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People like to pay a certain amount of lip service to the importance of young people participating in the electoral process. Still, in most regards, they tend to be either marginalized or outright dismissed. So it’s always a delight when those underestimated voices band together and flex their political muscle in unexpected ways. Recall, if you will, that 2020 Donald Trump rally in Tulsa with a much lower turnout than expected, reportedly largely due to TikTok users and K-pop fans mass-buying tickets they had no intention of using. More recently, the ascension of Kamala Harris to the position of presumed Democratic presidential nominee and JD Vance’s odious comments regarding so-called “childless cat ladies” have inspired fans of Taylor Swift to mobilize on Twitter to help get out the vote.

For an ideal cinematic representation of this phenomenon, you need not look further than “Dick,” the 1999 comedy that took one of the darkest periods in the history of American democracy – the Watergate scandal – and transformed it into a smart, sprightly, and hilarious comedy. It not only observed the proceedings, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern-style, through the eyes of a pair of bubbly teenage girls; it suggested that they were actually Deep Throat, the then-unknown inside source utilized by Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward to help reveal the story to the world. 

Perhaps inevitably, it failed to click with audiences when it first came out. But over the years it has gained a cult following thanks to several factors: a clever screenplay that skewers both the scandal and the various treatments it had previously received in the media; a knockout cast headed by two young actresses who would be celebrated as the very best of their generation backed up by an absolute Murderers’ Row of comedy talents; and the silly but inspiring way in which its adolescent heroines recognize and develop their political agency in the most absurd manner.

Said teens are Betsy (Kirsten Dunst) and Arlene (Michelle Williams), two best friends living in Washington D.C.—the former in Georgetown with her well-off family and the latter with her widowed mother (Teri Garr) in an apartment in the Watergate complex. The two girls sneak out late one evening to mail it, putting a piece of tape on the door lock so they can get back in undetected. This is, of course, the night of the infamous Watergate break-in, and to say they get caught up in the international scandal would be an understatement.

“Dick” appeared at the end of a decade that saw considerable effort go into rehabilitating the reputation of the disgraced former president. This started with the opening of the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace in 1990 and the Nixon Center think tank in early 1994, culminating with his death later that year. This was followed the next year with Oliver Stone’s “Nixon,” an epic so solemn and stately in tone that critics at the time were pretty much legally required to refer to it as “Shakespearean” at least once. As loopy as it gets at times — and it gets very loopy as things go on — “Dick” serves as a bit of a corrective to this post-mortem veneration while reminding us exactly what led to his disgrace in the first place.

The film was the brainchild of director Andrew Fleming, who was riding high on the surprise success of the teen-witch thriller “The Craft” (1996), and co-writer Sheryl Longin, who reportedly had her own youthful encounter with Nixon when he and her family were staying at the same hotel. (She and a friend apparently tossed ice cubes at him.) Granted, the conceit of presenting well-known real-life events through a comically skewed take purporting to show audiences what really happened is nothing new—see Robert Zemeckis’s delightful 1978 debut “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” or the recent “Fly Me to the Moon” —but it requires filmmakers to find just the right tone for audiences who might not be familiar with the events depicted instead of becoming one increasingly tedious in-joke.

“Dick” finds that tone right from the start, and maintains it throughout. Sure, there are the expected bits about the tackier fads and fashions of the time, an equal number of jokes playing off the name “Dick” on which your personal mileage may vary (though the final one of those does earn a huge, if undeniably juvenile, laugh in the closing moments). There’s also a soundtrack jammed with the hits of the era, including a particularly inspired use of Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain.” 

However, the script knows its history, coming up with inspired explanations for everything from that infamous 18 1/2-minute gap to John Dean’s sudden willingness to testify against his former colleagues. It amusingly pokes holes in the ways we’ve processed the entire story in our collective consciousness: turning war criminal Henry Kissinger’s inexplicable reputation with the ladies on its head by showing him droning on about international diplomacy to a disinterested Betsy and Arlene. Woodward & Bernstein’s treatment is especially funny—instead of the dashing pursuers of the truth worthy of being depicted by Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford, Will Ferrell, and Bruce McCulloch portray them as a pair of petty, bickering dolts.

