Buzz Blog

Adam the First **
There’s an important distinction between “what is this movie about” from a synopsis standpoint and “what is this movie about” from a thematic standpoint—and while I can certainly explain to you the former, I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around the latter. It’s the tale of Adam (Oakes Fegley), a 14-year-old raised off the grid in a remote forest, who—after the death of the man who raised him (David Duchovny)—sets out with a list of three names to find out which one of them is his biological father. The schematic nature of the plot structure really dampens the sense of drama, because let’s face it, we know that that will be like a search for missing keys in the sense that dear old Dad is going to be in the last place Adam looks. But it’s never even clear what Adam is supposed to be learning from his non-fatherly encounters, or why the people in writer/director Irving Franco’s movie keep behaving in ways that are writerly contrivances. Fegley does his best to convey a mix of scrappiness and longing, even when Franco decides to use an interminable pan during one scene to focus on someone else’s response to an emotional meeting. The diversions into quirky sorta-comedy and violent confrontations make it all the more difficult to figure out who this movie is for, or what lessons we’re supposed to take away from it. Available Feb. 14 in theaters. (NR)

Bob Marley: One Love **
In a post-Walk Hard world, it is to the credit of director Reinaldo Marcus Green and his screenwriting team that their film biography of reggae legend Bob Marley (Kingsley Ben-Adir) doesn’t make all the mistakes represented in the now-classic genre satire; instead, they mostly make a bunch of new ones. Rather than tell a cradle-to-grave story, for example, they focus mostly on 1976-1978, with Marley already a star in his native Jamaica and trying to navigate the political divisions of that country as his popularity ascends internationally; in flashback, we occasionally see the early days of Marley’s music career, meeting eventual wife Rita (Lashana Lynch) and his conversion to Rastafari. Sure, we do also get some Walk Hard-esque moments, like the studio recording session where a specific song gets someone’s ears pricked up, or cameos by other artists of the era. And while It’s a bold decision to hinge a story of social upheaval around a character who is so generally mellow, Ben-Adir finds the vibe of Marley’s unique brand of zealotry, for better or worse. But for mostly worse, One Love plays out largely as a Rasta recruiting film, focused on spreading its message of racial justice and world harmony to a very specific audience, to the extent that its un-subtitled Jamaican patois is frequently incomprehensible. As an authorized biography, we do get the benefit of plenty of great music; we also get decisions that might eventually inspire its own very specific parody. Available Feb. 14 in theaters. (PG-13)

Madame Web **1/2
Sony keeps trying to build its own version of the Marvel Cinematic Universe out of third-tier characters connected to their Spider-man franchise, and maybe it’s only because <em>Morbius</em> set the bar so low that this entry seems kinda mostly okay. It’s the origin story of Cassie Webb (Dakota Johnson), a New York City paramedic circa 2003 whose latent ability to see future events manifests after an accident, and ties her up in the attempts by a villain (Tahir Rahim) to kill three seemingly ordinary teenagers (Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced and Celeste O’Connor) that he has foreseen will eventually be his superheroic downfall. The screenplay doesn’t spend much time establishing the specifics of our villain’s villainy, leaving a fairly bland antagonist at the center of things. But director SJ Clarkson—who oversaw episodes of the Netflix Jessica Jones and The Defenders  Marvel series—finds a straightforward narrative with its four motherless female protagonists, hooking into that time-honored “surrogate family” vibe of so many comic-book team stories. Johnson’s performance is fairly uneven, mostly because she always seems ill at ease trying to convey intensity, but a nice rapport eventually develops with that central foursome. And while this often feels like it should be the pilot episode for a TV series—only slightly different from the way most comic-book features are trying to launch or sustain a series—it’s at least a pilot episode that makes you think, “Well, maybe it’s worth checking out the next couple episodes.” Available Feb. 14 in theaters. (PG-13)

Oscar-Nominated Short Films—Animation ***1/2
One of the most satisfying things about this category each year is being reminded that “animation” offers avenues for creativity beyond the now-ubiquitous CGI of theatrical animated features. Only one of the 2024 nominees—War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko—is predominantly CGI, telling a simplistic story of a carrier pigeon transporting chess moves between opposing soldiers during World War I. In a program that also includes non-nominated shorts I’m Hip (from Disney veteran John Musker) and Wild Summon (an odd story that turns a nature film about the life-cycle of the salmon into a story of humanoid forms in wetsuits), the visual imagination is much more pronounced in stuff like Yegane Moghaddam’s Our Uniform, which uses articles of clothing as the background for an exploration of restrictive gendered dress-code requirements in her native Iran. Director Stéphanie Clément and writer Marc Rius offer the storybook hand-drawn style of Pachyderme, built on remembrance of a girl’s 9-year-old summer visiting her grandparents in the country. Multiple animation styles spark the story of Jared & Jerusha Hess’s Ninety-Five Senses, with Tim Blake Nelson providing the narrative voice of a man philosophizing about his unusual life. However, it feels like the likely winner is Tal Kantor’s Letter to a Pig, in which a Holocaust survivor speaks to a classroom of Israeli children; beyond the arresting animation style, its narrative about “othering” and parental lessons about what creatures are disgusting feels too timely not to resonate. Available Feb. 16 at Broadway Centre Cinemas. (NR)

