Losing a friend and a career is devastating in Blue Moon, the drama starring Ethan Hawke the same week he plays a serial killer in Black Phone 2. Both are in theaters now, along with Aziz Ansari's feature directorial debut, Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein, a gambling story from the director of Conclave, and a tale of retribution from a formerly imprisoned Iranian director. Here are your choices in cineplexes.
Black Phone 2
In theaters Friday
In the 2021 film The Black Phone, Ethan Hawke played a child abductor/serial killer who hid behind a demonic mask. In Black Phone 2, four years have passed since Finney, played by Mason Thames, escaped the Grabber's basement by killing him. Finn's in high school now, and struggling, because: trauma. His little sister Gwen (Madeleine McGraw), whose psychic visions helped the cops find Finn in the original movie, is being tortured by dreams of the Grabber murdering boys at a remote Christian camp.
Together, because this is a horror movie and it's the kind of decision people only make in horror movies, Finn and Gwen decide to visit the camp in question — in the middle of a blizzard. Ethan Hawke's Grabber is back for the sequel — and if you're asking how, given that the character is dead, you really need to see more horror movies. Grabbers gonna grab, even from beyond the grave. — Glen Weldon
Good Fortune
In theaters Friday
This trailer includes instances of vulgar language.
Hoping to boost his status in the guardian angel hierarchy, Gabriel (Keanu Reeves), a sweetly inept angel-in-training arranges for Arj (Aziz Ansari) who's not quite making ends meet as a gig worker, to switch places with Jeff (Seth Rogen), an empty-headed but wildly successful venture capitalist/tech bro. Gabriel figures they'll each learn something from walking in the other's shoes for a while. Alas, they tend to learn the wrong things in this pleasantly undemanding comedy. It's Trading Places meets It's a Wonderful Life, with a faint social satire edge. It's also Ansari's feature writing/directing debut, and he turns out to be adept at getting loose, easygoing performances from co-stars ranging from Sandra Oh (his angelic supervisor) to Keke Palmer (Arj's not-so-secret crush). As a writer, he's better at crafting funny scenes than at getting them to hang together, so the social commentary feels at once well-meaning and slightly out-of-touch. But with Reeves' guileless angel as his secret weapon, Ansari's made the film a fun hang. — Bob Mondello
Blue Moon
In limited theaters Friday
March 31, 1943 — the opening night of Oklahoma! is reaching its climax, with audience enthusiasm as high as an elephant's eye, but Lorenz Hart can't stop muttering about those cornball lyrics.
For nearly a quarter of a century, Hart has been the lyric-writing half of Rodgers and Hart, a team that has authored two dozen musicals and hundreds of songs. But Oklahoma! isn't by Rodgers and Hart. It's by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein.
So in the middle of the title number, he mumbles his apologies, and heads for Sardi's, the showbiz watering hole just down the block, hoping to inoculate himself before the cast party starts. Played by a deliciously dyspeptic Ethan Hawke, Hart is greeted by Bobby Cannavale's Eddie the bartender with a line from Casablanca, that leads to what sounds like a practiced routine. But it ends with a request for a drink that breaks that routine.
"Larry, you told me under no circumstances," protests Eddie.
"I'm just gonna look at it — take the measure of its amber heft in my hand," Hart replies, before launching into riffs on anything and everything except the opening night down the block. Chief among his topics of choice, a college co-ed (Margaret Qualley), with whom he's trying to convince himself he's smitten, though his taste usually runs to men. If she's a prize worth prizing, maybe he can avoid thinking about the breakup of his partnership with Rodgers.
The second topic is writing, and on that, he lucks out: Also in the bar this evening is E.B. White, co-author of The Elements of Style, and future children's book author (Stuart Little, Charlotte's Web).
"I'm in love with your punctuation," Hart tells him before going on a tear about the art of turning love into lyrics — say, "bewitched, bothered and bewildered."
Like most of Robert Kaplow's screenplay, their conversation is exquisitely crafted writing about writing, designed to keep Hart from engaging with the dissolution of his partnership with Rodgers.
Filmmaker Richard Linklater keeps things intimate and steadily more awkward, so that by the time Rodgers (Andrew Scott) finally talks with Hart, nerves are raw. He's found ways to make Ethan Hawke, who's a good head taller than Hart was, look like he's about four foot ten. And he varies the pacing as much as he can with a film that's basically all talk. You'll realize at some point that while sitting with the smartest guy in the room is definitely exhilarating, it can also be exhausting.
