“THE SECRET AGENT” My rating: B+ (At the AMC Town Center)
161 minutes | MPAA rating: R
A shroud of dread lies draped over “The Secret Agent,” Kleber Mendonca Filho’s epic yet intimate dive into the reactionary world of Brazil in the 1970s.
We’re put ill at ease in the very first scene. Armando (Wagner Moura) stops his yellow VW Beetle at a rural gas station to fill up. Lying in the drive is a human body. The station operator says the dead guy tried to steal some motor oil and was shot by the night attendant. He’s been waiting for two days for the cops to pick up the body.
Two officers show up, but are indifferent to the festering corpse. Instead they start hassling Armando, demanding identification and going over his car in search of contraband or some violation. When the fuzz find nothing wrong they hit up Armando for a “contribution” to a police charity.
It’s a long scene and an unnerving one. We’re pretty sure that Armando is on the run and avoiding the law, but just what he’s done is a mystery.
The title “The Secret Agent” is meant ironically. For while Armando is a fugitive and an opponent of Brazil’s right-wing government, he’s no spy. He hasn’t been trained to kill. He’s just a guy who has run afoul of the powers that be and is hoping to find refuge in his hometown of Recife.
Tania Maria
He’s taken in by the elderly, chain-smoking Dona Sebastiana (Tania Maria) who manages an apartment complex where other fugitives like Armando hunker down while awaiting a chance to escape the country.
The shadowy organization that had set up this little conclave for political dissidents also has pulled strings to get Marcello a job in the records department at police headquarters where, uncomfortably enough, he finds himself befriended by the utterly corrupt head cop.
He also finds a few moments with his young son, who in Armando’s absence is being raised by Don Alexandre (Carlos Francisco), father of Armando’s late wife. Alexandre is the projectionist at a big movie house that currently is showing “Jaws” (the year is 1977). In fact, sharks keep popping up in “The Secret Agent,” with the cops investigating the discovery of a human leg inside a dead shark that has washed up on shore.
Among the other characters are a pair of hit men (Roney Villa, Gabriel Leone) who have been contracted by an aspiring right-wing plutocrat to track down and kill Armando.
At certain points “The Secret Agent” dips into surrealism. There’s a sequence in which the severed leg comes to life and begins hopping around, kicking lovers trysting in a park. And one of the residents of Dona Sebastiana’s little commune is a cat with two heads.
In the present we meet a college researcher (Laura Lufesi) whose assignment is to sleuth out the fates of various “disappeared” individuals from nearly 50 years ago. One of her main sources is an old audio tape of an interview Armando made with a sympathetic journalist; now she sets off to find Armando’s grown son (also played by Wagner Moura).
There’s enough going on in “The Secret Agent” to warrant multiples viewings, but even a cursory glimpse will cement Moura’s place as one of the great actors of his generation. It’s a terrifically human performance, one of fear, resolution, love and defiance.
Every once in a while you encounter a film so achingly on target that you instinctively realize that it had to be torn from someone’s personal experience.
So it is with “Sorry, Baby,” Eva Victor’s hauntingly beautiful film about the aftermath of a sexual assault.
The words “sexual assault” will be enough to scare off many viewers. But while Victor’s semi-autobiographical film (she wrote, directed and stars in it) addresses trauma, it’s more about the healing aftermath.
It starts unremarkably enough with our protagonist, Agnes (Victor), being visited by her old college roommate, Lydia (Naomi Ackie). They’re several years out of school, but while Lydia has moved to the big city and settled down (she’s gay, not that it’s a big deal) Agnes has hung around their New England college town. In fact, she’s now a bigwig in the English Department.
These opening scenes radiate the easy familiarity of old friends reconnecting. But soon the talk drifts back to their senior year and an unpleasant incident. In a flashback we view Agnes’ interaction with Decker (Louis Cancelmi), one of her professors. He seems like a standup guy…until he isn’t.
Victor wisely refrains from showing the assault. Instead we get a long shot of the teacher’s home, where the two are meeting to discuss her thesis. Agnes goes inside, and the unmoving camera records the home’s facade as the sun dims, night falls, and lights go on inside. Apparently several hours have passed before Agnes stumbles out, walks to her car and drives away in a fog of humiliation and disbelief.
In a balancing act for the ages, Victor seasons this traumatic incident with satiric flashes. When she meets with school officials to discuss the incident, she’s told that it’s not their problem. Decker turned in his resignation just before the assault. This news is delivered by a couple of women administrators whose clumsy efforts at sympathy are undermined by their panicked sense of institutional preservation.
“Sorry, Baby” rises and falls with Victor’s performance. Her Agnes is tall, gawky and unremarkable (though, weirdly enough, by film’s end I saw her as beautiful). She’s intellectually solid but emotionally tentative. She often masks her feelings with oddball comments and an ironic aura.
Not that she doesn’t get some solid help from the other players. Ackie is the best friend everyone wishes they had. Lucas Hedges shines as the vaguely nerdy neighbor with whom the post-assault Agnes has a sweetly goofy love affair. And veteran actor John Carroll Lynch nearly steals the film as a sandwich shop operator who takes a grieving Agnes (whom he has never met before) under his caring wing.
The world can be cruel. But simple decency goes a long way.
Bob Odenkirk
“NOBODY 2” My rating: C+(Peacock)
89 minutes | MPAA rating: R
“Nobody” (2021) was an unexpected sleeper, a hyperviolent, darkly funny yarn about a nondescript family man (Bob Odenkirk) whose secret job is that of assassin.
Now we’ve got a second installment and it’s pretty much the same thing all over again…minus the sense of discovery that made the first film so enjoyable.
Imagine “National Lampoon’s Vacation” mated with “Pulp Fiction.” Odenkirk’s Hutch Mansell takes the family (Connie Nielsen is the Missus) to the cheesy amusement park he enjoyed as a boy.
Except he finds the place now is a front for a drug operation run by a sociopathic grand dame (Sharon Stone) and administered by a corrupt local sheriff (John Ortiz).
Much mayhem ensues.
Except this time the brew of comedy and over-the-top violence falls to the law of diminishing returns. (Although I did enjoy the addition of Christopher Lloyd as Hutch’s father, himself a retired black ops type.)
Colin Farrell
“BALLAD OF A SMALL PLAYER” My rating: B (Netflix)
101 minutes | MPAA rating
“The Banshees of Inisherin.” “Sugar.” “The Penguin.”
Yeah, Colin Farrell has been on a roll. And it continues (sort of) with “Ballad of a Small Player,” which works a bit too hard to breathe new life into the gambler-at-the-end-of-his-luck yarn.
Farrell is Lord Doyle, a polished gent who floats through the casinos of neon-lit Macau as if he owns the joints. He sophisticated, generous, impeccably dressed.
It’s all a sham. In truth he’s a common hustler who’s developed an impressive fictional character. Lord Doyle (he’s not a lord and Doyle is not his actual name) is so good at role playing that he has credit at all the tables.
That is, until his losses get so big that they can no longer be ignored.
Scripted by Rowan Joffe and Lawrence Osborne and directed by Edward Berger (“All Quiet on the Western Front,” “Conclave”), “Ballad…” attempts to make up for a lack of originality (really, it’s just another movie about a desperate gambling addict searching for a big score) with a heightened visual sense and an almost operatic sense of melodrama.
But it’s worth sticking with to watch Farrell navigate Lord Doyle’s existential dilemma. Toss in Tilda Swinton as a comically stuffy investigator hot on his trail and Fala Chen as the casino hostess who provides a love interest, and you’ve got a good-looking if not terribly deep outing.
The latest from the prolific Luca Guadagnino (“Challengers,” “Call Me By Your Name,” “Bones and All,” “Suspiria”) is an academic “Rashomon,” a she said/he said puzzle populated by presumably smart people who do some really dumb things.
“After the Hunt” opens in the off-campus apartment of Yale philosophy professor Alma (Julia Roberts) and her psychiatrist husband Frederik (Michael Stuhlbarg). They’re hosting a soiree for friends, colleagues and students, and just about everybody is conversing in pompous academia speak. They’re really, really irritating.
Among the partiers are Alma’s colleague Hank (Andrew Garfield), the kind of guy who puts his feet up on other folks’ furniture while waxing eloquently on existentialism. And then there’s Maggie (Ayo Edebiri), a grad student in philosophy (and daughter of one of the university’s biggest donors); everyone expects her Ph.D. dissertation to make a big splash.
“After the Hunt” centers on an accusation of sexual assault. The day after the party Maggie confides to Alma that Hank drove her home and, well, you know. (Actually we don’t know, because Nora Garrett’s screenplay is so fiendishly effective at suggesting things without actually getting down to the nitty gritty.)
But here’s the thing. Maggie is gay and may be secretly infatuated with Alma. And she recently uncovered evidence suggesting that Alma and Hank have been having an affair behind Frederik’s back. (Again, it’s suggested.Maybe it was just intense flirting.)
So perhaps the accusation of assault is a way to eliminate a competitor for Alma’s affections.
Hank, it turns out, is his own worst enemy. He’s evasive about just what went on with Maggie. And in his defense he says that he has accused Maggie of plagiarizing material for her dissertation. This may be her way of discrediting him before he can go public with his suspicions.
Alma is caught in the middle…no matter what she does one of these two will see it as a betrayal. In fact, Maggie submits to a newspaper interview in which she scorches Alma for her lack of support. Could racism be a part of it? (Maggie is black, you see.)
Pile on top of that Alma’s disdain for the self-righteous entitlement exuded by many of her students, and you can see a career collapse coming down the road.
And then there’s her health issues…Alma only recently returned to class after a health crisis and she’s coping with pain that has her doubling up in a fetal position. So she does something really dumb…she steals a prescription pad from the desk of her psychiatrist friend Kim (Chloe Sevigny) and fakes a script for opiates.
“After the Hunt” (a cryptic title I’m still trying to figure out) manages to be gripping even while withholding key pieces of information. This has not a little to do with Roberts’ performance, which gos from haughty to wretched wreck. She can look great or ghastly.
But everyone is solid, especially Stuhlbarg’s husband; Guadagnino seems to turn to this actor whenever he needs someone to represent non-flashy decency.
Elizabeth Olsen, Miles Teller, Callum Turner
“ETERNITY” My rating: C(In theaters)
114 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13
I really wanted to like the end-of-life romcom “Eternity,” but in the end it just made me want to rewatch Albert Brooks’ “Defending Your Life.”
In this supernatural love story from David Freyne an old man chokes on a pretzel and awakens on a train pulling into the afterlife. Larry (MilesTeller) finds he’s back in his 30-year-old body. His afterlife counselor (Da’Vine Joy Randolph) informs him that he must pick an eternity to reside in.
Turns out heaven has multiple destinations, from a beach world where it’s always sunny to library world (apparently not a very popular eternity). The trick is that once you’ve chosen, there’s no changing your mind.
Anyway, the newly dead must spend their first week at a sort of gigantic trade fair in which all the various eternities have set up booths to distributed enticing pamphlets and show fun-filled videos.
Some of this is kinda cute.
The film’s main plot, though, concerns the arrival of Larry’s wife Joan (Elizabeth Olsen) and a major complication. Joan’s first husband Luke (Callum Turner) has been hanging around in limbo for 70 years (he died in the Korean War), awaiting Joan’s arrival.
And now Larry and Luke must compete to see which one of them Joan will choose as an enternal partner.
Quite the conundrum…and one that Freyne and co-writer Patrick Cunnane can’t really finesse.
Part of the problem is that “Eternity” is nearly 30 minutes too long; after a while it starts to feel like an eternity watching it.
“IF I HAD LEGS I’D KICK YOU” My rating: B (PPV on various services)
113 minutes | MPAA rating: R
The first thing you see in Mary Bronstein’s “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You” is a looming closeup of Rose Byrne’s face. Her character, Linda, is being mom shamed by an unseen woman — some sort of physician — about her handing of her young daughter’s medical situation.
Just a few seconds of staring into Linda’s eyes betrays an ever-changing wash of emotions. Defiance, aquiescence, guilt, cajoling, panic…Linda’s on a feeling-fueled roller coaster. She’s trying to hold it together, but her desperation is everywhere creeping through.
Things just go downhill from there.
“If I Had Legs…” features a great performance from Byrne. It is also a thoroughly unpleasant experience.
Unpleasant because Linda is circling the drain and hasn’t the strength to pull herself out.
Here’s her situation: Her daughter (voiced by Delaney Quinn, who is never fully seen) has an eating disorder so dangerous that she’s being fed through a tube inserted into her abdomen.
Linda must try to get the kid to eat real food while hooking her up nightly to a feeding machine. She’s got no help in dealing with her whining, manipulative offspring because her husband is away for several weeks on business (Christian Slater provides his voice in mansplaining phone conversations).
Linda and the child move to a transient motel after a leaky pipe causes the ceiling of the family’s apartment to cave in. The crew hired to remediate the black mold and make repairs are doing a lousy job— when they bother to show up at all.
Things are no better on the work front. Linda is a psychoanalyst (talk about a case of “physician, heal thyself”!). Her clients include a postpartum-plagued young mother (Danielle Macdonald) who abandons her baby, expecting Linda to care for it, and a demanding young man (Daniel Zolghadri) who has the hots for his shrink.
Linda is herself undergoing therapy from a colleague (Conan O’Brien, solid) who is clearly bored with sessions that have become a repetitive emotional merry-go-round.
In fact, Linda has taken the plunge from merely miserable to self-destructive. She’s hitting the bottle and often abandons her sleeping child to engage in misadventures with a fellow resident of the motel (A$AP Rocky).
To emphasize Linda’s isolation, writer/director Bronstein rarely lets Byrne share the frame with a fellow actor.
And then there’s the question of how much of what we see is actually happening and how much is the product of Linda’s overworked nervous system. For instance, what’s with the eerie dots of light that swarm like fireflies in the black hole of her ceiling?
Bottom line: I’m in awe of Byrne’s work here. It’s Oscar-level and then some.
But the film itself is tough going.
Zoey Deutch, Guillaume Marbeck “NOUVELLE VAGUE” My rating: B (Netflix)
106 minutes } MPAA rating: R
I thoroughly enjoyed Richard Linklater’s “Nouvelle Vague,” his recreation of the 1959 making of “Breathless,” the French independent film that introduced a whole new cinematic vocabulary and launched the directing career of Jean-Luc Godard.
But I wonder… will anyone who is not already a hard-core film geek, who had not seen “Breathless” repeatedly, who is unaware of Godard’s influence…will anyone else understand or appreciate it?
Well, screw ‘em. “Breathless” is a film fanatic’s wet dream, a story of an outsider who makes an end run around movie conventions and created one of the seminal works of the 20th century.
Linklater’s approach is both reverent and impish…he understands what made “Breathless” work and tries to apply the same ethos to “Nouvelle Vague,” even to the point of using the same film frame ratio and grainy black-and-white palette that Godard emplioyed.
Guillaume Marbeck is absolutely spot on as Godard, the cryptic film critic who wants to make his own movies. Godard is plenty weird (he wears sunglasses 24/7 and appears to live in his own world) but he somehow manages to inspire a company of young moviemakers to break all the rules to create a masterpiece on a starvation budget.
Aubry Dullin plays Jean-Paul Belmondo, the young Gallic boxer/actor who would become an international star as a result of ”Breathless.” He doesn’t look all that much like Belmondo (whose nose was one of a kind) but he nails the body language and languid/sexy humor.
Zoey Deutch, on the other hand, is a dead ringer for American actress Jean Seberg, who was highjacked into doing the film and, despite numerous attempts to bail from the production, gave a career-defining performance.
Of the supporting perfs I was taken with Matthieu Penchant’s Raoul Coutard, the cinematographer who shot scenes on the streets of Paris while hidden in a handcart, and Bruno Dreyfurst as Georges de Beauregard, the exasperated producer who nevertheless stuck with Godard to make history.
“Nouvelle Vague” (the title translates as “New Wave” and refers to the generation of young French filmmakers that included giants like Truffaut, Chabrol, Rivette and Rohmer) oozes youthful exuberance and intellectual precocity. It’s both lighthearted romp and a serious appreciation of an important moment in cinema history.
For a good three quarters of Chloe Zhao’s “Hamnet” I found myself diverted — fine photography, good acting — but nowhere near the emotional catharsis that has many critics calling it a masterpiece.
But just wait.
“Hamnet” only comes fully to life in the last 20 minutes, but it does so with devastating intensity.
Well, better to peak late than early, and in that regard the film will leave viewers well wrung out as they head for the exits.
This is the story of how the death of Shakespeare’s young son, Hamnet, inspired the playwright to create perhaps his most enduring and overwhelming drama, “Hamlet.”
Zhao’s screenplay abandons the jumbled timeline of Maggie’ O’Farrell’s best-selling novel for a straightforward chronological narrative. At the same time it keeps a couple of the book’s twistier aspects by leaving nameless the Shakespeare character (we know he’s the Bard, but none of his contemporaries do) and by identifying his wife as Agnes when history tells us that Shakespeare’s wife actually was named Anne.
The film begins with the courtship of a small-town Latin tutor (Paul Mescal) and an odd young woman (Jessie Buckley) who spends much time in the woods, has a pet hawk and is rumored to be the daughter of a witch.
Their respective families (Emily Watson plays the tutor’s mother) disapprove, but young love (or lust) will have its way. With Agnes pregnant, marriage is the next step.
Paul Mescal
The bulk of “Hamnet” is devoted to domestic life in Stratford. The young husband begins spending time away in London (writing plays, we presume) while Agnes holds down the fort back home. Their reunions are happy ones, and the couple have three children.
The only boy is Hamnet, so charmingly played by young Jacobi Jupe that we nave no trouble imagining the fierce love his parents have for him.
At age 9 Hamnet succumbs to the plague in a horrendous death scene that leaves his mother a screaming wraith of pain. Father arrives too late to see his boy alive.
Tragedy can bring families together or tear them apart. It appears that this family will never recover from Hamnet’s death.
When Agnes learns that her spouse’s latest play references their dead son, she makes the long trip to London to confront her now-estranged husband, arriving just in time to witness one of the first performances of “Hamlet.”
It’s at this point that “Hamnet” becomes something extraordinary. Agnes enters the open-air Globe with dozens of other playgoers, pushes her way to the front of the crowd and leans on the stage, ready to hurl objections and insults at this entertainment that capitalizes on her grief.
Except that during the performance she finds herself engrossed by the extraordinary storytelling and language. Like her fellow playgoers, she is transported to Elsinore Castle and caught up in the tale of loss, revenge and existential paradox. Abandoning her initial objections, Agnes ultimately recognizes that her husband has come to grips with their loss by using the theater to resurrect their dead child.
Art as therapy.
Zhao’s recreation of an Elizabethan production is extraordinarily captivating, not the least because Noah Jupe (older brother of the actor who played Hamnet) is so spectacularly good as the actor portraying Hamlet on stage.
Watching this tragedy unfold is a transforming experience. We recognize the awe and investment of the London audience in this new play; the sheer aesthetic pleasure that transcends the tragedy.
Mescal and Buckley give fine performances, but in the end it is the eternal genius of William Shakespeare that sticks in the memory.
George Clooney
“JAY KELLY” My rating: C(Netflix)
132 minutes | MPAA rating: R
I’m a fan of George Clooney’s work. his persona and his politics. But “Jay Kelly” left me cold.
Noah Baumbach’s latest film is a character study…sort of…of a man who apparently has no character.
Jay Kelly (Clooney) is a famous movie star. Millions know him from his many screen appearances, but apparently nobody knows him, really.
His family, his friends, his co-workers…about all they get from him is suave charm, self-deprecating wit and good looks. If there’s a real human being in the attractive package, it’s yet to assert itself.
The screenplay by Baumbach and actress Emily Mortimer (who takes a small role) finds Jay on a trip to Italy to receive some sort of award. Usually he flies in a private jet, but for this trip he has decided to take the train with all the other tourists and proles. He says he doesn’t like being noticed, but he sure spends a lot of time being noticed.
If anyone is close to knowing Jay it’s his long-suffering manager Ron (Adam Sandler), who likes to think of himself as a friend. Except as Jay points out, friends don’t usually take 15 percent.
