Ask anyone in the movie world what the second-worst month for new releases is and they’ll all have the same answer: February.
Multiplex fare tends to be better than it is in January, but, like the weather, it’s usually a difference of just a few degrees. March promises to be a marked improvement, with new offerings from the likes of Bong-joon Ho (Mickey 17), Steven Soderbergh (Black Bag), and Miguel Gomes (Grand Tour) on the calendar. In the meantime, I hope that you, too, consider the first line of Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer your personal mantra: “The fact is I am quite happy in a movie, even a bad movie.”
Spoiler alert: We never truly meet Armand’s title character, an apparently troubled boy accused of committing a disturbing act on school grounds. That we hear so much about him, none of it positive, rather than his side of the story, is, of course, the whole point. Writer/director Halfdan Ullmann Tøndel — who, as the grandson of Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann, is cinematic royalty in his native Scandinavia — wants to test whether we, too, will deem the six-year-old guilty sight unseen. The Worst Person in the World star Renate Reinsve plays Armand’s mother, whose penchant for theatrics is both an occupational hazard and an effective means of deflecting blame.
The initial parent-teacher meeting regarding the supposed incident is tense, with each mother defensive on her child’s behalf — who wouldn’t be? — and refusing to see the situation from any other perspective. This is a movie of whispers and allusions, with underlying issues often hinted at but rarely broached directly. That builds tension to a point, but after a while it starts to feel like Tøndel is beating around the bush because he knows that wondering is more fun than finding out. By the time Armand’s third act (d)evolves into a stagey psychodrama, you’ll wonder whether Tøndel watched Persona too many times (relatable) and tried too hard to add his own ingredients to the family recipe.
When thinking of slashers, we’re almost always thinking of the past. Freddy, Jason, and Chucky are all decades past their prime, and anyone who’s been to the movies lately knows the genre is too. Not since Wes Craven went meta has one of these movies felt like it had anything new to say, and even Scream has long since entered its legacy-sequel phase. The reason Heart Eyes works as well as it does is because it’s as much a sendup of romantic comedies as it is of slashers, marrying the two more harmoniously than you might expect.
The eponymous killer’s reputation precedes him by the time we meet him, as the rampage that takes place in Josh Ruben’s film is his third consecutive high-body-count “celebration” of Valentine’s Day in a major city. “This is more than just a simple murder,” says one of the self-aware detectives on the case. “It’s…a kink.” Everyone has one, according to the film, whose own fetish is winking at the audience without fully committing to the bit. There’s an inherent problem with horror-comedies that few of its exemplars manage to overcome, including this one: Trying to scare your audience is fundamentally at odds with repeatedly telling them that nothing they’re watching is to be taken seriously. Heart Eyes owes as much to Scary Movie as it does to My Bloody Valentine, but the more it goes for laughs, the more you start to roll your eyes instead.
No one who’s seen The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent needs me to tell them how beloved Paddington 2 is — it’s literally been deemed one of the best movies of the 21st century by a number of reputable critics and publications. I wouldn’t go that far, but neither do I begrudge the family-friendly delight its well-earned laurels. And while Paddington in Peru was never going to surpass its predecessor, it’s still a worthy, if slight, entry in the trilogy. These are wholesome movies for decidedly unwholesome times, and the huggable bear’s journey back to his home country is, among other things, a moving treatise on found families and the fact that where you’re from isn’t necessarily where you belong. That includes a trip to a home for retired bears run by nuns (sure, why not?) whose leader is played by a wonderfully devious Olivia Colmna. This one expands the lore by adding a mythical quest for El Dorado to the proceedings; it also replaces Sally Hawkins, who opted not to return to the series after playing Mrs. Brown in the first two films, with Emily Mortimer. She’s as good a replacement as you could hope for, but Hawkins is such a singularly warm onscreen presence that you’ll feel her absence just as surely as Paddington himself feels his Aunt Lucy’s.
The 35th(!) entry in a certain cinematic universe requires one bit of foreknowledge: The original Captain America has retired, and his replacement doesn’t know if he’s up to the task. But the real issue with Brave New World isn’t whether or not Anthony Mackie is on the same level as Chris Evans or whether the former Falcon is worthy of carrying the shield. It’s that the First Avenger had a reasonably satisfying conclusion in a movie literally called Endgame and they made another movie about him anyway. There’s nothing brave or new about the 35th entry in a franchise that refuses to either bow out or do something we haven’t seen dozens of times already; this one in particular, with its vague paranoid-thriller trappings, mostly feels like a retread of Captain America: The Winter Soldier.
As for the villain this time around, everything you need to know about him is revealed in his name: Red Hulk. You’d think the fact that he’s played by Harrison Ford would lend him some gravitas, but the actor has made such a habit of showing how little he cares about projects like this that you can’t help feeling the same way. The series is directionless, and each individual movie feels more superfluous than the last. The best response to Brave New World’s premise — that Captain America is as essential as ever — is his fellow Avenger’s most memorable line: “Is he, though?”
One of the world’s most dangerous jobs gets a risk-free portrayal in Last Breath, an adaptation of Alex Parkinson's documentary of the same name that was filmed inside actual diving vessels. Even if you don't already suffer from thalassophobia, you're still likely to emerge from Parkinson’s based-on-a-true-story thriller with a crippling fear of the deep water. Woody Harrelson plays the I’m Not Leaving One of My Guys Behind leader of a three-man saturation-diving team, with Simu Liu as the gruff but noble veteran and Finn Cole as the diver in distress. He gets separated from the other two with just five minutes of oxygen reserves, an emergency made even more dire by the fact that it will take them at least half an hour to rescue him. While waiting, he’s met with something even more viscerally terrifying than the abyssal creatures we’d see in a more fantastical movie: the infinite oblivion of a pitch-black seabed and the knowledge that he’s running out of air. Most of the tension arising from that life-or-death crisis is rendered inert by every cliché you can imagine. No one who sees Last Breath will expect anything less than a Hollywood ending, but it would have been nice to have held my own breath more often.
