Peter Debruge Chief: Last News

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Check out the brain on Barbie! Sure, she’s just a doll, but that doesn’t mean she has to be an airhead. Therein lies “Lady Bird” director Greta Gerwig’s inspired, 21st-century solution to bringing one of America’s most iconic playthings to life on the big screen. Combine that with the casting of Margot Robbie in the title role, and “Barbie” is already starting out on the right, perfectly arched foot. So what if this high-concept comedy falls a bit flat in the final stretch? Barbie’s strength as a brand comes from her aspirational appeal. While some have rightly criticized the doll for setting unrealistic beauty standards, Barbie also showed girls they can do and be anything, as different models have portrayed her as president, a rocket scientist, even trans. You know who else sets unrealistic beauty standards? Movie stars. Like Barbie, they serve as role models, which is what makes Gerwig’s take on the ultra-popular toy line so darn smart. Robbie might be a dead-ringer for Barbie, but her moxie powers the performance. Gerwig has made the kind of family film she surely wishes had been available to her when she was a girl, sneaking a message (several of them, really) inside Barbie’s hollow hourglass figure.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Here’s the funny thing about “The Little Mermaid”: Ariel spends most of the film wishing she were human, wondering what it’s like to go walking around on those … what do you call ’em? But practically every girl who sees the movie dreams of swimming in the opposite direction — which is to say, they want to be mermaids … or else an animated Disney princess. “The seaweed is always greener in somebody else’s lake,” as the song goes, and the most important thing about remaking this particular favorite for a fresh generation is maintaining the fantasy that any of us can be Ariel, when in fact, it takes a one-in-a-million talent like Halle Bailey to fill those flippers on-screen.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Poor Beau. Nearly half a century on Earth, and he’s never really lived. Sure, he was born — that much director Ari Aster depicts from Beau’s point of view at the outset of his wildly self-indulgent and frequently surreal third feature, “Beau Is Afraid,” lingering long enough to witness the infant’s umbilical cord being snipped — but what has Beau done with his life since then? Can it be said that he ever really developed an identity apart from his successful single mom, Mona Wasserman, who haunts the film for the better part of three hours before finally revealing herself? Not since “Psycho” has an off-screen mother loomed so large over a film’s protagonist, played here by Joaquin Phoenix, cowering from the world. The Hitchcock comparison could be misleading, since Aster (who helmed indie studio A24’s two most successful horror movies, “Hereditary” and “Midsommar”) makes a surprising tonal shift away from traditional nightmare material for this deranged road trip, which follows Beau cross-country — and through several substitute families — to face his intimidating Jewish mom.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Cinema, as an artform, relies on two tools — sight and sound — to fool us into believing that all five of our senses are being stimulated. That makes Léa Mysius’ more-intriguing-than-successful supernatural thriller, “The Five Devils,” a very curious animal indeed, since it focuses on a young girl with an exceptionally strong sense of smell, a phenomenon its director can show but never properly reproduce. Eight-year-old Vicky (Sally Dramé) would be right at home as one of the young mutants in an “X-Men” movie, so hypersensitive are her olfactory skills. A future perfume designer perhaps, the frizzy-haired kid spends her free time collecting odoriferous scraps from her life and environment and storing them in neatly labeled jars. When her mother Joanne (Adèle Exarchopoulos) discovers Vicky’s gift during a walk in the woods, she blindfolds her daughter and tries to hide under a pile of wet leaves. Sniffing the air, Vicky manages to locate Joanne almost immediately.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Can you imagine anything more delightful than Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin co-starring in a movie with Richard Roundtree and Malcolm McDowell … in 1972? That was the year Fonda won an Oscar for “Klute” and daffy “Laugh-In” star Tomlin released her first comedy album. The two men were riding high with “Shaft” and “A Clockwork Orange,” respectively. Just think what an ensemble film that played to each of their strengths might have yielded 50 years ago. That’s wishful thinking, of course. You can’t go back, and you can’t do things over, but it’s never too late to move on. At least, that’s the message writer-director Paul Weitz is peddling in “Moving On,” a sassy feature-length sitcom with a #MeToo twist in which two estranged friends reunite to settle a decades-old score.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic God’s thumbs! Leave it to “Girls” creator Lena Dunham to deliver what’s been missing from the field of princess movies all these years: namely, permission for young women to be themselves, regardless of what their parents or the patriarchy might think. In many ways, movies — and YA movies in particular — double as a kind of socializing tool, encouraging audiences to be independent thinkers (on their surface) while in fact giving them the keys for conformity: Follow the rules, respect your elders, marry the right guy, and you’ll be rewarded with your happily ever after, they say. But that’s not independence; that’s indoctrination. Adapted from Katherine Cushman’s 1994 novel, “Catherine Called Birdy” is a genially impertinent feature-length celebration of not always doing what you’re told. Set in 1290, at a time of infrequent baths and early-40s life expectancy, Dunham’s comedic take follows the creative schemes 14-year-Lady Catherine (Bella Ramsey) devises to avoid being married off by her father, Lord Rollo (Andrew Scott), to the first scraggly beard that comes along. “Your villagers are allowed to marry where they will, but your daughter is sold like a cheese for your profit!” she scoffs in the book. Here, she’s got even more attitude, a 21st-century spirit trapped in a girl’s body.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Something’s not quite right with Pearl, who wields a pitchfork less like a tool than a sex toy when tending the family farm. Such macabre behavior will come as no surprise to fans of Ti West’s “X,” who met the character in her advanced years, horny and homicidal, killing the amateur adult film crew staying on her property, then feeding their pieces to a grateful alligator. West wrapped that early-2022 horror offering with a trippy teaser for “Pearl,” a stand-alone origin story rendered in the style of a Douglas Sirk melodrama. The trailer suggested something practically avant-garde, with a dance scene, dream sequences and a super-saturated color scheme, but the reality is more mundane than A24 audiences have come to expect.

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity — the stars of Ryan White’s inspirational and wonderfully engaging “Good Night Oppy” — were designed to last 90 days on the Red Planet. Instead, they went right on exploring the alien terrain for years, sending invaluable data and images back to NASA the whole time. For scientists, students and astronomy buffs around the world, the two robots became mascots for a historic mission, the goal of which was to find evidence of past water on Earth’s nearest neighbor, for that in turn could suggest the possibility of life on Mars. To call the MER experiment a success would be an understatement, but it wasn’t until this delightful documentary that a more important point became clear: As it turns out, for nearly 15 years, there was life on Mars: Within the opening minutes of “Good Night Oppy,” White convinces us that these two solar-powered, remote-controlled research tools weren’t just machines but sentient characters with personalities, every bit as relatable as Pixar’s lovable trash compactor, WALL•E, or the Johnny 5 droid from “Short Circuit.”