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FROM D13
THE FABELMANS
★★★★
PG-13, 151 minutes. Mystic Luxury Cinemas, Westbrook.
“I need to see them crash.” These are the first fated words of a future filmmaker, Sammy Fabelman (Mateo Zoryon Francis-DeFord), whispered to his mother, Mitzi (Michelle Williams) after he’s crashed his toy train after bedtime, inspired by his very first bigscreen cinematic experience, “The Greatest Show on Earth.” Mitzi instantly recognizes that re-creating the train crash is a way for young Sammy to exert some control over the fear he felt during the movie, and so she presents him with his father’s 8mm camera to capture, and replay, the crash. With this lesson on art as catharsis imprinted in his young mind, a movie director is born. In the deeply personal “The Fabelmans,” legendary filmmaker Steven Spielberg applies his artistic instincts to his own familial catharsis, turning his lens on his own upbringing, his childhood journey to becoming a filmmaker, and his parents. What could have been some kind of auto-hagiography is a playful, honest and ultimately gracious childhood memoir that derives its universal lessons from its specificity. “The Fabelmans” is simultaneously the story of how a filmmaker comes to be, the product of an artist and an engineer, and a reckoning with, or setting the record straight, about his parents’ relationship.
— Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service
INFINITY POOL
★★★★
R, 117 minutes. Through today only at Waterford, Lisbon.
Infinity pools are built as optical illusions, where water seemingly has no boundary, slipping into nothingness, bleeding into the horizon. There could be no better title for Brandon Cronenberg’s latest identity crisisas-body horror film, “Infinity Pool.” Set at a high-end all-inclusive resort in the fictional country of Li Tolqa, “Infinity Pool” is Cronenberg’s “Eyes Wide Shut” by way of “The White Lotus”; it is in conversation with “Triangle of Sadness,” but it also seems to be a deeply personal film about an artist confronting his insecurities and finding a transformation, of sorts, in pure abandon and submission.
— Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service
KNOCK AT THE CABIN
★★ 1/2
R, 100 minutes. Mystic Luxury Cinemas, Waterford, Westbrook, Lisbon.
It seems that M. Night Shyamalan has the end of days on his mind. A couple of years ago, he pondered the quandary of aging in “Old,” based on the graphic novel “Sandcastle,” by Pierre Oscar Levy and Frederik Peeters. In his latest film, he turns toward the apocalypse, or at least the idea of it, in “Knock at the Cabin,” adapted from Paul Tremblay’s 2018 horror novel “The Cabin at the End of the World.” Tremblay’s novel is terrifying in its unpredictability and ambiguity. Structured around a home invasion that takes place over the course of a couple of days, it explores the ways in which a stunning amount of suffering can occur if someone believes enough in their mission, misguided or not. “Knock at the Cabin,” adapted by
Shyamalan, Steve Desmond and Michael Sherman, is faithful to the source material until it is not, because this wouldn’t be a Shyamalan movie without his own original take on the ending. Shyamalan films are always perfectly cast, thanks to longtime casting director Douglas Aibel, who has worked with the director since “Unbreakable” in 2000, and “Knock at the Cabin” is no exception. There are no better actors to play the main trio than Ben Aldridge, Jonathan Groff and Dave Bautista, who tear into these challenging roles with an emotional and technical rigor. The rest of the small cast is uniformly excellent, including the incredible Kristen Cui in her first film role.
— Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service
A MAN CALLED OTTO ★★ 1/2
PG-13, 126 minutes. Through today only at Madison. Still playing at Mystic Luxury Cinemas, Waterford, Westbrook, Lisbon.
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 “The 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. If these lessons are all a little bit obvious, and somewhat maudlin, well, yes, they are, in “A Man Called Otto,” but that doesn’t make them any less effective.
— Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service
M3GAN HHH
PG-13, 102 minutes. Through today only at Westbrook. Still playing at Waterford, Lisbon.
Last fall the internet witnessed a rare phenomenon: the meteoric, memeified rise of a brand new star, catapulted into mononymic ubiquity thanks to a single two and-a-half minute movie trailer. But M3GAN isn’t your average girl — she’s a lifelike, powerful robotic doll equipped with machine-learning capabilities that makes a Tamagotchi look like child’s play. “The Terminator” in an “Annabelle” wig, Chucky by way of “The Bad Seed,” or the nasty little sister of “Ex Machina’s” Ava, M3GAN is equipped with a searing side-eye and snappy clapbacks. You can run, but you definitely can’t hide, so say hello to your newest horror movie obsession in the delightfully bonkers “M3GAN.”
— Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service
MISSING ★★ 1/2
PG-13, 111 minutes. Waterford, Lisbon.
