The Media Tourist

Kirsten Dunst plays a photojournalist in a battlezone that hits uncomfortably close to home

Kirsten Dunst & Cailee Spaeny in ‘Civil War.’

Civil War
Starring Kirsten Dunst, Cailee Spaeny, Wagner Moura & Stephen Henderson
Directed by Alex Garland
Rated R

In theaters Friday, April 12, 2024

As a team of journalists traverses a country that’s become a deadly battlefield, what they witness looks all too familiar to things we’ve seen on the evening news. But this war is different: It’s here, and it’s now—or it could be.

Set in an unspecified future that looks very much like today, Civil War follows a war-weary photographer (Kirsten Dunst), her adrenaline-junkie colleague (Wagner Moura), a young newshound wannabe (Cailee Spaney) and an older rival reporter (Stephen Henderson) on a perilous trek to the nation’s capital, where they hope to interview the besieged U.S president (Nick Offerman) before D.C. and the government fall to insurrectionist forces.

Civil War never defines or specifies the fractious divide that led to American-vs.-American infighting, but instead plunks us—and the characters—smack-dab down in the messy midst of it. There’s talk of successionist states, treason, an Antifa massacre and the disbandment of government agencies, but no direct reference to politics, parties or people. The movie suggests that, when war breaks out, ideology gets boiled down to brutal basics—an endless, senseless loop of kill or be killed, shooting because someone else is shooting at you.

Which side are you on, and what kind of American are you? It’s a loaded question, and how you answer it might cost you dearly.

It’s intentionally unnerving, unpleasant and terrifying as the journalists make their way toward Washington. Along the path of destruction, they see a crumbling civilization well on its way to collapse. A fuel stop off the interstate reveals a gruesome gas-station Gitmo; enemy hostages are hooded and executed by firing squad; highways are littered with abandoned vehicles and bodies; bombed-out buildings smoulder.

American currency is practically worthless, like “Confederate” dollars after the War Between the States—the original Civil War—ended in the 1860s. Civilians are armed with assault rifles, and Jesse Plemons adds another character to his growing catalogue of creep-out roles. And young Cailee Spaeney crawls out from a pit of corpses, which is even ickier than what she had to do as Elvis’ child bride in Priscilla.

It’s about war, yes, but it’s really about seeing war, watching it through the photos and videos of reporters in the line of fire, who risk their lives to reveal it—in the Ukraine, in Iraq, in the Persian Gulf, in Vietnam. It’s about journalism, the free press, and the media. Maybe you’ve heard that confidence in media has plummeted to an all-time low. That’s not good, but at least it’s not to the point where, as in the movie, we hear about journalists being shot on sight—at least not yet. That would give a whole new meaning to “deadline.”  

The movie asks how much death and destruction can you watch, through a camera lens or faraway, on a screen, before you become numb, burned out or even perversely pumped about what you’re seeing—images of suffering, barbarity and inhumanity. And what happens when those hard-hitting images—from those far-away places—hit a lot closer to home?

Director Alex Garland has made unsettling, thought-provoking movies before—Ex Machina, Annihilation, Men. But Civil War is in a league of its own. It’s an expertly crafted homeland horror show, an in-our-face wake-up call for a nation that seems to be on the precipice of a similarly polarized abyss, with no bridges left to cross.

Think it couldn’t happen here? Think it couldn’t happen a second time? Civil War pointedly asks us to think again.

—Neil Pond

After 40 years, the spooky-fun franchise feels like it’s run out of ‘Ghostbuster’ gas

Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire
Starring Paul Rudd, Carrie Coon, Finn Wolfhard & McKenna Grace
Directed by Gil Kenan

In theaters Friday, March 22

Time to strap on those proton packs—here come the Ghostbusters, again.

Has it really been 40 years since the first Ghostbusters, back in 1984? Yep. Hasn’t there already been a couple of sequels (1989 and 2021), an all-female reboot (2016) and a slew of spinoff cartoons, comic books, theme park attractions, toys, and a hit song by Ray Parker Jr.?

Yep, yep, yep and yep.

So, is there any afterlife left in this spooky sci-fi comedy franchise?  Frozen Empire reunites stars from the original movie with later sequels for a gang’s-all-here retread of familiar faces, snappy quips, supernatural hijinks and Scooby Doo-ish scares that works hard to connect four decades of nostalgic movie dots and ghostbusting lore from before. It will likely find a decent audience of true-blue fans who dig its boisterous, noisy amusement-park vibes, but this overcrowded mashup and its complicated, convoluted plot feels like a franchise that may have finally run out of ghostbusting gas.

