Your Weekly Roundup of New Movies: “French Exit” Is a Roving Gabfest, and a Wonderful Showcase for Lioness-in-Winter Michelle Pfeiffer

What to see and skip while streaming or at the theater.

Michelle Pfeiffer and Lucas Hedges star in French Exit trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqMJeE15YiA (Sony Pictures Classics)

TOP PICK OF THE WEEK

French Exit

*** The Parisian take on the Irish goodbye, a French exit amounts to quickly and silently ditching a party. That's the Price family's move when their New York accounts run dry and mother Frances (Michelle Pfeiffer) and son Malcolm (Lucas Hedges) flee to France. There, they can hole up and spend their last cash stacks while the movie around them cycles through genres. Based on a 2018 novel by Portland author Patrick deWitt (The Sisters Brothers), French Exit is mostly a roving gabfest, and a wonderful showcase for lioness-in-winter Pfeiffer, who savors Frances' boozy Lucille Bluth-esque contempt in dialogue exchange after exchange. By contrast, a kindly naturalist at his acting core, Hedges can't quite handle the playful yet biting artificiality. Still, French Exit simply tries on enough hats (love triangle, supernatural mystery, mannered comedy) that no one weak spot sinks the ship. Azazel Jacobs' film is by far at its best in skewering wealth's absurdity, namely when Frances overpays a private detective to find a psychic to find a cat. Its more serious elements tend to drag, but there's a curiosity and empathy toward the Prices' ridiculous position. A onetime trophy wife (with no husband) and her trust-fund son (with no trust fund) are free of most everything: the good, the bad and any definition but mother and son. R. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Century 16 Cedar Hills, Century 16 Eastport Plaza, Liberty.

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The Father

*** The play-to-film transition often lacks formal ingenuity. Regardless of quality, you know the type: static cameras, actors gnawing on scenery, wordy dialogue carrying protracted scenes. But French playwright Florian Zeller adapting his acclaimed dementia drama to cinema has the opposite effect. The Father either eludes or busts multiple movie norms of perspective, setting and unreliable narrators, and then cinches into a harrowing but not exploitative puzzle box. As the dementia-ridden Anthony, 83-years-young Anthony Hopkins resists the pleas of his daughter Anne (Olivia Colman) to accept an in-home caretaker and grant the family some freedom. That's as much plot as can be said for certain, as scenes loop, rooms mutate in almost imperceptible ways, and basic facts aren't what they were five minutes ago. Robbed of truth but not his showy, sparring personality, Anthony isn't an unexpected character from Hopkins, but the performance is a gauntlet and his best in 10 years. Unfortunately, The Father doesn't offer Colman anywhere near the same material, but it does allow the audience to see things from her perspective, as well as Anthony's. You're fighting for understanding one moment, sure you've got it the next, rebuffed just after that, and then mercifully, fittingly ready to give in. PG-13. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. AMC Vancouver Mall 23, Bagdad, Century 16 Cedar Hills Crossing, Century 16 Eastport Plaza, Liberty, Living Room.

F.T.A.

*** According to director Francine Parker, the White House itself called up American International Pictures in 1972 and, poof, this vérité document of Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland's anti-war variety show evaporated from theaters. The presumed reason for the censorship is still the most important historical detail within F.T.A. (standing alternately for "Free" and "F*ck the Army"). Those were the flames Fonda, Sutherland (both fresh off Klute), songwriter Len Chandler and their touring troupe tried to stoke with this satirical counterprogramming to the USO. We witness thousands of soldiers thwarting their base commanders to attend, and concurring with the vaudevillian skits and musical numbers skewering a war that would "flatten" Southeast Asian nations "to save" them. While the unearthed documentary's chief drawback is its sense of preciousness for the actual live show—maudlin folk ballads deserve their own wing in the Diminishing Returns Hall of Fame—it also demonstrates a real-time attentiveness to the Vietnam War's countless exploited parties: Black GIs, women in the Air Force, unionizing Okinawan workers, Filipino independence movements. Even if the harmonies and high kicks didn't turn the Hueys around, F.T.A. is a convincing testament to the theater kid's particular tools of discord. R. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Cinema 21, Hollywood, Virtual Cinema.

