TRUDGE MATCH

In theaters this weekend:

The Long Walk--In the late '70s and early '80s, the young and already prolific Stephen King, not wishing to glut the market with his name, published five pungently entertaining novels under the pseudonym "Richard Bachman." Only one of them, Thinner (1984), was a supernatural horror story; two of them were dystopian tales which seem disturbingly prescient in their anticipation of competitive "reality TV." One of these, The Running Man (1982), was filmed in 1987, and a remake is scheduled for release this November. The other, The Long Walk (1979), opens this weekend.

This harsh, bitter film looks like a period piece, set the '70s (it was filmed in Manitoba). But it's an alternative version of the '70s, in a shabby, impoverished America under the rule of "The Major" (Mark Hamill) a gravel-voiced and rather seedy-looking military dictator. It's unclear whether The Major is the ultimate power or just a regional tinpot, but he's the lord of the title competition, an odious annual death sport.

The event is simple: a cross-country walk down a rural road for young men--boys, really--accompanied by soldiers in vehicles. Participants must maintain a speed of three miles per hour; if they fall below this pace, they are given a series of warnings, and if they fail to keep moving after the third and final warning, they are shot dead. If they step off the course, they are shot without warning. Last man still walking wins a huge monetary prize, and the granting of an extravagant wish.

Our focus is on Ray (a fine everyman turn by Cooper Hoffman), a local favorite who gets dropped off by his anguished Mom (Judy Greer) like he's going to play high school football. Director Francis Lawrence, working from a generally faithful adaptation by JT Mollner, then keeps the movie on the literal straight and narrow; except for a very quick flashback or two, it's just Ray and his competitors, walking and talking, and occasionally getting their brains graphically blown out (we're also, in case you're wondering, shown how they manage their other bodily needs on the hoof).

Along the way, Ray bonds with Peter (David Jonsson, terrific here as he was as the guileless robot in Alien: Romulus) and they realize that they're true friends, not just allies of convenience. This is the emotional core of the film, and the intractable, ambiguous heart of its drama. The book, written in the shadow of the Vietnam war and its hideous squandering of young men, packed a punch; but it's possible the movie, despite its inevitable monotony and the morbid self-pity common to "young adult" fiction, is even more unsettling and troubling. The excellence and value of this ensemble cast adds to the weight of seeing the walkers senselessly slaughtered.

Most of the boys are supportive and encouraging of each other, despite the ultimate disadvantage of such behavior in the vile, survival-of-the-fittest nature of the competition. And even after years of Big Brother and Survivor providing non-lethal examples to the contrary, somehow I found this weird and generous-hearted esprit de corps believable, and touching. It's what makes The Long Walk not just horrific but genuinely tragic.

BAR NONE

In theaters this weekend:

Sing Sing--A troupe of actors, all incarcerated, work to put up a show in the notorious maximum security state prison in New York. They're members of the institution's Rehabilitation Through the Arts program (RTA). At the center of the company is John "Divine G" Whitfield (Colman Domingo).

In prison for a crime he did not commit, Divine G not only throws his soul into his theatre work, playing Shakespearean leads like he should be onstage in Central Park, he also assists his fellow inmates with appeals and preparation for parole hearings.

His anger at the injustice of his circumstances is unmistakable, yet it's less scary than the intensity with which he works to control and channel it; he knows too well that giving vent to rage would be futile and harmful to his cause. Besides, he's a true believer. His positivity is an act of faith, sometimes a Herculean one.

Like its hero, the movie, directed by Greg Kwedar from a script he wrote with Clint Bentley, is taut and melodrama-free. Perhaps because so many of the actors were actually incarcerated people--many of them RTA veterans playing themselves--Sing Sing has almost a documentary feel at times. Yet it also has, with almost no violence or other prison-movie cliches, the charge of high drama. Clarence "Divine Eye" Maclin and Sean San José are particularly memorable among the other company members. A word should also be said for Paul Raci, who plays Brent Buell, the diplomatic, unflappable director and playwright. 

But the core of the film is Colman Domingo. Rarely does an actor give us so much heart to invest in with so little hamming or telegraphing. It's a classic performance, both for its emotional impact and for its discipline.

My Penguin Friend--It's hard to go wrong with penguins. They've been amusing us for a long time, not just in zoos but in movies like George Miller's mad animated musical epic Happy Feet and its sequel, and Surf's Up, and the crack team of penguins in the Madagascar franchise, and Mr. Popper's Penguins, and the 2005 French documentary March of the Penguins, back though the exploding penguin and the giant penguin in Monty Python, not to mention Chilly Willy and Bugs Bunny's friend "Playboy Penguin," who wept tiny ice cubes when he was sad.

