He does the shallow, typical teen-lit thing of fixing her whole life with his attraction, so sprung for this largely unremarkable dork that he takes it upon himself to give her all the life experiences she hasn’t been social enough to have for herself. Quirked-up insomniac and recent high-school grad Auden (Emma Pasarow) spends one magical summer staying with her dad (Dermot Mulroney) in a cozy beach town, where she meets fellow night owl Eli (Belmont Cameli). Gender equality means that viewers of YA dreck should get their fair share of Manic Pixie Dream Boys to match the girls, an initiative undertaken by writer-director Sofia Alvarez in her emotionally stunted adaptation of Sarah Dessen’s novel. Worst of all, the food porn isn’t even that mouthwatering, its colors too garish to be believable as fresh. Their teasing romance, his processing of weighty feelings, and the broad comedy connecting them all suffer from a lack of seasoning in the unimaginative dialogue and overlit cinematography, as bland and flavorless as a boiled chicken breast.
As he attempts to put his baggage to one side and cook through the angst, he’s helped along by a foxy vacation fling (Gaby Espino) too perfect to exist in workaday life. Victory will demand all of his concentration, so there couldn’t be a more inconvenient time for him to learn that the son (Ricardo Zertuche) he’s raised for ten years was conceived with another man.
Hotshot chef César (Erick Elias) has finally made the big time by landing a slot in the Grand Prix of cooking competitions, a showdown set in adoringly photographed, tourist-friendly Cancún. At least that severely miscalculated scene has the benefit of being funny (for the wrong reasons, but still), whereas the rest of the film tops out at a perverse source of ghastly fascination, like a fish born with too many eyes. Instead, the hard-to-look-at aesthetic goes hand-in-hand with every other aspect in an offense against art, taste, and basic logic, which peaks when Marmaduke’s green cloud of flatulence moves a crowd of onlookers to puke and die. Incredible to shame), the cheapo style blows past any claim to realism without finding a workable alternative. In its motion, textures, depth of field, and freaky angular design (the hip-to-waist ratio on the mom character puts Mrs. The commendable merciless action and savvy inflection of iconography known all too well to American viewers makes this an inviting entry point for neophytes curious about the bustling universe of Bollywood, and an edifying data point for longtime fans interested in seeing the effects of its globalization.įans of the rambunctious, mess-making Great Dane will be baffled and horrified to find that their beloved pooch has been mutated beyond recognition by crummy computer animation in this profoundly cursed feature vehicle. A gang of ex-military Pakistanis also lurks in these northern hinterlands, making for one big powder keg that Chaudhary ignites in glorious fashion. We have a man in a white hat - Inspector Surekha Singh (the great actor-producer Anil Kapoor), the sheriff ’round these here parts - and a man in a black hat - the sadistic antiques dealer Siddharth (Harshvardhan Kapoor), roving around the desert and leaving a trail of corpses behind him. He does right by his influences with a sunbaked mystery rich in hard-bitten Peckinpah style, from the nail-spitting acting to the brisk runtime, which is especially surprising in Hindi-language cinema. Raj Singh Chaudhary’s epic of bullets and sand is an homage twice over, a nod to the genre extravaganzas that flooded Indian cinemas during the ’80s, which were themselves a tribute to Hollywood’s classic Westerns and noirs.
Give the AC unit a good smack and beat the heat with Netflix’s lineup of original movies in the month of May: And viewers in search of something completely different should look into the noir-Western mashup mayhem of Thar, a Bollywood import arriving in a blaze of bullets. Period-piece enthusiasts get Operation Mincemeat, a WWII espionage thriller good for calm-keeping and on-carrying. Those sore for a bubbly rom-com have Senior Year, in which Rebel Wilson busts out of a coma and goes to finish high school. Though it’s more like an anti-summer-movie season while the big studios unload marquee titles, Netflix offers more humbly scaled alternatives in genres that have been largely left behind. As May brings climbing thermometers, Hollywood launches the grand return of a quasi-post-pandemic summer-movie season and Netflix transitions into its own equivalent.