“Jay Kelly” has an astoundingly deep cast — Greta Gerwig, Billy Crudup, Laura Dern, Patrick Wilson, Stacy Keach, Isla Fisher, Jim Broadbent, Riley Keough, Josh Hamilton (for starters) — though many have only a few seconds of screen time.
The film is stranded somewhere between satirizing Hollywood and its denizens and empathizing with Jay’s late-in-life realization that as a human he’s pretty much blown it. But it’s neither funny enough or tragic enough to warrant a bloated running time (more than two hours).
Moreover, since Jay is a handsome cipher, our only real human connection is Sandler’s Ron, who must ride herd on a mercurial star while trying to hold together his own private life. It’s the film’s best performance.
“Jay Kelly” ends with Jay and an audience watching a compilation of scenes from his film and television work (actually they’re clips from George Clooney’s career, making for a sort of head-smacking meta moment). To the extent that the segment stirs pleasurable memories it gives Jay’s life an emotional arc missing from the rest of the film.
But it’s a contrived moment in a film that already feels contrived.
“IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT” My rating: B+ (Various PPV services)
103 minutes | MPAA” PG-13
Jafar Pantani’s “It Was Just an Accident” begins with a long (like, 10 minutes) uninterrupted shot of an Iranian family driving down the highway at night. At the wheel is Eghbal (Ibrahim Azizi), at his side his wife, and in the back seat his little daughter.
They hit and kill a dog (again, all in one long shot) and thereafter their vehicle starts acting up. They must pull over and ask for assistance.
So far it looks like the film is going to be about Eghbal and his family. Uh, no. Eghbal will spend most of the film off camera, drugged and locked in a tool chest in the van operated by Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), an almost comic bumbler with drooping mustache and basset hound eyes.
Vahid spent several months being tortured in an Irani prison for his part in an illegal labor strike. He was blindfolded most of the time, but the guard who regularly abused him had an artificial leg that squeaked…and Eghbal has an artificial leg that makes the same sound.
So the revenge-minded Vahid has kidnapped Eghbal and is rounding up some of his fellow former prisoners. If enough of them can identify his captive as their oppressor, Vahid plans on burying him alive.
One of these half-assed outlaws is a wedding photographer Shiva (Mariam Afshari); she’s the voice of reason, working to keep her friends from doing something stupid. Hamid (Mohamed Ali Elyasmehr) and Golrokh (Hades Pakbaten) want revenge right now. (Golrokh was preparing for her marriage when she got sucked up in this misadventure…she goes through the entire film wearing her wedding dress, dragging along her befuddled fiance).
Here’s the problem. All of these folk are good people. They argue about the morality of what they’re doing; they wonder if they’re not embracing the same evil as the government thugs who made their lives miserable. And having spent time behind bars, they are not eager to return should this crazy caper goes south.
Beyond the compelling plotting and characters, “It Was Just an Accident” is a quiet condemnation of the Iraqi regime. I found myself wondering how a film this critical of the government ever got made.
Stellan Skarsgard, Renate Reinsve
“SENTIMENTAL VALUES” My Rating: B (Various PPV services)
133 minutes | MPAA rating: R
Films about fathers and sons are commonplace. Those about fathers and daughters, on the other hand, are few and far between.
Joachim Trier’s followup to his “The Worst Person in the World” is a testimonial to family love that survives all the travails we can throw at it.
It begins with a funny/scary sequence in which actress Nora Borg (“Worst Person’s” Renate Reinsve) undergoes a world class panic attack seconds before the opening night performance of the play in which she stars. She literally has to beg a co-worker to slap her silly to work up the determination to go on stage.
Nora’s carrying plenty of emotional baggage. Her mother has recently died and her father Gustave (Stellan Skarsgard) is a famous movie director who bailed on the family years ago. She has anger issues.
There’s a younger sister, Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas),who as a child starred in one of her dad’s films but now concentrates on marriage, motherhood and her career as an historian. Having rejected show biz, she’s as close to normal as this clan gets.
Gustav (think Ingmar Bergman) wants to come out of retirement to make one last film, a self-referential bio-drama about his family, especially his mother who during the war defied the Nazis and ended up committing suicide. He wants Nora to take the leading role; she wants nothing to do with the old man and rejects this obvious peace offering. So Gustav has cajoled American movie star Rachel Kemp (Elle Fanning) to take on the part.
The performances are strong all around, but especially in the case of Skarsgard and Reinsve, whose scenes together are a form of emotional jousting. It’s like a master class in subtle acting.
“Sentimental Values” is slim on plotting and there are no earthshaking revelations. But over its running time we see the characters incrementally shift their attitudes toward each other. This leaves the film’s title oozing irony…these people are about as far from sentimental as you can get, yet in the end they grudgingly accept each other despite their obvious egos, faults and foibles.
“THE LIFE OF CHUCK” My rating: A-(Various PPV platforms)
111 minutes | MPAA rating: R
Mike Flanagan’s “The Life of Chuck” provides the 10 most joyful minutes of cinema I’ve seen in all of 2025.
Which is not bad for a movie that starts out depicting the end of the world.
“…Chuck” is a departure for writer/director Flanagan, possibly our best dispenser of supernatural horror (“The Haunting of Hill House,” “Midnight Mass,” both Netflix miniseries); but then it is based on what is probably the most atypical story ever penned by Stephen King.
I mean, we’re talking a weirdly-structured but deeply moving meditation on the meaning of life.
You know somebody’s tinkering with the time/space continuum when the opening titles tell us that the yarn begins with Chapter III.
Here we meet Marty Anderson (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a middle school teacher struggling (as is everybody else) with the rapid collapse of civilization. First the Internet went down. Now cell phones aren’t working. TV stations are going off the air one by one, but not before announcing that most of Northern California has fallen into the Pacific.
There’s still electricity, but nobody knows how long the juice will keep flowing.
With classes cancelled, Marty wanders the streets of his town, now cluttered with abandoned cars. He has a conversation with a funeral director (Carl Lumbly) about a blitz of billboards, banners and TV/radio commercials that have appeared overnight. These declare “Charles Krantz. 39 Great Years! Thanks, Chuck!” and feature a photo of Chuck (Tom Hiddleston), a pleasant-looking guy wearing a business suit and spectacles. Maybe Chuck is retiring from his job, though he doesn’t look nearly old enough.
And anyway, the world is ending.
A big chunk of Chapter III centers on Marty’s efforts to reconnect with his ex, Felicia (Karen Gillan), a nurse now jobless since all the high-tech medical machines in her hospital stopped working. Reunited, Marty and Felicia sit in her back yard watching the stars blink out one by one.
Next up is Chapter II. We find Chuck (Hiddleston) attending a conference for accountants. On a stroll through the city center he is confronted by a busking street drummer (Taylor Gordon). Listening to the percussive symphony she generates, the buttoned-down Chuck begins swaying tot he music.
Then he starts doing a few dance steps. Before long he’s grabbed the hand of a passer-by (Annalise Basso) and together they put on an impromptu display of big band terpsichorean razzamatazz that draws a cheering crowd.
It’s a heart-in-your-throat “Singin’ in the Rain” kind of moment. Pure movie magic. (Much love to Mandy Moore’s spectacular choreography).
Mark Hamill, Benjamin Pajak
Then it’s on to Chapter I, which depicts Chuck’s childhood (as you’ve gathered by now, “The Life of Chuck” unfolds in reverse order). Orphaned by a car accident, young Chuck (he’s depicted as a middle schooler by the excellent Benjamin Pajak) is being raised by his grandparents (Mark Hamill and Mia Sara).
(Uh, wait a minute. Mia Sara. Wasn’t she Ferris Bueller’s squeeze only a couple of years back? Surely she can’t be anybody’s grandma.)
Anyway, this segment examines Chuck’s relationship with his loving grandparents, and his discovery of dance in an after-school club. The kid’s a whiz…before long he’s the talk of the prom for cutting a rug with a girl two years his senior.
Once again, the dance sequence is magic. But what kind of career is dance for a red-blooded American boy? No, Chuck will grow up to study something more practical, like accounting. But he’ll never forget the thrill of his body moving effortlessly to the music.
“…Chuck” bites off a big chew by attempting (in reverse) to depict one man’s life. What we come to realize is that Chapter III is actually unfolding in the head of a dying man. Chapters I and II tell us how he got there, while introducing figures (Marty, Felicia, the funeral director) who will appear in his end-of-life reverie.
The film has been so deftly directed and acted (even from the unseen Nick Offerman, whose narration provides just the right taste of detached observation) that more than a few veiwers will find themselves in tears.
If Terrence Malick and Kelly Reichart had a baby it would be “Train Dreams,” a visually ravishing examination of one human life.
This is only the second directing credit from Clint Bentley (he wrote the Oscar-nominated screenplay for “Sing Sing”), but it displays an astounding depth of maturity and sensitivity.
In adapting Denis Johnson’s novella (he co-wrote the piece with Greg Kwedar) Bentley has approached this sprawling tale as a sort of visual folk song. There’s only limited dialogue, but since his leading player is the breathtakingly empathetic Joel Edgerton, little is required.
Will Patton’s voiceover narration (a device I generally despise; here it is delivered like a poetry reading) tells us of the origins of Robert Grainier, a foundling who grows up in a small burg in the Pacific Northwest. He comes to maturity in the early 1900s, when the mechanized modern world has not yet intruded on the wilderness.
Poorly educated, Robert excels at manual labor. He helps build a wooden railroad bridge across a forested gulch, and witnesses the murder of a co-worker, a Chinese man (Alfred Hsing) whose ghostly visage will haunt him throughout his long life.
Mostly Robert works for logging crews; his huge axe is practically an extension of his own arm.
He meets and falls for Gladys (Felicity Jones) and together they build a cabin and have a daughter, though Robert’s work requires him to be away for months at a time.
The loggers are a hard-working bunch, a collection of loners who can go all day without saying a word. There is one exception. William H. Macy is terrific as Arn Peeples, a grizzled old codger whose main job seems to be serenading his fellows with nonstop running commentary on anything that comes into his head.
There are on-the-job accidents, some fatal. Robert soldiers on. His goal is to make money, return to his beloved wife and child, and start the process all over again.
Felicity Jones, Joel Edgerton
The scenes of the Grainier’s domestic life are so achingly beautiful that one is tempted to give up on civilization and take up residence in the woods. Adolpho Veloso’s camera seems to caress its subjects; frequently we’re distracted by the waving tufted tips of wild grass, or the grain of a tree trunk. Man and nature in harmony.
These scenes arebolstered by the presence of the uncredited young child who plays Robert and Gladys’ daughter. The kid steals every scene without even trying. We’re as delighted in her as are her parents.
Then cruel fate intervenes. Robert is away on a job when tragedy strikes back home. His cabin lies in ashes; the fate of his wife and daughter unknown.
Ever faithful, Robert is determined to rebuild on his smoldering acreage so that when his family returns, he’ll be ready.
Edgerton is devastatingly effective as the stoic yet forlorn Robert. The sadness in his eyes, the gentleness in his movements, the way his posture changes over more than 60 years of physical labor…all these add up to an unforgettable portrait of a man who, by most standards, is unremarkable.
But then that’s the whole point. “Train Dreams” finds the unexpected nobility in everyday humanity.
“Eddington” is a mess, but at least it’s an ambitious mess.
For his followup to “Hereditary” and “Midsommar” filmmaker Ari Aster has come up with a different sort of horror film in which the threat comes not from the supernatural but from within ourselves.
Unfolding in the sun-baked burg of Eddington, N.M., this drama attempts nothing less than to summarize all the roiling currents of contemporary America. Which is a nice idea, but it devolves into a credulity-crushing melodrama populated less by characters than by various poltical/social points of view.
The time is the early months of the Covid pandemic, and Sheriff Joe Cross (Joaquin Phoenix) has his hands full on just about every front. At home there’s his childlike and sickly wife Louise (Emma Stone) and her conspiracy-crazed mother Dawn (Deirdre O’Connell).
On his patrols of the town Joe finds himself refereeing standoffs between pandemic-panicked citizens in government-mandated face masks and those individuals who refuse to muffle up, whether because it’s physically uncomfortable or because they smell the nefarious efforts of Big Brother to smother individual identity.
It’s also election season in Eddington, with mayor Ted Garcia (Pedro Pascal) running for another term. Ted’s campaign centers on bringing in a high-tech outfit to erect a data farm, or a bitcoin mine, or some other damn electicity-gobbling enterprise. The whole thing smacks of an insider deal.
There are the kids, the teenagers who aren’t content just to smoke grass behind the grocery store. No, they’ve all climbed on a high horse to protest everything they don’t like — which is just about everything from Native America rights to old folks who can’t be bothered with personal pronouns. They’re putty in the hand of the charismatic Vernon (Austin Butler), a rabble rouser who may be a good guy…or maybe a Charles Manson.
And finally there’s Lodge (Clifton Collins Jr.), a hirsute desert rat who wanders through town babbling angrily at demons real and imagined.
Pushed way past exasperation, Joe decides to take matters into his own hands. He’ll run for mayor, too. Except that the key to his campaign is assassinating the opposition.
Once the crime’s been committed “Eddington” becomes a sort of Jim Thompson thriller with Joe working overtime to cover up his crime and blame it on somebody else. Except that there are a couple of armed vigilantes (identified in the credits as Antifa Terrrorists 1 and 2) who begin stalking him in a beautifully staged nighttime action sequence.
By the time “Eddington” wraps up after nearly 2 1/2 hours the patience of most viewers will be worn thin. As a schematic of our current state of affairs the film offers some good nasty fun, but there’s not a character on screen we can actually like.
Tessa Thompson
“HEDDA” My rating: B-(Prime Video)
107 minutes | MPAA rating: R
Hendrick Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” gets a heavy-duty makeover in “Hedda,” in which writer/director Nia DaCosta makes actress Tessa Thompson the scene-stealing centerpiece.
Ibsen’s original was set in the 1890s Norway; DaCosta moves the action to post-war Britain.
The story is pretty much the same with some radical casting changes…new bride Hedda (Thompson) is miserable with her stuffy academic hubby George (Tom Bateman) and uses a big cocktail party attended by his colleagues to do mischief. She’s supposed to be boosting George’s profile for a much sought-after collegiate gig, but Hedda’s personal demons are going strong.
George’s main competition is Eileen Lovborg (Nina Hoss), an openly gay female academic working on what will surely be a best-selling book. Eileen is a recovering alcoholic; she’s also a former lover of Hedda, though she now cohabits with the mousy Thea (Imogen Poots).
In the course of the evening Hedda will sabotage Eileen’s relationship, her husband’s career, and her own life.
“Hedda” has been very well acted, and the updatings made to the original text are intriguing and evocative.
But here’s the thing…when I think of Britain in the 1950s I’m thinking of the rather stiff world of PBS’s “Granchester,” a time when the old social mores were only slowly changing and gasoline was still being rationed.
What we get here, though, is a Bacchanal right out of the 1920s, with stuffy college professors getting blotto and dancing the boogie woogie. The film’s frantic ambience felt forced and overstated.
If you can get past the anachronistic elements, “Hedda” offers some terrific acting. If.
Historical drama gets no better than “Death by Lightning,” a recreation of one of the more obscure but weirdly resonant moments in our national history.
Based on Candice Millard’s superb history Destiny of the Republic, this retelling of the assassination of President James A. Garfield in 1881 has been spectacularly well acted and produced. It almost perfectly captures the same emotional and intellectual notes that made the book so memorable.
And it does it all in just four one-hour episodes.
It begins with Senator Garfield (Michael Shannon) leaving his Ohio farm for the 1880 Republican National Convention in Chicago . His hope is to prevent the renomination of incumbent president Ulysses S. Grant, the figurehead of a spectacularly corrupt administration.
In a twist of fate that seems more fairy tale than fact, it is Garfield himself who ends up the party’s nominee. It’s not that he seeks the presidency…but he’s the only candidate the warring anti-Grant delegates all can get behind.
In the process he makes an enemy of Grant supporter Roscoe Conkling (Shea Whigham), the U.S. senator from New York whose control of that state’s ports holds the American economy in a stranglehold. Conkling is a savvy pol…he’s also willing to employ pure thuggery to get his way. The comically boozy Chester Arthur (Nick Offerman) provides the muscle behind Conkling’s manipulations.
Garfield knows he cannot win without New York. So he does the unthinkable…he chooses as his running mate the hapless Arthur; basically it’s an end run around Conkling’s plan to sit out the election and pick up the pieces later.
The rise of Garfield runs parallel to the story of Charles Guiteau (Matthew Macfadyen), a failed lawyer and hustler with serious mental issues. Guiteau fantasizes that his support was vital in getting Garfield elected, and now he wants a reward. And when his pathetic entreaties are rejected, he plots to kill the President.
Matthew Macfadyen
As was the case with Millard’s book, this series leaves viewers ruminating over what might have been. In his three months as President, Garfield embraced a progressive agenda. A Civil War veteran, he reached out to African American leaders, especially black soldiers whose sacrifices were overlooked. He laid plans to replace the spoils system with a non-partisan Civil Service.
I doubt we’ll see better acting this year than what’s delivered here by Shannon and Macfadyen.
Shannon probably has the tougher job, given that Garfield was low-keyed, modest and generous. Not exactly a personality to set off dramatic fireworks. Yet the actor finds the heroic in Garfield’s calm reasonableness. Especially telling are the scenes with the Garfield family (Betty Gilpin is terrific as Mrs. Garfield), which bring to mind the domestic image of Abraham Lincoln and his brood.
The upshot is a genuine sense of loss.
Macfadyen, on the other hand, gets to play a crazy man…but with restraint. The key to his Guiteau is the disarming “normalcy” of his presentation. The guys often sounds reasonable but behind the fancy words there’s a crippling desperation at war with rampant narcissism. In any conversation there comes a moment, a tell if you will, that suggests something is seriously wrong with this guy. Maybe you can’t quite put a finger on it, but that creepy feeling on the back of your neck is inescapable.
The fourth and final episode unfolds in the aftermath of the assassination attempt. Garfield lingered in agony for a month while inept physicians tried to locate the bullet for extraction…even calling upon inventor Alexander Graham Bell to employ a primitive metal detector.
Weirdly enough, the reform movement Garfield put into motion survived him, thanks to an unlikely proponent we won’t name here.
Now this is all pretty heavy stuff, but director Matt Ross and writer/creator Mike Makowsky often put a bleakly funny spin on the material. The brutal cronyism of Conkling and Arthur gets the full satiric treatment (the parallels between their machinations and those of our current President are inescapable) and the characters often employ ear-burning language. I doubt that statesmen of the 19th century were that open with their profanity, but in dramatic terms it works…most of the really vile pronouncements come from the show’s heavies.
Even the smallest roles are deftly handled. Among the supporting players are Bradley Whitford, Vonnie Curtis-Hall, Paula Malcomson and Zeljko Ivanek.
When it’s all over, “Death by Lightning” leaves us marveling at the decency of good men and the unpredictability of fate.
Ethan Hawke
“THE LOWDOWN” (Hulu)
I love, love LOVE this show.
Lee Raybon (Ethan Hawke) is a shabbily-clothed freelance journalist whose search for truth always has him in hot water with Tulsa’s movers and shakers.
In this funny and weirdly moving series from Sterlin Harjo (the man who gave us “Reservation Dogs”) Lee sets out to prove that the suicide of one of the local gentry is actually murder.
He runs up against the dead man’s brother (Kyle Maclachlan), who’s running for governor; the scheming widow (Jeanne Trijpplehorn), a neo-Nazi cult and a whole bunch of corrupt power brokers.
All while trying to keep his struggling used book store afloat and delivering questionable parenting to his teenage daughter (Ryan Kiera Armstrong).
Plus Lee gets beat up. A lot.
This sprawling noir comedy (think Jim Thompson on laughing gas) is crammed with eccentric and memorable characters, and the players (among them Keith David, Tracy Letts, Tim Blake Nelson, Killer Mike, Tom McCarthy, Peter Dinklage, John Doe and the late Graham Greene) take full advantage of the possibilities. Rarely have so many scene stealers been assembled in one place.
I was borderline bereft when “The Lowdown” reached its eighth and final episode. But I’ll tell you what…I’m gonna plop down and watch it all over again.
