Category: Movie Reviews

A favorite college professor once compared listening to modern (i.e., 20^th century) opera to doing homework, especially if you weren’t already familiar with the conventions, the tropes, and the general form that modern composers were either departing from or reacting to. I thought about homework as I watched “Final Cut,” a French remake of “One Cut of the Dead,” the meta-textual and often monotonous Japanese zombie comedy.

Like that recent word-of-mouth smash, “Final Cut” follows the making of a Z-grade horror movie within the movie, which is presented without commentary during the movie’s first half hour or so. The next 70+ minutes follow the making of that movie. There’s more dialogue in this remake, especially for its supporting characters, and therefore more attention is paid to the movie within the movie’s nature as a collaborative effort. But somehow, in trying that much harder to enunciate the original movie’s already clear message, the makers of “Final Cut” suck the fun out of the chaotic working conditions and heroic problem-solving skills required to make anything. The dead air and pregnant pauses now feel heavier, and while that’s sometimes amusing, “Final Cut” also rarely seems as playful or ingratiating as “One Cut of the Dead.”

To be fair, watching “Final Cut” didn’t remind me of doing homework because the movie required me to love or have deep knowledge of the filmmaking process. Rather, “Final Cut” is busy but not complex, clever but not smart, and involved rather than involving. Some film buffs might not be surprised to learn that “Final Cut” was directed and adapted by Michel Hazanavicius, whose toothless but watchable meta-comedies include the silent movie homage “The Artist,” the “OSS 117” spy spoofs, and the French New Wave sex dramedy “Redoubtable.” Others might wonder how the ideal viewer of “Final Cut,” who presumably already loves watching movies, is supposed to walk away feeling energized instead of exhausted.

Maybe it doesn’t matter that the 36-minute zombie pastiche that kicks off “Final Cut” looks both more polished and less dynamic than the one that begins “One Cut of the Dead.” The rest of “Final Cut” presumably matters more since that’s when we learn all about the fictional jobbers who made that tired-looking horror pic. Director Remi (Romain Duris) takes a paycheck and struggles to spin several plates after he’s offered a job by the genial but disengaged producer Mounir (Lyes Salem), negotiating on behalf of the Japanese TV executive Mrs. Matsuda (Yoshiko Takehara, in the same role that she previously had in “One Cut of the Dead”).

The stakes are low—Matsuda wants somebody who can deliver a cheap but engaging one-take horror movie to launch her new horror-themed streaming platform—but they seem high enough given the many schticky personalities working on the project. There’s the prima donna leading man Raphael (Finnegan Oldfield), who talks a lot about “veracity,” “volition,” and other haughty-sounding 25-cent words; Nadia (Berenice Bejo, Hazanavicius’ partner), a makeup artist and Remi’s wife; Philippe (Gregory Gadebois), a cameraman and a drunk; and Ava (Matilda Lutz), Raphael’s overwhelmed and over-worked co-star.

Remi’s feelings about making a zombie movie are quickly sublimated into the process of making a zombie movie. He paces up and down naturally lit hallways and staircases, either fills in or delegates last-minute problem-solving, and generally tries to keep everybody happy. He especially wants to please his wife and daughter Romy (Simone Hazanavicius, the real director’s daughter), who loves Raphael and is also very opinionated about authenticity. They race about the camera, put out various fires, and feverishly think on their feet in ways that will maybe re-orient how viewers see the zombie movie that begins “Final Cut.” Now it’s not just another schlocky potboiler—it’s a team effort, a hectic but thrilling high-wire act, a relay race, and a work-for-hire nightmare all in one.

Duris’ wired performance seems emblematic of the movie’s hectic mood, but much of the movie’s comedy dies on the vine, given how deliberately stretched out the movie’s pregnant pauses and dead air now feel. “Final Cut” feels long, even if it’s only about 12 minutes longer than “One Cut of the Dead.” However, that extra legwork does not confer greater depth, nor does this sort of high-concept stunt play to its cast or writer/director’s comedic strengths.

