Buzz Blog

Flow ***1/2
We live in an age of ever-advancing filmmaking technology, but I’ll gladly sacrifice state-of-the-art for something that feels dedicated to basic, engaging storytelling principles. This minimalist, wordless animated feature from Latvian director Gints Zibalodis is set in a post-human world, where a solitary cat attempts to survive in the midst of an apocalyptic flood, eventually requiring the assistance of other animals like a capybara, a lemur and a previously-antagonistic dog. To say that the animation is primitive would be an understatement; some of the rendering feels like it could have come out of a 1990s Pixar short. Fortunately, that rarely matters, since the moment-to-moment adventures of the feline protagonist are presented so effectively, and with a keen sense of visual narrative-building. Zibalodis and co-screenwriter Matiss Kaza don’t explicitly anthropomorphize the animals—although some of them do seem strangely savvy about the concept of how a boat’s rudder works—nor do they go out of their way to explain either the absence of the humans, the possible cause of the flood or even the geography where a lemur and a capybara coexist in the same landscape. They’re simply concerned with a tale about how theoretical enemies can become allies in times of crisis, mixed with a good old-fashioned survival yarn. If there’s one lesson we’re learning in the AI era, it’s that no increase in computing capacity is a substitute for real artistic creativity. Available Dec. 6 in theaters. (NR)

Get Away **
It’s hard to explain what doesn’t quite work about this attempt at horror comedy without describing what it’s actually about—which the script by Nick Frost keeps hidden for most of its running time. Frost also stars as Richard, patriarch of a U.K. family—including his wife Sue (Aisling Bea) and two kids (Sebastian Croft and Maisie Ayres)—who decide to vacation on a Swedish island with a dark historical story, and where the locals appear none-too-happy to have outsiders visiting during the festival commemorating that tragedy. Initially, it appears that Frost and director Steffen Haars are taking a satirical swing at “folk horror” like Midsommar, skewering a kind of thick-headed cultural tourism oblivious to real-world awfulness. Then, at around the one-hour mark, the story takes an abrupt pivot, with a thematic idea that could have yielded interesting results if the filmmakers had really been willing to dig into it. Instead, the movie remains not particularly funny while wallowing in a gleeful display of spraying blood and graphic murder. Get Away shows a vague sense for what one of the scariest things in the world really is, but can only manage to treat it is a bit of a goof in service of a plot twist. Available Dec. 6 in theaters. (R)

Nightbitch **1/2
Here’s the thing about literary metaphor along the lines of Kafka’s Metamorphosis: It generally doesn’t work to present that metaphor in concrete images, and it really doesn’t work to repeat the meaning of the metaphor in literal dialogue. That’s the challenge faced by writer/director Marielle Heller’s adaptation of Rachel Yoder’s 2021 novel, in which an unnamed woman (Amy Adams) deals with the strains of having given up her artistic career to be a stay-at-home mom to her toddler son, with those frustrations manifesting in the possibility that she’s transforming into a dog at night. Adams’ performance finds some wonderful grace notes, never suggesting that her character is anything but a devoted, loving mother, and that such devotion can exist side-by-side with a desire for more from her life that that single role. The problem with Heller’s text is that it’s full of speeches—some of them actually taking place within the world of the movie, some just in our protagonist’s head—about the unfairness of societal expectations placed on women in general and mothers in particular, and how women through the generations have been hindered by those expectations, virtually none of which offer anything fresh or insightful on those subjects. It ends up feeling mostly designed to inspire applause breaks in its target audience of non-tradwife women, rather than evoke the primal sensations of the protagonist’s alter-ego. Available Dec. 6 in theaters. (R)

The Order **1/2
As sadly timely as it might feel to explore the horrors possible at the hands of White nationalists, this dramatization of real-life events from director Justin Kurzel and screenwriter Zach Baylin feels disappointingly lacking in a sense for what kind of story it wants to tell. Set in 1983-1984, it follows a veteran FBI agent named Terry Husk (Jude Law) who begins investigating a series of bombings and robberies in the Pacific Northwest, eventually connecting them to White separatist leader Bob Mathews (Nicholas Hoult) and his followers. The filmmakers spend a lot of time inside the world of Mathews and the Aryan Nation group with which he had become disillusioned, offering creepy insight as we watch them indoctrinate their kids. But they never find a rhythm in terms of incorporating Husk’s character into the story, playing coy with the nature of his health issues and his estrangement from his family in a way that doesn’t make the most of Law’s ferocity in the role. And then at times it feels like they want to lean into the story simply as a straightforward procedural crime narrative, including the antisemitism-fueled assassination of Denver radio personality Alan Berg (Marc Maron). The result is just too thematically jumbled—a little bit action movie, a little bit cop-on-the-edge character study and a little bit disturbing portrait of racism that doesn’t quite grasp how much more needed the latter part is right now. Available Dec. 6 in theaters. (R)