For the first hour or so Guillermo del Toro’s new (and let’s face it, ultimate) version of “Frankenstein” left me a bit cold.
It’s been brilliantly designed and photographed but emotionally…kinda meh.
Turns out I just had to show a little patience. For once the Creature comes to life, so does the movie.
Indeed, our sympathies lie with none of the human characters…least of all Oscar Isaac’s Victor Frankenstein, the ruthless and ego-driven medical genius bent on reanimating dead corpses.
No, this “Frankenstein” belongs to Jacob Elordi’s Creature…and please note that he will not be described here as “the Monster.” For this stitched-together superman exhibits more pure humanity than any of the “normal” folk around him. It’s a performance that transcends the scars and death-blue pallor of the Creature’s skin to reveal, well, a beautiful soul.
Expect an Oscar nomination for Elordi, a screen heartthrob and sexual icon (“Saltburn,” the Max series “Euphoria”) who here shows unpredictable depths of loneliness, love, rage and compassion.
Del Toro’s adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel begins at the end. The crew of a sailing ship trapped in the Arctic ice take aboard a frostbitten man being pursued by a terrifying giant. This is Victor Frankenstein, and to the Captain (Lars Mikkelsen) he relates his tale.
We see the boy Victor dealing with his icily controlling and intellectually cruel father (Charles Dance); this helps explain why as an adult Victor is a bit of a medical oddball, convinced of his own brilliance and openly contemptuous of his colleagues.
Victor’s ambitions know no bounds, and with the help of a rich benefactor (Christoph Waltz) — who it turns out has his own twisted motives — our man gets to work sorting through the bodies left on a recent battlefield (the setting is 1850s Europe), looking for pieces that can be sewn together and animated with a jolt of lightening.
When not impersonating God, Victor expresses a bad case of the hots for Elizabeth (Mia Goth), the fiancé of his brother (Felix Kammerer). Clearly he observes few moral boundaries.
Oscar Isaac
That becomes even more clear in his relationship with the Creature. He keeps his nearly naked (and weirdly erotic) creation chained in the castle basement, where he berates the poor unfortunate for lacking the mental acuity to match his physical power.
It is Elizabeth who breaks through, treating the Creature with kindness and unlocking his emotions and intellect. But exasperated by what he views as a failed experiment, Victor attempts to destroy his creation in a massive conflagration.
Turns out the Creature cannot die, as much as he might wish for it. The second half of the film finds the Creature joining Victor and the captain aboard the ship to explain why he’s been pursuing the semi-mad doctor over land, sea and ice.
It is in the Creature’s backstory that we find grace notes of beauty and longing. The highlight is his “adoption” of a farm family. Hiding in their idle gristmill he emerges at night to leave presents of dead game and firewood at their door. They call their mysterious and unseen benefactor “the spirit of the woods.”
The Creature’s real education begins when the blind grandfather is left alone and befriends this stranger, teaching him to read (how a blind man teaches someone to read is a poser, but I’m not complaining) and opening up his intellect to literature, history and philosophy.
Maddened by the knowledge of both his “otherness” and his inability to end his miserable existence, the Creature decides on revenge. He’ll pursue Victor halfway around the world for a final confrontation between father and son.
The old “Bride of Frankenstein” attempted to humanize the Monster (the blind hermit had a brief but telling scene), but the dominant themes of that classic were horror and camp. Here del Toro goes for an emotional and spiritual catharsis. That might seem a stretch for what is essentially a horror movie, but damned if he doesn’t pull it off.
In the end we’re left not so much with lingering terror as a disquieting sadness.
Well done.
Julia Garner
“WEAPONS My rating: B (HBO Max)
128 minutes | MPAA rating: R
A long tantalizing tease capped by a what-the-hell ending pretty much describes every horror movie I’ve seen in recent years.
It’s no different with “Weapons,” writer/director Zach Cregger’s followup to his brutally effective creepfest “Barbarian.”
The film opens with spectacular imagery…at exactly the same moment one fall night, nearly two dozen elementary school students rise from their beds and in their pajamas race away from their homes with arms stretched at a weird angle…it’s simultaneously scary and beautiful.
Turns out all the missing children were from the class taught by Justine (Julia Garner). Only one little boy, Alex (Cary Christopher), shows up at school the next day.
The others seem to have vanished without a trace.
The authorities are baffled. The parents frantic…and then vengeful. They turn on Justine, accusing her of being behind the disappearances/abductions. She’s told to go on hiatus until things settle down.
Cregger’s screenplay tells the story from several different perspectives. First there’s Justine, whose long-dormant drinking problem gets kicked back into high gear. There ‘sthe local cop (Alden Ehrenreich) who is part of the search and has a sexual relationship with Justine.
Archer (Josh Brolin) is one of the parents, driven to acts of desperation by the loss of his son.
Marcus (Benedict Wong) is the principal, trying to keep a lid on the town’s boiling emotions.
Austin Abrams is a young drug addict pulled into the mystery.
And finally there’s little Alex, whose home life harbors a dark secret.
Amy Madigan
About two-thirds of the way through the film we meet Alex’s Aunt Gladys (a nearly unrecognizable Amy Madigan), who’s just come to town and wears a gosh-awful orange wig that makes her look like a septagenarian Bette Davis after an all-night rave. Gladys is bleakly funny and not a little creepy — you just know she’s got something to do with the mass vanishing.
With its elements of the Pied Piper legend plopped down in contemporary suburbia, “Weapons” certainly grabs our interest and keeps us guessing as to what’s going on. If the final reveal is a bit underwhelming, Cregger seems to think so, too, because at the last moment “Weapons” shifts from slow-creep dread to over-the-top physical comedy.
Even if the big explanation is a fairy-tale head-slapper, most of “Weapons” is extremely watchable and quite involving.
“SPRINGSTEEN: DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE” My rating: B+ (In theaters)
120 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13
Less rock concert than chamber piece, “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” is an intimate drama about a guy losing his mind at the same time he’s becoming one of the most famous entertainers on the planet.
As a longtime fan of the Boss, I found Scott Cooper’s film unexpectedly moving, and not just because of the brilliance of Bruce Springsteen’s songwriting.
The film is about the creative process, sure, but it’s also about family dysfunction, personal demons, and the lifelong struggle to discover one’s true essence even when the rest of the world is all too eager to dictate what it expects you to be.
Unfolding over a year in the early 1980s, “Deliver Me…” finds Springsteen (Jeremy Allen White, stupendous) riding high from his just-completed “River” tour…or is he? Bruce finds little satisfaction with his new star status (first new car, lakeside rental in rural Jersey, guest gigs at the Stony Pony in Asbury Park). Something’s missing.
The screenplay by Cooper (adapting Warren Zanes’ book) follows Bruce’s retreat to his hideaway in the country where he lays low and begins writing the material that will become his album “Nebraska.” It’s less a pleasurable vacation than a furious quest. The man has ideas — dark ones at that — circling around in his head that demand expression in song.
Periodically the film delivers black-and-white flashbacks to Bruce’s childhood with a protective mother (Gaby Hoffmann) and a struggling working class father (Steven Graham) who all too often takes out his frustrations on his loved ones.
These digressions are integral to understanding the singer and his songs. Childhood trauma finds its way into the music…but, then, so do little moments of grace (dancing with Mom, being driven into the country by Dad for a romp in the cornfields). In some cases you can draw a direct line from Bruce’s boyhood to individual songs (“My Father’s House,” “Used Cars”).
Perhaps the most problematical element of “Deliver Me…” is the brief romance between Bruce and a young waitress/mother named Faye (Odessa Young). Faye is a composite character, an amalgam of women Springsteen dated during this period. Young is solid in the role but it’s something of a thankless task…Bruce is simply so at sea with his own mental and emotional health that romantic commitment to another human being is out of the question.
Professional relationships are a bit easier to navigate. Jeremy Strong is hugely effective as manager Jon Landau, who runs interference for his famous client and appears to care more for Bruce’s well-being than for the moneymaking machine he could soon become. When Bruce decides to release the rough demos of his “Nebraska” songs — acoustic mono, no backup musicians, no fancy mastering, no portrait on the album cover, no tour, no press — it is Landau who stands up to record company bigwigs who dismiss Springsteen’s “folk record” as a disaster in the making.
Jeremy Strong
Late in the film we see Bruce in his first session with a psychiatrist, but throughout “Deliver Me From Nowhere” we see our man making small incremental steps toward healing. The first of these is recognizing that something’s wrong.
The performances are terrific throughout, but White’s Bruce is so good that he becomes his own person. It’s not an imitation — although White’s vocals and stage movements are uncannily accurate — but rather a reinterpretation. There were moments when I forgot this was a film specifically about Springsteen and regarded it as a much bigger examination of the artistic imperative. Which is saying something.
I fully expect an Oscar nomination for White…and another for Graham, whose Springsteen pere is a sad nightmare of blue-collar disappointment and emotional turmoil. This British actor has only a few moments of screen time, but the impression he makes on the viewer gives the film a thematic backbone that keeps everything moving.
Will “Deliver Me From Nowhere” appeal to those merely on the fringes of Springsteeniana? It’s a tough call. I found the process of creating “Nebraska” and tracing the LP’s roots back to boyhood incredibly involving…but then I know these songs by heart.
But even a viewer who has never heard of Bruce Springsteen should respond to the very human conflicts depicted here.
Fathers and sons. Failed love. Lifelong friendship. These are universal stepping stones in human life, and “Deliver Me From Nowhere” finds both the beauty and the dread.
This Halloween season’s scariest movie has nothing to do with ghosts and ghoulies. It will nonetheless induce nighmares.
Kathryn Bigelow’s latest directorial effort takes the same 20-minute time frame and retells it repeatedly from different perspectives.
It begins with American military personnel in Alaska detecting an incoming ICBM and ends with the President faced with an impossible decision that could determine the fate of mankind.
Noah Oppenheimer’s screenplay — created with the assistance of former military types who know their stuff — exudes an aura of helplessness that not all our high-tech weaponry can dispel.
The incoming missile was launched from the Pacific, but we don’t know from where, exactly. Without knowing who fired it, our military cannot know against whom to retaliate. The Russians? The North Koreans?
Also. how could it be launched undetected by our surveillance capabilities? Maybe someone inside our defense system is a saboteur?
Two of our missiles are sent to stop the intruder. One breaks down in flight. The other hits its target, but without effect. The missile just keeps coming. The most likely target is Chicago.
With each iteration of the story things get more dire, more tense. How will it end?
“A House or Dynamite” has been crammed with familiar faces (Idris Elba. Rebecca Ferguson, Jared Harris, Tracy Letts, Anthony Ramos, Jason Clarke, Greta Lee, Renee Elise Goldsberry, Kaitlyn Dever), many of whom are on screen for only a minute or two.
They’re all solid, but I found myself being drawn to many of the background characters, soldiers and White House staffers caught in the awful realization that the horrors they trained for have now come to pass. Some maintain their by-the-book demeanor. Others come close to panicking. Many call their families and friends with dire warnings to evacuate or simply to say “I love you.”
Bigelow cannily employs handheld cameras to capture a documentary feel; as the film progresses the tension reaches near unbearable levels.
Maybe don’t watch this one before going to bed.
“JOHN CANDY: I LIKE ME” My rating: B(Prime)
113 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13
The late John Candy was a very funny man, but the overwhelming feeling percolating through this documentary is one of profound loss.
Director Colin Hanks (yes, Tom’s son) seems to have interviewed virtually everyone who moved in Candy’s orbit. Among the famous talking heads represented here are Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Dave Thomas, Martin Short, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Catherine O’Hara, Steve Martin, Conan O’Brien, Mel Brooks and Macaulay Culkin.
Not to mention Candy’s widow, children and siblings.
To an individual they describe a prince of a guy — warm, empathic, considerate. Bill Murray struggles mightily to find something negative to say (conflict is vital to drama, right?) but in the end can’t deliver.
But we learn a lot about Candy here. His father died of a heart attack when he was just a boy…ironically Candy would die of a heart attack at age 43.
He wasn’t comfortable with his image as a jolly fat man; interviewers back in the day subjected Candy to a not-terribly-subtle form of fat shaming that would get them fired today. He never struck out at them…just smiled thinly and carried on.
There are, of course, a ton of clips from his stint with “SCTV” and from his many feature films, including “Planes, Trains & Automobiles,” in which Candy delivered a performance of such humor and humanity that in retrospect you’ve got to wonder what the Academy folk were thinking in not giving him a nomination.
All in all this is a warm tribute to a very good man.
Keira Knightley, Guy Pearce
“THE WOMAN IN CABIN 10” My rating: C (Netflix)
93 minutes | MPAA rating: R
Reporter Laura Blacklock (Keira Knightley) is invited to cover the maiden voyage of a super yacht whose owners — a dying billionairess and her husband (Guy Pearce) — want to draw attention to their new charity.
The proletarian Laura feels painfully out of place among these rich creeps (Hannah Waddingham, David Morrissey, etc.), and when she reports that the woman in the cabin next to hers has fallen (or was thrown) overboard, she becomes the object of suspicion and ridicule.
Apparently Cabin 10 was never occupied.
I was kinda bored by the first third of Simon Stone’s thriller (the screenplay is by Stone, Joe Shrapnel and Anna Waterhouse). The middle section, in which Laura hides on the boat from unseen killers, has a sort of “Die Hard” tension going on.
It’s all wrapped up with a posh gala on a Norwegian fiord that deteriorates into a sort of soggy Velveeta pizza. Didn’t believe a word of it.
“ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER” My rating: B+ (In theaters)
161 minutes | MPAA rating: R
Rarely has a journey from cautious cringing to outright admiration been as marked as in the case of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another.”
For the first 20 or so minutes of this epic satiric actioner I feared that the movie was going over a cliff. Anderson is here practicing a form of exaggerated realism that, until you lock into his ethos, feels like slapstick caricature. And not very clever slapstick at that.
The dialogue in the opening minutes — most of it spoken by a sexuality-fueled young black woman with the unlikely name of Perfidia Beverly Hills (she’s played with feral ferocity by Teyana Taylor) — seems almost a parody of blaxploitation/hippie era speechifying.
The target of her taunting is one Col. Steven J. Lockjaw (Sean Penn, looking as if he grooms with a dull-bladed Lawn Boy), the turkey-necked commander of an immigrant detention camp being raided by the French 75, the underground army of which Perfidia is one of the most outspoken and violence-prone members.
Sean Penn
Clearly Colonel Lockjaw (the names alone should have provided me with a clue as to how to navigate this material) is torn: He’s a racist being held at gunpoint by a young black woman, which is humiliating. At the same time, this situation fulfills his most twisted fantasies; Perfidia sneeringly comments on the involuntary bulge in his camouflage pants.
If all this sounds pretty over the top…well, I thought so, too. But a funny thing happened…as the film progressed I found myself warming up to its unique blend of violence, “Dr. Strangelove”-level social/political black comedy and goofball characters. Weirdest of all, perhaps, is “Battle’s” genuinely moving depiction of father/daughter bonding.
The film’s prologue depicts Perfidia’s life with her lover and fellow terrorist, a bomb-maker played by Leonardo DiCaprio. When the two find themselves facing the prospect of parenthood, he’s all for dialing back on the radical behavior. But not Perfidia…she keeps pushing for more and bigger actions against the Establishment.
The segment ends with Perfidia’s arrest. Her lover and their baby girl are relocated by the underground army to a small city in what appears to be the Pacific Northwest. He changes his name to Bob and devotes his spare time to weed. His daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) grows up hearing stories of her legendary mother; she’s an overachiever who seems determined to make up for her doofus dad’s dropout lifestyle.
The bulk of the film (it’s 2 1/2 hours long but feels much shorter) centers on Colonel Lockjaw’s obsessive hunt for Perfidia’s lover and child. To that end he orders the military invasion of the sanctuary city where the pair reside. In the chaos father and daughter are separated; the heart of the film centers on Bob’s quest to get Willa back.
Chase Infiniti
Willa is abetted in her escape by one of her parents’ old French 75 comrades (Regina Hall), while Bob (clad in plaid bathrobe) relies on the vast underground network run by Willa’s karate instructor (a scene-stealing Benecio Del Toro), who blends zen calm with barrio bravado.
Along the way Anderson dishes some genuinely biting satire. Willa finds herself sheltered in a leftist convent where the nuns have daily machine gun practice. And there’s an entire subplot involving the billionaire members of the Christmas Adventurers, a clandestine ultra-right cabal dedicated to racial purity (Tony Goldwyn and Kevin Tighe are among the fat-cat members).
DiCaprio has a truly hilarious segment in which he phones the underground army’s call center (the music you hear while on hold is Gil Scott Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”) and totally freaks out because after years of drugs he can no longer remember the password that will allow him to talk to his old French 75 buddies.
Now it’s pretty clear that a movie like this takes several years to get off the ground, yet “One Battle…” feels as if it was torn from today’s headlines. Its depiction of alien roundups, concentration camps and ICE-type military actions smack of our evening news.
And the Christmas Adventurers are a savage sendup of American oligarchy that in the long run feels less satirical than prescient.
I mentioned earlier that “Battle…” features “Strangelove-ean” humor. There are moments, in fact, when the film feels like a homage to Kubrick. A meeting of the Adventurers unfolds with the same stiff-necked formality we saw in “2001” in the office gathering on the moon. And who is Lockjaw if not a descendant of Gen. Jack D. Ripper?
Given the outrageousness of it all, it’s a miracle that the players achieve a surprising level of depth and believability. Exhibit No. 1 is Penn’s Lockjaw, a cartoon of military macho (the guy literally walks as if there’s a ramrod up his butt) who somehow segues from silly to weirdly chilling and maybe even a little compelling.
“One Battle After Another” is so diverting that it’s easy to overlook Anderson’s dead-serious ideas about radicalism and the difficulty of keeping one’s idealistic edge in this America of consumer excess and moral erosion. Laugh until you cry.
It’s not exactly a groundbreaking notion in the world of television (“Dynasty,” “Dallas,” “Succession”), but “House of Guinness” tosses in a few nifty variations on a familiar theme.
Plus it may be the most perfectly produced/photographed/edited miniseries I’ve ever seen.
Set in the 1860s, this series from Steven Knight (“Peaky Blinders”) zeroes in on the Guinness family of Dublin, brewers of a stout that remains a favorite of barflies the world over.
It begins with the death of the brewer’s founder and the power struggle that ensues.
As the oldest son, Arthur (Anthony Boyle) inherits the factory and the family fortune. But he’s spent the last decade in London engaging in a decadent gay lifestyle and knows almost nothing of the business.
Second son Edward (Louis Partridge) has lived at his father’s elbow and knows brewing inside out. He’ll continue running the biz while Arthur reluctantly campaigns for Parliament and searches for a wife who can provide cover for his true proclivities.
The third son, Benjamin (Fionn O’Shea) is a hopeless dipsomaniac barely sober enough to remain upright at the funeral.
The one daughter, Anne (Emily Fairs), is stuck in a joyless marriage but is determined to use some of the family fortune on social projects.
These familial struggles unfold against a background of political upheaval. The Guinnesses represent the Protestant, Brit-leaning rich who control Ireland; they are opposed by a growing army of Irish rebels, among them the charismatic fire-breather Ellen Cochrane (Niamh McCormack) who, improbably enough, will find romance with a member of the Guinness clan.
There are several breakout performances here. Boyle (“Masters of the Air”) is fascinating, infuriating and a bit heartbreaking as Arthur, whose true nature is constantly at war with the facade he’s expected to maintain.
James Norton
James Norton steals virtually every scene as Rafferty, the brewery foreman and fixer who’s not above brutality in protecting the family name and fortune.
And I find my thoughts returning often to Danielle Gilligan’s Lady Olivia, who marries Arthur knowing they’ll never share a bed.
A real left-field surprise is Jack Gleeson. This young actor was hated the world around for his portrayal of the spoiled, vindictive King Joffrey Baratheon in “Game of Thrones.” Here he’s almost unrecognizable as Hedges, a sort of leering human leprechaun who talks his way into becoming the Guinness brand’s agent in America and gradually takes over the clan’s political fortunes.
So, yeah, it’s a bit of a soap opera. But an imminently watchable one.
