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ONE FINE MORNING
*** No one ever says that Sandra (Léa Seydoux) is spread too thin in One Fine Morning, writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve’s follow-up to Bergman Island, but it’s obvious when you observe the Parisian single mother’s daily routine. Through weariness and without complaint, Sandra dotes on her young daughter and cares for her dementia-ridden father, struggling to imagine how a new romance could fit into her life. But it’s not just the contents of Sandra’s plate that suggest a put-upon person; it’s how Hansen-Løve allows all the other characters to monologue. Sandra’s love interest (Melvil Poupaud) is a verbose chemist, her mother (Nicole Garcia) a remarried political advocate, her daughter (Camille Leban Martins) a bright young student. Even Sandra’s career as a translator deemphasizes her perspective. That’s a fascinating challenge for Seydoux, a movie star (best known for Bond films and Blue Is the Warmest Color) inhabiting an everyday person decentralized in her own life. It’s a frustratingly subversive, perhaps overly thorough approach to making the audience constantly hope that someone else will put Sandra first. Maybe that day will come some fine morning. Maybe the reprieve will last five minutes. Maybe this is just the thankless labor for too many women. R. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Cinema 21.
CREED III
*** Boxing legend Marvin Hagler once quipped that it’s hard to get up at 5 am “when you’ve been sleeping in silk pajamas.” That’s the comfort predicament for Adonis Creed (Michael B. Jordan). He’s now a gladiator in quiet detente, surrounded by fineries: a beautiful family (Tessa Thompson, Phylicia Rashad, Mila Davis-Kent), a robust knitwear collection, and a promising post-boxing career as a gym owner. But his bliss is interrupted by Dame Anderson (Jonathan Majors, cementing himself as 2023′s Biggest Bad after playing Marvel’s Kang), a childhood friend and veritable shadow of Adonis, locked up as a teenager and now hulking toward a title shot. With a posture and wardrobe modeled on Mike Tyson’s Spartan intimidation, Majors enriches the character with bone-deep anxiety and loneliness. Like all the Creed films, III reimagines its Rocky forebears in better taste: empathy for “villains,” better roles for women, honest conversations between Black heroes and antiheroes. Does it toss the electricity and breakneck pacing of Rocky III out with Mr. T’s bathwater? Regrettably. Do the scenes of men learning how to cry outshine the combat that Jordan himself now directs? Also yes. But pity the franchise that, unlike this one, refuses to work on itself. PG-13. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, City Center, Clackamas, Division, Eastport, Fox Tower, Lloyd Center, Mill Plain, Pioneer Place, Progress Ridge, Studio One, Tigard.
EMILY
*** From its opening, a question of selfishness pulses within this Emily Brontë biopic. How could Emily dare write a novel so rife with “selfish” characters as Wuthering Heights, her older sister Charlotte implores. Actor-turned-director Frances O’Connor’s debut film then flashes back to Emily’s teen years to consider the pain, passion and self-focus necessary for a young woman to pen an all-time-great novel in a culture deadening to her inspiration. Emma Mackey (star of Netflix’s Sex Education) plays Emily as a proverbial middle child, rebellious with a sly remove. She employs her senses as a sponge, soaking in the ghostly vigor of the West Yorkshire moors despite the Anglican influence of her father (Adrian Dunbar) and hunky new local preacher William Weightman (Oliver Jackson-Cohen). O’Connor’s script largely invents a web of Brontë family dynamics, positing her path to becoming the lit-loving clan’s simultaneous North Star and black sheep. That’s a welcome alternative to depicting staunch Victorian manners and Emily glued to a writing desk. Still, one wonders if a slightly bloodier performance (think Keira Knightly, circa 2007), as opposed to Mackey’s inherently modern-feeling cool, could have elevated the sensuousness. But as an act of risk-taking imagination, Emily gives a legendary novelist and the power of selfishness their rightful flowers. R. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Fox Tower, Living Room.
ANT-MAN AND THE WASP: QUANTUMANIA
** After cringing through a full trilogy of nobody’s favorite superhero, it may be impossible to differentiate the gibbering insufferableness of Paul Rudd from the cornball inanity of his character, Scott “Ant-Man” Lang. Admittedly, the Ant-Man oeuvre was never expected to spark casual fan interest in such an eminently second-tier figure, but at least the first movie maintained just enough anarchic frisson from original director Edgar Wright’s abandoned treatment to breeze through the drearier aspects of Marvel Cinematic Universe world building. The third installment, conversely, serves as a de facto origin story for Marvel’s next archvillain. Turns out far-future warlord Kang (Jonathan Majors) was once loosed upon Ant-Man trilogy matriarch Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer) during her lost years in the universe known as the Quantum Realm, a revelation that brings our heroes back Quantumville way. In its best scenes, the film lets Pfeiffer and Michael Douglas (returning as Hank Pym, the original Ant-Man) clash with the always-captivating Majors, trade quips with an aging lothario (Bill Murray), or just pose iconic amid gorgeous imagery ripped from vintage sci-fi digest covers. Scott, meanwhile, loses his daughter (Kathryn Newton) yet again—a fated incompetence that may be the character’s true legacy. With very small powers come no real responsibilities. PG-13. JAY HORTON. Academy, Bagdad, Cedar Hills, Clackamas, Eastport, Fox Tower, Joy Cinema, Lake Theater, Living Room, Lloyd Center, Pioneer Place, St. Johns, St. Johns Twin, Studio One, Tigard.