Buzz Blog

Cheaper By the Dozen *1/2
I’m certain that the creative team of this latest adaptation of the 1948 book—director Gail Lerner and screenwriters Kenya Barris & Jennifer Rice-Genzuk, all alums of Black-ish—had the best intentions in making the central family not just blended, but multiracial. It’s just sooooo awkward watching them stir complex sociological issues into this movie’s fluffy, family-flick vibe. Zach Braff and Gabrielle Union play Paul and Zoey, whose household forms an even dozen including biological siblings, half-siblings, adoptees and Paul’s troubled nephew. Complications ensue when the family restaurant business takes off, and the accompanying new money changes all of their lives. The narrative is densely packed with subplots, not just for the individual kids, but for Paul and Zoey’s respective exes (Erika Christensen and Timon Kyle Durrett), to the extent that it feels more like a series pilot at times. But the real messiness comes from juxtaposing the slapstick chaos of getting-everyone-off-to-school mornings with microaggressions faced by Zoey and the BIPOC kids in the family’s new upscale neighborhood. There’s just no practical way to swing from “will Paul realize that he’s losing focus on his family” to “how does Zoey explain to her Black kids that it’s dangerous for them to have toy guns outside the house” in a way that doesn’t turn the latter into a weird punch line. Yeah, combining a White family and a Black family in America will involve some hard stuff; a whimsical Disney comedy just ain’t the place to get into it. Available March 18 via Disney+. (PG)

Deep Water ***1/2
When it comes to trashy cinema, there’s “trashy” and then there’s “Adrian Lyne trashy”—the kind of high-gloss provocateurship that the director mastered in the late ’80s and early ’90s with Fatal Attraction, 9-1/2 Weeks and Indecent Proposal. Twenty years removed from his last feature, Lyne serves up something that would have been right at home in his heyday: an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1957 novel about jealousy and murder. Independently wealthy ex-engineer Vic Van Allen (Ben Affleck) keeps a precarious hold on his marriage to his volatile wife, Melinda (Ana de Armas), by “allowing” her to have lovers so she won’t leave—except that maybe he’s not “allowing” some of those lovers to live. Despite setting the story in New Orleans, Deep Water doesn’t lean into sweaty Southern gothic, instead focusing on character dynamics. And both of the leads are terrific: Affleck radiating a simmering hostility, and de Armas capturing the kind of low-key crazy that some dudes too-easily equate with sexy. The script even does a great job of showing what having parents like these would do to a kid, as Vic and Melinda’s 6-year-old daughter (Grace Jenkins) appears to be a budding sociopath herself. The pacing drags more than a bit as the narrative weaves through “who did what to whom” questions, but Lyne always manages to keep things stylish, cashing in on a little three-decades-gone trash-stalgia in a way that doesn’t simply feel like a mash-up of the greatest hits. Available March 18 via Hulu. (R)

Master **
Not every piece of allegorical horror needs to be neat and tidy in its thematic touchpoints, but it feels like writer/director Mariama Diallo is casting such a wide net that it catches everything without really latching on to anything. At an Eastern liberal-arts college, two Black women—freshman arrival Jasmine (Zoe Renee), and dorm faculty rep/headmaster Gail (Regina Hall)—are attempting to settle into their new roles, in a place where a history of racism and violence haunts it like a ghost, perhaps literally. Much of what follows becomes a case study in enduring microaggressions, from a library employee needing to search Jasmine’s bag, to the conversations about who has “earned” tenure involving Gail’s fellow Black faculty member (Amber Gray). But Diallo ultimately is trying to connect that material to supernatural tales of witch hangings—which definitely muddles the specifically racially-charged subtext—and student suicides, and neither the director’s uneven visual approach to that material nor the wide-ranging type of phenomena we see helps to bring into focus the real-world experience of being a Black woman in a space controlled by white men, especially when one late revelation pivots in an entirely new direction. All the performances are fully committed to the intensity of the experience; the experience itself just keeps shifting on a moment-to-moment basis. Available March 18 in theaters and via Amazon Prime. (NR)

The Outfit ***1/2
See feature review. Available March 18 in theaters. (R)

The Torch ***
It would have been easy enough to make a conventional biopic about blues guitar legend Buddy Guy, but director Jim Farrell aims for something slightly richer by exploring the sense of responsibility felt by caretakers of the blues to pass it on as it was passed to them. We do get Guy—just past his 80th birthday when much of this was shot—sharing recollections of his childhood on a sharecropping farm in Louisiana, through his early career after relocating to Chicago in 1957. But there’s also time spent on Guy’s work with teenage guitar prodigy Quinn Sullivan, whom Guy discovered when Sullivan was just 7 years old, and proceeded to mentor and take out on tour with him. Combined with Guy’s recollections about following in the footsteps of his own musical idols like John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, we get a wonderful portrait of artists who choose to pay it forward and continue a legacy. Farrell spends perhaps a bit too much time allowing other sorta-protégé fans of Guys—most notably Carlos Santana—share loads of anecdotes which don’t necessarily have much to do with the film’s central theme. When Farrell does stay focused on that theme, and allow his main subject to be both entertaining storyteller and gracious teacher, the result is something more than great-musician hagiography. Available March 18 via VOD. (NR)

Windfall ***
There’s something about a film’s title appearing on screen in quotation marks that promises a bit of a throwback sensibility, and at its best this tight little suspense thriller gets that sensibility right. It opens with a man (Jason Segel) enjoying the fruits (at times literally) of breaking into the desert vacation home of a tech billionaire (Jesse Plemons) and his wife (Lily Collins). But when the couple unexpectedly arrives while the intruder is still on the premises, what should have been a harmless grab-and-run turns into a hostage situation. The conceit of keeping all three principal characters unnamed stacks the deck for the possibility that the interactions will be somewhat archetypal: the capitalist asshole, the put-upon common man, the unhappy trophy wife. But while there are components of that dynamic in the script attributed to Andrew Kevin Walker and Justin Lader (the latter a regular collaborator with director Charlie McDowell), the performances are all deft enough at finding slightly different layers, particularly for Segel’s quietly-intelligent reluctant kidnapper. McDowell’s direction builds tension whenever necessary—from tapping toes to a Collins’ slow walk to the edge of their property—with a terrific assist from composers Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans. The climax proves to be a bit of a disappointment, not entirely paying off the economic cynicism of everything that precedes it, but Windfall still feels like a cinematic story that could have worked 60 years ago, in all the right ways. Available March 18 via Netflix. (R)

X ***
There’s more going on here that what can be captured in an exploitation-y logline; it might take a while for me to decide how much more. But here’s that logline for writer/director Ti West’s horror yarn anyway: In 1979 Texas, a group of six young people rents out a house on a rural farm to shoot a porn movie, unbeknownst to the possibly dangerous older couple who own the place. The flash-forward prologue doesn’t exactly make it a secret that bloody mayhem will eventually ensue, though West takes a surprisingly long time to get the carnage rolling. Along the way, he at least offers some creative filmmaking, including a God’s-eye-view shot of one of the protagonists (Mia Goth) in the path of a dangerous pursuer. That’s also when West sets up the thematic ideas—a mix of verge-of-the-Reagan-Era moral Puritanism and contemplation of the inevitable decay of the flesh—which are individually compelling though they sometimes feel like they bump up against one another without necessarily complementing one another. The rush of violence in the final half hour pretty much takes over the show, with a mix of laugh-inducing simple shock and elaborate gore, yet I can’t quite stop thinking about how this package of blood, guts and T&A also made me consider how some sex-negativity might be a form of grief for the missed opportunities of one’s younger self. Available March 18 in theaters. (R)