The Banshees of Inisherin

In theaters now

THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN

Colin Farrell and a donkey in 'The Banshees of Inisherin'

| Credit: Jonathan Hession/Searchlight Pictures

It's been nearly 15 years since Martin McDonagh made his feature directorial debut with In Bruges, a neat, nasty little gem of a movie about two bungling hitmen (Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson) on the lam — and not doing it well — in Belgium. The Banshees of Inisherin reunites him with his two leading men in a film that turns out to be pretty much the furthest thing from a sequel to Bruges, but still feels like a kind of homecoming nonetheless. It's also the Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri auteur's most humane and deeply felt offering to date — which says a lot about a movie rife with blasphemy, self-mutilation, and miniature donkeys.

It's 1923 on a small windblown island off the coast of Ireland, and Pádraic (Farrell) seems like a happy-enough creature of habit: He lives in a modest cottage with his wry, bookish sister, Siobhán (Better Call Saul's Kerry Condon), tends to a small stable of animals, and meets his best mate Colm (Gleeson) regularly for pints at the local pub. That is until the day Colm announces that he no longer wants to get pints, ever again. Life is too short, and Pádraic is too dull; Colm would prefer to be left alone with his dog and his fiddle, and maybe write a piece of music that actually means something before he dies. This abrupt change of heart isn't just bewildering for Pádraic, it's entirely destabilizing. Who is he, if not the man who gets pints with Colm?

Banshees, with its Kelly-green vistas, warbled shanties, and blithe obscenities ("feck" is a noun, an adjective, and sometimes a verb),could easily come off as the kind of Irish burlesque we've seen many times before; instead, the movie turns out to invert cliché as much as it embraces it. The dialogue unfurls in Mcdonagh's signature rhythms, a sort of profane poetry that skitters between farce and calamity often within the same sentence, and the cast tasked with it is masterful.

Farrell — alternately bruised, defiant, achingly sincere, and also very funny — wears the sum of his years here with fresh significance; there's a depth of feeling that could only come from lived experience, and a tender, shaggy gravitas in Gleeson too. Their falling out, of course, is not just about pints, or Pádraic's little house donkey that he keeps by his side like a border collie. To be corny, which the film is decidedly not, it's about life: the brevity of it, the risks we do or don't take, who we choose to share it with in the end. And for all the gall, absurdity, and outright threats of physical violence, it's pretty feckin' wonderful. Grade: A– —Leah Greenblatt

Inside Amy Schumer

Streaming now (Paramount+)

Inside Amy Schumer

Amy Schumer in 'Inside Amy Schumer'

| Credit: Paramount+

It's not a great time to be a woman, which means it's a welcome time for the return of Inside Amy Schumer. After a six-year break, the comedian is back to translate the terrifying, exhausting, anxiety-making, demoralizing experience of modern female existence into TV comedy.

The new episodes continue Inside's familiar format, with loosely themed sketches, self-referential interstitials, and recurring appearances from character-comedy mainstays including Jon Glaser, Bridgett Everett, and Michael Ian Black. Misogyny is the main motif: A college RA gives a disconcertingly peppy safety talk at freshman orientation ("All aboard the 'Don't rape me' train!"); a woman is pressured into wearing "Sex Spanx"; a company's first female board member is stuck working in an office that is literally toxic.

So far, the funniest bits take aim at female rage and self-sabotage — a dating show contestant reluctantly agrees to re-record her reputation-ruining confessional comments for the post-production team — and revel in delightful stupidity. (Grey's Anatomy dreamboat Jesse Williams guests in a sketch called "Fart Park." It is just what it sounds like.) Not everything works in the two episodes made available for review, but even the ones that miss elicit a few chuckles. You can't ask for more from sketch comedy than that — except maybe the chance to hear Jon Glaser say the words "monthly drippy-drips." B+ —Kristen Baldwin

Aftersun

In theaters now

Aftersun

Credit: A24

Though any honest summation can't do it justice, Charlotte Wells's tender feature debut is the kind of revelation that movie fans dream of finding: not a wow so much as a guaranteed piece of emotional ravishment. Aftersun aches with a feeling that's hard to pin down, but when you finally do, it clicks together like nothing else you'll see this year.

