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BIOSPHERE
*** You haven’t seen every possible buddy-comedy configuration until you’ve holed up with Mark Duplass and Sterling K. Brown in a self-sustaining, post-apocalyptic biodome as they experience “accelerated evolution.” Time is plentiful and space is limited, so the lifelong pals—possibly the last people on earth—ponder which member of their duo is Mario and which is Luigi, the intricacies and pitfalls of the dome (designed by Brown’s character, a brilliant scientist), and their childhood memories. Like any bottle movie, especially of the indie sci-fi variety, Biosphere’s success depends on suggesting a wider world without showing it and how compellingly its actors can turn exposition into story. Duplass, ever shaggy and smirking, and Brown, ever proud and deep-feeling, are utterly committed to Duplass and director Mel Eslyn’s script, which gutsily upends the heroes’ biology and relationship, even if the story’s biggest cracks actually develop around the margins (i.e., did one of these guys kill all of humanity? Don’t think about it!). As with many Duplass brothers-produced comedies, there’s a charm to the pure, idea-driven screenwriting no one was asking for (Biosphere is like Humpday by way of Claire Denis’ High Life). Just put the buds in a bubble and, to paraphrase Biosphere’s paraphrasing of Jeff Goldbum in Jurassic Park, let the movie, uh, find a way. NR. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Cinemagic, July 7-13.
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, Laurelhurst, 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. Bridgeport, Cascade, Cedar Hills, Cinema 21, Clackamas, Eastport, Fox Tower, Laurelhurst, Movies on TV, Vancouver Mall.
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.
INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY
*** The Indiana Jones saga gives its iconic character a fifth adventure that moviegoers didn’t ask for, but that longtime fans should appreciate. Yes, the story blatantly mines the series trope of an archaeological artifact chase with a foreign adversary threatening catastrophe, but director James Mangold (Logan) has crafted an installment laden with pleasing referential tips of the fedora to Steven Spielberg’s previous chapters. As comforting as the homages are, what saves the film from being a rolling boulder of mediocrity is 91-year-old composer John Williams, who has scored every Indiana Jones film. Harrison Ford still charms as Jones (an aging icon recognizable the world over by his statuesque silhouette), but Indy could have become a relic of the ‘80s if not for Williams. His inspired work on Dial of Destiny breathes life into the action scenes, authenticates the otherwise unearned emotional interludes, and adds a tickle to the comedy in ways its 80-year-old lead can no longer pull off (to quote Indy, “It’s not the years, honey, it’s the mileage”). This cinematic serial has run its course, but thanks to Williams, Indiana Jones can now retire with his dignity mostly intact. PG-13. RAY GILL JR. Academy, Bagdad, Cedar Hills, City Center, Eastport, Evergreen Parkway, Fox Tower, Joy Cinema, Lake Theater, Lloyd Center, Regal Pioneer Place, St. Johns, St. Johns Twin, Studio One, Wunderland Milwaukie.
JOY RIDE
** In a seeming attempt to reflect the diverse array of untold Asian narratives—a shared pressure among many Asian American artists—Joy Ride accomplishes the opposite, offering a rushed 90 minutes overcrowded by underdeveloped characters and plot turns. Adopted Chinese American Audrey (Ashley Park) travels to her birth country for the first time, along with two eccentric best friends, Kat (Stephanie Hsu), a Chinese soap opera actor hiding her sexual past from her God-fearing virgin fiancé, and Lolo (Sherry Cola), a fledgling artist who makes playground models resembling genitalia to “get the conversation going” (Lolo also brings along her BTS-obsessed cousin, played by a wide-eyed, scene-stealing Sabrina Wu). Audrey’s business trip to China quickly turns into a cross-continent search for her birth mother, and the film sharply illustrates certain minority challenges—internalized shame, dissonance between internal and external perceptions of self. Yet its efforts to provide a comprehensive cultural education (the work of not one, but many, many more representative films) result in stilted dialogue and a hasty denouement. The comedy’s saving grace lies in its effectively over-the-top humor; filled with riotous bits and clever one-liners, Joy Ride promises to leave the audience feeling lighter than before they entered the theater. And sometimes, that’s all we need from a movie. R. ROSE WONG. Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, City Center, Clackamas, Division, Eastport, Evergreen Parkway, Fox Tower, Lloyd Center, Mill Plain, Progress Ridge, Vancouver Mall, Vancouver Plaza.
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, City Center, Clackamas, Eastport, Evergreen Parkway, Fox Tower, Laurelhurst, Lloyd Center, Oak Grove, Progress Ridge, St. Johns Twin, Studio One, Vancouver Mall.