Oscar-Nominated Short Films—Documentary **1/2
I’ll be honest: I’m not sure I know what makes for an Oscar-winning short documentary. Without feature-length to build either a narrative or the sustained force of an issue, do folks just want something cute and wistful like Sean Wang’s Nai Nai & Wài Pó, about the shared life of his two Chinese grandmothers? Maybe the goal is a hot-button topic like Trish Adlesic, Nazenet Habtezghi and Sheila Nevins’ The ABCs of Book Banning, even if it feels jumbled and often loses sight of its focus on kids responding to the idea of censorship. S. Leo Chiang’s Island in Between, about the island of Kinmen as a borderland in the conflict between his native Taiwan and mainland China, has the loveliest cinematography and great attention to detail, yet ultimately feels truncated. The Last Repair Shop, dealing with those who work on maintaining the free musical instruments in Los Angeles’s free program for schoolchildren, has the requisite emotional punch and a worthy topic, but does it matter that co-director Ben Proudfoot won this category already just two years ago? That leaves The Barber of Little Rock, from co-directors John Hoffman and Christine Turner, which has a great subject in Arlo Washington and his efforts to build a community bank and address economic disparity in the Arkansas capital, and its only really problem is that it’s the one that maybe could have (and should have) been a feature. But I wouldn’t ask you to bet on it. Available Feb. 16 at Broadway Centre Cinemas. (NR)

Oscar-Nominated Short Films—Live Action ***
In case you think this is a category marked by obscurities, there are a fair number of familiar faces in this year’s five nominees. That’s not so much the case with non-English language entries, like Vincent René-Lortie’s fact-based Quebecois story Invincible—a disappointingly underdeveloped tale about an angry teenager sentenced to a youth correctional facility—or Lasse Lyskjaer Noer’s Danish drama Knight of Fortune, which finds a wonderful mix of deadpan humor, real emotion and a recognition of varying kinds of grief in two men’s chance meeting at a morgue. But David Oyelowo headlines co-writer/director Misan Harriman’s The After, as a London man dealing with the aftermath of a family tragedy; his intensity levels up a story that’s otherwise somewhat lacking in a clear narrative arc. Red, White and Blue casts Brittany Snow as an Arkansas single mother on a road trip with her adolescent daughter to procure an abortion in a state where it’s legal; Nazrin Choudhury’s direction hits some obvious notes, but the subject matter alone should make it the favorite to win. And of course you can find Benedict Cumberbatch, Ralph Fiennes, Ben Kingsley and Richard Ayoade in Wes Anderson’s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar. While the latter might not even be the best of the four Roald Dahl-based shorts Anderson released to Netflix last year, his remarkable sense of stagecraft makes it worth a look—and even if you’ve already seen it, another look. Available Feb. 16 at Broadway Centre Cinemas. (NR)

The Taste of Things ***1/2
For approximately the first 30 minutes of writer/director Anh Hung Tran’s deliriously romantic feature, we watch the preparation and consumption of a single meal in an 1880s French chateau: head cook Eugénie (Juliette Binoche) bringing in produce from the garden and leading the preparations; the house’s master, gourmand Dodin Bouffant (Benoît Magimel), frequently assisting; a young would-be apprentice chef (Bonnie Chagneau-Ravoire) learning the ropes. The expression “food porn” has dominated discussion of this and other long stretches of The Taste of Things, but it feels almost cruel to reduce the experience to that level, as Tran—adapting Marcel Rouff’s novel La vie et la passion de Dodin-Bouffant, Gourmet—turns the act of sharing a love for something into pure visual poetry. The loose narrative involves the fact that Dodin and Eugénie have engaged in a decades-long love affair, with Eugénie having rejected several proposals of marriage even as she begins experiencing fainting spells. That relationship is the real heart of Tran’s film; as lovingly as the camera captures the preparation of food, it’s the expressions on the faces of those who take joy in creating and enjoying it that make it sing, juxtaposed with the ritual consumption of ortolans while hidden under a napkin. It all leads to a final exchange of dialogue that absolutely wrecked me, capturing what it means to be truly kindred souls. Available Feb. 14 at Broadway Centre Cinemas. (PG-13)