John Cena
“PEACEMAKER”(HBO Max):
We’ve already got one ultra-violent, gleefully profane genre-busting superhero series in Prime’s “The Boys.” HBO Max’s “Peacemaker” is in the same ballpark, but more overtly comic.
Now in its second season, this James Gunn-created series centers on one of the peripheral characters in the DC Universe. Christopher Smith — aka Peacemaker — is a brawny, not-too-bright vigilante with a collection of masked headgear that impart to him special properties.
The joke here is that Peacemaker (John Cena) is so thick that he’s ready to kill as many people as possible in the name of peace (nothing more peaceful than a corpse, right?).
He’s abetted in his often misguided efforts by a gang of fellow misfits (Danielle Brooks, Freddie Stroma, Steve Agee) and a foul-tempered pet eagle (brilliantly animated). He’s also got a slow burn crush on a government spy/assassin (Jennifer Holland) who can’t decide if she likes or hates the big hunk.
The show’s comic tone is set with the opening credits, a huge dance number featuring most of the cast members in costume. That about half of them cannot dance to save their lives only makes the experience more pleasurable.
Season One found Peacemaker and crew battling an alien invasion. Season Two centers on an alternate universe which appears far more copacetic than ours. In this parallel world Peacekeeper never killed his brother and their father is a hero rather than a thuggish peckerwood.
Much of the fun comes in watching the characters interacting with their parallel universe doppelgängers. Not to mention an absolutely wonderful late-in-the-season reveal — turns out this isn’t the utopia Peacemaker hoped for.
Actually, our hero seems to be getting smarter and more empathetic. Nice to know he’s capable of change.
Not for the kiddies, put perfect for guys still working their way out of adolescence.
“ALIEN: EARTH”(Hulu):
So much has already been written about this series that there’s not much I can add.
I will say that the first couple of episodes left me cold…I was tempted not to keep watching.
Glad I did. The series finds its voice by episode four and the final four installments offer an ever-tightening narrative noose.
Plus I’d watch Timothy Olyphant in anything…even as an emotionless cyborg.
Forget your chest-busting aliens and serial killers. The scariest monster I’ve ever seen on film is the fiery holocaust depicted in Paul Greenglass’ “The Lost Bus.”
Long a master of the historical recreation (“Sunday Bloody Sunday,” “United 93,” “Captain Phillips”), Greenglass here turns his attention to the 2018 Paradise fire, the devastating inferno that ripped through a wooded California town, killing more than 80 people and leaving thousands homeless.
The sneakily benign title refers to the real-life experiences of school bus driver Kevin McCay and elementary school teacher Mary Ludwig, who with a busload of 22 youngsters spent a hellish day surrounded by ever-mounting flames in a desperate search for a safe route out of the burning town.
The screenplay (by Greenglass and Brad Ingelsby) finds a few minutes in which to explore the backgrounds of these two heroes. Kevin (Matthew McConaughey) is a life-long screwup with an angry ex-wife and a teenage son who hates him. Mary (America Ferrera) is a wife and mother who has always regarded her backwoods California community as a refuge from a larger and more inhospitable world.
But the bulk of the film is an almost documentary look at what happened that day, cutting between the frantic efforts of firefighters to contain the blaze (Yul Vazquez portrays the overwhelmed local fire chief) and the efforts of Kevin and Mary to get the children to safety.
America Ferrara, Matthew McConaughey
Initially they’re far from a perfect partnership. Kevin is dismayed/angered by Mary’s calm, slow, don’t-alarm-the-kids approach to the situation; all he can think about is the red glow getting bigger in his rear-view mirror. But surrounded by flames and facing the likelihood that they’re going to die in this big yellow oven, the two find a common bond in the need to be strong for the children.
The acting is terrific without ever looking like acting.
But the real star of “The Lost Bus” is the production itself. It’s impossible here to differentiate between practical real-world effects and computer-generated imagery; they combine effortlessly to depict the horrors of that day.
“Awesome” doesn’t seem too hyperbolic a word to describe the accomplishment of cinematographer Pal Ulvik Rokseth and his editors (Peter Dudgeon, William Goldenberg and Paul Rubell). They have created a vision of flame and chaos so convincing that you almost imagine heat radiating from your TV screen.
And talk about tension! No Hitchcock movie ever had me perched so dangerously on the edge of my seat.
Seriously, folks. There were moments here so intense that even after a lifetime of moviegoing I found myself fighting the urge to freeze the action and take a break. It’s that effective.
Well, it’s an improvement over the dour Zack Snyder’Henry Cavill adaptations, but James Gunn’s “Superman” mostly made me appreciate the insanely clever balancing act of the first Christopher Reeve “Superman” (1978).
No origin story here. It begins with Clark Kent (David Corenswet) already co-habiting with fellow reporter Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan), who is well aware of his powers. Evil mastermind Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult, strangely uncompelling) wants to bring down our hero.
Superman’s alien origins are at the heart of the yarn. Our man comes to believe (mistakenly, it turns out), that he was sent to Earth not to serve its people but to rule them. This leads to a crisis of conscience. Meanwhile Luthor picks up that idea and runs with it to justify his persecution of the Man of Steel.
Corenswet makes for a likable if not particularly dynamic Superman. But he’s got no chemistry with Brosnahan. Far more engaging is Superman’s apparently untrainable dog Krypto, a computer-animated mutt who combines puppy-like misbehavior with insane strength and speed.
Gunn’s “Superman” has been accused of woke-ness, apparently because it presents its hero as an illegal immigrant and because a subplot — about one country’s invasion of its impoverished neighbor — strikes some viewers as a commentary on the war in Gaza. Maybe. Maybe not.
“Superman” isn’t bad. Nor is it particularly good.
Lily James
“SWIPED” My rating: B (Hu;u)
110 minutes | No MPAA rating
Save your Coke bottles, ladies. Men are shit.
That’s the unstated but inescapable message percolating through “Swiped,” a tale of female empowerment (and frustration) based on the career of Whitney Wolfe Herd, who was instrumental in creating the dating app Tinder.
Rachel Lee Goldenberg’s film (she co-wrote with Bill Parker and Kim Caramele) follows Herd (Lily James) as she navigates the treacherous waters of the social media industry in the 2000 teens.
Geeks will appreciate the tech history laid out here, but the film’s real concern is the hellish mistreatment Herd was subjected to. If you thought the computer world was enlightened and egalitarian compared to old school business…well, no. Her male co-workers take credit for her innovative ideas. And when she dares complain, she finds herself the object of corporate slut shaming.
On the personal side, the co-worker she falls in love with turns out, after a period of charming behavior, to be a sexist sleaze ball. Herd goes solo to develop her own app, using funds provided by a Russian tech magnate (Dan Stevens) who seems too good to be true. He is; the dude’s got Epstein-level baggage.
Ultimately Herd found true love (with someone well outside her business circles) and founded the wildly successful female-oriented dating app Bumble. She is now rich and powerful.
“Swiped” is inspirational, sure. It’s also unsettlingly cautionary.
“28 Years Later” has plenty of gruesome action, a good chunk of suspense and even, in its final moments, a crushing emotional component.
And zombies, of course.
What it doesn’t have is a sense of completion. This continuation of the series, directed by “28…” veteran Danny Boyle, ends with an abrupt cliffhanger that leaves characters and plot points dangling. Obviously there will be a Part II. In the meantime, the film feels incomplete.
Fans of post-apocalyptic nihilism will no doubt be transported; your hard-core zombie freak will find plenty of new revelations to discuss with the like-minded; and action junkies should get satisfaction. But let’s be honest…this is just another zombie movie. Well made and with a deep pedigree, perhaps, but it’s going to appeal mostly to the already converted.
Basically Alex Garland’s screenplay delivers two stories and a snippet of a third that sets up the next film.
After a brief (and kinda pointless) prologue set back at the beginning of the “rage virus” infestation, Part One picks up 28 years later on an island off the coast of England. Here human survivors have established a zombie-free commune, a just-the-basics but nurturing environment where 14-year-old Spike (Alfie Williams) has grown up in.
Not that everything is copacetic in this island refuge. Spike’s mother Isla (Jodie Comer) suffers from some debilitating condition, and his father Jamie (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) has sought solace in the arms of other women.
The bulk of this segment finds Jamie leading Spike off the island for a sort of coming-of-age initiation on the mainland. Under his Dad’s firm but encouraging tutelage Spike is expected to use his bow and arrow to dispatch a zombie, thus cementing his manhood.
Their trek reveals to us the changes that have undergone Merrie Olde England after all three decades of being quarantined from the rest of civilization.
On the neat side there are the huge herds of deer that race across the landscape like stampeding bison.
On the not-so-neat side are the zombies, which have evolved into two species. Easiest to deal with are the obese, sluggish, worm-eating “slow-and-lows.” More problematical are the more humanoid zombies — thin, naked wraiths that move with remarkable speed. Worst of all are the zombie leaders, the “alphas,” who look like Jason Momoma after a long night of binge drinking and seem capable of at least minimal strategizing.
Alfie Williams, Jodie Comer, Ralph Fiennes
So that’s the movie’s first half. Part Two offers a different sort of quest.
Desperate to find a cure for his mother’s condition, young Spike hatches an audacious and dangerous plan. Leaving his father behind, he will sneak Isla to the mainland to find the physician reputed to be living there. Surely there is a cure for what ails her.
Along the way they team up briefly with a young Swedish soldier (Edwin Ryding) marooned while enforcing the quarantine. They witness a female zombie giving birth (apparently the walking dead have active sex lives) and finally meet the fabled medico (a delightfully scenery-chewing Ralph Fiennes), who still retains his diagnostic skills after having spent 30 years building a massive pyramid of human skulls.
What’s remarkable about all this is that young Williams and Comer — despite all the mayhem surrounding them — are able to create a genuinely touching mother/child relationship. Which provides the film with a quietly heartbreaking pivotal moment.
Production values are strong, offering a thoroughly convincing view of what England might look like once people are gone.
And the action scenes benefit from fiercely kinetic editing that allows us to see the zombies and splashes of gore mostly in staccato flashes. It’s a lesson learned from “Jaws” — what you can’t clearly see is far more unsettling than what you can.
“SUNDAY BEST: THE UNTOLD STORY OF ED SULLIVAN” My rating: B+(Netflix)
90 minutes | No MPAA rating
For millions of Americans in the 1950s and ‘60s, Sunday night meant gathering around the TV to watch Ed Sullivan’s variety show.
Sullivan was notoriously stiff on camera and dismissed by many a teenager as a hopeless square. Nevertheless he gave us our first glimpses of Elvis and the Beatles, no small thing.
But his greatest achievement, according to the new documentary “Sunday Best,” was defying the societal norms of his times to promote black entertainers in the face of widespread racism.
Directed by Sacha Jenkins (he’s done docs on Louis Armstrong, Wu-Tang Clan and the roots of rap), this surprisingly moving and thoroughly entertaining effort charts Sullivan’s early career as a newspaper sportswriter and, later, Broadway editor of the NY Daily News. He ended up on television almost by accident and in fact Sullivan’s lack of charisma had critics howling for his replacement.
But audiences got on his unconventional wavelength and he settled in to write more than 20 years of broadcast history.
The doc features several vintage TV interviews of Sullivan and testimony from dozens of entertainment figures (Harry Belafonte, Berry Gordy, Smoky Robinson, Oprah Winfrey), but the film’s greatest selling point is its jaw-dropping collection of great on-air performances.
We’re talking a teenage Stevie Wonder, Ike and Tina Turner, The Supremes, Nina Simon, Gladys Knight, Mahalia Jackson, Sammy Davis Jr., Bo Diddley, the Jackson Five, Nat King Cole…and that’s just scratching the surface.
What comes through loud and clear here is that Ed Sullivan truly loved show people. Race didn’t matter. Talent did.
Turns out that wooden exterior masked a great heart and a very good soul.
Simon Baker, Jacob Junior Nayinggul
“HIGH GROUND” My rating: B (Prime)
104 minutes | No MPAA rating
Civilization, observes a character in the Australian-lensed “High Ground,” is the story of bad men doing bad things to pave the way for the rest of us.
Among those “bad things” is blatant racism, a trait the Aussies historically share with us Americans. Here we enslaved black men and killed Native Americans; in Australia it was all about the destruction of Aboriginal culture.
Set in the decade after WWI, this visually devastating film from writer Chris Anastassiades and director Stephen Johnson depicts one small outlier in a greater race war and how two men — one white, one black — find themselves caught in the middle.
The film begins in 1918 with the massacre of a clan of Aborigines by white police officers. Among them is Travis (Simon Baker), a former army sharpshooter dismayed when his fellows go on a killing spree.
Only two Aborigines survive the mayhem. One is Gutjuk, 8 years old when he loses his family. More than a decade later we find Gutjuk (now played by an excellent Jacob Junior Nayinggul) living at a remote Outback mission where he has been renamed Tommy and reared in a more or less caring environment.
The other survivor is his uncle Bawara (Sean Mununggurr), left for dead but now staging retaliatory raids on white-owned ranches.
Travis is assigned to kill or capture Bawara; Tommy/Gutjuk accompanies him as a guide and interpreter. Neither man wants to be there.
Among the supporting players are Callan Mulvey as Travis’ old army buddy, now a squinty-eyed hater, and the great Jack Thompson as the local head of police; his mere presence provides a link to the glories of the Australian New Wave of the ‘70s.
This story could be plopped down in the American West (there are more than a few similarities to “Dancing with Wolves”). What makes it especially noteworthy is “High Ground’s” quiet respect for native culture and its awed admiration for the rugged yet beautiful topography, captured by cinematographer Andrew Commis in almost unbearably evocative images and not a few soaring drone shots that momentarily transform the viewer into a hawk floating above a “Lawrence of Arabia”-level landscape.
Several of the executive producers of the film are themselves Aborigine, and it shows. There’s no attempt to romanticize the tribe’s hunter/gatherer lifestyle; an almost documentary observation takes over certain scenes.
A pall of uncertainty and sadness hang over the yarn. We’re not sure who to root for; nor does there seem to be any easy answer to the long-simmering hatreds on display.
But I found myself unexpectedly moved by the film’s brutal yet inescapable conclusion.
“WARFARE” My rating: B (HBO Max)
95 minutes | MPAA rating: R
“Warfare” is an almost minute-by-minute depiction of an actual firefight that took place during the American occupation of Iraq.
It’s about as accurate a look at modern combat as we’re likely to see.
In fact, Ray Mendoza, who co-wrote and co-directed the picture with veteran Alex Garland, is a former Navy SEAL and was a participant in the action recreated here.
There’s no plot. No character development. Instead we spend a night with a group of SEALS who have taken over an Iraqi home to observe terrorist activity in the neighborhood.
The clan that lives there have been sequestered in a bedroom. The Americans haven’t threatened them, but it’s easy to understand the family’s anxiety and, as time passes, their outrage.
Not a word is wasted here. Most of the dialogue is radio chatter and ordered commands. The first half of the film displays the boring side of war…sitting around waiting for something to happen.
And when it does happen, the mayhem is anything but glorious.
The cast is peppered with familiar faces (Will Poulter, Joseph Quinn, Michael Gandolfini) but nothing here even remotely resembles a star turn.
Under the stress of combat these are less individuals than extremely well-oiled cogs in a killing machine.
At the film’s conclusion we see the actors with the real-life SEALs they portray. There could hardly be a more resounding endorsement of the movie’s truthfulness.
I cannot say enough good things about “Pernille,” a funny/touching Norwegian series about a single mother, her two daughters and the people in their lives.
How good is this show? So good that when I had watched all 30 episodes (five seasons of six half-hour episodes) I was bereft. Felt like I’d lost good friends, or maybe a family member.
The show was created and written by Henriette Steenstrup, who also plays the title character. What a performance!!!
Steenstrup’s Pernille is a 45-year-old divorce who works in child protective services (the source of the show’s most sobering moments). Caring for others is Pernille’s thing — her two spoiled daughters shamelessly manipulate her and she’s also got her fingers in the life of her widowed father (Nils Ole Oftebro), who at age 75 announces he’s gay.
As the series begins the family is mourning the traffic accident death of her sister Anne. Almost every night Pernille retreats to her garage to call her sibling’s number and leave confessional messages that will never be answered.
Pernille is aflood with conflicting emotions, all of which flicker across Steenstrup’s features like lightning dapplling a clouded sky. In the wrong hands this display of unfettered expression could seem gimmicky and off-putting. Overacting with a capital “O.”
Instead it is ingratiating. Steenstrup’s Pernille has more than a little in common with Jason Sudiekis’ Ted Lasso; both are flawed characters whose humane cores confirm that with the right perspective this world can be a blessing.
So over the course of the series we find her engaged in an on-again off-again relationship with a municipal lawyer (Gunnar Eiriksson) more than a decade her junior. The daughters (Vivild Falk Berg, Ebba Jacobsen Oberg) slowly discard their maddening petulance and entitlement and become good people. Grandpa finds love and in one of the show’s more amusing plot lines becomes a veritable bridezilla planning his same-sex marriage.
The show is nothing if not charitable when it comes to the human condition. Even the shows’s erstwhile heavy, Perille’s ex (Jan Gunnar Roise) is allowed to reveal the man-boy insecurities beneath his pompous intellectualism.
Give this show a chance and it will hook you with the first episode.
Cecilia Suarez, Alvaro Rico
“THE GARDENER” (Netflix)
The old gimmick about a hit man who falls for the woman he’s supposed to kill gets buffed up and turned inside out in “The Gardener,” a six-part Spanish miniseries that is my current guilty pleasure.
Our killer is Elmer (Alvaro Rico), a bespectacled twenty something who runs a nursery/greenhouse operation with his mother China (Cecilia Suarez). Elmer has a spectacular green thumb…his lush gardens are practically tourist attractions.
His secret? All the decomposing human bodies beneath the beds.
But Elmer isn’t your typical movie tough guy or skin-crawling ghoul. After suffering head trauma in the same childhood auto accident that cost his mother her leg, Elmer lost his emotions.
No love. No joy. No fear. No envy. No guilt. No regret. The kid’s an emotional blank slate, an innocent, really. The ideal state for a killer.
China, once a minor movie star, now accepts murder contracts which are executed by her stoically efficient son.
All goes well until Elmer is hired to eliminate Violeta (Catalina Sopelana), a young elementary school teacher. Wouldn’t you know…for the first time Elmer feels stirrings of romantic love. This complicates things.
Created and written by Miguel Baez Carral, “The Gardener” delivers its ridiculousness with a mostly-straight face. We’re talking telenovello-level melodrama, but instead of laughing it all off the screen we go along for the ride.
“The Gardener” is crammed with rcultural eferences and plot twists. For starters, there’s the China/Elmer relationship, an Iberian permutation of “Bates Motel,” with a manipulative mother and her loving boy.
And periodically we find ourselves hanging out with a couple of local cops (Francis Lorenzo and Maria Vazquez), middle-aged drones bored to tears with their gig on the missing persons desk and energized when they stumble onto their very own a serial killer. Their scenes are a hoot.
In fact, the acting here is way better than required. Rico’s Elmer is a lost soul who gets our sympathy despite his high body count; we want desperately for him to find love. Sopelana’s Violeta is dead on as an good-girl educator who, as it turns out, has a few secrets of her own.
But the star here is Suarez’s China. Born in Mexico, educated in the States and a veteran of Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre, Suarez oozes a hypnotic blend of sexy/crazy. With her black hair and penchant for long black capes she seems to be taking her cues from the Wicked Queen in Disney’s “Snow White.” It’s an eye-rolling perf without any actual eye-rolling. Very sly.
The Finnish actioner “Sisu” feels like a Road Runner cartoon directed by Quentin Tarantino.
Not that it’s funny, exactly. Jamari Helander’s film is crammed with gloriously gruesome mayhem meted out by a silent fellow who, like the beep-beeping star of those old Chuck Jones cartoons, survives every attempt on his life, absorbing punishment after punishment.
The violence is utterly outlandish, but presented with such a straight face (and with so much stage blood) that we get caught up in the whole silly premise.
It also helps that the Wile E. Coyote of the piece is a platoon of goonish Nazis. Nature’s perfect bad guys.
