‘Black Phone 2,’ ‘Good Fortune,’ ‘Blue Moon’ and more in theaters: NPR

Losing a friend and a career is devastating Blue Moonthe drama starring Ethan Hawke the same week he plays a serial killer in Black phone 2. Both are currently playing, alongside Aziz Ansari’s feature debut, Guillermo del Toro’s. Frankensteina game story from the director of Conclaveand a revenge story from a formerly imprisoned Iranian director. Here are your choices in cinemaplexes.

Black phone 2

At the cinema Friday

In the 2021 movie The black phoneEthan Hawke played a child kidnapper/serial killer who hid behind a demonic mask. In Black phone 2four years have passed since Finney, played by Mason Thames, escaped from the Grabber’s basement by killing him. Finn is in high school now and he’s struggling due to trauma. His little sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), whose psychic visions helped the cops find Finn in the original film, is tortured by dreams of the Grabber murdering boys at a remote Christian camp.

Together, because this is a horror movie and that’s the kind of decision people only make in horror movies, Finn and Gwen decide to visit the camp in question – in the middle of a snowstorm. Ethan Hawke’s Grabber is back for the sequel – and if you’re asking how, given the character is dead, you really need to see more horror films. Seekers will catch them, even from beyond the grave. -Glen Weldon

Chance

At the cinema Friday

This trailer includes examples of strong language.

Hoping to boost his status in the guardian angel hierarchy, Gabriel (Keanu Reeves), a gently incompetent angel-in-training, arranges for Arj (Aziz Ansari), who can’t quite make ends meet as a construction worker, to switch places with Jeff (Seth Rogen), an empty-headed but successful venture capitalist/tech bro mad. Gabriel thinks they will each learn something by walking in each other’s shoes for a while. Alas, they tend to learn the wrong things in this pleasantly undemanding comedy. It is Places of commerce encounter It’s a wonderful lifewith a slight touch of social satire. It’s also Ansari’s feature-length writing and directing debut, and he proves adept at coaxing loose, laid-back performances from co-stars ranging from Sandra Oh (his angelic supervisor) to Keke Palmer (Arj’s not-so-secret crush). As a writer, he’s better at creating funny scenes than holding them together, so the social commentary seems both well-intentioned and slightly disconnected from reality. But with Reeves’ naive angel as his secret weapon, Ansari made the film a fun one. —Bob Mondello

Blue Moon

In limited theaters Friday

March 31, 1943 — opening night of Oklahoma! reaches its peak, with audience enthusiasm as high as an elephant’s eye, but Lorenz Hart can’t help but mumble about those cornball lyrics.

For nearly a quarter of a century, Hart has been one half of the lyric-writing side of Rodgers and Hart, a team that wrote two dozen musicals and hundreds of songs. But Oklahoma! is not by Rodgers and Hart. It’s from Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein.

So, midway through the title number, he mutters his excuses and heads to Sardi’s, the showbiz watering hole just down the street, hoping to get his shot before the party begins. Played by the delightfully dyspeptic Ethan Hawke, Hart is greeted by Bobby Cannavale’s bartender Eddie with a line of Casablancathis leads to what feels like a practiced routine. But it ends with a request for a drink that breaks this routine.

“Larry, you didn’t tell me under any circumstances,” Eddie protests.

“I’ll just look at it – take the measure of its amber weight in my hand,” Hart replies, before launching into riffs about anything and everything. except opening night in the neighborhood. Chief among his favorite subjects is a university student (Margaret Qualley), with whom he tries to convince himself that he is in love, even though her tastes generally run towards men. If she’s worth the reward, perhaps he can avoid thinking about the breakdown of his partnership with Rodgers.

The second subject is writing, and on that he’s lucky: also at the bar tonight is EB White, co-author of Style elementsand future author of children’s books (Stuart Little, Charlotte’s Web).

“I’m in love with your punctuation,” Hart tells him before weeping over the art of turning love into words – let’s say, “bewitched, disturbed and baffled.”

Like most of Robert Kaplow’s screenplays, their conversation is superbly crafted writing. about writing, designed to prevent Hart from engaging in the dissolution of his partnership with Rodgers.

Filmmaker Richard Linklater keeps things intimate and increasingly awkward, so that by the time Rodgers (Andrew Scott) finally speaks with Hart, nerves are on edge. He found ways to make Ethan Hawke, who is a good head taller than Hart, look like he was about four foot ten. And he varies the pace as much as he can with a film that is essentially just chatter. You’ll realize at some point that while sitting with the smartest guy in the room is certainly exhilarating, it can also be exhausting.

