Film Reviews: New Releases for Oct. 20

Dicks: The Musical **1/2
There’s a thin line between a movie that’s idiosyncratically weird, and one that feels designed to play midnight screenings—and it’s a line that Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp trample into a paste in the film adaptation of their short play. Jackson and Sharp play Trevor and Craig, two proudly heterosexual alpha-dog salesmen who realize that they are identical twins separated at birth, and subsequently concoct a decidedly Parent Trap-esque plan to reunite their mother (Megan Mullaly) and father (Nathan Lane). Absolutely nothing that follows is done in half-measures, from the silly voice Mullaly employs that feels like a cross between South Park's Eric Cartman and Tweety Bird’s granny, to the fact that Lane’s character keeps a pair of mutant puppeteered “sewer boys” in a cage, feeding them pre-chewed deli meats, to Bowen Yang’s flamboyant God endorsing incest. It’s so enthusiastically performed and directed (by Borat’s Larry Charles) that it earns some laughs out of sheer chutzpah and a refusal to consider any cow sacred. But those laughs are fewer and farther between than one might hope, especially when the original songs don’t carry enough weight either in terms of tunefulness or in terms of comedy. Something this queer is bound to find a cult audience, as might be expected when it includes conceits like a flying vulva. The best such efforts, though, tend to be the result of people who were trying to make a movie first, and a cult movie only incidentally. Available Oct. 20 at Broadway Centre Cinemas. (R)

Killers of the Flower Moon ***1/2
See feature review. Available Oct. 20 in theaters. (R)

Nyad **
Directors Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi (Meru, Free Solo, The Rescue) have made a career out of documentaries chronicling people who put themselves in life-threatening situations—and in their first narrative feature, it looks for all the world like they’d rather be making a documentary instead. It’s the story of Diana Nyad (Annette Bening), the celebrated marathon swimmer whose exploits in her 20s included a failed attempt to free-swim from Cuba to Key West. But as she reaches her 60s, she becomes determined to attempt the swim again, enlisting her best friend Bonnie (Jodie Foster) as coach. Screenwriter Julia Cox doesn’t shy away from Nyad’s sense of self-importance, and Bening plays her single-mindedness and ego with an eye to how it could alienate those close to her. But while Chin and Vasarhelyi certainly take advantage of the opportunity for visual creativity beyond verité style—particularly during flashbacks to Nyad’s experience with sexual abuse at the hands of her youth swimming coach, and hallucinations she experiences on her epic swims—there’s a cycle of repetition not just in Nyad’s attempts to conquer the Cuba swim, but in multiple scenes, motifs and lines of dialogue. More frustratingly, Nyad relies overly on archival material, to the extent that the movie basically has the real Nyad playing her younger self. It’s the story of that Nyad that Chin and Vasarhelyi seem most fascinated by, leaving the dramatized scenes feeling somewhat adrift. Available Oct. 20 in theaters; Nov. 3 via Netflix. (PG-13)

The Pigeon Tunnel ***
Over the course of his 40-plus year career as a documentary filmmaker, Errol Morris has developed a particular style that feels most compelling when his subject is either someone potentially trying to hide something, or quirky oddballs—so it’s a bit unusual to find him profiling someone who seems to be a famous figure who appears to be a relatively open book. That subject is bestselling espionage novelist John le Carré—real name David Cornwell—who focuses here on his formative relationship with his father, inveterate con man and gambler Ronnie Cornwell, in interviews conducted shortly before le Carré’s death in 2020 at the age of 89. Morris mixes in clips of film and TV adaptations of le Carré’s books, along with dramatized re-creations of events from his life with Ronnie, creating something that is, typically for Morris, more visually interesting than most conventional talking-head documentaries. And le Carré is a lively enough raconteur, sharing wild anecdotes about Ronnie’s behavior and how it served as an influence, as much as le Carré’s actual work with the British secret service, on his stories about duplicity and betrayal. So perhaps it’s unfair to be hoping for the kind of moments of discovery that Morris’s best work has always included, when you’re just waiting for his technique as an interviewer to crack open something that was being obscured. The result is an eminently watchable profile, if rarely a revelatory one. Available Oct. 20 via AppleTV+. (PG-13)