NEW THIS WEEK (8/7) IN THEATERS, VOD AND/OR ON HOME VIDEO
COOKIE QUEENS--Some documentaries discover a world hidden in plain sight while others merely borrow pre-existing formulas. Alysa Nahmias' movie falls squarely into the latter camp, dutifully applying a familiar template to the annual rite of Girl Scout cookie sales. Nahmias follows four aspiring "Cookie Queens" through a selling season that becomes an $800-million crash course in capitalism, corporate branding and parental ambition. The girls strategize, set lofty goals, weather disappointments and discover that childhood now comes with spreadsheets and performance metrics. Ever since Jeffrey Blitz's "Spellbound" (2003) transformed the National Spelling Bee into a miniature portrait of American life, docs have repeatedly chased that same alchemy: find a quirky competition, assemble a geographically diverse cast of precocious youngsters, sprinkle in family dysfunction and wait for life lessons to emerge. Two decades later the recipe has become more reflex than inspiration, and "Cookie Queens" never quite escapes the feeling that it's coloring inside someone else's lines. Aside from one or two engaging personalities, Nahmias' quartet rarely develops beyond the broad outlines of ambition and determination. The North Carolina contestant projects the relentless, résumé-building intensity of a junior Tracey Flick by treating every box of Thin Mints as another rung on her future political ladder. She's fascinating in small doses, exhausting in larger ones. Nahmias remains an observant filmmaker with a sympathetic eye, and she occasionally captures revealing moments when the adults inadvertently expose the pressures they've transferred onto their children. Those glimpses hint at a sharper film lurking beneath the cheerful facade. Ultimately it settles for being sweet when it should have been bittersweet. (C.)
ICE CREAM MAN--For all its gleeful nastiness, Eli ("Hostel," "Cabin Fever") Roth's latest horror flick ultimately proves that even the most outrageous premise needs something sturdier than buckets of gore to hold it together. Written, directed and produced by Roth, it has the blunt-force confidence of someone determined to top his own reputation for excess. In the seemingly placid suburb of Bayleen Bay, a mysterious ice cream vendor (played with unnerving blankness by Ari Millen) begins handing out frozen treats that transform neighborhood children into homicidal monsters. As the town dissolves into paranoia and carnage, a troubled priest (Benjamin Byron Davis) struggles to make sense of the epidemic while everyone else tries to survive an increasingly surreal bloodbath. Roth has always understood the tactile pleasures of horror: the queasy anticipation, the extravagant makeup effects, the guilty laughter that follows an especially outrageous kill. "Ice Cream Man" certainly delivers on those terms. Limbs fly, strawberry syrup becomes an obvious visual joke and Roth stages setpieces with the kind of Grand Guignol gusto that will delight devotees of splatter cinema. But the screenplay circles the same ideas with diminishing returns, piling on carnage where sharper characterizations and genuine dread might have better served the material. Roth knows how to orchestrate audience gasps, though, and he seldom flinches from the grotesque. Yet for all its technical polish, the movie feels oddly flavorless beneath its sticky coating of blood and sugar. Like the kind of frozen novelty treat that looks irresistible in the wrapper but disappoints after a few bites, it's momentarily satisfying before melting into a forgettable puddle of excess. (C.)
OLMO--There's a becoming modesty to the latest film from Mexican writer-director Fernando Eimbcke whose gift has always been finding quiet revelations in ordinary lives. Like his earlier "Temporada de Patos" and "Lake Tahoe," this tender coming-of-age tale rebuffs melodrama in favor of careful observation, trusting that the smallest emotional shifts can carry the greatest weight. Set in 1979, it follows 14-year-old Olmo (Aivan Uttapa), a shy adolescent whose summer has been swallowed by responsibility. While his mother and sister are at work, he spends his days caring for his bedridden father (Gustavo Sánchez Parra),who suffers from multiple sclerosis. When a beautiful neighborhood girl Nina (Melanie Frometa) invites him to a party, Olmo embarks upon an evening of minor rebellions and youthful misadventures that gradually become something deeper: a bittersweet education in loyalty, family and the fragile exhilaration of growing up. Eimbcke has little interest in the oversized epiphanies that dominate most coming-of-age sagas. Instead he accumulates fleeting moments--a hesitant glance, an awkward silence, a joke that lands unexpectedly--and allows them to gather force. The result is a movie that understands adolescence not as a sequence of dramatic milestones but as an accumulation of tiny awakenings. Every errand feels monumental because, at fourteen, every choice does. Uttapa gives a wonderfully naturalistic performance, conveying Olmo's uncertainty with expressive restraint rather than precocious showboating. Sánchez Parra is equally affecting, bringing warmth, wit and stubborn dignity to a father whose illness never completely defines him. Their relationship, prickly yet deeply affectionate, becomes the quiet center of gravity. Running a lean 84 minutes, "Olmo" possesses the easy grace of a summer memory recalled years later: funny without straining, melancholy without sentimentality and compassionate without pleading for tears. In an era when so many films mistake volume for feeling, Eimbcke reminds us that intimacy can be every bit as cinematic. It leaves behind the gentle afterglow of time well spent in the company of characters who feel less like inventions than people you once knew and never quite forgot. (B PLUS.)
