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BLUE BEETLE
*** Instead of falling into the trap of big team-ups, multiverses, and turgid action scenes, Ángel Manuel Soto’s small-scale superhero film Blue Beetle keeps its focus on family, humor and Latino culture. The charming Xolo Maridueña plays Jaime Reyes, a college graduate who returns home to Palmera City and is tasked with protecting a device called “the Scarab,” a piece of tech that attaches itself to Jaime and forms a powerful exoskeleton around him. It isn’t long before military-minded baddies show up looking for the Scarab, with businesswoman Victoria Kord (Susan Sarandon) wanting to take her corporation to the next level by harnessing the device’s energy. Blue Beetle has formulaic plot elements and a C-grade villain in Kord, and some of the jokes fall flat (such as when a bug vehicle farts on Kord’s henchmen). It overcomes its weaknesses with well-rounded supporting characters (George Lopez is a hilarious standout as Uncle Rudy), heartfelt scenes of family bonding, and well-framed action sequences. Blue Beetle is one of the last films in the soon-to-be-defunct DC Extended Universe, which began a decade ago with Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel. It’s too late to salvage the series, but Soto deserves credit for creating one of the more charming entries in a mixed-bad franchise. PG-13. DANIEL RESTER. Bridgeport, Cascade, Cedar Hills, City Center, Clackamas, Division, Eastport, Fox Tower, Lloyd Center, Mill Plain, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place,Progress Ridge, Studio One, Vancouver Plaza.
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. Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, Cinema 21, City Center, Clackamas, Division, Eastport, Empirical, Fox Tower, Hollywood, Laurelhurst, Living Room, 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, Century Eastport, Cinema 21, Clackamas, Fox Tower, Lake Theater, Laurelhurst, Living Room, Lloyd Center, McMenamins St. Johns, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, 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.
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. Bridgeport, Cinema 21, City Center, Movies On TV.
BETWEEN TWO WORLDS
** In the opening scene of Between Two Worlds, French acting icon Juliette Binoche is seen applying for low-level cleaning jobs. Her character, Marianne, is mannered, vulnerable and observant—almost the opposite of her often genuine, sometimes coarse, unselfconscious coworkers. Based on French journalist Florence Aubenas, Marianne is undercover and researching a book on laborers who work tirelessly yet teeter on society’s edge. They’re paid minimum wage to perform herculean invisible tasks, like turning over 60 beds in 90 minutes on a ferry from Northern France to England. Visually, director Emmanuel Carrère strikes the right pose, a docu-realist style that puts the viewer in supply closets, break rooms, and even toilet bowls. But the need to manufacture drama often feels patronizing to the workers and ironically misfocused. At one point, Marianne announces in voice-over that her book is becoming a portrait of Chrystèle (Hélène Lambert)—a co-worker, friend and single mother to three boys—but that doesn’t remotely bear out in the film. Instead, it remains centered on the awkwardness of a journalist being found out by subjects with whom she’s behaving far too familiarly. In film and in life, the road to poserdom is paved with good intentions. NR. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Living Room.
THE LAST VOYAGE OF THE DEMETER
** There’s a refreshing simplicity to The Last Voyage of the Demeter, the latest horror film by director André Øvredal (Troll Hunter, The Autopsy of Jane Doe). Based on a single chapter from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the film follows a crew of seamen who become captured prey on a voyage to London with an unexpected, bloodthirsty stowaway. After reading the brief plot description, you’ve practically seen the movie. Imagine you’re stranded in a desert, having gone days without food or water, and you see a faded neon sign in the distance. As you drag your dehydrated body through the hot sand, you get closer and closer to the sign, with the buzzing neon lights guiding you to your destination. Once you arrive, you see a single sand-covered peanut butter and jelly sandwich resting on a dirty plate. Obviously, with no other options, you eat it. But with each begrudging bite your heart fills with more and more contempt while your stomach fills nonetheless. This scenario is an exact parallel to the viewing of The Last Voyage of the Demeter. In the middle of August, you assuredly won’t find many horror films in theaters, but with each gritty bite, your annoyance with the sheer mediocrity of this one grows. R. ALEX BARR. Bridgeport, Cascade, Cedar Hills, City Center, Clackamas, Division, Eastport, Evergreen, Parkway, Fox Tower, Lloyd Center, Mill Plain, Oak Grove, Progress Ridge, Vancouver Mall, Vancouver Plaza.