Category: Movie Reviews

Director Peter Berg approaches Netflix’s six-episode “Painkiller” with an almost frantic style. There’s an urgency here in his telling of the origin of the opioid crisis in this country that’s admirable given the damage still being caused by Purdue Pharma, but ultimately shallow. Every episode of the series opens with shots of loved ones of people whose addiction led to their deaths in which they read the boilerplate “fictionalized” disclaimer and then pay homage to “what wasn’t fictionalized” in their life. It’s an effective reminder of the truth at the core of what “Painkiller” seeks to unpack—how greed destroyed lives—but the thin characters, aggressive filmmaking choices, and complete lack of subtlety means that every episode fails to find the right tone for its heartbreaking overtures.

“Painkiller,” developed by Micah Fitzerman-Blue and Noah Harpster (co-writers of “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”) from a New Yorker article by Patrick Radden Keefe and Barry Meier’s Pain Killer: An Empire of Deceit and the Origin of America’s Opioid Epidemic, moves down four intertwining tracks. The central one belongs to U.S. Attorney’s Office investigator Edie Flowers (an appropriately enraged Uzo Aduba), who is being interviewed by a law firm planning a civil suit against Purdue Pharma, the manufacturer of OxyContin. She basically narrates the show that follows, telling the story of how pain medication forever altered the American landscape.

Of course, this means Richard Sackler (Matthew Broderick), the Dr. Frankenstein of this monster, has to be a major character, along with his cadre of creeps, including brother Raymond (Sam Anderson) and the other suits who placed profit over caution. Broderick’s take on Sackler is similar (but less effective) to Michael Stuhlbarg’s in “Dopesick,” the award-winning Hulu series that told a similar tale—a kind of sociopathic disengagement with the world. A few flashbacks reveal an abusive father for Richard, and it’s almost implied that that trauma broke him. If there’s a fire in the eyes of Aduba, there’s nothing but ice in Broderick’s.

A battle of wills between Edie and the Sacklers might have been enough for a feature film version of “Painkiller,” but this is a Netflix mini-series—so we need two more. The better of the pair is the “case study” arc of Glen Kryger (Taylor Kitsch), a mechanic who suffers a brutal accident in the premiere that leads to his addiction to OxyContin. Kitsch, an underrated actor in general, does good work here, but it’s ultimately a vein of the series that’s too thin. It’s admirable to highlight the human cost of Richard Sackler’s decisions on so many average people that he never even considered. Still, the rest of “Painkiller” is so frenetic that the Kryger material feels exploitative and manipulative. Because of Kitsch and Carolina Batrczak’s work as his wife, parts of the Kryger arc are undeniably moving. But it’s too predictably manipulative in its writing, like watching a slow-motion car crash.

Berg uses a totally different filmmaking style with Britt (Dina Shihabi) and Shannon (a promising West Duchovny, who seems like she could have handled more challenging material), a pair of Purdue Pharma salespeople who discover there’s a lot of money to be made in pushing drugs on smalltown doctors. Shihabi’s Britt is already a shark when we meet her, and she’s playing to the back seats, sketching her character like someone who never realized “The Wolf of Wall Street” was about a bad dude. Duchovny gets a little more subtlety as the new girl who will obviously learn the hard way that she’s part of a corrupt system, but this arc lacks subtlety at every turn. It’s the kind of show that drops people partying to Bow Wow Wow’s “I Want Candy” at a Purdue Pharma corporate event, one episode after actually using Iggy Pop’s “Candy” on the soundtrack. Get it? The drugs are like candy.

It feels like the pitch for “Painkiller” was “The Big Short” for the opioid crisis, but that near-satirical tone is almost impossible to maintain for six hours across multiple character arcs, some of which never intersect. “This isn’t just about a pill that killed a lot of people,” says Edie. “It’s bigger than that.” She’s speaking for the filmmakers, who center their intention to tell the “bigger” story in every episode, but too often forget the “people.”

Now playing on Netflix.

In 2020’s “The Mole Agent,” the Chilean director Maite Alberdi got an elderly investigator into a nursing home and filmed his attempts to uncover potential abuse there. The residents of the senior facility were told that they were to be the subjects of a documentary. Which was true, but definitely in a different way than they clearly believed, on the evidence of the movie itself. By the end of the picture, I was asking myself whether the tender and compassionate portraits of old folks in need the movie presented actually justified the arguable ethical breach committed by the filmmaker and his lead performer, who took on the title role.

