Buzz Blog

Absolution **
Has Liam Neeson really been riding in the same groove for so long that he’s moved from multiple “aging badass reaching a life transition” roles to multiple “aging badass reaching a life transition who also has dementia” roles? His unnamed character here is long-time muscle for a Boston-area crime boss (Ron Perlman), facing memory loss and trying to use the time he has remaining to reconnect with his estranged daughter (Frankie Shaw) and grandson (Terrence Pulliam). Screenwriter Tony Gayton dabbles in the issue of fathers passing violence and unhealthy behavior down through the generations, and Neeson certainly has the gravitas as an actor to dig into that messy territory. But the narrative keeps feeling like an awkward mix between genre psychological subject and conventional genre elements: director Hans Petter Moland (the 2019 Leeson vehicle Cold Pursuit) offering up a nightmare involving our protagonist and his dad here, fisticuffs and gunplay in the middle of the street there. Mostly, it just becomes weird so soon after Neeson did Memory to find him once again playing a gunman trying to hide his diminishing faculties, leaving aside the fact that it’s harder for the character to legitimately grapple with the man he has been vs. the man he wants to be. Here’s hoping filmmakers can avoid the short-term memory loss required to give Neeson one of these roles again. Available Nov. 1 in theaters. (R)

Anora ***1/2
Considering the humanity with which writer/director Sean Baker has approached sex workers in his previous features Tangerine and Red Rocket, it was probably only a matter of time before he turned out his own spin on Pretty Woman—and one that was both exponentially funnier and more genuinely heartbreaking. His not-exactly-a-Cinderella here is Ani (Mikey Madison), a Russian-American woman working the lap dances and private rooms of a Brooklyn strip club when she meets Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), the 21-year-old do-nothing son of a Russian oligarch. Their occasional hookups turn into a pay-for-a-week engagement, which in turn becomes an impulsive wedding during a weekend trip to Las Vegas—the discovery of which by Ivan’s parents is not exactly met with bubbling enthusiasm. What follows next might have been a broad slapstick comedy as the employees of Ani’s unhappy in-laws attempt to secure an annulment, and indeed the frantic 24-hour sequence that follows is full of precisely-staged humor. But it’s also a sneaky kind of character study about Ani—with Madison serving up a knockout performance—and the shifts in this tough young woman’s perception of whether she’s actually lucked into a Prince Charming. By the time Baker arrives at the final scene, and a resolution of the contentious interactions between Ani and one of Ivan’s father’s goons (the sublime Yura Borisov), we’ve gotten the kind of tragically perceptive tale Pretty Woman could have been. Available Nov. 1 in theaters. (R)

The Carpenter **
If you didn’t know any better, you’d swear it emerged from an improv-comedy prompt: “Jesus is a sports psychologist for an MMA fighter.” That’s the utterly bizarre conceit behind this Biblical-era drama that casts ex-football player/first-time film actor Kameron Krebs (who also co-created the story) as Oren, a Viking adoptee in 1st-century Cana who takes his skills as a fighter to Nazareth when his family relocates. There Oren meets the carpenter called Yeshua (Jeff Dickamore) in the time before his public ministry, and becomes an apprentice in woodcraft as well as in life wisdom. If you’re wondering how these two pieces fit together, the simple answer is “they don’t.” For a while, we’ll get Oren training for his matches and fighting to the ahistorical crunching guitar chords of Motley Crüe, Metallica and Godsmack; then for a while, we’ll get Oren learning at the knee of Yeshua and wooing a widow (Aurora Florence). It all feels like a kind of trick to sneak the vitamins of Christian teaching about love and service into the red-meat of an action movie—director Garrett Batty even stages a chase sequence that includes the Holy Land equivalent of that old “knocking over the fruit cart” chestnut—with Krebs providing an impressive physical presence but virtually no dramatic presence. At least the improv-comedy version might have included a few jokes. Available Nov. 1 in theaters. (NR)

Emilia Pérez **1/2
In theory, I’m always here for an avant garde musical approach to a subject that doesn’t intuitively feel like it calls for a musical approach, but Jacques Audiard’s melodrama kind of lacks the conviction to go full opera. It opens with Mexico City-based lawyer Rita Mora Castro (Zoe Saldaña) lamenting her dead-end career writing legal briefs in support of horrible defendants, when she gets an unusual offer: helping notorious drug cartel boss Manitas del Monte find a surgeon to perform gender-reassignment surgery, fake the drug lord’s death and allow her to live a new life as Emilia Pérez (Karla Sofia Gascón). The second act focuses on Emilia several years later attempting to make some measure of amends for her violent previous life, while reconnecting with the wife (Selena Gomez) and kids who don’t know that “Auntie Emi” is actually Manitas, and Audiard at times shows an understanding of how to mix the music and choreography with pure over-the-top telenovela emotions. Yet it also feels at times that Audiard wants to get intimate and human-scale with the moral conflicts facing his characters, and the performances can’t always connect with those broad mood swings. A weirdly abrupt anti-climax leads immediately into a choral grand finale, which feels like an apt summary of the pieces here that don’t always fit together. Available Nov. 1 at Broadway Centre Cinemas; Nov. 13 via Netflix. (R)

