Mike Schulz talks with Dave Levora and Darren Pitra about his second week of fives — first, the dream logic of Ari Aster’s Beau is Afraid, “creepy, laugh-out-loud funny, and people are going to hate it.” Schulz loved the film, but thought it a narrative mess; and he suspects Aster doesn’t know how everything ties together, either. Second, there’s Lee Cronin’s Evil Dead Rise, which doesn’t feel like much thirty minutes in, but after that — WATCH OUT! Not even the children are safe from the Deadites. “This movie is not messing around,” Schulz says, “and it is so über-gory. . . I’ve rarely seen that much blood in my life.” Add fantastic acting, make-up, and FX jobs, and the film redeemed itself for MS, despite being “more creepy than scary.” Third, there’s Stephen Williams’s Chevalier, about the Eighteenth-Century French-Caribbean musician Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, played by Kelvin Harrison Jr. Schulz, sighing, calls it “a Masterpiece Theatre movie, a Merchant-Ivory movie, basically,” with too-obvious plot points that won’t allow an audience to draw anything more than simple moral lessons, “and there’s not a believable moment in it, there’s not a surprising moment in it. It looks great — they all do —” a common criticism of the Merchant-Ivory films — “and geared to an audience that likes to go to movies to feel good about themselves. ‘Look at those horrible bigots up there!’” Fourth, Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant, so titled to distinguish it from all the other Covenant films out there, and not so much because Ritchie has traded up from chronicler of “Cockney goofball adventures” to auteur noble (though the fact that Jason Statham is nowhere to be found seems to genuflect to that latter quality). Set in war-torn Afghanistan in 2018, the film is a rescue thriller, with which Schulz had a problem, because “I realized, during the end-credits, that this was not based on a true story, which, like, all these movies are. . . They show images of actual soldiers with their actual interpreters. . .  and then you gradually [realize], ‘everything in [The Covenant] that is too Hollywood for words automatically [becomes] worse for me. . . this action scene is clearly unrealistic, and this rescue, there’s no way that could happen — but if it were a real story, you could [surmise], “Well, yes, it did. . .”.’” The problem boils down to Ritchie’s set-up fooling viewers into thinking the events and the characters in his film are authentic, and the deaths have real-world tragic consequences — but without the artistic pay-off of a switcheroo film like, say, the Coen Brothers’ Fargo, whose bait-and-switch with the truth at least left you something to chew on; whereas Ritchie’s exercise didn’t promise as much but managed to deliver even less. Fifth, Ray Romano’s Somewhere in Queens, starring Romano and Laurie Metcalf — a “big ol’ screen sitcom. . . It’s something I’d watch on TV every week for a few years.” Next-week noteworthies include the marking of the fortieth anniversary of Star Wars Ep VI: Return of the Jedi with theater showings — and congratulations: If you saw it the first time around, you’re old; an adaptation of Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, directed by Kelly Fremon Craig, whose previous film, 2016’s The Edge of Seventeen, was the kind of film that, according to Schulz, “John Hughes would have made, but didn’t” — do with that info what you will; and Big George Foreman: The Miraculous Story of the Once and Future Heavyweight Champion of the World — or, to save time, Big George Foreman — a biopic whose story is neatly summed up in its title. Will it justify itself as a film that merits watching? We’ll see, won’t we?

“Beau is Afraid,” “Evil Dead Rise,” “Chevalier,” “Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant,” and “Somewhere in Queens”