Perhaps the smartest thing about “Dick” is the genuine affection it has for Betsy and Arlene. Contemporary reviews of the film have described them as bimbos and airheads and such, but, they’re just ordinary teenage girls—a bit giggly and silly, to be sure, but not dumb by any means. And the screenplay doesn’t treat them as such: they’re just at a point in adolescence where the issues of the world around them don’t have as much impact as the latest issue of Tiger Beat, The point is to see them gradually become smarter and more aware of their potential places in the world, without losing the sense of goofy effervescence that made them so appealing in the first place. This is the kind of character journey that Elle Woods would famously make in “Legally Blonde” (2001). Betsy and Arlene not only got to do the same thing a couple of years earlier, but they also got to bust out some swell roller disco moves in the process. 

Perhaps in response to “Nixon”’s stacked cast, “Dick” also brings in a crop of great comedic performers and lets them riff on their real-life counterparts. Among the highlights are Harry Shearer’s maniacal caricature of Liddy and Dave Foley scoring big laughs as Haldeman. Then there’s Hedaya’s scene-stealing work as Nixon, a performance so funny and inspired that, in the pantheon of great Nixon performances, I’d put him second only to Phillip Baker Hall in Robert Altman’s “Secret Honor.”

But it’s Dunst and Williams’ lead performances that make “Dick” rise. By the time Dunst appeared here, she’d already more than held her own against powerhouse co-stars in films as varied as “Interview with the Vampire” (1994), “Little Women” (1994) and had shown a flair for comedy in the satires “Wag the Dog” (1997) and “Drop Dead Gorgeous” (1999). Williams, on the other hand, had fewer credits, and the ones that she did have—most notably her work on the hit series “Dawson’s Creek”—didn’t often give her many chances to cut loose. That said, they make for a genuinely sweet, engaging team. 

The pair invest their roles with a kind of grounding that allows them to come across as recognizable people instead of mere bimbos. Take Arlene’s infatuation for Nixon: The conceit of a teenager fangirling over Richard Nixon is deeply silly, but Williams plays it with a real sense of conviction; it’s hilarious without ever tripping over into cruelty. When she holds up the microphone to Nixon’s tape recorder and delivers a rendition of Olivia Newton-John’s “I Honestly Love You,” it’s both side-splittingly funny and weirdly touching. 

“Dick” largely failed to find an audience when it opened in theaters for a number of reasons. The ad campaign devised by the studio was aimed entirely at its young stars’ fan base (who presumably had little practical working knowledge of the details of the Watergate scandal); they likely preferred the more salacious outrages of that summer’s “American Pie.” At the same time, older viewers assumed that it was little more than an extended episode of “That ‘70s Show” and gave it a pass. It also had the misfortune to hit theaters a mere two days before “The Sixth Sense” became a genuine phenomenon.

Happily, “Dick” would begin to find its audience via home video and would eventually go on to become a cult favorite. However, the underlying message of the film—that young people, and young women in particular, can make a difference in the world —is one that not only continues to ring true today but now feels more timely and relevant than ever. Who knows? Perhaps one day, these politically fraught times may inspire another movie along similar lines. If it does, here’s hoping it’s as inspired and inspirational as “Dick.”

Your investment in Zack Snyder’s creative vision will likely determine how badly you need to see the R-rated director’s cut of “Rebel Moon,” Snyder’s grim Netflix space opera adventure. This new director’s cut adds 120 minutes of footage, including a numbing wealth of computer-animated gore and a bit more sex. Some of this new material adjusts without significantly enhancing Snyder’s stab at a “Star Wars”-style sci-fi pastiche and an over-extended update of “Seven Samurai” that mainly takes place on the storyboard-perfect farm planet of Veldt. 

Some new scenes add more information about the characters’ motives, while others extend already lifeless action sequences. This new material usually only lets the previous version’s footage play out slower. In its new form, “Rebel Moon” now seems mediocre where it used to be outright bad, a frequently monotonous fable that confuses volume with intensity and generally resembles cut scenes from a video game that you’ll never get to play.

Where the previous release of “Rebel Moon” sometimes sped through superfluous flashbacks, this new director’s cut wades through them while still being over-reliant on leaden expository dialogue and faux-lyrical voiceover narration. Now we get to spend more time with the robot warrior JC-1435 (voiced by Anthony Hopkins), who mostly watches and frets over the people of Veldt as they prepare to fight the implacable space fascist Admiral Noble (Ed Skrein) and an inexhaustible army of Nazi-looking Imperium soldiers. There’s also more backstory connecting Noble with Kora (Sofia Boutella), a mysterious orphan hiding out on Veldt. Kora leads a group of castoff fighters, including former Imperium General Titus (Djimon Hounsou) and cyborg swordsperson Nemesis (Doona Bae), in protecting Veldt from Noble. 

