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NO HARD FEELINGS
**** The raunchy midbudget summer comedy is back and better than ever. The premise behind No Hard Feelings is as simple as it is morally ambiguous: Maddie Barker (Jennifer Lawrence) is a lifelong resident of a vacation town in New York who’s struggling to pay the rising property taxes on the house her mom left her. While trolling Craigslist, she stumbles on an ad posted by parents of a 19-year-old boy who are looking for a young girl to “date” (emphasis on the quotation marks) their socially awkward offspring. If she can bring their son, Percy (Andrew Barth Feldman), out of his shell before he heads to Princeton in the fall, Maddy gets a used Buick Regal. Lawrence stuns with her hilarity—between a full-frontal nude fight scene, using a stuffed lobster plush as a cum rag and squeezing in a Chinese-finger-trap-on-a-dick gag, her physical comedy skills are on par with predecessors like Steve Martin and Jim Carrey. Lawrence is perhaps one of the few bona fide female stars with the chops to usher in the renaissance of Superbad-style comedies, and Feldman offers a hilariously uncomfortable performance that pairs beautifully with hers. All in all, No Hard Feelings is the antithesis of family friendly, but perfectly treads the line between risqué and offensive. One minute you’re laughing to the point of tears, the next you’re asking yourself, “Am I a bad person?” R. ALEX BARR. Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, City Center, Clackamas, Division, Eastport, Evergreen Parkway, Living Room, Lloyd Center, Mill Plain, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, Progress Ridge, Studio One, Vancouver Plaza.
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.
EXTRACTION 2
*** Chris Hemsworth returns as black ops mercenary Tyler Rake in Extraction 2, a relentless action sequel that surpasses its predecessor. After Rake awakens in a hospital due to his injuries from the previous film, he sets out to rescue his ex-wife’s sister and her children from a prison in the country of Georgia. But things go sideways, and Rake and the group must outrun a baddie determined to avenge his murdered brother. Sam Hargrave returns to the director’s chair and ups his game in staging the action; the fight choreography, explosions and camerawork are the real stars of Extraction 2, though Hemsworth and the other cast members do what they can with their stock characters. Some of the scenes feel more like Call of Duty multiplayer matches than film set pieces, but for the most part, they remain exciting. An extended chase involving a train is especially impressive as Hargrave opts for long takes, with the camera moving in and out of the railcars. Extraction 2 doesn’t quite match the quality of the John Wick and The Raid franchises, but it does an admirable job of trying to emulate them. R. DANIEL RESTER. Netflix.
FALCON LAKE
*** No, of course 13-year-old Bastien (Joseph Engel) doesn’t want to watch anime with his kid brother all summer, he protests when chided by 16-year-old Chloé (Sara Montpetit), the family friend with whom he’s sharing a lakeside cabin in Quebec. Instead, they swim, try terrible wine, and question each other’s fears. Falcon Lake observes Bastien and Chloé's age difference carefully, exploring how one adolescent’s puppy love is another’s safety net—how the messiness of teenage sexuality, intimacy and friendship bunk together in a cramped bedroom and a sliver of time. Shot on 16 mm and directed by Charlotte Le Bon (an actor best known to Americans for The Walk and The Hundred-Foot Journey), Falcon Lake is summer-loving in the vein of Call Me By Your Name, both innocent and daringly amorous, as every Bastien and Chloé interaction—each bike ride, prank and outfit change—is charged, taken personally and riddled with perspective gaps. Strangely, though, hovering around this enthralling coming-of-age snapshot is an obsession with ghosts (allegedly in the lake and in characters’ imaginations) that never connects to Falcon Lake’s best qualities. There’s an argument that departing childhood is a kind of death, but who needs the metaphor? The core of Falcon Lake is blistering, awakening life. NR. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. On demand.
