Quietly Watching

  Somewhere on day four of a 435-mile race through the jungle, an exhausted adventure racer tossed a meatball to a stray dog. That dog then followed his team for the rest of the course and eventually flew home with him to Sweden. So yes, Arthur the King is based on a true story, and the dog at the center of it was very real. What is surprising is how much the movie changed around him. The racer was not American, the race was not held in the Dominican Republic, and the year was not 2018. Mark Wahlberg's version keeps the animal's story mostly intact and moves almost everything else. Directed by Simon Cellan Jones, it is an unabashed, well-made crowd-pleaser, and knowing which parts really happened only makes it hit harder. What's Real: The Dog Who Chose Them The heart of the film is true. A racer shared some food with a battered stray at a transition point, and the dog made up its own mind after that. Nobody recruited him. He simply decided he belonged with the team and refu...

  You spend a good part of We Live in Time unsure of when you are. One scene has Almut and Tobias meeting for the first time. The next has them raising a young daughter. Another drops back to a hospital room that resets everything you have watched so far. The film never flags these jumps, and the disorientation is deliberate. Quick answers first, since people come looking for them. No, it is not based on a true story. And yes, the ending is going to hurt. Almut, the chef played by Florence Pugh, is living with terminal ovarian cancer, and the movie knows it from the first frame even when you do not. It comes from the same wave of streaming grief romances as Reminders of Him , but tells its story in a stranger, smarter shape. The better question is why screenwriter Nick Payne refuses to tell her story in a straight line. The Playwright Behind the Puzzle The scrambled structure looks like an A24 mood, the kind of choice a director makes to freshen up a familiar story. It is older tha...

  Ordinary Angels opened quietly in early 2024, to modest business and politely mixed reviews, and then slipped off to streaming the way small faith-based dramas usually do. Two years later it sits in the Netflix top three, and plenty of people are meeting it for the first time. The strange part is that the movie itself is not really what pulled them in. The true story it tells is. Directed by Jon Gunn, the film stars Hilary Swank as Sharon Stevens, a hard-drinking Kentucky hairdresser, and Alan Ritchson, the mountainous star of Reacher, as a widowed father with a dying child. That casting is a curiosity on its own. But what actually happened in Louisville in the winter of 1994 is something else, and it is the reason this small movie refuses to disappear. What Actually Happened in Louisville In 1994, Ed Schmitt was a widower raising two young daughters, Michelle and Ashley, both born with a congenital liver disease. Three-year-old Michelle was running out of time on the transplant ...

  For twenty years, fans have wanted Matt Damon and Doug Liman working together again. The Bourne Identity launched both of their careers in 2002, and The Instigators, now the number one movie on Apple TV+, is their reunion: a Boston heist comedy that Damon's own production company handed to Liman as a script. What the two of them made is not the sleek, clockwork caper that reunion might promise. It is a shaggy comedy about two men who are bad at crime, and it cares far more about why they need the money than about whether they ever get it. A Heist Built Backward Rory, played by Damon, is a broke and depressed father who is behind on everything, including what he owes for his son. Cobby, played by Affleck, is a motormouth ex-con who cannot stop talking himself deeper into trouble. A local crime boss points them at what sounds like an easy score, the untraceable election-night cash of a corrupt Boston mayor, and neither man has the skill to pull it off. That gap is the joke, and Lim...