Buzz Blog

Echo Valley **1/2
One thing I desperately wish for the screenwriters of the world is that they would spend as much time trying to craft a compelling dramatic story as they spent trying to outsmart their viewers. You can see that sense of misplaced priorities in Brad Ingelsby’s script set on a horse farm where Kate Garretson (Julianne Moore), still mourning the recent death of her wife, most also deal with the latest crisis of her drug-addicted daughter Claire (Sydney Sweeney), who owes money to her dealer, Jackie (Domnhall Gleeson). It’s a movie full of impressive performances, from Sweeney’s tricky portrayal of Claire’s wild swings between ingratiating sweetness and monstrous rage, to Gleeson’s scary criminal who’s not nearly as smart as he thinks he is, to Fiona Shaw as Kate’s ride-or-die “lesbian mother.” The emotional centerpiece of the story, however, must be the question of whether a child can ever go so far that their mother will consider them a lost cause, as Kate ends up helping Claire hide a crime. Instead, nearly the entire third act of Echo Valley turns into a cat-and-mouse thriller between Kate and Jackie, built around the twists and turns of whether Kate can think her way out of the box in which Jackie seems to have her trapped. As understandable as it may be to focus the audience’s attention on propulsive plot mechanics, by the time we end on an enigmatic shared look between mother and daughter, we’ve almost forgotten why that matters. Available June 13 via AppleTV+. (R)

How to Train Your Dragon **
See feature review. Available June 13 in theaters. (PG)

The Life of Chuck **1/2
If one subscribes to the “vibes” theory of art, then sure, I understand the appeal of Mike Flanagan’s adaptation of a Stephen King short story of the same name. It’s a tale about carpe-ing the diem, presented in a minor key despite its potentially disturbing themes. But what is it saying, really? The structure certainly offers some intrigue, as the narrative opens with two formerly married people—high-school teacher Marty (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and hospital nurse Felicia (Karen Gillan)—coping with what seems to be the impending end of the world, which somehow seems connected to strange advertisements about a man named Charles “Chuck” Krantz (Tom Hiddleston). Chronology moves backwards from there to reveal more about, well, the life of Chuck, including his childhood as an orphan (Benjamin Pajak) living with his grandparents (Mark Hamill and Mia Sara), and it’s clear that King and Flanagan want to poke around at notions like how one lives life to the fullest, and what to do with the certain knowledge of one’s own mortality. Despite some undeniably charming moments, however—notably an interlude in which Chuck pauses to react to a busking drummer—the pieces just seem generally nice rather than offering insight. It’s more like the stuff of a few individual Twilight Zone episodes cobbled together so that they step on one another, rather than building to a big life-affirming finish. Available June 13 in theaters. (R)

Materialists ***1/2
“It’s just math,” Lucy Mason (Dakota Johnson) frequently intones about her job as a professional matchmaker to upper-class Manhattanites—creating power couples based on pragmatic overlap in physical attractiveness, income, political views, etc. Then things get messy for her when, at the wedding of one of her clients, she meets the groom’s wealthy brother, Harry (Pedro Pascal), but also reconnects with John (Chris Evans), her cater waiter/struggling actor ex-boyfriend. Writer/director Celine Song shows off a more puckish sense of humor than was evident in her phenomenal 2023 debut Past Lives, including a couple of delightful montages involving Lucy’s meetings with her clients, a look at John’s chaotic life with inconsiderate roommates, and putting her own name as the writer of the vaguely pretentious play John is performing in. Yet despite wrapping Materialists in the trappings of a slick New York-set romantic dramedy, Song continues to prove thoughtful about the intricacies of love, in this case focusing on the idea of commodifying the desirability of people as partners, particularly among people who view everything as transactional. Johnson’s tendency towards icy reserve on screen is well-used here, as she plays someone who could be distracted from a kiss by gawking at the kisser’s impressive penthouse apartment. It’s a wonderful, emotional thing watching her wrestle with the variables she can’t control, and trying to understand what happens to the math when love presents some irrational equations. Available June 13 in theaters. (R)

The Unholy Trinity **
In one of those cutesy double-meaning titles that filmmakers seem so fond of, “Trinity” refers not just to the name of the post-Civil War frontier Montana mining town where this Western takes place, but in theory to its three main characters: Henry Broadway (Brandon Lessard), the young man tasked by his condemned father (Tim Daly) with avenging him on the sheriff who framed him for murder; Gabriel Dove (Pierce Brosnan), the successor to that now-deceased sheriff in Trinity; and St. Christopher (Samuel L. Jackson), a formerly-enslaved man who had some unfinished business with Henry’s dad. For a movie that spends a fair amount of its 90-minute running time on good old-fashioned gunfights, The Unholy Trinity tries to juggle quite a few narrative balls—including the vigilante search for a Blackfoot woman (Q’orianka Kilcher)—distracting from what should have been a simple tale of a callow youth discovering that the father he idolized might have had some skeletons in his closet. Of course, that also would have required centering Henry, when Lessard is by far the least interesting performer among the central trio, as Brosnan does fine work as the world-weary Dove and Jackson gets a few terrific scenes evoking St. Christopher’s ferocious drive for what he believes he’s owed. Director Richard Gray manages the simple genre action well enough, but when it comes to the storytelling, he’s trying to prop up a three-legged stool that really only has two legs. Available June 13 in theaters. (R)