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Summer of Soul
*** Someone who attended the Harlem Cultural Festival, a series of free concerts held in Mount Morris Park in the summer of 1969, referred to it as “the ultimate Black barbecue.” That’s as good a description as any considering the celebratory vibe created by organizer Tony Lawrence and the more than two dozen artists—Stevie Wonder, Sly and the Family Stone, Nina Simone, Moms Mabley and former Temptation David Ruffin, among them—who performed at the event. Despite the estimated 300,000 attendees, the festival has been all but ignored in the wake of Woodstock, which went down weeks later. Questlove, founder of hip-hop ensemble the Roots, is jogging the world’s collective cultural memory with his directorial debut, Summer of Soul. Built from a wealth of footage captured at the Harlem Cultural Festival for a New York television station, this documentary perfectly contextualizes the event by weaving in news clips from the time and contemporary interviews with attendees and performers. But the true draw is seeing the kings and queens of R&B, funk, jazz and gospel, all of them at the peak of their considerable careers. They poured every ounce of themselves into their performances that summer and will be blowing minds anew thanks to this fantastic film. PG-13. ROBERT HAM. Cinema 21, Hollywood, Vancouver Mall.
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Luca
**** Luca (Jacob Tremblay) is a sea monster, but there’s nothing monstrous about him. That’s the premise of this buoyant adventure from Pixar Animation, a studio that specializes in telling profoundly human stories about nonhuman characters, from the tormented toys in the Toy Story films to the lovestruck robots in WALL-E. Like those movies, Luca is an allegory for kids. When Luca first emerges from the sea and sets foot on the Italian coast, he is horrified to find that coming ashore has physically transformed him into a human (his soul remains the same). If the ocean embodies the oppressive coziness of childhood, the land represents the seductive liberation of adulthood. When Luca becomes human, he protests, “I’m a good kid,” sounding like a boy taught to be ashamed of his sexuality. The ideal audience for the film will be interested in both the hints that Luca is gay and the kinetic pleasures of the plot, which include Luca and his best friend, Alberto (Jack Dylan Grazer), teaming up with a valorous human girl (Emma Berman) for a bicycle race. There is a winner, but the real winners are the young moviegoers who will learn that Luca respects and cares about them enough to challenge them while also delivering a good time. PG. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Disney +.
Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It
**** “Damn the shadows and here’s to the light.” When Rita Moreno speaks those words in Mariem Pérez Riera’s excellent documentary Rita Moreno: Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It, she isn’t just talking. She’s revealing the inner strength that sustained her from her childhood in Puerto Rico to an acting career that led her to face the triumphs of stardom and the evils of discrimination and abuse. The documentary is a chronicle of her experiences and a corrective for moviegoers who have seen only her Oscar-winning performance as Anita in West Side Story. Did you know she won an Emmy for The Muppet Show? That she played a nun working in a prison on Oz? That she unleashed unscripted fury on her toxic former lover, Marlon Brando, in the 1969 film The Night of the Following Day? Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It revels in these victories, but it also listens to Moreno’s recollections of her most harrowing hours, from onset jellyfish stings to being raped by her agent while she was menstruating. Riera’s documentary is about how Moreno lived through those horrors and transcended them. A series of animations imagines her as a living paper doll, but the movie shows you that she was (and is) nobody’s plaything. PG-13. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Cinema 21.
F9
*** Vin Diesel is a lovably goofy badass, but he isn’t the hero of the Fast & Furious franchise. That honor belongs to Justin Lin, the hotshot director who solidified the series’ brand: deranged automotive action and devotion to the belief that if all of humanity could barbecue with Diesel, the world would know peace. Lin keeps the faith in F9, a sequel that satisfies despite signs of wear and tear that have multiplied during the franchise’s 20-year reign at the multiplexes. Dom Toretto (Diesel) returns to battle his grouchy brother Jakob (John Cena), a rogue government agent hunting for a MacGuffin best described as a fancy soccer ball with apocalyptic potential. The action isn’t so clever or coherent as the merry mayhem Lin unleashed on Tokyo and Rio in previous Fast & Furious films, but the sweet camaraderie between Dom and his loyal cronies (including Michelle Rodriguez, Jordana Brewster, Tyrese Gibson and Christopher Bridges) endures. Best of all, F9 brings back Han (Sung Kang), an avatar of superhuman coolness who was apparently killed in an exploding Mazda several movies ago. When someone wonders how Han survived, he politely tells them to shut the fuck up and live in the moment. That’s good advice for anyone who goes to see F9. PG-13. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, City Center, Dine-In Progress Ridge, Evergreen Parkway, Fox Tower, Lloyd Center, Pioneer Place, Regal Movies on TV, Sherwood, St. Johns Twin Cinemas, Studio One, Tigard, Wunderland Beaverton, Wunderland Milwaukie.
