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OPPENHEIMER
**** At the start of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, raindrops fall; at the end, fire rages. You’ll feel it burn long after the end credits roll. Nolan has made violent movies before (including Inception and Dunkirk), but Oppenheimer is not just about physical devastation. It submerges you in the violence of a guilt-ravaged soul, leaving you feeling unsettled and unclean. Confronting the film’s moral and spiritual weight is a fearsome challenge, and one well worth rising to.
With agitated charisma and vulnerability, Cillian Murphy embodies J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist whose mind birthed the atomic bomb. When we first meet him, he’s a curly-haired lad staring at a puddle, but he swiftly evolves into an excitable visionary leading a cadre of scientists into the deserts of New Mexico, where they will ultimately build and test a plutonium device (referred to as “the gadget”) on July 16, 1945.
While Nolan exists a world apart from Oppenheimer—his creativity far exceeds his fascination with destruction—he has absorbed some of his subject’s frantic energy. Attempting to squeeze decades of a man’s intellectual and emotional life into a mere three hours, Nolan sometimes reduces moments to fragments, egged on by Ludwig Göransson’s eerie and pulsating score (which is excellent but overused).
What saves the film from becoming a connect-the-dots biopic is Nolan’s ingenious chronicle of the post-World War II rivalry between Oppenheimer and Atomic Energy Commission chair Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.). The more Oppenheimer fights to put “the nuclear genie back in the bottle,” the more Strauss seethes and schemes, thrusting the movie into a maze of double-crosses that echo the exhilarating games of perception in Nolan’s 2001 breakout hit Memento.
Of course, the thrill can’t (and shouldn’t) last. A decade ago, I applauded jubilantly as Nolan wrapped his Dark Knight trilogy, but Oppenheimer left me silent and still. As many as 226,000 people were killed when the U.S. bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and they haunt the film like ghosts—especially when Oppenheimer imagines a charred corpse beneath his foot. A man dreamed; people died. All a work of art can do is evoke their absence. R. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Academy, Cedar Hills, Cinema 21, Cinemagic, City Center, Clackamas, Eastport, Evergreen Parkway, Fox Tower, Hollywood, Laurelhurst, Lloyd Center, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, Studio One.
BARBIE
*** Once upon a time, Barbie dolls liberated all women from tyranny. The end…at least according to the first few minutes of Barbie, a sleek and satirical fantasia from director Greta Gerwig (Lady Bird, Little Women). Set in the utopian kingdom of Barbieland, the movie dramatizes the existential crises of the winkingly named Stereotypical Barbie. She’s played by Margot Robbie, who was last seen battling a rattlesnake in Damien Chazelle’s Babylon—and her misadventures in Barbie are hardly less bizarre. Plagued by flat feet, cellulite and fears of death, Barbie seeks the source of her ailments in the real world, bringing along a beamingly inadequate Ken (Ryan Gosling) with catastrophic consequences: Awed by images of Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan, Ken becomes a crusading men’s rights activist, leading a revolt against the government of Barbieland and instituting bros-first martial law. And they say originality is dead! With its absurdist wit, glitzy musical numbers, and earnest ruminations on whether matriarchy and patriarchy can coexist, Barbie is easily one of the most brazen movies released by a major studio. Yes, its tidy ending betrays its anarchic spirit—after insisting that empowerment can’t be neatly packaged in a doll box, the film seems to say, “No, wait! It can!”—but it would be churlish to deny the charm of Gerwig’s buoyant creation. In an age when genuine cinematic joy is rare, we’re all lucky to be passengers in Barbie’s hot-pink plastic convertible. PG-13. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Academy, Bagdad, Cedar Hills, Cinema 21, City Center, Clackamas, Eastport, Fox Tower, Laurelhurst, Lloyd Center, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, St. Johns Twin, Studio One, Wunderland Milwaukie.