Here **
It’s been 30 years since director Robert Zemeckis, writer Eric Roth and stars Tom Hanks and Robin Wright teamed up for Forrest Gump, a facile, overly sentimental approach to the sweep of history—and it looks like they haven’t learned much since then. Adapting Richard McGuire’s 2014 graphic novel, they tell the story of a single spot on the North American continent, almost entirely from a fixed camera location, spanning the ages from the primordial soup through indigenous cultures and the American revolution, but mostly focusing on a single family from the 1940s – early 2000s: WWII veteran Al Young (Paul Bettany) and his wife Rose (Kelly Reilly), and Al’s oldest son Ricky (Hanks) and his eventual wife Margaret (Wright). The gimmicky premise also allows the filmmakers to peek in on other residents of the same house over the decades, to little effect but allow touchstones like the attack on Pearl Harbor or the COVID pandemic to make cameo appearances. But without the creative courage to go truly experimental the way McGuire did—capturing individual human lives as fleeting specks on a massive timeline—Zemeckis and company are left with a parade of CGI de-aging and a simplistic homily about carpe-ing the diem. If Forrest Gump was a cinematic version of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” this is simply Fall Out Boy’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” Available Nov. 1 in theaters. (PG-13)

Hitpig! *1/2
I’ve been reading the work of cartoonist Berkeley Breathed (Bloom County, Outland, Opus) for 40 years, so please trust me when I say that there is nothing about this nominally-based-on-a-book-by-Breathed feature remotely worthy of his name. Jason Sudeikis voices the eponymous protagonist, a sort of animal bounty hunter who accepts a lucrative offer from a circus performer (Rainn Wilson) to recover his escaped trained elephant (Lilly Singh). Plentiful slapstick nonsense ensues, virtually none of it funny—nuclear-powered farts become a major plot device at one point—though it’s at least occasionally funnier than the parade of groaners that make up the dialogue. While the character arc in theory connects with Breathed’s long-standing support of animal-rights organizations, there’s nothing in the writing or in Sudeikis’ vocal performance that offers an emotional hook. It’s simply the kind of animated feature where the selection of tunes for the soundtrack is the most obvious possible choice every single time: Men at Work’s “Down Under” when the setting is Australia; B-52’s “Rock Lobster” when we see a lobster; etc. Whatever small fortune was budgeted for obtaining music rights, at least some small portion of it could have been reallocated to figuring out a screenplay that was as amusing as any given panel of a Berkeley Breathed comic strip. Available Nov. 1 in theaters. (PG)

Lost on a Mountain in Maine **1/2
There’s a potent dramatic hook to this fact-based survival narrative, which makes it all the more frustrating when the filmmaking keeps getting distracted by other completely unnecessary stuff. Based on the memoir of the same prosaic name, it’s set in 1939 New England, where 12-year-old Donn Fendler (Luke David Blumm) gets separated from his family in a storm while hiking Maine’s Mt. Katahdin, and winds up wandering alone for more than a week. The set-up for that separation involves the contentious relationship between Donn and his hard-working father (Paul Sparks), and screenwriter Luke Paradise builds a rich framework for a father who thinks he’s preparing his son for the harsh real world, while the son still wants to be a kid who can be with his dad; Blumm’s performance does a particularly nice job of walking that line. But there’s a bizarre structural choice in Andrew Boodhoo Kightlinger’s direction to throw talking-head recollections of real people from Donn Fendler’s life in the middle of the story, often blunting the dramatic momentum. It’s also frustrating to devote much less time to how Donn actually knows enough to survive than to the logistics of the search for him and the family’s angst. Here’s a movie that seems to understand the push-pull of adolescents who need both affection and independence, while too rarely giving that idea the focus it needs. Available Nov. 1 in theaters. (PG)

Music by John Williams ***
Documentary profiles of artistic legends always run the risk of being little more than a parade of talking heads uttering breathless variations on “isn’t this person awesome.” So director Laurent Bouzereau deserves credit for turning his exploration of the life and work of movie-music icon John Williams into something that offers actual insight. It’s true that we get plenty of testimonials to the huge cultural footprint of the guy who scored Jaws, Star Wars, E.T. and so many more, from likely suspects including Steven Spielberg and George Lucas to less obvious fans like Coldplay’s Chris Martin. But we also get a chance to understand the background—in a family of musical professionals—that nurtured Williams and gave him a background in a wide range of musical forms and genres that ultimately influenced his wide-ranging career. And the film also becomes something of a eulogy for the dying art of orchestral movie music, even as it recognizes how Williams’ own work was part of reviving it after a similar shift away from that tradition in the 1960s. It is, of course, fortunate that Williams himself is still around at the age of 92 to share self-deprecating perspectives on his life and oeuvre, which helps perk up a documentary format that only can do so much to avoid predictability. This still serves as a better example than most of conveying not just “this person is awesome,” but why. Available Nov. 1 via Disney+. (NR)