Movie Reviews: New Releases for April 1

Apollo 10-1/2: A Space Age Childhood **1/2
See feature review. Available April 1 via Netflix. (PG-13)

Barbarians ***
I often don’t know quite what to do with a movie that starts off brilliantly, fumbles the opportunity to give that start an appropriately great payoff, but has so many great bits along the way that it still feels like a success. Writer/director Charles Dorfman serves up what looks for most of its running time like it will be a darkly comedic four-hander chamber drama. Adam (Iwan Rheon), a commercial director and frustrated would-be filmmaker, is about to buy a house with his artist-girlfriend Eva (Catalina Sandino Moreno); the house is partly a payment for Eva creating a sculpture for the housing development created by Adam’s pal Lucas (Tom Cullen) in the shadow of Stonehenge-like hallowed ground. Much of the action revolves around Lucas and his girlfriend Chloe (Inès Spiridonov) having dinner at Adam and Eva’s for Adam’s birthday, as Rheon does a splendid job of capturing Adam’s impotent rage over being perpetually emasculated and infantilized. And there’s also hilarious stuff involving Lucas’s mastery of social media for combining his hucksterism with performative emotion. Then the story pivots just past the half-way mark, in a way that only rarely feels like it ties the earlier threads together. It’s not bad when it turns into a thriller; it’s simply more thrilling when it’s a less overtly genre-based portrait of inadequacy curdling into something darker. Available April 1 in theaters and via VOD. (NR)

Better Nate Than Ever ***
If you didn’t know any better, you might swear this was something put together by Disney to combat the bad publicity about its commitment to supporting LTBTQ rights; this might be the most overtly queer thing ever released under the Disney banner. Writer/director Tim Federle’s adaptation of his own young-adult novel follows the adventures of Nate Foster (Rueby Wood), a 13-year-old Pittsburgh native with big theater-kid dreams that keep getting knocked down when he never gets cast as a lead in school shows. When his best friend Libby (Aria Brooks) learns that there’s an open casting call for a new Broadway musical version of Lilo & Stitch, the two sneak off to the Big Apple to try their luck. Along the way, Nate connect with his black-sheep-of-the-family aunt (Lisa Kudrow), and Federle tries to work in some material about family outcasts that connects to Nate’s strained relationship with his jock older brother (Joshua Bassett). The story in general doesn’t know quite what to do with those more serious matters, as it’s mostly a breezy comedy with a couple of musical numbers, but which doesn’t entirely commit to being a full-on musical. The appeal comes mostly from newcomer Wood, who leans into the big personality of a gay adolescent trying to find his place in the world. Like Nate himself, the movie is awkward, but its heart is in the right place—and that heart is something Disney could stand to emphasize right now. Available April 1 via Disney+. (PG)

The Bubble **
Judd Apatow has plenty of comedic gifts, but being a farceur—which requires a lightness of touch and efficiency of pacing—just isn’t one of them. Directing and co-writing (with South Park veteran Pam Brady), Apatow tells the high-concept story about the decision to shoot the sixth installment in the long-running action franchise Cliff Beasts during the early months of the COVID pandemic, which means isolating the actors and crew on a British estate for the duration of the shoot. Karen Gillan leads the cast as a prodigal Cliff Beasts veteran returning after missing Part 5, trapped with a bunch of potentially interesting types: a married couple (Leslie Mann and David Duchovny) perpetually breaking up and reuniting; a Method actor (Pablo Pascal) doing some genre slumming; the Sundance-pedigree director (Fred Armisen) doing his first big-budget movie; a TikTok star (Apatow’s younger daughter, Iris) brought in to increase youth appeal. The clash of personalities in a claustrophobic environment could have made for great comedy, and occasionally The Bubble hits its targets about pampered celebrities facing pandemic upheaval. Apatow simply has no sense for when to dial things back, overloading the movie with video-chat cameos and dragging out sequences past their reasonable end point. And the script generally seems more determined to make all the characters the same—stir-crazy and horny—than to differentiate them. The result lacks a necessary nimbleness, feeling just as frantic, eager to please and overstuffed as the kind of blockbuster it’s theoretically satirizing. Available April 1 via Netflix. (R)