Yet how often do you get the chance…maybe once in a Blue Moon? —Bob Mondello

It was just an accident

In limited theaters now

Jafar Panahi’s latest film is arguably the most refreshing thriller/road movie of the year – a tragicomedy that speaks to this moment with searing intensity, but sometimes manages to turn into a comedic brawl. It begins with the titular accident – ​​Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi) is driving with his pregnant wife and young daughter when he needs help from a car mechanic. Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), upstairs at the mechanic’s, hears it and panics at a squeak that Eghbal, who has a prosthetic leg, makes while walking. Vahid thinks he remembers this sound from his time, blindfolded, as a political prisoner, supervised by a brutal guard known as Peg Leg. Vahid tracks down Eghbal, hits him on the head with a shovel and hides him in a white van. But when Eghbal wakes up and insists that he is not the guard, Vahid’s initial, not very well-thought-out plan to simply bury him in the desert goes awry.

To confirm he has the right guy, Vahid searches for other ex-prisoners and is soon joined by a wedding photographer, her ex and the bride and groom she photographed in wedding attire, all (except the groom) were also imprisoned and were also blindfolded. What follows is an often terrifying but often quixotic adventure, filled with detours, prison nightmares and philosophical arguments.

Filmmaker Panahi has been imprisoned several times by the Iranian regime, most recently after he raised questions about other detained filmmakers. It was just an accident is a furious indictment of the authoritarian reign of terror gripping Iran, but it is also often comical. (There’s a scene, for example, in which the bride in her wedding dress steps in to push the van out of gas into heavy traffic.) It’s surprisingly generous in its spirit and in its assumptions about retaliation by people of good will. There are explicit references to Samuel Beckett’s book Waiting for Godotand the film sometimes seems like a societal version of this existentialist masterpiece, a nation that constantly questions and philosophizes, sometimes clowning around, waiting for who knows what. —Bob Mondello

Frankenstein

In limited theaters Friday; on Netflix November 7

Guillermo del Toro has made several monster films of a particular bent – ​​moving, swooning, feverish films about grotesque-looking creatures that turn out to be more profoundly human than the humans who reject them. hell boy (2004) was a half-demon with a full heart. The amphibian man in The shape of water (2017) He was an emo f-boy with gill slits. Even the titular puppet in Guillermo del Toro Pinocchio (2022) was such a mensch that he earned the right to exchange his knotty pine countenance for a sack of flesh.

Moving, swooning, feverish, with a narrative that stacks the emotional deck in favor of the hideous outcast – I mean, it’s about the dust jacket copy you’ll find on any volume of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel. FrankensteinRIGHT?

That’s why it seems like the perfect combination of story and muse; Del Toro has certainly been talking about creating his own version of the tale for decades, calling it a “lifelong dream.”

That dream is now realized, and while the resulting film captures the tone and spirit of the original novel in all its jaw-dropping zeal and passed out-on-the-couch delirium, the many narrative tweaks del Toro makes—some of which work, some of which don’t—ensure that you’ll never be wrong about his Frankenstein for someone else. -Glen Weldon

Ballad of a Little Player

In limited theaters now; on Netflix October 29

If a great film about gambling addiction could be crafted entirely from a compelling central performance and lush Macau visuals – peacock feathers, quivering neon lights, sumptuous velvet, shimmering silks, blazing pagodas, smoke billowing from opium bowls – then Edward Berger’s dream adaptation of Lawrence Osborne’s novel The ballad of a little gambler that would be it. Operatic in style and grandiosely pictorial in the manner of ConclaveBerger’s recent drama about the papal succession, this overwrought story of a down-on-his-luck hedonist, Lord Doyle (Colin Farrell) finds its hero about to be evicted from the hotel he calls home (and perhaps Macau), but still absorbed in his drinking – still looking for another drink, another order of caviar, another game of baccarat, another extension of credit.

A fragile stranger played shakily by Tilda Swinton seems to see through him. A casino hostess gambled attractively, and with eyes wide open, Fala Chen sees something in him. But it’s hard to know what exactly. He is grotesque, remaining compelling mainly because Farrell makes it his physical terror to never be satisfied. What he isn’t, however, is empathy, and as the plot takes a course that begins to seem inevitable well before the finale, it makes his behavior – both monstrous and pathetic – increasingly difficult to watch. —Bob Mondello