In this latest romp, the extended family of newbie ‘busters (Paul Rudd, Carrie Coon, Finn Wolfhard and McKenna Grace) have relocated from the Midwest (in Ghosbusters: Afterlife) to New York City (the original setting), where they join forces with OG stars Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson and Annie Potts when an ancient artifact unleashes a malevolent force that threatens to turn the world into a giant ice cube. Is it getting cold in here, or is it just a banished Byzantine demon doing his Mr. Freeze thing?

New additions this time around include Kumail Nanjiani and Patton Oswald, who provide bits of comedic freshness to the somewhat stale shenanigans, in which much of the fun is choked out by the overloaded, overcooked plot. Emily Alyn Lind (she was young Tanya Harding in I, Tonya) plays a chess-loving friendly ghost (no, not Casper) with an agenda of her own, furthering the teen-misfit plotline of Phoebe Spengler (Mckenna Grace). Turns out Nanjiani’s character has ties to a long-ago group of Old World ghostbusters, and if you’ve ever wanted to see the prolific actor/comedian in Mesopotamian body armor, hurling fireballs at a giant horned demon, well, here’s your chance.  Some classic spooks (the cartoonish Slimer) make encore appearances, along with new apparitions (like the Hell’s Kitchen Sewer Dragon). There are all the gizmos—proton blasters, ghost traps, the Ectomobile converted hearse and the Ectocycle. There’s a bunch of cutesy little marshmallow men, the bite-size spawn of the movie’s original menace, the gigantic Stay Puft monster that lumbered through Manhattan.

Aykroyd blathers earnestly about parapsychology, Murray looks bored and bemused, and Rudd plays the decent, do-the-right-thing kinda guy that’s become his acting trademark. Potts gets a handful of lines, but not much else. And I’m not sure what to make of one of the movie’s other new “characters,” a spirit called the Possessor, which can take over inanimate objects. Honestly, the Possessor doesn’t seem much of a threat, inhabiting a garbage bag, a folding chair and a tricycle. And by all appearances, ghosts and those who bust ‘em have all but taken over one of North America’s most bustling, heavily populated metropolises, muscling out everyone except a scant handful of pedestrians and ordinary citizens. Or maybe the film spent all its budget on ectoplasmic dodads, and couldn’t afford to hire a lot of extras.

In an early scene, one of the kids (Wolfhard) complains that he’s not getting paid for being a ghostbuster. “We’re all being paid,” Rudd’s character tells him, “in memories.”

Memories are about all that Ghostbusters seems to have left in this sequel that does little to recapture the magic or fresh comedic surprises that were once essential ingredients, as necessary as green slime. Like you’d feel after scarfing a bagful of little marshmallow men, it’s mostly running on empty movie calories.

—Neil Pond

Kristen Stewart stars in a gritty neo-noir story of muscles, mullets and murder

Love Lies Bleeding
Starring Kristen Stewart, Katy O’Brian, Ed Harris & Dave Franco
Directed by Rose Glass
Rated R

In theaters now

There’s love, lies and bleeding aplenty in this gloriously gritty love story about two young women, toxic family ties and good things that go bad and keep getting worse.

In her second feature film (after the acclaimed Saint Maude in 2019), British director Rose Glass bears down on mullets, muscles and murder in late ‘80s America, where a mousy gym manager, Lou (Kristen Stewart), falls for a hunky female bodybuilder, Jackie (Katy O’Brian). Pretty soon there’s hot sapphic sex, crazily bulging biceps, Ed Harris caressing a caterpillar, and a growing body count at the bottom of a smoldering New Mexico gorge.

It all meshes in the bold, brutally unpredictable twists of Loves Lies Bleeding, which (in case you’re wondering) has no connection to the Elton John song of the same title from 1973’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. The road in this movie is a dark desert highway, and the movie barrels down it with bruising neo-noir propulsion as Lou and Jackie find themselves falling ever deeper into each other, bound together in a hopelessly tangled web of lust, rage and vengeance, and racing to cover up a crime.  

The performances are all wowza. Stewart adds to the growing breadth of her wide-ranging career arc, from swooning over sexy vampires and werewolves in the Twilight flicks to her Oscar-nominated starring role as Princess Diana in Spencer. O’Brian, who’s had roles in The Mandalorian and a couple of Marvel movies, flexes her real-life background as a former bodybuilder into full, brawny play as Jackie, who dreams of oiling up and winning a big competition in Las Vegas. Ed Harris (above) is pure seething menace as Lou’s estranged father, sporting a Crypt Keeper ‘do and determined to keep the skeletons of his violent past buried.