Alberdi’s new movie, something like a straight-up documentary rather than a drama hybrid, is even more intimate, so much so that almost all of its running time it only puts two people in the frame. Two prominent people—at least in their home country. Augusto Góngora was a television newscaster and interviewer from the early 1970s onward; he also produced films and books and acted in a miniseries for the great Raul Ruiz. His wife, Paulina Urrutia, 17 years his junior, is an actress with a solid filmography, not much of which has traveled to the United States. Alberdi’s movie chronicles their life together as they cope with Góngora’s condition, Alzheimer’s disease. 

Hoo boy. Having lost two reasonably close relatives to the condition and one other family member still dealing with it, I consider Alzheimer’s a particularly hateful ailment. And as you might imagine, my reflexive reaction to a documentary such as “The Eternal Memory” might be to recoil from an open flame. This is despite having gotten a lot out of the harrowing fictional journeys undertaken by Michel Haneke with “Amour” and Gaspar Noe with “Vortex.” And, of course, I should know better here, too. Because even in a documentary, what makes the subject matter resonate if at all, is how it’s framed. And Alberdi frames this movie around the ethos that Gongora stressed while he was a journalist. 

Because, if you haven’t been connecting the dots already, Góngora was at his job for the Pinochet regime. And reported its abuses, insofar as he was permitted and/or able, and then continued to dig into those abuses after Pinochet was put out of power. For Góngora, national memory—the refusal to forget the crimes of its rulers and their henchmen in the military and the police (which under Pinochet were pretty much one and the same)—is crucial. This makes his loss of personal memory all the more tragic and galvanic. 

Much of the movie was shot, of course, during the height of the Covid pandemic, which meant that Alberdi himself wasn’t even in the room with the couple. Camera work in many of the contemporary scenes was done by Urrutia, who is a kind, and infinitely patient, spouse—and also sometimes kind of focus-challenged, not that it ultimately matters. 

Among the more vexing effects of Alzheimer’s goes beyond memory loss. Often the sufferer just has no idea of where they are, or what they’re doing there. “Where are my friends,” Góngora laments in a late-night rant, one of the sort that can sometimes take hours to pull a patient out of.   

These and many other moments are painful to watch. And they do make one wonder, again, about whether one ought to be watching them at all. There’s no narration in this movie, no text explaining when Góngora was diagnosed. (Or, for that matter, when and how he gave his consent to be filmed. Not that I doubt he did—before his condition deteriorates he acknowledges that he’s involved in a documentary—but it would be useful information.) We piece together Góngara’s relationship with Urrutia through often poignant-in-hindsight archival footage. It’s not until rather late in the movie that we learn Góngara has two children from a prior relationship, and we never find out how that relationship resolved. 

Instead, we are witness to the degeneration of a noble mind and an interrogative soul. “I’m not myself anymore,” Góngara says to Urrutia late in the movie. “I think you are,” she responds. “No,” he says. And he repeats that word several times. We’re left with the question of what a person can hang on to when everything about their identity and values leaves them. 

The coldness of corporate America is a much-explored cinematic landscape. The hierarchical dynamics within business spaces lend plenty of opportunity for satirical examination. Whether it’s a horror spin (“Mayhem” “The Belko Experiment”), or flat-out comedies (“The Office” “Horrible Bosses”), social climbing and capitalist Darwinism are ripe themes for the picking. Joachim Back’s feature debut, “Corner Office,” based on Jonas Karlsson’s novel The Room, is a stab at a Kafka-esque addition to the canon. 

Orson (Jon Hamm) is the newest employee at the cheekily-named The Authority. He’s a typical benumbed office cog with a muted brown suit and flat disposition to boot. Working in the offices of The Authority, he encounters gossipy, unfriendly coworkers and a droning boss. He doesn’t mind as long as he sticks to his schedule and completes his tasks. His cyclical respite, which manifests in scheduled breaks during the day, involve leaving the communal cubicle area and taking time to think in the corner office that he discovers across from the elevator. 

In contrast to the white, fluorescent, geometric, design of the group’s workspace, the corner office is a mid-century modern dream. Where the main space is a poster of sterility (down to hospital-blue shoe covers worn by the employees to protect the floor), stunning wood-paneled walls, a large executive desk, and a perfectly curated record collection bathe the corner office in warmth and invitation. Not only does Orson find the room to be an ideal space to recharge, but he comes to find that he can only excel at his job when working within its walls. However, this habitation creates a hostile work environment once he is confronted by his coworkers about the fact that the room he frequents does not exist. 

