Review: 'Barb & Star' is a wacky comedy centered around two fierce, funny females

The power of friendship is at the heart of “Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar,” a wickedly funny if sometimes scattershot comedy by real-life friends Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo.

Mumolo plays Barb and Wiig plays Star, middle-aged best pals, co-workers and roommates in their small Nebraska town. They spend practically every waking moment together, but they don’t mind because their favorite things include telling the other the smallest details of their lives.

One day, though, they lose their furniture-store jobs, and that same night are booted from their “talking club” by the officious Debbie (Vanessa Bayer). They need something to shake up their lives, so they follow a friend’s advice and book a trip to Vista Del Mar, a sun-dappled resort on Florida’s Gulf Coast. What could go wrong?

Well, unbeknownst to Barb and Star, an evil villain — also played by Wiig, in eggshell-white face makeup and a severe brunette wig — has hatched a dastardly plot to let loose a swarm of killer mosquitos onto Vista Del Mar. To carry out the details, the villain sends the assassin henchman she’s been stringing along for years, Edgar (Jamie Dornan), to carry out the details of the plot. But Edgar hasn’t calculated the devastating effect of meeting two Midwestern women with a penchant for culottes.

Watching “Barb & Star” feels as if Wiig and Mumolo, who co-wrote the 2011 classic “Bridesmaids,” have been talking to each other as these characters as a private joke for years, and someone decided to just film them doing the bit in a resort hotel. They seem so natural as comedy partners, each trusting the other to take the scenes in odd directions.

Director Josh Greenbaum — a TV and documentary veteran, making his first feature film — helps Wiig and Mumolo throw every wacky idea onto the screen, just to see what sticks. Some of the gags, like an opening bit with a kid (Reyn Doi) delivering newspapers and lip-synching Barbra Streisand, are offbeat enough to be funny. Other elements, like Damon Wayans’ not-too-bright spy character, fall flat.

But Greenbaum’s number one job is to not get in the way when Wiig and Mumolo get riffing as their off-the-wall characters. They so sweetly and hilariously inhabit these friendships that it seems they could make a series of their adventures. Where will Barb and Star go next? Zanzibar? Madagascar? Back to the U.S.S.R.? Wherever they go, we will follow them.

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‘Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar’

★★★

Available starting Friday, February 12, for streaming as a video-on-demand rental. Rated PG-13 for crude sexual content, drug use and some strong language. Running time: 107 minutes.

Review: 'Judas and the Black Messiah' is an explosive tale of a Black Panther leader and the man who betrayed him to the FBI

History may be written by the winners, but movies about historical events — like the incendiary drama “Judas and the Black Messiah” — are an indication that the battle for hearts and minds is never over.

Director Shaka King takes a passage from recent history, chronicling a span from 1968 to 1969, recounting the career and assassination of Fred Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya), chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party. It’s also, as the title suggests, a morality play, with a party member, William O’Neal (LaKeith Stanfield), turned by the FBI into Hampton’s betrayer.

As with Jesus, the title “black Messiah” isn’t one Hampton chose — it’s only used by the one undeniable villain in the piece, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover (Martin Sheen). So-called radicals like the Black Panthers — who practiced socialism and community building, as well as keeping plenty of firearms at the ready — were, in Hoover’s view, the biggest threat to (white) America’s way of life.

An ambitious young FBI agent, Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons), finds O’Neal facing an auto-theft charge — using a fake FBI badge to make the theft easier because “a badge is scarier than a gun.” Mitchell tells O’Neal he can avoid prison time if he infiltrates the Black Panther Party and brings back information to bring down Hampton.

O’Neal quickly works his way into the Illinois Black Panther Party, and gets a job as Hampton’s driver, using a car provided by the FBI. This gives O’Neal a front-row seat as Hampton tries to unite gangs in Chicago’s diverse neighborhoods — Blacks, Puerto Ricans and Confederate flag-flying whites — against the “pigs,” police both from Chicago and Hoover’s bureau.

King, co-writing with Will Berson (with story credit to brothers Keith and Kenneth Lucas), gives us two sides of Hampton’s life. One is the public face, the fiery orator who tells followers the Panthers’ most powerful weapon is the people. The other is his private side, shown in his romance with Deborah Johnson (tenderly played by Dominique Fishback), a poet who helps Hampton perfect his rhetoric and reach more people.

King packs a lot into his movie — history, allegory, romance, suspense — and does so with an adrenaline-pumping pace, cinematographer Sean Bobbitt’s strong visuals and a production and costume design that bring the swinging ‘60s to life.

