Review: Willie Mays swings away on HBO Max, and Cartoon Saloon’s fifth feature lands on Netflix

‘Say Hey, Willie Mays!’

4 years after Jackie Robinson broke main league baseball’s pernicious coloration barrier by taking the sphere with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Willie Mays joined the rival New York Giants and was instantly acknowledged as one of many sport’s greatest gamers. Mays continues to be thought-about an all-timer — maybe one in every of MLB’s prime 10, ever — however as director Nelson George’s documentary “Say Hey, Willie Mays!” notes, his narrative wasn’t as dramatic as Robinson’s or Hank Aaron’s or different all-star Black gamers who challenged norms and paid a social price for it. Mays confronted racist invective all through his profession as he racked up numbers that put him in the identical rarified realm as Aaron, Babe Ruth, Ted Williams and different legends. However in comparison with his Black friends, the Mays story was — outwardly, at the least — easier, all a few universally beloved outfielder taking part in with infectious pleasure.

“Say Hey, Willie Mays!” isn’t a corrective to that story, essentially. Mays actually did play exuberantly and didn’t publicly stick his neck out in the way in which Aaron and others did when it got here to civil rights. (Contained in the clubhouse, it was a unique story.) However this doc is a welcome reminder of how Mays’ very presence in American well-liked tradition was a game-changer, on condition that solely probably the most virulent of racists might deny his superiority to just about everybody on the sphere. It’s additionally a present to listen to from Mays himself, nonetheless kicking at 91. He has lengthy deserved a complete bio-doc like this one. It’s one thing baseball followers will probably be watching lengthy after the good man is gone.

“Say Hey, Willie Mays!’”TV-14, for grownup content material and language. 1 hour, 38 minutes. Obtainable on HBO Max

‘My Father’s Dragon’

The Irish studio Cartoon Saloon has had a exceptional streak of Oscar success, with every of its first 4 motion pictures — “The Secret of Kells,” “Track of the Sea,” “The Breadwinner” and “Wolfwalkers” — all scoring animated function nominations. Its fifth function, “My Father’s Dragon,” is predicated on Ruth Stiles Gannett’s beloved 1948 kids’s novel and combines the colourful, geometrical designs of the e-book’s authentic illustrations (by the writer’s stepmother, Ruth Chrisman Gannett) with the studio’s personal kaleidoscopic strategy to 2-D animation. The result’s one thing visually dazzling and emotionally resonant, although more likely to attraction primarily to children and style buffs.

Jacob Tremblay voices Elmer, the one son of a struggling small-business proprietor who has simply moved each of them to the unfriendly large metropolis. When the stress of dwelling in poverty turns into an excessive amount of, Elmer runs away, and thru a string of circumstances finds himself stranded on Wild Island, which is populated by fierce speaking animals and one imprisoned dragon, named Boris (Gaten Matarazzo). Elmer cuts Boris free, solely to study the dragon was load-bearing — chained by a manipulative gorilla (Ian McShane) to maintain the island from sinking.

The boy and the beast have a collection of adventures on Wild Island, befriending different animals whereas making an attempt to determine a technique to let Boris be free with out hurting the land’s different inhabitants. It’s all very fanciful in a reasonably simplistic method — aimed primarily at children below 10. However dad and mom ought to nonetheless connect with Elmer’s issues, which actually all comes right down to him studying what it’s wish to be a grown-up: making powerful choices and hoping family and friends will probably be understanding.

“My Father’s Dragon.”PG, for some peril. 1 hour, 39 minutes. Obtainable on Netflix; additionally taking part in theatrically, Bay Theatre, Pacific Palisades

‘Bar Battle!’

In writer-director Jim Mahoney’s raucous comedy “Bar Battle!,” Melissa Fumero and Luka Jones play Nina and Allen, a Los Angeles couple whose amicable separation will get thrown into turmoil after they each present up to hang around with mates at their favourite hipster bar on the identical night time. The workers likes the previous couple, so that they give you a plan. Nina and Allen will play a collection of foolish video games — like blindfolded darts, drunken tricycle racing and “human bowling” — to find out who will get 86ed from the bar.

That is Mahoney’s directorial debut, though he beforehand wrote, produced and starred within the equally themed horror-comedy “Gatlopp,” during which a bunch of mates type by way of their current private {and professional} setbacks by, sure, taking part in a sport. As with that movie, “Bar Battle!” by no means makes its lead characters’ issues particularly compelling. (They’re simply going by way of routine relationship and profession drama.) But as soon as once more, Mahoney’s large gimmick proves helpful, protecting the motion shifting whereas giving the actors quite a bit to do apart from simply ingesting and speaking.

Mahoney works properly together with his gifted forged of comedian actors — together with Rachel Bloom and Julian Gant because the ex-couple’s bickering greatest mates, and Shontae Saldana and Hope Lauren as likable bartenders. He has a knack too for creating distinctive and different characters who mesh properly collectively in snappily written and staged scenes. “Bar Battle!” is so low-stakes and small-scale that at instances it feels extra like a TV sitcom pilot than a movie. However this may be a pilot worthy of a pickup.

