Author: jose

“Sound of Freedom,” the movie of the moment, has a message first, and a story second. Its message is to get us to care more about the horrors of child sex trafficking. It does that by showing queasy sequences of kids in danger, being carted around by slimy adults, and making us remember everyone’s faces. Then it gives us a weary hero, Tim Ballard, an American man whose superpower is that he cares. This father and husband cares so much that he leaves his job at Homeland Security ten months before earning a pension. Instead of only catching pedophiles, as he has done nearly 300 times before, he goes to Colombia and undercover to help rescue children. This man is played by a gentle and gravely serious Jim Caviezel, who shoulders this message’s suffering just like when he played Jesus Christ in Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ.” 

The story is true, but it barely comes to life with such a telling. Which is a shame, not just because it’s uncomfortable to be numbed by these themes, but also because director Alejandro Monteverde well-clears the low bar for filmmaking one expects from movies that are message-first (and often come with similar faith-driven backers). Take away the noise surrounding it, and “Sound of Freedom” has distinct cinematic ambitions: a non-graphic horror film with what could be called an art-house sensibility for muted rage and precise, striking shadows derived from an already bleak world. If “Sound of Freedom” were less concerned with being something “important,” it could be more than a mood, it could be a movie. 

All on its own, “Sound of Freedom” is a solemn, drawn-out bore with a not particularly bold narrative stance—caring about the safety of children is roughly the easiest cause for any remotely decent human being. Previous films like “Gone Baby Gone” and “Taken” have also banked on that tension, showing how easy it is to be invested in a story when children are stolen and put into uncertain danger. But while being so committed to such solemnity and suffering, the truncated storytelling by co-writers Monteverde and Rod Barr neglects to flesh out its ideas or characters or add any more intensity to Ballard’s slow-slow-slow burn search for two kids in particular (Lucás Ávila’s Miguel and Cristal Aparicio’s Rocío) whose faces haunt him. The “true story” framing only gives it so much edge before that, too, is dulled. 

This world is so fraught with worry about the children that it seems to avoid creating tension elsewhere, and so it places Ballard in dull scenes opposite gullible one-dimensional creeps; his undercover missions, which sometimes have him speaking like the pedophiles he is pursuing, are more about the audience’s discomfort than his danger. There are hardly any mind games to be played, just the settings of sting operations made from a broad idea of how this would happen in real life. It’s one anti-climactic moment after another, and while it’s intriguing how Monteverde leans away from violence or machismo, it puts little else in its place. (For anyone gearing up to see “Sound of Freedom” because the poster has Caviezel holding a gun and a glare, this isn’t that kind of movie.)

Handsomely stark scenes are often reduced to three or four lines of dialogue, including the eureka moment of how Ballard gets involved in the process. A work buddy asks him how many children he’s saved, so Ballard changes his line of work. Mira Sorvino, as Ballard’s wife Katherine, plays a character who is credited at the end as inspiring his whole journey, but we only hear from her a couple of cliche sentences at a time. We at least get to hear more from Bill Camp, playing a confidant for Ballard. Camp has a gutting monologue about being at the heart of darkness of child sexual abuse. He’s also there to say the movie’s title and sets up Ballard to say its catchphrase, which you can now buy as a bumper sticker: “God’s children are not for sale.” 

With his blonde hair cutting through the movie’s gray and black palette, Caviezel is a crucial anchor for this hollow character study to be taken as seriously as possible. It’s an intriguing, restrained performance but loses its appeal parallel to how the movie doesn’t develop Ballard beyond being a symbol. A casual YouTube search on the real Ballard shows that he’s a far more outspoken, hyper type than we see here. It suggests a different tone for such a character-focused story, and one wonders why the makers were weary of it. 

“Sound of Freedom” takes place in, and posits to be, a tough conversation piece about the world of child sex trafficking, but it’s hardly any more informational than a horror movie about bogeymen. A few factoids about the pervasiveness of modern slavery are shared in text at the end, and there’s a note about how Ballard’s dedication helped pass legislation that made international cooperation on such stings more possible, but these notes are overshadowed by “Sound of Freedom” yet again being misguided and making the cause about itself. As the end credits play, Jim Caviezel re-appears to say how the makers of “Sound of Freedom” believe this movie could be the “Uncle Tom’s Cabin for 21st-century slavery.” He says that the children shown in the movie are the real heroes but spends most of the time trying to empower you, the people, to spread the word, scan the QR code, and buy more tickets so other people can see this movie and put an end to this horror. But there’s little transparency here about how seeing Monteverde’s film can help stop child sex trafficking, as this movie suggests. The suspiciousness of “Sound of Freedom” is queasy itself. 

Now playing in theaters. 

The 2010 Ugandan film “Who Killed Captain Alex?” is unlike any action movie that came before it. Over a non-stop entertaining 70 minutes, the violent but knowingly cartoonish single-camera film unleashes an onslaught of explosions, gunfire, and exploding heads, treating war as extreme, gleeful slapstick. A voice shares space on a soundtrack that sometimes borrows a flute-synth cover of Seal’s “Kiss From a Rose,” his exclamatory commentary emphasizing how serious you should not take its Rambo-inspired carnage: “Everybody in Uganda knows kung fu! The movie’s on!” “Who Killed Captain Alex?” is pure cinema. Like whatever young Sammy Fabelman of “The Fabelmans” would go on to make, it’s the work of a dreamer with a movie camera. 

