Smile lays out the horror bait, Bros is rom-com bliss, and Andor requires patience
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Smile
In theaters now
Paramount Pictures Smile
Every year, a new crop of cheap-and-cheerful horror movies comes along to meet our seemingly bottomless need to be terrorized at the multiplex, and maybe inspire a few good memes — or even a whole franchise — if they do it well. Smile, the feature debut from writer-director Parker Finn, does that with more nightmare pizzazz than most, which seems like good news for the genre, even if you might need a bucket of bleach (and several hours of TikTok kitten videos) to cleanse your brainpan afterward.
Sosie Bacon (13 Reasons Why) is Dr. Rose Cotter, a young psychiatrist at a New Jersey trauma center who often handles the intake of deeply disturbed patients. But when a pretty grad student comes in one day complaining of an evil, smirking presence that's followed her for years, then suddenly breaks into a frozen rictus of a grin and essentially slices her own face off in the waiting room, Rose is more than shaken. Soon she's convinced this curse or malevolent presence, whatever it is, has jumped to her; how else to explain the strange glitches in her perception and memory, and the way visions of her late mother's suicide some 20 years ago keep flooding back to her, more real than what's in front of her?
A little research tells her that this smiling-death thing is a daisy chain, even one that possibly feeds off trauma, and that she might not have much time. Her fiancé (Jessie T. Usher Jr.) is sympathetic, then annoyed; her sister (Gillian Zinser) would prefer this disturbance not mess with her own carefully curated housewife life. Her therapist (Deadwood's Robin Weigert) is very good at wearing pale-colored linens and looking concerned, and her kind, confused boss (Kal Penn) just wants her to get better. The winding storyline goes on probably a little too long, and the jump scares are, in a word, sadistic. But Bacon is great fun as a girl on the verge of a nervous breakdown, chirping with increasing desperation that she's fine, and Finn is a pleasingly nervy stylist, letting the camera tilt and flip at seasick angles and ratcheting the tension as he goes. Smile is a pretty silly movie by any metric; still, it has teeth. Grade: B —Leah Greenblatt
Reasonable Doubt
Streaming now on Hulu
Ser Baffo/Hulu Emayatzy Corinealdi and Michael Ealy in 'Reasonable Doubt'
Jax Stewart (Ballers' Emayatzy Corinealdi) is a ruthless and relentless L.A. defense attorney married to her job — which is one of the reasons her frustrated husband, Lewis (Queen Sugar's McKinley Freeman), recently moved out. When a self-made Black billionaire (Sean Patrick Thomas) is put on trial, Jax can't help but take the high-profile case, even though it means defending a man accused of raping and murdering his mistress (Perri Camper).
The nine-episode season centers on that sensational murder trial, along with the return of Jax's hottest former flame, Damon (Michael Ealy, amen!), an ex-con who she represented during her days as a public defender. Created by Raamla Mohamed (Scandal) and exec-produced and directed by Kerry Washington, Reasonable Doubt is enjoyably Shonda-esque, in that it's a steamy, speed-plotted soap built around a morally ambiguous female power player whose life is filled with ridiculously attractive men. But Mohamed also weaves in frank and nuanced stories about marriage, parenting, and the importance of (and challenges with) female friendships. Resentful over his parents' separation, Jax's son, Spenser (Thaddeus J. Mixson), keeps icing her out, while her tween daughter, Naima (Aderinsola Olabode), is going through early puberty and needs her mom more than ever. Though she sometimes succumbs to guilt, Jax rejects Lewis' implications that she is doing something wrong by devoting time to her career.
Corinealdi delivers the formidability to establish Jax as a compelling antihero and the vulnerability to make her authentically human; Tim Jo (This is Us) adds a welcome dash of comedy as Jax's investigator, Daniel; and Michael Ealy — well, all that man needs to do is exist. B+ —Kristen Baldwin
Bros
In theaters now
Courtesy of TIFF
It's been duly noted that 2022 has stealthily become the year of the Big Gay Romantic Comedy — "big" in the sense of films aimed squarely at the mainstream, but also in that they're made under the banner of major studios. (Disney is the parent company behind the sunny Pride and Prejudice redux Fire Island, released to streaming this past June, and Universal is throwing its weight behind a full theatrical run for Bros, set to bow on 3,000 screens).
There's surely a smart grad-school thesis, or at least a decent term paper, about the convergence of those two films and what it means in the larger scheme of things. But after seeing Bros — directed by Nicholas Stoller (Neighbors, Forgetting Sarah Marshall) and starring comedian Billy Eichner, with whom he cowrote the script — it almost seems more relevant to view it through the lens of the Apatow Extended Universe (Judd's is the first name listed as a producer here, the same honorific he held for Trainwreck and Bridesmaids, and the poster isn't shy about calling that out).