Everybody good in “Rebel Moon” has lost somebody that they’ve loved, usually because they had no other choice but to either kill for or be killed by the Imperium. Now they kill the Imperium’s soldiers with impunity, even the few who express misgivings, and especially that one guy who, in the movie’s second half, begs to be spared for the sake of his wife and children. He gets shot in the face and so do a few other Imperium soldiers, many of whom get pumped full of holes with laser guns in slow-motion. Noble also betrays a few more of his informants and allies, presumably establishing how badly he and the Imperium need to be stopped. It’s still hard to understand why we need to see the same process of collaboration and violent betrayal play out so many times and at such punishing length in “Rebel Moon,” as if repetition necessarily added meaning instead of just extra steps.

“Rebel Moon”’s grisly action scenes remain pretty monotonous, featuring way too many stock poses and gestures, and at such length that even diehard fans will likely wonder why so much dramatic short-hand was used. Too much money’s on the screen for the movie’s big fight scenes to be flat-out ugly. Still, there are only so many times that you can be impressed by turgid bloodletting wrought by stick-figure heroes whose physical movements are never graceful or well-choreographed enough to warrant so much slow motion. Everything blends together (often literally, given the eye-straining soft-focus camerawork and butter-colored lenses). Only the most hardcore Snyder fans will care about what happens to protagonists who explain away their personalities rather than embody them through their behavior. 

Stunted by Snyder’s literal-minded, reproduction-heavy imagination, “Rebel Moon” lacks the sort of emotional inflection needed to justify its indulgent length. There are some additional stabs at a topical/timely subtext to the movie’s hammy anti-fascist parable in this new director’s cut, particularly whenever a supporting character forgives one of the leads for doing whatever they must to survive. It’s also pretty telling that the best new material in this new release of “Rebel Moon” is an extended sex scene in “Chapter 2,” a relatively tender reunion for Kora and her meek farmer beau Gunnar (Michiel Huisman). Sadly, Kora and Gunnar’s sex doesn’t match the tone or style of the movie since it presents the two leads as human-scaled individuals instead of over-inflated effigies of suffering and badass revanchism.

More of everything doesn’t otherwise enhance this new version of “Rebel Moon,” whose shameless and uninspired cribbing from superior films soon makes six-plus hours seem interminable. The best scenes remain the ones that don’t revolve around people. I said it before, but I maintain that Snyder’s latest only really sings when big objects are either exploding or crashing into other large things. The director’s cut of “Rebel Moon” features the same imaginative shortcomings as the last edition. It’s campy and joyless and will never be more than the sum of its well-oiled parts, a feature-length mood board for Snyder and his collaborators, and a pretty slog for everyone else.

The Belfast schoolchildren stand in their classroom, singing “Óró Sé do bheatha abhaile,” a traditional Irish song, in the Irish language required in their school. They drone the lyrics, looking bored out of their minds. Two boys in the back, sharing earbuds, are pretending to sing along but are actually listening to another kind of music, hip hop, by an exciting new local trio called Kneecap. Kneecap rap in the Irish language. It isn’t something you hear every day. This brings up one of the many interesting points made in Rich Peppiatt’s “Kneecap,” a funny, exhilarating film about the real-life Kneecap, where the members of the group – Liam Óg (stage name Mo Chara), Naoise Ó Cairealláin (stage name Móglaí Bap) and JJ Ó Dochartaigh (stage name DJ Próvaí) – play themselves.

The Irish language was nearly stomped out of existence. Speaking in Irish is seen by many as a political act. Kneecap was formed in 2018 amidst the controversial “discourse” surrounding Sinn Féin’s proposed Irish Language Act. The Irish Language Act would legally place Irish on the same level as English, which would include garda interrogation rooms and the courts. The “Óró Sé do bheatha abhaile” scene is a snarky representation of the various strands of dialogue at play around the Irish language. A language needs to grow in order to live; it needs to be present in the Now. A traditional song from a century ago has no relevance to the 21st-century kids singing it. But a trio of angry men screaming

C.E.A.R.T.A 
Is cuma liomsa foc faoi aon gharda, 
Duidín lásta, tá mise ró-ghasta, 
Ní fheicfidh tú mise i mo sheasamh ró-fhada

is another thing entirely.

