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Reviews of movies showing in theaters or streaming online
‘FEAR’: “Fear” is a COVID19 movie and a contagion film and a haunted house story rolled into 100 feverishly stylized minutes. The film would be a tortured metaphor for the ways in which we all allow fear to rule our lives and how we manifest what we focus on, for better or for worse, but it’s not so much a metaphor as it is plainly and repeatedly stated throughout. Joseph Sikora stars as horror novelist Rom, who takes his girlfriend Bianca (Annie Ilonzeh) on a weekend getaway in Northern California as a reprieve from the pandemic lockdown. They arrive at the rustic Strawberry Lodge, and as he’s about to propose, he blanches and falters, instead revealing that he has invited their group of friends to celebrate Bianca’s birthday. They’ve got the historical lodge to themselves for the weekend, and seriously, don’t worry about the incredibly creepy innkeeper who leaves them a terrible bottle of wine, or the detailed stories that Rom tells about the miners who tortured and killed indigenous women thought to be witches. As the friends confess their phobias around the campfire as a means of catharsis, the story unfolds every which way. 1:40. 1 ½ stars. — Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service
‘INFINITY POOL’: Alexander Skarsgard plays James Foster, a writer with an inferiority complex. Having published one novel, he’s on vacation with his wife Em (Cleopatra Coleman), the publisher’s daughter, looking for something to combat his writer’s block. Inspiration, or something like that, walks into his life in the form of Gabi (Mia Goth), a fan of his book, she claims, and soon the couple are dining, dancing and escaping the heavily fortified resort compound for a beach picnic with Gabi and her husband, Alban (Jalil Lespert). While James is tipsily navigating their illegally rented convertible back to the resort, the headlights malfunction, and he hits and kills a local farmer, triggering his descent into the unique and dystopian legal process of the impoverished, religious and conservative Li Tolqa. He’s sentenced to die for his hit-and-run, ordered to be executed by the man’s young son. But for a hefty fee, the police can create his “double” or a clone, to be killed instead. Would he prefer to be executed? The only catch? He has to watch. 1:57. 4 stars.
— Katie Walsh
‘A MAN CALLED OTTO’:
The “Grumpy Old Men” era seems to come for all of our lovable movie stars, including Tom Hanks, who easily slides into this new phase with “A Man Called Otto,” a remake of the Oscar-nominated Swedish film, “A Man Called Ove.” It’s not easy to translate the famously dry and somewhat bleak Scandinavian humor to a sunnier, more optimistic American worldview, but writer David Magee and director Marc Forster manage to maintain the melancholy of the original film, which is based on the book by Swedish author Fredrik Backman. Set in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, “A Man Called Otto” is a story about the loss of human connection in a modernized and rapidly changing world, and the effort it takes to knit a community through the ties that bind: personal ones. It is also a story about the transformative nature of grief, and the beauty and cruelty of life lived in
moments both mundane and monumental. 2:06. 2 ½ stars. — Katie Walsh
‘MAYBE I DO’: In the romantic comedy “Maybe I Do,” a young couple played by Emma Roberts and Luke Bracey debate whether marriage is in their future. She’s all in; he’s all “What?!” But this bland, beautiful duo might as well be an afterthought. The star attractions are their respective parents, played by rom-com veterans, including Diane Keaton, Richard Gere and Susan Sarandon. Rounding out the foursome is William H. Macy, and you have a quartet of seasoned stars who manage, despite the script’s shortcomings, to generate some light absurdist sparkle and emotional nuance as two late-in-life couples dealing with relationship issues and extramarital dalliances of their own.
1:35. 2 stars. — Nina Metz, Chicago Tribune
‘M3GAN’: A straightforward horror flick that doesn’t blink while simultaneously jabbing the audience in the ribs, “M3GAN,” more often than not, and
indeed, right away, is a comedy before it’s a horror movie. It opens with a guffaw, teasing the audience with a laugh before a jarring smash to violence and trauma. The unique tone is anchored by star Allison Williams, who has surprisingly become one of our best horror leading ladies, bringing her signature brand of eerie camp to such films as “Get Out,” “The Perfection,” and now “M3GAN.” Williams’ skillful intentional affectlessness renders her characters slippery, difficult to pin down into preordained binaries of good and evil. In “M3GAN,” Williams is a Dr. Frankenstein type, playing Gemma, a toy designer with a savant-like skill for robotics. She’s toiling over a Purrpetual Petz prototype for her demanding boss at Funki Toys, when she receives the call that her sister and brother-inlaw have died in an accident and she’s to assume guardianship of her niece, Cady (Violet McGraw). Career-oriented Gemma isn’t quite sure how to connect with a kid, and so she revives her scrapped project, M3GAN (played physically by Amie Donald and voiced by Jenna Davis) as a sort of pal for her lonely, grieving niece. 1:42. 3 stars. — Katie Walsh
‘MISSING’: This movie takes some absolutely wild and crazy twists and turns arriving at its destination. College-bound
June (Storm Reid), 18, just wants to rage with her friends while her mom, Grace (Nia Long), is on vacation in Colombia with her new boyfriend, Kevin (Ken Leung). But when a hungover June rolls into LAX to pick them up a week later, Grace and Kevin are a no-show. Relying on her impressive Google skills, innate to a digitally native member of Gen Z, June starts searching for her missing mom, combing through tourist live cams, bank statements and hiring a TaskRabbit-type helper, Javi (Joaquim de Almeida), to do footwork on the ground in Colombia. The swift and suspenseful “Missing” plows through nearly two hours of shocking plot twists at a breakneck pace, and while it’s entertaining to be sure, it also takes on a somber tone as it reckons with grief, loss and intimate partner violence in a way that’s very real, backed up by headlines ripped from the news, and yes, those true-crime series and TikToks that are so very compelling. 1:51.
2 ½ stars. — Katie Walsh
‘NO BEARS’: The facts are stark. In 2010, discouraged at one of its native artist’s insistence on pushing boundaries and making Iran look less than ideal on film, the Iranian government slapped writer-director Jafar Panahi with a 20-year ban on moviemaking. He was also confined within Iran itself, with no travel beyond its borders.
Last July, after the completion of his fifth clandestine feature project in 12 years, Panahi was imprisoned just before Iran’s civil unrest and mass protests boiled over, for a time. The director is to serve up to six years. How does an artist with a camera keep going under those conditions? An ingenious, subtly anguished answer to that question, Panahi’s film is both an act of self-assessment, with the filmmaker assuming the role of himself, and a crafty drama of suspense, identity and the perils of what we do for love. 1:47. 4 stars. ‘YOU PEOPLE’: It’s not quite peanut butter meeting jelly, but the idea of Kenya Barris and Jonah Hill getting together to make a movie is pretty appealing. Barris is the creator of the well-received and recently concluded ABC sitcom “Black-ish” and its spinoffs, “Grownish” and “Mixed-ish.” His feature-writing credits include 2017’s hilarious “Girls Trip.” Hill is the comedically gifted actor known for movies ranging from “Superbad” to “The Wolf of Wall Street” to “Don’t Look Up.” They co-wrote the romantic comedy, with Hill co-starring — alongside Lauren London — and Barris making his feature directorial debut. In it, Black meets white and, to a somewhat lesser degree, the Muslim faith clashes with Judaism. What could go wrong? Streaming on Netflix. 1:58. 2 ½ stars.
RATINGS: The movies listed are rated according to the following key: 4 stars, excellent; 3 stars, good; 2 stars, fair; 1 star, poor.