Multiplex Madness
Inside Out 2
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Genre: Comedy, Fantasy
Director: Kelsey Mann
Starring: Amy Poehler, Maya Hawke, Phyllis Smith, Lewis Black, Liza Lipera, Tony Hale, Ayo Edebiri, Kensington Tallman
The original Inside Out is my favorite Pixar movie, one of my favorite animated movies, and a contender for best movie of the last ten years. That's where I stand going into Inside Out 2: with impossible expectations. But Pixar has turned unlikely sequel potential into pure ugly-cry fuel before. Just look at every Toy Story movie. Except maybe Lightyear.
We venture back into Riley's head, as we see her emotions manifest as living beings once more. Now hitting puberty, several new emotions join the group in Riley's mind, led by Anxiety, who could lead Riley down a worse path. Inside Out 2 does a good job continuing the themes of emotional balance of the previous film, and the concentrated depictions of anxiety are strong and the center of the film's emotional weight. I find myself more subdued on it over the first film because it just never hits nearly as hard. It has good moments of emotional vulnerability and a strong core, but it lacks the heaviness and imagination of the first film. A lot of its settings and landscapes are things we've already seen, and while there are a couple of new offerings, there isn't anything that equals the pure creative playfulness that we got previously. But it's almost unfair to ask a movie to play at such a high standard, even if it is a direct follow-up. Inside Out 2 is a movie that works, and fans of the first film will likely respond to it and possibly hold it to high regard. Inside Out 2 isn't nearly as effortlessly beautiful and poetic as the first film, but as a high-concept comedy, it's still a splendid entertainer that is both funny and heartfelt.
Latency
⭐️⭐️
Genre: Science Fiction, Horror
Director: James Croke
Starring: Shasha Luss, Alexis Ren
This tech-based supernatural horror sees a professional gamer named Hana using an experimental neural device to win a video game competition, only to begin seeing ghostly apparitions in her apartment. Hana suffers from agoraphobia, but also has workout montages to make sure the viewer knows that despite her anxieties, she is still hot. She is emo, young-adult drama pretty and somehow has more video games in her early-thirties than Angry Video Game Nerd in his entire career (she still has a functioning Game Boy that she plays daily, which, by itself, is impressive). Sasha Luss gives an almost good performance, but her main problem is that she slips in and out of her natural Russian accent that she's trying desperately to downplay. Premise-wise, the movie is a surreal allegory for feeling trapped in one's own personal space by one's phobias, while the tech and gamer twist adds a bonus theme of technology addiction. They do a lot with the confines of its one set, and it's almost inspiring. There are some solid spook scenes where we see ghosts fade in and out of mundane backgrounds, though it tends to get undercut by the fact that most of its big scares is just screaming at the audience. But the movie acknowledges this, see, because Hana's screenname is "Banshee" and she's being haunted by an actual banshee. The moments of inspiration feel gutted by the film's slip into delusion, as the third act is reality-bending chaos that works overtime to feed its allegory rather than come together in a sensible way. There is a swing here of making something high-concept with a thin budget, but it's not paying off. While the movie isn't all that good, I like its plucky spirit.
Tuesday
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Genre: Drama, Fantasy
Director: Daina O. Pusić
Starring: Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Lola Petticrew, Leah Harvey, Arinzé Kene
It might look like one of those super weird experimental movies that A24 likes to distribute (if nothing else, advertisements often reminded me of the movie Lamb), but Tuesday is a far more straightforward movie than one might assume. The film sees a girl who is about to succumb to her terminal illness, only to make friends with Death himself as he is about to take her. She asks to see her mother, played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, one last time, who complicates the situation by refusing to let Death take her. The movie is a contemporary version of one of those fables where a person has a conversation with death, just with a giant parrot representing the supernatural being. The movie's primarily a look at looming mortality and grief, though it tends to be too on-the-nose to be a genuine allegory. Writer/director Daina O. Pusić steps up to the plate with big ideas conveying personal stakes. These ideas can overwhelm her, sometimes causing the movie to ramble and ponder when only a few words would suffice. Tuesday isn't a movie that breaks new ground on the "Yup, we're all gonna die some day" corner of arthouse cinema, but it's a well-made and passionate entry into it.
Treasure
⭐️⭐️1/2
Genre: Drama, Comedy
Director: Julia von Heinz
Starring: Lena Dunham, Stephen Fry, Zbigniew Zamachowski
Based on the 1999 novel Too Many Men, Treasure sees Lena Dunham attempting to take a trip to Poland to see locales of her family's history, only to be accompanied by her father, Stephen Fry, at his insistence. Dunham and Fry hit the road as a uniquely awkward pairing, and a lot the film's humor comes Fry's abrasive nature steering Dunham's deadpan calmness through an environment that she's unfamiliar with. The drama, on the other hand, plays into Fry's repressed trauma, as Dunham desires to understand her history while they're visiting sites that unpack a heavy load of memories that Fry would rather forget, many of which are Holocaust related. The movie is quite touching and heavy at the best of times, and endearingly funny as well. It also tends to meander and sometimes lacks a forward sense of momentum to really keep the audience invested. Dunham and Fry are excellent, regardless, and the material can give them the strength to overcome that. One just wishes it was more consistent and providing that for them.
Movies Still Playing At My Theater
Bad Boys: Ride or Die ⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Fall Guy ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
The Garfield Movie ⭐️⭐️1/2
IF ⭐️1/2
The Watchers ⭐️
Young Woman and the Sea ⭐️⭐️⭐️
New To Digital
I Saw the TV Glow ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2
Unsung Hero ⭐️1/2
New To Physical
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire ⭐️⭐️1/2
Immaculate ⭐️⭐️
Stopmotion ⭐️⭐️
Coming Soon!
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