Some of the familiar and faithfully recreated twists and turns of the original “One Cut of the Dead” still land here, but not enough to make this leaden remake seem endearing or zany enough to pick through. By spoon-feeding movie lovers an overcaffeinated sendup of the filmmaking process, Hazanavicius and the gang have only dumped a bunch of pre-solved homework into viewers’ laps, leaving us to keep up as they cheerlessly show all their work.

Now playing in theaters. 

When conversations about America’s racist past hit a fever pitch in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd, members of the Lakota Nation joined in protest. As Confederate monuments were being toppled one by one, they called for the restoration of one of their sacred sites. The Black Hills in South Dakota, the cradle of their civilization, had been defaced with the visages of four white presidents decades before. If we could crumble the statues built to the oppression of others elsewhere, why not address Mt. Rushmore and all that it represents? 

That is just one of the questions and stories in directors Jesse Short Bull and Laura Tomaselli’s searing documentary, “Lakota Nation vs. United States.” Writer and poet Layli Long Soldier’s melodious narration leads the film through an expansive view of the systemic ways the U.S. stripped Indigenous communities from their land, denied them their rights, forbade them their language and culture, murdered generations, abused their children in residential schools, and to this day, continue to harm their communities by trying to extract natural resources and pollute their endangered lands. The film is a history lesson, a poetic cry for justice, a testament to the Lakota Nation’s resilience and acknowledgment of the community’s loss – an incalculable loss that can never be fixed with underwhelming financial reparations – from the U.S. government’s 150-year betrayal of their people. 

“Lakota Nation vs. United States” moves swiftly but thoughtfully through various topics, covering issues like the over 400 land-grabbing treaties that robbed tribes of their homes to historic confrontations from the Battle of Little Bighorn and water protection protests at Standing Rock. Voices of modern-day Lakota activists and elders connect the past to the present, explaining how the treaties and mistreatment of their people in days past have hurt the generations since. This emotionally resonates when retracing the harrowing development of residential schools, which sought to “kill the Indian, save the man,” and the lasting harm it did to rip a culture out of the hearts of its children – if they survived. 

Oral histories weave between the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries in a dreamy nonlinear narrative path written by Long Soldier, Benjamin Hedin, and Laura Tomaselli. Delicately constructed, the narrative shows how systemic dehumanization disenfranchised and villainized Indigenous people and justified their mistreatment in the eyes of white colonists who saw them as savages. But all this leads to the film’s hope for better days ahead, a future that returns the land to its original Lakota stewards. 

Throughout the film, directors Short Bull and Tomaselli couple numerous interviews that personalize the Lakota Nation’s heartaches with montages of archival documents, old news reports, and mesmerizing footage steeped in the natural beauty of the Black Hills. Together, they illustrate the confounding legalese that took millions of acres away from tribes, examine the way media stereotyped Indigenous groups in cartoons and movies (like an abbreviated version of Neil Diamond’s “Reel Injun”), and documented the many painful rewritings of history that erased bloodstains off the records of beloved presidents and historical figures who carried out atrocities in the name of manifest destiny.  

In the U.S. government’s crusade to make the West “safe” for white settlers, untold horrors happened and continue to happen. While history books reimagine cowboys and the General Custers to be the good guys, films like “Lakota Nation vs. United States” are a necessary and vital correction. They are a collection of the living legacies petty tyrants and racist politicians have sought to silence. The Indigenous activists’ ongoing advocacy work is a radical act of defiance, a forceful stop to having their story whitewashed and written for them by outsiders. With its methodical approach, the documentary exhumes the nearly forgotten past, exposes assimilation as a form of violence, and explores how private ownership and capitalism have displaced generations of Lakota from their ancestral homes. “Land Back is a war cry for the liberation of my people,” one activist tells the camera. Because for all the tragedy in the past, the movie ends with a look towards the future and a hope for the next generation. The movement moves towards a better tomorrow if only people outside the Lakota Nation will embrace and support their efforts.