There’s also James Franco is a philandering sleazeball and Anna Baryshnikov, who costarred in the AppleTV+ series Dickenson, as the local meth head, Daisy, whose sexual obsession with Lou becomes a fatal attraction.

It’s wild and wicked and crazily original; bodies pile up so quickly, I became concerned that Lou wouldn’t have enough rugs to roll them in and dispose of them all. When Jackie’s muscles bulge and enlarge and pop out of her skin, like the biceps of the Incredible Hulk, we’re not to meant to take it literally, but rather as a hyper-visual projection of her escalating emotions. When James Franco beats his wife (Jena Malone) so badly she ends up in the hospital, well, he’ll find out he shouldn’t have done that. And when Harris’ character crunches down on a beetle, it just shows how he’s one badass, beetle-biting hombre that you don’t want to mess with.

Throughout the movie, Jackie shoots herself up with steroids; Lou even holds the syringe, with no judgement. “Your body, your choice,” she says. The raw, visceral thrills of Love Lies Bleeding might not be everyone’s choice for a soothing afternoon matinee. But for more adventurous moviegoers, it’s a buckle-up blast about the things we do, and might do, for love—blood, lies and all.

—Neil Pond

New country music movie gets some things right—and a few wrong

The Neon Highway
Starring Beau Bridges & Rob Mayes
Directed by William Wages
Rated PG-13

In theaters Friday, March 15

In The Neon Highway, an aspiring singer-songwriter (Rob Mayes) hitches up with a washed-up former country legend (Beau Bridges) to get a song recorded in Nashville. But the “new” Nashville has changed a lot since yesteryear, and the two aren’t exactly greeted with open arms when they get to Music City. It’s a modest little music-centric melodrama with humor, heart and hope, a B-movie about second chances that features cameos by a handful of real-life music-makers, including Pam Tillis, Lee Brice and former BR-549 front man Chuck Mead, providing a backdrop of authenticity.

Bridges, a veteran actor with more than 200 movie and TV roles, gives his character, Claude Allen, an aura of weary experience, worn down by the grind after the hits have stopped coming. Mayes has done primarily television work and even released several singles as a singer-songwriter, which meshes with his role as Wayne Collins, whose fledgling career never recovered from a tragic setback several years ago. His song, “The Neon Highway,” is about hitting the road, taking the stage and performing again—a dream both characters share.  

But The Neon Highway is a bit off-key, alas, in its depiction of Nashville and its best-known export. For starters, it doesn’t look like Nashville, mainly because it was filmed almost entirely in Georgia, home to director William Wages, a former cinematographer turned TV director who’s also one of the film’s cowriters. There are no identifiable Nashville landmarks, but there is a plug for Leopold’s, the Georgia-based ice cream company owned—not coincidentally—by the film’s producer.

But one thing in particular rings realistically true: The rejection and indifference felt by Wayne and Claude when they get to Nashville is echoed by the experiences of thousands of songwriters and artists who know how rough the road to success can be. The movie hits some flat notes with cliches and hokum, and often seems dated about how the wheels of Nashville’s modern music business really turn; record execs, for instance, don’t dress like Urban Cowboy extras from the ‘80s, with Western shirts and rodeo-size belt buckles. And whatever the “sound” of Music City might be, wafting on the breeze as Claude and Wayne arrive on the outskirts of what the movie pretends is Nashville—well, it’s likely not a sonorous violin version of “Danny Boy.”

In the movie, Wayne’s job—as an installer for a telecom company—proves a novel (if highly unconventional) way of getting his song released. Don’t give up your day job, as the old showbiz adage goes.

Bridges, as movie fans likely know, has a younger brother, Jeff, whose long string of popular films include The Big Lebowski, Iron Man, Tron: Legacy, the Coen Brothers’ remake of True Grit, and his own country music movie, the well-received Crazy Heart. Both actor sibs have also dabbled in music, and they’ve made a handful of flicks together; one of them, The Fabulous Baker Boys, was nominated for four Oscars. Hey, maybe they should reteam for a movie about country music singers Buck Owens and Dwight Yoakam—and call it The Fabulous Bakersfield Boys. Just a thought.