“Corner Office” nails its intended energy. The dystopian visual tone is apparent throughout. With The Authority’s office building being an isolated brutalist high rise set off a snowed-in parking lot filled with identical cars, it’s clear that the film is built on the feeling of stark neutrality. This coldness is an accessory to that of the script, which largely consists of voiceovers of Orson’s inner dialogue. These voiceovers also serve as the core of the film’s comedic chops. 

Orson is marked by his detachment and rigidity, but also his arrogance. Much of this social distance is intentional, as he simply has no interest in his coworkers, but there is also plenty of evidence to suggest that Orson does not understand people. His inner dialogue is delivered exceptionally by Hamm, with dry monotony and unempathetic social observations and notes on the status quo reminiscent of “American Psycho.” However, these voiceovers quickly devolve from being the film’s comedic center to its crutch. 

The humor of “Corner Office” quickly grows tired. The structure and delivery are stagnant, and it drags the film into restless territory by the time it’s only halfway through. The question of whether the room exists, and what the answer means for the characters, is what holds investment, but the runtime becomes tedious while we wait out the reveal. 

Back’s filmic thesis is there, but it isn’t fully realized. The script packs punchlines, but eventually fizzles out, and the film itself wavers while trying to keep the peace between its promise and its lack of substance. “Corner Office” is a sometimes-funny satire stuffed with capitalist ennui, but it bites with dull teeth, failing to provide enough support for its sentiment to stick.

On demand and in limited theatrical release now.

Many films that tackle Black stories prioritize plight, treating their characters as inconsequential stand-ins for a thesis on trauma and pain. More successful, powerful films devote their narrative effort to how characters move through their environments. They afford their subjects agency and identity, rendering them as individuals instead of thoughtless symbols of the Black experience. It’s a nuanced distinction, but prioritizing character relays a deeper level of understanding and empathy, which Clement Virgo’s “Brother” executes poignantly.

“Brother” opens with brothers Francis (Aaron Pierre) and Michael (Lamar Johnson) climbing up electrical towers. Francis leads, instructing younger brother Michael to follow his every move. He signals that the buzzing will get louder the higher they climb, but all Michael needs to do is follow his example, and they’ll make it to the top. This vignette becomes a metaphor for their lives as “Brother” threads together three timelines: their childhoods, adolescence in high school, and young adult years. 

The sons of a single mother, a Caribbean immigrant to Scarborough, Canada, Francis and Michael couldn’t be more different. Francis is confident, physically imposing in height and musculature, and a leader among his family and peers. Michael is meek and reserved, a small fish in the pond of an increasingly hostile environment. As Francis finds himself straddling a life of family and ambition while walking a tightrope with a gang-affiliated friend group, the brothers begin facing questions of masculinity and tenacity as they age, coming face to face with the consequences of an anti-Black world in all its forms. 

Pierre and Johnson’s excellent chemistry is integral to the film’s success. They are believable as brothers not only through performance but also through the script’s ability to showcase the symbiotic relationship they have. One’s fear begets the vigilance of the other, just as one’s reservation influences the other’s proactivity. Pierre’s stoicism is a major marker of Francis’s strength against the odds, so when he breaks, showing tenderness and vulnerability, the moments hit with full impact. His indomitable facade doesn’t feel overly constructed or contrived, and Pierre performs each end of the spectrum with touching empathy in body and expression. 

Johnson, on the other hand, is always easy to read, constantly wearing his heart on his sleeve. Though Michael doesn’t intend to be seen, it can’t be helped, and this openness of character is precisely what incites so much love for him. He isn’t painted as a victim but as a dependent. And as we tour his life in Virgo’s three stages, it isn’t until we learn of Francis’ departure (the context of which isn’t explicitly revealed until the final act) that we see Michael come into his authority. He is the film’s emphatic core, driving the emotional weight and expressing it with sensitivity in its gravity, contrasting Francis’s stone-cold disposition.

As their neighborhood sees an uptick in gang violence, Francis withdraws. The brothers come of age during the 1990s hip-hop renaissance, as Michael’s dream is to be an emcee like Dr. Dre. Yet as he grows up, pulling further away from the family unit and into independence, the household is left rocked. Their mother, Ruth (Marsha Stephanie Blake), is a force of tough but tender love. Her ideas for the home are rigid, but her love for Michael and Francis butts against them in a typical head vs. heart dilemma. Blake gives a stunning performance as we view her development as much as Michael’s. From the boys’ childhood to Francis’ eventual departure, Ruth undergoes waves of change she can’t keep up with, and her relationship with Michael supplements the film’s heart after Francis leaves the picture.

