Skip to main content
PAST LIVES
**** As Nora (Greta Lee) is about to share a first kiss with her future husband, Arthur (John Magaro), she explains the Korean phrase in-yun—fate’s hand in human connection and reconnection. Intentionally or not, she’s referring just as much to Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), her best friend and crush from before she immigrated from Seoul to Canada. Ever since, Hae Sung has reappeared to Nora like a 12-year comet, and in director Celine Song’s Past Lives, Hae Sung visits Nora in present-day Brooklyn. Both unambiguous romance and genre experiment, Past Lives sustains itself on love’s textures and musings: endless gazes, mirrorlike skyscrapers, a twinkling synth score (by Christopher Bear and Daniel Rossen) and a vibrant but melancholy obsession with New York City. Gorgeous 30-somethings who can’t keep guileless vulnerability off their faces, these characters aren’t looking to blow up their lives for the sake of movie contrivances, but through every private conversation, they’re drawn to discussing the same narrative possibilities on the audience’s minds. Who is the right lover in a story sense? Even Arthur wonders. Are in-yun and Nora’s brief, almost multiversal encounters with Hae Sung potent enough to alter the years in between? And when she glimpses the past in his kind, mournful eyes, is she dreaming or seeing? PG-13. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Cinema 21, Hollywood.
ELEMENTAL
*** Though AI tech is still a bit too raw for Pixar productions to be wholly computer-generated, the studio that launched the age of CGI animation with films largely ignoring humanity keeps churning out iterations of the same master code, Elemental included. Adorably anthropomorphized animal-vegetable-mineral thing? Climactic epiphany plucked straight from college admission essay? Aggressive punnery so relentless it begins to feel like a tic? So far, so Pixar. As newly humanized dramatic personae, the classical cornerstones of our universe are easily enough rendered recognizable tropes yet nimbly evade the worst ethnic stereotypes. Within the bustling metropolis of Element City, cloud-hoppers huff and puff like aggro Scandinavians, while society largely dismisses the earthen denizens as stolid civil servants transplanted from the Low Countries. Still, the spotlight remains fixed on the unlikely pairing of Firetown lass Ember Lumen (voiced by Leah Lewis) and Old Water scion Wade Ripple (Mamoudou Athie). You can guess the rest; he carries a torch, she’s wet, things get steamy. Lush visuals and trenchant wordplay be damned, the studio’s target audience remains young children, and a whiff of regressive unease curdles all supposed love story trappings. Whereas early Pixar’s best echoed the far-flung imaginings of an especially gifted, somewhat creepy preteen, the neutered rom-com narrative reveals a blinkered worldview and a stunted emotional maturity all too, sigh, elementary. PG. JAY HORTON. Academy, Cedar Hills, City Center, Clackamas, Eastport, Evergreen Parkway, Fox Tower, Lloyd Center, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, St. Johns, St. Johns Twin, Studio One, Wunderland Beaverton, Wunderland Milwaukie.
IT AIN’T OVER
*** Sports documentaries are typically fueled by controversy, but It Ain’t Over is about Yogi Berra, a man who was anything but typical. A cinematic love letter from his granddaughter Lindsay Berra, who narrates, the film sets out to reframe a man mocked for being seemingly molded out of Silly Putty, rather than chiseled from bronze and marble, though the 5-foot-8 “everyman” with a Forrest Gump-like charm and Chauncey Gardner-like wisdom consistently found levels of success far exceeding most Hall of Famers. Yogi’s story had humble beginnings: The son of immigrants in an Italian working-class neighborhood, he joined the U.S. Navy and was wounded during the D-Day landings, an experience that defined him before the Yankee pinstripes did. The film admirably conveys the spirit of a man who never punched down, choosing instead to see individuals for whom they were (exemplified by his embrace of Jackie Robinson and his feud with sports villain George Steinbrenner). The disarming honesty of his simple “Yogi-isms” impacted people in messianic ways, most poignantly displayed here when confronting his son caught in the death grips of drug addiction. All in all, It Ain’t Over successfully recontextualizes Berra’s legacy beyond that of his Hanna-Barbera pantless cartoon bear counterpart, leaving us with the story of a loving husband, a devoted family man, and a world-class winner. NR. RAY GILL JR. Bridgeport, City Center, Fox Tower.
FLAMIN’ HOT
** Despite the title implying that it’s about the development of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, the directorial debut of Eva Longoria is actually a biopic of Richard Montañez (Jesse Garcia), the man who claims to have invented them. Emphasis on “claims,” since the Los Angeles Times published a fairly convincing story in 2021 suggesting that Montañez’s account doesn’t match the timeline of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos’ origin. And in the context of the script (adapted from Montañez’s book A Boy, a Burrito and a Cookie), the story is hardly convincing. Setting aside the truthiness issue, Flamin’ Hot is at best an extended motivational speech about a guy who worked his way up from janitor to marketing executive. It’s an interesting story, if you’re the sort of person who’s inspired by tales of meritocracy in corporate America. It’s hard to imagine who else this movie is supposed to appeal to. PG-13. WILLIAM SCHWARTZ. Hulu.