You don’t need to know your Wicked from your Waitress or your Lerner from your Loewe to enjoy the earnest humor of “Theater Camp”—but it helps.

The mockumentary is by, for, and about hardcore theater nerds, but there’s enough infectious, let’s-put-on-a-show energy to entertain casual fans—for a while, anyway. Because for all the zippy audition montages and clever turns of phrase that propel the first act, “Theater Camp” eventually drags in the midsection before picking back up again for the big finale. It’s based on a 2020 short that directors Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman made with their co-writers Ben Platt and Noah Galvin, and you can feel the strain of stretching this concept to feature length. Eventually, the movie abandons the fake documentary structure altogether, which makes it seem unnecessary in the first place.

The filmmakers’ affection for the material, this setting, and each other is evident; they’re all close friends who’ve grown up and worked together for years. That footage at the beginning of the movie of cute kids performing on stage? That’s Gordon and Platt, long before TV’s “The Bear” and the musical “Dear Evan Hansen” would make them famous, respectively. Galvin also starred in “Dear Evan Hansen” on Broadway and is engaged to Platt. Gordon and Galvin both had key supporting roles in Olivia Wilde’s “Booksmart.” Lieberman, the only one of the four who does not also appear on screen, has been friends with Platt since high school and directed several of his music videos. It’s clear how much they love this world of hammy, misfit kids who thrive within their tribe in this bucolic location, hours outside New York because they lived it themselves. But the execution doesn’t always match the power of their emotions.

“Theater Camp” begins promisingly with Platt and Gordon co-starring as Amos and Rebecca-Diane, former campers with dreams of stardom who now return annually as counselors. AdirondACTS (a funny idea in itself) is a ramshackle cluster of cabins that’s seen better days but still bursts with youthful glee each summer. This year, though, acting coach Amos and music teacher Rebecca-Diane must run the whole operation, as founder Joan (Amy Sedaris in a frustratingly brief appearance) has suffered a “Bye Bye Birdie”-related seizure and is in a coma. Joan’s wannabe finance bro son, Troy (Jimmy Tatro), shows up and tries to impose his will, but the precocious theater kids immediately see through his inauthenticity and reject him.  

The show must go on, though, which is extremely amusing for a while but grows inconsistently so. Some of the kids are insanely talented—particularly Bailee Bonick, Luke Islam, and Alexander Bello—and it would have been nice to get to know them a bit beyond watching them belt out a show tune or emote with a depth beyond their years. They’re actually way more interesting than the adult characters, except for Galvin’s Glenn, the beleaguered technical whiz with a secret. A bit involving young “Minari” star Alan Kim as a would-be agent who wears suits and makes phone calls all day is emblematic of both the humor and shortcomings of “Theater Camp.” It’s intriguingly specific but also woefully underdeveloped. This is also true of the presence of Ayo Edebiri, who’s so excellent alongside Gordon on “The Bear”: Her character is here under dubious circumstances that the movie doesn’t explore nearly enough.

Beneath the percolating excitement of preparing the original, season-ending musical—a tribute to AdirondACTS’ founder, titled Joan, Still—there is the underlying threat that the camp is on the verge of foreclosure, with the neighboring rich kids’ camp looking to expand onto their land. That could have lent itself to a kind of brash, ‘80s-style class warfare comedy that never materializes.

The problem here is that we’ve seen so much of what “Theater Camp” is doing and seen it done better, from the loving send-up of self-serious theater people in “Waiting for Guffman” to the blissful insularity of “Wet Hot American Summer.” Plus, Todd Graff wrote and directed a 2003 indie similar to this—“Camp”—featuring a young Anna Kendrick and Robin DeJesus.

Still, there are enough scattered moments here that result in big laughs. The lyrics to some of the original songs are hilariously terrible. An exercise exploring the children’s past lives is wonderfully bizarre. And some of the intense advice the counselors give these eager youngsters is thoroughly inappropriate. You may not walk out humming the tunes, but you’ll leave with a smile.

Now playing in theaters. 

