Netflix's The Bubble is a bust, The Dropout finale flails, but The Outlaws steals laughs

Each Friday, our critics provide a few quick-hit reviews of the titles that have them giddy and groaning — or, to put it another way, the Musts & Misses of the week.

Apollo 10 ½

Friday, April 1 (Netflix)

What if the first man on the moon was actually a kid? That's the hook of Apollo — though it's really just a slim pretext for director Richard Linklater (Boyhood, Before Sunrise) to revisit his idyllic Texas youth, done in the realist animation style of 2001's Waking Life. Stanley (voiced by Milo Coy, with a chatty narration by Jack Black) is the youngest of six in a suburb of 1960s Houston where everybody's dad seems to work for NASA and the space race is still a shiny American dream. A miscalculation on the first manned rocket (it's been built too small for full-grown adults, but sized just right for Stanley) leads to his secret recruitment, but the bulk of the movie centers on the unsupervised joys of an analog childhood: prank calls, Ouija boards, kickball in the street till dinnertime. It's all lulling and immersive and surprisingly lovely, a sweetly unhurried ode to a bygone world. Grade: A– — Leah Greenblatt

The Outlaws

Friday, April 1 (Amazon Prime Video)

Court-ordered community service begets a perilous crime caper in this lively comedy-thriller from Stephen Merchant (The Office) and Elgin James (Mayans M.C.). Seven disparate Bristolians — including an Oxford-bound kleptomaniac (Rhianne Barreto), a socialite influencer with anger issues (Eleanor Tomlinson), and a sweet-talking con man (Christopher Walken) — are tasked with rehabbing an abandoned building as payback for their petty crimes. But the work goes beyond painting over graffiti and clearing out animal carcasses, as each character reexamines the insecurities and destructive patterns that led to their reflective-vest reality.

The six hour-long episodes (all available now) offer an intriguing blend of sharp comedy and genuine danger, as the gang stumbles into a local drug cartel's messy business. Merchant is impeccably hapless as Greg, an incompetent lawyer and recent divorcé, while Darren Boyd (Trying) and Clare Perkins (The Wheel of Time) make excellent foils as John, an aggrieved conservative, and Myrna, a militant liberal activist. Credit Outlaws for delivering the second sublime hit of Walken in as many months (see: Severance) — and this time, he serves up a rousing karaoke performance of the Pussycat Dolls' "Don't Cha." B+ — Kristen Baldwin

The Bubble

Friday, April 1 (Netflix)

Oh, the curse of the Covid comedy. Judd Apatow's latest — in which a passel of movie stars and hangers-on gather on a sprawling British estate during lockdown to film the latest installment of a low-rent fantasy franchise called Cliff Beasts — is less a movie per se than a Whitman's Sampler of half-formed subplots and starry cameos strung loosely across a two-hour timeline. Actors like David Duchovny, Keegan-Michael Key, and Leslie Mann do their level best to make this turkey fly, and the famous-people drive-bys (Kate McKinnon, Benedict Cumberbatch, James McAvoy) come fast and loose. But the jokes are broad where they should be specific, and smug even when they're not sharp; a long walk with no real payoff, or a punchline. Grade: C– — Leah Greenblatt

The Dropout finale

Wednesday, April 7 (Hulu)

My negative review of Hulu's bouncy-bleak recreation of the Theranos fraud was a bit of an outlier when the show premiered. That take was based on the 8-part miniseries' first seven episodes, which took (I thought) forever to outline the con pulled by executive ghoul Elizabeth Holmes (Amanda Seyfried). Hulu has now released the finale to critics…and it confirms that Dropout's a tonal misfire, full of loud performances and lame needle drops. The dialogue remains frantically on the nose, with one (fictional) character screaming "You hurt people!" right at Holmes' face in a phony burst of catharsis. At one point, boyfriend-conspirator Sunny (Naveen Andrews) makes a very secret phone call with his door cracked open juuuuust wide enough for his voice to travel. Maybe that happened; I doubt it. Seyfried has some good moments, but The Dropout lacks any real moral or psychological insight into its fascinating subject. Grade: C — Darren Franich

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