Film Clips: Dec. 20, 2021

The 2021 World Series (Shout! Factory/MLB Blu-ray)

Major League Baseball is the ideal sport for obsessive fans. Thirty teams compete over a season that can seem interminable with so many games and so many variables that the outcome—who will meet at the World Series?—is long in doubt. Atlanta homeboy Ludacris takes evident pleasure in narrating The 2021 World Series. The documentary includes scenes from press conferences and locker rooms as well as game day footage and headshot interviews with individual participants. For the Houston Astros and the Atlanta Braves, the World Series was their field of dreams come true. (David Luhrssen)

Coming Home in the Dark (Dark Sky Films Blu-ray)

The middle-class family on a road trip in distant parts, menaced by homicidal maniacs—it’s become a running theme in American filmmaking and has spread abroad. In New Zealand director James Ashcroft’s Coming Home in the Dark (2021), married schoolteachers and their sons are in a remote destination when approached by a pair of drifters. The leader, calling himself Mandrake, drips with sarcasm and malice. But does he have a grudge against his victims? In the film’s most beautifully rendered scenes, the humans are specks on the breathtaking landscape. (David Luhrssen)

The King’s Man (In theaters Dec. 22)

This prequel to the three “Kingsmen” movies distorts history and tangles its goofy comedy in chaos. Ralph Fiennes portrays the Duke of Oxford. Following his wife’s death in the Boer War, he uncovers a cabal of evildoers contriving to start war. Oxford makes a futile effort to stop them, but the film shows us the reason he can’t, exploring glib family squabbles between George V of Britain, Wilhelm II of Germany and Nicholas II of Russia, that result in World War I. The loopy storytelling is a conundrum, but worse, never comes round to its point. Fiennes is undone by a script that renders holding onto any reasonable characterization impossible. Finally, the breezy tone is disrupted by tragic events that relying on the soundtrack to inform us these are tearful moments. (Lisa Miller)

The Matrix Resurrections (In theaters & streaming on HBO Max, Dec. 22)

This fourth Matrix installment is set 20 years after 2003’s The Matrix Revolutions. Neo (Keanu Reeves) is once again living within The Matrix as Thomas A. Anderson, unable to remember his awakening. A San Francisco resident, Anderson sees a therapist (Neil Patrick Harris) who prescribes blue pills to counteract his patient’s feelings that his strange dreams seem real. Encouraged by a bookstore owner (Priyanka Chopra Jonas) who knows more than she lets on, Anderson is drawn to Alice in Wonderland. He’s also attracted to Tiffany (Carrie-Anne Moss), though he can’t remember her as Trinity.

Eventually, an alternate version of Morpheus (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) offers Anderson a shiny red pill and a trip down the rabbit hole. We miss Hugo Weaving’s Agent Smith and Laurence Fishburne’s Morpheus. When COVID-19 shut down filming in April 2020, Wachowski pondered abandoning the film. After her cast campaigned to continue, filming resumed in August 2020. It feels a little like we’re living in the Matrix because the film premiered in Toronto on Dec. 16, then was released in Japan, Thailand and Russia on Dec. 17. The U.S. gets its first look on Dec. 22. (Lisa Miller)