We first see Astami (Jorma Tommila) in the vast treeless plains of Lapland. Accompanied only by his dog, this heavily scarred fellow with a white beard is prospecting. One day he finds a vein of gold so rich that he soon has a couple of backpacks crammed with fist-sized nuggets.
Up to this point we don’t really know whether this is taking place in the present or the distant past. Then we’re introduced to a unit of retreating Germans. Okay…so World War II.
Basically this is an elaborate chase. The Nazi commander (Aksel Hennie) takes Astami’s gold and leaves him for dead. Figuring the war is lost, the German plans on using the treasure to build a new life.
But it turns out that Astami is a Finnish national hero, a sniper/survivalist who before leaving the war behind racked up hundreds of kills.
Now he wants his gold back. He goes after the Germans like some sort of Scandinavian Terminator.
Along the way he will be shot, nearly blown apart, set on fire, hanged and drowned. He’ll even survive a plane crash.
You can’t keep a good Finn down.
Oh…and with the Germans is a truckload of Finnish women being used as sex slaves. Astami makes sure that before it’s all over the ladies will be well armed and ready for vengeance.
Among the film’s “huh?” elements is the dialogue, which drifts unexpectedly between English, German and Finnish for no obvious reason.
Then there are the many virtues of “Sisu” (a Finnish word that roughly translates as “unstoppable”): drop-dead gorgeous cinematography, spectacular fight coordination and especially the slow-burn performance of Tommila, who doesn’t say a word until the final scene but commands the screen every time a camera (or gun) is pointed at him.
Cate Blanchett, Michael Fassbender
“BLACK BAG” My rating: B+ (Peacock)
93 minutes | MPAA rating: R
About the highest praise I can give Steven Soderbergh’s “Black Bag” is that it is of John le Carre quality, a spy thriller less about violence than about the toll the business of espionage takes on the human soul.
Michael Fassbender (who seems to be in every movie) is George Woodhouse, a Brit intelligence agent who after a legendary field career is now holding down a desk. His specialty is rooting out double agents.
David Koepp’s script is set in motion when George is given a list of five fellow agents suspected of selling secrets to Britain’s enemies.
Just one problem: One of the suspects is George’s wife Kathryn (Cate Blanchett). The big question: If it turns out that Kathryn is a turncoat, will George serve his country or his heart?
After much preliminary sleuthing, George decides to hold a dinner for the potential traitors (the others are played by Tom Burke, Regé-Jean Page, Naomie Harris and Marisa Abela).
It’s borderline Agatha Christie (everyone assemble in the dining room where the killer will be revealed) but thanks to the intricacies of the screenplay and a fistful of great actors playing duplicity to the hilt, “Black Bag” becomes a hold-your-breath thriller.
And then there’s the title. “Black Bag” refers, of course, to black bag operations, meaning an assignment so secret that you must keep it from your friends and loved ones. While superficially about rooting out a mole, on a deeper level this film is about living in an environment where no one — not your boss, your best friend or your lover — can be trusted.
Amazingly, all this is there in Fassbender’s quietly contained performance. Like Le Carre’s George Smiley, George is a bespectacled straight man with a volcano of suppressed and rarely-expressed emotion smoldering within.
Now that’s some acting.
Rami Malek, Caitriona Balfe
“THE AMATEUR” My rating: B-(Hulu)
122 minutes | MPAA: PG-13
The Rami Malek starrer “The Amateur” has little of the depth of “Black Bag,” but as a sort of underdog espionage yarn it’s diverting and generally satisfying.
Malek is Heller, who writes top-secret computer code for the CIA. He’s essentially a nerd, but he does have a deeply satisfying marriage to Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan), whose job requires her to travel internationally.
On one such trip Sarah becomes a hostage when terrorists take over a London hotel. She is executed in front of the television cameras.
Heller is crushed. Then he wants to get even, badgering his boss (Holt McCallany) to undergo field training so that he can track down the terrorists. The bigwigs figure this hopeless amateur will soon tire of the whole business.
Uh, no.
One of the virtues of Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli’s screenplay (based on James Hawes’ novel) is that it tricks the viewer in the same way Heller tricks his handlers. Just when you think the jig is up and our man is going down, the film reveals that Heller has been way ahead of us all the time.
His bosses — who secretly organized the illegal terrorist action that took Sarah’s life — find they can’t keep track of Heller as he galavants around Europe because the computer programs designed for that purpose were written by Heller himself. He knows all the loopholes.
“The Amateur” has a deep supporting cast (Laurence Fishburne, Jon Bernthal, Julianne Nicholson, Caitriona Balfe, Michael Stuhlbarg) and the direction by James Hawes keeps the yarn chugging along.
As for the Oscar-winning Malek, this film will undoubtedly come to be regarded as a toss-off in a career of some depth. But as toss-offs go, it’s enjoyable enough.
Sociopaths and psychopaths are the common currency of today’s streaming environment.
The problem, of course, is that now we’re so inundated with psychotic characters that they’ve become a bit ho-hum. It really takes something special to grab our attention.
Enter “Smoke,” a miniseries from crime specialist Dennis Lehane that delivers not one but two world-class psychos, both of whom specialize in setting things on fire.
Loosely based on the real case of an arson investigator who spent his spare time starting the blazes he was allegedly trying to solve, this show stars the chameleonic Taron Egerton as Dave Gudsen, chief arson detective for a municipal fire department in the Pacific Northwest.
Davis is a fascinating study in two-faced fiendishness. He’s got a huge ego which he tries to hide behind a facade of professional composure and good-guy cameraderie, but his megalomania keeps oozing out around the edges. He loves to give presentations in which he shocks his audience by planting incendiary charges in wastepaper baskets, timing them to go off at key moments during his talk.
At home Dave’s ass-hat smugness is quickly alienating his wife and stepson.
And he’s writing a novel (a desperately bad one) about an arson investigator very much like himself, a brilliant fellow who can run circles around the bad guys while satisfying every erotic fantasy of his curvy female partner.
Dave’s real-life female partner, Michelle (Jurnee Smollett), can only roll her eyes at this fiction. She rather quickly goes from admiring her new mentor to suspecting that Dave may himself be responsible for a series of fatal arson incidents.
The scripts take a slow burn approach (sorry about that) in revealing Dave’s double life and the reluctance of his long-time boss (Greg Kinnear) and other colleagues to grasp just what’s going on.
Ntare Guam Mbaho Mwine
Meanwhile, there’s that second psycho, a pathetically sad but genuinely scary fellow named Freddy Faso (Ntare Guam Mbaho Mwine). This friendless loner lives in a shabby apartment, mans a grill at a fast-food franchise and dreams of joining the mainstream. Fat chance. Freddy is a loser in virtually every way. A man without a voice, he makes himself heard by setting fires to punish those individuals (other customers celebrating at the local bar, his bosses) who he blames for his own misery.
Freddy is such a weirdly compelling/repellant character that Mwine’s performance should be incorporated into college courses about mental health.
And the fact that “Smoke” gives us one arsonist tracking down another arsonist (kinda like Dexter stalking other serial killers) turns the show into a sort of moral yo-yo.
And while we’re cataloguing the series’ assets, let’s not forget a late-in-the-proceedings appearance by John Leguizamo, nothing short of superb as Dave’s former partner, who has long suspected he was teamed with a firebug and has now come out of a boozy, drug-riddled retirement to lend his hand in the investigation.
That said, not everything about “Smoke” works. There’s a rather unnecessary backstory about Smollett’s character, who as a child was almost burned to death by her crazy mom. And in the next to the last episode the writers throw Michelle a wildly improbably curveball that the show almost can’t recover from.
At nine episodes “Smoke” feels a bit padded. But the high points compensate in the end.
Owen Wilson, Peter Dager
“STICK”(Apple+)
I didn’t expect many surprises from “Stick,” and I didn’t get many.
But what I got was sufficient. The show is funny and diverting and occasionally even shows a little heart.
Owen Wilson plays Pryce Cahill, a former professional golfer now fallen on some very hard times. Then he discovers Santi (Peter Dager), an unknown teenage golfer who might just be the lovechild of Lee Trevino and Tiger Woods.
Pryce decides to go on a tour of golf tournaments with the kid, bringing along the boy’s mother (Mariana Trevino) and Pryce’s former caddy, the gloriously misanthropic Mitts (Marc Maron).The goal is to somehow recover his long-lost pride and, hopefully, humiliate his long-time rival Clark Ross (Timothy Olyphant), who now runs a world-class golf club. (Is this supposed to reference Trump? Not sure.)
Among the supporting players are Judy Greer as Price’s long-suffering but still supportive ex-wife, and Lilli Kay as the evocatively gender jumbled waitress who becomes Santi’s first love.
Anna Maria Mühe
“WOMAN OF THE DEAD”(Netflix)
A female undertaker becomes an angel of vengeance in “Woman of the Dead,” a German thriller that is more nuanced than it first sounds.
When her policeman husband is killed in a hit-and-run outside their mortuary in the Austrian Alps, Blum (Anna Maria Mühe) goes looking for answers. What she uncovers over the course of two seasons is a conspiracy of very rich men who make snuff films starring illegal immigrants lured to Germany by the promise of good jobs.
Blum is a fascinating character, a doting mom of two who spends her days embalming corpses. Even weirder, the recently dead often talk to her from their perch on the slab. Is this her imagination? Is Blum a bit bonkers?
She apparently has no qualms about personally eliminating the men she blames for her husband’s demise. So as viewers we’re torn between her need for answers and her shocking vigilantism. Will she get away with it? Do we want her to?
It helps that Mühe isn’t movie-star glamorous. We can definitely see her as a wife and mother.
And should your attention wander, there’s always the spectacular mountain scenery.
I’ve avoided watching “The Penguin Lessons” because, well, penguins and lessons. Sounded just a bit too emotionally pushy, you know?
Having finally watched this Peter Cattaneo-directed effort, I can report that my misgivings were misplaced. The film is subtle, unsettling and about as unsentimental as a movie with a two-foot-tall feathered costar could be.
It helps that the film is based on the real-life story of Tom Michell, a British educator who in the 1970s found himself teaching English to the boys in a posh boarding school in Argentina.
When we first meet Michell (Steve Coogan), he’s a wryly caustic fellow oozing ennui. We’ll learn much later that he’s attempting to outrun a personal tragedy.
On a seaside vacation to nearby Uruguay, Michell stumbles across a flock of penguins who have succumbed to a massive oil spill. He retrieves the lone surviving bird and cleans it up in his hotel room (to be honest, his kindly display is intended to impress the woman he met that night at a dance club).
Anyway, once rescued the penguin refuses to leave. Michell is stuck with the fishy-smelling creature, reluctantly smuggling it back to Argentina in a backpack. He tries to pawn off the bird on anyone who’ll take it (a customs official, the local zoo) but ends up secreting it in his on-campus apartment.
The setup screams “cute,” but director Cattaneo and screenwriter Jeff Pope deftly sidestep all the pitfalls. For one thing, there’s no attempt to anthropomorphize the penguin. He’s basically an eating machine that waddles. No personality to speak of — although just by being his cute, mute self he elicits confessional revelations from the humans who hang with him.
The eccentric creature — dubbed Juan Salvador by his savior — also proves a classroom asset, focusing the attention of the normally unruly rich twits who attend the school. Grades actually start improving, much to the delighted surprise of the stuffy headmaster (Jonathan Pryce).
Here’s where “The Penguin Lessons” turns the tables. Michell was on hand for the military coup that for several years turned Argentina into a fascist camp where more than 30,000 citizens were “disappeared” for their political, intellectual and moral proclivities.
One of these unfortunates is Anna (Julia Fossi), a young cleaning lady at the school who is an outspoken liberal and always taunting Michell for his political indifference. Michell witnesses Anna being snatched off the street by a pack of government thugs. Appalled by his own cowardice for not interfering, he joins the girl’s grandmother (Vivian El Jaber) in a months-long search to discover Anna’s fate.
Now this is pretty dark stuff…and darker still because it mirrors recent images of masked ICE agents snatching dark-skinned people off America’s streets.
Coogan is a specialist at humanizing vaguely repellant characters, and here he quietly and efficiently limns Michell’s moral journey. The supporting players are all fine, from the leads to the entitled adolescents who occupy Michell’s classroom (they could have called this “The Dead Penguin’s Society”).
Jenna Ortega
“DEATH OF A UNICORN” My rating: C (Netflix)
107 minutes | MPAA rating: R
Not even an A-list cast can do much with “Death of a Unicorn,” a hodgepodge of myth, father-daughter bonding, greedy rich folk and a big dose of gut-splattering violence.
Alex Scharfman’s film (he both wrote and directed) finds corporate attorney Elliott (Paul Rudd) and his surly daughter Ridley (Jenna Ortega) cruising down a mountain road en route to the alpine compound occupied by Elliott’s employers, a family of pharmaceutical robber barons.
At first Elliott thinks he’s hit and killed a deer. Actually it’s a honest-to-God unicorn, a creature whose long horn is capable of delivering psychedelic experiences, healing diseases and even bringing the dead back to life.
Their moneyed hosts (Richard E. Grant, Will Poulter, Téa Leoni) quickly realize the creature’s powers could be a game-changer and launch plans to harvest whatever other unicorns may be frolicking in the woods.
What they don’t realize is that these creatures are malevolent, with the fangs of a carnivore, the speed of a charging rhino and the ability to crash through doors and walls.
The tone is all over the place. “…Unicorn” wants to be a satire of corporate greed, but it’s hitting at a pretty obvious target. (Drug executives? Really?) Meanwhile it’s hard to root for the unicorns…they’re some mean mofos.
And the violence is wildly gruesome…yet we’re supposed to laugh. Those are some mixed messages.
Adolescent Ridley advocates a more humane approach to the whole situation; gradually bringing Dad Elliott into her corner. Of course, you can’t exactly wave the flag of peace when these monsters are laying siege to your aerie.
“THE BALLAD OF WALLIS ISLAND” My rating: B (Peacock)
99 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13
Like the character who sets its plot in motion, “The Ballad of Wallis Island” is sorta irritating at first but eventually pulls us in.
This individual in question is Charlie Heath (Tim Key), a burly, bearded denizen of Wallis, one of the more remote of the British Isles. Having come unexpectedly into a small fortune (we will learn that he has won the national lottery not once, but TWICE), Charlie has decided to spend a big chunk of it on a concert by his favorite musician.
That would be Herb McGwyer (Tom Basden), whom we meet bobbing miserably in the tiny boat that is Wallis Island’s principal link to the mainland. Herb has been lured to the scenic but underpopulated isle by Charlie’s offer of 500,00 pounds for an hour-long concert.
He needs the money. Herb used to be part of a moderately successful he/she folk duo, but that relationship went south a decade earlier. Ever since Herb has been trying to get back his musical mojo. Currently he’s recording a rock album, and he desperately needs Charlie’s payday to cover expenses.
A bit of a sourpuss on even a good day, Herb is alarmed to learn that Charlie — a fanboy given to incredibly corny or inappropriate exclamations (”Wowzer in the trousers!”) — will be the the sole member of the audience.
There’s no hotel on the island, so Herb must stay at Charlie’s quaint but slightly-gone-to-seed mansion. Which means that there’s no escape from his host’s geeky adulation.
“Ballad…” only really kicks into gear with the arrival of Herb’s old singing partner and one-time paramour Nell (Carey Mulligan), who’s no longer playing professionally and, like Herb, needs the money. Charlie has booked her without consulting Herb.
Tensions mount.
There’s a sort of “Local Hero” vibe wafting around this effort (the screenplay is by stars Key and Basden, the direction by James Griffiths, all of whom collaborated on a “Willis Island” short film a few years back). The movie thrives on low-keyed, character-driven fish-out-of-water humor, but it’s also an affecting meditation on loss (Charlie reveals that Herb and Nell were the favorite recording artists of his late wife).
Don’t be surprised if you find yourself gulping back a few tears.
There’s not a ton of music in the film, but the few songs performed by Basden and Mulligan (all written by Basden) nail the same guy-girl sweet spot that made “Once” so memorable.
So…charming.
Simon Baker
“LIMBO” My rating: B (Amazon Prime)
108 minutes | No MPAA rating
As a minimalist mystery about a crime that will never be solved, the Australia-lensed “Limbo” starts out deep in the hole when it comes to attracting a mainstream audience.
Toss in a subplot about the casual abuse of Australia’s aboriginal population, stark black-and-white cinematography, and the usually-hunky Simon Baker looking like something the cat dragged in, and you’ve got a film that will appeal mostly to hardcore cineastes.
Which is OK with me.
“Limbo” (written and directed by Ivan Sen) got under my skin and refused to be shaken off.
A good chunk of that has to do with the astonishingly beautiful cinematography (director Sen was his own d.p.). The film’s widescreen format and lack of color are just about the perfect way to capture an outback burg so windblown and pocked with ugly craters (the area used to be a center for opal mining) that it really does seem like the waiting room to hell.
Our hero — no, not hero. Our protagonist is Travis Hurley, a big-city cop assigned to look into a very cold case, the two-decades-old disappearance of a young aborigine woman.
Travis isn’t exactly your gung-ho cop. Initially he seems only to be going through the motions.
Even fans of TV’s “The Mentalist” will require a reel or two to wrap themselves around Baker’s transformation here. Sporting a buzz cut and month-old beard, his eyes shaded by aviator glasses and his arms covered in tattoos (the result, one surmises, of an undercover stint with the drug squad that left him addicted to heroin), Travis is Simon Baker as we’ve never seen him.
He starts asking questions but gets few answers. The local cops have a history of racism and the aboriginal community doesn’t trust lawmen. Eventually the missing girl’s now-grown brother (Rob Collins) and sister (Natasha Wanganeen) provide a bit of insight, but not enough for an arrest.
Everyone has heard the old saw that it’s not the destination but rather the journey that matters. That’s certainly the case with “Limbo,” which I found weirdly compelling despite its lack of resolution.
Streaming in two 90-minute episodes, “Pee-Wee as Himself” might seem a case of show-biz overkill.
Sure, funnyman Pee-Wee Herman was wildly entertaining, but can you really fill three documentary hours with him?
Uh, yeah. Not only fill them, but leave you with a sob in your throat when it’s all over.
That silly/sly manchild Pee-Wee was the onstage alter ego of comic Paul Reubens, who had a pretty good resume even before creating his bow-tied, pink-cheeked character. The big revelation of Matt Wolf’s doc is that for much of his lifetime (he died of cancer in 2023), Paul Reubens spent more time as Pee-Wee than as Paul.
It was a case of performance art carried to Kaufmann-esque extremes.
This doc was made with the cooperation (often grudgingly) of Reubens, who sat for endless on-camera interviews to talk about his Pee-Wee character, his career, and the scandals that threatened to sink it all. Throughout he frets that somebody else is telling his story. He can be kinda cranky.
There are contributions from friends and co-workers like Cassandra Peterson (better known as the spooky/sexy Elivra), “SNL” legend Laraine Newman, Natasha Lyonne (as a child she was a regular on TV’s “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse”), S. Epatha Merkerson and Lawrence Fishburne (also “Playhouse” veterans), director Tim Burton (who got his start in features with “Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure”), filmmaker Judd Apatow and friends Debi Mazar and David Arquette, who got to know Reubens when he wasn’t Pee-Wee.
There’s all sorts of back story. RE: Reuben’s work with the Groundlings improv group in Los Angeles (one of his best buds was the late Phill Hartman; also Kansas City actress Edie McClurg was part of the original Pee-Wee cast). His creation of dozens of recurring characters for that troupe. And the gradual development of the impish Pee-Wee, a character so beloved that not even a tawdry sex scandal could put much of a dent in his fan base.
We get insight into Reubens’ private life. In those months when he wasn’t playing Pee-Wee he grew long hair and a beard, making him virtually unrecognizable.
He acknowledges that he is gay and even had a live-in boyfriend, but once the Pee-Wee phenomenon took off he dived deep into the closet. (We tend to forget that in the ‘70s being outed could be a career killer.)