The Return **
Director Uberto Pasolini’s adaptation of the last section of Homer’s The Odyssey is a bit on the bloody side to be shown in a middle-school classroom, but otherwise it’s exactly the kind of lugubriously “literary” cinema that would cause any student to tune out within minutes. It picks up as Odysseus (Ralph Fiennes) washes up on the shores of Ithaca after years away fighting the Trojan War, discovering that his land has been paralyzed by his absence, and by his wife Penelope (Juliette Binoche) refusing to believe he is dead and marry one of her many suitors. Fiennes absolutely brings the necessary gravitas to the role of a military veteran reduced to the dead-eyed stare of one who wonders what all the death was for, and there’s certainly some juice to the scenes between him and his English Patient co-star Binoche. But otherwise, it’s often quite a slog—particularly any time the narrative needs to focus on Charlie Plummer’s pouty performance as Odysseus’s son Telemachus, but definitely not limited to those scenes. And the few occasions where Pasolini tries to amp up the action lack any real energy. In theory, it’s an attempt to humanize a classic by connecting it to modern anti-war narratives, but instead it just feels like a ready cure for adolescent insomnia. Available Dec. 6 in theaters. (R)

Werewolves *1/2
B-movies can be a hell of a lot of fun when they’re done right, but even unpretentious genre fare needs to make at least some effort at comprehensible world-building. This one opens by telling us that a year earlier, a “supermoon” triggered a latent mutation in a billion people, causing a mass werewolf near-apocalypse. Military veteran/molecular biologist Wes Marshall (Frank Grillo) is part of the team working on a cure as the next supermoon approaches, but (unsurprisingly), all hell breaks loose again. The action cuts back and forth between Wes and his widowed sister-in-law (Ilfenesh Hadera) and niece (Kamdynn Gary), establishing the kind of “family attempting to reunite” plot that has been at the core of innumerable disaster movies. But beyond the kinda chintzy werewolf effects and an editing rhythm that blunts nearly every big action sequence, this is a movie that simply never bothers with any internal logic about the behavior of its monsters or the world in which they operate. Are the wolves intelligent problem-solvers, or raging beasts? Should we care more about certain involuntarily-transformed wolves than others? What’s the deal with various subcultures that have emerged in the wake of the first event, but are dismissed within seconds? It’s just a lazy-ass screenplay, and that should matter whether you’re aiming for “A” or “B”. Available Dec. 6 in theaters. (R)

Y2K **1/2
I’m pretty sure I can see where director/co-writer Kyle Mooney was trying to go with his funky genre mash-up; I just wish it had been a little bit funnier or more insightful while trying to get there. The story opens on Dec. 31, 1999, with nerdy high-school juniors and best friends Eli (Jaeden Martell) and Danny (Julian Dennison) deciding to crash the popular kids’ New Year’s Eve party, and subsequently getting caught in the chaos when electronics start going haywire. What follows ends up feeling a lot like The Breakfast Club meets The Terminator wrapped in the skin of a stoner comedy, as a ragtag group of survivors—including geeky Eli, the homecoming queen (Rachel Zegler), the “freak” (Lachlan Watson), etc.—try to fend off the robot apocalypse by first figuring out how to accept one another. There’s some enjoyable stuff along the way, mostly in the creative carnage that breaks out at the party, plus Mooney’s own supporting performance as a dreadlocked video-store clerk. But while Mooney only occasionally resorts to wrestling his jokes from pointing at 1990s cultural touchstones—Enron! The Macarena! Slowly-loading dial-up Internet porn!—he also doesn’t find a lot to replace it with. And once you’ve grasped the idea that maybe the best hope for humanity is not to let technology prevent us from being human with one another, it starts to feel like kind of an ungainly ride even at just 90 minutes. Available Dec. 6 in theaters. (R)