Clown in a Cornfield **
High-concept premise and social commentary certainly have the ability to work together, but it feels like those two things are pasted awkwardly together in co-writer/director Eli Craig’s adaptation of Adam Cesare’s 2020 YA horror novel. It’s set in a rural Missouri town where 17-year-old Quinn (Katie Douglas) and her widowed dad (Aaron Abrams) relocate after a family tragedy, only to discover that the place has a history with serial killings involving someone dressed as the clown mascot of the corn syrup company that was the town’s main industry. There’s a lot of preliminary throat-clearing before the carnage commences in earnest, playing on slasher movie tropes in a way that only occasionally gets too self-aware. But even once creeps in squeaky shoes start dispatching teens with bloody gusto, the mayhem isn’t creative enough or funny enough to sustain feature length, nor are the characters interesting enough for them to register beyond the same kind of death fodder you’d find in a vintage slasher thriller. Mostly, it gets weird once it kicks in that there’s a socio-political subtext about conservative communities and generational shifts. As occasionally funny as it is to play with the notion that our protagonists might be doomed by their inability to understand how a rotary phone works, or how to drive a manual transmission, there’s still a clunkiness involved in trying to deliver this particular message through chainsaw-wielding clowns. Available May 9 in theaters. (R)

Fight or Flight ***
While I’ll confess that I’m often kind of an easy touch when it comes to gleefully over-the-top action movies, there’s also a welcome goofiness at play in this one that makes its preposterousness a little more fun. The premise finds disgraced and involuntarily exiled ex-Secret Service agent Lucas Reyes (Josh Hartnett) recruited by a hated former colleague (Katee Sackhoff) with the promise of clearing his name if he can locate and apprehend the notorious cyber-criminal Ghost known to be on a plane from Bangkok to San Francisco. Eventually Lucas himself also becomes a target of the many mercenaries also seeking to cash in on the Ghost bounty, and director James Madigan turns the many ensuing fights—involving weaponry as varied as champagne flutes, armrests, chainsaws and mountaineering gear—into wonderfully blood-soaked exercises in “should I giggle or should I cringe.” Yet there’s also a loopy sense of humor on display, in moments that include a realization of what would happen if you tried to tuck a gun into the waistband of a pair of pajamas, and Hartnett’s delightful interpretation of being high on hallucinogenic toad venom. The plotting gets unnecessarily convoluted, and the attempt to craft a sympathetic relationship between Lucas and a flight attendant (Charithra Chandran) feels kinda half-hearted; personally, I’m fine with anarchic violence served up with a bit of a wink. Available May 9 in theaters. (R)

Henry Johnson **1/2
We could dispense quickly with the extra-textual realities that David Mamet has become extremely problematic in the decade since his last feature film, but it’s almost impossible to watch this one without asking why he is the right guy to share these particular ideas. Adapting his own 2023 play, Mamet follows the titular character (Evan Jonigkeit), an attorney whose life takes a turn that lands him in prison. The story plays out through four extended dialogues—with Henry’s boss (Chris Bauer), with his cellmate (Shia LaBeouf) and with a correctional officer (Dominic Hoffman)—all with that now easy-to-parody staccato snap of Mamet’s language but offering some great performance moments, particularly for Bauer, and constructed in a way that embraces the material’s stage roots cinematically. Ultimately, though, this is a story about one very basic idea—that Henry is easily manipulated by absolutely everyone with whom he comes in contact—which definitely allows Jonigkeit’s passive performance to make sense, yet yields nothing richer as subsequent scenes unfold. And considering the kind of full-throated whackadoo nonsense Mamet has spouted publicly in recent years, including his support of our current president, it’s hard to take him seriously when he wags a finger at the idea that “the mob loves to submit,” or tries to play the expert on the perils of being a dupe. Available May 9 via pay-per-view at henryjohnsonmovie.com. (NR)