ONE NIGHT ONLY--Will Gluck has spent much of his career trying to convince filmgoers that the romantic comedy didn't need saving so much as a healthy dose of locker room humor. It was a dubious proposition in Gluck's "Anyone but You" where every genuinely charming moment eventually got buried beneath another round of anatomical punch lines, and "One Night Only" doubles down on the notion that the quickest route to romance is through the sort of humor best left in college frathouses. It's an odd fit for a genre whose greatest pleasures have traditionally depended on anticipation rather than consummation. Ernst Lubitsch's "The Shop Around the Corner" understood that longing is funny. Nora Ephron's Tom Hanks-Meg Ryan pairings knew that chemistry could be intoxicating without constantly reminding viewers that the characters possess functioning libidos. Sex comedies have their place, but rom-coms only work when they're buoyant enough to let audiences fall in love alongside the characters instead of wondering what bodily fluid joke is waiting around the corner. Gluck's latest imagines a near-future America where the government has somehow criminalized premarital sex, forcing unattached adults into an absurd bureaucratic maze of surveillance and romantic compliance. The premise collapses before the opening credits have even finished rolling. How exactly is this omnipotent government agency supposed to monitor every unattached citizen in the country? The screenplay treats this logistical black hole as a mere inconvenience, asking us to accept an authoritarian fantasy whose rules change whenever another gag requires them to. The attractive leads do what they can. Calum Turner plays Nick Moretti, the owner of a neighborhood pizzeria whose old-fashioned romantic streak makes him an unlikely rebel in this over-regulated future. Monica Barbaro is Sophie Vale, an aspiring singer whose debilitating stage fright has confined her to recording breezy radio jingles instead of pursuing the career she dreams about. Turner has an easy, unforced warmth that recalls the leading men who once anchored studio romances while Barbaro projects intelligence and vulnerability without pleading for our affection. Together they generate precisely the kind of low-key chemistry that a better movie would have trusted. Instead, Gluck keeps interrupting them with another wink, crude innuendo and reminder that he's less interested in romantic tension than proving he can get away with one more "R"-rated joke. The film mistakes crudeness for wit, cheapening a genre that has survived for nearly a century on timing and restraint. When a movie hangs out the "romantic comedy" shingle, the audience has every right to expect that romance will matter at least as much as the raunch. "One Night" wants desperately to be naughty when it might have been memorable simply by being romantic. (C MINUS.)
SUPER TROOPERS 2--You have to admire the Broken Lizard gang's stubbornness. 25 years after "Super Troopers" became a dorm room touchstone and eight years after the belated second installment, they're still polishing the same badges, grooming the same mustaches and hoping the same jokes will elicit the same giggly surrender. Familiarity may breed affection, but "3" mostly breeds déjà vu. Directed by Jay Chandrasekhar who again plays the unflappably smug Senior Trooper Arcot "Thorny" Ramathorn, the latest sequel concocts a plot so perfunctory it feels like an excuse scribbled on a cocktail napkin. Trooper Rodney "Farva" Farva (Kevin Heffernan) is preparing for an absurdly overblown engagement to Thorny's sister--much to Thorny's horror--while the Vermont State Police stumble onto a new designer drug operation that inevitably requires juvenile undercover antics and the usual avalanche of practical jokes. Along for the ride are Steve Lemme's prank-happy Mac Womack, Paul Soter's deadpan Carl Foster, Erik Stolhanske's earnest Rabbit Roto and Brian Cox as the perpetually exasperated Captain O'Hagen. The problem isn't that the movie repeats itself; repetition has always been part of Broken Lizard's comic metier. It's that the anarchy now feels dutiful. Every traffic stop, every screaming match and every improvised insult arrives with the air of performers revisiting a beloved sketch simply because the audience demanded an encore. A handful of gags land smoothly enough to remind you why these characters became cult favorites in the first place. But nostalgia isn't comic timing. "Super Troopers 3" offers another ride with old friends, yet even the most indulgent fan may find themselves wondering whether it's time to finally let these lovable lawmen pull over and park the cruiser. (C.)