Cathryne Czubek’s charming and entertaining documentary “Once Upon a Time in Uganda” bottles the magic that goes into such a production, which includes years of hard work, the support of believers, and a need to make one’s imagination reality. “Who Killed Captain Alex?” is one of many high-octane and low-budget action features from writer/director Nabwana I.G.G., known here as Isaac, the founder of Ramon Productions in the Wakaliga slum in Uganda. He also calls his enterprise Wakaliwood, and there among people’s homes and mud roads, you can find him and his crew of stunt people, props makers, stars, and filmmakers using condoms for blood bursts or tying a green screen to the side of a one-story building so that someone can imitate hanging from a helicopter. His monthly-made features are then distributed around town, though DVD players are not common. It is not a high-profit business model, but that isn’t why Isaac is doing this. 

The creation of Isaac’s homemade blockbusters is (sometimes uneasily) framed as a life-changing journey for his most dedicated follower, a white New York film impresario named Alan Hofmanis, who becomes our surrogate into this world where Czubek and her crew have an invisible presence. Hofmans saw a type of cinematic revolution when he got his first glimpse of Wakaliwood (the viral trailer for “Who Killed Captain Alex?”), and he spent years living in Uganda trying to help Isaac with his knowledge of film festivals and publicity. They began a friendship and partnership that had Alan working on, sometimes starring in (as the one white person always beaten up) and helping produce and distribute Isaac’s movies. 

Isaac’s prolific cinema is the kind of DIY goodness that Michel Gondry (“Be Kind Rewind”) has long been manifesting, and Czubek has a playfulness similar to the French filmmaker while illustrating the history of Wakaliwood, including how it presents the past. I loved a moment where Isaac reflected on how while he was a brick-maker, he was always been thinking about movie-making—behind him, characters appear as if walking out from his dream. He then “directs” them away, one of a few moments in which Isaac, Alan, and Czubek treat this documentary as means for more Wakaliwood rule-breaking. 

Taking place over many years, “Once Upon a Time in Uganda” focuses on both Alan’s and Isaac’s experiences, although the former can sometimes have less impact, even with all of his advocacy. Czubek’s take struggles with the main problem in its tale, a critical moment when the friendship breaks down after Isaac agrees to make a TV series out of “Who Killed Captain Alex?” with a Ugandan media mogul. Alan sees it as a type of betrayal. Though they live near each other, they don’t talk for weeks. Part of it seems to be a miscommunication, which is hard to make a good drama out of, and also out of Alan’s steadfastness to keep Wakaliwood within his definition of pure. Money can ruin good ideas, as Hollywood knows, which makes Wakaliwood even more of a potent microcosm for Czubek’s ode to movie-making. But this problem does make for a good scene in which the two friends and collaborators eventually talk and can’t meet eye-to-eye, a more bracing and stark moment compared to the usual fictional chaos in Isaac’s films. 

It’s also rewarding and helpful when this doc addresses some of the “criticisms” that Isaac’s cinema could face, especially for those who see “Who Killed Captain Alex?” out of the loving context this movie provides. “Once Upon a Time in Uganda” voices Isaac’s perspective—“They are action in a comedy way”—while Alan compares them to Road Runner cartoons, scoffing at anyone thinking Isaac should be doing something more dramatic to be taken seriously. In a reflective, tactfully incorporated moment, Isaac talks about the real horrors he saw in Uganda in the ‘80s after the fall of Idi Amin and then directs a kid to play his younger self running away from violence. But he also tells us he doesn’t want to make movies about such real horror, at least yet. “This is a different narrative about Africa,” he says. 

As it champions the importance of Wakaliwood with equal admiration and clarity, “Once Upon a Time in Uganda” maintains a personal POV that offers more than an outsider’s awe, even though Alan’s wanderlust arc just doesn’t compare to what Isaac has done and is doing. But while certain passages of the doc can be less emotionally involving than others, its surf-guitar-fueled montages of Isaac making another audacious movie are always invigorating. “Once Upon a Time in Uganda” is the advocacy that Isaac’s auteurship and ideology need most—this doc helps one re-appreciate movie-making as a compulsive, creative odyssey, a shot-by-shot pursuit of elusive inner peace. 

Now playing in theaters. 

“The Out-Laws,” about a blithering schmuck (Adam DeVine) who gets tangled up with his fiancee’s secret-bank-robber parents (Pierce Brosnan and Ellen Barkin), would be skippable even if it didn’t have the rotten timing to debut a week after the death of the great Alan Arkin, one of the stars of the “The In-Laws,” a movie that this new film incompetently tries to channel. Nearly every aspect of this feature from Tyler Spindel, formerly a second unit director for Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison Productions, is derivative and desperate and, at the same time, bizarrely pleased with itself. 