The plot comes together in uninflected swathes of behavior — we're watching a father and daughter on vacation at a Turkish resort. Occasionally, they do the filming themselves on a handheld video camera (that device, a boxy Walkman, and the loneliest karaoke take on R.E.M.'s "Losing My Religion" situate us somewhere in the '90s.). Calum (The Lost Daughter's gentle Paul Mescal), almost too young to have an eleven-year-old, ping-pongs between fun-dad engagement and a complex distance. Sophie (Frankie Corio) knows how to ride his waves; also she's just hitting that age when the doings of older kids are more interesting anyhow.

It's not the most thrilling week for either of them, but Scottish director Wells, only 35 but already a Campion-esque master of teasing out the richness of pauses (editor Blair McClendon also deserves mention), is after something deeper. You begin to sense that this trip was both the beginning and the end of everything, a fulcrum point during which an unhappy man, plagued by difficulties, and his orbiting child wobbled out of sync.

"You don't totally belong there again, not really," says Calum in one of the film's elliptical snatches of dialogue; he could be talking about a place from which they both have drifted. Aftersun is a reclamation of that place and those memories — it invites us to do the remembering, too. We can only get so close, and that's what makes the movie feel wise. Grade: A —Joshua Rothkopf

My Policeman

In theaters now

DAVID DAWSON, EMMA CORRIN, and HARRY STYLES star in MY POLICEMAN Photo: Parisa Taghizadeh © AMAZON CONTENT SERVICES LLC

Credit: Parisa Taghizadeh/Amazon Studios

My Policeman is a movie set in both 1957 and the late 1990s, based on a novel first published ten years ago. But when one of your featured actors is the biggest pop star in the world in 2022, strange things happen to the reality-distortion field around a film. Policeman is in almost every way the most classic kind of high-toned British period piece: a tea-kettle swoon steeped in stolen gazes, flocked wallpaper, and long meaningful walks along windswept coastlines. It's also the story of a love that, back then at least, dared not speak its name between a closeted young officer (Harry Styles), his naive bride-to-be (The Crown's Emma Corrin), and the man he actually has endless, gymnastic sex with (David Dawson). 

The result, adapted by lauded London theater director Michael Grandage, is fevered, lovely to look at, and at times deeply silly; a plush romantic drama that somehow manages to be both explicit and decorous, like horny Merchant Ivory. Its title also could have been Everybody Loves Harry: He's the film's ever-elusive object of desire, a dimpled dreamboat named Tom who pledges himself to Corrin's Marion, a prim, eager schoolteacher-in-training, but saves his passion for a courtly museum curator named Patrick (Dawson). For a while they're all great friends, a condition that depends on Marion's ignorance — the opposite of which, she will eventually learn, is not bliss.

There's also a fussy, sentimental framing device, in which a 40-years-older Marion (Gina McKee) has taken in Patrick (Rupert Everett), now an invalid badly impaired by a stroke, much to the chagrin if not outright fury of Tom (Linus Roache). The passing decades don't seem to have imparted much emotional clarity, and what the characters will do with this very British cycle of repression, release, and heroic self-denial is rendered in the script, by Ron Nyswaner (Philadelphia, The Painted Veil), in sometimes delicate but more often jarringly unsubtle ways.

