Highest 2 Lowest
Directed by Spike Lee (R)
★★★
"A new Spike Lee movie is still a calendar-clearing event," said David Fear in Rolling Stone. The latest addition to his canonical but up-and-down oeuvre bears the title Highest 2 Lowest yet "falls ironically right smack dab in the middle." Denzel Washington, in his fifth Spike Lee joint, stars as David King, a once-mighty music mogul who is pursuing a crowning business deal when he's told that his teenage son has been kidnapped. Despite an intriguing plot twist—the discovery that the kidnapper grabbed the son of David's right-hand man and driver—the next hour "risks being sluggish." Still, "when Spike wants to turn it up, he rises to the occasion."
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After the movie's "bafflingly rough start," said Alison Willmore in NYMag.com, the action moves to the streets of New York City "and when it does," Highest 2 Lowest "bounds forward with a thrilling vibrancy," beginning with a suspenseful ransom drop-off that starts in the subway. And when King confronts the crime's perpetrator, played by rapper A$AP Rocky, this movie based on the same 1959 Ed McBain novel that inspired Akira Kurosawa's High and Low "finds its way to the shores of greatness."
In the end, "it's half mess, half triumph, and thrilling even in its failures," said Richard Lawson in Vanity Fair. You root for Lee and Washington because, at 68 and 70, respectively, they're reaffirming a fealty to art over commerce. "If much of Highest 2 Lowest plays like older men shaking their fists at the youth culture of today, it does so in charming, rakish fashion."
Weapons
Directed by Zach Cregger (R)
★★★
Last week's U.S. box-office champ "begs to be seen in a theater, where a moviegoer can ride the communal waves of horrified delight," said Ty Burr in The Washington Post. As Zach Cregger's "nerve-shredding" yet "almost absurdly enjoyable" follow-up to his 2022 sleeper hit Barbarian begins, 17 third-graders in a small American town have mysteriously fled from their homes in the middle of the night, vanishing without a trace. The town quickly turns on the children's teacher, and as the mystery deepens, Cregger "slowly and fiendishly turns up the heat." With Weapons, he "vaults into the esteemed company of modern horror maestros like Ari Aster, Robert Eggers, and Jordan Peele."
The movie's story unfolds by way of several characters' perspectives on the crisis, said Nick Schager in The Daily Beast. Julia Garner plays the unraveling teacher and Josh Brolin an angry parent, and as the town's anguish builds, so does the terror, until the film's "sterling" climax "tips into outright lunacy," making it "difficult not to laugh" at the anarchy Cregger has exposed beneath the surface calm of suburbia.
The division of the story into segments can be frustrating, said Manohla Dargis in The New York Times. "Not all the viewpoints are equally engaging," and the repeated resets of the timeline feel like a delaying tactic. Still, "Cregger understands the importance of pacing as well as how laughs can amplify scares." Also, "the guy knows how to slither under your skin—and stay there."
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