Devine’s character, Owen Browning, is a bank manager, despite being so cloddish and lacking in judgment or impulse control that it’s hard to imagine him being trusted to take a bag of garbage to the curb. His fiancee Parker (Nina Dobrev), is a yoga instructor everyone in Owen’s family inexplicably thinks is a stripper. She’s pleasant and conventionally attractive, but just quirky enough not to come across as bland or dull. She seems stable and mature. We never understand why she’d be with a guy like Owen, who freaks out at the most minor things, obsesses over action figures and pop culture trivia, and can’t overcome the urge to blurt out any thought that pops into his head, no matter how inappropriate or insulting. This sort of dynamic is the movie equivalent of the TV sitcom formula where an irritating, clueless, selfish man-child somehow ends up married to a beautiful saint.

Neither Owen nor his parents (Julie Hagerty and Richard Kind) have ever met Parker’s parents, Billy and Lilly, whose cover story is that they’re globetrotting anthropologists who’ve been in the Amazon for many years studying the Yanomami tribe. To their everlasting regret, Billy and Lilly do the meet-the-in-laws thing. Owen spills enough details about his job to guarantee a robbery and an investigation because Billy and Lilly need a lot of cash fast, and Owen makes it easy for them to raise it. The story is effectively over halfway through the film’s running time but insists on continuing, serving up theoretically madcap but mostly repetitive retreads of things that happened in the first half, but with more car chases and “twists” and shooting and yelling. 

The cast is as impressive as its efforts are futile. Besides Brosnan, Barkin, Kind, and Hagerty, “The Out-Laws” features Poorna Jagannathan as Billy and Lilly’s deranged money launderer; Michael Rooker as an alcoholic FBI agent who wears a straw boater hat in lieu of genuine eccentricity; and Lil Rel Howery as the hero’s excitable, shout-y best friend, a type who’s been imported straight from “Get Out.” “The Out-Laws” does this sort of thing a lot, compulsively reminding you of better films you could be watching instead, from the “Ocean’s” pictures and “Heat” to “Die Hard” (a snippet of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony plays when Owen gets to see the inside of the most sophisticated bank vault in town). The title even boasts a grammatically unnecessary hyphen to ensure you know which classic provided its core DNA.

Overqualified bit players show up, goof around a bit, and disappear. All have been delightful presences elsewhere. This film gives them next to nothing to work with. They’re kneecapped by the sloppy, improv-y mucking about that’s become the default mainstream Hollywood comedy mode since the ’90s. There are two credited screenwriters, Evan Turner and Ben Zazove. One would assume or perhaps hope that they contributed the occasional line that has personality and seems tied to the psychology of one of the characters (as when Margie insists, “I always knew they were criminals … They drink during the day”). 

But it’s hard to tell, and in the end, who cares? Half-assed doesn’t describe this movie. It’s quarter-assed at best. It plays like a workshop filmed in full dress on lit and decorated sets. Characters blurt sentences that are not only nonsensical but are barely connected to the story, while the other characters in the scene labor to “top” them or else “react” by wincing or huffing or making a “Wow, that’s weird; why would anyone say something like that?” face. Devine’s mugging is nonstop and barely modulated. The movie is shot in the wide CinemaScope ratio for no discernible reason other than to reassure viewers that they’re watching “cinema” rather than 40 YouTube sketches strung end-to-end.  

There’s a solid tradition of droll but hard-edged slapstick comedies of the type that this film wants to evoke. It stretches from “The In-Laws” through “Midnight Run” and “The Freshman” through “Central Intelligence” and “Game Night.” But the worst five seconds of any of these is better than the best moment in “The Out-Laws.” Imagine the most irritating DreamWorks animated comedy that could exist with humans instead of animals or creatures and done in live-action. You won’t have to imagine very hard because there’s a scene in “The Out-Laws” where a robber wears a Shrek mask. Of course, he tries to do the character’s Scottish accent. And, of course, he asks one of his colleagues if he did the accent well or sounded Irish. Watch “The In-Laws” instead.  

Now playing on Netflix. 

At least Patrick Wilson still cares about “Insidious.” A staple of the James Wan-iverse (he also stars in the “Conjuring” series), Wilson makes his directorial debut with “Insidious: The Red Door.” He also stars in the movie, reprising his role as protective dad Josh Lambert from “Insidious” and “Insidious: Chapter Two.” In classic “why the hell not?” deep-franchise style, he also performs a hard-rock number with the Swedish band Ghost over the end credits. (Did you know Patrick Wilson could sing? Neither did I.) 

“The Red Door” is the fifth, and supposedly final, “Insidious” movie. And, with the caveat that you can never trust a horror franchise to end when it says it will end, it does deliver a reasonably satisfying wrap-up to the story of the Lambert family. They’ve been absent from “Insidious” since 2013, when Blumhouse pivoted to focus on Lin Shaye’s motherly psychic character Elise Rainier in a string of prequels. (Although she died in the second one, she appears here, because again — why not?) And much has happened while the series was away. 

Young Dalton Lambert (Ty Simpkins) has grown from a possessed little boy into a brooding 19-year-old art student beginning his first semester of college. His parents Josh (Wilson) and Renai (Rose Byrne) have separated. And his grandmother Lorraine, who played a role in saving Dalton from the evil spirits of The Further, has died. Dalton doesn’t remember his trip into The Further, and neither does Josh; the film opens with a scene of the two of them being instructed to forget an entire year of their lives by a hypnotist. 