Still, how often do you get the chance…maybe once in a Blue Moon? — Bob Mondello
It Was Just an Accident
In limited theaters now
Jafar Panahi's latest film is arguably the year's most refreshing thriller/road movie — a tragicomedy that speaks to this moment with searing intensity, yet manages to morph at times into a comic brawl. It begins with the titular accident – Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi) is driving with his pregnant wife and young daughter when he needs assistance from an auto mechanic. Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), upstairs at the mechanic's shop, hears him and panics at a squeak that Eghbal, who has a prosthetic leg, makes when he walks. Vahid thinks he remembers that sound from his time blindfolded as a political prisoner, overseen by a brutal guard known as Peg Leg. Vahid tracks Eghbal, knocks him over the head with a shovel, and stashes him in a white van. But when Eghbal wakes and insists he's not the guard, Vahid's initial, not-terribly-considered plan to just bury him in the desert goes sideways.
For confirmation that he's got the right guy, Vahid seeks out other former prisoners and is soon joined by a wedding photographer, her ex, and the bride and groom-to-be she's been shooting in full wedding regalia, all of whom (except the groom) were also imprisoned and were also blindfolded. An often terrifying but frequently quixotic adventure, filled with side trips, prison nightmares, and philosophical arguments ensues.
Filmmaker Panahi has been imprisoned multiple times by the Iranian regime, most recently after asking questions about other detained filmmakers. It Was Just an Accident is a furious indictment of the reign of authoritarian terror that grips Iran, but it's also frequently comic. (There's a scene, for example, in which the bride in her wedding dress pitches in to push the out-of-gas van through heavy traffic.) It's surprisingly generous in spirit, and in its assumptions about what retribution by people of good will looks like. There are explicit references to Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, and the film does feel at times like a societal version of that existentialist masterwork, a nation restlessly questioning, and philosophizing, occasionally clowning, as it waits for it knows not what. — Bob Mondello
Frankenstein
In limited theaters Friday; on Netflix Nov. 7
Guillermo del Toro has made several monster movies of a particular bent – soulful, swoony, feverish films about grotesque-looking creatures who prove themselves more deeply human than the humans who reject them. Hellboy (2004) was a half-demon with a full heart. The Amphibian Man in The Shape of Water (2017) was an emo f-boy with gill slits. Even the titular marionette in Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio (2022) was such a mensch that he earned the right to trade in his knotty pine physiognomy for a flesh bag.
Soulful, swoony, feverish, with a narrative that stacks the emotional deck in favor of the hideous outcast – I mean, that's pretty much the jacket copy you'd find on any volume of Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein, right?
Which is why this seems like the perfect match between story and muse; certainly del Toro's been talking about making his own version of the tale for decades, calling it his "lifelong dream."
That dream is now realized, and while the resulting film captures the tone and spirit of the original novel in all its breathless zeal and hie-me-to-yon-fainting-couch deliriousness, the many narrative tweaks del Toro has made — some of which work, some of which don't — ensure that you'd never mistake his Frankenstein for anyone else's. — Glen Weldon
Ballad of a Small Player
In limited theaters now; on Netflix Oct. 29
If a great movie about gambling addiction could be crafted entirely from a persuasive central performance and lush Macau visuals — peacock feathers, shuddering neon, plush velvets, glittering silks, blazing pagodas, smoke curling from opium bowls — then Edward Berger's fever dream adaptation of Lawrence Osborne's novel The Ballad of a Small Player would be it. Operatic in style, and grandly pictorial in the manner of Conclave, Berger's recent pope-succession drama, this overwrought tale of down-on-his-luck hedonist, Lord Doyle (Colin Farrell) finds its hero on the verge of being tossed out of the hotel he calls home (and possibly out of Macau), but still consumed with consuming — ever seeking another drink, another order of caviar, another game of baccarat, another extension of credit.
A brittle stranger played tremulously by Tilda Swinton seems to see through him. A casino hostess played appealingly and with eyes wide open by Fala Chen sees something in him. But it's hard to see what, exactly. He is grotesque, remaining compelling mostly because Farrell makes physical his terror of never being satiated. What he's not, though, is empathetic, and as the plot runs a course that starts to seem inevitable long before the finale, that makes his behavior — at once monstrous and pathetic — harder and harder to watch. — Bob Mondello
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