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NIGHT ALWAYS COMES
In the tradition of Good Times and Zola, Night Always Comes follows Lynette (Vanessa Kirby)—a 30-something supporting her mother and disabled brother—over one breakneck night to raise the $25,000 down payment to buy her crumbling Kenton bungalow. In her quest for basic stability, Lynette calls in every favor from a checkered past, and burns every last bridge. By now, the millennial financial meltdown movie is well established. This movie instead gets its mileage from its Rose City specificity: luminous shots of the Avalon Theater arcade at night, the Ritz-Carlton taunting Lynette midconstruction from afar, seedy chop shops past 82nd, Columbia Boulevard’s illegal street races and a heartbreaking reunion amid the eclectic clutter of Really Good Stuff. It hits close to home. Chances are you’ve been to these places. Chances are you’ve spoken to these people. As things escalate, the star turns are particularly memorable. Julia Fox crushes a one-scene performance as a Pearl District sugar baby with a penthouse full of Temu furniture. A sinister Eli Roth even shows up as the kind of high-level drug dealer who puts his AirPods in to have sex. My one note? No Portland all-nighter is complete without a stop to Javier’s. R. KARLY QUADROS. Netflix.
HONEY DON’T!
The middle installment of Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s “lesbian B-movie” trilogy, Honey Don’t!, shares much of the DNA with not only its predecessor, last year’s Drive-Away Dolls, but other darkly absurd Coen projects like Raising Arizona and Fargo. But Honey Don’t! sadly strains under its mismatched tones and uneven script. Our story takes us to Bakersfield, Calif., the desiccated husk of ’70s Americana, where private investigator Honey O’Donahue (Margaret Qualley) looks into the suspicious death of a prospective client (Kara Petersen). The prime suspect? A charismatic preacher (Chris Evans) with a side hustle moving drugs for a French cartel. Our intrepid detective navigates shifty witnesses and a mysterious new love interest (Aubrey Plaza) in her search for the truth. Qualley’s performance is what holds most of the film together: a world-weary cynicism that she makes believable and relatable. Evans, meanwhile, continues to relish playing the heel after eight years carrying the shield. Despite its oddball sense of humor, however, Honey Don’t! will suddenly veer into brutal scenes of violence that belong in a Tarantino movie more than something trying to be this light. There are the seeds of a much deeper story here that could explore Honey’s trauma or the effect cults have on wayward youths, but at 89 minutes, Honey Don’t! has neither the time nor the inclination to have any staying power. There are moments of brilliance within the mystery, but it’s too slight and unfocused to be truly satisfying. R. MORGAN SHAUNETTE. Living Room Theaters, Studio One Theaters, AMC, Cinemark and Regal locations.
AMERICANA
If Americana was meant as a litmus test to verify Sydney Sweeney’s viability as a movie star, the results have come back decidedly negative. But writer-director Tony Tost’s debut wasn’t really designed to be that: Premiering more than two years ago at South by Southwest and dropping now to capitalize on Sweeney’s controversial American Eagle ad campaign, Americana is a shaggy ensemble crime caper that’s one part Coens, one part Tarantino and one part revisionist Western without anything intelligent to say about its antecedents. A Lakota buckskin ghost shirt is the MacGuffin here, with an impressive gallery of ne’er-do-wells (Paul Walter Hauser, Toby Huss, Zahn McClarnon, Simon Rex, and singer Halsey) competing to possess it. Sweeney plays an aspiring country singer with a stammer, an idea that’s cute on paper but enervating in practice, with each line delivery taking three times too long. There’s also the problem of Cal (Gavin Maddox Bergman), a white kid who believes he’s the reincarnation of Sitting Bull. Cal gets plenty of shit from the other characters, including the Native Americans he’s trying to befriend, so it falls short of offensive, but it’s irksome nevertheless. And that’s the issue with Americana: It’s chock-full of wacky ideas but is missing the humor to make the wackiness sing. R. NED LANNAMANN. Laurelhurst, Studio One, AMC, Cinemark and Regal locations.
THE ROSES
Somebody get the lovely duo of Olivia Colman and Benedict Cumberbatch a better movie for their talents because The Roses doesn’t deserve either of them. A largely empty remake of Danny DeVito’s infinitely more engaging The War of the Roses (1989), it takes on the same 1981 novel by Warren Adler though comes away with infinitely less. The basic premise, about a couple whose seemingly picture-perfect marriage begins to come apart following a crisis of sorts, remains largely the same in the broad strokes, but every other choice proves to be a worse one. There are more supporting characters and gags jammed in, though we almost entirely lose sight of the full complexities of the couple who’s supposedly meant to be the film’s center as they just end up feeling like sad caricatures of themselves with little depth. It’s not the worst remake to be made by any means, but it is the most lackluster as it jettisons most of the more biting elements that made DeVito’s approach grab hold of you. The more that you try to see what it was going for, the more you really struggle to see what the vision was for why something like this deserved revisiting. In the end, it just proves that the incessant desire for remakes is often only good for revealing what shined the first time. R. CHASE HUTCHINSON. Living Room Theaters.
