New Movies to Watch This Week: ‘Capone,’ ‘The Wrong Missy,’ ‘Scoob!’

By Peter Debruge

LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – It’s a relatively slim week in new releases, even by the standards of the ongoing coronavirus shutdown — although there are a few gems to be found, if you hunt hard enough. Families have “Scoob!” which Warner Bros. decided to make available directly via digital, following the recent success of “Trolls World Tour.” And grownups can check out Tom Hardy playing the shell of a notorious gangster in “Capone.” Here are the week’s new releases, with excerpts from reviews and links to where you can watch them.

High-profile on-demand studio and indie offerings:

Capone (Josh Trank)
Distributor: Vertical Entertainment

Where to Find It: Rent on Amazon , iTunes and other on-demand platforms.
In “Capone,” Tom Hardy, as the aging, broken-down, not-all-there Al Capone, acts under a corpse-gray mask of desiccated-mobster makeup. Is “Capone” a fascinatingly idiosyncratic twilight-of-the-mobster drama? Or is it a “Saturday Night Live” sketch with pretensions? It may be a bit of both. The concept feels original, even if it does suggest the last half hour of “The Irishman” crossed with the doddering-legend parts of “Citizen Kane,” all mixed in with Hardy’s apparent desire to play the creature in “Frankenstein.” — Owen Gleiberman
Read the full review

Scoob! (Tony Cervone)

Distributor: Warner Bros. Pictures

Where to Find It: Rent for $19.99 via a variety of streaming providers .
“Scoob!” is the first salvo in a Hanna-Barbera crossover bonanza, resurrecting such dusty, disparate characters as Dynomutt and Blue Falcon, Dick Dastardly (of the “Wacky Races” series) and Captain Caveman, alongside the Mystery Inc. team. When confined to their respective shows, these eccentric goofballs were all reasonably entertaining, and yet they don’t naturally coexist in the same world, forcing the film’s four credited screenwriters to contort the plot like a rickety roller coaster so as to accommodate them all. — Peter Debruge
Read the full review

Independent films, directly on demand:

Alice (Josephine Mackerras)
Distributor: Monument Releasing
Where to Find It: Choose a virtual cinema to support.
A truly independent debut, shot in Paris outside the system (sans permits or institutional support), “Alice” came out of nowhere to win the top prize at the 2019 SXSW Film Festival. Such accolades aside, it’s less a fully realized study of a naive wife’s brusque awakening than a thinly sketched tale of female empowerment, pushing an unconvincing sex-positive agenda in which prostitution is a reasonable, relatively worry-free shortcut to financial emancipation. In taking that implausible leap — on her own terms, of course — Alice may as well be launching a direct assault on the madonna-whore double-standard that destroyed her marriage. — Peter Debruge
Read the full review

Castle in the Ground (Joey Klein)

Distributor: Gravitas Ventures
Where to Find It: Rent on Amazon and other on-demand platforms.
This well-acted second feature from actor-turned-director Klein charts a grieving youth’s terrible choice of succor in the company of his junkie neighbor. Part gritty portrait of a mutually destructive drug-based relationship, part crime thriller, the film never quite grips enough on either plane. The result is an earnest, sometimes skillful effort that nonetheless often feels slack and underwritten, as well as ultimately less-than-rewarding. Strongly acted down the line, “Castle” still manages to feel too sketchy as a character drama, as well as a crime melodrama. — Dennis Harvey
Read the full review

Graves Without a Name (Rithy Panh)
Distributor: First Run Features
Where to Find It: Rent on iTunes and other on-demand platforms.
A more intimate follow-up to Panh’s Oscar-nominated documentary “The Missing Picture,” this meditative piece likewise seeks to move past devastation and into a manner of still-painful peace. Following the director himself on a study of indigenous ritual and mythos in search of his slain family’s unknown resting places, the film might seem a heartfelt concluding statement on a subject that Panh has addressed in multiple projects since 1991’s “Cambodia: Between War and Peace” — though never with his lens turned so directly on himself. — Guy Lodge
Read the full review

The Wolf House (Cristóbal León, Joaquín Cociña)
Distributor: KimStim
Where to Find It: Choose a virtual cinema to support.
If an Orwellian fable were to be visualized by a surrealist in the vein of Salvador Dali, the result would look and feel something like “ The Wolf House ,” a jaw-dropping marriage of various animation techniques, chiefly stop-motion. A dystopian tale with haunting echoes of “The Three Little Pigs” and “Red Riding Hood,” this shape-shifting, trippy nightmare from filmmakers Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña startles and terrifies in equal measure, while putting forth an uncompromising examination of fascism in a way that only animation can do. — Tomris Laffly
Read the full review