AFIRE
**** In the tradition of his many compromised romances (Phoenix, Transit, Undine), writer-director Christian Petzold explores connections missed, made and retroactively illuminated during a novelist’s work-cation on the Baltic Sea in Afire. In black denim and gray New Balances, Leon (Thomas Schubert) is practically in uniform as someone who hates the beach. He’s destined to miss out, but the audience doesn’t. Petzold lets us enjoy Leon’s companions—his friend Felix (Langston Uibel), their unexpected housemate Nadja (Paula Beer) and a local lifeguard (Enno Trebs)—and Germany’s north coast. All the while, Leon frets over his manuscript, and a forest fire rages in the distance. Dreamy yet frustrated, blunt yet forgiving, Afire holds space for modern life’s many scales—a creative’s navel-gazing, less selfish characters’ acceptance of provincial life, existential dread. Reveling in Nadja’s beauty, intelligence and generosity (she’s always making goulash), Petzold keeps challenging the audience with Leon’s shaky grip on protagonist status. Often, this sour lump is the last character whose vantage point you’d want in this film, but that’s all part of Petzold’s ever-fascinating “both/and” filmmaking. People will still take meaningful vacations as the world burns; a bad writer can tell a good story; and Nadja will offer Leon a welcoming smile because they’ve shared a deeply imperfect moment. NR. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Living Room.
MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – DEAD RECKONING PART ONE
**** Danger is a drug—and in his third Mission: Impossible film, director Christopher McQuarrie simultaneously shoves it up your nostrils and stabs it into your veins. As usual, daredevil secret agent Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) is chasing after an explosive MacGuffin that he must protect from a doomsday-loving maniac (Esai Morales, in this case) lest the world go boom. Rather than vary the formula, McQuarrie simply refurbishes it (brilliantly) with fresh flourishes of suspense. You’ve seen Ethan race against the clock, but you’ve never seen him rushing through an airport in Abu Dhabi during a countdown to a nuclear explosion. You’ve seen him in one-on-one fights, but never with a demented French swordswoman (Pom Klementieff) in a terrifyingly cramped alley in Venice. You’ve seen him battle his adversaries on trains, but never run through one as it tumbles into…oh, just see the movie already, will you? Dead Reckoning Part One isn’t just cinema. It’s the essence of everything cinema was made for—not just triumphantly tense violence, but delicious glamour and sex appeal (a nighttime negotiation with Alanna Mitsopolis, a broker played with a lascivious grin by Vanessa Kirby, is nearly erotic enough to deserve an NC-17 rating). And while the apparent death of a main character strikes a sour note—these films work best when they’re disposable and delightful, not tragic and ruthless—I’m hopeful that it’s a red herring designed to goose our sympathies before Part Two arrives next year. It wouldn’t be the first time that a Mission: Impossible movie has manipulated its audience to irresistibly grand effect. PG-13. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Academy, Cedar Hills, Cinema 21, City Center, Eastport, Fox Tower, Joy Cinema, Lake Theater, Laurelhurst, Lloyd Center, Mill Plain, Pioneer Place, St. Johns Theater, St. Johns Twin, Studio One, Wunderland Milwaukie.
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. Living Room.
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-continental 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. Eastport, Fox Tower.
QUICKSAND
* A bickering couple on the brink of divorce gets stuck in a muddy hole in the forests of Colombia in Quicksand. Carolina Gaitan and Allan Hawco play Sofia and Josh, health care professionals who have journeyed to the country to assist a friend. After going on a hike and winding up in an area they were warned about, Sofia and Josh end up in a fight for their lives. The two have to put aside their differences in order to survive the ordeal, but Matt Pitts’ screenplay never rings true as it jumps from scene to scene. Quicksand could have worked as a survival scenario crossed with a therapy session, but the couple’s conflict feels underwritten and their inept decision making makes it hard to root for them. Director Andres Beltran tries to overcome the thin screenplay by overselling many scenes with music and style; many sequences are well shot, but the messy editing often betrays the images. Quicksand does provide some minor enjoyment with unintentional laughs (some involving a snake), but most of the time the film is alternately boring and annoying. NR. DANIEL RESTER. Shudder.