ROBOT DREAMS ***
Slotting into the subgenre of cute/traumatizing animated movies for kids, Robot Dreams is best watched immediately before your next therapy session. Realized with bright, hand-drawn images that have greater dimension than an ocean of CGI, Pablo Berger’s dialogue-free film stars Dog, a lonely pooch whose only comforts are TV dinners and staring longingly at the jubilant family across the street. Desperate for companionship, Dog purchases Robot, a smiling android who becomes his roommate and dance partner, opening our canine protagonist’s eyes to the wonderment of pre-9/11 New York (the Twin Towers are visible in several shots). If the film ended there, it would have been the cinematic treat of the winter, but Berger, adapting a comic book by Sara Varon, splits Dog and Robot apart in a manner both arbitrary and horrific. For all its playful flourishes, watching Robot Dreams is like watching a feature-length version of the Inside Out scene where Bing Bong vanishes in a cloud of dust. The mix of adorableness and brutality is enough to make you wail, “How can a movie with a cephalopod playing percussion in the subway hurt me like this?!” Robot Dreams is too wise and tender to deny, but for better or worse, there’s a touch of sadism behind its sweetness. NR. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Cinema 21, Living Room. Wednesday, March 6.
PERFECT DAYS ****
Every dawn, Hirayama (Koji Yakusho) awakens without an alarm. His neighbor’s sidewalk sweeping initiates the handsome 60-year-old’s daily consciousness, and a routine begins. Mustache trim, coveralls, canned coffee, cassette in the van stereo (Patti Smith or Lou Reed) as Hirayama commutes into Shibuya City to dutifully clean Tokyo’s public toilets. From what we can tell—because Hirayama says maybe five sentences in Perfect Days’ first half—the dirty job is just a job to him. The work remains in balance with Hirayama’s passion for music, his voracious reading, and his lunchtime nature photography. It’s no mystery why directing legend Wim Wenders (Paris, Texas; Wings of Desire) would be interested in rendering such a life. What 78-year-old capital-A artist wouldn’t be? This is idealistic working-class poetry (à la Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson) about a man who accepts life as a series of days that can be pleasurable if porcelain scrubbing and creative ruminating are treated with equal care. As the Cannes jury decided when they gave him Best Actor in 2023, Yakusho makes all this mundanity incredibly watchable. The Japanese star’s shifting micro-expressions reveal a character who can be bashful, boyish or imposing when his constancy is interrupted by his co-worker, his niece, or a fateful stranger. We may wonder why Hirayama chooses solitude, but his ability to be present is as comforting as it is aspirational. Wenders taps into a precious cinematic paradox: We viewers escape our lives to be mindful inside someone else’s. PG. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Bridgeport, Cinema 21, Laurelhurst, Progress Ridge.
DRIVE-AWAY DOLLS ***
The first act of Drive-Away Dolls, Ethan Coen’s pre-Y2K lesbian screwball comedy, is pure cringe. It’s 1999 and two friends, Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) and Jamie (Margaret Qualley), are driving a rented sedan from Philadelphia to Tallahassee—and acting more like caricatures than characters. Marian is a bookish romantic; Jamie just wants to get laid, dude! The film is so dependent on stock characterizations that Ethan initially seems to be flailing without his filmmaker brother Joel (like Joel’s gorgeously austere The Tragedy of Macbeth, Drive-Away Dolls is a Coen brother movie, singular). Yet when Marian and Jamie get ensnared in a scheme involving a seething senator (Matt Damon) and a murdered dildo collector (Pedro Pascal), Drive-Away Dolls emerges as a cleverly comedic and romantic provocation. Despite being set after Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, the film imagines the ‘90s as an age when bigoted politicians were more ridiculous than dangerous and even Florida church ladies could be prevailed upon to support gay marriage. Kinky lovemaking abounds, but the evolution of Marian and Jamie’s bond—from friendship to far more—carries a whiff of Jane Austen, with Qualley playing a boisterous Elizabeth Bennet to Viswanathan’s disdainful Mr. Darcy. Is it any wonder that Coen wrote this jubilant lark of a movie with his wife, the film editor Tricia Cooke? The couple that plays together stays together. R. BENNETT CAMPBELL FERGUSON. Cedar Hills, City Center, Clackamas, Eastport, Evergreen Parkway, Fox Tower, Hollywood, Lake Theater, Laurelhurst, Living Room, Lloyd Center, Oak Grove, Progress Ridge, St. Johns Twin, Studio One.