Paul Reubens in police mug shot
And of course there’s no escaping the scandals. In one instance Reubens was arrested allegedly for masturbating in a porn theater. In the other LA cops raided his home for child pornography. They found only vintage physical culture mags (Reubens had a massive collection of kitschy ‘50s homoeroticism). In both cases Reubens plead guilty or nolo contendre to end the episodes, even though he here claims he’s innocent of those crimes and would have prevailed in court if he’d wasted the time and money on the effort.
But what makes “Pee-Wee As Himself” so damn wonderful is the cornucopia of clips of his work. Was “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse” the greatest kid’s TV show of all time? It’s got my vote.
Ultimately this is portrait of a man far more comfortable playing a role than living everyday life. It was tough on him…but good for the rest of us.
Jayne Mansfield and daughter Mariska Hargitay
“My Mom Jayne”My rating: B+ (HBO Max)
105 minutes / No MPAA rating
After her decades in the role of Det. Olivia Benson on TV’s “Law & Order: SVU,” fans of actress Mariska Hargitay by now are aware of her show-biz pedigree: She is the daughter of mid-century sex bomb Jayne Mansfield.
Not that she remembers her mother. Hargitay was only three in 1967 when she was pulled from the wreckage of the car in which her mother died. And as she tells us in this documentary (her feature directing debut), she has lived her life with no memory of Jayne Mansfield.
In fact, her widowed father, the late Hungarian-born athlete and bodybuilder Micky Hargitay, advised her to steer clear of the scandal-saturated Mansfield biographies and documentaries that have come out over the years. So in a weird way, Hargitay’s knowledge of Jayne Mansfield wasn’t much greater than that of your average pop culture fan.
“My Mom Jayne” operates on two levels. First, it is a daughter’s quest to understand her mother, to get a grasp on her own family history. Thus it is a very personal examination of her own life.
Hargitay interviews her older siblings, mining their childhood memories. She talks to her mother’s press secretary (who wrote a Mansfield biography filled with insider revelations).
Late in the film she visits a storage facility where for the first time she sorts through the detritus of her mother’s life (a Golden Globe statuette, movie posters, a publicity album overflowing with press clippings).
But even deeper, it is an appreciation of Mansfield, a woman whose reputation as the poor man’s Monroe didn’t begin to reflect her depths, desires and hardships.
Throughout the doc we get tons of photos, movie clips, TV appearances and interviews. The film makes the case for Mansfield being a talented actress whose ambitions were undermined by the pneumatic dumb blonde performance that got her foot in Hollywood’s door and then could not be extracted.
Pregnant at 16 and divorced by the time she was 20 and trying to gain traction in Tinsel Town, Jayne Mansfield found herself at 21 starring in a hit Broadway comedy and launching a movie career that today is regarded as forgettable but at the time was the talk of the industry.
She played piano and violin (there’s footage of her sawing the fiddle on Ed Sullivan’s show) and spoke several languages. But she was also a shameless publicity hound.
Apparently through all this she was a great mother, if her children are to be believed. Even when her marriage to Hargitay was breaking up and she was dating/marrying other men (most of them brutes, this film suggests), Jayne Mansfeld was devoted to the kids.
Just when you think you’ve got a handle on the whole situation, the filmmaker drops the big one. It turns out that Mariska Hargitay was not the natural daughter of Mickey Hargitay, the man who raised her. Her biological father, whom she did not meet until well into adulthood, is the Italian-born Vegas entertainer Norman Sardelli, who had a brief but torrid affair with Jayne Mansfield when she was separated from Hargitay. Late in the film we meet Sardelli (89 at the time) and the two half-sisters Mariska never knew she had in a kitchen table conference that is both achingly sad and hilariously funny.
Revelations like this might move some of us to bitterness. Mariska Hargitay seems happy to incorporate the Sardellis into her larger family.
She also shows her chops behind the camera. “My Mom Jayne” succeeds on just about every level.
Tomasin McKenzie has been on the verge of first-class stardom for several years now. “Life After Life” should cement her reputation.
Now 24, this descendent of Down Under theatrical royalty has exhibited wisdom beyond her years in her choice of projects.
Titles like “Leave No Trace,” “Jojo Rabbit,” “Lost Girls,” “The Power of the Dog,” “Last Night in Soho” and “Joy” are not only good movies, they have allowed McKenzie to display gob-smacking range.
She can play anything from childish innocence to middle-aged maturity. “Life after Life” allows her to do it all in one four-hour miniseries. She’s unforgettable.
The thumbnail description of “Life…” (based on Kate Atkinson’s best-selling novel) is that it’s sort of a non-comedic “Groundhog Day” with a protagonist who dies dozens of times only to be reborn back in 1910 to start the process all over again.
Our lead character, Ursula (played as a teen and adult by McKenzie), has vague deja vu-ish memories of her previous incarnations…just enough to avoid situations that in the past led to her demise. Like Bill Murray’s weather man, she learns from her failures.
Problem is, fate always catches up with her, throwing new dangers in her path.
She dies. She is reborn. She dies. Reborn. Dies. Reborn.
Will she ever get off this karmic Ferris Wheel?
Created and scripted by Bathsheba Doran and directed by John Crowley (who has a way with young actresses…witness the perf he got from Saoirse Ronan in “Brooklyn”), “Life After Life” is crammed with fantasy elements.
Yet you can’t call it an escapist experience. Life is cruel and though she finds moments of love, Ursula’s lives more closely resemble the trials of Job than a hopeful march toward Nirvana.
Born in 1910 to a well-off and loving Brit gentleman (James McArdle) and his brittle wife (Sian Clifford), little Ursula dies shortly after birth, strangled by her own umbilical cord.
Not to worry. She’s soon reborn; this time the country doctor overseeing the delivery acts decisively to save the baby.
Childhood in her parents’ green estate should be idyllic. But Ursula (played as a child and early adolescent by Eliza Riley and Isla Johnson) lives under a cloud of gloom. Even as a youngster she sense that nothing is permanent.
Indeed, in less talented hands Ursula’s revolving door of disasters might seem ludicrous.
Death by drowning. A fall from an upstairs window. Fatal auto accident. Rape. Abortion.
Small wonder that adolescent Ursula is bitter, grouchy and even borderline homicidal.
And that’s just the personal crises. In the background we endure two world wars. In one of her lifetimes Ursula marries a German and moves with her husband to the Third Reich, just in time to endure starvation with her three-year-old daughter. In another she and a lover are blown to smithereens during the London Blitz.
You cannot outrun fate.
The pitfalls inherent in this project were considerable. It’s like playing a board game where you’re repeatedly sent back to the go position. Atkinson’s script and the editing (by Nick Emerson) deftly lay out just where we are in Ursula’s spiritual journey, with each succeeding life zipping through the scenes we’ve already witnessed to get on with her latest travails.
(For those of us who still don’t glom onto the film’s methodology, a voiceover narration by Leslie Manville pops up now and then to offer guidance.)
The performances of the huge cast are quietly spectacular. There are so many catch-in-the-throat moments here that the four episodes become an acting marathon.
Holding it all together is McKenzie, whose ability to convincingly transform from freckled youngster to embattled adult and back again is positively superhuman.
For all its grim elements, “Life After Life” is weirdly poetic. Each time Ursula dies she finds herself surrounded by gently dancing snowflakes, a recurring visual that suggests a kindness in death that is missing from our heroine’s lives.
For those who have followed the controversy over the years, “Surviving Ohio State” will drop no new bombshells.
But Eva Orner’s documentary, about the sexual abuse scandal that wracked a powerhouse Midwestern University, does an admirable job of telling a big story that most of us have received only in bits and pieces over the better part of three decades.
Orner (an Australian whose “Chasing Asylum” savages her country’s response to refugees) takes her cues from the script by Jon Wertham, the “60 Minutes” correspondent whose 2020 series in Sports Illustrated painstakingly examined decades of predatory activities at OSU and many years of coverups.
Like a lot of rah-rah sports films, this one begins by describing the long culture of winning at Ohio State and the near-maniacal loyalty of its athletes and fans. We’re introduced to legendary wrestling coach Russ Hellickson and his assistant and former collegiate wrestling champ Jim Jordan. (Yes, the same Jim Jordon who is now a rabidly MAGA member of Congress.)
We’ meet the late Dr. Richard Strauss through the testimony of students and student athletes who were his victims. Strauss, a physician in the athletic department, had a reputation for fondling the genitals of athletes under the guise of a medical exam. He didn’t come off as an overtly dirty old man….more like straight-faced professional engaging in business as usual. His handsy practices were tolerated because the young players were too naive to realize precisely what was happening to them.
And then there were the showers. Strauss would take several a day, but only if there was an athlete in there with him. At one point after a tournament a wrestling referee found himself in the showers with the masturbating M.D.
Those who complained got knowing shrugs and answers like, “Well, that’s the Doc.” Strauss’ behavior became a running joke.
Except that in interviews numerous athletes (mostly wrestlers but also members of the fencing and hockey squads) exhibit traumatic responses to even talking about Strauss. Tears. Trembling. Big tough guys in their 40s and 50s going to pieces before our eyes. There was damage done.
The first hour of “Surviving Ohio State” chronicles the abuse in blushing and/or stomach-churning detail. My main beef with the film is that we keep getting the same story from a variety of individuals…the movie makes its case, but only at the risk of becoming repetitive.
Just when you think you can’t take another twisted anecdote, the movie shifts to the effort by former OSU jocks to sue the university for what they endured. Their legal effort was almost derailed by the statute of limitations; it took the intercession of the U.S. Supreme Court to get it back on track.
The former students interviewed say it isn’t about the money. They want the school to admit its complicity in tolerating Strauss’ behavior and then covering up the scandal.
In the film’s final chapter that we return to Jim Jordan. The former wrestlers who appear on screen invariably say that Coach Jordon was completely aware of Strauss’s transgressions. Jordan has repeatedly denied that this is the case.
I’ve never been a fan of Jordan’s politics, but after this I can hardly watch or listen to the guy.
Perhaps even more disheartening is the behavior of the beloved Coach Hellickson, who after meeting with former students agreed to join them in their quest, then did a 180 and prertty much evaporated from sight.
Throughout the all, the University refused to admit to any wrongdoing.
Daisy Ridley, Matthew Tuck
“CLEANER” My rating: B-(MAX)
97 minutes | MPAA rating: R
For an unapologetic ripoff of “Die Hard,” “Cleaner” is ridiculously diverting.
Terrorists take over a high-rise office building during a big celebration. They kill a few hostages. They can only be stopped by one lone individual who’s in the wrong place at the right time.
The good news is that the script by Simon Uttley, Paul Andrew Williams and Matthew Orton throws some unexpected twists into the familiar mix.
For starters, the bad guys are ecoterrorists whose plan is to the reveal to the world the dark secrets of a polluting energy conglomerate and the government officials who facilitate its environmental depredations.
Our lone wolf protagonist is a female window cleaner who is dangling outside the building 30 floors above the street when the invasion takes place. Her name is Joey (Daisy Ridley of “Star Wars” fame) and as luck would have it she’s a former special forces operative with a lethal skill set.
Oh, yeah, she’s also babysitting her autistic brother (Matthew Tuck), a geeky guy who carries a replica of Thor’s hammer but is something of a savant when it comes to computer hacking. His talents will come in handy.
“Cleaner “ gets off to a slow and rather desultory start. I was almost ready to bail after five minutes.
But then it kicks in and director Martin Campbell (a veteran of the Bond franchise) deftly juggles the growing suspense and carefully choreographed action.
Given that the hardasses at Amazon have already cancelled “Étoile,” one might question whether it’s worth investing time in a show for which there will apparently be but one season.
Well, yeah.
Let me put it this way…if you got off on the cultured people doing below-the-belt things in “Mozart in the Jungle” (a series about the backstage goings-on at a big-city symphony orchestra), you’re a perfect candidate for this show set in the rarified world of ballet.
The show was created by Daniel Palladino and Amy Sherman-Palladino, the big brains behind “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” and like that long-running series “Étoile” (French for “star”) is a potent mix of comedy and social observation.
And there’s an astonishing cast. More on that in a sec.
The premise is that to battle a post-COVID downturn in attendance, ballet companies in NYC and Paris hold a cultural exchange, sending key players across the Big Pond in the hope that fresh blood will revive public interest in dance.
Running the two companies are Jack McMillan (Luke Kirby, so terrific as Lenny Bruce in “Maisel”) and Charlotte Gainsbourg.
Both are fine actors, and Gainsbourg brings with her a rep as the most desired French actress since Bardot. She’s not a conventional beauty and almost never plays a seductress, yet I personally know several middle-aged men who think she’s sex on wheels. That audience base in itself should have been enough to keep the show around for a second season.
Stealing his every scene is Simon Callow as Crispin Shamblee, the ruthless mogul (we’re talking international arms dealing and heavily polluting industries) who uses his millions to rescue the two dance companies but in return demands a big say in their artistic and day-to-day decisions. He’s hateful in a Koch-ish way, but so puckishly erudite the screen lights up every time he’s on.
Tobias Bell is a font of insecurity and arrogance as the American choreographer shipped to France for the season; David Haig is loveably amusing as the New York company’s artistic director, nearing retirement and overflowing with sex-and-drug anecdotes from his dance career.
The breakout star, though, is Lou de Laâge as Cheyenne, the French prima ballerina who come to NYC with a chip on her shoulder and a bad attitude that could singe your bangs. When we first see Cheyenne she’s on a Greenpeace ship confronting a fishing fleet…think Greta Thunberg on speed.
In my book the surly Cheyenne is one of the season’s great characters. And the fact that de Laâge also appears to be a first-class dancer only seals the deal.
For that matter, all of the actors playing dancers seem to actually know their stuff. I kept looking for evidence of post-production sweetening in the big production numbers, but couldn’t find any. This appears to be the real thing — good actors who are also terrific ballet dancers.
Conleth Hill
“SUSPECT: THE SHOOTING OF JEAN CHARLES de MENEZES” (Hulu)
In 2005 the London transportation system was racked by a series of terrorist bombings that brought the metropolis to a standstill.
This four-part Brit docudrama divides its time between the Jihadist perpetrators and the authorities engaged in a nationwide manhunt.
But as the show’s title suggests, there was collateral damage. A Brazilian worker named Jean Charles de Menezes was misidentified as a possible suspect and murdered by trigger-happy police as he innocently rode a subway. This was followed by a massive coverup as the police tried to minimize their culpability in his death.
British viewers are no doubt already familiar with the incident, which may account for the satiric edge creators Kwadjo Dana and Jeff Pope give to the proceedings.
At least some of that attitude is warranted. After a successful subway attack a second wave of suicide bombers were dispatched, but their homemade bombs were duds, succeeding mostly in scaring commuters and burning the would-be martyrs who triggered them. It was a sort of black comedy of incompetence and “Suspect” plays it that way.
But the real knives are sharpened for Sir Ian Blair, the head of the Metropolitcan Police and portrayed by Conleth Hill as the worst sort of pompous autocrat, always ready to burnish his resume or cover his ass.
Hill already had strong credentials in unctuousness thanks to his turn as the conniving eunuch Lord Varys in “Game of Thrones.”
But here he ups the ante, delivering a dissection upper class arsery so shamelessly self-serving that I found myself roaring with laughter.
Which is not what you expect from a show about real-life terrorism, but there you have it.
Actually, “Suspect” is the perfect title. It’s not only about suspected perpetrators. It’s also about officials whose motives are suspect.
Paddy Considine, Pierce Brosnan, Helen Mirren, Tom Hardy
“MOBLAND’’ (Paramount )
When it comes to reprehensible behavior and mindless violence, American criminals seem positively enlightened compared to the mayhem-dishing psychos inhabiting British series like “Gangs of London” and, now, “Mobland.”
In “Mobland” the seemingly omnipresent Tom Hardy plays Harry, the stoic but ruthlessly effective lieutenant to the Harrigans, one of London’s two major crime syndicates.
Hardy, who is watchable in even iffy material, here gets the most out of Harry’s slow-burn personality. This is a guy who seems calm even when spraying a machine gun in a war for supremacy in London’s illicit drug trade.
But the real acting meat goes to Pierce Brosnan as Conrad Harrigan, the arrogant, emotionally loose-canon boss of the clan, and especially Helen Mirren as his wife Maeve, a scheming Lady Macbeth with a gloriously foul mouth and a chess master’s talent for duplicitous scheming. Emmys seem obvious.
Toss in Paddy Considine as their tormented son, Anson Boon as his homicidal spoiled-brat teenager and Joanne Froggatt as Harry’s kept-in-the-dark wife, and you’ve got a pedigreed supporting cast.
Keep your eyes open for brief but telling perfs from the likes of Janet McTeer and Toby Jones.
Wagner Moura, Brian Tyree Henry
“DOPE THIEF”(Apple +)
Is there any role Brian Tyree Henry can’t play?
He’s impressed as a perplexed rapper in TV’s “Atlanta,” been a heavy in actioners like “Bullet Train” and showed his humanistic side in “Causeway” and “The Fire Inside.”
He massages all those facets into his lead performance in “Dope Thief,” a crime drama that also serves as a touching bromance.
Ray Driscoll (Henry) and his buddy Manny (Wagner Moura) are ex cons who now earn a living by posing as DEA agents and ripping off drug houses. It’s the perfect crime, since their victims aren’t about to go to the authorities for redress.
Perfect until, that is, their latest score results in a shootout. Turns out their target was actually part of a federal sting operation. Among the dead is a government agent; surviving but badly wounded is DEA agent Mina (an excellent Marin Ireland), now determined to track down the guys responsible for killing her partner.
And that’s not even mentioning the white supremacist motorcycle gang who were the original target of the sting and now seeking to recover their cash.
“Dope Thief” alternates between high drama and some satiric comedy, not always making the transition gracefully. But Henry and Moura are weirdly compelling as two guys in way over their heads, with Moura’s character burdened by a bad case of conscience.
And you’ve gotta love Kate Mulgrew as Ray’s chain-smoking, casino-crawling mother (or is it stepmother?)
Alexej Manvelov, Matthew Goode, Leah Byrne
“DEPT. Q” (Netflix)
Based on Danish author Carl Adler-Olsen’s series of crime novels, “Dept. Q” takes his yarn about a squad of police misfits and plops them down in Scotland.
Matthew Goode, whom I usually associate with fairy genteel roles, here is having almost too much fun as scuzzy, scraggly Carl Morck, a police detective with a Scroogish personality who, to keep him out of his colleagues’ hair, is given his own cold case unit operating from the dank basement of police headquarters.
Though a fierce loner, Carl finds himself saddled with other officers from the department’s roster of losers.
Alexej Manvelov is borderline brilliant as Akram, a quiet, seemingly gentle refugee from Syria whose kindly exterior hides a disturbing knowledge of torture techniques. Leah Byrne is Rose, a Kewpie doll of a cop out of the loop since accidentally killing a citizen during a high-speed chase. And Jamie Sives is Hardy, Carls’ old partner now paralyzed after a shooting but still able to man a computer.
This first season is dedicated to the search for a prosecuting attorney (Chloe Pirrie) who has been missing for four years. Periodically the action shifts from Carl and his crew to a remote location where the woman has been enduring a hellish imprisonment.
Though there are parts of the yarn that seem underdeveloped or even superfluous (I’m thinking Carl’s contentious relationship with his angry motherless stepson and his mandated sessions with a shrink played by Kelly Macdonald — who may in upcoming seasons turn into a love interest), the central crime and its slow unravelling makes for compulsory viewing.
Erika Henningsen, Steve Carell, Tina Fey, Colman Domingo, Will Forte, Marco Calvani
“THE FOUR SEASONS”(Netflix)
This spinoff from Alan Alda’s 1981 feature film is a quiet delight.
The movie followed a group of middle-aged friends through four vacations, each set in one of the four seasons (with musical accompaniment featuring Vivaldi’s ever-popular “Four Seasons”).
Tina Fey and Will Forte are Kate and Jack, long married but starting to see cracks in the relationship. The flamboyant Italian Claude (Marco Calvani) and the workaholic Danny (Colman Domingo) are a gay couple going through their own issues.
And then there’s Nick and Anne (Steve Carell, Kerri Kinney), who shock their friends with a divorce. Things get really uncomfortable when Nick starts showing up for group gatherings with Ginny (Erika Henningsen), a dental hygienist half his age.