King structures this history like a Passion Play, with Hampton as Christ, O’Neal as Judas taking his silver, and Hoover’s boys as the Pharisees. There’s also a Last Supper, and a moment where O’Neal denies his connection to Hampton. And, as with some interpretations of Jesus’ crucifixion (“Jesus Christ Superstar” comes to mind), much of the drama comes from O’Neal’s torn feelings over what he’s doing — supporting the aims of Hampton’s cause, but corrupted into actions that will lead to a martyr’s death.

For this to work, both sides of the duo must be at their sharpest, and Kaluuya and Stanfield are. Kaluuya produces some forceful oratory, and he’s soulful and introspective in the quiet moments where Hampton contemplates the sacrifice he’s making for the cause. Stanfield gives an equally dynamic performance, as O’Neal tries to justify his betrayal and make peace with his guilt. Together, they make “Judas and the Black Messiah” one of the most intense movies you’ll see this year.

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‘Judas and the Black Messiah’

★★★★

Opens Friday, February 12, in theaters where open, and streaming on HBO Max. Rated R for violence and pervasive language. Running time: 126 minutes.

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This review originally ran on this site on February 1, 2021, when the movie premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'Minari' is a warm and wise look at a Korean family trying to make it in America

Culture clashes and family struggles are at the heart of “Minari,” an emotionally resonant drama from director-writer Lee Isaac Chung.

Jacob Yi (Stephen Yeun, formerly of “The Walking Dead”) and his wife, Monica (Yeri Han), are a Korean-born couple who have left California for Arkansas in the mid-1980s, to pursue Jacob’s dream of running his own farm. With them are their American-born kids, Ann (Noel Kate Cho), who’s about 11, and 7-year-old David (Alan Kim), who gets extra pampering and worry from Monica because he has a heart murmur.

Jacob is enthusiastic about the fresh start, from buying a new tractor to hiring Paul (Will Patton), a local laborer who practices his own eccentric brand of Christianity. Monica is less thrilled about the single-wide pre-fab home they are living in, though her spirits pick up when her mother (Youn Yuh Jung) comes to live with them, bringing Korean chili powder and a penchant for playing cards. David is reluctant to befriend Grandma, whom he’s never met, but they bond over planting seeds of minari, a Korean plant and on-the-nose metaphor that fares well wherever it’s sown.

Chung’s script runs the Yi family through hardships, both financial and marital, while also displaying David’s child’s-eye view of life in the South. Chung’s direction captures the details of life in Reagan’s America, of Sunday church services and summer heat waves. And the cast, particularly Yeun and Han as the couple struggling to stay together through hardship, is exceptional. 

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‘Minari’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, February 12, in theaters where open, and in virtual cinemas. Rated PG-13 for some thematic elements and a rude gesture. Running time: 115 minutes; in English and in Korean, with subtitles.

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This review originally ran on this site on January 28, 2020, when the movie screened at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'The Mauritanian' is an unflinching drama about one detainee's horrific time at Guantanamo Bay

In the harrowing true-life drama “The Mauritanian,” audiences are confronted with America’s foreign policy and its most horrific symbol of injustice and fear in the name of security: The American prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Guantanamo Bay — a U.S. military base conveniently out of the reach of most American jurisprudence — is where Mohamedou Ould Salahi (played by Tahar Rahim) spends most of the 14-plus years in which he was held captive by U.S. forces. Detained by corrupt law officers in Mauritania, he is ultimately accused of being the recruiter for Al Qaeda who, while a student in Germany, befriended a couple of the men who flew planes into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.

Salahi’s case, four years after that attack, becomes a high priority for the Bush administration, who want to see Salahi tried, convicted and executed. The prosecutor brought on board is Stuart Couch (Benedict Cumberbatch), a Marine attorney whose moral rectitude is as thick as his Southern accent.

Taking up Salahi’s defense is Nancy Hollander (Jodie Foster), an ACLU attorney who sees in her client’s captivity a snake pit of constitutional violations. Aided by a young lawyer, Teri Duncan (Shailene Woodley), Hollander fights the secrets-obsessed bureaucracy surrounding Guantanamo, and convinces Salahi to write her letters that reveal the stomach-churning details of the interrogation techniques used on him.