Todor Kobakov’s spellbinding score glues the film’s emotional display to its stunning visuals. Played over meditative moments, the music brings “Brother” down to earth while warm versus cool color schemes paint the screen with damning dissonance. No feeling in “Brother” goes unfelt; every element of its filmmaking taps into the heart. As Michael navigates his memory, trying to reconcile ideas of masculinity against unforgiving circumstances, a study erupts: that of the spirit’s resolve and the immortality of familial love. “Brother” is a portrait of Black youth pitted against forces beyond their control. 

Now playing in theaters. 

Anyone hoping that Ben Wheatley might bring some of the exuberant personality and boundary-pushing creativity on display in films like “Kill List” and “In the Earth” to his for-hire gig directing the dismally boring “Meg 2: The Trench” should find different cinematic waters to swim in. Much as in his atrocious remake of “Rebecca” in 2020, Wheatley mostly phones it in here, and he does so on a rotary land line. At least until the final half-hour, when he’s finally free to unleash some monstrous chaos, this is one of the dullest films of the year, a plodding, poorly made giant shark movie that inexplicably lets the giant shark take a backseat to an evil underwater drilling operation. This thing just has no teeth.

Never really allowed to have the winking fun that he is in his best action parts, Jason Statham looks visibly bored this time as Jonas, the deep-sea diver employee of the Zhang Institute, the facility that discovered the continued existence of a prehistoric predator known as the Megalodon in the first film. The sequel reveals that the research facility has even kept one in captivity to continue to study it. Jiu-ming (an inconsistent Wu Jing), the head of the institute, is even convinced that he can train the megalodon, but everything goes wrong when it escapes and … no, this is not just a shark-escape-attack movie, although you’ll wish it was as simple as that.

Instead of focusing on the fugitive meg—who escapes hysterically easily while the crew is focused on something else—the script by Jon Hoeber, Erich Hoeber, and Dean Georgaris sends Jonas and his crew deep into the ocean to the trench that the megalodons have called home for centuries. On their way into the murky, poorly shot ocean—seriously, Wheatley’s answer to recreating underwater photography is just to turn the lighting down—they discover other megalodons, but that’s nothing compared to the evil humans who also happen to be in the trench, mining it for resources. Yes, Jonas and his team basically stumble onto an illegal operation in the middle of the ocean, which leads to their vessels being destroyed. A sequence in which they’re forced to walk the ocean floor to a facility is one of the most poorly executed in years. It almost felt real-time.

A few personality-less characters get chomped or blown up but most of the faux tension is saved for Mei-ying (Sophia Cai), who survived the first film and becomes the main creature that Jonas tries to keep alive. It’s barely a spoiler to say that Jonas, Jiu-ming, Mei-ying and a few others eventually make it back above the surface, fleeing the facility that is now overrun with soldiers for reasons I couldn’t possibly care enough to explain. They head to a resort called Fun Island, and almost 90 minutes into this mess, “The Trench” finally gets a little fun. You see, the underwater explosions destroyed the temperature shield that had kept things like a giant octopus away from tourists. Finally, Wheatley and his team get to have a little fun, but it’s far too little and far too late.

Even the action-heavy final section of “The Trench” barely seems like a production that’s trying to have a good time. How do you make a movie about a jet-skiing Jason Statham throwing harpoons at giant sharks and do with such little joy? This is a bizarrely inert film with none of Wheatley’s dark sense of humor or vicious skill with horror. It’s almost like when he found out that he couldn’t make it R-rated, he just gave up on doing anything interesting at all. Cliff Curtis and Page Kennedy develop a strange buddy-comedy-action vibe late in the proceedings that almost works, but it feels a different movie from the rest of the action. Absolutely nothing here has stakes—so many people in Jonas’ world die with barely a nod to the fact they ever existed—and anyone who has ever seen a movie knows who’s going to make it to the final scene.

Of course, that’s not always a problem. We go to giant shark movies knowing that Jason Statham is going to save the day. So it becomes about execution instead of originality, and maybe that’s why Wheatley falls so flat here. It seems like he needs to be able to play with narrative to be effective, and when he’s forced into a traditional structure like he is here then he can’t put his heart into it. He just checks out and goes through the motions.  

Early in the film, Jiuming gives a speech with a quote about how man is only limited by his imagination. Too bad the movie that follows has so little of it.