The Neon Highway means well and it has its heart in the right place, somewhere in there between three chords and the truth. And it definitely does show how, as another old Nashville songwriting adage goes, it all begins with a song—even when things look a lot like Georgia. 

—Neil Pond

Return to ‘Dune’ is a sandy sci-fi spectacle with overtones of a scarily familiar world

Dune: Part Two
Starring Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Austin Butler, Florence Pugh, Josh Brolin, Javier Bardem & Dave Bautista
Directed by Denis Villeneuve
Rated PG-13

In theaters Friday, March 1, 2024

Summon your sandworm! One of the most anticipated movies of the year has arrived.

Returning director Denis Villeneuve’s sequel to his 2021 blockbuster certainly won’t disappoint fans of the acclaimed sci-fi franchise (which was also turned into a movie in the 1980s, and later two TV miniseries). It’s a spectacular, sprawling extravaganza that shows the remarkable effects, star-studded casting and thrilling big-screen world-building wallop a budget north of $120 million can get you.

It looks epic and feels epic—mainly because it is epic, a gobsmacking, action-packed, emotionally stirring return to the characters and story based on author Frank Herbert’s 1960s novel about humanity’s future on a distant colonized desert planet called Arrakis, sometimes known as “Dune.” And it sounds epic too, thanks to another masterful soundtrack by Oscar-winning Hans Zimmer, whose grandiose orchestrations perfectly underscore the excitement, danger and drama onscreen.

You heard of “dry counties.” Well Dune is even dryer, a dry planet where water is so precious, it’s extracted from dead bodies on the battlefield. The superheated desert air and relentless sun aren’t so great for humans, but they’re fine for the sandworms, monstrously large carnivorous alien creatures that burrow just underneath the surface. The desert dwellers on Arrakis use the gigantic worms as transport, summoning them with sounding devices then jumping aboard, clamping down and holding on, surfing the sandworm highway.

And sandworms are fundamental to the reason anyone lives on Arrakis, where the nightmarishly inhospitable conditions favor a secretion of the worms called mélange, or “spice.” It was discovered millennia ago to be a psychoactive narcotic that can make life better for humans in many ways, including precognition, seeing what’s coming before it gets there. And the whole ecosystem of the planet depends on harvesting the sparkly sandworm stuff.

The Duneverse, as it’s called, is dense with its own language, nomenclature, characters, history, mythos and symbolism; it might remind you of Lord of the Rings star-crossed with Game of Thrones and The Empire Strikes Back in a massive movie sandbox—and if you just happen to wander into it unaware, you may feel a bit overwhelmed and lost in the desert. It’s about nomads and royals, blood feuds and civil wars, enemies and allies, rebels and renegades, faith and hope, spies and traitors, and a world with a rigid, sometimes cruel caste system of slaves, barons and emperors. It’s about a love story that starts in a sand-swept cauldron of war, generational grudges and power struggles, and a people who’ve been promised “paradise” and look for a messiah to lead them there.

Even though the story is set in the distant future, it has overtones and undertones of our past, and even our present—conflict, religion, politics, exploited resources, war machines on the move. One side dehumanizes the other as “rats” to be exterminated, refusing to acknowledge them as human. The desert setting gives a definite vibe of the Middle East, where “spice” could be seen as a metaphor for oil, and people have been in-fighting for, well, centuries. Dune: Part Two draws comparison to some familiar territory—Hitler’s rallies, the atrocities of the Roman arena, holy wars, and even modern geopolitical, genocidal situations.

It’s a richly detailed, fine-tooled sci-fi depiction of a culture and a people in a faraway futuristic world that nonetheless looks and feels a lot like our own—what our world has been, and what it could again become.

And the cast—wow. You probably won’t see more stars in one place this side of the Milky Way, with many of them reprising previous roles. Timothée Chalamet leads the ensemble as the heralded heir of a disposed royal house, continuing to seek revenge on the conspirators who destroyed his family. Zendaya is Chani, a young desert warrior who falls in love with the exiled duke. Austin Butler (above) is a million movie miles away from Graceland (and his all-American Elvis swagger) in the role of a psychotic, ghost-faced sexy-beast villain. Stellan Skarsgård is a fat-cat baron who’s often seen soaking in a tub of black ooey-goo goop. (Hey, this is Arrakis, not the Catskills.) And then there’s Florence Pugh, Josh Brolin, Dave Bautista, Christopher Walken, Rebecca Ferguson, Javier Bardem, Charlotte Rampling and Léa Seydoux. It looks like everyone wanted to be in this movie. Even Anya Taylor-Joy makes a “surprise appearance.” It’s almost easier to name actors who aren’t in it.

