Buzz Blog

The Adam Project **1/2
Ryan Reynolds is such an identifiable brand at this point that it shouldn’t be difficult to figure out material that plays to his strengths and doesn’t overthink things. Yet here we are, taking his motor-mouthed wise guy screen personal and overloading it with too many clashing attempts at emotional resonance. Reynolds’ Free Guy director Shawn Levy oversees this high-concept in which he plays Adam Reed, a pilot from the year 2050 who travels back in time on a risky mission to save his wife (Zoe Saldana), and along the way encounters his 12-year-old self (Walker Scobell) and his long-dead father (Mark Ruffalo). The genre components are effective enough, built on a few fun bits of technology and the lively interactions between Reynolds and Scobell, the latter doing an effective job of capturing a physical manifestation of Adam’s wounded inner child without resorting to doing an impression. But the script—attributed to four writers, and feeling every bit of it—has a tricky enough time balancing the timeline-changing hijinks of Back to the Future with the daddy-issues fantasy of Field of Dreams, without adding the attempt at making Adam’s relationship with his lost wife genuinely affecting. It all starts to feel like putting a hat on a hat. You can make a sci-fi comedy that’s just about letting Ryan Reynolds riff; it’s not required to have the moral of the story become “the real Adam Project was … love.” Available March 11 via Netflix. (PG-13)

All My Friends Hate Me **1/2
For approximately 80 minutes, All My Friends Hate Me is a brutally effective dark comedy about realizing you’re no longer the cool college-age self you idealize in your memories—and then in the final 10 minutes, it gets unfortunately over-complicated. Tom Stourton (who also co-scripted with Tom Palmer) plays Pete, who visits the country estate of a college friend to celebrate his 31st birthday with his old university gang. But things quickly turn weird as Pete starts to feel targeted by his old mates—and even more so by a local guy named Harry (Dustin Demri-Burns), who insinuates himself into the festivities. Director Andrew Gaynord establishes a surreal vibe from the outset, building on the script’s notion of Pete as unsure of his place in the world of his posh schoolmates, after the years working with refugee children he can’t stop talking about. There’s a sense of mystery in the proceedings—who is Harry, and are the rest of Pete’s friends in on whatever Harry is up to?—but the humor always focuses on Pete wanting to be the “skipper” of their clique once again, only to be afflicted by the anxiety that he can’t do anything right in their eyes. It’s a damned shame, then, that the finale goes to a completely different dark place, and kind of trips over the finish line rather than sprinting through it. The messiness of realizing you might be the problem doesn’t need to take quite so grim a turn. Available March 11 at Broadway Centre Cinemas. (R)

I Am Here ***
The most cynical possible way of looking at Jordy Sank’s documentary is that we’ve seen this before: first-person accounts by Holocaust survivors, recollections of past events represented through animation, and so forth. Yet as antisemitism rises throughout the world, and fewer survivors remain with every passing year to combat Holocaust denialism, there’s still power in a story related with such detail and emotion. Ella Blumenthal is celebrating her 98th birthday in South Africa at the film’s outset, gathered with three generations of descendants—and it’s an occasion she uses to share with those family members stories of her experience in the Warsaw ghetto and multiple concentration camps that she’d kept buried, to the extent that she’d had her camp ID number tattoo surgically removed and lied about the reason for the scar. The animation visualizing Ella’s recollections is almost too primitive, which might have felt more appropriate if she had been a child at the time rather than already an adult; it’s also mostly a literal translation of what we’re already hearing Ella say, only occasionally getting imaginative about conveying state of mind. As long as Ella is speaking, though, it’s still heartbreaking stuff, her voice cracking with memories of suffering and loss nearly 80 years removed. It’s a potent reminder that those horrifying events are not even entirely “history” yet, while people like Ella still live, and that we benefit from being reminded that those things happened to real flesh-and-blood people. Available March 11 at Broadway Centre Cinemas. (NR)

Turning Red **1/2
See feature review. Available March 11 via Disney+. (PG)

Tyson’s Run **
Making an “inspirational” film is tricky enough; it gets even harder when it doesn’t seem like you really know what you’re trying to be inspirational about. The central characters here area a suburban Georgia family: Bobby Hollerman (Rory Cochrane), successful coach of the local high-school football team; his wife, Ellie (Amy Smart); and their son Tyson (Major Dodson), a 15-year-old on the autism spectrum who has been home-schooled his whole life. As he attempts to attend mainstream school for the first time, Tyson also becomes interested in distance running, seeking the help of shoe store owner/ex-marathoner Aklilu (Captain Phillips’ Barkhad Abdi) to train him for the town’s upcoming marathon. The central arc belongs to Bobby, whose drive to make up for his own injury-shortened athletic career ties into his inability to connect with Tyson. But Cochrane plays the character as almost a parody of the gruff, emotionally-closed-off jock, and his epiphany moment comes surprisingly early in the running time. That leaves nearly an hour to spend on various subplots—Ellie’s later-in-life pregnancy; a possible romantic interest for Tyson; Aklilu’s back-story, which tries not-entirely-successfully to rescue his character from “magical Negro” territory—before The Big Race and its clunky expository news coverage. It feels like a weird miscalculation, though far too typical of some religiously-themed narratives, to build up not to Bobby learning to change his heart, but something that suggests the faithful always get the tangible victories they pray for. Available March 11 in theaters. (PG)