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DESPERATE LIVING--If there's a single film in John Waters’ career that can plausibly be described as both his most hostile and greatest work, it's 1977's "Desperate Living," a magnum opus so gleefully indifferent to audience comfort levels that even now it feels less like a cult movie than a dare. Made between the underground provocations of "Female Trouble" (1975) and the breakthrough appeal of "Polyester" (1981), it occupies a singular place in Waters’ body of work, the moment when his fascination with social outcasts, bad taste and institutional collapse achieved its purest, most uncompromising expression. The story follows neurotic suburban housewife Peggy Gravel (Mink Stole) who murders her husband during a psychotic episode and flees with her morbidly obese Black maid/lover Grizelda (Jean Hill) to Mortville, a ramshackle shantytown populated by criminals, misfits, political revolutionaries and sexual reprobates. Mortville is ruled by the tyrannical Queen Carlotta, played by Edith Massey with a combination of bewilderment, conviction and comic majesty that no trained actor could ever hope to duplicate. Around them swirls a society in perpetual decay where authority is absurd, morality is meaningless and civilization itself appears to have been built from salvaged garbage. Waters had already spent years developing his cinema of bad taste, but "Desperate Living" pushes beyond mere outrage. Unlike "Pink Flamingos" or "Female Trouble" whose satirical targets remain discernible beneath the anarchy, "Desperate Living" often seems determined to sever every remaining tie to conventional entertainment. There's no reassuring protagonist, sentimental core or attempt to soften the grotesque edges. The visual ugliness isn't an accident of budget but an aesthetic choice. Waters creates a world in which degradation becomes a form of liberation, and the collapse of social order is treated not as tragedy but utopian possibility. What makes the film endure is the singular perfection of its performances. Waters’ Dreamlanders were never actors in any conventional sense: line readings wobble unpredictably, emotional registers shift without warning and any connection to "realism" is tenuous at best. Yet these qualities became expressive tools. Stole’s Peggy is the very incarnation of suburban hysteria; Hill gives Grizelda an unexpected sweetness beneath the character's nonstop vulgarity; and Massey achieves something close to immortality. As Queen Carlotta, she's simultaneously ridiculous, terrifying, pathetic and oddly regal--amateurism inseparable from genius. Within Waters’ oeuvre, it represents the culmination of his underground period before a gradual migration toward mainstream acceptance. Later films would become more polished, accessible and even humane. but none would ever achieve this level of feral artistic freedom. It's a vision untainted by compromise, a fairy tale assembled from refuse and deviance. A half century later, "Desperate Living" remains problematic, abrasive and frequently appalling. It's also quite possibly Waters’ undisputed masterpiece. The Criterion Collection's new box set includes both 4K and Blu-Ray copies of the film; an audio commentary with Waters and actor Liz Renay; "Back to Mortville," a featurette with Waters leading a tour of the movie's Baltimore locations; new interviews with actors Susan Lowe, Mary Vivian Pearce and Mink Stole; a conversation between Waters and film programmer Cristina Cacioppo; an interview with production designer Vincent Peranio; and "Mortville in Revolt," an essay by critic/author Grace Byron. (A PLUS.)