This is accomplished remarkably quickly—if “The Red Door” was an anti-drug PSA, its tagline would be, “Hypnosis: Not even once.” Counting backwards from 10 is all it takes to wipe huge chunks of the Lamberts’ minds clean, and those memories resurface just as easily when Dalton is asked to perform a meditation exercise in his painting class. “The Red Door” does play a little bit with the trope of artists creating possessed or otherwise supernatural works as seen in horror movies like “The Devil’s Candy.” But most of its runtime is spent exploring something less inspired. 

Here, Josh and Dalton’s gift for astral projection isn’t just a mysterious phenomenon. It’s that old saw of inherited trauma and mental illness that’s been wreaking havoc on horror movies since “Hereditary.” This manifests in the form of revelations about the father Josh never knew, which overlap with Josh’s guilt and Dalton’s resentment about the divorce. It’s not the most labored use of the metaphor in recent years — that would be another of co-screenwriter Scott Teems’ credits, the nonsensical “Halloween Kills.” But it’s such a rote theme at this point that it sucks all of the interest from the family drama.

Callbacks to other “Insidious” films are half-hearted, and “The Red Door” just seems to give up on trying to make all of the pieces fit after a while. What does work are a handful of scares in the film’s first half. As a director, Wilson proves himself familiar enough with the mechanics of a jump scare—clearly, he picked up a few things from working with Wan all those years—to give audiences what they want. An early scene where Josh hallucinates a ghastly old woman while trapped inside of an MRI machine is especially well done and ties in with a subplot where Josh seeks treatment for persistent fatigue and brain fog. (Long COVID? Nope, The Further!)

Once the college-centric main plot kicks in, however, the movie starts its slow decline towards an underwhelming finale. Visually, Wilson faithfully re-creates the misty look of the previous films. Tiny Tim’s “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” warbles in a room full of broken dolls somewhere in the negative space of The Further. This is all fine — as are the jokes, the supporting characters, and the concessions to the film’s PG-13 rating by replacing explicit gore with fake vomit and pancake makeup. Wilson is pretty good as Josh, but that’s to be expected. He’s the one that’s still invested in the whole thing. 

Almost as soon as they met as children, Audrey and Lolo became inseparable. They were among the few Asian Americans in a painfully homogenous white town in the Pacific Northwest. When their first playground bully hurled a racist insult at them, Lolo landed a punch right in his face as Audrey looked on in awe. Since that fateful day, the pair stuck by each other through the rest of school, the start of their careers, and the beginnings of many bad choices. Now as an ambitious associate at a law firm, Audrey (Ashley Park) has the chance for a life-changing promotion when her boss sends her to China to close a major business deal, and Lolo (Sherry Cola), Audrey’s much more chaotic counterpart, comes along on the adventure as a translator back to their homeland. With the help of two more friends, Deadeye (Sabrina Wu) and Kat (Stephanie Hsu), the group make it an unforgettable trip that gets dirty and deep on what identity means and how to be true to oneself. 

Making her feature debut, Adele Lim takes bold risks in her raunchy road trip comedy “Joy Ride.” The movie walks a fine line between exploring heartfelt questions about belonging and outrageous jokes played for shock value. It’s as if Lim and fellow co-writers Cherry Chevapravatdumrong and Teresa Hsiao saw the antics in Malcolm D. Lee’s “Girls Trip” as a challenge to top. It’s safe to say, the crew in “Joy Ride” do top the outrageous factor, but whether or not it’s as effective will depend on the viewer’s stomach for bawdy humor. Still, as uneven as the tone may feel shifting from Audrey’s search for her long lost mother who gave her up for adoption and the group hooking up with members of a traveling basketball team, there is no shortage of jokes and other comical situations to keep the awkward laughs and full-body cringes rolling along. To enhance the movie’s whirlwind melee, Paul Yee’s cinematography transports audiences from the banality of Audrey and Lolo’s hometown to the luridly colorful animated sequences of the group’s K-Pop fantasy number and the many stops along the way, from misty country roads and expansive rivers to busy cafes and dimly lit clubs. The richness of each scene steadies the sense of whiplash from the story’s breakneck pace. 

Beyond crude humor, “Joy Ride” also pokes fun at Audrey’s identity crisis, using it as a springboard for pointed self-criticism and sharp cultural commentary. One of the movie’s sharpest sequences occurs when Audrey is fooled by a white American who’s a drug dealer desperate to hide her goods. She initially trusts her fellow American at the expense of sitting with other Chinese passengers and puts the group in an even more precarious situation because as Lolo puts it, Audrey is prejudiced against people who look like her. There are many little introspective moments throughout the movie, like when they land at the Shanghai airport, Audrey notes what a different feeling it is for her to no longer be in the minority. There’s even more observational jokes about missing out on a country’s traditional cuisine or speaking the language when you grew up outside the culture. These one-liners and observations throughout “Joy Ride” give a more nuanced sense humor to the quips about random sex acts and ill-advised tattoos. 

