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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 passing 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, Clackamas, Division, Eastport, Fox Tower, Hollywood, Laurelhurst, Living Room, Lloyd Center, Oak Grove, Progress Ridge.
AFIRE
**** In the tradition of his many compromised romances (Phoenix, Transit, Undine), writer-director Christian Petzold explores connections missed, made and retroactively illuminated during a novelist’s work-cation on the Baltic Sea in Afire. In black denim and gray New Balances, Leon (Thomas Schubert) is practically in uniform as someone who hates the beach. He’s destined to miss out, but the audience doesn’t. Petzold lets us enjoy Leon’s companions—his friend Felix (Langston Uibel), their unexpected housemate Nadja (Paula Beer), and a local lifeguard (Enno Trebs)—and Germany’s north coast. All the while, Leon frets over his manuscript, and a forest fire rages in the distance. Dreamy yet frustrated, blunt yet forgiving, Afire holds space for modern life’s many scales—a creative’s navel-gazing, less selfish characters’ acceptance of provincial life, existential dread. Reveling in Nadja’s beauty, intelligence and generosity (she’s always making goulash), Petzold keeps challenging the audience with Leon’s shaky grip on protagonist status. Often, this sour lump is the last character whose vantage point you’d want in this film, but that’s all part of Petzold’s ever-fascinating “both/and” filmmaking. People will still take meaningful vacations as the world burns; a bad writer can tell a good story; and Nadja will offer Leon a welcoming smile because they’ve shared a deeply imperfect moment. NR. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Living Room.
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, Cinemagic, Clackamas, Division, Fox Tower, Hollywood, Laurelhurst, Living Room, Lloyd Center, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, St. Johns Twin, 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. Bagdad, Cinema 21, Clackamas, Eastport, Empirical, Fox Tower, Joy Cinema, Laurelhurst, Living Room, Lloyd Center, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, St. Johns, Studio One, Wunderland Milwaukie.
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. Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, Clackamas, Division, Eastport, Lake Theater, Lloyd Center, Mill Plain, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, Progress Ridge, Vancouver Plaza.
THEATER CAMP
*** In Molly Gordon and Nick Lieberman’s hysterical mockumentary Theater Camp, self-delusion drives youth theater camp AdirondACTS and the lives of its eccentric campers. After the camp’s founder, Joan Rubinsky (Amy Sedaris), falls into a coma, devoted counselors Rebecca-Diane (Gordon) and Amos (Ben Platt) return to AdirondACTS to put on a biographical musical about their matriarchal founder—while crypto-bro Troy Rubinsky (Jimmy Tatro) flounders as he attempts to keep the camp afloat in his mother’s absence. Written by Gordon, Lieberman, Platt and Noah Galvin (who plays a stage manager), the screenplay delivers sharp deadpan humor as it satirizes theater kids’ notorious self-seriousness (children in a seemingly furtive drug deal negotiate for “throat coat” tea bags and Amos calls a child using a tear stick onstage “Lance Armstrong for actors”). The actors’ egos contrast with the camp’s financial ruin and the counselors’ stale individual careers; self-delusion becomes power in surviving a profession based on attention and rejection. Most scenes were improvised with rough outlines, a method that causes the story to wander, but highlights the actors’ craft and chemistry. It’s all captured with swift camera work that drenches the audience in summer camp nostalgia, a sweet blur seemingly over just as it began. PG-13. ROSE WONG. Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, Fox Tower, Living Room.
HAUNTED MANSION
** Loath as Disney would be to admit it, Haunted Mansion pulls from the same playbook as its failed 2003 attempt to turn the titular theme park ride into a blockbuster: Once again, the studio has created a horror comedy that leans heavily on spook-house kitsch and self-aware snark. So what’s different this time? A slightly better script and a postmodern approach to the story, courtesy of director Justin Simien (Dear White People). Instead of an ordinary family facing the 999 specters that haunt Gracey Manor, the film assembles a ragtag team of discount ghostbusters to stop the haunt—namely a washed-up scientist (LaKeith Stanfield), a fast-talking priest (Owen Wilson), a sassy medium (Tiffany Haddish), and an excitable historian (Danny DeVito), plus the house’s current owner (Rosario Dawson) and her adolescent son (Chase W. Dillon, the surprise MVP of the cast). The actors have fun riffing on the material, but the jokes are hit or miss and the scares are (understandably) toned down to remain kid-friendly. There’s an ongoing theme of not wallowing in grief that adds a welcome weight to the story, but it’s diluted by every character having their own mini-arc and a mystery investigation that has a few too many steps. Fans of the Magic Kingdom ride and kids with a taste for the macabre will likely find something to enjoy in Haunted Mansion, but for most everyone else it’s a passable but skippable trip to the other side. PG-13. MORGAN SHAUNETTE. Bridgeport, Cascade, Cedar Hills, City Center, Division, Lloyd Center, Mill Plain, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, Progress Ridge, Studio One, Vancouver Plaza, Wunderland Milwaukie.