The Sparks Brothers
*** At first glance, the cult rock band Sparks seems a bizarre subject to receive the epic rockumentary treatment. Ron and Russell Mael’s long-tenured art pop group, whose visual impact John Lennon allegedly described as something akin to Hitler playing piano for English musician Marc Bolan, released 24 and counting chart-nudging albums that flirted with relevance during the glam and disco periods before retreating toward a decidedly niche appeal in the past few decades. Nevertheless, The Sparks Brothers wrings ecstatic appreciation from a murderers’ row of commenters, ranging from obvious acolytes (members of Erasure, Squeeze, Duran Duran) to further afield well-wishers (Beck, Flea, Weird Al) to friendly faces perhaps just passing by the studio that day (Mike Myers, Neil Gaiman, Patton Oswalt). As multimedia homage to a deserving band, there’s a desperate allure to the hyperkinetic blend of monochromatic celeb testaments, sweaty ’70s concert footage and animated re-creations of what few stories emerge. Clearly a passion project for first-time documentarian Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Baby Driver), his all-encompassing ardor tries its best to breathe life into the inevitably less than compelling tale of talented brothers who overcame loving parents and SoCal golden-boy origins. At its best, the doc plays out like a star-studded listening party thrown by a manic superfan asserting the Sparks’ rarefied charms, and the sheer breadth of luminaries gathered diverts attention for a while. Well before minute 150, though, even the guests of honor might wish to hear something else. R. JAY HORTON. Bridgeport, Cascade, Cinema 21, Living Room, Laurelhurst, Vancouver Mall.
The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard
** With a title resembling an SAT question on the possessive form, this sequel to 2017′s The Hitman’s Bodyguard follows up one of the least-discussed studio hits of the past five years. This round again pairs Ryan Reynolds, a rule-abiding bodyguard, with Samuel L. Jackson, a hitman who loves to yell “motherfucker,” this time on a mission to save that little old world. Reynolds, we’re reminded, is one of Hollywood’s most reliable stars in any context, with a comedic bounce that bolsters this chaotic sequel’s surprisingly strong bones. The delight of Reynolds’ relentless thwarting, drugging and battering from hyperactive and hyperviolent Jackson and Selma Hayek (the hitman’s wife who was foretold) is so thorough that the rest of the movie can mostly be as loud, crass and ridiculous as it likes. That said, director Patrick Hughes’ action is dreadfully incompetent. Frank Grillo and Antonio Banderas spearhead a nonsensical world-domination plot that delivers some of the shoddiest visual effects in recent memory. Though placating 2021 attention spans might explain the film’s needlessly panicked clip, The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard looks warmer through the lens of action-comedy ancestors like Midnight Run and The In-Laws. God knows why it’s shot and edited like a drunken Bourne movie. R. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Cedar Hills, Evergreen Parkway, Pioneer Place, St. Johns Theater & Pub, St. Johns Twin Cinemas, Tigard.
La Dosis
** Like a giant shouldering the weight of the planet, Marcos (Carlos Portaluppi) lumbers through this Argentine thriller, which is simultaneously sinister and lethargic. Marcos is a nurse in an intensive care unit, but he doesn’t just heal the sick—he quietly puts them out of their misery when he believes it is necessary. He’s a murderer, but not like Gabriel (Ignacio Rogers), a slick nurse who kills not out of compassion, but for kicks. La Dosis is essentially a morbid duet performed by these two men. One considers taking lives to be a solemn duty, and one revels in the unholy thrill of playing God, but they are both symbols in writer-director Martín Kraut’s medical parable. La Dosis is a portrait of health care workers who are so brutally demeaned and exploited that they can’t feel in control unless they shatter their most sacred oath. It’s a perverse and audacious idea, but the film built around it is punishingly slow and lacks conviction. Kraut seems afraid to decide whether the psychological battle between Marcos and Gabriel is a showdown between good and evil or if they are just devils in slightly different disguises. Despite its impressively dark premise, La Dosis doesn’t end with a shock. It ends with a shrug. NR. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. On Demand.