In 2018, director Aneesh Chaganty and co-writer Sev Ohanian turned in a nifty little thriller, “Searching,” that commented on the way we live now, which is to say, online. In it, John Cho searches for his missing daughter through her digital detritus, parsing clues that lie in plain sight. The entirety of the film took place on a computer screen, making use of the way that cameras have permeated our everyday existence, from FaceTime to surveillance video. “Searching” was a critical and commercial success, and a sequel, “Missing,” is hitting theaters with a story by Chaganty and Ohanian, directed by Nick Johnson and Will Merrick, who wrote the screenplay as well. This time, the parent goes missing, as a daughter searches for her mother, turning up a whole host of new terrors and triumphs of tech and true crime. Johnson and Merrick utilize the format set by “Searching,” but the technological, cultural and media landscape has evolved, including the fire hose of streaming true crime content — the only time the camera is ever liberated from the laptop screen is during fake-out recreations from a Netflix true crime series called “Unfiction.” There’s also the proliferation of TikTok detectives and Twitter police performing armchair analysis on every missing person case. If you’ve seen “Searching,” you’ll probably have an inkling that the answer will be planted in front of us, but “Missing” 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.
— Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service
PLANE ★★ 1/2
PG-13, 126 minutes. Waterford, Lisbon.
The villains of the 2022 holiday season were the airlines, so it’s an apt moment for the Gerard Butler action vehicle “Plane” to take flight. The inciting incident involves a cost-cutting safety checker at Trailblazer Airlines insisting that Captain Brodie Torrance (Butler) pilot through a storm instead of around it in order to save fuel during a New Year’s flight from Singapore to Tokyo. Of course, since this is a Gerard Butler action film the passengers on Trailblazer Flight 119 don’t end up stranded for days in an airport but rather fighting for their lives on a remote island in the Philippines ruled by a separatist militia whose primary source of income is hostages. Not to worry though, because Butler’s Brodie isn’t your average airline pilot, he’s an airline pilot who can kill bad guys with his bare hands. Plus, has backup in the form of Mike Colter, and the two actors make a fine, fun and appealingly masculine pair in “Plane.”
— Katie Walsh, Tribune News Service
PUSS IN BOOTS: THE LAST WISH ★★★ PG, 102 minutes. Westbrook, Lisbon.
Quick, without looking, guess how long it’s been since there’s been a Shrek movie or even a Shrek-adjacent one. Over a decade seems too long for such a popular franchise, right? And yet here we are, 11 years later, welcoming back Antonio Banderas’s swashbuckling feline in “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish.” No wonder he’s forced to think about his own mortality in this one — certain segments of the audience will be too when they realize how much time has passed. It wasn’t for lack of trying, but things were happening behind the scenes with various directors coming and going. Then Universal acquired DreamWorks and they went back to the drawing board under new leadership. Somehow television spinoffs kept coming. The good news is that the character is evergreen. And as soon as Banderas starts speaking, and singing, as his playfully egotistic character, it’ll feel like hardly any time has gone by at all. In “The Last Wish,” the ever-confident Puss in Boots is shaken to discover that he’s used up eight of his nine lives and, for the first time, has started worrying about his own death. It might seem a little dour for a children’s animated comedy, but when you start to think about other kids’ movies, it’s actually a quite common theme. Are they the anxieties of the middle-aged creators creeping out or an empathy machine for kids to think about the adults in their lives? Both? Does it matter? It’s a device to rattle our hero, who has a bounty on his head and a big, bad wolf (Wagner Moura) on his tail. First he tries out retirement life in a home with Mama Luna (Da’Vine Joy Randolph), in which he’s forced to behave like a cat — using a litter box (“so this is where dignity goes to die,” he says) and eating cat food as opposed to his stovetop cooking as a cover of The Doors’ “The End” plays in the background. But he gets a lifeline in the legend of a single wish in a star that’s fallen to earth and is waiting to be granted, sending him, Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek Pinault) and a gratingly earnest dog (Harvey Guillén) on an adventure to get said wish.
— Lindsey Bahr, Associated Press
TITANIC
PG-13, 195 minutes. Starts today at Waterford, Lisbon. Starts Friday at Westbrook.
The romantic epic is being re-released during its 25th anniversary year. WOMEN TALKING ★★★★ PG-13, 104 minutes. Starts today at Madison.
What happens when your home no longer feels like a home? When the rules of your life no longer make sense? When your body is not your own? When your children are not safe and neither are you? For a crime as old as sexual assault, we still struggle to find the language to talk about it. Sarah Polley knows the terrible truth about sexual assault and the criminal and civil justice system. In her book “Run Towards the Danger,” she writes about how she watched it unravel from the sidelines, in horrified silence at the advice of friends and lawyers, as a man she alleges assaulted her when she was 16, was found not guilty. The other women who claimed assaults publicly were deemed unreliable narrators, their memories imperfect. And so, for her extraordinary film “Women Talking,” she approaches this societal, cultural conundrum from a different angle and in doing so makes the conversation undeniable. The women in her film have no memory of the assaults. What they do have are bruises, blood and babies and a trauma so deep that they no longer feel like themselves. This isn’t helped by their faith, and the elders in their isolated religious colony who tell them that it was ghosts or Satan who did it, that they’re lying to get attention, or that it was an act of wild female imagination. One of the attackers is caught and this has led to a series of events in which three generations of women have 24 hours to decide what to do before they return, demanding forgiveness. Their three options as they see it are 1) do nothing, 2) stay and fight, or 3) leave. So, they talk.