DUNE: PART TWO ***
As tonally and stylistically consistent with its predecessor as any sequel you’ll encounter, Dune: Part Two—which adapts the back half of Frank Herbert’s landmark novel—is an escalation. We catch up with Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) deep in the northern deserts of Arrakis, learning the ways of the indigenous Fremen, who debate among themselves whether Paul is the prophesied savior Muad’Dib. Falling for his fellow guerrilla fighter Chani (Zendaya), Paul seeks revenge on the invaders who destroyed House Atreides and whose ranks are now bolstered by sociopathic Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler). With production design that would make a pharaoh blush and sonics that touch bone marrow, director Denis Villeneuve outdoes himself in the realms of scale and sensory impact (any sequence involving sandworms is a guaranteed jaw-dropper). Yet no amount of mind-expanding spice could convince an audience that Chalamet and Zendaya have romantic chemistry or can quite explain Villeneuve’s overly slick habit of resolving hard-earned confrontations with swift, barely visible violence. Part Two also complicates the first film’s coldness by actualizing how cryptic storytelling can become when every major character is basically drunk on fate, unsure whether they are pawns, gods or kingmakers…or if convincing onlookers of that status simply makes it so, a philosophical dilemma destined to be resolved in a planned third film. It’s curious to say that a two-hour, 45-minute epic of this tonnage is holding something back, but Villeneuve is (once again) just as interested in prophesying the next film as he is in cementing the current one. PG-13. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Academy, Bagdad, Cedar Hills, Cinema 21, Cinemagic, City Center, Empirical, Fox Tower, Laurelhurst, Living Room, Lloyd Center, Pioneer Place, St. Johns, St. Johns Twin, Studio One.
IO CAPITANO ***
Like most 16-year-olds, Seydou (Seydou Starr) wants more out of life. His family home in Dakar, Senegal, is cramped, his construction job is menial, and his small world is more or less run by his mother and his sisters. This is the launch pad of a classically masculine quest, as Seydou and his cousin Moussa (Moustapha Fall) undertake a bruising odyssey across North Africa in hopes of reaching Italy, starting music careers, and sending money home. Once the journey begins, Io Capitano is a standard yet affecting drama about the carceral horrors experienced by undocumented immigrants—the kind of drama that (with respect) is tailor-made to get nominated for Best International Feature at the Oscars, as Io Capitano is. In a struggle defined by dirty cops, human traffickers, and broken dreams, Italian director Matteo Garrone (Gomorrah, Dogman) has assembled an empathy check for anti-immigration Europeans, perhaps even the far-right prime minister of his home country, Giorgia Meloni. The folk-tale framing gives the movie its narrative grip, though that conceit doesn’t always sit easily next to the process-driven indignities endured by Seydou and Moussa. Some interludes seem almost to punish the boys for their dreams of grandeur, but that may also be the point. Broadly speaking, the fantasies they harbor are near-universal among teenagers, only these two are met with nativism and machine guns. NR. CHANCE SOLEM-PFEIFER. Living Room.
SUNCOAST ***
Nico Parker gives a breakout performance as Doris in Suncoast, the directorial debut from Laura Chinn, who based the film on her experience watching her brother die of brain cancer. In the movie, the brother is Max (Cree Kawa), who grows up with Doris in Florida. Even in the face of death, life goes on. The siblings’ mother, Kristine (Laura Linney), watches over Max at a hospice, while Doris befriends Paul (Woody Harrelson), an activist campaigning for Terry Schiavo to be kept on life support (the time is the mid-2000s). Suncoast is a deeply felt coming-of-age film that mostly works, despite stepping into familiar territory (anytime a film features driving lessons and a prom, clichés are guaranteed). Linney and Harrelson have their roles down pat, but it is Parker who breathes life into Suncoast. She takes Chinn’s sincere writing and runs with it in beautiful ways, turning Doris into a relatable teen who believably grapples with the awkwardness of friendship and the grief of her brother’s deterioration. It’s a performance that makes Suncoast a rarity: a film that evokes a specific moment in time without getting too heavy-handed with the nostalgia. R. DANIEL RESTER. Hulu.
BOB MARLEY: ONE LOVE **
“Sometimes,” Rita Marley (Lashawna Lynch) says to her husband Bob (Kingsley Ben-Adir), “the messenger must become the message.” Her affirmation illuminates the thesis of Bob Marley: One Love, that the reggae superstar must learn to accept the consequences and dangers that come with being an activist and not let them impede his mission. It’s a noble sentiment that makes for a compelling arc, but it is undercut by the screenplay’s version of Marley and his beliefs, which are sanitized to the point of sterility. The story—which kicks off with the attempted assassination of Marley in 1976, prompting an exile to London where he recovers from the trauma while writing his landmark ninth studio album, Exodus—rarely rises above artist-biopic clichés, despite occasional flashes of brilliance from director Reinaldo Marcus Greene (King Richard) and the compelling combo of Ben-Adir and Lynch (whose performance is a reminder that after supporting roles in No Time to Die and The Woman King, she’s overdue for a starring vehicle of her own). Perhaps One Love’s greatest disappointment is that it’s so thoroughly average; a man like Marley deserves a mightier film. Devotees may find some enjoyment in hearing hits from the singer’s back catalog in surround sound, but anyone hoping One Love will do justice to an icon will find that the cinematic message lacks the conviction of the messenger. PG-13. MORGAN SHAUNETTE. Bridgeport, Cedar Hills, City Center, Clackamas, Division Street, Eastport, Evergreen Parkway, Fox Tower, Lloyd Center, Mill Plain, Oak Grove, Pioneer Place, Progress Ridge, Studio One, Vancouver Plaza.