As with many an ensemble movie, the strength is in its cast, and “Joy Ride” is no exception. Led by the central drama between Ashley Park and Sherry Cola’s characters, their relationship shifts and evolves over the course of the journey, forcing them to reckon with their own moments of self-discovery. Park plays the pitch perfect straight character, the high achiever destined for greatness – with all the flaws that can come with that personality. With a deceptively calm demeanor, Cola’s character often instigates many of the movie’s problems but not in a malicious way, almost as if eternally optimistic that she will get the results she wants. Sabrina Wu’s Deadeye and Stephanie Hsu’s Kat bring even more volatility to the mix, as Deadeye’s unpredictability and deadpan expression make it tough for others to connect with her and Kat’s sordid past comes to haunt her more than once even as she’s trying to change her lifestyle for a Christian fiancé. 

While not everything in “Joy Ride” comes together smoothly, Lim’s movie is plenty of messy fun, mostly lighthearted but occasionally profound in what it says about identity and friendships. The stars of the show embrace the outrageous high jinks, enjoying the free pass to behave badly and push the envelope of raunch comedy. For all its twists and tangents, “Joy Ride” remains unapologetically true to itself and the central friendship that starts us all on our merry misadventure. 

Throughout most of the Italian film, “Amanda,” the title character wears an outfit perhaps best described as Moody Teen: “Who me? I just threw on this old thing, but did you notice how punk it is?” There’s a shapeless jacket, clunky boots, and a vest that looks like it was crocheted by someone’s grandmother. And throughout most of the movie, she sports a sullen expression giving notes of truculence, superiority, and occasionally helplessness, as in, “I may be far above these lesser people I am doomed to be with, but I still wish one of them liked me.” We eventually see Amanda lounging by the pool in a bathing suit, a sharp contrast that calls back to the film’s flashback opening.

First-time feature writer/director Carolina Cavalli has a strong eye for composition and an appealing confidence in her vision. She said she picked Benedetta Porcaroli to play Amanda because of her melancholic attitude and strength of spirit. Both are evident in the character, whose outsider status may be suggested by her name, very popular in the US but almost unheard of in Italy. In a very brief flashback that opens the film, we see that even as a child, her behavior could be shocking, though we do not find out until much later exactly what she did that caused the maid to shriek her name and drop the tray she was carrying. When we see her again, she is in her twenties and has returned home to her wealthy family’s comfortable home after studying in Paris. She is unwilling to join her sister in the family business, a chain of pharmacies. But she is not willing to do anything else, either. She is certain that she knows what she does not like and even more certain that she is above the people and activities around her. She shows some interest in her sister’s young daughter and a neighbor’s horse, but the closest thing she has to a companion is Judy, that same maid who dropped the tray, a middle-aged woman she begs to go to a rave with her. Amanda’s mother, Sofia (Monica Nappo), will no longer allow Judy to go out with Amanda and offers an alternative.  

Sofia and her friend have no idea what to do with their failure-to-launch daughters and hope that getting them together will somehow help them move forward. When they were children, Amanda was friends with Rebecca, the other character with an Anglo-American name. The slight problem now: Rebecca (Galatéa Bellugi) refuses to leave her room.

Like a less-cluttered Wes Anderson film, “Amanda” has quirky, precocious young characters who deliver aphoristic pronouncements in monotone, deadpan voices amid beautifully composed settings. Although she is in her mid-twenties, Amanda seems like a teenager, reflexively defensive. She feels more in control when expressing dark sentiments, insulting people, or transgressing the boundaries of acceptable behavior, as in clipping her toenails into her mother’s bathwater. Amanda desperately wants a friend and boyfriend but has no idea how to show interest in anyone other than insulting them. She cares about and even identifies with the neighbor’s neglected horse, but all she says to him is, “You’re too skinny.  You look like a table.” She gazes with longing at an attractive young man but has no idea how to let him know she is interested. And then she is hurt and angry when he dates someone else.  But she is self-aware enough to understand that she “never does anything because she is too busy doing nothing.”

Amanda’s bluntness is an asset with Rebecca. Like Mary with her spoiled cousin Colin in The Secret Garden, Amanda’s abrasive directness brings out an honesty between herself and Rebecca, leading to some progress for both. Porcaroli’s face, as Amanda’s perpetual frown begins to relax, is a small gem. In the American version of this movie, it might result in more palpable progress, probably with some hugging. But this is not that movie. Cavalli respects the world’s complications, and “Amanda” the film is as uncompromising as Amanda the character.

Now playing in theaters. 

If you muted the soundtrack of the lopsided sci-fi parable “Biosphere,” about the presumed last two men on Earth, the movie might look better than it sounds. Not because “Biosphere” features spectacular special effects or because it’s visually impressive. Rather, this ponderous two-hander looks better when its co-leads, Sterling K. Brown and co-writer Mark Duplass, try to convey a manic, claustrophobic mood mainly through body language instead of grating, sitcom-style dialogue. Director/producer/co-writer Mel Eslyn also occasionally succeeds in reframing her two characters as parts of their cramped habitat. But there’s more schtick than speculation baked into the dialogue, which makes it too easy to dismiss this unfortunately stagey misfire.

“Biosphere” has a curious premise that’s briskly unpacked within the movie’s first half hour. [SOME ESSENTIAL SPOILERS FOLLOW] In that time, insecure Billy (Duplass) and overweening Ray (Brown) discover that they’re not only trapped in a biodome that is running out of food but also that one of the fish that they’re raising for their own dietary needs has suddenly and unexpectedly become a hermaphrodite. This evolutionary leap coincides with an even bigger plot contrivance: Billy’s also spontaneously undergoing intersex changes, which freaks him out and intrigues Ray, formerly a biologist. Somehow, these key plot developments aren’t the most unbelievable parts of “Biosphere.”