So, sci-fans, the wait is over. Come for the stars, stick around for the sandworms. And stay tuned for even more: Dune Part 3 is already in the works.

—Neil Pond

Bob Marley biopic undersells the story of reggae’s global superstar

Bob Marley: One Love
Starring Kingsley Ben-Adair & Lashana Lynch
Directed by Renaldo Marcus Green
Rated PG-13

In theaters Wednesday, Feb. 14

The new movie about the late, larger-than-life Jamaican superstar depicts Bob Marley bringing reggae music and his Rastafarian mindset to the masses, becoming an almost messianic figure to fans and followers around the world. Focusing on one relatively narrow but significant segment of his life 1976-1978, it shows him as a family man, a rebel caught in the middle of the fractured politics of his home country, a Utopian musical shaman and an adherent to Biblical signs and symbols.

We hear Marley talk more than once about the Lion of Judah, making an Old Testament reference central to the Rastafarian religion.

But unlike a lion, this movie feels rather timid, failing to soar—or roar—with the depth or drama of other hit musical biopics, like Rocketman (Elton John), Ray (Ray Charles), Get Up On It (James Brown) or Bohemian Rhapsody (Freddy Mercury). We see Marley survive an assassination attempt, stage two concerts for peace, smoke prodigious amounts of ganga, release his groundbreaking Exodus album, and muse on his white-Englishman father, who abandoned little Marley when he was a just a lad. We see Marley when he learns he has a rare form of melanoma from an old soccer injury. But the story unfolds in what feels like a mostly haphazard, episodic fashion, showing us things that happen with little connective tissue or real consequence, and the movie never breaks out of its meandering biopic blahs.

In a repeated flashback, we see young Marley as a boy running from a literal ring of fire—without ever really knowing what it’s supposed to mean or represent. But the movie itself fails to catch fire and show us where Marley’s passion for peace was rooted, just how he became an emblem of laid-back, rasta-fied global groovery, or what made his music so uniquely popular in Jamaica and beyond.

British actor Kingsley Ben-Adair gives a solid, all-in performance as Marley, convincingly delivering dialogue in the singer’s Caribbean creole dialect and mimicking his ragdoll-like swept-away-in-the-music onstage movements. Lashana Lynch—who might be recognizable to Marvel fans from her recurring role as Maria Lambeau in MCU movies—is even better as Marley’s wife, Rita, especially in a scene where she smacks him for his infidelities and his unawareness of how he’s becoming corrupted by his success. “You swallow pollution, you get polluted,” she spews, her eyes ablaze.

We hear renditions of Marley’s greatest hits, including “Three Little Birds,” “I Shot the Sheriff,” “One Love,” “Jamming,” “War,” “Redemption Song,” “Get Up, Stand Up” and “No Woman, No Cry,” songs with potent messages—of rebellion, reckoning and reconciliation—that made him a musical hero to millions before his death in 1981, at the young age of 36.

Bob Marley: One Love was made with members of late singer’s family—including wife Rita and son Ziggy—involved as producers (along with Brad Pitt!). That kind of close-range, “hands on” might have steered the director and the project away from some of the broader, nitty-gritty that would have made it feel more lived-in and authentic, and less “deifying.”  

You may be happily “Jamming” to the jaunty sounds of this play-it-safe movie portrait, but music’s rasta messiah would have been better served by a more adventurous, more multifaceted flick about a complicated man and the music that became his message, and his mission.

—Neil Pond

New spy spoof purrs along with crazy action, an all-star cast, a cat in a backpack…and rumors of Taylor Swift

Argylle
Starring Bryce Dallas Howard, Sam Rockwell, Henry Cavill & Bryan Cranston
Directed by Matthew Vaughn
Rated PG-13

In theaters Friday, Feb. 2

The greater the spy, the bigger the lie.

That’s a phrase you’ll hear several times in this frisky tale of double agents, triple crosses, sexy sleuths and golly-whopping lies, and how a popular, fan-favorite author of espionage novels literally becomes part of the spy-lit stories she’s famous for writing.

Bryce Dallas Howard stars as reclusive writer Elly Conway, whose character of agent Argylle (Henry Cavill) is a superstar in the fictional spy genre—an impossibly handsome, dashing dreamboat secret agent on the trail of a sinister global criminal syndicate. When Elly gets writer’s block about how to wrap up her latest Argylle novel, she’s suddenly, surprisingly swept into the literary world she’s created, finding out that perhaps it’s not so fictional after all.  