Dawson (All the Old Knives) is quietly affecting as a man so used to subterfuge and fear that he's become defiant in the face of it. Styles' style is more remote: His Tom often feels like a cipher, thoughtful and charming one moment and heedlessly cruel and manipulative the next. That makes sense in a way; Tom is, after all, a stranger to himself. And Styles doesn't hold back in the sex scenes, which seem destined to live a long life outside the film online and amongst his considerable fanbase. Otherwise Policeman, as emotionally earnest and elegantly made as it is, mostly feels like a movie we've seen many times before: a pleasantly escapist two hours with pretty people in pretty clothes, madly sublimating their feelings until the final, luminous frame. Grade: B– —Leah Greenblatt

Wendell & Wild

Streaming now (Netflix)

Wendell and Wild

Credit: Netflix

Stop-motion genius Henry Selick has been gone for so long — a full 13 years since his last feature, Coraline — it makes you wonder about the proper care and feeding of such sensibilities. Can painstaking artists like Selick swim in today's streamscape? The answer is: Sort of. He arrived fully formed with 1993's A Nightmare Before Christmas: ghoulish yet charming, unafraid of real darkness (for when his audience gets a little older), but thrilled to play around in the silly or scatological.

Wendell & Wild has all of this, plus a bit more plot than it needs (a school for girls, dead parents, a rapacious corporation, an election, etc.), but you'll forgive the movie its cluttered shagginess because its universe is so strange — even an icy puddle is rendered exquisitely. A Key & Peele reunion is the lure: Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele, the latter also a co-screenwriter, are cavorting demon brothers, irresponsible yet somehow charming, who escape a hellish existence living up the nose of a giant bruiser to wreak havoc in the real world. Vocally, there's more than a hint of their improv-trained fluidity; the comedians are born to this format.

But the movie's most huggable creation, true to Selick's instincts, is his main character, a punkish teen named Kat (Lyric Ross) with green hair, her dad's old X-Ray Spex mixtapes, and a need to reconcile her tragic past with a way forward. Thankfully, the story isn't about Kat softening so much as embracing her own weirdness. Kids on the mature side (and a fair number of parents) will resonate. They may even emerge with stop-motion dreams of their own — and better musical taste. Grade: B+ —Joshua Rothkopf

Raymond & Ray

On AppleTV+ now

Ewan McGregor and Ethan Hawke in Raymond and Ray

Credit: Gilles Mingasson/Apple TV+.

You want to root for Raymond & Ray, as a modestly scaled indie starring two appealing marquee actors who've earned the right to lived-in character work. Instead what plays out is more like No Weddings and a Funeral: a vamping, oddly inert dramedy that never for a moment transcends its paper-doll characters and forced quirkiness. 

Ewan McGregor and Ethan Hawke are the two beleaguered brothers of the title — half siblings whose dad thought it was hilarious to give them the same name, if you want to know what kind of parent he was. Now he's dead, and these semi-estranged men must road-trip their way to the burial, learning things about themselves and one another along the way. McGregor's Raymond is textbook Type A, a fleece-vested suburbanite with two failed marriages and several soul-deadening decades behind him; Hawke's Ray is former addict who lives in a curiously Ralph Lauren-ish cabin in the woods, a depressive jazzbo with no discernible career but an enduring appeal to every woman who enters his bad-boy orbit. 

Their father, it turns out, left behind a lot of curious conditions for his interment that his sons will have to settle — he wanted them to hand-dig his cemetery plot, for one — and the execution of those provides the main plot engine for writer-director Rodrigo Garcia (Four Good Days, Albert Nobbs). So does the arrival of several previously unannounced progeny (Dad was prolific, and apparently very fertile), and a pair of potential love interests, a levelheaded nurse, Kiera (Sophie Okenodo), and a landlady named Lucia (Pan's Labyrinth's Maribel Verdú).

What a beautiful Spanish woman is doing driving Ubers in the drab Midwest, or why everybody reacts with wry, unbothered bemusement when one of the brothers grabs a gun and pumps out several bullets, are two of many mysteries the screenplay hardly bothers to resolve. Vondie Curtis-Hall has an appealing turn as a cool-cat reverend, but the whole thing is so airless and hollowly constructed, so full of mimed but unfelt feelings, that it's a relief to put this body in the ground and forever hold your peace. Grade: C– —Leah Greenblatt

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