We soon learn that Billy used to be President of the United States, if only for 14 months. He doesn’t, or at least didn’t, share Ray’s progressive values, and while Billy’s never out-and-out compared to a Bush or a Trump, there are clear signs that his policies have had a similarly polarizing effect. The fact that even Billy cops to making rash decisions as POTUS says more about the filmmakers and their ideal audience than these characters, whose relationship is built around an unbelievable sort of present-tense camaraderie.

Yes, Ray, a registered Democrat, has regrets, including his tenure as the ex-President’s adviser, but he and Ray live in the now. They talk about their feelings, which are neatly labeled and broken down in ways that suggest that it’s not the situation at hand that’s funny, but the characters, who are both more suggestive as symbols than as psychologically or emotionally complex people.

Through a surplus of hand-holding dialogue, “Biosphere” presents a weirdly hollow sort of Utopian optimism, where the bonhomie between a Black and a white man says everything and nothing about the movie’s understanding of the “patriarchy,” as Duplass refers to his edgy protagonists in the movie’s press notes. Here, Billy and Ray follow what seems like an inevitable progression toward an unusual premise: Would you be able to able put aside your differences and repeatedly change your relationship with somebody you’ve known for years, first because of utilitarian necessity and then maybe some latent personal feelings?

The latter part of that character dynamic goes largely unexplored in “Biosphere” since so much dialogue indicates qualities in both Billy and Ray that their creators never seem interested in developing. Most anecdotes and tit-for-tat bickering only serve to establish the characters’ theories about their shifting relationship or their philosophical differences. You probably don’t know any real people who talk like Billy and Ray do, despite some load-bearing references to “Super Mario Bros.” Even two key scenes where Ray unpacks his heart’s contents, first with a fish and then to Billy, seem more like story outline placeholders than soul-baring monologues.

Granted, a good part of the appeal of “Biosphere” stems from its nature as a fantasy of what could be rather than what already is. Which might be why so much of Billy and Ray’s squirmy banter concerns their insecurities, though Billy’s feelings get unpacked at greater length, partly because he’s the chattier of the two men. Ray’s a doer while Billy’s a worrier; Ray has faith, while Billy tends to sulk and catastrophize. More importantly, the two men deliberately focus on their present dilemma—what to do about Billy and his body—which only partly opens a can of worms. Rather than dig into what’s specifically changing about their relationship, Duplass and Eslyn focus on armchair psychology and black-box speeches to explain away what’s really going on with these two men. Never mind why the world ended. What matters is Billy and Ray’s magical thinking, as well as their coy will-they/won’t-they tension.

The movie’s comedic climax is both the worst and the best scene: [ANOTHER ESSENTIAL SPOILER] Ray and Billy attempt to get to know each other a little more intimately but only wind up weirding each other out even more. This routine is mostly funny, thanks to Brown and Duplass’ frenzied slapstick chemistry. Unfortunately, this scene also drags on for so long, with too little comedic inflection or development, that it eventually feels like the best and only joke the filmmakers could think to tell. Maybe it plays differently if you cover your ears?

Now playing in theaters. 

Early on in this dreary would-be psychological thriller, the literary mandarin J.M. Sinclair, played by Richard Grant, shares with an interviewer his observations on the writing life. “Now, average writers attempt originality. They fail. Universally. Good writers have the sense to borrow from their betters. But great … great writers … steal.” He then breaks into a cocky grin and laughs wheezily, like Mutley on “Wacky Races.” I’m sure not on purpose; I trust Mr. Grant has been fortunate enough to have never been exposed to that cartoon.

The adage that Sinclair paraphrases may have, um, originated with T.S. Eliot or with Igor Stravinsky, who applied it, of course, to composers. And it’s a not entirely untrue and not entirely un-useful aperçu. Still, if you’ve been writing for a long time, even in the relatively unheralded trenches of criticism, you’re likely sick of hearing it. God knows I am. In any event, Sinclair’s observation, aside from adding dimension to his character (not a particularly interesting dimension, given how tired is his pet observations), also serves as, speaking of phrases we all ought to be thoroughly tired of, a kind of Chekhov’s Act-One-Gun for the plot.

“The Lesson,” directed by Alice Troughton from a script by Alex MacKeith, aspires to be high-toned but only gets to the peak of a cliché slag heap. The ostensible protagonist is Daryl McCormack’s Liam, first seen being interviewed himself, speaking of his first novel, about a ruined patriarch trying to reassert power over his fraying realm. In a flashback, the unpublished Liam is summoned by “The Agency” (not the C.I.A.) to audition for a tutoring gig. Bertie, the son of literary lion Sinclair and his French wife Hélène (Julie Delpy), needs a leg up to get into Oxford. Young and pale and poor of attitude, Bertie (Stephen McMillan) resists Liam’s friendly suggestions about learning critical thinking and insults the guy at family dinners. Nevertheless, Liam gets the gig, moves into the family’s palatial manor (this is a world in which literary mandarin status still pays big), and starts putting Post-It notes on his mirror; observations on the family that he hopes will feed a literary work of his own.