Early into “Bird Box Barcelona,” a set-up foretells the shallow test of fate the film will attempt. The workmanlike, passable Spanish-set sequel to the apocalyptic horror sci-fi flick “Bird Box” opens as Sebastián (Mario Casas) and his daughter Anna (Alejandra Howard) are celebrating her birthday by roller skating. Afterward, they’re jumped for their food by a blind trio of goons. Later, they encounter a group of scavengers who plead for help. Sebastián tells them he’s a former engineer and knows where there’s a generator. He just needs shelter for the night. 

The group takes him in and mends his wounds. While sleeping in the comforts of a depot, someone hijacks the bus they’re slumbering in, exposing everyone to the open. If you’ve seen the first “Bird Box,” you know the deal: There are creatures that seem to live in the air, and when you look at them, they whisper your deepest desires to you so that you might die by suicide. The narrative now asks, “Is Sebastián the shepherd or the wolf?” While co-directors David Pastor and Àlex Pastor are intrigued by injecting religiosity into an apocalyptic narrative, their instincts lack flair or a point. This version feels like it’s trying to reengineer the prior film’s success without any of the originality. 

“Bird Box Barcelona” takes inspiration from a tiny nugget from the first movie by Susanne Bier. Some people can look upon the creatures without later turning to self-harm. Instead, they’ve formed a kind of cult around the creatures. Seven months ago, Sebastián had a run-in with Barcelona’s version of that clan. It takes time before we learn exactly what happened. But in the meantime, we figure out the mythology that drives Sebastián: He believes these creatures are seraphs. Not only that, he gets a kick out of seeing the celestial orb that seems to float up to the heavens from the people who die. 

Like many films, “Bird Box Barcelona” advertises itself as a narrative about grief, covering the subject in the blandest ways. Before long, Sebastián discovers another group, this time led by the British-Spaniard Claire (Georgina Campbell). She happens to be dressed in the same color scheme as Sandra Bullock in the first film, an all-too-on-the-nose attempt to recreate that magic. The primary figures among Claire’s companions are Octavia (an underused Diego Calva), a lost German girl looking for her mother, Sofia (Naila Schuberth), and an elderly couple, Isabel (Lola Dueñas) and Roberto (Gonzalo de Castro). Nearly all of them have lost somebody, which makes them vulnerable when the creatures whisper in their ear with the voice of long-gone loved ones. 

The script by the Pastors (with Josh Malerman’s novel still an inspiration) skims the surface of grief. Their film says that the trauma wrought by grief might push you to lose your senses, decimate your logic, and maybe even make you go on a religious crusade. But that sense isn’t deeply felt in any of the characters. Instead, we’re given their base-level tragedy and not much else. Outside of Sebastián, are any of them religious? Do they blame God for what happened? The film is in such a rush to create a quick binary between Sebastián’s mission and this group of people that it doesn’t bother to get us to care about them. 

It doesn’t help that much of the mystery and intrigue that accompanied the concept from the previous “Bird Box” evaporates here. Rather the primary goal is for these survivors to trace their way through Barcelona to a set of gondolas that’ll take them to Montjuic Castle, where there are rumors that survivors are hiding out. Sofia’s mom might even be among them. 

Along the way, Sebastián must, of course, grapple with his faith. But that internal conflict lacks dramatic tension. The same can be said about the horror aspect. “Bird Box Barcelona” is cut with assured hands by editors Luis de la Madrid and Martí Roca and shot with a watchful eye by cinematographer Daniel Aranyó, but there’s a general dearth of shocks. That bite is even absent from the film’s final race to the gondolas, where Sebastián and the survivors must square off with the head of this doomsday cult. Its leader, a bearded man with a third eye branded on his hand, is so barely sketched he might as well be a figment of Sebastián’s mind.      

There’s nothing inherently bad in the Pastors’ film. It’s competently made with the general sheen you expect from a bigger budget. You are, however, left scratching your head about what another sequel could bring that this one clearly couldn’t. No one in this cast is as dynamic as Bullock, nor is anything as tightly conceived as in the prior film. If seeing is believing, “Bird Box Barcelona” doesn’t have much to show.