Director Kevin Macdonald (“The Last King of Scotland”) pulls no punches in depicting the waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other techniques of “enhanced interrogation” — or, as sensible people who aren’t hiding their crimes call it, torture. The description Macdonald and screenewriters M.B. Traven, Rory Haines and Sohrab Noshirvani give to the torture Salahi suffered is frightening and infuriating.

In a cast with such heavyweights as Foster and Cumberbatch, Rahim (the star of the French prison drama “A Prophet”) is compelling, and Macdonald makes a wise choice to center the film around his performance. His take on the character is carefully ambiguous, so the audience isn’t sure for a long time whether Salahi is an innocent man caught in hell or a cagey terrorist sympathizer manipulating this situation for his own gain.

“The Mauritanian” isn’t likely to sway opinion about Guantanamo Bay or America’s shameful record of civil rights after 9/11 — those attitudes are too deeply engrained by now. But as a first-person account of the toll left by America’s embrace of such torture, the movie is thorough, arresting and alarming.

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‘The Mauritanian’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, February 12, in theaters where open. Rated R for violence including a sexual assault, and language. Running time: 129 minutes.

Review: 'The Map of Tiny Perfect Things' adapts 'Groundhog Day' into a tender YA romance

The beauty of the “Groundhog Day” premise, repeating the same day over and over, is how malleable it is — translatable as romantic comedy (“Palm Springs”), action movie (“Edge of Tomorrow”), slasher flick (“Happy Death Day”) and, in the sometimes charming “The Map of Tiny Perfect Things,” existential young-adult romantic drama.

Mark (Kyle Allen) is a high-school student has been stuck in a “Groundhog Day”-like time loop for awhile now — long enough that he can smoothly ride his bike through town, grab the latte someone left on the roof of their car, drink it, and toss the empty cup in the back of a passing garbage truck. He’s obviously done this before, just as he has rescued a young woman (Anna Mikami) from falling in the pool and then finagled a date with her.

One day, though, another young woman steps through Mark’s perfectly choreographed pool scene, as if she’s seen it before. It turns out she has. Margaret (Kathryn Newton) is also caught in the same time loop, waking up every morning to the same day and, at midnight, rewinding the tape and starting over.

Mark and Margaret decide to join forces, to see if they can locate all the “tiny perfect” moments in this particular day, thinking that if they find them all, they will unlock some kind of secret and end the loop. Along the way, feelings of love grow between the teens — but things get complicated, as we get clues about why Margaret may not want this day to end.

Lev Grossman’s screenplay, adapted from his short story (he’s also the author of the novels on which “The Magicians” is based), gets a little too cute dropping references to better-known time-travel stories. Director Ian Samuels (who made Netflix’s “Sierra Burgess Is a Loser”) keeps the pace well, and shows some flair setting up long takes following Mark or Margaret as they waltz through scenarios they’ve practiced a thousand times.

All the delight taken from “The Map of Tiny Perfect Things” is from the chemistry between the two leads, which is considerable. Allen is a likable guy, handsome but humble. And Newton — whose ever-growing resumé includes “Blockers,” “Pokemon Detective Pikachu” and “Freaky” — is delightful as the sardonic young woman with a hidden dark side. Together, they create an emotional map well worth following.

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‘The Map of Tiny Perfect Things’

★★★

Available starting Friday, February 12, for streaming on Prime video. Rated PG-13 for brief strong language, some teen drinking and sexual references. Running time: 98 minutes. 

Review: Robin Wright tries to get lost in 'Land,' a gorgeous drama about solitude, nature and grief

For “Land,” her first feature as a director, Robin Wright displays all the qualities she has as an actor: Elegance, natural beauty and a core of strength beneath a delicate surface.

Wright plays Edee, a woman who has suffered something — what that something is remains unexpressed for much of the film — and is looking to get away from other people. She buys a cabin deep in the Wyoming Rockies (the shoot was actually in Alberta), and holes up with a lot of canned food and some manuals on how to survive in the woods.

Working off a spare script, by Jesse Chatham and Erin Dignam, Wright shows Edee’s gradual evolution as she figures out how to live alone. After one event that leaves Edee starving and freezing, she gets an assist from a hunter, Miguel (Demián Bichir), who shows her skills that can’t be learned from a book. A friendship develops, though both recognize the other is in pain and are careful not to pry into each other’s pasts.

Wright and cinematographer Bobby Bukowski capture the austere, unforgiving beauty in which Edee has surrounded herself. And, with an assist from editors Anne McCabe and Mikkel E.G. Nielsen, Wright unfolds the depths of Edee’s grief and Miguel’s regrets in subtle strokes, creating a shattering effect when the whole picture becomes clear. Wright is also a fair arbiter of her own performance, which is as powerful as it is understated.