It's also hard to go wrong with Jean Reno. Best known as menacing killers in Luc Besson films like La Femme Nikita and The Professional, the rugged-looking French actor projects an air of effortless authority. So My Penguin Friend, which has both Jean Reno and a jaunty, spirited penguin in starring roles, starts out with certain advantages. And it ends up needing both of them.

This family film is, to use its opening titles, "Inspired by a True Story." In 2011, a man named Joao Pereira de Souza living on Ilha Grande, off the coast of Brazil, found a weakened, oil-slicked Magellanic penguin outside his house along the beach. He cleaned the poor flightless castaway up, fed him some sardines, and soon became friends with him. Dubbed "Dindim"--a grandchild's mispronunciation of the Portuguese word for penguin--the bird disappeared back into the Atlantic some months later. But he returned for many years thereafter, to hang out for the winter with Joao along his migratory route.

This fictionalized retelling of the story, directed by David Schurmann from a script by Kristen Lazarian and Paulina Lagudi Ulrich, starts off on the wrong foot with a tragic episode that seemed entirely gratuitous to me. And in its second half, it follows Dindim's encounters with researchers at his other home in Patagonia. These scenes feel very strained, with dialogue so stilted I began to wonder if it had been written by AI. And the movie's final stretch, which attempts to generate some danger and suspense, feels extremely half-hearted.

In between all this, however, we get to see Jean Reno, looking scruffy and soulful and beaky-faced as Joao, tenderly interacting with a penguin. That can carry a movie a long way. Reno seems to enjoy playing a childlike sweetness here, as Joao proclaims that Dindim "comes and goes as he pleases" and is "not my pet...he's my friend." The other humans in the film, including Adriana Barraza as Joao's wife, are all attractive, even when the dialogue coming out of them seems canned.

The movie is visually impressive, too. Dindim was played by several different penguins, and presumably his adventures, particularly underwater, have been at least partly enhanced by CGI, but it's pretty effective and seamless; he comes across as a character. And the scenery, both in windswept Patagonia and idyllic-looking Ilha Grande, is breathtaking.

So it will be a matter of personal calculation for you to decide if a penguin, a bona fide international movie star and gorgeous settings overcome feeble kid-movie devices enough to make My Penguin Friend worth your time. For me, it was; the penguin tipped the scale the farthest.

Alien: Romulus--A band of young scavengers bust into a huge derelict spaceship in orbit around the cheerless, sunlight-free mining planet on which they live. They're hoping to filch equipment that will allow them to escape their indenture, and they repeatedly express confidence that they'll be in and out in half an hour, and nothing can go wrong.

So in they go, get the stuff they need, and sail off to a new world where they live happily ever after. The end.

Just kidding. The result, in this seventh entry in the Alien series, is of course another gory encounter with an infestation of the elegantly spindly, terrifying creatures in all of their various stages of development, from "facehugger" to "chestburster" to full-grown fang-bearer.

Though it's not close to the 1979 original, Romulus is on the more watchable end of the franchise, deliberate and creepy for the first half, and non-stop in the second. It's a little unvaried and dark, however, and until the climactic scenes it doesn't really give us much that's new. Toward the end, the shots of the ice ring around the planet that the ship is approaching have a certain magical beauty, but otherwise we're mostly stuck in the chiaroscuro space dungeon.

The star is Cailee Spaeny, who played the fresh-faced young journalist in Civil War earlier this year. She's sympathetic, but the movie is stolen by David Jonsson as her companion Andy, a sweet, dad-joke-dispensing android who gets a reboot that gives him an upsetting personality change. Andy may be the best robot with divided loyalties since Robby in Forbidden Planet.

One more note: I'm a little over the vogue for gynecological/obstetric body horror. We got a big dose of nasty surgical instruments and moaning, keening young women birthing unnatural spawn earlier this year in The Last Omen; we get more natal splatter here. The gifted director of Romulus, the Uruguayan Fede Alvarez, also showed unsavory interest in coercive pregnancy in his terrific 2016 shocker Don't Breathe. Even the title Romulus refers to one species nursed at the teat of another.

Could all this be a reaction to post-Roe reproductive chaos? I'll leave that to graduate students with stronger stomachs than mine.