(Translation: 
R.I.G.H.T. 
I don’t give a f*ck about any Garda A lit joint,
I’m too fast, 
You won’t see me standing too long.)

Now that’s a living language. 

Unsurprisingly, Kneecap’s music caused a wave of controversy, mostly because of their gleeful detailing of their drug use, but also because of exposing their asses with “BRITS” on one butt cheek and “OUT” on the other. A newscaster tut-tuts: “This is the true face of the Irish language.” The Irish language advocates did not consider Kneecap good ambassadors for the language and, in fact, were hurting the cause. Meanwhile, Kneecap was playing sold-out shows, where hundreds of kids were screaming lyrics in Irish. Shouldn’t the Irish language people welcome this development? Of course, they don’t!

One film can’t explain all of the complexities around the Irish language and its history, but “Kneecap” does a remarkable job laying it all out (while also making it fun). The film’s style is frenetic and propulsive, profane and provocative, peppered with jokey asides, stylistic flourishes (slow-mo, animation), and pulled along by a snarky voiceover (reminiscent of Ewan McGregor’s voiceover in “Trainspotting”). The film is unabashed in its portrayal of drug use and the realities of life in West Belfast among the generation nicknamed “the Ceasefire Babies.” (Journalist Lyra McKee wrote a remarkable article for The Atlantic in 2016 called Suicide Among the Ceasefire Babies, saying, “We were the Good Friday Agreement generation, spared from the horrors of war. But still, the aftereffects of those horrors seemed to follow us.” Tragically, infuriatingly, McKee was right. In 2019, she was murdered at a protest in Derry.)

Naoise’s father, Arlo (Michael Fassbender), was in a paramilitary group and has been on the run for 10 years after faking his death. (He tells his son, “Every day I am not captured is a psychological victory against the occupiers.”) His absence from Naoise’s life has been catastrophic for both Naoise and his depressed mother (the excellent Simone Kirby). The film opens with Liam refusing to speak English in a police interrogation. A translator is called in, JJ Ó Dochartaigh, who teaches music at an Irish language school and is married to an Irish language activist. JJ learns that Liam and Naoise have written a song called “C.E.A.R.T.A.” He helps them record it in the makeshift studio in his garage.

Their gigs at first are teeny. They play in pubs, where old men drink Guinness at the bar, wondering what the hell is going on. Word spreads. Kids start showing up. JJ joins the trio, adopting the name DJ Próvaí. He wears a balaclava onstage (in the colors of the Irish Republic’s flag, of course) because he’d probably lose his job and his wife. They call themselves Kneecap after the “kneecapping” punishment endured by drug dealers from Irish paramilitary groups. (There’s one such group after Kneecap. They call themselves “Radical Republicans Against Drugs,” and they are scary guys. They burn down JJ’s garage studio.)

Hip hop’s origin story comes out of the ad hoc, the DIY, “outsiders” screaming their voices at a mainstream that ignores them. Hip-hop is inherently political; it is legitimate protest music. The controversies around N.W.A.’s lyrics are a case in point, but we don’t need to go back in time to provide context. (The ongoing persecution of Iranian rapper Toomaj Salehi is the worst example of its kind and probably the most important thing going on in hip-hop right now.) Governments fear freedom of speech. So, too, do advocate groups who want to control the narrative. Kneecap blasts through all of that.

Liam hooks up regularly with a girl (Jessica Reynolds) on the other side of the tracks (not Republican, in other words), and their sex is wild and passionate, filled with balaclava-wearing role-play and political disagreements shouted in the heat of passion. (Is it “North of Ireland” or “Northern Ireland”? Hot!) In one of their arguments, Liam tosses in a furious reference to Ireland’s 1916 Proclamation. This doesn’t feel cheeky or intellectualized. It feels local and authentic. Some viewers might need footnotes. The film barrels on without you.

Having the Kneecap members play themselves was a bold choice, and it pays off. They’re engaging and unself-conscious, and professional actors like Fassbender and Kirby bring out the best in everyone. “Kneecap” is “about” a lot of things, and its pace makes it impossible to resist getting swept up in it. I’ve been following Kneecap for a while but didn’t know much about their backstory. “Kneecap” isn’t an underdog rags-to-riches story. It’s about the right of people to say what they want to say, to criticize the power structures ruling their lives, and to create a community of opposition. And, yes, to put “BRITS OUT” on their butt cheeks. That’s free speech, too.

