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PASSAGES
** Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A German filmmaker announces to his British husband that he’s just had sex with a woman—and that he’d like to tell him about it. Thus commence the erotic games of Passages, a caustically witty fable from director Ira Sachs (Love Is Strange). Franz Rogowski stars as Tomas, who, when not making films, is busy being a needy, self-pitying nogoodnik. Lucky for him, his oily charisma hypnotizes seemingly everyone who should know better, including his husband, Martin (Ben Whishaw), and his French mistress, a teacher named Agate (Adèle Exarchopoulos). Good news for fans of Exarchopoulos’ quietly explosive performance in Blue Is the Warmest Color: Sachs gives her plenty of opportunities to dance, gaze silently and power through Agate’s private anguish even as her students demand every ounce of her attention. So entrancingly familiar are these motifs that Sachs could almost be making a Blue sequel, though it’s often Whishaw who commands the screen. As Q in the recent Bond films and the titular marmalade-loving bear in the Paddington series, Whishaw was miraculously sensible and sensitive, a feat he repeats for Sachs. A lesser film might have become overly besotted with Tomas’ morbidly fascinating manipulations, whereas Sachs lets Whishaw cut through the gaslighting with five simple words: “I want my life back.” Who needs Q Branch gadgets when you have some fucking self-respect? NR. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Cinema 21.
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, 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. 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. 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. 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. Cedar Hills, Cinema 21, City Center, Clackamas, Evergreen Parkway, Fox Tower, Hollywood, Living Room, Lloyd Center, Mill Plain, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, St. Johns Twin, Studio One.
TALK TO ME
**** Talk to Me is the scariest horror movie of 2023. Walking the fine line between referential and redundant—good horror filmmakers employ motifs, but bad horror filmmakers rely on them—twin-brother duo Danny and Michael Philippou stun in their directorial debut, delivering a gripping (pun intended) plot driven by starmaking performances. Sophie Wilde shines as Mia, a grieving teenage girl reeling from her mother’s death two years earlier. Then, a paranormal party trick lifts the veil between the living and the dead—and teens recklessly abuse it for entertainment purposes (shocking!). In some ways, Talk to Me is a natural evolution beyond the Ouija board, the deadest horse of all horror tropes. In others, it’s an existential exploration that leads to a genre-defining question: Can new rules be made and/or old ones broken? Either way, there are moments when the movie makes the theater feel like a vacuum, sucking you into a vortex of heart-racing, chest-clutching, jaw-dropping terror. It’s the enthralling kind of horror that you can’t look away from. R. ALEX BARR. Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, City Center, Clackamas, Division, Evergreen Parkway, Fox Tower, Laurelhurst, Living Room, Lloyd Center, Mill Plain, Vancouver Plaza.
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, Empirical, Fox Tower, Laurelhurst, Living Room, Lloyd Center, McMenamins St. Johns, Pioneer Place, St. Johns Twin, Studio One, Wunderland Milwaukie.
JULES
*** Like clockwork, solitary widower Milton (Ben Kingsley) makes two testimonies at his weekly city council meetings. One statement amounts to senile nonsense about the town motto (“a great place to call home”); the other is a genuine concern regarding a much-needed crosswalk. Through this dichotomy, we understand Jules’ take on Milton (whose grumbling sounds like Kingsley meets Dustin Hoffman): Yes, he’s slipping mentally, but his everyday experience shouldn’t be discounted. So when Milton believes a flying saucer has crash-landed in his azaleas, Jules presents the kind of earthbound sci-fi usually reserved for movies about children and their supernatural discoveries—only here, the heroes are a Western Pennsylvania town’s septuagenarians, including alien caretakers played by Jane Curtin (SNL) and Harriet Sansom Harris (Frasier), being instructed by their adult children to stop imagining things. Heartfelt to the end, Jules has no ambitions to ascend to the alien-encounter movie canon, but by toying with the E.T. formula, it makes clear a gentle point well taken: Before life ends, the need for childlike wonder comes back around. PG-13. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Bridgeport, Cascade, Clackamas, Evergreen Parkway, Fox Tower, Living Room, Progress Ridge.
TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: MUTANT MAYHEM
*** Part of what makes Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles unique among other franchises is its malleability. Reinvention is as much a part of the Turtles’ DNA as glowing green ooze and a love of pizza—and in the case of Mutant Mayhem, the recipe is a blend of family dynamics, grandiose sci-fi and heartfelt comedy. For the first time in franchise history, the Heroes in a Half-Shell are actually voiced by teenagers: Leonardo (Nicholas Cantu), Raphael (Brady Noon), Donatello (Micah Abbey) and Michelangelo (Shamon Brown Jr.) goof around and clown on each other like any other kids, and their interactions make for the movie’s strongest moments, comedically and emotionally. Things get mighty chaotic in the back half when we’re introduced to the megalomaniacal Superfly (Ice Cube) and his cadre of mutant henchmen (voiced by several recognizable names pulled from producer-writer Seth Rogen’s contact list), but it all fits with the movie’s eager, excited vibe. There’s a love for the boundless possibilities of the TMNT world and a desire to bring as much of it to life as possible, all through the filter of a wonky, hand-drawn aesthetic that makes for some spectacular creature designs and doesn’t skimp on the martial arts action. The quest for a perfect TMNT film remains incomplete, but Mutant Mayhem is nonetheless a fine effort: a stylish, fast-paced, eminently fun take on the material that updates the Turtles for the modern world without losing the oddball charm that has made them fixtures of pop culture since 1984. Cowabunga, dudes! PG. MORGAN SHAUNETTE. Cedar Hills, City Center, Clackamas, Evergreen Parkway, Lake Theater, Laurelhurst, Lloyd Center, Mill Plain, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, Studio One, Wunderland Beaverton, Wunderland Milwaukie.
HEART OF STONE
** Heart of Stone, the latest vanilla action film from Netflix, is little more than a Mission: Impossible rip-off. Gal Gadot plays Rachel Stone, an agent for a group called “The Charter” who step in to save lives when governments fail, using tech called “The Heart” (which can hack into any computer). Heart of Stone starts out decently enough with a big action sequence at a ski resort, but the script goes nowhere new as Stone hops from one exotic location to the next while chases and explosions are thrown in. These moments are occasionally fun and well executed (such as when a blimp blows up, leading to a skydiving scene), but most of the time, everything plays out in a rote fashion, from obvious character betrayals to unrealistic hacker nonsense. Heart of Stone may have the ingredients of an M:I film, but it lacks the excitement and cleverness found in that series. Your mission, should you choose to accept it: Stop indulging Netflix’s fantasy that it can make good action movies. PG-13. DANIEL RESTER. Netflix.