Argylle is a crazily creative riff on the spy-action genre, with winks and nods to a lot of things we’ve seen onscreen before, from James Bond romps to Mission: Impossible stunts and John Wick’s hyper-stylized, close-range ultraviolence. But it’s also totally and uniquely its own, zip-zapping and zig-zagging with twists and turns, feisty humor and some wowza sequences, including a battle royale with improvised ice skates on an oil slick and a slo-mo shoot-‘em-up ballet inside a colorful smoke-grenade cloud.

The cast is full of familiar faces, and they all look like they’re having a ball. Sam Rockwell is a hoot as a real-life superspy with a deep secret, or two—or maybe three. There’s also a dastardly duplicitous turn by Bryan Cranston, Samuel L. Jackson as a basketball-loving, wine-aficionado counterspy, and Schitt’s Creek’s Catherine O’Hara along with John Cena, plus singer-actors Ariana Dubose and Dua Lipa. Just about everyone is pretending to be someone else, or hiding something, or both, or more. There’s computer hacking, skull-cracking, screwball romantic comedy and a plot sweetly serenaded by “Now and Then,” the final Beatles song, and some classic dance-floor groove-ery by Barry White. Oh, yeah, and Dua Lipa on a motorcycle, with a machine gun.

And one very cool cat. Elly’s constant companion is her Scottish fold feline, Alfie, who spends most of the movie inscrutably going along for the wild ride, peering through the porthole in her backpack decorated with Scottish, argyle-pattern diamonds. But when Alfie gets out, watch out for those claws (and the same for Elly!). Alfie isn’t agent Argylle, but he anchors the movie with his presence—not to mention some of its best gags. Hello, kitty, indeed!

British director Matthew Vaughn certainly knows his way around a labyrinth of spies and deception, peppered with high-octane violence and zingy Brit wit, as he demonstrated in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Snatch, and The Kingsman and its two sequels. (Stick around for the credits and see the movie’s shoutout to the spy world of The Kingsman, plus how Argyll is connected.)

Speaking of connected, there’s been a lot of buzz about how Argylle might be connected to cat-loving superstar Taylor Swift. Bryce Dallas Howard let the cat out of the bag when she admitted that the director was “inspired” by a photo of Swift with one of her cats—a Scottish fold—in a backpack, just like the one strapped to Elly in the movie. Swiftys have buzzing about how perhaps the whole movie was even ghost-written as a side project by the hitmaking singer-songwriter. (It wasn’t, the director insists.)

“I don’t know who to trust,” Elly says, her eyes opening wide to the crazy swirl of danger and deception in which she’s found herself. But trust me on this: You’ll have to open your eyes and see Argylle for yourself to sort out the lies from the spies, the facts from the fiction, and tap into the cool-cat vibes of this high-spirited, creatively fresh spin on a time-tested genre. And Argylle might not turn out to have nine lives, but it’s supposedly meant to set the stage for at least two more installments.  

It’s a delightfully preposterous, big-budget popcorn movie with the improbable power to unite action lovers, espionage buffs, cat fanciers and Taylor Swift fans, wrapping them all up in the merry mayhem of flying bullets, multi-layered mystery and the sweet bow of a Beatles swan song.  

And, yes, great spies, big lies, huge surprises and lots of fun!

—Neil Pond

A classic teen comedy gets fletch new faces and a zippy new musical spin

Mean Girls
Starring Reneé Rapp, Angourie Rice, Auli’I Cravalho & Christopher Briney
Directed by Samantha Jayne & Aururo Perez Jr.
Rated PG-13

In theaters Friday, Jan. 12

It’s time to go back to high school with this zippy new musical spin on a teen-comedy classic.

The revamped Mean Girls combines the storyline, deets and characters of the original film—released 20 years ago—with songs and showtunes from its later incarnation as a Broadway musical, which opened in 2018 but shut down two years later due to the COVID pandemic.

And it’s unquestionably grool.

That means groovy and cool, for anyone un-hip to the many memorable lines from this oh-so-quotable coming-of-age tale about a young math nerd, Cady (Angourie Rice), who becomes an unlikely competitor to her high school’s alpha female, Regina George (Reneé Rapp), while joining Regina’s tight clique of bratty hangers-on (Bebe Wood and the mono-monikered Avantika).