In theaters now.

Pregnancy makes you pragmatic. Yes, your body is bulging and your hormones are raging and anxiety is plaguing you over the great unknown of it all, especially if you’re expecting your first child like Oksana Cherkashyna’s Irka is in the Ukrainian drama “Klondike.”

But someone’s still got to milk the cow and dust the cabinets and do all the canning for winter—and that someone is you. The fact that Irka must maintain all these mundane tasks in the midst of increasing instability—she lives in Eastern Ukraine on the Russian border at the start of the Donbas war in 2014—provides both the absurd conflict and dark humor in writer/director/editor Maryna Er Gorbach’s film. Irka is performing all these chores, for example, in an already modest house where the living room wall now has been blown wide open, the accidental target of an errant mortar blast. This adds a degree of difficulty in keeping a tidy home.

Cherkashyna gives a stoic and steely performance, and Er Gorbach lingers over her quietly determined features in the kinds of long, single takes she favors throughout her understated film. “Klondike” is a patient and observant movie, giving us time to notice the small details in the rundown but functional house Irka shares with her husband, Tolik (Serhii Shadrin), or the way afternoon clouds play across the barren, rural landscape as Irka stomps away in frustration, seeking a moment of peace. Working with cinematographer Sviatoslav Bulakovskyi, Er Gorbach skillfully uses steady pans and slow zooms – both in and out – to reveal devastating details as the film reaches its dramatic conclusion.

The situation is already stressful at Irka and Tolik’s meager farm when Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 plummeted from the sky en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur on July 17, 2014, killing the nearly 300 people on board. (“Klondike” is inspired by true events.) The crash was the work of Russian-backed Ukrainian separatists, one of which Tolik is on the verge of becoming himself. This heightens the tension in his marriage with Irka, which ranges from perturbed teasing to tearful screaming. “They bombed the stroller. Where will I put my child?” Irka wonders aloud in a way that straddles the line between wry humor and dire need.

But because she is about to give birth so soon, everyone is trying to get her out of the house and into a hospital. This includes the mostly useless Tolik and her concerned brother, Yaryk (Oleh Shcherbyna), whose suspicions about Tolik’s alliances are growing. Irka insists on staying put, despite the danger surrounding her. Er Gorbach’s film becomes more harrowing but maintains a matter-of-fact tone, which makes the fear feel even starker. The subtle, deep strings of Zviad Mgebry’s score enhance the haunting atmosphere. The crunch of truck tires carrying tanks into town and the shrill crow of a rooster in the distance pierce the quiet. Anything could happen at any moment, but you get the sense that Irka is prepared to withstand it.

This is especially evident in the film’s lengthy final shot, which provides a fascinating juxtaposition between total disregard for human life and the possibility of hope for the future. When Cherkashyna lets the emotions flow, she reveals such a deep reservoir of pain that it’s startling. Er Gorbach’s film may feel too slow and restrained at times, but moments like this in which she lets her powerful imagery play out in unadorned fashion show why this was such a wise choice. And while this particular story takes place nearly a decade ago, it remains unfortunately timely as Russia’s horrific war in Ukraine rages on; “Klondike” helps put a specific, vivid face on a faraway conflict.

Now playing in theaters. 

Usually, when a road movie sticks you with two characters, you’re supposed to like at least one of them. Carter Smith’s “The Passenger” bravely denies this comfort as part of its queasy, then curious, then underwhelming embrace of extremes. One character is Randy (Johnny Berchtold), a legendary pushover and fast food employee who would rather swallow bites of a force-fed, day-old cheeseburger than stand up to a bully co-worker. The other man is Randy’s silent co-worker Benson (Kyle Gallner), who then shoots up the Bayou burger spot, killing all his co-workers except Randy. After making him hide the bodies in the freezer, Benson lets Randy live but forces him to come along. 

Benson and Randy are incredibly striking contrasts as these nightmarish characters, intriguing conceits of this Blumhouse project not sticking to the rules in part because it’s going straight to the modern grindhouses of streaming anyway. Much of the movie relies on their odd pairing after such an abhorrent opening scene and in place of any greater tension. It’s not about waiting for justice or that gibberish about “being a man.” The control that Benson has over Randy as they drive around is not asserted by a smart plan but rather the dominating sense of power Randy has seceded. Benson doesn’t really have to consider whether he’s setting himself up by being near a phone or an open field. He knows to his core that Randy won’t challenge him, won’t call for help. And he doesn’t. 

