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Reviews of movies showing in theaters or streaming online
‘BENEDICTION’: In Terence Davies’ “Benediction,” a moving portrait of English war poet Siegfried Sassoon, the blessing bestowed is both literal and cinematic. While older Siegfried (Peter Capaldi) receives a blessing from a priest while converting to Catholicism, much to the chagrin of his adult son, George (Richard Goulding), the true benediction of “Benediction” is much more than just the on-screen ritual. The blessing of the film is the film itself, and the extraordinary grace that Davies extends toward his subject, a poet who made his pain public but had to keep his intimate life private. 2:17. 3 ½ stars.
— Katie Walsh, Tribune News Services
‘THE BOB’S BURGERS MOVIE’:
The long-running, award-winning Fox animated series “Bob’s Burgers,” created by Loren Bouchard, is an unassuming Hollywood success story. The arrival of a movie version, “The Bob’s Burgers Movie,” on big screens seems like just the icing on the cake, but the film is also a refreshing contrast to the kind of big screen spectacle that usually crowds theaters in the summer. The antics are wacky, the jokes are dense, and “The Bob’s Burgers Movie” is both nail-bitingly tense and genuinely moving.
It’s a story that demonstrates how family unity is a powerful force, and that small businesses are tantamount to preserving the fabric of a community. But most importantly, it’s hilarious, and it’s likely to make you crave a burger too. 1:42. 3 stars. — Katie Walsh
‘DOWNTON ABBEY: A NEW ERA’:
The new “Downton Abbey” film proclaims that it’s “A New Era,” but in actuality, it’s a real throwback. It’s not just that “Downton Abbey: A New Era” is a shiny replication of a world that’s nearly a century old, but it’s also a reminder of the world that we lived in when we loved “Downton Abbey,” those heady days of the 2010s when we gulped down seasons of the wildly popular, award-winning historical TV drama created by Julian Fellowes. Watching it feels like double escapism: to early 20th-century England, as well as to a pre-pandemic time. “Downton Abbey: A New Era” is a chaste, mannered soap opera that feels like a relic of another time in more ways than one, but perhaps, that’s the entire appeal. 2:05. 2 ½ stars.
— Katie Walsh
‘FIRE ISLAND’: It’s important for there to be bad queer rom-coms, because there are plenty of bad straight rom-coms. Every one does not have to be “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” or “Call Me By Your Name.” In this sense, “Fire Island,” a new movie written by comedian Joel Kim Booster and starring Booster and “Saturday Night Live’s” Bowen Yang, is important. Based on a script originally written for the doomed TV streaming app Quibi, and a plot that feels more like a gimmick than a passion project,
“Fire Island” is a mess with a few bright spots and some mildly funny jokes. It’s noteworthy that this is a movie with four Asian American leads, which is also important representation. In the spirit of “Pride and Prejudice,” written as a critique of marriage and class in Georgian England, it has thoughtful moments criticizing modern queer culture, its prejudices and its obsession with body image. But in the end, it’s unclear what the movie gained by conforming itself after a straight, white, English story. It’s a selfconscious movie that rarely goes deep, despite a few heartwarming moments.
And again, that’s OK — there are plenty of surfacelevel straight romances! Streaming on Hulu. 1:45. 2 stars. — Scott Greenstone, The Seattle Times
‘MEN’: “Visionary” is liberally used to describe directors these days, but if any filmmaker has earned the title, it’s writer/director Alex Garland, whose work has pushed forward some of the major trends in horror and sci-fi filmmaking over the past two decades. He penned the screenplays for “28 Days Later” and “Sunshine,” and directed the coolly intelligent “Ex Machina,” as well as the feverishly hallucinatory “Annihilation.” Garland uses genre to explore the nature of human existence, and the ways in which human beings struggle to connect across planes of being, both organic and mechanic. In his latest film, “Men,” Garland turns toward the domestic, finding the horror within the confines of the home, and ripping it out from within. With “Men,” Garland remains
rooted in the natural world, but in this folk horror riff, the events that unfold are so entirely unnatural that some images and concepts are impossible to unsee or forget. Garland challenges the natural order in order to examine the many monstrous forms that emotional abuse and trauma can take on a human being’s psyche, and he does so in a Grand Guignol of grotesquerie. Yet after all that blood and gore, too much remains mysterious about “Men,” as Garland poses big questions that remain unanswered. 1:40. 3 stars.
— Katie Walsh
‘OPERATION MINCEMEAT’:
With any war movie, the safe audience bet typically favors the immediate, graphic horrors of battle. Espionage makes for subtler, trickier storytelling. “Operation Mincemeat” takes as its subject a singular feat of deception cooked up by British intelligence in
1943. How decisively the operation turned the Allied tide against Nazi Germany
is up for historical debate. But the men and women of MI5 assuredly helped make the invasion of Sicily a key Allied military success. Streaming on Netflix. 2:08. 3 stars. — Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune
‘TOP GUN: MAVERICK’:
It couldn’t outmaneuver the pandemic enemy that delayed its release for two years, but “Top Gun: Maverick” can’t lose, really. It’s a pretty good time, and often a pretty good movie. It’s cozy. And it’ll be catnip for those eager to watch Tom Cruise flash That Look. What is That Look? It’s the half-smile of insubordination when a superior officer (Ed Harris or Jon Hamm this time) busts test pilot and congenital speedneeder Capt. Pete “Maverick” Mitchell’s chops, ineffectively. It’s The Look that goes with an eternally boyish voice and demeanor. Capt. Mitchell, who lives alone in the desert with his beloved Kawasaki motorcycle, is called to a new and time-sensitive duty by his old cohort Iceman (Val Kilmer), now a U.S.
Pacific Fleet commander. Maverick has three weeks to train a group of new
Top Gun aces to destroy a uranium enrichment plant in an unspecified but assuredly Slavic location. One of the trainees is Bradley “Rooster” Bradshaw (Miles Teller), the grudge-laden son of Maverick’s late radar intercept officer, Goose, played by Anthony Edwards back when. It’s silly-rousing enough to satisfy younger and older audiences alike. It may help to have hated the original, but I liked this one, even though it’s not so very different from the first. Thirty-six years from now, we’ll probably be watching Cruise teaching a new cadre of flying aces. Only the planet will have changed. 2:17. 3 stars. — Michael Phillips ‘WATCHER’: In Chloe Okuno’s stylish debut “Watcher,” the title refers not just to one person, but two, when the watched becomes the watcher, the stalker and stalked swapping places throughout the course of this chilly psychological thriller. Working in the vein of ’70s-style horror, Okuno’s “Watcher” is in dialogue with films like Roman Polanski’s “Repulsion” and “Rosemary’s Baby,” nods to Andrzej Zulawski’s “Possession” with its foreboding European setting, and features a Hitchcock blonde in Julia (Maika Monroe). But those films about vulnerable women caught in voyeuristic traps were all directed by men, and with Okuno, a female writer/director, telling the story, it’s a very different result, one that’s emotionally and ethically complex, but undeniable in its bold clarity. 1:35. 3 stars.
RATINGS: The movies listed are rated according to the following key: 4 stars, excellent; 3 stars, good; 2 stars, fair; 1 star, poor.