On Netflix tomorrow, July 14th.

Two years ago, writer Ed Solomon and director Steven Soderbergh collaborated on one of the best noirs in years with “No Sudden Move.” The pair are back with another twisty tale of buried secrets and double-crosses with Max’s “Full Circle,” a six-part limited series with a phenomenal cast and expectedly ace direction. There are a few too many coincidental twists in this tale for it to be as taut as the best of the genre, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that a feature runtime would have forced a paring of the script that would have fixed this problem. But there’s so much to like here that its sins can be forgiven. 

“Full Circle” opens as what seems like a relatively straightforward kidnapping drama, almost as if it will be Soderbergh’s take on something like Ron Howard’s “Ransom.” The son of a wealthy family is kidnapped. Except, well, not really. Things go very wrong from the beginning of this complex scheme, orchestrated by Guyanese power player Mahabir (CCH Pounder), who speaks of closing a circle to remove a curse. You see, the powerful New York family has ties to an incident in Guyana many years ago, and so the kidnapping is more than just a typical money grab—it’s an act of vengeance. Much of the most interesting material in Solomon’s script works from the idea that people often act out of more than one self-interest.

At first, Derek (Timothy Olyphant) and Sam (Claire Danes) presume that the abduction of their son Jared (Ethan Stoddard) is purely for financial gain. After all, Jared’s grandfather is a celebrity named Chef Jeff (Dennis Quaid). The abductors, which include Mahabir’s nephew Aked (Jharrel Jerome), his ex-girlfriend Natalia (Adia), and teens named Xavier (Sheyi Cole) and Louis (Gerald Jones), demand an odd sum: $314,159, which Jeff notes is the start of the numerical value of pi. It’s an easy amount of money for this incredibly well-off family to get, and Derek is soon racing around town with a bag of cash. However, something’s gone wrong from the very beginning that I won’t spoil. I’ll only say that decisions must be made quickly, and not everyone here seems capable of making the right ones.

Dragged into this drama is an officer of the United States Postal Inspection Service named Harmony (Zazie Beetz), who is investigating a series of insurance scams perpetrated by Mahabir and her crew. When she’s not butting heads with a slimy superior Manny, played perfectly by Jim Gaffigan, or breaking up with her girlfriend, the spectacularly named Melody Harmony is playing Columbo, drawing the lines that connect Mahabir, Aked, Sam & Derek, and even her boss. It’s a tale of remarkable connections between characters that sometimes stretches credulity, but the robustness of Soderbergh’s filmmaking holds it together. Whether it’s sweaty close-ups or liberal use of a very Bernard Herrman-esque score by Zack Ryan, “Full Circle” is a great example of how much craftsmanship one of the best American filmmakers brings to everything he does.

Soderbergh is also a consistently underrated director of performance, and there are several stand-outs here. There could almost be a feminist read of this tale given how not only are Manny, Jeff, and Derek’s skeletons about to come tumbling out of their closets, but they seem radially incapable of holding their own lives together as the tensions rise. Olyphant, Gaffigan, and Quaid are all excellent at capturing this privileged naivete without turning their characters into caricatures. Danes can do “harried professional” in her sleep, partially because she’s so good at it. As she realizes the connections that give “Full Circle” its shape, Danes deftly sells some late-series moral conundrums necessary for the show’s endgame. Beetz nails the playful tone of a woman who knows she’s smarter than the professional situation she has found herself in—working for a jerk—and it’s her ability to sell Harmony’s quick decisions that gives the piece much momentum. Finally, Jerome is perhaps the best of the series, giving Aked a desperation that feels truly dangerous.

The final episode is a bit of a letdown in that the series has built so much tension to that point, only for it to stall when it still has to close a few loops. Having said that, the final image is one of Soderbergh’s best closing shots, a reminder that this has all been about long-term consequences and that things have a habit of finding their way back to where they began.

Whole series was screened for review. “Full Circle” premieres on Max tomorrow, July 13^th.

“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.