Spoiler alert

Lean on Pete

Crit

Wow, this is certainly not your standard Disney horsey film. Seriously, there are people I know who should not see this excellent film. Especially people who love horses. Have I made myself clear?

That said, this is a beautiful, moving (well, kinda bumming-out, mostly) film, with a splendid performance by Charlie Plummer, as a kid who falls in love with someone he shouldn't have fallen in love with.

A boy's best friend

Love after Love

Crit

Andie MacDowell plays the matriarch of a family in a narrative that takes chronological jumps in a way that put me in mind of Hannah and Her Sisters, which is not a bad thing. Here we have brothers instead of sisters, and here the brother who starts out as "the good one" (Chris Dowd) churns through wives and affairs all the while it's clear to the viewer that he'll never be in love with anyone as he's in love with his mother. Not in a creepy way, just in a possessive, clingy way. OK, yeah, that's pretty creepy.

Also, the sloppy-drunk black-sheep brother (James Adomian), whose talent, he says, is for writing short things that no one will ever want to read, gets to deliver the unexpected (and very funny) comic monologue that serves as the centerpiece of the film.

Oh, and about MacDowell: (1) either I've never given her enough credit as an actor, or she has suddenly blossomed, but (2) she really needs to start at least vaguely resembling the 60 she turned today; took me awhile to recognize in the opening scene that her character and Dowd's were mother-son, not a couple. (Though given what I've said above, maybe that was just smart filmmaking.)

No one knows you're a dog

Ready Player One

Crit

There must be some films not alluded to in Steve Spielberg's intentionally outlandish exploration of online gaming, social media, and the conventions of teen-centered films about future dystopias, but I can't think of any right offhand.

Fetching

Isle of Dogs

Crit

Yes, yes, yes, I know: why set a fable of police-state wall-building in a long-peaceful land, for decades a key American ally, almost three-quarters of a century removed from the status of defeated enemy? Why cast so few Japanese actors (and why is the best known someone who has lived on Central Park West for decades?)? Why engineer the plot such that a savior is the only American? And what's with her hair?

But sorry, I tend to watch Wes Anderson films less with my brain than with my heart, and my heart got the spastic dog-licking that it went for.