JANET PLANET
Janet Planet begins with an 11-year-old girl threatening to kill herself, and unfortunately, that is the most exciting thing that happens in the film. The girl in question is Lacy (Zoe Ziegler), whose suicidal ideations are little more than a ploy to get out of sleepaway camp and spend the summer of 1991 with her mother, Janet (Julianne Nicholson), an acupuncturist and recovering hippie in the midst of a midlife crisis. Over the next few months, Lacy watches as various partners (Will Patton, Sophie Okonedo, Elias Koteas) drift in and out of Janet’s orbit, giving our adolescent heroine a new view of her mom and their unusual relationship. The feature debut of playwright Annie Baker, Janet Planet is a story without much forward momentum, opting to bask in the silence of lazy summer afternoons and serenity of heartfelt conversations at bedtime. The clarity of vision is admirable. Baker and cinematographer Maria von Hausswolff can make a West Massachusetts cottage feel like a contemporary Eden. However, the film’s deliberate gait often asks for too much patience from the audience, to the point I found myself asking less “Where are we going?” and more “Are we going anywhere at all?” The performers are game for it—Ziegler in particular makes a subtly sublime debut, walking a tightrope between quirky and precocious and just your average weird kid—and there’s a lesson to be learned about the perils of letting your child be your best friend. Janet Planet’s juiciest rewards are to be found in the post-viewing headspace, but the film itself may leave its audience adrift in space with no grounding and an unclear destination. PG-13. MORGAN SHAUNETTE. Living Room Theaters, Regal Fox Tower, Regal Bridgeport Village.
FANCY DANCE
It took years of burbling independent acclaim after she broke through in Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women and a questionable Oscar loss for Killers of the Flower Moon last year, but Lily Gladstone is a movie star. In Fancy Dance, her first film since Martin Scorsese’s epic tragedy, Gladstone plays Jax, a Seneca Cayuga grifter searching for her missing sister while caring for her still-optimistic 13-year-old niece Roki (Isabel DeRoy-Olson). To the role, Gladstone brings her preternatural patience, a nuclear side-eye and the ability to turn stock civilian detective lines like, “What is it that you’re doing here?” into drawling poetry. Debut feature filmmaker Erica Tremblay smoothly works sociological observations into this custody drama/rural mystery—namely the justice system’s glaringly selective interest in finding missing Indigenous women and, in that light, how public expressions of their womanhood can feel particularly complicated. Granted, when you build a movie around Gladstone’s gift for naturalism, any deviations stick out. Shea Whigham (playing Jax’s estranged father) and the young DeRoy-Olson are right there with her, but the directing isn’t always. Notably, Fancy Dance’s final scene badly rushes and stylizes what’s set up as an impressively grounded moment. Still, good signs abound for Gladstone’s continued brilliance, not the least of which is that Forest Whitaker executive-produced Fancy Dance. She shares his uncanny knack for controlling tone and pace, such that believability is never in question. R. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Premieres June 28, Apple TV+.
SING SING
The prison drama genre often lends its focus on the salacious, physical stakes of life in the carceral system—gang hierarchies, corrupt officials, and the constant threat of physical violence. Those fears are an unspoken undercurrent of Sing Sing, but director/co-writer Greg Kwedar instead focuses on psychological tortures that the prison-industrial complex has to offer: a denial of humanity and an erosion of self-worth, which can only be countered by the friendship, emotionality, and fun that communal art can provide. Sing Sing is a dramatization of the prison’s Rehabilitation Through the Arts program, which gives convicts the chance to stage theatrical productions for their fellow inmates, and focuses on the experience of two of the program’s members: co-founder John “Divine G” Whitfield (Colman Domingo), and newcomer Clarence “Divine Eye” Maclin, who plays himself. In fact, most of Sing Sing’s cast are RTA graduates, showing off what the program taught them and the relief it provided. That tone of authenticity carries throughout the proceedings, as Kwedar shoots the film with handheld shots and natural editing to make it feel as real and immediate as possible. The performers pull off this trick with aplomb while Domingo, fresh off an Oscar nomination for Best Actor, carries the dramatic weight and centers the heartbreak, hopelessness and redemption that are core to the film’s themes. The emotional journey through Sing Sing is often one of rejection and despair, but it stresses the need for community and laughter, even in the bleakest of situations, and is sure to set you free smiling. R. MORGAN SHAUNETTE. Premieres July 12.
THE BEACH BOYS
Hurried onto the Disney+ slate absent any recognizable promotional push, the streaming giant’s new Beach Boys doc makes a certain bloodless sense as intergenerational background edutainment meant to stoke boomer pride while distracting grandkids with a supercut medley of the catchiest tunes ever recorded. In that specific context, as a definitive accounting of a half-century’s rumors and bitchfests lushly presented, co-directors and celebrated rockumentary vets Thom Zimny (Sly, Elvis Presley: The Searcher, Willie Nelson & Family) and Frank Marshall (The Bee Gees, Carole King & James Taylor, Laurel Canyon) assemble a crisp, even-handed, always-watchable Behind the Music-style tribute illustrating how the untutored sock-hop darlings atop America’s silliest genre—surf music, rivaling only Smurf music for emotive nuance and depth of lexicon—would both rewrite the rules of popular song with transcendent masterwork Pet Sounds and outlast all contemporaries along an endless summer tour that has state fairs scheduled past the dying of the sun. To the filmmakers’ credit, even the most sensitive subjects are addressed, but whether restrained by length or editorial license, glossing over songwriter, producer and genius Brian Wilson’s drug-hastened breakdown and the group’s oblique involvement in the Charles Manson murders only forces more questions. Chiefly, why does this project exist? A feature-length look at the USA’s most consistently popular band feels either 10 episodes short or two hours too long. However drolly damning the rope, given band co-founder Mike Love’s noose-tightening defense of his lawsuits against Wilson, there’s no need to pretend objectivity. People tune into these not for subject or format so much as the expectation of passion projects undertaken by committed archivists given pace and freedom to explain the story they believe worth telling in the manner they think best. Wouldn’t that be nice? PG-13. JAY HORTON. Disney+.