Morbius *1/2
Many criticisms can rightly be leveled at the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but even when they’re clearly serving the interests of perpetuating a franchise, at least they’re usually fun. Here, however, is a profoundly joyless affair from Sony’s Spider-man-centric slice of Marvel: Jared Leto as Michael Morbius, a brilliant scientist with a debilitating genetic blood disorder, whose attempt at a cure that includes gene-splicing with bats turns him into a superhuman with a thirst for blood. The cursory back-story introduces an old friend (Matt Smith) who inevitably becomes an enemy, and a romantic-interest/colleague (Adria Arjona) who inevitably becomes a damsel in distress, all surrounded by special effects that emphasize the characters in super-fast motion as represented by wisps of smoke. Those wisps are more substantial than anything that happens in this story, which should involve the psychological tumult of being both cured and cursed, but which even Leto at his most earnestly Method-y can’t make into something that matters at all. Meanwhile, director Daniel Espinosa’s action sequences are virtually incomprehensible, consisting of CGI blurs smashing into other CGI blurs. Only Smith’s performance seems to embrace any kind of silliness, while the rest of what remains becomes an ordeal to endure, and the mid-credits tease for an ongoing franchise feels vaguely like a threat. Available April 1 in theaters. (PG-13)

The Nameless Days **1/2
A general atmosphere of dread and a cool monster can take a horror film reasonably far, but there are enough gaps in the execution here that it ends up feeling frustrating. In a Texas border town, teenager Nicole (Ally Ioannides) gets tangled up in the creepiness when a Mexican demon known as the Coaxoch (Ambyr Mishelle)—doomed to hunt for a baby to replace its own, and kill those who get in its way with a nasty velociraptor-like talon—sets its sights on the newborn of a lost migrant (Ashley Marian Ramos). The “rules” for the creature dictate a narrow span of days when it can occupy our world, which should be one of the key ticking clocks for our heroes. So it’s a big problem that they never actually know where they are in that span, and seem to be operating out of sheer hopes and luck. That’s just one place where the things that should dictate how the characters behave—how fast the Coaxoch moves, how it can sense the presence of a child—come and go seemingly at random. The performances are all solid enough, with Ioannides making for a spunky “final girl,” and her complicated relationship with her single father (Charles Halford) puts at least a little meat on the story’s bones. This simply feels like a script in need of more focus, so that any limitations of a low-budget production could be overcome by its smarts. Available April 1 in theaters. (NR)

You Won’t Be Alone ***
Imagine an A24 supernatural horror thriller as directed by Terrence Malick, and you have a pretty good sense of what to expect from writer/director Goran Stolevski’s feature debut—and you should trust whether that notion sounds intriguing or baffling to you. In rural Macedonia, a mother hides her newborn child away from the threat of a witch known as Old Maid Maria, the “Wolf-Eateress” (Anamaria Marinca); many years later, the now-teenage child, Nevena (Sara Klimoska), raised in an almost feral state, finds herself transformed into a witch herself, and begins her experience of understanding what it is to be human. Contemplative voice-over narration, much of it in Nevena’s stilted understanding of language, and an often stream-of-consciousness editing rhythm make for Malick-like approach to the familiar sci-fi/fantasy trope of the alien among us learning our ways, with Nevena herself played by multiple actors—including Noomi Rapace and Alice Englert—as she shape-shifts her way into various lives. It’s a unique approach, one that finds an undercurrent of even more pathos once Old Maid Maria’s own tragic origin story is revealed. It does feel like a weird mismatch at times when bloody deaths find their way into what is ultimately an earnest drama about stuff like gender roles and finding love, but give Stolevski credit for taking two very particular flavors and figuring out a way for them (mostly) to taste good together. Available April 1 in theaters. (R)