There aren’t many movies that advertise themselves as treatises on masculine love. Look hard, however, and you can find them. Try as it might, “Secondhand Lions” (2003) isn’t one of those wistful, sepia-toned, “written and directed by” pieces of sugar candy that help one pass a lazy Sunday afternoon. It isn’t simply two feral geezers and an abandoned kid trying to figure each other out in rural 1960s Somewhere. It helps that Michael Caine, Robert Duvall and Haley Joel Osment are the principals, but underneath the tall-tale bluster, there’s a heart to this film, and it’s shared by those three.
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Hey, “Edge of Seventeen” (2016). I saw what you did there. And you did it well. So I’m not going to spend the next 84 words belaboring comparisons to teen films from the 1980s. Suffice to say kids are different these days (and so are parents), but they still deserve good movies about themselves. And this is one. And a wink and a nod at the genre’s forebears signifies respect, not derivativeity. I’m also not going to continue discussing my non-sexual but age-inappropriate crush on Hailee Steinfeld, which began with “True Grit.” Suffice to say I’m glad she’s 20 now.
A modern-day Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn run away from home and into a Colorado version of the opening to “Goodfellas” in “Cop Car” (2015). The best way to describe the movie would be “oddly fascinating.” Kevin Bacon’s Rocky Mountain copstache sure is. The first half of the movie almost seems like it ought to be nominated for Best Short Film. It’s like the end of “My Own Private Idaho,” except it’s not in Idaho. And it doesn’t suck. Then the fun starts. And by fun, I mean, “not fun.” At least not for Tom and Huck. Lesson: don’t steal.
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