Bob Trevino Likes It ***1/2
Full disclosure: At this moment, I’m particularly susceptible to stories about human beings just being decent to one another, and writer/director Tracie Laymon has crafted a lovely tale about someone trying to believe that she’s worth being treated decently. Based on events from the filmmaker’s own life, it follows 25-year-old live-in caregiver Lily Trevino (Barbie Ferreira) as she wrestles with legacy of being abandoned by her drug-addict mother and left with her self-absorbed father, Robert (French Stewart). After a falling-out with her dad, Lily goes searching for him on Facebook—only to accidentally discover a different Bob Trevino (John Leguizamo) who seems like the father Lily wishes she’d had. To Laymon’s credit, the way the two main characters deal with this scenario never plays out in the most obvious ways, allowing the performances to take priority over the plot machinations. And those two central performances are both lovely: Leguizamo capturing sadness turned into profound introversion, and Ferreira finding the wounded soul in Lily’s desperate need to be approved of by someone. It feels a bit like gilding the … well, the Lily to have these two characters’ traumas be so complementary, even if that happened in real life, but this is still a character piece that isn’t afraid of real emotion, and the power of showing another person that they have value. Available April 4 in theaters. (PG-13)

Freaky Tales **
Sometimes it takes a movie like this one to help you realize how miraculous it is that Quentin Tarantino’s “love letters” to the genres he adores don’t seem oppressive more often. This quartet of narratives is loosely connected by their setting in Oakland, Calif. circa May 1987, following: punk kids deciding to stand up to bullying skinheads; aspiring hip-hop artists (Normani and Dominique Thorne) getting a potentially big break; a hired thug (Pedro Pascal) at a life crossroads; and then-NBA star Sleepy Floyd (Jay Ellis) becoming a vengeance-seeking ninja. To their credit, writer/directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck seem utterly unconcerned about how bizarre their movie gets, with a focus on a mysterious semi-supernatural force, plenty of ultra-violence and one particularly satisfying cameo. All the retro-ness does become fairly forced, though, between the “cigarette burns” to make it seem like you’re watching film and the VHS fuzz, as though the only way to be fully about this era is to mimic its aesthetics. And while Freaky Tales foregrounds being about underdogs getting satisfying victories over Nazis, sexist rappers or racist cops, it all starts to feel more than a little pandering as the applause breaks hit every 20 minutes or so, and like an attempt to filter the filmmakers’ affection for this time and place through Pulp Fiction, Grindhouse *and* Kill Bill. Even love letters generally know when to stop laying it on so thick that it feels smothering. Available April 4 in theaters. (R)

The Friend ***
I know, I know: They’re all good dogs. But it really does matter to The Friend that it has a particularly good dog. His name is Apollo, and he’s a 150-pound Great Dane unexpectedly bequeathed to New York-based writer Iris (Naomi Watts) upon the death by suicide of her close friend and former professor/mentor, Walter (Bill Murray). Various narrative complications are involved in this out-of-nowhere fostering scenario—primary among them that Iris’s rent-controlled apartment doesn’t allow pets—and the adaptation by Scott McGehee and David Siegel of Sigrid Nunez’s 2018 novel gets a little busy with Iris’s attempts to find alternate homes, while also never quite knowing how to handle the notion that Walter engaged in inappropriate relationships with his students. It is, however, an effective portrait of people struggling to understand why someone they care about would choose to end their life, with a particularly great moment for Watts when Iris gets to fictionalize a “last conversation” with Walter she never actually had. Most significantly, though, it provides a wonderful canine performance by Bing as Apollo, the melancholy Dane, who captures not just the real-world mourning of dogs who have lost their human, but the way humans can project their feelings onto their animal companions. In a good drama about trying to separate anger from grief, we get a very, very good dog. Available April 4 in theaters. (R)

Hell of a Summer **
The thing about a horror comedy is that ultimately, it has to pick the one of those two things that it’s going to be really good at, while still being at least passable as the other. And that goal feels somewhat out of the reach of co-writers/co-directors/co-stars Billy Bryk and Finn Wolfhard in their narrative set at an isolated summer camp, where the group of freshly-arrived counselors—led by tries-too-hard veteran Jason (Fred Hechinger)—spends a terrifying night before the arrival of their young charges as a masked killer starts picking them off. It’s a blessed relief that the aspiring-screenwriter character doesn’t turn into the Scream-esque voice of meta-commentary about the slasher genre, allowing the story to simply be about the potential for murder and mirth without heavy-elbowed self-awareness. But while it’s at least mildly amusing some of the time, most notably in Hechinger’s earnest performance, it falls terribly flat at making the scary stuff interesting, with some truly baffling directing decisions undercutting potential scares. Even the eventual reveal of the killer’s motivations, while potentially provocative, plays out as completely disconnected from everything surrounding it. The movies to which Bryk and Wolfhard are paying homage knew how to deliver the creative kills in a way that didn’t feel like an afterthought. Available April 4 in theaters. (R)

A Minecraft Movie ***
There are far worse models for how to make an IP-based family film work than The LEGO Movie—and fortunately, this effort from Napoleon Dynamite director Jared Hess finds its own goofy spin on that template. We get a loooooot of introductory exposition for how an office drone named Steve (Jack Black) winds up in the block-based Overworld, eventually to be joined by several other unintentional visitors from our real world: Garrett (Jason Momoa), a pathetic one-time video game champ; orphaned siblings Natalie (Emma Myers) and Henry (Sebastian Hansen); and real-estate agent Dawn (Danielle Brooks). There’s some expected fate-of-the-universe business involving a powerful artifact and an evil villain (a wonderful puppet character voiced by Rachel House), all wrapped up in a narrative loosely tied, LEGO Movie-style, to the idea of celebrating limitless imaginative play of the kind offered by the Minecraft game. That’s a nice enough notion in its own, but the real appeal here comes from a screenplay and performances with a deep commitment to pure silly fun: Jack Black dialed up to the uncut version of his School of Rock persona, complete with songs; Momoa embracing his living-on-past-glory loser á la Napoleon Dynamite’s Uncle Rico; a thoroughly satisfying mix of deadpan verbal humor and broad slapstick. Yeah, it’s both disappointing and predictable when the finale has to involve swarms of CGI antagonists, but along the way, you also get Jennifer Coolidge on a dinner date with a block-headed Overworld villager—and that’s a kind of creativity I’m happy to celebrate. Available April 4 in theaters. (PG)