FILMS from AFAR

Spencer plays straight woman to McCarthy's goofball antics in this fun, female take on the superhero genre. New ground is broken in terms of representation, but otherwise Thunder Force follows familiar formulas of "good guys vs. bad guys" with a comic twist, meaning its appeal to audiences will rest almost entirely on its stars. McCarthy invariably delivers the funniest lines and has the best pratfalls of Thunder Force, and her fling with Bateman's crab-man is priceless. She and Spencer, who seems a little less comfortable with the physicality of her role, make a great pair, and the script does a sufficient job of setting up their deep childhood bond and divergent paths. Memorable scenes include the duo crooning '80s ballads, squeezing in and out of their too-tiny Lamborghini, and reacting to Emily's grandma's conviction that they're secretly a couple. When Grandma Norma (Marcella Lowery) produces a wedding cake topper with two women, one Black and one White, Lydia cracks a joke asking which one is supposed to be her -- which is really the script's only reference to the two friends' different races. The fact that they're heavier, older, and a different gender from standard-issue movie superheroes is also treated as somewhat of a non-issue, outside of the Lamborghini gag and a couple of one-liners. That doesn't mean that the film, which was written and directed by McCarthy's husband, Ben Falcone (who also has a small role), avoids issues of identity or representation. Thunder Force sends a clear female empowerment message, including having a woman named Gonzales as the mayor of Chicago, and it pokes gentle fun at older generations' attempts to be respectful of changing social norms, like when Lydia stumbles over her words trying to ask Emily's daughter the gender of the people she dates. McCarthy's blue-collar, beer-guzzling, hard rock-listening, pro sports-watching Lydia is perhaps the film's biggest stereotype, and it wouldn't be hard to draw connections between real-life fear-mongering politicians and Cannavale's The King, but both comic portrayals are played for laughs, not jabs. And with purposeful mention of the villainous mastermind being captured alive at the film's close, Thunder Force leaves open the possibility of a sequel. Read the full review at Common Sense Media.

This optimistic, well-meaning coming-of-age film will leave feminist viewers cheering. Fans of co-star/director Amy Poehler are also likely to flock to Moxie. Poehler and her scriptwriters clearly tried hard to reach a diverse audience, learning from the mistakes of the 1990s Riot Grrrl movement that provided some inspiration for the film. Characters specifically talk about being more intersectional. It's a worthy goal, but there are moments when the film risks devolving into a grab bag of grievances. Still, just when you think Poehler may have cast her net too wide, she flicks it back with a self-aware wink, like Vivian's insistence that her mom give up milk, Lisa's prominently-placed NPR tote, or Claudia's polite concern that a Hawaiian-themed party doesn't feel "culturally sensitive." Poehler also knows to step out of the way and let the teen actors carry the film, which they do with plausibility and confidence, particularly leads Robinson, Pascual-Peña, Tsai, and Nico Hiraga as Vivian's love interest. Schwarzenegger is appropriately smarmy as the "mediocre White dude" bully with a "chokehold on success." And it was a smart idea at the script level to start the film with Vivian mulling over her college application essay, that rite of passage for college-bound high-schoolers who are expected to both summarize their lives and show themselves to be wholly unique. The problem introverted Vivian faces is writing about a "cause" she feels passionate about when she has thus far just gone with the flow, even when the flow may have felt wrong. Moxie is, at heart, a coming-of-age tale, and maybe also a generational one, since transitions are generally marked by eye-opening experiences and change. The film visualizes this in young women finding their voices, literally and figuratively. Despite Moxie's imperfections, those voices will speak to many. Read the full review at Common Sense Media.