The script by Jack Stanley toys with this dynamic for a long while, eventually running out of ways to vocalize its initial boldness. But it has a do-or-die commitment to this knowingly frustrating character dynamic, a deconstruction of an adult who is as spineless as one can believe, another provocation from this tale meant to mirror a more relatable, psychological reality. Randy eventually trickles out to Benson about why he is, to put it politely, such a decision-averse wuss. Blinded by his frustrations from such passivity, Benson decides he will help Randy face the people he fears—the girlfriend who dumped him after her cat died, and the teacher he accidentally half-blinded in second grade. 

The main spectacle from these scenes comes from its two performances of physical opposites: Berchtold hardly squirms as his captor pushes him along and gives a believable voice to his frailty beyond tears that are at the ready. Meanwhile, Benson is always buzzing with adrenaline, anger, and god knows what else, from Gallner’s fingers and in a few carefully placed and thankfully brief monologues. It should be noted that “The Passenger” does not turn Randy into the Magical Mass Shooter. 

“The Passenger” lacks a greater plan, but such a journey is compelling more thanks to its various inspired pieces. Cinematographer Lyn Moncrief has numerous striking compositions that readily use negative space and the movie’s growingly cryptic color palette, and such shots are given a bite by Eric Nagy’s editing, who uses them like individual statements from the film’s lurking notions of fear, control, and trauma. Smith’s direction, in general, maintains an air of being off-kilter, like with the fluffy sweater Benson dons midway through or the blast of neon purple that fills a climactic diner scene. 

Even if this movie doesn’t achieve a great epiphany at the end of the darkest route, it offers a great showcase for Gallner in particular. He has the playful intensity of Jack Nicholson without ever aping the legend’s grin. Nor does Gallner overplay the imposing presence Benson readily assumes, especially as the story has Benson leaning over Randy’s shoulder as he meets with these two people from his past who have made him fearful. Gallner has such an ease in the role; he can do so much else, as we’ve seen from his previous films, but he’s a natural with the unnatural. “The Passenger” projects a future for Gallner of roles that may not win Oscars, but they’ll be far more exciting and daring than that. 

Now playing on digital platforms and available on demand.

The melancholic melodies of Donnie and Joe Emerson don’t quite feel of this world. Particularly “Baby,” a song which always sounds like something out of a dream. The duo, who grew up on an insular family farm in rural Fruitland, Washington, were teenagers when they self-released their only album—the wistful, soul-inspired “Dreamin’ Wild”—in 1979, without much fanfare. Over 30 years later, the album got a second life when the reissue from boutique label Light in the Attic Records became a cult success. A standard biopic of a story like this could easily write itself. 

Thankfully, writer/director Bill Pohlad has brought their tale to the silver screen with the same thoughtful, humanist lens with which he made the excellent Brian Wilson biopic “Love & Mercy” a decade ago. While his new film hits all the cursory beats of their rediscovery, including a few scenes of Chris Messina playing their record company savior Matt Sullivan, Pohlad is less interested in the album’s resurrection than he is in the psychological effects this had on the duo, especially on the more naturally talented Donnie (Casey Affleck). 

The film begins in the forest surrounding the Emerson farm. The dark blue night sky is illuminated by the amber lights of their homemade recording studio. A young Donnie (Noah Jupe) strums one of their songs, “Good Time.” Its reverb-laden vocals, slick guitar riffs, and crashing drums echo as the scene shifts to the boy performing on a stage, the audience hidden by shadows. The lyrics “Did you have a good, good time?” repeat on loop until the adult Donnie awakens, as if it were all a dream. 

Throughout the film, Pohlad employs this hazy, dreamlike editing as Donnie remains haunted by his younger self and the broken promise the album represents. At first, it seems Donnie, who runs a flailing recording studio and plays weddings and dive bars with his wife Nancy (Zooey Deschanel), is mourning solely the loss of his artistic dreams. But as Donnie spends more time with his brother Joe (a tender Walton Goggins) and father Don Sr. (Beau Bridges, never better) preparing for a comeback concert, it’s clear there’s more emotional baggage here than meets the eye.

While in “Love & Mercy,” the two Brian Wilsons were played in lockstep by John Cusack and Paul Dano at different ages, the lines between the past and present here are a little more blurred. Jupe’s young Donnie is filtered through Affleck’s memories. At first, he’s the wide-eyed, hopefully teen legend printed by the New York Times. But soon, a more realistic, somber portrait of his youth and his rocky relationship with young Joe (Jack Dylan Grazer) and their father is revealed. 