Boogie

** The debut film directed by Fresh Off the Boat creator (and then disowner) Eddie Huang follows a Chinese American basketball star, Boogie (newcomer Taylor Takahashi), who's shooting for a college scholarship. Replete with sports drama clichés—a needlessly dickish crosstown rival (played by late rapper Pop Smoke), parental pressures, a befuddled coach preaching teamwork, a blooming romance bigger than sports—it's the finer strokes that still merit Boogie a watch. Not just a vessel of his parents' professional dreams, Boogie is the evolution of their specific cultural expressions; he's portrayed as the product of a marriage (Dragon + Dog = Snake on the Chinese zodiac chart) destined to distress the son. Making sense of that legacy—explaining both this movie's swagger and genuinely foul mood—is more important than Boogie learning a pat American lesson about claiming his own path. To his credit, Takahashi can genuinely ball, though he looks about 12 years too old for high school and routinely falls flat in emotional scenes. It's Taylour Paige (star of the forthcoming Zola) as Boogie's beloved and Perry Yung as his ne'er-do-well father who shoulder the humanity. Ultimately, if most every other variation on these hoop dreams has been told, Boogie at least deserves the court time. R. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. AMC Vancouver Mall 23, Century 16 Cedar Hills Crossing, Century 16 Eastport Plaza, Living Room, On Demand.

The Courier

** During the Cold War, British businessman Greville Wynne had a secret life. While exporting industrial engineering products, he worked as a courier for Col. Oleg Penkovsky, a Soviet military intelligence officer who was an informant for MI6 and the CIA. Wynne's espionage career ended with his capture in 1962, but he survived 18 months in a Moscow prison and later wrote two memoirs, The Man From Moscow and The Man From Odessa. It would take more than a facile film to diminish his heroic legacy, but it's still dispiriting to watch The Courier, a movie so bland it's barely fit for the BBC. Under the direction of Dominic Cooke (The Hollow Crown), a tale that should have been scary and suspenseful turns into a stately British period piece, complete with a surprisingly shapeless score by the brilliant Polish composer Abel Korzeniowski. As Wynne, Benedict Cumberbatch is exquisitely vulnerable—the prison scenes are haunted by images of his increasingly skeletal frame—but The Courier's cheery conclusion obscures painful realities, including the real Wynne's MI6 training, which he said was more brutal than the KGB beatings he endured. Greville Wynne risked his life to prevent nuclear war. The least The Courier could have done was risk being honest. PG-13. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. AMC Vancouver Mall 23, Century 16 Cedar Hills, Century 16 Eastport Plaza, Living Room.

Nobody

** His centrality to this hyperstylized shoot-'em-up notwithstanding, Bob Odenkirk shares one other crucial trait with the Bruce Willises and Dolph Lundgrens of the world—his head. That Easter Island chin. Those granite cheekbones. Stubble the color and texture of iron filings. Every time Odenkirk growls, broods or ironically luxuriates in the battering he takes in this half-comedic John Wick knockoff, that mug draws all attention away from the stunt men overselling his unremarkable punches and gunplay. Ilya Naishuller's debut feature is essentially Death Wish with dads who collect vinyl and cultivate man caves they would never deign to call man caves. The spree of (maybe righteous?) violence by suburban accountant Hutch Mansell (Odenkirk) begins when he freezes up during a home invasion, much to the chagrin of his wife and teenage son. From there, Hutch is on a collision course with the criminal underworld as Nobody becomes a bloody romp but skirts questions of wounded modern masculinity raised by the inciting incident. Nobody can't get over the fact that it cast Bob Odenkirk instead of letting the incredibly versatile actor tangle with the meaning of all this carnage. If only it took its own premise more seriously. R. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. AMC Vancouver Mall 23, Century 16 Cedar Hills, Century 16 Eastport Plaza, Cornelius 10 Cinemas.

Zack Snyder's Justice League

* A death in the family. Dueling directors. Wrathful fans. Zack Snyder's Justice League may be a slab of bloated mediocrity, but the story of its creation is a saga of epic, tragic proportions. In 2017, Snyder surrendered his superhero mashup Justice League to director Joss Whedon (The Avengers), who reshot multiple scenes while Snyder grieved for his daughter, Autumn, who had died by suicide at age 20. Enraged by Whedon's revisions, some fans demanded to see Snyder's version of the film, unleashing a campaign that included a Times Square billboard and an airplane banner. Zack Snyder's Justice League is the answer to their prayers: a restoration supervised by Snyder himself. It is also a four-hour bore that subjects us to a lifeless Batman (Ben Affleck), an apathetic Superman (Henry Cavill) and an appallingly clichéd screenplay (sample line: "The great darkness begins!"). The Justice League's more charismatic recruits—Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), Aquaman (Jason Momoa), the Flash (Ezra Miller), and Cyborg (Ray Fisher)—provide spark and spunk, but not enough to elevate the interminable action scenes, which are clogged with sluggish slow motion, a Snyder trademark. None of this will faze Snyder's fans, who care about him so passionately they have donated half a million dollars to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. There are plenty of reasons to loathe Zack Snyder's Justice League, but it is important to acknowledge that it has meaning beyond its artistic failures—and to hope that finishing it brought some solace to a bereaved father. R. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. HBO Max.

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