Like the film, this eight-part series is consistently funny while tackling some pretty serious themes about marriage, infidelity, the middle-aged blahs and how the hell you’re supposed to support both members in a failed marriage.
Audiences have the habit conflating big moments with great acting. Indeed, the history of Oscar wins suggests that if you want a statuette, you’d best come up with a few barn burning peel-off-the-paint moments.
The Brazilian “I’m Still Here” (it was nominated for Best Picture and Best International Feature, winning in the latter category) takes another approach entirely.
Walter Salles’ film (screenplay by Muriel Hauser, Heirtor Lorega and Marcelo Rubens Paiva) tells a hugely dramatic real-life story by concentrating not on the big moments but on the little ones. The results are quietly devastating.
This is the story of one family living through the two-decade reign of terror of a military junta that ruled Brazil from the early 1970s. During that period more than 20,000 citizens were arrested and tortured; nearly 500 were executed without trial.
The film’s first 40 minutes are largely devoted to depicting the middle-class lives of Rubens Paiva, an architectural engineer and former member of Congress, his wife Eunice (Oscar-nominated Fernanda Torres) and their five children.
They live in a big house just yards from Rio’s fabulous beach in the shadow of Sugarloaf. The grownups are deeply in love and enjoy entertaining friends. The kids are a rowdy bunch who practically live in the ocean and adopt a lost dog. It’s pretty damn idyllic.
But there are cracks in this blissful picture. The Paivas’ family friends are nervous liberals; some plan to leave Brazil to avoid right-wing oppression. And while driving with her friends the oldest daughter finds herself caught up in a military dragnet as authorities search for rebels who have kidnapped a foreign diplomat.
Papa Rubens periodically gets unexplained phone calls asking him to receive or deliver unidentified documents. We never will learn just what that was all about.
It all comes to a head with the arrival on the doorstep of armed men in civilian clothes who announced that Rubens is needed to give testimony. He is taken away while several of the interlopers hang around the house, rifling through closets and drawers and generally terrifying the family.
Within a few days Eunice is herself dragged to a military prison where she spends nearly two weeks wallowing in filth and listening to the screams of the tortured; each day a quietly intimidating interrogator has her thumb through a thick book of mug shots, demanding to know if she recognizes any of the faces.
To her queries about the whereabouts of her husband, she is always told: “I do not have that information.”
If this story had been told by an American there would undoubtedly have been some dramatic fireworks. Eunice would go to court to demand the truth about her husband’s disappearance. There would be clashes between rebels and the authorities.
But if any of that happened, in this retelling it occurs offscreen. The fierce focus is on Eunice and how she deals with her confrontation with institutionalized evil. And Torres pulls it off not with big moments but with small ones, with a careful accumulation of details that are registered in the eyes, in subtle body language. This is a woman who must simultaneously nurse a terrible loss and somehow remain strong for her children.
“I’m Still Here,” which follows the Paiva family for nearly 40 years, has been impeccably acted on all fronts. Each of the family’s offspring get a few telling moments, and one must reluctantly admire the chilling work of the actors portraying the blandly terrifying torturers.
Finally, it’s impossible to watch the film without looking at the United States teetering on the brink of dictatorship and wondering if our own citizens will be disappeared.
Brenca Vaccaro, Susan Sarandon, Vince Vaughn, Lorraine Bracco and Talia Shire
“NONNAS” My rating: B- (Netflix)
111 minutes | MPAA rating: PG
Vince Vaughn, who in his three-decade career has specialized in playing smarmy jokesters, takes a more low-keyed approach in “Nonnas.”
Basically he lets four veteran actresses do the heavy comedic lifting while he plays it straight. It works.
“Nonnas” is inspired by the real life story of Joe Scaravella, an unnmarried NYC transit worker who, after the death of his beloved mother, decided to use his inheritance to open a restaurant…one in which real Italian grandmas (“nonnas”) cook their traditional family recipes.
Problem is, Joe knows virtually nothing about the restaurant biz and makes misstep after misstep, in the process that nearly alienated his best bud (Joe Manganiello) and his wife (Drea de Matteo), who have imprudently risked their life savings on Joe’s dream.
The nonnas Joe recruits are a colorful mixed bag. The scratchy-voiced Roberta (Lorraine Bracco, almost unrecognizable) is a grump looking to spend a few hours outside her retirement community. Teresa (Talia Shire) is a timorous former nun. Gia (Susan Sarandon) brings a bit of blowsy glamor as Gia, who runs her own beauty salon. And chatty Antonella (Brenda Vaccaro) introduces Joe to his love interest, a law student (Linda Cardellini) who helps him over some legal hurdles.
The nonnas bitch and kvetch and engage in geographical rivalries (apparently Sicilians don’t get along with Mainlanders), but eventually all fall behind Joe on his march to success.
The resulting film is a pleasant blend of comedy and pathos, with writers Liz Macci and Jody Scaravella and director Stephen Chbosky never going overboard on either.
At the very least you’ll leave the movie craving a big plate of lasagna.
Greta Garbo as Mata Hari
“GARBO: WHERE DID YOU GO?” My rating: C (Netflix)
90 minutes | No MPAA rating
As a fan of Old Hollywood I jumped at the chance to learn more about Greta Garbo, who throughout the 1930s was not only Hollywood’s best-paid actor but also widely regarded as the most famous woman on Earth.
But the Swedish-born star gave it all up after 15 intense years, retiring in 1941 and spending the rest of her life avoiding the limelight.
Why? That’s the question posed by Brit director Lorna Tucker’s documentary, and my appetite was whetted by the news that Tucker had managed to get her hands on Garbo’s private correspondence, home movies and other material never before seen by the public.
Alas, the answer Tucker comes up with his hardly revelatory. Basically, Garbo got sick of being hounded by the press — this was before the term paparazzi had been coined — and decided to bail from the high-profile rat race. She lived a long life, had a lover who protected her, and enjoyed a small coterie of extremely loyal friends who would be cut loose if they should spread info about her private life.
What really chaps my ass, though, are the artsy/fartsy flourishes Tucker has packed into the tale.
Periodically we are addressed by a young woman (uncredited) with a platinum blonde Monroe ‘do who dresses in tight black clothing (like a waitress at a beatnik coffee shop) and stares piercingly at a wall full of Garbo photos, post-it notes and newspaper clippings. Apparently she’s attempting to sleuth out the story behind Garbo’s exile. Mainly what she is is irritating.
Equally off-putting is another actress wearing a creepy Garbo mask who strikes thoughtful poses while offscree Noomi Rapace reads from the actress’s correspondence.
Okay…most folks don’t know anything about Greta Garbo, so they’ll learn a few things from this movie. But only at the risk of getting really irritated.
Among the highlights of Questlove’s Oscar-winning documentary “Summer of Soul” was performance footage of Sly and the Family Stone in their prime.
Now he has given us a full-length appreciation of Sly Stone (born Sylvester Stewart) and it’s both exhilarating and deeply troubling.
Almost from the get-go Sly exhibited musical genius. From his earliest years he performed nightly at his church, playing any instrument that needed playing. As a teen he was a successful radio deejay.
He began producing records in the Bay Area (“Laugh Laugh” by the Beau Brummels, the first version of “Somebody to Love” by Grace Slick and the Great Society).
He formed his own interracial band. At first they played covers of popular songs. Then Sly began writing his own funky tunes.
When his first album tanked he roared back with a song nobody could resist: “Dance to the Music.” (There’s astounding footage of Sly revving up the pasty white crowd on the Ed Sullivan show by wading into the audience and dancing in the aisle…the honkies couldn’t help but get swept up in the funk.)
Questlove has basically given us two movies here. First there’s the exciting rise…followed by the achingly depressing fall marked by paranoia and drugs.
Sly himself only appears in archival footage, including a television interview from what appears to be the mid-1980s. Mostly Questlove allows others — band members, producers, lovers — to tell the tale.
Even when nursing a crippling drug habit Sly could put on a show. One admirer recalls seeing the band in the late 70s: “I left thinking that he could run for President and win.”
But the decline was unmistakeable. He was late for shows or didn’t show up at all. His bandmates were slowly alienated and left one by one, especially as the heady collectivism of his early songs segued into self-referential navel gazing.
Many of the talking heads Questlove has interviewed see in Sly’s slow downfall an all-too-common story of self-inflicted wounds. In fact, the film’s subtitle is “The Burden of Black Genius.” The film is never angry, though — instead it seeks to understand.
Sly Stone, now 82. has mostly been out of the public spotlight for nearly 40 years. He seems to like it that way. One of his children describes him as “a standard old black man.”
But one leaves this fine documentary wondering not only at Sly’s body of work, but at the ripples his career sent through the musical world, paving the way for Janet Jackson, Prince, Parliament/Funkadelic and many others.
Black genius? For sure.
“PANGOLIN: KULU’S JOURNEY” My rating: B- (Netflix)
88 minutes | MPAA rating: PG
The shadow of the Oscar-winning “My Octopus Teacher” hangs heavily over “Pangolin: Kulu’s Journey.”
Both films have been directed by Pippa Ehrlich. Both unfold in South Africa and chronicle the relationship between a human and an exotic creature. Both aim for a synthesis of documentary discipline and intense emotion.
Except that lightning rarely hits twice in the same spot.
Let’s start with our animal hero. Little Kulu is an orphaned pangolin, a bizarre African mammal that seems more like a dino than a creature of our present world.
Pangolins are a bit like anteaters…only weirder. They are the only mammal covered in rigid protective scales. They walk on their hind legs holding their much smaller forelegs in front of them. One pangolin expert describes them as miniature T-Rexes.
The creatures are utterly harmless, able to open their mouths only enough to stick out a foot-long tongue that scarfs up termites, ants and their eggs. When threatened their only defense is to curl up into an armored ball. Currently they are endangered, since their scales are essential to many traditional Chinese medicines.
In fact our central character, Kulu, is rescued as an infant from poachers and turned over to Gareth Thomas, a volunteer (or is he an employee?) of a Pangolin rescue organization. His job is to spend months feeding and protecting Kulu until the creature is big enough to be released back into the wild.
Here’s the problem. Thomas isn’t a terribly interesting fellow. We really don’t learn much about him. His salient feature is his love of Kulu. And that is a one-way deal since Kulu expresses no emotions. No purring. No wagging tail.
In fact, the pangolin spends most of its time trying to ditch Thomas, who can only retrieve the wandering creature at the end of the day with the help of a radio transmitter attached to Kulu’s back.
So the human/animal love affair— one of the most amazing things about “My Octopus Teacher,” is something of a bust this time around.
At nearly 90 minutes “PangolilnL Kulu’s Journey” feels padded. Would have been much more effective as a 60-minute National Geographic entry.
Still. the artful photography of this otherworldly creature going about its business is captivating.
At a certain point in every artist’s life the old mortality bug starts nibbling away. Apparently filmmaker Pedro Almodovar has reached that stage.
“The Room Next Door” is typical Almodovar in that it concentrates on relationships among women. But mostly it’s an atypical contemplation of death.
Popular author Ingrid (Julianne Moore) learns that her old magazine colleague Martha (Tilda Swinton) has terminal cancer. A visit to the hospital leads to much reminiscing (there are flashbacks to Martha’s early life and career as a war journalist) and a startling request.
Martha has obtained a “euthanasia drug” on the dark web. She wants Ingrid to accompany her to a vacation rental in the Catskills where Martha plans to end her life. (“Cancer can’t get me if I get myself.”) She wants Ingrid simply to be on hand in an adjacent bedroom so she won’t feel she’s totally on her own.
Ingrid is reluctant (she hasn’t seen Martha in five years and, besides, her most recent book examines her own fear of death) but finally acquiesces when she learns that several other friends have already turned down Martha’s request.
The source material here is Sigrid Nunez’s 2020 novel What Are You Going Through, and there are times when the English dialogue (I believe this is the first all-English language movie in Almodovar’s resume) sounds like it has been strained through a translation app.
But the real issue here is one of tone. Almodovar is known for his wonderful wackiness (“Women on the Verge…,” “I’m So Excited”), his camp sensibilities and his deep appreciation of over-the-top melodrama.
None of which is in evidence here. Even Almodovar’s visual panache has been muted as if intimidated by the grim subject matter. (Although the closer Martha comes to taking the pill, the more colorful the wardrobe she chooses.)
Clearly Almodovar wants to move us. But I felt peculiarly unmoved.
It’s not the actresses’ fault. Moore is solid as a reluctant participant in what is legally a crime, while Swinton, with her glacial pallor and skeletal physique certainly looks like she’s about to cash in.
Then, too, the screenplay has digressions that seem not to go anywhere. John Turturro has a couple of scenes as the pessimistic writer both women have had relationships with. Alessandro Nivola is a moralistic police detective who in an unnecessary coda grills Ingrid for her part in the death.
And at the very end Martha’s estranged daughter briefly shows up. She also is played by Swinton, whose appearance has been subtly altered (either by makeup/prosthetics or CGI makeover).
Okay. Almodovar has gotten that out of his system. Let’s move on.
Edward Norton as Pete Seeger, Timothee Chalomet as Bob Dylan
“A COMPLETE UNKOWN” My rating: B(Apple+)
141 minutes | MPAA rating: R
“A Complete Unknown” is about as good a Bob Dylan biopic as we’re likely to get.
First, it absolutely nails the where and when of the early 60s folk scene in New York City.
And second, it knows that no matter how hard it tries, its main character will remain an enigma.
I mean, I’ve been listening to Bob Dylan for more than half a century and I still couldn’t give you a reading on his personality. Would I like him in person? Would he be a pain in the ass?
Shut up and listen to the music.
Anyway, James Mangold’s film (the excellent screenplay is by Mangold, Jay Cocks and Elijah Wald) covers Dylan’s early years in the Big Apple, from his crashing the hospital room of the dying Woody Guthrie to his controversial (we’re talking “Rite of Spring” outrage) embrace of an electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival.
Along the way Oscar-nominated Timothee Chalomet delivers a terrific central performance, capturing his subject’s physical and vocal quirks (the musical numbers were all recorded live on camera) while carefully concealing the innermost Bob. It shouldn’t work. It does.
Just as good is Edward Norton as folkie purist Pete Seeger, who takes Dylan under his wing, only to go ballistic when our man turns his attention to rock’n’roll.
Monica Barbaro is solid as folkie “it” girl and Dylan squeeze Joan Baez.
You don’t need an excuse to drag out your old Dylan records, but don’t be surprised if after watching this you do a deep dive into the catalogue.
Keanu Reeves
“JOHN WICK: CHAPTER 4” My rating: B (Roku)
169 minutes | MPAA rating: R
So far there have been four John Wick movies…although actually they’re the same movie with slightly different fight scenes.
“John Wick: Chapter 4” has the same story line as all the others. Good-guy assassin John Wick (Keanu Reeves) once again finds himself in a one-man war against the numberless minions of The Table, the all-powerful international crime syndicate.
“Wick” regulars Ian McShane, Donnie Yen and Laurence Fishburne reprise their supporting roles…the main baddie this time around is played by Bill Skarsgard as a sort of sinister fop.
The story doesn’t matter. It’s the fights that count, and “Wick 4” is crammed with them.
In fact, there’s so much to it that midway through this nearly 3-hour bloodiest I found myself zoning out from too much good fight choreography. (It’s like movie nudity. One naked woman gets your attention; 100 of them leaves you kinda ho-hum.)
Happily the film concludes with a doozie, a nearly 40-minute battle in which our man Wick must kill his way up a long outdoor staircase leading to Paris’ Sacre Coeur Cathedral where he is to engage in a final duel with his main foe.
What’s interesting here is that director Chad Stahelski and his writers (Shay Hatten, Michael Finch, Derek Kolstad) finally accept the ridiculousness of it all and inject some humorous elements into the mayhem.
After killing dozens of bad guys and nearly reaching his goal, Wick is sent tumbling back to the bottom of the stairs to start the whole thing over again. It’s like that old two-reeler in which Laurel and Hardy are deliverymen attempting to carry a piano up an endless flight of stairs.
Reeves even allows a bit of comic exasperation to creep into his performance. He doesn’t quite roll his eyes at the silliness, but he comes close.
Three very good actors obviously saw interesting possibilties in “Holland.”
I can’t.
Mimi Cave’s film flounders in a stylistic miasma. Not quite comedy. Not quite thriller. No edge. No commitment.
Andrew Sodroski’s screenplay unfolds in Holland, Michigan, a burg whose identity is centered in its Dutch heritage.Think Colonial Williamsburg only with a full-scale windmill, a tulip festival and lots of Hans Brinker cosplay.
Nancy Vandergroot (Nicole Kidman) is a mentally and emotionally fragile housewife and high school home ec teacher. Hubby Fred (the ever excellent Matthew Macfadyen) is the very image of midwestern blandness —an optometrist by trade, a civic booster and a model train enthusiast with an entire Lionel-scale world constructed in the garage.
Early on Nancy begins to suspect the Fred’s out-of-town travel to medical conferences is cover for an affair. Driven by bizarre dreams, she teams up with lonely fellow teacher Dave (Gael Garcia Bernal) to catch hubby in the act; along the way the bumbling educators/amateur gumshoes fall into each other’s arms.
For a good hour “Holland” treads water. Perhaps what’s intended here is a sort of satiric “Blue Velvet” atmosphere of cozy domesticity masking buried perversion…but Cave is no David Lynch.
Finally, in its last quarter, “Holland” delivers a head smacking revelation about Fred. No, not extramarital sex. Something way worse.
But by then I was beyond caring. If only “Holland” had really gone for it, pushed the weird buttons with a vengeance. I might have gotten with the program.
Sour Vane Brean
“NUMBER 24” My rating: B (Netflix)
111 minutes | No MPAA rating
Movies about the resistance to the Nazis during WW2 suddenly seem way too relevant.
“Number 24” chronicles the real-life adventures of Gunner Sonsteby, who while still a teen launched Norway’s most successful career of anti-German sabotage.
John Andreas Anderson’s film starts with the 90-year-old Sonsteby (Erik Hivju) addressing an assembly of high school students.
The film then flashes back to the war years where young Gunnar (Sour Vane Brean), now idenfited as Number 24, is recruited by the resistance. He helps publish an underground newspaper. He “borrows” plates from the federal mint with which to print currency. He assumes four separate identities and never spends more than two nights in any one place. He spies on German troop movements.
The secret to his success at least in part is due to his colorlessness. Gunnar is bland, easy to overlook. Hard to imagine as a saboteur. In fact, his longevity is so remarkable that at one point his handlers wonder if he isn’t a double agent.
Ultimately resistance work comes down to doing bad things for the right reasons. In this case Gunnar must plan the assassination of a childhood friend who has become a collaborator.
In the future he must justify his actions to the man’s great-granddaughter.
“Number 24” is a modest triumph, low-keyed but consistently effective.
“SATURDAY NIGHT” My rating: C+ (Netflix)
119 minutes } MPAA rating: R)
Furiously frantic but not particularly funny, “Saturday Night”appears on the 50th anniversary of NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” to depict the machinations surrounding the show’s first-ever broadcast.
Unfolding in two chaotic hours, Jason Reitman’s film is a veritable avalanche of familiar characters, situations, skits and backstage intrigue plucked from the show’s rich mythology. For boomers who grew up on SNL it’s a cultural Where’s Waldo?
But even for them it quickly wears out its welcome. The film is populated not with characters but with caricatures. The only figure to hold center stage is Gabriel LaBelle’s Lorne Michaels, the young producer risking all on a new idea of TV comedy.
Some of the impersonations are dead on. Nicholas Braun is perfect as one of the first guests, wacko comic Andy Kaufman. J.K. Simmons chews scenery as Milton Berle (who I don’t think was there for the first broadcast but here shows up anyway to literally wave his dick). Jon Batiste has a nice turn as musical guest Billy Preston. Paul Rust is a dead ringer for Paul Shaffer.
Others are hit and miss. Matthew Rhys cannot channel opening night host George Carlin. The SNL regulars — Belushi, Aykroyd, Curtin, Newman, Chase, Morris, Radner —are adequate but none knocked me out (or got much of a chance to).
Given the slipshod way in which the first show came together it’s a miracle there was ever a second, but we all know how that worked out.
There is not one word of dialogue in the Czech animation feature “Flow,” which is up for Oscars in both the Animated Film and International Feature categories.