Even with two riveting performances at its core, this dialogue-centered film organized around an arguing couple over the course of one night will either speak to you or not. And that will depend entirely on how interesting you find the two characters, Malcolm & Marie, and their stories and concerns. Their sparring over the course of the entire film can feel tiresome, and there are moments of real emotional cruelty and name-calling that could turn some viewers off. Yet the script also deftly reveals new layers of information bit by bit, explaining the roots of their rage as well as the contours of their deep mutual devotion. Malcom and Marie are flawed, scarred, and selfish. They're also smart, driven, and in love. As closing lyrics suggest, they're toeing a thin line between love and hate; the tagline deadpans they're "madly in love." In a film stripped down to the core of just two people expressing emotional turmoil, Washington and Zendaya are mesmerizing. The black-and-white cinematography is meant to convey elegance and sophistication, as is the modernist house, sexy black-tie attire, and the stylish cool of the movie's score. It may also carry some symbolism. The Black Malcolm is deeply, at points comically, concerned with the mostly White film critics' reactions to his film. He knows he needs their approval, but he bristles at the guilt-driven, elitist, pedantic, "academic nonsense" they spout. As Marie likes to point out, he's a walking contradiction: He worships "revolutionary" Spike Lee but comes from a privileged, intellectual family. "Not everything I do is political because I'm Black," he shouts, but Marie points out he's working on an Angela Davis biopic. He explodes in a lengthy diatribe about artistic freedom, railing against the boxing-in of filmmakers and their perceived ability or legitimacy to tell stories according only to static identities -- White, Black, male, female, trans, gay, and so on. "Cinema doesn't need to have a message. It needs to have a heart and electricity," he vows. Malcom & Marie has all three. Read the full review at Common Sense Media.

Sylvie's Love is a sweet, well-acted but overly packaged film that consciously reimagines mid-century Douglas Sirk-style melodramas with a Black cast and a Harlem setting. It's an interesting updating that many viewers will welcome, so long as they're comfortable suspending a certain amount of disbelief to be swept into its manicured world. The film's romanticized rendering of late 1950s and early 1960s New York has scrubbed the city so clean there are no pedestrians and the streets permanently glisten. Characters are always impeccably dressed, and Robert's smoky jazz milieu is as improbably clean-cut as etiquette-trained debutante Sylvie's world. This idealized portrayal is only finely cracked in a few specific scenes where the racial barriers and bigotry Black people still faced in the 1960s are referenced. As Sylvie and Robert begin to grapple with more grown-up troubles in the second half of the story, the film gains depth, even despite a general lack of subtlety (see Sylvie reading a copy of The Feminine Mystique soon after she's declared her independence). Thompson and football pro-turned-actor Asomugha bring a pleasing wholesomeness to their characters and carry the film with sincere performances. The soundtrack has its own starring role: this film is about love, but it's also about love for music, and it captures music's power to define eras, evoke memories, enchant, and enamor. Read the full review at Common Sense Media.