Juliet & Romeo **
I’m not going to say “every generation gets the youth-skewed Romeo & Juliet adaptation it deserves,” because I’m not sure anyone deserves this. Writer/director Timothy Scott Bogart—son of Casablanca Records founder Neil Bogart—plays fast and loose with Shakespeare’s star-cross’d lovers, casting Clara Rugaard and Jamie Ward as the young members of feuding families in 14th-century Verona, set to original pop songs composed by Justin Gray and the filmmaker’s brother, Evan Bogart, and absent all the familiar Shakespearean poetry aside from the occasional “what’s in a name.” Despite what the flip-flopped title might suggest, this isn’t a particularly female-centric spin, notwithstanding one song that laments the proscribed roles faced by women of this era. Indeed, that’s one of the few songs that stands out, since it’s also one of the few songs that isn’t specifically a love ballad; no fewer than five numbers are mostly-indistinguishable duets for Rugaard and Ward. That musical sameness collides with a plot where Bogart decides it’s incredibly important to emphasize the political battles between secular and religious powers in Rome, as though a simple family feud were insufficient to divide our protagonists. The attractive and charming lead actors do their best to give a pop of energy that the limp tunes can’t provide, but they’re working with a script that takes away everything that makes the source material great, without replacing it with anything interesting. Available May 9 in theaters. (PG-13)

Secret Mall Apartment ***1/2
Director Jeremy Workman (The World Before Your Feet, Lily Topples the World) is building a unique documentary career out of profiling dreamers, and he hits the bullseye again in this tale that begins with one of those “And finally tonight …” local-news footnotes that turns out to be more complicated than the simple headline: Several young people spend four years clandestinely creating a living space in an unused corner of a Providence, R.I. mall circa 2003 – 2007. As Workman digs deeper into the story, however—and into the life and work of Michael Townsend, the local artist and Rhode Island School of Design instructor who served as ringleader for the project—he uncovers much more that what is revealed through the low-def footage Townsend and company took contemporaneously. It becomes a story of gentrification, and how artists almost always become the first casualty of attempts to make an area “economically productive;” it investigates how hard it can be to measure the value of artistic work, especially when that work is transitory. And it’s definitely a rich examination of Townsend himself, and how hard it can be pragmatically, yet how fulfilling personally, to live a life completely dedicated to art. Workman perhaps doesn’t trust his audience enough by closing with people trying to define what the mall apartment “meant” as its own kind of installation art experiment—which kind of misses the otherwise lovely point that art can be its own meaning. Available May 9 at Broadway Centre Cinemas. (NR)

Summer of 69 ***
We are far enough along in the history of female-forward coming-of-age sex farces—like Booksmart and Bottoms—that it’s no longer enough to get by on the novelty of the set-up alone. So it’s fortunate that co-writer/director Jillian Bell has kind of an unexpectedly sweet idea at the center of hers. During the last week of high-school for nerdy, virginal senior Abby (Sam Morelos), she becomes determined to capitalize on the recent break-up of her long-time crush Max (Matt Cornett)—and to that end hires exotic dancer Santa Monica (Saturday Night Live’s Chloe Fineman) to serve as her “sexual fairy godmother.” The natural comedic timing Bell has always demonstrated on-camera carries over to her feature directing debut, guiding sharp and funny performances by her two leads and a stacked supporting cast including Paula Pell, Charlie Day and Natalie Morales. But the wisest element in the script by Bell, Jules Byrne and Liz Nico is the recognition that the lonely Abby is as much in need of a friend as she is of a boyfriend, and how that loneliness can lead to misdirected feelings. The subplot involving Santa Monica’s insecurity about her career on the verge of her high-school reunion often feels like an awkward fit and a distraction from the central relationship, yet there’s still a fair amount of charm in a story that doesn’t just assume it’s inherently funny that girls can be horny. Available May 9 via Hulu. (R)

When Fall Is Coming **1/2
Tiptoeing along a line between Dardennes-style morality play and melodrama, co-writer/director François Ozon winds up with something that’s not particularly satisfying as either one as he unfolds the story of Michelle (Hélène Vincent), a retiree living in the French countryside whose estranged relationship with her daughter Valérie (Ludivine Sagnier) takes a turn after the release from prison of Vincent (Pierre Lottin), the son of Michelle’s best friend Marie-Claude (Josiane Balasko). Ozon and co-writer Phillippe Piazzo enjoy playing coy with several key pieces of information—including the reason for Vincent’s incarceration, and the history behind the tension between Michelle and Valérie—which, along with some moody music by Sacha and Evgueni Galperine and he occasional significant camera pull-back, suggests a kind of psychological drama in the making. Yet while there are hints of a “sins of the mother” narrative, and potentially interesting material about what truly makes up a family, the character drama just never really grabs hold, leaving the performances adrift in all the things that Ozon opts to keep unclear, particularly once we start getting visions of dead people. It’s one of those character studies that feels intriguing in theory, without ever delivering the pop of a well-crafted yarn or the insight of a finely-tuned portrait of guilt. Available May 9 at Broadway Centre Cinemas. (NR)