A lot of "first steps" from Hollywood this weekend: a superhero saga designed to make you feel like you did when you first saw a comic book, a tale of an Italian 19-year-old on his own for the first time and a rom-com about millennials whose first romantic getaway gets seriously complicated when they find a set of handcuffs.
The Fantastic Four: First Steps
In theaters now
In a primary-colored, retro-futurist version of 1961 Manhattan, elastic Mister Fantastic (Pedro Pascal) and his wife Sue, aka Invisible Woman (Vanessa Kirby) are living in a sort of dysfunctional family with Sue's brother, Human Torch (Joseph Quinn), and their buddy The Thing (Ebon Moss-Bachrach). A baby's on the way, but their celebratory mood is cut short by the arrival of a threatening glow in the heavens and a Silver Surfer who looks like a classy hood ornament, bearing a message: "Your world will be consumed by the Devourer … Galactus." Always something, yes? It occurs to the Four that maybe they should go talk to this Galactus fellow before he starts his devouring, and soon they're sitting atop a rocket that director Matt Shakman and his team have crafted to look the way I thought rockets would look back before I saw real rockets — sleek, slender, elegant, with fins — which is to say, a 3D comic-book rocket. Gotta say, as it was transporting them, I was feeling a little transported myself — to a time that I remember as simpler, much like the sentiments this cheerfully heroic gang expresses on the way to the usual cosmic showdowns.
There are loads of in-jokes, including having the original cast from an unreleased 1994 Roger Corman-produced Fantastic Four show up as extras. It's brisk, brightly comic, and most of all, sincere and earnest (this year's superhero mode), a combo that works just as well here as it does for Superman in the DC Universe. That's a good thing, because there's a lot riding on whether audiences like The Fantastic Four: First Steps, since it's kicking off the Marvel Cinematic Universe's "Phase Six" and setting up years of storylines. Happily, unlike most recent superhero movies, you don't have to know any backstories at all to understand it. You can take your first steps with the team.
Oh, Hi!
In theaters Friday
It's on an almost impossibly romantic weekend in the country that Iris (Molly Gordon) realizes she's finally found her perfect guy. Isaac (Logan Lerman) is sweet, funny, sexy, sensitive, and practically finishes her sentences. They buy strawberries on the way to a beautiful country house, go swimming in a lake, share confidences, and by the time Isaac is cooking her scallops, Iris is picturing wedded bliss. They're also crazy horny for each other, and when they find some BDSM gear in the house, one thing leads to another. There's just one thing: they haven't really talked about where they are in their relationship, and having that conversation when Isaac, who thought he was just having a fun fling, is handcuffed to the bed, may not be ideal.
Director Sophie Brooks, who wrote the screenplay with Gordon, has a blissed-out way with the early rom-com scenes but finds her footing less secure in the Misery-esque situation they've created for the film's second half. The story's darker turns get at an anxiety and loneliness in millennial romance that feels genuine, and the performers' considerable chemistry goes a long way, even if the film's later sequences push unlikeliness well past the breaking point.
Diciannove
In limited theaters Friday
Leonardo (Manfredi Marini) begins Italian filmmaker Giovanni Tortorici's debut feature with a bloody nose, but it's quickly clear that what's suffered a hit is his sense-of-self. Not a kid any more at 19, but with adulthood still on the horizon, he's headed to college with no clear notion of who he's supposed to be, lasting just a few days at a business school in London before switching to a university in Sienna that's known for its literature department. That ought to be a good fit: when a new hotplate stinks up his room because he neglected to remove its plastic sheathing, he writes in his notebook that "a breath of corrupted air imbued each of my nerves."
But he's soon arguing with his Dante professor, thinking seriously about selling his body for some extra cash, and doing shots with a cousin until he ends up in the hospital. He's impulsive, coltish, bright, and in Marini's performance, charismatic. Also self-aware enough to peer at kids who are four or five years younger and see "a generational change." With Luca Guadagnino producing Diciannove (which means "19" in Italian), Tortorici's filmmaking veers from jittery and handheld to sweepingly panoramic, capturing the contradictions of a kid who looks to renaissance literature for the sort of moral certainty and instruction that might keep him from making the mistakes he's so eager to experience.
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