Photo © Universal Pictures
Ryan Gosling in ‘The Fall Guy’
Ryan Gosling in ‘The Fall Guy’
The Fall Guy
(In Theaters May 3)
Director David Leitch loosely adapts an ‘80s TV series from a screenplay by Drew Pearce. The film’s triumph is both revealing the risks of doing stunt work while weaving its eye-popping action into a winning romantic comedy. Ryan Gosling appears as stuntman Colt Seavers. He’s determined to woo back former girlfriend Jody Monero (Emily Blunt), and so agrees to perform stunts for her science fiction blockbuster. The pair’s chemistry runs deep, but wounded egos and a disaster-prone history present hilarious impediments. Meanwhile, the star of Jody’s film, Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), goes missing, prompting Seavers to work some search-and-rescue magic for the same actor who fails to appreciate the risks Seaver takes on Ryder’s behalf. Gosling himself boasts he had four specialized stunt men for this film, bragging he’s the first star to perform none of his own stunts. Blunt’s woman-in-charge is romantically vulnerable, and vengeful, finding excuses to make Seaver perform the most difficult stunts repeatedly. With over 100 reviews to its credit, “The Fall Guy” sits at an 87% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. (Lisa Miller)
Stigmata
(Capelight Blu-ray)
A rosary picked up casually in a Brazilian flea market brings unexpected consequences in this 1999 entry in horror genre: Roman Catholic division. Patricia Arquette is a New York hair cutter suddenly afflicted with strangely deep wounds. The hospital staff thinks they’re self-inflicted but we come to learn they are stigmata. David Byrne plays a weary Vatican investigator whose job is to debunk unwanted miracles, holding anomalies to the scientific method. And there is a lost ancient text, Dan Brown-like, that could upset the Vatican bureaucracy. As one of the wiser priests tells Byrne, paraphrasing Plato, “We’re all blind men in a cave, looking for a candle that was lit 2,000 years ago.” (David Luhrssen)
Tarot
(In Theaters May 3)
Adapted from Nicholas Adams’ 1991 novel Horrorscope, the film is aimed at a YA audience ready to move up a rung from the “Goosebumps” series. Directors Spenser Cohen and Anna Halberg co-wrote the script with Adams. Friends in their early 20s (Jacob Batalon, Avantika Vandanapu, Adain Bradley, Humberly González, Olwen Fouré, Wolfgang Novogratz and Larsen Thompson) go looking for professional horoscopes when they settle for an amateur tarot reading instead. They laugh off the legend that using someone else’s tarot deck is courting disaster, which is precisely what befalls them. One-by-one, they begin dying by outrageous means. The survivors band together in an effort to cheat fate, eventually coming to suspect there’s a serial killer is behind what appear to be bizarre accidents. Either way, the film’s scares rely on eerie masks, darkened nooks, and gruesome blood spatter. The plot seeks to blend the inevitable deaths of Final Destination with tarot card symbology and astrology. The convoluted strategy weakens the overall effect. Cleverly focusing the camera on the perimeter of the killings, Tarot earns the PG-13 rating needed for young viewers, not to mention us less hard-core horror fans. (Lisa Miller)
