Paramount Pictures
Smile 2
Exhibiting Forgiveness ***
There are some challenging things percolating beneath the surface of writer/director Titus Kaphar's movie, which might have made even more of an impact had he not been so determined to underline things that didn’t need underlining. It’s the tale of on-the-rise visual artist Tarrell Rodin (André Holland), whose burgeoning success is unexpectedly accompanied by the reappearance of his long-absent father, La’Ron (John Earl Jelks), in recovery from years of drug addiction and seeking reconciliation for the damage he did as a father. Holland’s performance is a winner, conveying how much anger and fear he hangs onto even as he commits himself to being a great father himself. And there’s a provocative thread running through Kaphar’s script regarding the specifically Christian idea of forgiveness, and how the faithful might lean into lovely-sounding admonitions like “turn the other cheek” and questionable criteria for what makes a “good person,” rather than confronting the genuine pain that people might feel. It’s a shame, then, that the material about patterns of abuse sometimes turns into overly-literal dialogue and confrontations; it feels particularly unnecessary when Tarrell’s wife (Andra Day) tells him that “some things can’t be worked out on canvas.” For the most part, it’s effectively-rendered family melodrama, thankfully providing more thorny exploration of why we should or shouldn’t forgive than thesis-declaring recriminations.
Available Oct. 18 at Broadway Centre Cinemas. (R)
Goodrich **1/2
If you check out the biographies of
Goodrich writer/director Hallie Meyers-Shyer and her parents,
Father of the Bride filmmakers Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer, it becomes clear that Meyers-Shyer is working out some daddy issues here—which makes it all the more surprising that the theoretically central relationship gets sidelines so regularly. Michael Keaton plays Andy Goodrich, who’s already dealing with the financial struggles of his art gallery when his wife (Laura Benanti), seemingly out of nowhere, announces that she’s going into rehab for prescription drug addiction, leaving him to care for their 9-year-old twins (Vivien Lyra Blair and Jacob Kopera). Andy begins leaning on his pregnant adult daughter Grace (Mila Kunis) for assistance, and the tentative re-connection between Andy and Grace is by far the most interesting part of the story. Yet Meyers-Shyer keeps taking lengthy digressions into other subplots, like a friendship between Andy and the father of one of the twins’ classmates, or Andy wooing a potential client. Keaton does some nice work as a guy figuring out how to be present for the people in his life, though even that idea gets a bit distracted by the idea of joining Keaton’s recent revisiting of his 1980s roles in
Beetlejuice and
Batman by messing around with a 21st century version of
Mr. Mom. If Meyers-Shyer really wanted to dig into her own messy family history, she seems a little timid about doing it.
Available Oct. 18 in theaters. (R)
Rumours ***1/2
Canadian director Guy Maddin has spent much of his career plundering the aesthetics of silent film, particularly German Expressionism, for his funky deadpan comedies. Here, however—working again with his
The Green Fog co-directors Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson—he remains squarely in the real world of our present, adding a satirical edge to his singular sense of humor. The action is set at a summit of G7 nation leaders in Germany—including the chancellor of Germany (Cate Blanchett), U.S. president (Charles Dance), Canadian prime minister (Roy Dupuis) and British prime minister (Nikki Amuka-Bird)—to craft a joint statement on an unspecified “crisis.” But in the midst of their meeting, they become isolated from the rest of the world, trying to understand if they’re facing some strange, supernatural event. Those unfamiliar with Maddin’s sensibility should come prepared for truly weird stuff like a giant human brain and masturbating zombies. For my money, though,
Rumours works best on a lower-key level, like the dramatic music that plays while Blanchett tries to explain the complicated financial scandal facing the Canadian prime minister, or how the filmmakers acknowledge then quickly dismiss Dance’s American president speaking with a British accent. The pacing does poke along, perhaps appropriately for a tale in part about performative, dead-end politics. It’s just hard to resist a movie where the “swag bag” for the G7 leaders includes an extremely niche magazine called
Incumbent Life.