The Sinclairs are one of Tolstoy’s unhappy families; an older son, Felix, committed suicide by drowning himself in the manor lake a few years back. In another excerpt from a public interview, J.M. gets into a snit when asked about his son’s death. Among other things, the tragedy seems to have blocked J.M.

Hélène takes to Liam to the extent that she wants to hire him directly, cutting out “The Agency.” In this movie, no one has ever seen any other movies, so Liam thinks this is an excellent idea. And he also very gladly signs an NDA. We also learn that the window of Liam’s room—which had once belonged to Felix (and the house does appear to have a lot of rooms, so why Liam’s been boarded in such a grief-weighted space doesn’t make much sense but go on)—looks directly into Hélène and J.M.’s bedroom, and one night Liam watches while J.M. performs cunnilingus on his wife. “Don’t do that, dude,” I said to the screen as this happened. “This is a border from which you cannot step back.” Oops, then Hélène sees him watching and smiles. “You’re in it now, pal,” I said to the screen. But honestly, I wasn’t that concerned.

Because, come on: this is one of those movies that goes on for an hour and forty minutes because someone doesn’t have the common sense to get the hell out of Dodge twenty minutes in. When J.M. asks to read Liam’s novel-in-progress and offers his own work for Liam’s delectation, the subsequent comparing notes session goes poorly, and Liam contrives to get some of his pride back, helped by an explosive (or so the movie hopes) discovery.

When all the dominoes fall, it’s so neat, so pat; there’s no credibility, and with that gone, any opportunity for emotional resonance goes pffffft as well. Some might expect this picture to be redeemed by juicy performances, but that’s not the case; while none of the performers phone it in, the script gives them only the most commonplace ideas and states to convey. “The Lesson” is a wash. 

Now playing in theaters. 

“Welcome to the internet
Put your cares aside
Here’s a tip for straining pasta
Here’s a nine-year-old who died.”
— Bo Burnham, “Welcome to the Internet”

“The algorithm is a beast that really can’t be tamed once it’s been unleashed and it’s already been unleashed.” In Alex Winter’s new documentary “The YouTube Effect,” these words—probably not a surprise to anyone at this point—are said by Anthony Padilla, founder of the YouTube channel Smosh, a very successful early adapter of the platform. Padilla is one of the interview subjects in “The YouTube Effect,” and he explains how the algorithm works and why it’s a huge problem. He’s a powerful interview subject because he speaks from the inside. He also speaks against his own interests. He’s benefited from YouTube. He was made by YouTube (Smosh launched on YouTube in the prehistoric year 2005). “The YouTube Effect” is a chronicle of extremely recent history and doesn’t cover much new ground. If you follow YouTube, big tech, or any controversies surrounding social media, you will be familiar with everything here.

Recent history moves so fast that the now-ancient (i.e., the 1990s) term “24-hour news cycle” takes on an entirely new meaning. The “news” itself is off-road. We are in the whirlwind right now, and it’s hard sometimes to get perspective on what the hell is actually going on. Maybe that’s the point: if you don’t give people time to think, they won’t cause problems for you as you lug your money to the bank. To quote Bo Burnham’s song again: “It was always the plan / To put the world in your hand.” The 21st-century version of bread and circuses.

Winter interviews people from tech, writers who cover tech, as well as the original co-founder Steve Chen. (YouTube’s humble beginnings echo all the other startup legends, college dropouts with an idea, setting up in their parents’ garage.) Originally designed as a video version of the website “Hot or Not?” (what is it with social media behemoths starting with sleazy little concepts?) YouTube quickly took off into the stratosphere, so much so that even a couple of years later, it was hard to imagine the world without it.

It’s only 15 years of time, but so much has happened. Winter picks out some of the major YouTube moments: The Arab Spring, the 2020 protests, the New Zealand mosque shooting (live-streamed), Elliot Rodger, and the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. But YouTube is too vast an eco-system to be summed up by its most high-profile and politically-charged controversies. Winter provides brief flashes of other famous (and sometimes controversial) YouTube figures/events: Shane Dawson, Tana Mongeau, James Charles … and who can forget Logan Paul’s “Japanese Suicide Forest” debacle? These eruptions in the YouTube community are still being discussed by creators on the channel. Winter doesn’t really go into these tempests-in-a-teapot, and this is probably a good thing because once you search “James Charles Apology,” you will lose hours of your life in a rabbit hole that goes to the center of the earth. I speak from personal experience.

Winter is after the Big Picture: how YouTube’s “recommended” algorithm changed the game, our world, and us. Susan Wojcicki, the former CEO of YouTube, is interviewed extensively, and her corporate-speak about the positive “connections” formed between “diverse” groups of people rings false, as does her reassurances of how hard YouTube works to make the community safe. There should be a debate between free speech advocates and those who think protecting people from death threats/doxing/SWAT-ting, etc., is good. There’s no reason compromises can’t be made. There have been times in the past—the anti-trust laws of the early 20th century, automobile safety, etc.—when regulations were imposed, and it was all for the greater good. This debate needs to happen but not in the current zero-sum atmosphere. Winter includes people who speak to it: a litigator who goes after social media sites for the “harm” they cause (and sometimes catastrophic harm), and Brianna Wu, a tech writer and video game developer who felt the wrath of gamers when she spoke out in support of Zoë Quinn curing so-called GamerGate. These interviews help clarify what is, at times, rather unfocused.