THE ELEPHANT MAN--David Lynch's 1980 masterpiece has long occupied an unusual place in his storied oeuvre. On paper, it seems almost anomalous: a period biography commissioned by a major studio, adapted from existing source material and based on the documented life of Victorian-era celebrity Joseph/"John" Merrick. There are no red curtains, no cryptic FBI agents, no uncanny doubles or dream logic to announce themselves in obvious fashion. Yet with each passing year, "The Elephant Man" has come to seem less like an outlier in Lynch's career than one of its purest expressions. That paradox began with one of Hollywood's most inspired leaps of faith. Mel Brooks--hardly a filmmaker associated with Victorian tragedy--recognized something extraordinary after seeing Lynch's micro-budget 1977 freak out "Eraserhead." Rather than dismissing it as the work of an eccentric provocateur, Brooks perceived an artist capable of rendering interior experience with startling emotional force. His decision to entrust Lynch with the material remains one of the great producer's gambles in American cinema, a reminder that genuine artistic patronage occasionally flourished within Hollywood's sausage factories. Brooks was wise enough to keep his own name largely out of the marketing, fearing audiences would expect a comedy. What emerged instead was a work of overwhelming compassion. Merrick's story had already passed into modern myth before Lynch arrived. Born with severe physical deformities and exploited as a carnival attraction before finding refuge under the care of surgeon Frederick Treves, Merrick became a symbol of both Victorian cruelty and human dignity. Lynch approaches that familiar narrative without sentimentality. His Merrick, embodied with astonishing delicacy by John Hurt beneath Christopher Tucker's extraordinary prosthetic makeup, is never reduced to an object of pity. Instead, he becomes the emotional and moral fulcrum of a world whose supposedly "normal" inhabitants are frequently revealed as the true grotesques. It's here that "The Elephant Man" unmistakably reveals itself as a Lynch film. His lifelong fascination with outsiders, hidden suffering, industrial landscapes and the fragile boundary separating civilization from barbarism was already fully formed. Freddie Francis's luminous black-and-white cinematography transforms smokestacks, steam and Victorian machinery into landscapes every bit as uncanny as the factories of "Eraserhead." Sound design--always one of Lynch's secret weapons--creates an oppressive, dreamlike atmosphere where mechanical noise becomes psychological music. Even moments of conventional narrative unfold with the strange dream logic that would later define "Blue Velvet," "Lost Highway" and "Mulholland Drive." More than four decades later, it's lost none of its capacity to move audiences. The humanism never curdles into sanctimony nor does the visual beauty overwhelm the pain at its center. If anything the movie has only grown richer with time, revealing that Lynch's greatest subject was never mystery for its own sake but empathy. That may explain why this seeming curio now feels indispensable. It's not merely one of the finest biographical dramas ever made, but one of the essential works in the Lynch canon: a masterpiece whose tenderness proves every bit as radical as his nightmares. The Criterion Collection 4K Blu-Ray includes archival interviews with Lynch, Hurt, Brooks, Francis, Tucker, co-producer Jonathan Sanger and stills photographer Frank Connor; a 1981 audio recording of an interview/audience Q&A with Lynch at the American Film Institute; "The Terrible Elephant Man Revealed," a 2001 documentary about the film; a 2005 featurette, "Joseph Merrick: The Real Elephant Man," with archivist Jonathan Evans; Lynch and critic Kristine McKenna reading excerpts from their 2018 book, "Room to Dream;" excerpts from an interview with Lynch from the 2005 edition of Chris Roley's book, "Lynch on Lynch;" and an 1886 letter to the editor of the London Times concerning Merrick by the chairman of the London Hospital. (A PLUS.)
MINIONS & MONSTERS--For a franchise built on the principle that more is always more, "Minions and Monsters" arrives with a deflating sense of exhaustion. Directed by Pierre Coffin, the latest installment in Illumination Animation's seemingly endless yellow empire once again mistakes frenetic activity for inspiration, piling gag upon gag in hopes that sheer velocity will compensate for the absence of novelty. The cobbled-together screenplay finds the Minions in 1920's Hollywood attempting to make their own creature feature. Naturally they unleash actual monsters in the process, triggering a globe-trotting chain of cataclysmic events that requires them to save the world from a disaster of their own creation. The starry vocal cast includes Jeff Bridges, Christoph Waltz, Jesse Eisenberg, Zoey Deutch and Allison Janney, though most are given little to do beyond supplying fleeting audio recognition amid the ensuing chaos. The monster designs are colorful, the Hollywood period backdrop is rendered with impressive detail and the animation moves with the fluid efficiency one expects from Illumination. Yet the craftsmanship only underscores the film's central problem: every joke feels engineered rather than discovered. The Minions remain industrious little engines of slapstick, but after more than a decade of sequels, prequels and spin-offs, their anarchic charm has ossified into formula. Coffin clearly understands the
mechanics of the series he helped create. What seems increasingly elusive, though, is a reason for its continued existence beyond brand maintenance. Neither terrible nor offensive, it's merely overfamiliar--another installment that treats volume as a substitute for imagination. Small children will laugh and their parents may occasionally smile. But everyone else may find themselves wondering if these industrious yellow creatures have finally run out of places to go. (C.)