Available Oct. 18 in theaters. (R)
Smile 2 **1/2
Parker Finn clearly has impressive chops as a horror filmmaker, and a potent metaphor for suppressed trauma in the concept he created for 2022’s
Smile; if only he weren’t so frustratingly clueless about how to approach it. This follow-up kicks off mere days after the events of the first film, with the malevolent entity that drives its hosts insane with images of smiling people finding its way into pop star Skye Riley (Naomi Scott), who’s trying to get back into the swing of her career a year after a tragic accident. Whenever Finn settles in for one of his scary set pieces, he’s on extremely firm footing, most notably in a sequence where Skye is terrorized by images of her backup dancers in her apartment. But he makes a huge mistake in using a superstar as his central character, making it too hard to connect with her particular struggles despite Scott’s go-for-broke performance. Finn ultimately seems most interested in how he can use Skye’s celebrity status for the big finale, in which—as was the case with the original—the filmmaker proves far more dedicated to a kind of smirky nihilism than to grappling with how people might actually overcome this kind of pain in their lives. You’ll see things here that might haunt your dreams, but it’s even scarier to realize Finn is taking on such a delicate subject without the emotional intelligence to pull it off.
Available Oct. 18 in theaters. (R)
We Live in Time ***
To the credit of director John Crowley (
Brooklyn) and screenwriter Nick Payne, they trust the audience to keep up as their romantic drama slides forward and backward through the lives of its two protagonists—though the title itself ends up doing some of the thematic heavy lifting. Mostly, it touches down periodically in three time-frames for up-and-coming chef Almut (Florence Pugh) and recently-divorced salesman Tobias (Andrew Garfield): the early days of their relationship; the final weeks of Almut’s pregnancy with their child; and their shared struggle dealing with Almut’s health crisis. Crowley spends plenty of scenes emphasizing clocks—the timer Tobias wears around his neck for labor contractions, countdown clocks for a cooking competition, etc.—as part of a not-particularly-subtle recognition that time moves fast, and that we can’t always know the outcome of the choices we make. Fortunately, the story is mostly lighter on its feet than that heavy-handed thesis might suggest, including a restrained approach to a marriage proposal, and a wonderfully chaotic sequence as Almut prepares to deliver their baby at an inconvenient moment. The two leads have the kind of chemistry required to drive a narrative of this kind, with Pugh in particular serving up plenty of her trademark spiky energy. It’s not much trouble keeping up with the temporal leaps, and humor leavening the melodrama makes it worth the effort.
Available Oct. 18 in theaters. (R)
Woman of the Hour **1/2
There’s a hell of a lot going on in Anna Kendrick’s feature directing debut, provocative in bits and pieces but struggling to pull together into a single story. Kendrick also stars in the fact-based circa-1978 narrative as Cheryl Bradshaw, a struggling would-be actor in Hollywood desperate for face time who takes a spot on
The Dating Game—unaware that Bachelor #3 is Rodney Alcala (Daniel Zovatto), a prolific rapist and serial killer. The game-show set-up takes up a relatively small amount of the running time, as Ian McDonald’s script also looks in on Alcala’s other crimes, with Zovatto delivering an effectively creepy performance when Alcala’s attempts at charm tip over into disturbing, and Kendrick’s direction impressively building tension. Yet it feels like this is also an attempt to craft a “here’s what happens when you don’t believe women” cautionary tale, particularly in the sub-plot involving a witness (Nicolette Robinson) who recognizes Alcala from the
Dating Game studio audience. And that’s all aside from Kendrick’s own role, which feels like an attempt to implicate media expectations of women in Alcala’s crimes. A character at one point describes the goal of
The Dating Game as figuring out “which one of you will hurt me,” and as interesting as that idea could be,
Woman of the Hour is just a bit too wide-ranging at trying to investigate it.
Available Oct. 18 via Netflix. (R)