Thesummer movie seasonis nearly upon us, but April still has one more Friday to win audiences over.
The Circle
Now playing.
As Mae gets sucked deeper and deeper into The Circle (more Kool-Aid, c’mon!
), she becomes less and less convincing and sympathetic.
If we can all see how baldly nefarious The Circle is, why can’t she?
And if she can’t, then why should we care about her?
Rotten Tomatoes: 22%
Metacritic: 43
Casting JonBenet
Now streaming on Netflix.
It’s a fascinating meditation on acting and empathy.
What it’s not is nonfiction.
A clever filmmaking experiment?
It’s a cliche superhero origin story.
Bo’s a street magician, but he’s also got powers.
(“How do I get nine grand by midnight tonight?")
You’d hope that a film like this could put a bold new spin on the superhero story.
), and an explosive hail-Mary finale so sublimely ridiculous it defies both good sense and gravity.
(It helps, perhaps, that several main players have no hair to singe.)
Consider the whole quotemarky “It’s just a joke!”
tone of online discourse, the rise of smirking insincerity as a political mode and an intellectual dialectic.
More than movies or theme parks, Disney has always been in the business of selling magic.
It’s more about the bedrock friendship between three lonely old men.
It’s a character movie, not an action movie.
And we’re always laughing with the characters, not at them and how old they are.
In the new version, Joe, Willie, and Albert watchThe Bacheloretteand get really invested the outcome.
They smoke pot with a gangster and get the munchies.
They attempt a practice heist on a supermarket and get away on a motorized old-folks scooter.
Ann-Margret even pops up as a horny, hot-to-trot grandma to lob lusty innuendos at Arkin.
I kept waiting for someone to make a joke about the size of his prostate.
Absurdity isn’t always the mark of simplicity, however.