“Bar Battle!”Not rated. 1 hour, 24 minutes. Obtainable on AMC+ and VOD; additionally taking part in theatrically, Laemmle Glendale

‘Paradise Metropolis’

Ever because the announcement that Bruce Willis could be retiring from appearing because of a medical situation that makes it troublesome for him to course of language, it’s been more durable to benefit from the dozens of flicks he’s appeared in over the previous couple of years. However, longtime Willis followers will undoubtedly be intrigued by the Hawaiian-set motion film “Paradise Metropolis,” during which he performs a grizzled bounty hunter named Ian Swan reverse his previous “Pulp Fiction” castmate John Travolta, who performs a shady wheeler-dealer named Buck. And the excellent news right here is that not like a number of their current bait-and-switch automobiles — the place the fellows on the poster are solely in a scene or two — each Willis and Travolta do get a good quantity of screen-time, individually and collectively.

The unhealthy information is that whereas Travolta has some entertaining scenery-chewing moments, Willis stays as flat as he’s been in practically the entire movies he’s made since his well being began to say no. The sight of him does encourage some pangs of nostalgia; but it surely’s not sufficient so as to add depth to what’s in the end a reasonably generic shoot-em-up, primarily about Swan’s son (Blake Jenner) working with a neighborhood cop (Praya Lundberg) and his dad’s roguish ex-partner (Stephen Dorff) to resolve Buck’s malfeasance. That is TV-cop-show-level stuff, shot in a few of Hawaii’s least scenic areas. The celebrities can’t reserve it.

‘“Paradise Metropolis.’”R, for violence and language. 1 hour, 32 minutes. Obtainable on VOD; additionally taking part in theatrically, Laemmle Noho 7, North Hollywood

‘Mandrake’

Northern Irish folk-horror merges with the grim European police procedural style in “Mandrake,” a pitch-dark story of witchcraft and homicide from director Lynne Davison and screenwriter Matt Harvey. Deirdre Mullins performs Cathy Madden, a parole officer assigned to examine on “Bloody” Mary (Derbhle Crotty), a hermit convicted of murdering her husband and suspected of much more nefarious occult exercise. Earlier than lengthy, Mary is dragging Cathy into her earthy rituals — maybe as a result of the officer herself is a lonely lady, more and more distant from her ex-husband and younger son. Davison and Harvey sprinkle robust jolts of terror right into a story that’s in any other case intentionally ambiguous, counting on deep-seated dread and maternal anxiousness to ratchet up the stress even when not a lot else is occurring. The consequence is a reasonably cerebral style hybrid that also connects on a intestine degree.

“Mandrake.” Not rated. 1 hour, 25 minutes. Obtainable on Shudder

‘Capturing the Killer Nurse’

A companion piece to Netflix’s current film “The Good Nurse,” the documentary “Capturing the Killer Nurse” tells the identical story through direct-to-camera testimonials from the true folks concerned, supplemented by dramatic reenactments and a few audio and pictures from the unique case recordsdata. Whereas “The Good Nurse” examines the bigger social and private issues that allowed serial killer Charles Cullen to homicide dozens of sufferers in a number of hospitals — steadily arousing suspicions with out getting arrested — Tim Travers Hawkins’ doc is extra standard true-crime fare, laying out the info in medical element. Anybody gripped by “The Good Nurse” gained’t be shocked to study that the movie adopted what really occurred fairly carefully. However whether or not dramatized or introduced as journalism, it stays stunning to listen to how the issue of Cullen saved getting handed from one establishment to a different.

“Capturing the Killer Nurse.” TV-14 for language and mature themes. 1 hour, 34 minutes. Obtainable on Netflix

Additionally on VOD

“All Jacked Up and Filled with Worms” is a psychedelic horror movie focusing on viewers keen to take the identical sort of journey because the film’s characters: an assortment of younger weirdos who discover the bounds of their consciousness and their our bodies by ingesting hallucinogenic earthworms. Author-director Alex Phillips and his forged aren’t telling a narrative a lot as staging a succession of surreal sketches, every veering wildly between the sensual and the disturbing. Obtainable on Screambox and VOD

Obtainable now on DVD and Blu-ray

Benedict Cumberbatch within the film “The Energy of the Canine.”

(Netflix)

“The Energy of the Canine” joins the Criterion Assortment in a spiffy-looking version that provides interviews and conversations with the forged and crew. Certainly one of final 12 months’s greatest movies, writer-director Jane Campion’s adaptation of Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel is a sly, poetic neo-western, that includes a career-peak efficiency from Benedict Cumberbatch as a swaggering Nineteen Twenties Montana rancher whose inflexible concepts about energy and individualism make life depressing for his light brother (Jesse Plemons), his brother’s skittish new spouse (Kirsten Dunst) and the spouse’s studious teenage son (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Criterion