Sometimes a film manages to completely capture a specific place and time, yet simultaneously feel universal -- a story that is so relatable and true you sense it could happen anywhere, to almost anyone. This is the case with the captivating Norwegian movie "Oslo, August 31st," currently available on Netflix. From writer-director Joachim Trier ("Louder Than Bombs"), the film is at once a meticulous portrait of 20- and 30-somethings in modern-day Oslo, and a poignant psychological drama that viewers of any background can identify with. In a recent phone interview, "Oslo" First Assistant Director and Producer Hans-Jorgen Osnes acknowledged this duality was intentional. "We knew that we wanted to make a local story," Osnes said. "We wanted to describe the city we live in and that was a strong wish. But we knew that there were some real universal aspects to it." One of those universal aspects was that the film is based on a 1931 French novel, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle's "Will O' the Wisp" ("Le Feu Follet"), and was previously brought to screen by legendary French filmmaker Louis Malle in 1963's "The Fire Within" ("Le Feu Follet"), available as part of The Criterion Collection on Hulu. A Portrait of Loneliness The story follows a young man on his first day out of rehab as he revisits old friends and slowly spirals back into addiction and, eventually, suicide. In Malle's version, alcoholic playboy Alain (a charming Maurice Ronet) announces he will kill himself and spends his last day bidding adieu to friends in swinging 60s Paris. ​​Trier's protagonist, Anders (insightfully played by Anders Danielsen Lie right), surrenders after a series of dishearteningly frank reencounters reminds him of the opportunities he squandered and the relationships he left in tatters while on drugs. ​​Both men are tortured, vulnerable and entirely alone even when surrounded by people, parties and noise. A memorable scene played out to equally moving effect in each film sees the protagonist people-watching at a cafe, a resigned outsider eavesdropping on the hopes and dreams and everyday affairs of regular people. Another scene from both films has Alain/Anders attend a party with old friends where he is tempted by alcohol and women but filled with ennui over the pseudo-intellectual conversations of his bourgeois peers. Neither man seeks the sympathy of others, but each seems to be searching for a reason to stick around, to keep living. It's part of the story's lingering melancholy that neither finds one. Like the character's closest friends and loved ones, you hold out hope until the end that something or someone will change that destiny. Love Letters to Paris and Oslo Still, neither film wallows in gloom, a testimony to the appeal of the lead actors and the honesty of the tale, as well as to the elegant look of the two productions. Both films were shot on location, giving their cosmopolitan settings a prominent role. We follow the characters through city streets, cafes, apartments and parks. "Oslo" opens with snapshots of the capital city accompanied by voiceovers recounting memories of place, a foreshadowing sequence that ends with the controlled implosion of a central building.​​ The story takes place over the course of a single 24-hour, end-of-summer period. "For 'Oslo,' our main challenge was how to create a feeling of one day in a shoot that had a duration of six weeks," Osnes said. The crew raced against changing seasons. "We were working our way towards yellow leaves, so we shot daytime and exterior scenes first and then nighttime last." Many of the extras in "Oslo" were locals already on site who agreed to be filmed, according to Osnes. This infuses the movie with greater realism than its predecessor which, in true 60s Euro art film fashion, hosts a cast of eccentric supporting characters. Malle's black-and-white version flaunts the stylistic influence of the edgy, mold-breaking French New Wave cinema of its era. As a whole it feels more theatrical than Trier's film, the settings and characters more flamboyant than their Nordic counterparts, reflecting different styles, time periods, personalities and perhaps cultures as well. Trier, too, makes some unforgettable technical choices, including allowing dialogues to carry on after scenes have ended and positioning the camera so we're often looking in on Anders' life through frames created by tunnels, windows and doorways, underscoring his journey as well as his growing detachment. Haunting opening and closing images in "Oslo," for example, are shot through the fluttering white curtains of an anonymous hotel window overlooking a busy freeway. It's a view that conveys loneliness, transience and a certain peril all at once. It's the crux of the story, and the character's existential experience, in a single image.

Over the Moon combines magical locations, impressive animation, memorable musical numbers, sweet characters, and positive life lessons in a fairy tale about the boundless love of family. There are some flaws, including not enough screen time for the adorable Gobi, played by comedian Ken Jeong, and especially the abrupt change in tone and pace when Fei Fei leaves her immaculate, golden-hued Chinese village and rockets to the moon. Here she enters an imaginary space kingdom made up of candy-colored "lunarian" creatures and a goddess (voiced by Hamilton's Soo) who appears unexpectedly as a kind of pop artist. It's all a bit disconcerting, and can feel at first like you've stumbled into an entirely different movie. Things eventually even out as Fei Fei's adventures in the lunar wonderland begin to make sense. Secondary characters are also entertaining, especially humorous, defenseless sidekick Gobi (think Sven in Frozen) and incorrigible tag-along little brother Chin. The title of Over the Moon may have multiple meanings for this film: It can be an expression of love or excitement, and it's also the place where Fei Fei travels to open up her heart again (production design was partially inspired by Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon album cover). The title also hints at Georges Melies' early film adventure, A Trip to the Moon, an image alluded to in the movie. Lastly, it makes reference to the Chinese festival known as the Autumn Moon Festival. All of these aspects and inspiration combine in a layered production that feels in more ways than one like a labor of love. Read the full review at Common Sense Media.