I didn’t think Doug Liman could deliver a worse film than “Road House,” the plastic, overwrought remake of the 1980s cult classic. With “The Instigators,” his second film of the year, he manages to make Matt Damon, in a re-teaming from their Bourne days, so void of any charm that the director makes this among the actor’s least crowd-pleasing offerings. This Apple TV heist flick is underwritten, dreary, tedious, inert, and without any stakes. I almost hesitate to write too much about it because this soulless dreck feels so unworthy of adding blemishes to the white page. 

From the jump, the unfocused script by Casey Affleck and Chuck MacLean makes “The Instigators” a chore to watch. The retired Marine Rory (Damon) and an alcoholic Cobby (Affleck) are two stiffs thrown together with the hot-headed Scalvo (Jack Harlow) by local Boston crime boss Mr. Besegia (Michael Stuhlbarg) and Richie Dechico (Alfred Molina). The city’s present mayor, the ruthless Mayor Micceli (Ron Perlman), is facing off against the underdog Mark Choi (Ronnie Cho). The two bosses think Micceli is going to win in a landslide like he always does. At his victory party, which requires a bribe for entry, there is bound to be plenty of money. The seemingly easy job, however, goes south when Micceli loses, leaving Rory and Cobby fleeing from the heist with nary any loot to show for their troubles. 

The only worthwhile treasure is a chain belonging to Micceli containing the combination to a safe. The desperate mayor dispatches Frankie (Ving Rhames), a cop, to hunt down Rory and Cobby. The pair leap across the city, taking Rory’s therapist, Dr. Donna Rivera (Hong Chau), hostage in the process. Despite the stacked cast, the premise is thin. 

“The Instigators” commits the unconscionable sin of somehow underusing every one of its actors. Stuhlbarg charges in with a big accent, but, along with Molina, pretty much disappears a third into the film. Paul Walter Hauser appears briefly as a fixer while Toby Jones, playing the mayor’s attorney, barely counts as background. Rhames merely broods. Pearlman sometimes yells. No one is a fully fleshed out character, including the film’s two leads. While we’re given some convoluted reasons why Rory and Cobby, respectively, need the money, those stakes aren’t felt during the film. Instead, the script attempts a half-baked triangle between Rory, Cobby, and Dr. Rivera — Cobby and Dr. Rivera attempt to do some form of flirting, maybe? — that totally fizzles. 

The film isn’t attractive, relying on garish coverage. The needle drops are among the most perplexing I’ve ever heard. The lyrics to “Ball of Confusion,” “People moving out, people moving in/Why, because of the color of their skin” soundtracks Rory and Cobby riding toward a pristine beach house (if this is a joke, Damon and Affleck do not sell it). “Downtown” jumpstarts a high-speed chase. “Jump Around” gives rhythm to a crowd of people chasing after money floating in the air a la Kubrick’s “The Killing.” The song choices lack coherency so much that they feel as though Liman forgot to turn the shuffle off on Spotify. 

None of this is helped by Affleck simply being miscast. While his morose persona should work for the sullen, sarcastic Cobby, he just sucks the energy away from the script’s banter. Neither Cobby nor Rory is particularly likable (or interesting for that matter). Damon tries to wield his usual charm, but it lands with a thud amid poorly conceived scenes and even worse rhythm between him and Affleck. In a better film, maybe, their dynamic would work. But in such a fatally flawed project, you come to wish Ben Affleck were opposite his good friend Damon. At least then we’d get some rhythm or some chemistry. Instead, this is a buddy film, made to mirror the absurdity of a Coen brothers flick, that lacks wit and amusement. 

“The Instigators” takes zero pleasure in entertaining. The heists are not intriguing or attention grabbing, even the planning of them feels like more of an annoyance than an opportunity to enrapture. The spectacle is flattened under tawdry VFX. Car chases are poorly stitched together. Unsurprisingly, the bracelet is a yawn-inducing MacGuffin. The film contradicts itself, takes little interest in its characters, and appears to only desire to provide its audience a stiff nap. “The Instigators” arouses no memorable scenes, feelings, jokes or profundity. At most, it’s a collection of moving images.