Mean Girls fans—especially the next-gen crowd to whom the new film is clearly targeted—will spot a host of recognizable fresh faces. Rapp is a 24-year-old singer/actress who’s reprising her leading role from the Broadway version; she also plays Leighton Murray in Mindy Kaling’s teen-comedy Max series The Sex Lives of College Girls. The Australian-born Rice got her start in The Nice Guys with Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe, and she’s also appeared in Spider-Man: Far From Home, Sofia Coppola’s remake of The Beguiled and alongside Miley Cyrus in an episode of the horror anthology Black Mirror.

Christopher Briney, who plays Cady’s dreamy crush—and importantly, Regina’s ex-boyfriend—Aaron, also stars in the Prime YA video series The Summer I Turned Pretty. Tina Fey, whose script provided the quippy zing for the 2004 film, reprises her original role as math teacher Ms. Norbury, along with fellow SNL alum Tim Meadows, who once again mines the low-key hilarity of the school’s ever-unamused principal Duvall. Fey also joins Lorne Michaels, the iconic producer of Saturday Night Live, as a co-producer—financing the bottom line of this production, where Mean Girls means serious movie business.  

Cady’s friend Damien (who’s “almost too gay to function”) is revitalized by a scene-stealing Jacquel Spivey, who honed his award-winning, Grammy-nominated chops in musical theater. Auli’i Cravalho, who plays Damien’s bestie and Cady’s art-nerd pal Janis, previously provided the soaring voice of Moana in Disney’s 2016 animated musical fantasy.

There are loads of fan-favorite callbacks to the original film (which sparkled with now-indelible performances from Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, Amanda Seyfried, Lacey Chalbert and Lizzy Caplan). Watch for a very special cameo at the math competition! But this new Mean Girls stakes its own claim as a top-notch new adaptation with a vibrant singing cast and some truly standout performances, especially from Cravalho, Rice and Rapp in absolutely showstopping numbers like “World Burn,” “Revenge Party,” “I’d Rather Be Me” and “Someone Gets Hurt.”

Tina Fey almost breaks into a song; Fargo’s Jon Hamm (below) doesn’t come near it, but he certainly makes the most of his two scenes as Coach Carr, who pulls no punches as he hits below the belt in the health class he also teaches. (I can’t wait to see all his outtakes in the bonus materials when the movie comes to Blu-ray.)

It all adds up to a mile of smiles, an engagingly witty cautionary tale about the bubbling caldron of peer pressure, snobbery, gossip and backstabbing fibbery that is—and has always been—high school, wrapped now in catchy songs and an uplifting teen-spirit message about true friendship and acceptance, and never pushing anyone in front of a bus.  

And if anything can, indeed, make fetch happen, it’ll be the infectious musical fun of Mean Girls. So get in, loser!

—Neil Pond

Awards-buzz drama about connection, revisiting the past, loss and two men who find each other

All of Us Strangers
Starring Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Claire Foy & Jamie Bell
Directed by Andrew Haigh
Rated R

In theaters Friday, Dec. 22

A struggling writer embarks on a fantastical journey back into his childhood in this gorgeously rendered existential meditation on loss, loneliness, memory and the power of love. All of Us Strangers is a wild ride full of feels in which past and present overlap and intertwine, time is fluid and fleeting, and Adam (Andrew Scott) gets to go home and visit again with his parents—who died in a car crash some 30 years ago, when he was just about turn 12.   

Is he hallucinating? Seeing ghosts? Did he fall into some kind of quantum-leap afterlife loop? How does his neighbor in his high-tech high-rise apartment complex, Harry (Paul Mescal), fit into things? There are more questions than easy answers in British director Andrew Haigh’s metaphysical, mind-bending adaptation of a 1980s Japanese novel with horror-story undertones.  

As Adam reconnects with his parents (Claire Foy and Jamie Bell, in smashingly good performances), he reenters a world that’s exactly how he remembers it, when he was a little boy. And mum and dad naturally want to know how he’s been, what’s he’s been doing, what kind of grownup he’s become. After all, they’ve been out of his life for a long time.  

So they’re not really prepared when Adam tells them he’s gay, in a relationship with Harry.  

That’s the crux of this improbable tale, as Adam’s gobs-smacked wonder becomes an emotional, heart-tugging reunion with parents who now realize they weren’t as supportive of their then-young son as they should have been, turning a blind eye to the bullying he endured and the loneliness he felt as a child. It’s left a hole in Adam’s heart.  