MAGGIE MOORE(S)
*** A madcap murder plot with a deadpan attitude, Maggie Moore(s) assigns a widowed sheriff (Jon Hamm) to the case of two identically named women killed in the same New Mexico town. Maybe the first Maggie Moore’s demise was a mistake, the sheriff speculates, or the second is merely a distraction. Meanwhile, the audience knows the answer—a curious, confident story structure orchestrated by actor-turned-director John Slattery (Hamm’s Mad Men compatriot). At its best, Maggie Moore(s) draws on Fargo; at its most ridiculous, it’s more like I, Tonya, foregrounding desperate, mustachioed yokels who hire the wrong people for dirty jobs. While it would be easy for Hamm to sleepwalk through a strong-jawed cop part, the sheriff’s relationship with Rita (Tina Fey), the neighbor of one suspect, makes for affecting character scaffolding. Another pair of old TV colleagues (30 Rock, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt), Hamm and Fey complicate their chemistry by smartly employing their star qualities—her sharp self-deprecation, his proud staunchness—as wedges. There’s only one Fargo, but thanks to the actors, the desert edition isn’t half bad. R. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. On demand.
ROCK HUDSON: ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWED
*** Fans, tabloids and critics always had plenty to say about Rock Hudson: how dreamy, how marble-cut, how bankable, how tragic. But making more genuine, empathetic meaning from the ‘50s matinee idol turned posthumous LGBTQ symbol is an elusive task for director Stephen Kijak’s HBO documentary. What little we know for certain is that Hudson possessed abiding self-belief—his beauty was his destiny—and slipped into a star-making Hollywood machine that polished and packaged him as a towering ladies’ man, best known for films like Giant and Pillow Talk. With little introspection from Hudson to go on, the film’s forte is the many frank interviews with Hudson’s totally over it former buddies and boyfriends. Many come to the mundane yet intriguing conclusion that before his zeitgeist-shifting battle with AIDS, Hudson appeared fairly comfortable in his double life—jet setting, pool partying, fooling around. Even so, there are brief characterizations of Hudson in the film’s title sequence that never reappear, as if irreconcilable within the complex narratives of his public versus private ambivalence and the ways he both spoke through and hid within his work. The movie industry clearly forced a mask on Hudson, but this documentary presents a man who committed to cipherhood too long ago to conceive of any other way. NR. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Max.
ASTEROID CITY
* 1950s movie star Midge Campbell (Scarlett Johansson) and war photographer Augie Steenbeck (Jason Schwartzman) are bonded because they’re both “catastrophically wounded people”; we know because Midge tells us so. Why so literal? Because they’re in a film directed by Wes Anderson, whose movies have grown so maniacally precise that they seem more suited to a museum than a multiplex. The Anderson who chronicled Schwartzman’s mad romantic pursuit of Olivia Williams in Rushmore has been replaced by an automatonlike auteur so fastidious that he frames Asteroid City as a film within a play within a television broadcast hosted by Bryan Cranston. There are flashes of fun in this nested narrative—including a bobble-eyed alien’s visit to the titular desert town—but only Anderson lovers with the constitution of devout Catholics will make it through without losing their faith (lines like “You see that wonderful crackly patch right out there, between the dead cactuses and the dried-up river bed?” are so Andersonian that they may as well be in Latin). Anderson has preached solely to his choir of fans before; his twee oceanic epic The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou was certainly not for normies. But that film let its emotions rough up its images, most memorably when a son was mortally wounded and his father remembered his first glimpse of him in a daggerlike burst of memory. Death haunts Asteroid City, but not enough to disturb its stoic actors, who all speak in the same mopey monotone as Gwyneth Paltrow in The Royal Tenenbaums (Anderson’s best film) whether they’re talking about religion, science, politics or pancakes. Hence the unspoken but obvious motto of Asteroid City: for the fans, by the fans. PG-13. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Academy, Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, Cinema 21, Clackamas, Eastport, Evergreen Parkway, Fox Tower, Hollywood, Laurelhurst, Living Room, Lloyd Center, Progress Ridge, Studio One, Vancouver Mall.