The director also flirts with flights of magical realism. When Donnie and Joe play their first big gig—an anniversary show for Light in the Attic at the Showbox in Seattle—like a specter, a disappointed young Donnie stares at older Donnie on the stage. Later, the two sit together outside the old recording studio to broker a peace between what once was and what now is. It’s an incredibly effective way of visualizing Donnie’s internal attempt at coming to terms with his own self-loathing. 

It also is a wonderful payoff for how Pohlad films the early scenes with Donnie and his family. Whenever Sullivan gives them good news, or Joe and Don Sr. happily reminisce, Pohlad often holds the camera directly on Affleck’s emotive face, under which he’s holding back a sea of unexpressed feelings—about these shared memories, these “good times,” and his guilt at not only not fulfilling his own dreams, but in pulling his whole family down as well. 

Although Pohlad successfully crafts a complex and tense dynamic between Donnie, Joe, and Don Sr., he fails to bring that same dimensionality to the women in the film, including their sisters and mother, and especially Donnie’s wife, Nancy. This is a pointed failure for Pohlad, considering the wonderful showcase the role of Melinda Ledbetter was for Elizabeth Banks in “Love & Mercy.”

Despite this, Pohlad’s film, like the music at its heart, has a beguiling, oneiric quality. “Dreamin’ Wild” is a rich and evocative portrait of the weight of broken dreams and the strength one can find in a family as unwaveringly supportive as the Emersons.

Now playing in theaters. 

French documentary director Claire Simon appears just a little over three times in “Our Body.” At the beginning, we see her walking from her home to the hospital, past, as she points out, the cemetery where her father was cremated. She tells us the idea for the movie came from one of her producers. There was “an encounter.” Her producer had an illness “that brought her into a female world.” And so Simon and her camera entered that world of “gynecological pathologies that weigh down our lives, our hopes, our desires.”  She jokes darkly that she hopes she will not catch cancer there. 

And then in a Frederick Wiseman “fly-on-the-wall”-style film, Simon takes us into the most intimate, terrifying, and sometimes joyful moments faced by the people who come to the hospital. But unlike Wiseman, whose films focus on institutions and bureaucracy, the focus here is on the lives of the patients and their interactions with very patient, sympathetic, and capable health care professionals. We see very little of the lives of those professionals. There are only two scenes without any patients. One is a very businesslike clinical discussion of care plans and prognoses.  The other is a truly astonishing scene of doctors in a lab, carefully joining an egg and sperm for a couple who need help getting pregnant.

Even with an almost three-hour run time, this is not the kind of film where experts weigh in with facts about health care policy or particular diseases or treatments. And it is not the kind of film where we see what happens to the patients we observe with their caregivers. Every scene is just a tile in the mosaic, not a part of a linear storyline arc. Very occasionally, we hear Simon ask a question off camera, and sometimes there is a light trickle of music on the soundtrack. But most of the film is quiet conversation, punctuated only by the hospital sounds echoing in the hallways and examination rooms. 

Americans will be especially interested to see that patients never feel rushed. No one worries about insurance or Medicaid or filling out forms or not being able to pay for care. While all the caregivers we see are compassionate and professional, at one point there is a protest rally outside the hospital, with angry patients complaining about abuse.

Inside, a teenage girl wants to terminate her pregnancy. A pregnant woman with cancer wants to be able to deliver her baby. Operation scenes (sometimes graphic) show us how the medical professionals work as a team. A trans man has to wait 11 months, until he is 18, to consent to the medical treatment his father will not approve. Doctors find a way to communicate with patients who have difficulty understanding the implications of their medical issues and evaluating the options they have to consider. Some of them are not native French speakers. In one case, they pass an iPhone back and forth to translate. An older trans woman learns she has to go through her own version of menopause. It is time to stop taking the estrogen that has been a foundation of her transition. A doctor points to the places in his own body to help the patient understand. Another doctor uses words that are gentle but vague. “Sometimes the disease can defeat bravery and defeat medicine.” Her words may not be clear but the way she grasps the patient’s hand tells her and us what she means.  

We notice those hands because Simon has an exceptional eye for the small details that illuminate the quiet but devastating, literal life and death moments. In another scene a slight widening of a close-up subtly reveals a wig removed from a patient receiving chemotherapy.  We also see a woman giving birth attended by just one medical professional, who gently coaxes and encourages her. The father is at home, caring for their other children. There is that moment of pure magic when suddenly a baby is welcomed to the world and the very first words she hears are her mother’s whispers of hope, love, and joy.  There are people who hear bad news and people who are learning what their lives will be after debilitating and sometimes disfiguring treatment. There are people who need medical assistance to become pregnant and some who learn that they will never carry a child. 