THE FLASH
** After Tom Cruise saw The Flash, he allegedly declared it to be “the kind of movie we need now” (or hyperbole to that effect). And he’s right—assuming he sincerely believes we need superhero films so bland they barely exist. The Flash’s bludgeoning marketing campaign may have spread whispers that it would be the best DC Comics-based blockbuster since the Dark Knight trilogy, but it’s as lifeless as the airbrushed babies that tumble through the air in a tasteless opening sequence played for laughs. Rescuing said babies is Barry Allen/The Flash (Ezra Miller), an agitated young vigilante who wants to save his dead mother (Y Tu Mamá También’s Maribel Verdú) by tweaking the time-space continuum. Alas, his meddling creates a doomy alternate reality in which Zod (Michael Shannon) is about to obliterate humanity, Batman (Michael Keaton) is a hippie recluse, and Eric Stoltz wasn’t booted from Back to the Future (the horror!). The plot—callow crimefighter discovers the danger of cheating fate—is derivative of Spider-Man: No Way Home, but that film made its hero pay a haunting price for his machinations. The Flash, on the other hand, has Barry learn to let history take its tragic course, then permits him to have his multiversal cake and (voraciously) eat it too. This is the way the DC Extended Universe ends: not with a bang, but with grating comedy, momentumless action, and convictions so flimsy that they cancel themselves out. PG-13. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Academy, Bagdad, Cedar Hills, Century Eastport, City Center, Clackamas, Fox Tower, Joy Cinema, Lake Theater, Laurelhurst, Lloyd Center, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, St. Johns Twin, Studio One.
LYNCH/OZ
** Discussing David Lynch is a delicate dance with the freedom of ideas running from definitions that leaves documentarian Alexandre O. Philippe stumbling. Lynch has stated: “If you have a name for something, like ‘cut’ or ‘bruise,’ people will automatically be disturbed by it. But when you see the same thing in nature, and you don’t know what it is, it can be very beautiful.” This simple idea encapsulates Lynch’s legacy, but not so much Philippe’s documentary. Lynch/Oz does succeed in uncovering some fascinating deep-cut similarities between The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Lynch’s body of work, but meanders into the realm of a wordy public autopsy as blunt as a hammer. Lynch is even quoted in the film saying, “There’s not a day that goes by I don’t think of The Wizard of Oz,” but he also famously avoids explaining his films out of respect for individual interpretation, which the documentary tends to ignore throughout its six-chapter presentation narrated by filmmakers and industry types. While the exploration of storytelling lures you into a desire to revisit Lynch staples like Mulholland Drive, Wild at Heart and Lost Highway, Lynch/Oz too often strays from its Yellow Brick Road into frustrating attempts at peaking behind the curtain. NR. RAY GILL JR. Cinema 21.
TRANSFORMERS: RISE OF THE BEASTS
** Following Michael Bay’s increasingly deranged march through the evidently endless Transformers saga’s first five chapters, 2018′s simple, sweet, Smiths-sampling Bumblebee felt miraculous. It was a delicate girl-and-her-fighting-car pearl somehow harvested from the murky depths of an unfathomable franchise—and newfound fans might have assumed the series had turned a corner. Alas, the title of the latest installment, Rise of the Beasts, speaks volumes (the series isn’t called Evolvers, y’know?). Set after Bumblebee and a bit before the first live action iteration, Beasts opens on a far-flung planet where close relations of Autobots leader Optimus Prime have taken the shape of apex predators (yes, they’re led by a metallic monkey named Optimus Primal, and yes, the Autobots evidently believe our world’s ruled by sports cars and tractor trailers). Cue a ‘90s NYC demolition derby and the arrival of the villainous Unicron, with a new pair of humans (plucky art curator Dominique Fishback, soulful veteran Anthony Ramos) shoehorned in. The Bay pentalogy so brazenly defied the fundamental laws of visual and narrative consistency that watching the films was like mainlining an entire season of NFL coverage amid the death spiral of a Gulf Stream RV. Taking over from Bay, director Steven Caple Jr. (Creed II) offers decidedly more supple, graceful filmmaking, letting Ramos and Fishback develop their characters and minimize the damage wrought by a uniformly awful screenplay. But doesn’t that make the inevitable downshift to robot-on-robot violence all the more joyless? Transformers don’t need moments to breathe. PG-13. JAY HORTON. Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, City Center, Clackamas, Eastport, Evergreen Parkway, Fox Tower, Living Room, Lloyd Center, Mill Plain, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, Progress Ridge, Studio One, Vancouver Plaza.