Make no mistake, Bros is a very gay movie, from its wry one-liners about poppers and Provincetown to its intimate if hardly explicit love scenes. But it's also one cast very much in the mold of the best kind of Apatow: whip-smart, soft at heart, full of bravura free-form character bits and cul-de-sacs. Eichner plays Bobby Lieber, a 40-year-old Manhattan podcaster, museum curator, and "cis white male homosexual" who uses his rat-a-tat humor as both a weapon and a shield. He's also proudly single, preferring a streamlined life of platonic friendships and passing hookups (there's a great, perfectly encapsulated Grindr interlude). And then fate steps in, nipples out, in the form of an improbably hot estate lawyer named Aaron (Brothers & Sisters' Luke McFarlane) who sidles up to him one night at a club.
Aaron is pretty much all the things Bobby is not — sexually confident, CrossFit ripped, happily hetero-basic in his tastes. (Loves: Garth Brooks, The Hangover, his mom; dislikes: divas, defensive sarcasm, wearing shirts). For them both, it's flirty antagonism at first sight, a tale as old as rom-com time. But the jokes about Schitts Creek and Maroon 5 are sublime, as are the cameos (among them Bowen Yang, Debra Messing, Kristin Chenoweth, and Harvey Fierstein). And there's a tenderness and vulnerability that the story also earns, bit by bit, between the high-camp roundelays of museum meetings and spontaneous trips to P-town. "Love is love is love" is a phrase that beatific straight people, smug in their allyship, keep pushing on Bobby, and he hates it. Maybe he's right: Bros wears its queerness proudly, without stooping to cater overmuch to whatever elusive demographics might qualify it as a "crossover" success. But good comedy doesn't hang on pronouns or preferences; like this sweet, sharp movie, all it has to be is itself. Grade: B+ —Leah Greenblatt
Andor
New episodes stream Wednesdays on Disney+
Lucasfilm Ltd.
The Star Wars output in 2022 has been inessential (Book of Boba Fett) and dire (Obi-Wan Kenobi), so Andor scores points just for basic watchability. Diego Luna reprises his role as Rogue One's rueful Rebel, though because this is a Disney property, he's not rebelling yet. Actually, this first season appears to be two origin stories for one character — a new record! We meet Cassian Andor as a directionless thief living in the rough mine systems. He's on the run from corporate security forces, led by officious Deputy Inspector Syril Karn (Kyle Soller). And we also meet Cassian as a little boy (Antonio Viña), living Peter Pan-ishly with other feral kids abandoned after some sort of toxic mining disaster.
So our hero has a mysterious past and a revolutionary future. He shouldn't be boring, and Luna's never not charming. But four episodes into a 12-part season, Andor's an oddly passive protagonist. Actually, creator Tony Gilroy has more fun with the bureaucratic grind of this space-opera universe. The language in the corporate-imperial scenes sounds like a British workplace satire: squabbles over jurisdictional access, stern discussions about unfinished memoranda, and quarterly reports. Soller makes an oddly appealing officious prick, while Stellan Skarsgård is a hoot as an anti-imperial shadowman performing spycraft out of a tchotchke shop.
Conversely, this week's episode brought Cassian together with a crew of proto-rebels planning a suicidal payroll heist. Sounds cool, right? But here (and often) Andor falls victim to Very Long Movie stall tactics. One rebel complains about Cassian getting added to the team; then another rebel complains about Cassian getting added to the team; then another rebel shows up to complain about Cassian getting added to the team. Creator Tony Gilroy is best known for Michael Clayton, but so far this series feels more like his Bourne Legacy, another franchise offshoot where the ambient world-building is more exciting than the main characters. B– —Darren Franich
God's Creatures
in select theaters and on demand
A24
God's Creatures has a lot going for it, including two prodigiously gifted actors at the center (Emily Watson and Paul Mescal) and an austere seaside setting so immersive it nearly passes through the screen, like a chill wind. But A24's bleak psychological drama, jointly directed by Anna Rose Holmer (The Fits) and Saela Davis, ultimately feels more like a heavy mood piece than a fully realized film: the half-submerged story of a prodigal son who abruptly returns to his remote Irish fishing village — is he there out of pure-hearted sentiment, or necessity? — and the slow unraveling that follows.
Watson's Aileen, who holds a sort of senior den-mother position among the women at the local seafood processing plant, is stunned to watch her youngest, Brian (Normal People's Mescal), walk through the door after several years of radio silence. (He alludes vaguely to some time spent in Australia, and leaves it at that.) Her husband (Declan Conlon) and grown daughter (Toni O'Rourke) are a little nonplussed by Brian's sudden reappearance after all this time, even suspicious; but Aileen is beaming, thrilled to have her golden boy back home. Until a girl she works with (The Fall's Aisling Franciosi) levels a sexual-assault charge against him, rending the uneasy social fabric of their insular small town, and the even more fragile ecology of her own family.
Mescal is consistently compelling as a young man so breezily charming and seemingly guileless, his guilt remains an open question until nearly the last scene, and Watson captures the gale force of a mother's love with quiet, increasingly desperate ferocity. Still, the movie spends so much time building its windswept atmosphere that it ultimately shorts on narrative and deeper character development, and the ending comes in a rush that feels unearned. As an acting showcase, Creatures is more than admirable; as a tourism ad for Ireland, untenable. As a movie experience, alas, it's both intriguing and teasingly incomplete. Grade: B —Leah Greenblatt
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