actions create an alternate reality where Barry runs into his former self. Along with an altered version of Batman (Michael Keaton), the two Barrys work to set the timeline right.

Yes, The Flash sees the return of Keaton donning the cape and cowl for the first time in over 30 years and despite the time that’s passed, he settles back into the role very nicely. His Bruce Wayne was always the most eccentric and cerebral of the bunch, traits that Keaton has refined even further in his career since Batman Returns. While director Andy Muschietti can’t help but bolster the performance with CG-enhanced virility that has Keaton moving like an impossibly spry sexagenarian, the best Keaton moments in this film call back to the ingenuity of those earlier Burton Batmans. Staging an escape in an elevator shaft, he quickly calculates the collective weight of the escapees, along with a handy tape measure, and sets an explosive charge with proportional propulsion to shoot them up to the roof.

Though Muschietti and his screenwriter Christina Hodson do their best to hold our hand through the time travel paradoxes and multiverse snafus, it’s enough to say that the concept of the “butterfly effect” is used very liberally throughout The Flash. After Barry makes his first interjection within the past, the ramifications are predictably severe and the storyline gets messier than an Ashton Kutcher nose bleed. But if going back in time and zipping back to the future is enough to completely alter the appearance of someone (Bruce Wayne, for instance, since he’s played by two actors), shouldn’t nearly everything else be drastically changed too? The way that these universes unravel relies heavily either on plot contrivance or comedic effect, as with the running joke that Eric Stoltz starred in an alternate version of Back To The Future instead of Michael J. Fox.

I’m not someone who tends to pick on CGI in these superhero epics; there’s often so much money on the screen that the majority of these blockbusters are arranged at least competently enough for me to ignore some choppy rendering or unconvincing shading here and there. Having said that, this movie has scenes containing some of the most jaw-droppingly outdated effects I’ve seen in the modern superhero era. When The Flash is speeding through time, he generates a large orb of energy around him that projects flashes of events as they were and could have been. It’s not clear to me if these images are meant to look as if real actors were present in creating these vignettes but as presented, they would barely pass muster as cutscenes from a Playstation 2 game. The Flash has flashes of brilliance when it tackles themes of regret and acceptance but stumbles in delivering a coherent standalone feature.

Score – 2.5/5

More movies coming this weekend:
Coming to theaters is Elemental, a Pixar animated movie starring Leah Lewis and Mamoudou Athie set in a world inhabited by anthropomorphic elements of nature where a fire creature and water creature strike up a romantic relationship.
Also playing only in theaters is The Blackening, a horror comedy starring Grace Byers and Jermaine Fowler about a group of Black friends who go away for the weekend, only to find themselves trapped in a cabin with a killer who has a vendetta.
Streaming on Netflix is Extraction 2, an action thriller starring Chris Hemsworth and Idris Elba continuing the story of a black-ops mercenary whose new mission involves the rescue of a ruthless Georgian gangster’s family from the prison where they are being held.

Reprinted by permission of Whatzup