The patients are very diverse (except that none of them are wealthy; apparently the rich have other sources of health care). The medical staff are all kind and thoughtful. The film would have benefitted from more about their perspective, how they manage the stress of the job. 

Simon tells us at the end that the doctors have many stories, but the patients have just one. Those stories together create what she calls “a crazed waltz of destinies.” And as Simon finds herself on the other side of the camera, hearing her own results from a doctor, it underscores the movie’s most important message that we all dance in the crazed waltz some day. 

Ben (Justin H. Min) is a snobby cinephile and Japanese-American living in Berkeley, California. He’s the kind of guy who, at the beginning of “Shortcomings,” dismisses the crowd-pleasing Asian action film he watches at a movie theater with his girlfriend Miko (Ally Maki) on arrogant grounds. Miko loves the representation on screen, believing it’ll lead to greater opportunities for Asian-American filmmakers. Ben doesn’t see the wonder “in a garish mainstream rom-com that glorifies the capitalistic fantasy of vindication through wealth and materialism.” He can barely hide his disdain for the picture when he meets its giddy filmmaker.  

Ben is a failed film student who spends his days managing an arthouse movie theater and watching Criterion discs such as Ozu’s “Good Morning.” He can’t fathom a world where he isn’t the prime arbiter of taste. Much to his chagrin, however, Ben loves white women. His attraction is tested when he hires the oddball performance artist Autumn (Tavi Gevinson) to work the ticket window at the theater. Will he cheat on his girlfriend, Miko? If he, along with the premise, comes off as loathsome, that’s sorta the point. 

“Shortcomings” is a wickedly funny, absorbing character study and solo feature directorial debut by actor Randall Park (“Fresh off the Boat”). In the hands of Park, Adrian Tomine’s graphic novel (adapted here by Tomine) finds cutting new dimensions in the miserabilism of an unabashed asshole. 

It works because the film fully embraces the wretched unlikability of Ben. Park worms through Ben’s many relationship troubles: He gets with Autumn, for instance, and then turns his sights to the politically charged Sasha (Debby Ryan), endangering each with his caustic humor. Min savors the script’s savage barbs and quick sarcastic one-liners. You can never tell if or when you’re seeing the real Ben. The same goes for the women he dates. They initially like his corrosive wit, believing it’s a charming feature rather than an unfixable glitch. Surely, more lies beneath the surface? But there is no there, there. And Min, who found critical acclaim as the android in “After Yang,” demonstrates his immense range as he plays with Ben’s surface-level features with the exhilaration of a man dancing on an electric fence.

The other major highlight in the cast is Sherry Cola as Ben’s loud, gregarious Lesbian best friend, Alice. The film’s heart is the balancing act between Alice and Ben’s friendship, including open dinner talks and double-teaming at parties. She puts up with his idiocy as he sometimes acts as her beard for her traditional Korean parents. When Miko moves to New York City for an internship, Alice, recently transplanted to the big apple herself, allows Ben to stay with her as he searches for Miko. But Ben is poison to everything he touches. 

While “Shortcomings” aims at identity, particularly Ben’s inability to be comfortable with his attractions—which causes him to default into an oppressed versus oppressor stance—the film relies on keen jokes to make a punchy mood. The tight dialogue runs the gamut from quips about experimental music and international and blockbuster cinema (“Snowpiercer is a sequel of Willy Wonka” is a theory one theater worker shares with another) to gags concerning representational movies and assimilation.

The film doesn’t break new ground in the genre, hewing close to rom-com tropes that’d feel at home in Judd Apatow’s late aught works. When the raw emotional outbursts need to flourish, Park can also slip into less-than-flattering coverage coated by less-than-snappy editing. Luckily, this isn’t a picture that lives and dies on big fights or charged monologues. 

Even when you expect “Shortcomings” to land on a redemptive note, it surprises you. Park doesn’t pull the easy lever. Instead, the film’s ending is far more truthful to the character than you’d expect in your usual rom-com because the happiness of others doesn’t bank on Ben’s evolution. In fact, their joy is firmly separate. Such honesty allows Park’s vision, comedic sensibilities, and fruitful work with actors to remain indelible even in a familiar package.   

Now playing in theaters.