One very interesting interview subject is Caleb Cain, whose humble little YouTube channel blew up when he posted a video called “My Descent into the Alt-Right Pipeline.” Suddenly he was on all the news shows, talking about the dangers of YouTube and how the “recommended” algorithm led him by the hand from self-help channels to White Nationalism. Cain speaks eloquently about how quickly and effectively this process worked. He understands how brainwashing works because 1.) It actually happened to him, and 2.) He was able to snap himself out of it.

There’s a too-brief diversion into the disturbing world of YouTube Kids. In 2017, James Bridle wrote a piece on Medium called “Something is wrong on the Internet” after a deep dive into YouTube Kids, and it should have been a wake-up call. More could have been made of this truly sinister aspect of the platform—and human nature—in “The YouTube Effect.”

I rely on YouTube for research and entertainment purposes. I love the old talk show clips, the music not available on iTunes/Spotify (like Bing Crosby’s 1930s recordings!), and television movies from the ’80s starring Gena Rowlands, not available anywhere else. I love “React To” channels (made up mostly of Gen Z kids watching classic films for the first time. I highly recommend this wholesome rabbit hole.) But everyone knows how the algorithm works. You watch one video on a controversial subject out of curiosity, and it could be from a valid source, but suddenly, within minutes, your “recommended” nav bar is now filled with similar “content,” and you’re one click away from a video claiming the earth is flat.

Winter’s documentary goes far but maybe not far enough. In her interview, YouTuber Natalie Wynn (aka ContraPoints) observes that YouTube is not “a public forum,” but THE public forum and it’s owned and operated by two of the biggest corporations in the world. This should make everyone—no matter their political views—at least take a moment to pause and consider the implications.

Now playing in theaters. 

Sam Pollard’s name should be included on any list of the best modern documentary filmmakers. Pollard started his impressive career as an editor, notably working with Spike Lee on a series of films, including “Mo’ Better Blues,” “4 Little Girls,” and “Bamboozled.” As a documentary director, he’s had a remarkable run lately that includes “Mr. Soul!,” “MLK/FBI,” “Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power,” and this week’s “The League,” playing in limited theatrical release before dropping digitally next week. This detailed telling of the story of the Negro League Baseball is informative and entertaining in equal measure, the kind of thing that will play well in equal measure to massive fans of the sport and those who know nothing about it. Growing up a huge MLB fan, I’ve read a lot of books on the history of the game and watched all 19 hours of Ken Burns’ “Baseball,” and I still found so much interesting material in “The League” that my main criticism is that I wanted it to be longer. There’s too much story to tell in a feature runtime and so there are parts of “The League” that feel like they’re just skimming the surface. But what a fantastic surface it is.

Pollard relies heavily on archival footage and photos, smartly allowing a relatively small cadre of experts to tell the story of Negro League Baseball, which means it doesn’t get too dry. From the beginning of the film, Pollard employs a tone that could be called joyous. It’s a smart decision that frames “The League” as a story of triumph—neighborhoods getting together to watch the best athletes in their region in a way that felt almost like a party. Pollard and his experts portray the early days of Black baseball as a place of pride. People would often come to games in their Sunday best, and there was a sense that this came from the community and belonged to the community.

In the communities in which Negro League Baseball flourished—basically on an East-West line from New York to Chicago—the sport started to develop its own stars. There’s always been a sense that the Baseball Hall of Fame is a bit illegitimate given how many of its legendary stars weren’t really playing against the best in the sport. As “The League” unpacks some of the legends of the game, one gets the feeling that most of them could support an entire documentary of their own. 

Take Rube Foster, the owner, manager, and star player for the Chicago American Giants. Over his career early in the century he threw seven no-hitters and is credited with inventing the screwball—a manager snuck him into an MLB clubhouse to teach it to his star pitcher. Or Josh Gibson, who hit a home run almost every 14 ABs over his career—a number that would have made him a household name at the peak of baseball’s popularity. I would absolutely watch entire films about either of them. Or Effa Manley, the co-owner of the Newark Eagles, who fought against a white, male baseball establishment, and often won.

“The League” is at its best when it’s focusing on lesser-known stories even if it has to eventually get Willy Mays, Hank Aaron, and Jackie Robinson in the mix. Of course, I’m not begrudging legends getting more attention, but I found the film at its most interesting when it was unearthing stories instead of just repeating oft-told ones. To that end, Pollard gets to a fascinating place in the final chapter when he unpacks how integration essentially meant the demise of Negro League Baseball, not only because the league’s stars left for the major leagues, but because the white owners didn’t pay their previous owners anything to steal them. So while there was an undeniable good in the integration of the sport, there was still greed under the surface dismantling something vital to the Black community. Again, this is less than 10 minutes of the film and I wanted a bit more of it.

It’s not that any of “The League” is shallow. Pollard doesn’t operate that way. And there’s something valuable about a feature documentary that makes you want to read more about its subject. I think Pollard would be fine with that criticism and agree that this is a starting point to learn about people who should have been household names when they were playing. It’s not too late.

In theaters for a week starting today and on VOD next week.