But as he’s nursing that deep wound, the void is being filled by his new relationship with Harry. They learn they share similar feelings of estrangement, as if being queer made them outcasts from their families, like strangers in their own homes. And two lonely people find each other in a world that can be indifferent or even hostile. Two lonely people who happen to be gay.

Scott, who played Professor Moriarty on TV’s Sherlock, and Mescal, who drew raves for his role last year in the acclaimed Afterlife, are both extremely committed to their characters in this exceptionally moving journey together, exploring a love and connection as vast and unknowable as the universe, as deep as infinity, yet as intimate and close and thrilling as the soft touch of bare skin. It’s a love powerful enough to transcend time and space.

And as Adam gets a rare, unbelievable opportunity to say a tearful goodbye that he never got the opportunity to say before, all that love becomes a cosmic thing, fuel for the universe, a glowing star in the thread of eternity.  

—Neil Pond

Zac Effron puts on the true-story tights of a wrestling family dynasty

The Iron Claw
Starring Zac Efron, Jeremy Allan White & Lily James
Directed by Sean Durkin
Rated R

In theaters Friday, Dec. 22

There can be a lot going on inside a wrestling ring—villains and heels, good guys, tough girls, cartoonish personas, flamboyant feuds, deep grudges, bucketfuls of trash talk. But there’s a lot going on outside the ropes, too, in this muscular movie saga about one of wrestling’s most successful real-life family dynasties.

The Von Erichs, a Texas-based clan of brothers and their father, dominated the sport in the late 1970s and early ‘80s. But their triumphs on the mat were swamped by waves of tragedy at home. Many wrestling fans spoke of “the Von Erich curse,” a grim reaper that seemed to relentlessly stalk the family.  

The Iron Claw opens with the eye-opening sight of Zac Efron, bulked up to balloon-ish proportions to portray Kevin Von Erich, the first sibling to follow the pro-wrestling footsteps of his father, whose signature wrestling “move” was a one-handed clampdown on an opponent’s face he dubbed The Iron Claw. If you ever wondered what the former star of High School Musical would look like with an ornately sculpted, Herculean body like He-Man or the Hulk, and a bowl-ish ‘70s haircut to match, well, wonder no more.

Kevin’s brothers Kerry (Jeremy Allan White, above, from TV’s The Bear), David (Harris Dickenson, now starring in the FX series A Murder at the End of The World) and Mike (Stanley Simmons) also become wrestlers, working to develop their father’s Iron Claw “finishing touch,” the unbreakable grip that almost always led to a quick end to a match.

We learn that the family’s firstborn, Jack Jr., died by drowning at the age of 6; he’s absent throughout most of the movie, but we meet him briefly in an ethereal “afterlife” scene. (The movie does not portray or mention at all another brother, Chris, who took his own life with a handgun in 1991.) But by 1993, five of the six brothers were dead, succumbing to suicide, drug overdose or disease. It’s a Greek tragedy written in spandex, served with a Texas twang.  

Holt McCallany, who played FBI agent Bill Tench on TV’s Mindhunter, is terrifyingly good as the Von Erich patriarch, Fritz, who also rules with an Iron Claw at home. The Affair’s Maura Tierney is his stoic, God-fearing wife, Doris, saying goodbye to her sons one by one. Lily James loses all traces of her proper British accent as Pam, the Texas belle who becomes Kevin’s wife, trying to calm his worries that he will pass on the dreaded family “curse” to their children.

It’s a walloping tale cloaked in woe, but the performances are gripping, and the wrestling sequences have the meaty slap, slam and thud of authenticity. You may not know a piledriver from a German suplex or a gutbuster drop, but, man, they all look convincingly uncomfortable here. The movie also depicts the heightened, hyped-up showmanship of the sport, with combatants huddling before matches to go over their “choreographed” moves; one cautions his opponents, “Don’t f*ck too much with my hair.” Afterward, they all go out for drinks and split up the night’s proceeds.

Songs by Tom Petty, Rush, Eddy Money, John Denver and Blue Öyster Cult add to the movie’s spot-on look and feel as the decades unfurl.  

Was there a Von Erich curse? Or was everything that befell the family just an unfortunate cascade of accidents, combined with risky behaviors, macho toxicity, the high-impact lifestyle of wrestling, and the psychological pounding the Von Erich boys took from their tough-as-nails father? This brawny-lad, testosterone-fueled tale won’t bring you much festive holiday cheer, but it packs a powerful punch with its often touching, true-life saga of sibling wrestlers held together in another kind of unbreakable grip—brotherhood.

—Neil Pond