FILM

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The Super Mario Bros. Movie UNIVERSAL STUDIOS

Cage, who’s vamping it up with his singular brand of unhinged glee. Renfield leans right into the campy, homoerotic side of things; instead of leaving the hapless lunatic gibbering in an asylum, this Dracula took Renfield into high society and even gave him a taste of his power and strength as his familiar.

True, there are drawbacks like any addiction, in that it harms both Renfield and the people around him, and forces him into a relationship that’s as toxic as it is codependent. It’s also wickedly funny, with Cage absolutely selling the gaslighting nature of Dracula’s insistence that Renfield is the true monster, and that the one who openly craves innocent blood and world domination is the true victim.

NOW PLAYING Hilma

The life and work of Swedish abstract art pioneer Hilma af Klint (1862-1944) is tailor-made for a biopic. Mostly ignored in her lifetime, af Klint has been rediscovered and celebrated to such a fever pitch that a recent retrospective at the Guggenheim in New York was the best-attended exhibition in that museum’s history. Her work looks fresh and contemporary today, but they did not have much of a chance in the first decades of the 20th century, when, guided by spiritual visions and an unusual hunger for knowledge of the inner workings of the natural world, she produced some of the first nonobjective paintings in Europe. Without institutional or familial support, af Klint retreated into obscurity just as male peers like Kandinsky and Malevich claimed credit for freeing the art form from the limits of seen reality.

Unfortunately, what Lasse Hallström has made is a schmaltzy, sentimental ode to his wife, Lena Olin, and daughter, Tora Hallström, who play the titular role at different ages. The film spends too much time speculating on af Klint’s sexuality and too little on the art that has justifiably, if belatedly, made her an icon. In a Q&A a er a recent screening, Olin admitted that they only learned about the painter a couple years before making this film. It shows. Watch the excellent 2019 documentary Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint, or better yet, just look at the paintings. There’s a lot more there than you’ll see in this Hallmark version of a misunderstood artist’s life. —DMITRY SAMAROV 120 min. Limited release in theaters

Mafia Mamma

Mafia Mamma has the makings of a cult classic. On paper, that is. Toni Collette plays the mild-mannered Kristin, an Italian American mother whose husband cheats on her immediately a er her son leaves for college. Not to mention, her misogynistic bosses barely acknowledge her existence. This timeless story sets up the justification for a drastic midlife crisis so that Kristin can eat, pray, and love. And that’s when she receives a call to attend her estranged grandfather’s funeral . . . in Italy.

Kristin escapes her mundane life and arrives in Rome where she is welcomed by Bianca, her family’s most trusted advisor, played by Monica Bellucci. When her grandfather’s funeral suddenly turns into an absurd shoot-out, Kristin learns that her grandfather was not a winemaker, but the head of the Balbano crime family. And his dying wish was that Kristin takes over as the Don. Or Donna

Despite this enticing premise, it’s doubtful that Catherine Hardwicke’s ludicrous and gory comedy will be remembered. Mafia Mamma’s only true achievement is its shock factor. Kristin’s transformation from “Suburban Mom to Mafia Don” is packaged with several laughs and twists in this frantically paced movie. It moves tactlessly from scene to scene, adorned with outrageous shoot-outs and lousy jokes, producing a feverish cinematic experience.

Renfield had already begun desiring something different for himself by the time he meets and saves the life of idealistic straitlaced cop Rebecca (Awkwafina). Unfortunately, their paths crossing means the Lobo crime family she’s obsessively pursuing, headed by matriarch Bellafrancesca (Shohreh Aghdashloo) and son Tedward (a standout Ben Schwartz), also come into contact with Dracula, and it’s a true meeting of the monsters.

Action-hungry audiences can count on getting their fix long before the final showdown, with limbs flying in a fashion that owes much to Sam Raimi, along with plenty of salutes to Dracula’s onscreen history, which have been seamlessly digitally altered to include Hoult and Cage in a contribution that will likely stand the test of time even as it embodies our current moment. Let the laughs and the darkly comedic bloodshed flow, because there’s no shortage of either in Renfield —ANDREA THOMPSON R, 93 min. Wide release in theaters

The Super Mario Bros. Movie

to make these guys more real, because that was never the point. The more human the brothers and their Princess Peach are made to be, the more dull. Let ’em fight! Let ’em fly! When the movie focuses on this, it’s fun—a movie that only focuses on this, closer to YouTube-able speedruns than paint-by-numbers IP origin story chum, would be better.