MOANA--Disney's live-action remake of their 2016 animated blockbuster finally settles one lingering question: apparently there is no intellectual property so beloved, so recent or so visually accomplished that it cannot be repackaged into another feature-length exercise in corporate déjà vu. Never mind that the original remains widely available or that much of this "live-action" production is itself an elaborate digital fabrication. Aside from flesh-and-blood performers occupying the foreground, the film often feels as computer-generated as its predecessor, only flatter and considerably less memorable. Directed by Thomas Kail (whose underwhelming résumé consists primarily of filmed stage productions like "Hamilton" and "Grease: Live! "rather than narrative features), the remake faithfully retraces the original's footsteps with almost devotional precision. One suspects Disney wanted a traffic controller rather than an interpreter, and Kail dutifully keeps the machinery humming without ever discovering a cinematic reason for its existence. The story remains unchanged. Young Moana (Catherine Laga'aia), the adventurous daughter of a Polynesian chief, defies her father's insistence that she remain safely on the island after an ecological blight threatens their people's future. Guided by the ocean itself, she embarks on a perilous voyage to restore the stolen heart of Te Fiti, enlisting the reluctant demigod Maui (Dwayne Johnson) in a quest populated by monsters, coconut pirates and towering lava demons.Laga'aia brings an unaffected warmth that keeps Moana sympathetic even when the screenplay is running on recycled fumes while Johnson slips comfortably back into a role he first voiced a decade ago. Yet neither can disguise the overwhelming sense that everyone involved is dutifully reenacting something that already worked better the first time. The real fatigue arrives not from the movie itself but the business strategy it represents. Disney has become trapped in an endless cycle of self-cannibalization, strip-mining its own library instead of taking risks on original stories. One remake might be harmless nostalgia, but a conveyor belt of them begins to resemble creative surrender. "Moana" isn't disastrous, it's merely another expensive reminder that Disney now seems far more interested in preserving its past than imagining its future. (C MINUS.)
THE ODYSSEY--Christopher Nolan has never mistaken moderation for a virtue, and the Oscar-winning director scales Homer's foundational text with the grit and determination of a filmmaker convinced that every myth should be experienced at maximum volume (and length). The result is frequently spectacular, intermittently exhilarating and, at nearly every turn, exhausting: a monument to cinematic ambition that's easier to admire than love. Matt Damon brings a weathered
intelligence to Odysseus, the battle-scarred king of Ithaca whose decade-long voyage home after the Trojan War becomes a gauntlet of monsters, shipwrecks, seductive goddesses and divine interference. Back in Ithaca, Penelope (Anne Hathaway) fends off increasingly aggressive suitors while her son, Telemachus (Tom Holland), searches for news of the father he scarcely remembers. Around them swirl gods, kings and mortals played by a cast so lavishly stocked with marquee names (Robert Pattinson, Zendaya, Charlize Theon, et al) that one eventually stops trying to keep score. Indeed, Nolan's parade of celebrity cameos becomes its own unintended spectacle. Every few minutes another recognizable face materializes for a scene or two before vanishing again, producing the same distracting effect as John Wayne turning up as a Roman centurion at the Crucifixion in George Stevens' "The Greatest Story Ever Told." Instead of enriching Homer's world, the procession of stars repeatedly nudges viewers out of it. No one stages large-format spectacle with Nolan's technical assurance, though. The sea battles roar, the cyclopean landscapes dwarf humanity and the practical effects possess a tactile grandeur that computer-generated fantasy often lacks. Yet the movie remains oddly resistant to emotional intimacy. Nolan is forever explaining destiny, honor and memory while rarely allowing his characters to inhabit them as flesh-and-blood people rather than ideas in armor. It's difficult not to be reminded of 2024's "The Return" in which Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche distilled the same source material into a lean, deeply human drama that proved more moving at a fraction of this film's budget (and nearly three-hour run time). For Nolan acolytes, "The Odyssey" will doubtless confirm his status as modern cinema's reigning architect of gigantism. For everyone else, it may feel like another reminder that bigger canvases don't automatically produce deeper emotions. Homer survives the treatment but just barely, emerging from beneath layers of IMAX grandeur and directorial self-regard nearly as formidable as the trials faced by Odysseus himself. (B MINUS.)
SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY--Destin Daniel Cretton’s "Brand New Day" arrives with the soft thud of a franchise refusing to acknowledge how tired it's become, and how tired we've become of it. Cretton, who brought a welcome tensile restraint to "Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings" (2021) again demonstrates a sure hand for staging action that actually registers as space rather than noise. But even his calm efficiency can’t fully counteract the sense that this is a series running on contractual obligation rather than narrative necessity.
Tom Holland returns as Peter Parker, and the performance--once spry, boyish, even genuinely affecting--now feels locked into a kind of unctuous autopilot: dutiful, perennially earnest and increasingly difficult to take seriously as anything more than Marvel’s most carefully managed mascot. The film leans hard on his supposed relatability, though it increasingly resembles a corporate talking point rather than a character trait. The story finds Peter attempting, once again, to reconstruct a life in fragments after the fallout of multiverse chaos and trying to reconnect with MJ (Zendaya) in a relationship strained into narrative convenience. Jacob Batalon returns as Ned, though the role has been reduced to a kind of narrative pressure valve to release jokes whenever the emotional circuitry starts to flicker. Cretton’s direction briefly steadies the machine. A sequence set in an abandoned transit hub has a clarity and spatial logic that suggests what these movies might look like if they trusted less in spectacle overload. But the script, assembled with the usual committee impersonality, keeps collapsing back into obligation: setup, quip, escalation, multiverse tease, repeat. What remains is a sequel that's competently made but emotionally airless, another entry in a saga that mistakes continuity for momentum. By the end, “Brand New Day” feels less like a promise than a corporate scheduling memo. (C.)
TOY STORY 5--There's a moment in the latest "Toy Story" sequel when Woody and Buzz Lightyear find themselves contemplating a world in which children no longer need them. That question lands with unexpected force not merely because it concerns the fate of beloved toys, but because it hovers over the entire series. After five movies spread across more than three decades, one starts to wonder if Disney and Pixar have returned to this toy box once too often. Directed by Andrew Stanton who helped launch the franchise in 1995 and later helmed such Pixar landmarks as "Finding Nemo" and "WALL-E," the newest chapter serves up a clever contemporary premise. Bonnie, now older and increasingly absorbed by a frog-shaped tablet named Lilypad, abandons her old toys and leaves them struggling for relevance. Woody, Buzz, Jessie and the gang are forced to confront a challenge they've never faced before: technology itself. The vocal cast remains one of the IP’s greatest strengths. Tom Hanks brings his familiar warmth to Woody; Tim Allen supplies Buzz with a mixture of overconfidence and vulnerability; and Joan Cusack gives Jessie much of its emotional weight. Pixar animators continue to find new textures, lighting effects and visual gags within a universe that ought to feel creatively exhausted by now, and the screenplay contains flashes of the melancholy wisdom that made previous entries so resonant. Yet "Toy Story 5" never fully escapes the gravitational pull of its predecessors. While its themes remain heartfelt (the toys once again face obsolescence and reaffirm the value of loyalty, friendship and imagination), repetition has somewhat diminished their impact. The lingering query is not whether Woody and Buzz have another adventure left, but whether Pixar does. (B.)
YOUNG WASHINGTON--Wrapped in solemn self-importance, John ("Jesus Revolution," "I Can Only Imagine") Erwin's movie is less a fully realized historical drama than an extended dramatization of a textbook sidebar. Intended as the opening chapter in the life of America’s most revered founding figure, it follows the young George Washington (waxen newcomer William Franklyn-Miller) during his formative experiences in the French and Indian War where military setbacks, frontier politics and personal ambition supposedly forge the character that would later shape a nation. Surrounding Franklyn-Miller are seasoned pros like Andy Serkis, Ben Kingsley, Mary-Louise Parker and Kelsey Grammer, but their fleeting appearances feel less like characters inhabiting a world than esteemed guests passing through a grade school pageant. The film has a curiously airless quality in which costumes appear freshly unpacked and bloodless battle scenes feel sparsely populated. Rather than evoking the chaos of a continent-spanning conflict, it mostly resembles an earnest reenactment staged at a government heritage center. What remains is an uninspired exercise in historical myth-making unwilling to complicate its hero or expand beyond the limitations of its modest scope. You're left wondering how a story as seemingly consequential as George Washington’s youth could feel so curiously banal. (D PLUS.)
---Milan Paurich