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‘Land’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, February 12, in theaters where open. Rated PG-13 for thematic content, brief strong language, and partial nudity. Running time: 89 minutes.

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This review originally ran on this site on January 31, 2021, when the movie premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: Farm life turns passionate in 'The World to Come,' an austere drama whose magic is in its details

Passion runs hot in the cold of 19th century New York state in “The World to Come,” a slow-burn romantic drama where the details are everything.

It’s 1856, and a couple, Abigail (Katherine Waterston) and Dyer (Casey Affleck) are scratching out an existence on their small farm. Abigail writes in her journal about her loneliness, and her concerns for Dyer’s mental state: “He told me contentment was a friend that he never gets to see.” Abigail is also mourning the death of her daughter, from whooping cough, and worried that she will never have another child.

Abigail’s spirit is lightened when a new couple arrives nearby, Finney (Christopher Abbott) and Tallie (Vanessa Kirby). Tallie becomes a fast friend, who invites herself over to see Abigail when Finney is doing the disgusting business of slaughtering a pig. Soon Tallie is a regular visitor, and Abigail is beside herself in those spaces when Tallie is not there.

Director Mona Fastvold (“The Sleepwalker,” SFF ’14) builds unbearable tension in the unspoken thoughts Abigail directs toward Tallie and the slight glances Tallie returns in Abigail’s direction. Eventually that tension must break, with life-shattering consequences for all concerned.

Fastvold, working off a script by Ron Hansen and Jim Shepard, steeps this story in the authentic details of the two couples’ farm lives, until one can almost smell the pigpen and feel the pressing of pen to paper in Abigail’s fervent writing.

Affleck’s quiet menace isn’t as flashy as Abbott’s pious browbeating of Tallie, but both men embody the unspoken oppression their wives endure. Kirby, so powerful in “Pieces of a Woman,” matches that performance with a strong turn as a woman willing to unleash the passion she’s feeling. Waterston carries the movie’s weight, as narrator and the vulnerable, yet forceful, woman who imagines a better world than the one in which she must survive. This quartet comes together to make “The World to Come” a quietly heartbreaking drama.

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‘The World to Come’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, February 12, in theaters where open. Rated R for some sexuality/nudity. Running time: 98 minutes.

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This review originally ran on this site on February 2, 2021, when the movie screened at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.

Review: 'Saint Maud' is a lurid, atmospheric horror film that showcases actress Morfydd Clark and director Rose Glass

A nurse with a messiah complex is at the bloody heart of “Saint Maud,” an atmospheric horror drama that spotlights two intriguing young talents: Actress Morfydd Clark and director Rose Glass.

Clark is somewhat familiar, or should be, having given solid performances in two Charles Dickens-adjacent period films: “The Man Who Invented Christmas,” in which he played Dickens’ young wife, and “The Personal History of David Copperfield,” where she stole the show as the title character’s ditzy fiancee.

Here, Clark plays Maud — or, at least, that’s the name she’s using now — who takes a job as a home nurse to Amanda (Jennifer Ehle), a famous dancer and choreographer who’s now using a wheelchair because of a cancer on her spinal column. We come to learn that Maud had an incident at the hospital where she previously worked, but her nursing skills and bedside manner seem to be OK for Amanda.

Glass, in her feature debut as director and screenwriter, shows us that Maud is a recent convert to Jesus — and is concerned, almost to the point of obsession, with Amanda’s imminent death and her destination in the afterlife. Amanda jokingly calls Maud her savior, but Maud seems to be seriously auditioning for the role.

Glass puts an intriguing spin on the straight-forward narrative, by showing us this relationship through two prisms: Reality, and the hyper-real fantasy land that Maud sees as she carries out her plan to “save” Amanda’s soul. The view isn’t always pretty, but it’s often fascinating.

Glass’ pace is brisk, but leaving enough time for Clark to put her stamp on this tricky role. Clark plays Maud as a madwoman, certainly, but with an earnestness that makes her delusions almost defensible. Together, Glass and Clark create an intense portrait of madness, of fanatical belief taken to bloody extremes.

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‘Saint Maud’

★★★

Opens Friday, January 29, in theaters where open; debuts February 12 on Epix. Rated R for disturbing and violent content, sexual content and language. Running time: 84 minutes.