The lone exception to its failures at cramming in charisma? Jack Black as Bowser; he gets to sing lovesick incel ballads, mewling about how Peach doesn’t love him enough, angry that the tiny courageous Italian has her heart instead. Black remains a performer who, no matter the stakes, brings the full experience. Bless him for doing that when no one else could. —JOHN WILMES PG, 92 min. Wide release in theaters

R Tommy Guns

“Who among us is the most dead?” a Black zombie asks a young white soldier who has wandered out of his own time. The answer, in Carlos Conceição’s not-really-war-film Tommy Guns, seems to be that colonialism inters colonizer and colonized in the same cycle of murder and death, staggering around in moldering circles together.

It’s hard to describe the plot of Tommy Guns, in part because avoiding spoilers is tricky, and in part because there just isn’t that much narrative. But most of the film is set in an indeterminate time in an indeterminate country that may be Angola under Portuguese rule. Coronel (Gustavo Sumpta) spends his days training a troop of soldiers, including our sort-of protagonist, Zé (João Arrais). The soldiers have been in the same barracks, surrounded by a huge wall, for a long time—long enough that they don’t remember their mothers’ names.

—MAXWELL

RABB R, 101 min. Wide release

Mafia Mamma’s frenetic momentum is not necessarily a drawback. In fact, it’s Hardwicke’s greatest achievement and what makes the movie the most engaging. That said, the film is cyclical, relentlessly playing on the same jokes and Godfather gags. Mafia Mamma mostly fumbles the absurdity that could make the film rewatchable, emerging as a hollow comedy instead of a self-aware and possibly beloved romp. But if you find yourself wanting to watch this movie, make sure it’s with friends.

in theaters

R Renfield

Get ready, because there’s yet another new take on Dracula. But no need to brace yourself, because Renfield feels surprisingly fresh.

Nicholas Hoult (The Menu) is the tortured title character and loyal servant to the Count, played by Nicolas

It’s a sacred text, but not one with any depth. The saga of Super Mario, told through dozens of video games over roughly four decades, should not be plumbed—yes, that’s right, plumbed—for richness that does not exist. In its surface-only fairy tale is a perfect simplicity, regularly used as framework for interactive platforming adventures that are, since they’ve existed, some of the most broadly shared experiences of joy on earth.

As a movie, the whole Mario thing will probably never work, but it would be interesting to see a version that makes no effort to explain what everyone already knows—that he’s a fast little dude in an inexplicable psychedelic hollow earth called The Mushroom Kingdom, jumping his way to Jesus status as he topples monsters and restores innocence. Among the many errors of The Super Mario Bros. Movie, screenwriter Matthew Fogel (formerly of Minions: The Rise of Gru and The Lego Movie: 2 repute) plops him and his brother Luigi into a milquetoast Brooklyn family that doubts them and disrespects their small-business dreams.

Who cares? Boring stuff. Get to the action. Don’t try

The movie rambles here and there, introducing characters—and for that matter, genres (a Romeo and Juliet riff, for example)—only to abandon them. But it’s structured by a series of rhyming scenes in which sex, desire, and/or recognition are shattered by violence and death. Colonialism here is less a history than a dreamed primal scene, in which intimate brutality is enacted and reenacted by imperial cat’s-paws who barely know who they are, much less what they’re doing or why.

Tommy Guns doesn’t entirely escape the Western colonial war film’s characteristic obsession with the heart of the colonizer at the expense of the material conditions of the colonized. But it manages to make war look not just ugly and pointless, but embarrassing, dull, and humiliating in a way that, say, Full Metal Jacket—which it at times seems to consciously parody—does not. Conceição has created a smart, strange film that is disjointed because colonialism is a thing of disjointed desires, histories, and deaths. —NOAH

BERLATSKY

118 min. Limited release in theaters v