The Midnight Sky is a film that tries to be epic but doesn't quite spend enough time with any of its characters to generate sufficient emotion. The two parallel storylines do have some interest. In one, a dying, grey-bearded Clooney evokes a combination of human frailty and save-the-species determination. His weary face and physical motions reflect the potential futility of the near-impossible journey he's set out on. It's unusual to see the leading man look so infirm, and this alone creates some intrigue to keep the otherwise slow opening scenes of Clooney shuffling around alone at an Arctic Circle observatory interesting. Ethan Peck also looks and sounds a lot like Clooney as the younger Augustine. In the parallel story, a group of astronauts steer their spaceship through unchartered space regions to get back to earth. We're meant to connect with each member of the crew through their relationships with each other and their individualized holograms of family life back home. But it's not quite enough to generate the emotion desired when the crew members suffer accidents or put themselves in harm's way. What films like this do have (and is likely better enjoyed on a big screen) is the creative and often quite beautiful invention of other worlds, or our own world made other. T he Midnight Sky has one other major facet to it, which is a prominent musical score by Alexandre Desplat that goes way beyond indicating moods and aims to inspire emotion all on its own. Read the full review at Common Sense Media.

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom is a tough film made more emotionally intense by the actors' soulful performances and the hard truths at the core of the story. Even if you didn't know the script was based on an August Wilson play, you could guess at the film's theatrical roots in its character focus, dialogue-heavy scenes, and stagy settings (the few outdoor scenes, particularly Chicago's city streets, seem to look purposefully like sets). The closed spaces, so muggy-hot that the characters are sweating, feel symbolically restrictive, a manifestation of the oppression the Black characters have experienced all their lives. Their rage and weariness materialize especially in Ma Rainey and Levee. In one scene, Levee breaks down a door only to find himself at the bottom of an enclosed brick patio, with no way out. Davis brings a simmering resentment to her Ma Rainey. One smoldering look through her smeared, maudlin make-up sends the men around her scampering. It comes as a bit of a shock to see photos over the end credits of a smiling, clean-faced real-life Ma Rainey. Meanwhile, Boseman's final film before his untimely death from cancer shows the full range of his acting prowess. His Levee is at turns charming, sorrowful, boastful, angry, and violent. The solid character actors playing the musicians around him all have their own starring moments, but they seem mostly there to react to Boseman. Levee is a talented, flawed, and traumatized young man who deeply deserves a better past and future than the ones he's got, and Boseman's gifted performance, exuding a mix of youthful energy, vulnerability and fury, brings this to tragic life. Read the full review in Common Sense Media.

Check your cynicism at the door before attending The Prom, a teen coming-out tale stuffed into a glitzy tux and bedazzled with schmaltz and splashy musical numbers. If you do, you'll be rewarded with 132 minutes of undemanding and giddily self-aware entertainment. The all-star cast looks to be having a blast barging into rooms, scarves billowing, belting tongue-in-cheek lyrics about setting the cow-tipping Midwest folk straight and sharing the true message of Christianity. Don't fear: The film forces the pompous New York libs to face their biases too. Leave it to Indianapolis-born director Ryan Murphy, creator of Glee, to pay gently teasing tribute to the deep human necessity for the arts, the empathy-creating nature of high school drama clubs, and the ultimately good folks of Indiana (especially the moms) and Broadway all in one film. The Prom serves as a golden-hued showcase for Streep and Corden, who primp, strut, sing, dance and convincingly emote in scenes where their characters are obliged to reckon with their own shortcomings and pasts. Kidman oddly fades into the background in a subdued performance that may be fitting for her role as the long-overlooked chorus girl but feels less intentional than that. Key, Pellman, Washington, and the multifaceted Rannells all have their own starring moments or big numbers. As its many wink-wink lyrics suggest, this film knows some will suffer it like choking on a "syrup-soaked American flag." Others will welcome the escape from a more contentious reality to this fictionally wholesome place where people randomly break into song, unquestioningly dance in unison, and all just get along. Read the full review on Common Sense Media.