Only on Amazon

Seberg (Benedict Andrews)
Where to Find It: Amazon Prime
“Seberg” covers the years when the French-adopted American star was made a prime target of the FBI’s illegal COINTELPRO project, which took invasive and threatening measures to “neutralize” her support for the Black Panther movement in the late 1960s. It’s a hell of story, buffeting what ought to be a hell of a character study, yet a workmanlike script doesn’t quite do either of these justice. Fiery political complexities of the era are ironed smooth, as are Seberg’s own fractured psychological impulses, while at least half the narrative is framed through the eyes of a fictional character ( Jack O’Connell) considerably less interesting than the one we’ve turned up to see. — Guy Lodge
Read the full review

New to Netflix

The Wrong Missy (Nadia Hallgren)
Where to Find It: Netflix
“The Wrong Missy” is a rom-com, but it’s really a ’90s Jim Carrey movie merged with one of those slob-goes-on-a-corporate-retreat comedies that has starred everyone from Bill Murray to Adam Sandler to Will Ferrell. Here’s what’s new about it: The hypomanic Jim Carrey figure is a woman played by the wild-card comedian Lauren Lapkus. Lauren Lapkus may deserve her own version of “The Mask,” but in “The Wrong Missy,” she gets her own version of “That’s My Boy.” Which isn’t a terrible thing. Watching “The Wrong Missy” it’s easy to sit back and give in to the movie’s it-is-what-it-is-ness. — Owen Gleiberman
Read the full review

Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics (Donick Cary)
Where to Find It: Netflix
Writer-producer Cary has spent his whole career near the top of the showbiz comedy heap. So it shouldn’t surprise that his first directorial feature is less a serious dive into its chosen subject than an excuse to have a lot of familiar-face colleagues and acquaintances serve up funny anecdotes. Since those anecdotes are about hallucinogenic drug usage, this documentary can hardly help but be entertaining. But those looking for much in the way of real insight will find this amiable enterprise doesn’t stray very far from a general, standard-stoner-yuks. — Dennis Harvey
Read the full review

I Love You, Stupid (Te quiero, imbécil) (Laura Maña)
Where to Find It: Netflix
In this romantic comedy from Spain, a hapless guy gets dumped from his girfriend and his job in the same day, only to rebound with a wild new woman.

Other releases debuting on streaming this week

Blood and Money (John Barr)
Distributor: Screen Media
Where to Find It: Rent on Amazon and other on-demand platforms.
Tom Berenger plays a hunter who stumbles upon a corpse and a bag full of cash in Maine’s Allagash woods.

Evil Little Things (Matt Green)
Distributor: Uncork’d Entertainment
Where to Find It: Rent on Amazon and other on-demand platforms.
Described on IMDb as “one of the southeast’s most active filmmakers,” veteran creature effects artist Green assembles a collection of horror stories.

Finding Eden (Rodney Luis Aquino)
Distributor: Freestyle Digital Media
Where to Find It: Rent on Amazon and other on-demand platforms.
Jason Sutton plays a loner roaming the country armed only with a bow and arrow in this low-budget “First Blood” knockoff.

Fourteen (Dan Sallitt)
Distributor: Grasshopper Films
Where to Find It: Choose a virtual cinema to support.
Two young women see their lifelong friendship strained as one finds it increasingly difficult to cope with her mental condition in this indie drama.

A Nun’s Curse (Tommy Faircloth)
Distributor: Uncork’d Entertainment
Where to Find It: Rent on Amazon and other on-demand platforms.
This direct-to-VOD horror movie takes place in an abandoned prison whose visitors discover the ghost of Sister Monday still haunts the grounds.

Proximity (Eric Demeusy)
Distributor: Shout! Studios
Where to Find It: Rent on Amazon and other on-demand platforms.
Convinced he was abducted by extraterrestrials, a NASA employee sets out to prove he isn’t crazy in this straight-to-digital sci-fi thriller.

Red Rover (Shane Belcourt)
Distributor: IndieCan Entertainment
Where to Find It: Rent on Amazon and other on-demand platforms.
A Canadian sci-fi movie that’s less about the outer-of-this-world premise — people competing for a ticket to Mars — than the underlying loneliness.

Up from the Streets: New Orleans: The City of Music (Michael Murphy)
Distributor: Eagle Rock Entertainment
Where to Find It: Watch the film via a virtual festival .
Hosted by jazz trumpeter Terence Blanchard, this documentary mixes new and archival musical performances to celebrate New Orleans’ influence on the scene.