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Pee-wee as Himself
The story of Pee-wee as Himself—the two-part Max documentary exploring the life of actor Paul Reubens and his career as his most famous character, Pee-wee Herman—is about the lack of control one has over one’s own narrative. Reubens often expresses reluctance to surrender his story to filmmaker Matt Wolf, and why wouldn’t he? Spending his years as a cultural figure in the closet, forcibly re-outed by police harassment, trumped-up charges and intense media scrutiny clearly took a toll. Yet this isn’t a story of victimhood, but of refusal to be defined by false perceptions. Pee-wee as Himself is artfully entertaining and informative, featuring interviews with many people from Reubens’ life, like actors Laurence Fishburne and Natasha Lyonne, as well as Tim Burton and Portlander Cassandra Peterson. Reubens died unexpectedly in July 2023 amid filming. Unbeknownst to Wolf, Reubens was battling leukemia. This film is a marvelous look into Reubens’ life: a correcting of falsehoods and a celebration of yet another queer icon whose life and career were shaken up by a world primed to view gay people as predators, regardless of how flimsy the evidence. TV-MA. MELODY ESME. Max.
Caught by the Tide
There’s a loose narrative thread that dangles through Caught by the Tides, the latest feature from Chinese auteur Jia
Zhangke, mostly to do with a silent woman (Zhao Tao) on a decades-long search for her lost love (Zhubin Li). The real attraction is the huge canvas that the filmmaker uses to tell this story. Using footage captured over the course of his three decades behind the camera, including unused segments from his previous celebrated films such as Ash Is Purest White and Unknown Pleasures, Jia paints a vast portrait of the rapid evolution of his home country due to huge advancements in technology and the changing physical landscape brought on by the completion of the Three Gorges Dam in 2006. Zhao serves as a wordless Virgil, guiding viewers through both piles of rubble and the forbidding urban sprawl of Guangdong Province with a mixture of wide-eyed curiosity and bone-deep despair. Her expressive face and furtive movements become avatars for Jia’s camera, which shifts from an early DV camcorder to a modern HD model as the film progresses. He sees the beauty in images of boats ferrying displaced families or the brutalist architecture surrounding our heroine, but despairs at the effect it is all having on his people. NR. ROBERT HAM. Opens June 6 at Living Room Theaters.
Friendship
It’s hard to make friends as an adult. It’s even harder if you’re a character played by Tim Robinson, whose awkward buffoon persona has been honed to a razor sheen by projects like Detroiters and I Think You Should Leave. A24’s Friendship gives Robinson the chance to exercise his schtick in a feature-length production, resulting in a maddening cringe comedy that’s just as funny as it is uncomfortable. Robinson stars as suburban schlub Craig Waterman, who finds an escape from his humdrum life by befriending his new neighbor, charismatic weatherman Austin Carmichael (Paul Rudd). However, when Craig inevitably ruins it by making it weird, it sends him down a spiral of obsession and resentment that these days we call (hyperbolically) “the male loneliness epidemic.” Robinson’s performance is truly what holds the whole affair together: His obliviousness and pratfalls are funny on their own, but underneath that is a sense of depression and desperation that elevates Craig into a real, three-dimensional person. Writer-director Andrew DeYoung shoots Friendship less like the formula bro comedies it’s riffing on (including Rudd’s own I Love You, Man) and more like a tense thriller, as if Craig’s fixations are a prelude to some deadly confrontation. The film never quite gets that dark (likely to its benefit), but it still works to craft a surreal, twisted parable on the dangers of male companionship. R. MORGAN SHAUNETTE. Cinema 21, Hollywood Theatre, Regal locations.
Bring Her Back
Twin Australian filmmakers Danny and Michael Philippou enlist Academy Award-nominated actress Sally Hawkins
for their supernatural horror film Bring Her Back, with frustrating results. A pair of half-siblings (Billy Barratt, Sora Wong) enter the foster system after their father’s sudden death. Laura (Hawkins), their caretaker, mourns the loss of her daughter. Grief clouds her judgment when she’s offered the chance to (wait for it) bring her back, which divides the living siblings surviving her increasingly mean-spirited abuse. (Spoiler: They should have kept her away.) Written by Danny Philippou and Bill Hinzman, who wrote 2022’s far-superior supernatural horror Talk to Me, Bring Her Back winds up both predictable and confusing at the same time. Its supernatural aspects aren’t fully fleshed out, leaving them unfulfilled up to the bitter end. Bring Her Back showcases some awesome Evil Dead-inspired practical effects-loaded jump scares, but they feel forced in for shock value without benefiting the overall narrative. It’s a film that opens in one direction but erratically changes lanes to chase another movie’s success rather than truly stand on its own. While Barratt and Wong are stellar in their roles, they’re not enough to salvage this chore. R. RUDY VALDEZ. Studio One Theaters, AMC, Cinemark and Regal locations.