Fans of JD Vance's best-selling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, will appreciate how the film adaptation has brought some scenes and relationships from memorable page to screen. The verdant hill country of poor, white Kentucky; a fancy Yale dinner with a confusing array of cutlery; the vicious cycles of poverty, addiction, and abuse that are so difficult to break out of. As the end credits confirm with photos of Vance's real family, the filmmakers also did a remarkable job styling the actors to look like the real people they're portraying. Close is nearly unrecognizable as Mamaw and fully embodies the character. But none of this will matter as much to newcomers to Vance's tale, and the movie doesn't construct as compelling a life story as the source material did. Rather than telling Vance's tale chronologically, the script aims to draw parallels between turning points and key events in two key years of life, intermittently employing a voiceover for clarity. The parallels aren't particularly subtle, and chunks of Vance's life between high school and law school have basically been skipped over. A tunnel metaphor employed whenever characters enter or leave their decaying Ohio town feels a bit obvious. The film's final scenes carry implicit messages about success that may or may not resonate with viewers' own experiences. Read the full review at Common Sense Media.

An energetic BFF road movie with pro-choice and feminist messages, this film relies on some high school stereotypes and gender clichés, mostly about boys, but manages to resist predictability. Unpregnant lands a lot of laughs in the banter between Veronica and Bailey and their misadventures on the road, and the two lead actresses do a great job playing opposites with a convincingly shared history and a deep mutual affection. Both actresses credibly transition between comedy and drama throughout the film. Unpregnant is no Thelma and Louise, but a key car-over-a-cliff scene references the classic, as does the American Southwest setting, complete with wide-open spaces, long, straight roads, and dusty small towns populated by cowboys, county fairs, and conspiracy theorists. This film aims for a much more upbeat tone than that classic, though there are some strong political messages here. The clinical, step-by-step description of an abortion procedure at the film's end aims to demystify the process. A pro-choice monologue laments the fact (and the film's premise) that a 17-year-old girl in present-day America should have to travel across several state lines to get an abortion on request without parental consent. That message, like two intense "pro-life" characters, a Mike and Karen Pence joke, and a coming-out plot twist, could turn some audiences off. It's more likely that the politics, the humor, and the generally youthful mood will all speak directly to this film's target audience. Read the full review at Common Sense Media.

This is a highly esoteric film that will surely find its fans, but could also feel too talky, too strange, and too confusing for many others. The twisting plot and myriad cultural references and internal clues may excite some viewers and send them down Reddit rabbit holes to dissect it all, but they require patience and attention. Writer-director Charlie Kaufman seems to drop hints about the film's meaning without actually explaining anything. "There is no objective reality." "I guess that's what one hopes for when one writes things ... universality in the specific." Watching too many movies is a "societal malady." "It's all planned ... yet it isn't thought out." I'm Thinking of Ending Things ponders the bending of time, the glorification of youth and beauty, the relevance of poetry in our lives, feminist readings of classic films and songs, dating and relationships, political correctness, and, if you can believe it, more. Also, it may suggest hell is high school, or maybe watching a high school musical. Despite all that, you get the sense that the film is more about a mood (an ominous malaise, also skillfully captured visually) than a clear message. The talented lead actors, Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons, take their roles seriously and keep you engaged, which is lucky considering there are 20-minute sequences of just them talking in a car. Toni Collette and David Thewlis are perfect as the weirdo parents. Still, you may find yourself wishing Kaufman had ended things -- meaning, this two-hour-plus movie -- a little sooner. Read the full review at Common Sense Media.