Which means a viewer has to pay attention. No looking out the window and expecting the soundtrack to carry you along.
Happily, concentrating on “Flow” is no problem, since creator Gints Zilbalodis packs his feature with so much intoxicating visual information and so many interesting characters and situations that our attention never wanders.
The film unfolds in a vaguely Asian landscape. There are bamboo huts and Ankor Wat-style temples and even an exotic city. These speak of human habitation, but we never do see an example of homo sapiens.
Instead we find ourselves on a grand adventure with a cat who initially survives a tsunami that floods the jungle, then hitches a ride on a drifting boat to be carried wherever the current takes him (or her).
Our feline protagonist is accompanied by a small menagerie of other animals seeking refuge from the waters. Among them a shuffling capybara (think large groundhog), a pack of dogs who put aside their cat-hunting proclivities for the sake of mutual survival, a magisterial crane, and a lemur obsessed with collecting items (he becomes frantic upon discovering one of his precious finds is missing…I call him Gollum).
We get to know them not from what they say (again, no dialogue) but by their actions, which have been brilliantly envisioned to be both sentient and animal.
“Flow” has no plot. It’s a series of episodes. There’s no explanation of the disaster that befalls the characters, no clue as to where all the people have gone. The movie doesn’t so much end as drift away.
So if you’re looking for a tidy package wrapped up with a bow, you’ll be frustrated.
If, however, you’re ready for something you’ve never seen before, dive into this brave new world.
Miles Teller, Anya Taylor-Joy
“THE GORGE” My rating: C+ (Apple TV +)
127 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13)
“The Gorge” has a nifty premise and a really solid opening 40 minutes.
After that it’s a bit of a mess.
Sniper Levi (Miles Teller) is tormented by the many people he has killed, both as a Marine and more recently as a paid mercenary. Looking for a change, he’s intrigued by a offer proffered by an obviously high-ranking government mover and shaker (Sigourney Weaver).
How would Levi like to spend a year in isolation, getting his head together while employing his skills as a marksman?
It’s all very mysterious, and after a long plane ride during which he was drugged Levi ends up in a concrete sentry tower overlooking a vast fog-filled chasm. His job is to use the resources he’s been given — long-range rifles, explosive mines dangled over the precipice, automated machine guns — to keep whatever is making eerie noises down there from getting out.
Oh…and about a mile away on the other side of the canyon is another sentry tower, this one occupied by Drasa (Anya Taylor-Joy), who like Levi has enjoyed a career of long-distance assassinations…albeit her employers were Eastern Bloc types.
Despite orders not to fraternize, the two snipers begin communicating via binoculars and messages written on big sheets of paper. It’s kind of a chaste courtship…at least until Levi uses a bazooka and metal cable to string a zip line above the roiling clouds.
So far so good. But the meet-cute romance that develops doesn’t convince (these two are too hard core to get their kicks dancing to ‘80s pop) and the mystery of just what is happening down below is a whole lot of nothing.
We’re talking about a long-ago government experiment that went south, creating an environment filled with mutant creatures (kinda reminds of the Skull Island sequence in “King Kong”).
Teller and Taylor-Joy are both fine performers, but Zach Dean’s script and Scott Derrickson’s direction give them little to work with.
Production values are solid, but “The Gorge” suffers from the great gaping hole that afflicts so many sci-fi/horror entries — a great buildup to a mediocre reveal.
Demi Moore’s much-deserved Oscar-nominated performance in “The Substance” is the film’s main selling point, but let’s not overlook the stunning (well, mostly) contribution from Coralie Fargeat, who has taken home noms in both the directing and original screenplay categories.
For its first hour, at least, “The Substance” is riveting stuff, a mashup of social commentary, a vicious satire of showbiz duplicity, an angry examination of feminine angst and a staggering truckload of Cronenberg-level body horror.
The premise is vaguely sci-fi — an aging actress (Moore) takes a new (and presumably illegal) drug that will allow her to “give birth” to a younger and more beautiful version of herself.
Moore’s career-stymied character is Elisabeth; her drop-dead alter ego, whom she calls Sue, is played by Margaret Qualley.
Margaret Qualley
The “science” behind all this is hard to grasp…basically we have two female bodies, one old and one young. Elisabeth can occupy Sue’s lithe body for seven days, then she must spend a week in her older form. While one body is active, the other lies in a coma, feeding intravenously on liquid nourishment provided by The Substance’s unseen creators/distributors.
Despite the admonition “Remember, You Are One,” Sue is all about herself; she extends her active cycle beyond seven days. Turns out abusing The Substance has grave (and alarmingly gross) consequences.
If “The Substance” relies on the familiar theme of a cure that isn’t all it seems (“Flowers for Algernon,” “Seconds,” “Awakenings”) it at least presents itself as a stylistic tour de force. Fargeat effortlessly juggles the script’s various elements — there’s horror, yes, but also some laugh-out-loud moments provided by Dennis Quaid as the most soulless producer in Hollywood.
The film’s look (though set in L.A. it was filmed in France and the U.K.) is dominated by chilly interiors, long claustrophobic corridors and Elizabeth’s white-tiled bathroom, which is the size of a small house.
“The Substance” demands considerable nudity from its two leading ladies, but there’s not a hint of eroticism. Elisabeth apparently has no sex life, while Sue takes pleasure not from the act itself but from being an object of desire. As the Substance does its sinister body-warping work, you’ll find yourself hoping that the women keep their clothes on.
The downside is a running time of nearly 2 1/2 hours. The film scores most of its points early and then descends into a nightmare of ghastly visceral visuals. This might not matter if we actually cared about Elisabeth/Sue, but the film is as chilly as that white bathroom, observing with almost clinical detachment the older woman’s travails while never establishing her as a character worth caring about.
Sebastian Stan, Renate Reinsve and Adam Pearson
“A DIFFERENT MAN” My rating: B- (Max)
112 minutes | MPAA rating: R
A distaff version of “The Substance” is “A Different Man,” in which a deformed fellow is given a drug that dissolves his tumors and leaves him looking like a movie star…namely Sebastian Stan.
Stan’s character, Edward, suffers from a Quasimodo/Elephant Man-level facial disfiguration. (The makeup is alarmingly convincing.) His condition has left him a social outcast who can only dream about befriending his new neighbor, the aspiring playwright Ingrid (Renate Reinsve).
Edward undergoes a new therapy that transforms him into a hunk. But his new situation also dramatically alters his personality; he changes his identity and dives into the happy (i.e. utterly selfish) life he has always dreamed of.
Writer/director Aaron Schimberg presents Edward’s story as a black comedy…although the laughs are few. Irony is the dominant emotion.
After Edward’s disappearance, Ingrid writes a play about her misshapen neighbor. Now Edward (she doesn’t recognize him) lands the leading role, which requires him to don face-hiding prosthetics on stage.
Like I said…ironic.
Enter Oswald, a debonair, utterly charming Brit who has precisely the facial deformation the role requires. Oswald is portrayed by Adam Pearson, an actor who really has the character’s condition (he had a brief but memorable turn as one of the alien’s victims in “Under the Skin”).
Before long the good-looking Edward is out, and his role taken over by Oswald. Is this just fate, or has Oswald been conniving to replace his fellow actor? Not just on stage, but in Ingrid’s bed as well?
The chilliness that kept me from wholeheartedly committing to “The Substance” affects “A Different Man” as well. Most films about misshapen outcasts ask us to empathize with those characters. Schimberg’s film suggests that Edward wasn’t a particularly likable individual before his transformation, and even less so after.
But you might very well consider going home with Oswald.
Fans of humanistic comedy (i.e. “Ted Lasso,” “Shrinking”) should make a beeline for all three seasons of “Somebody Somewhere,” an endearing and rudely hilarious series about life’s losers.
Or are they?
Bridget Everett, famed (and infamous) for her raunchy cabaret act, stars as Samantha, a fortysomething single woman with a voracious appetite for beer and unhealthy food whose bawdy/blowsy persona masks personal hurts and deep longings.
(Is there a better title than “Somebody Somewhere” to describe romantic yearning?)
Samantha gets through life with a little bit of help from her friends…and what a collection of distinct personalities!
Her sister Tricia (Mary Catherine Garrison) is the most conventional of the lot, dealing with the end of her marriage by opening a gift shop full of homey items embroidered with profane exclamations.
Best bud Joel (Jeff Hiller) is a gay man whose initial weirdness (who the hell cuts his hair?) is quickly eclipsed by his soulful decency.
Then there’s transexual Fred (Murray Hill), a university professor who seems to be an expert in just about everything.
“Somebody Somewhere” takes place in Manhattan KS, and while most of the series is shot in Illinois (aside from a few establishing shots of Kansas landmarks) there are enough references to K-State, K.U. and Kansas City to make Midwesterners feel right at home.
Laughter through tears. My favorite emotion.
Preston Mota, Taylor Kitsch
“AMERICAN PRIMEVAL” (Netflix):
The Western, once a staple of American entertainment, has been saved from extinction by the rise of streaming services.
The latest to hit the small screen is “American Primeval,” an astonishingly bloody miniseries that stomps on plenty of toes.
The essential plot is far from novel. A solitary and sulky mountain man (Taylor Kitsch) reluctantly finds himself guiding a woman from the East (Betty Gilpin) and her tweener son (Preston Mota) across the West for a rendezvous with the husband she hasn’t seen in many years.
Turns out the lady is more than she seems. Back in civilization she’s wanted for murder, and their journey is complicated by pursuing bounty hunters.
That’s just one aspect of the yarn cooked up by writer/creator Mark L. Smith (“The Revenant”) and director Peter Berg.
As a background to all this there’s the 1857 Mormon War and the infamous Mountain Meadow Massacre in which an LDS militia — fueled by religious hysteria and political paranoia — disguised themselves as Native Americans to wipe out an entire wagon train whose leaders made the mistake crossing Utah on their way to Oregon.
The militia officers are painted with a painfully heavy brush…basically they are conscienceless psychos. We also meet LDS prophet Brigham Young, played by Kim Coates, who has traded in his motorcycle from “Sons of Anarchy” for a horse and an eye-rolling display of duplicitous villainy.
Needless to say, 21st century Mormons will take umbrage. Historian have long wondered just how much Young had to do with the massacre, but Smith’s script actually shows the Mormon leader ordering the butchery.
There’s yet another plot, this time centering on a Mormon man (Dane DeHann) who loses both his scalp and his wife (Saura Lightfoot-Leon) to marauding Native Americans. He takes off after his missing spouse without bothering to wash his face of the blood that drips from his savaged hairline.
One of my favorites is the famous explorer and trapper Jim Bridger (Shea Whigham), who from his base in Wyoming’s Ft. Bridger interacts with most of the major characters.
And there’s a U.S. army officer (Lucas Neff) whose diary entries, read as narration, help set the scene.
“American Primeval” has its share of historic incongruities (uh…there are no mountains outside St. Joseph MO). And while it shares with “Lonesome Dove” multiple characters and plot threads, its overall feel is more bleak and cynical than inspirational. Certainly there are no characters to enchant us in the way Gus and Woodrow did on their cattle drive.
Still, this series has some kiiller scenery and the action is brutal and merciless. Squeamish viewers will spend a fair bit of time staring down at their laps.
“SQUID GAME – Season 2” (Netflix)
Sometimes you can’t go home again.
So it is with Season 2 of “Squid Game,” the smash Korean series about a secret island where life’s unfortunates play deadly games in the hope of walking away with a fortune.
Lee Jung-jae reprises his role as Song Gi-hun, who in the first season won the game (meaning he was the sole survivor). Tormented by what he experienced and determined to make the game’s organizers pay, he spends his fortune trying to find that mysterious isle.
Eventually he ends up back in the game, using his knowledge of the place to plan a takeover attempt.
This time around, though, something’s off. The characters are painfully one-dimensional, less real people than symbols (trans woman, fugitive from North Korea, religious fanatic, etc.).
In a new twist for this season, one of the players is a plant. Lee Byung-hun portrays one of the game’s organizers who befriends our hero and helps him foment rebellion — though why he does this is never explained.
It all ends with a cliffhanger and a wait of another two years for the third season. I don’t think I’m up for it.
That Colton Whitehead’s Pultizer-winning novel Nickel Boys is unfilmable is pretty much a given.
The book, a first-person retelling of a young black man’s stay in a brutal reformatory in the early 1960s, has one of those “Sixth Sense:”-level “gotcha” endings that works on the printed page but defies visual representation.
(Sorry if I seem coy. Those who have read the novel know what I’m talking about, and I don’t want to ruin the movie for those who haven’t.)
So I’m happy to report that first-time writer/director RaMell Ross has found a way to tell Colson’s story with the surprise intact. The answer to the conundrum is the first-person camera.
First-person camera movies — in which the camera views the protagonist’s world though his/her eyes — have a limited and not terribly successful track record.
Back in 1946 Robert Montgomery directed the Raymond Chandler mystery “Lady in the Lake” using a first-person camera. Montgomery plays detective Phillip Marlowe, but we only see the actor when the character looks into a mirror.
A year later in “Dark Passage” Bogart played an escaped convict. We see the film through the character’s eyes until about halfway through, when he undergoes plastic surgery and emerges looking like, well, Humphrey Bogart.
Neither film works all that well.
Here writer/director Ross resurrects the technique and the results are simultaneously satisfying and unsettling.
The plot is fairly straightforward. Elwood, a black teenager in Civil Rights-era Florida, is on his way to college when he hitches a ride in what turns out to be a stolen car. He ends up sentenced to spend the next few years in the Nickel Institute.
Ethan Herisse, Brandon Wilson
Elwood’s early life — including the influence of his doting grandmother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) — is depicted in a cataract of kaleidoscopic images.The effect is breathless yet lyrical, with editing (by Nicholas Monsour) that gives the entire film a sort of life-is-flashing-before-your eyes staccato sensation.
When the film began I assumed this creative but challenging approach would be retired after an opening sequence. But no…it’s there for the duration.
“Nickel Boys” is unique in that we almost never get a scene with a conventional beginning, middle and end. Rather we get snippets of scenes zapping by, and from these threads we have to assemble a tapestry.
If you can’t handle it (and many viewers won’t be able to) this movie will drive you nuts.
Teenage Elwood is played by Ethan Herisse, whose voice we hear but whom we rarely see (unless there’s a mirror in the room).
Since he’s black Elwood resides in a segregated wing of Nickel. He and his fellow inmates must attend class, but the administration puts more emphasis on putting them to work, either on the grounds or hired out to local farmers and homeowners. (The parallels to slavery are unmistakeable.)
The bookish, utterly inoffensive Elwood also discovers that physical brutality — torture, in fact — is part of the curriculum. One of the white teachers, Spencer (Hamish Linklater), is particularly fond of taking boys to the “white house,” a cottage on the edge of the property where their screams will not disturb the sleep of others.
Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor
Periodically a boy will vanish. The teachers will claim he ran away, but there are little mounds of dirt on the grounds that look an awful lot like graves.
All this is filtered through Elwood’s relationship with another boy, Turner (Brandon Wilson). Turner is as cocky as Elwood is retiring, but they watch each other’s backs.
When we first see Turner it is through Elwood’s eyes. But a few minutes later Ross does something extraordinary. He gives us a conversation between the two boys in which we’re in Elwood’s head. And then he replays the whole scene, only this time we’re looking at Elwood through Turner’s eyes.
From that point on the film will shift points of view between the two youngsters. The only time we see them together in the same frame is when they stand beneath a shop’s mirrored ceiling and look up at their reflections.
In the final third of the film we are introduced to Adult Elwood. Thirty years have passed and Elwood lives in NYC and runs a moving business. He’s married and devotes his evenings to scouring the Internet for news about the now-defunct Nickel Institute, where investigators are sifting through dozens of unmarked graves.
Adult Elwood (as he’s listed in the credits) is played by Daveed Diggs of “Hamilton” fame, but we only see him from behind. There’s a reason for this; readers of the book will understand.
Despite having to do most of his acting with his voice and the back of his head, Diggs has a marvelous scene where his character has a random encounter in a bar with another Nickel survivor.
All of this leads up to the yarn’s head-smacking last-moment revelation, which comes as Adult Elwood recalls the night Elwood and Turner attempted to escape Nickel once and for all.
On many levels “Nickel Boys” is a brilliant piece of work. So I feel somewhat churlish in stating that the thing that makes it work — the first-person camera — is also the thing that kept me at arm’s length emotionally.
I ended up admiring the film more for its ambience and message than for its dramatic palette.
Even so, I cannot think of another movie quite like it.
When it comes to his second film as a writer/director Jesse Eisenberg doesn’t shy from the big issues.
What’s amazing about “A Real Pain” is the way he deftly balances the comedic and the dramatic (even the tragic). It’s a nifty trick that has eluded even veteran filmmakers.
Moreover, Eisenberg also stars in the film…though he’s magnanimous enough to give the really showy material to co-star Kieran Culkin.
David (Eisenberg) is a New Yorker with a wife and young son who has invited his black sheep cousin Benji (Culkin) on a guided tour of Poland, the birthplace of their dearly beloved and recently departed grandmother.
It’ll be a chance for the boyhood buds to reconnect, not only with each other but with their family history.
They’ve signed on for a Holocaust tour (their comrades on the journey will be American Jews); at some point David plans to leave the tour so he and Benji can visit the house in which their grandmother lived.
From their first meeting in an American airport it’s obvious that they’re oil and water.
David is uptight, OCD, emotionally muted. He has everything planned down to the minute.
Benji is an unkempt man child —garrulous, charming, spontaneous, He’s the sort of guy unafraid to ask intensely personal questions of strangers, to nudge you out of your comfort zone. He has prepared for the trip by mailing a parcel of marijuana to their Warsaw hotel.
Eisenberg’s script follows two tracks. First there’s the cousins’ experiences with the other members of the tour.
Jennifer Gray has a nice turn as a middle-aged divorcee from LA; Kurt Egylawan plays an African convert to Judaism. Will Sharpe has some good moments as the tour leader, whose running commentary of canned observations may be designed to mask the pain of regularly visiting sites where thousands of innocents were slaughtered.
Throughout, though, there’s a canny dissection of the young men’s relationship, the shared love often threatened by Benji’s barely-hidden manic depression. Still mourning his grandmother, Benji tries to mask his pain by playing a cocky hipster…but the facade is cracking.
I said Eisenberg gave the showy material to Culkin, and that’s true. But late in the proceedings David has a an absolutely wonderful monologue about family and responsibility that gives the film a transcendent moral core.
Vampire movies are so ubiquitous that we’ve become inured to them.
When was the last time a film about a bloodsucker actually scared you?
(For me it was seeing Bela Lugosi’s “Dracula” when I was 11. It happened again when I first viewed F.W. Murnau’s silent “Nosferatu” in my early 20s. Since then it’s been mostly downhill.)
So how should we approach the new “Nosferatu” brought to us by writer/director Robert Eggers (“The Witch,” “The Lighthouse,” “The Northman”)?
It’s the third “Nosferatu,” after the 1922 silent German Expressionist classic and Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake. Though an obvious ripoff of Bram Stoker’s Dracula novel (Murnau renamed the characters in a vain attempt to avoid being sued for copyright infringement), “Nosferatu” introduced some interesting visual ideas which were picked up by Herzog and are now reamplified by Eggers.
Indeed, this “Nosferatu” works far better visually than it does dramatically.
Much of the dialogue (the screenplay is by Eggers) has a flowery late Victorian melodramatic feel that borders on the laughable. And the characters aren’t particularly compelling.
But the look of the piece is simply fantastic. Eggars and cinematographer Karin Blaschke slide effortlessly between blue-tinged black and white and a pastel pallette not unlike an old-fashioned hand-colored postcard.
There are a couple of extended tracking shots that are mind boggling.
And Craig Lathrop’s production design — especially the fantastically rugged Carpathian mountains and forests and the vampire’s crumbling castle — is little short of spectacular.
Nicholas Hoult, Aaron Taylor-Johnson
The plot closely follows the original. Estate agent Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult) is sent to Romania on business, leaving behind his recent bride Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp…yes, Johnny’s daughter), who has long been plagued by “melancholia” and horrific dreams.
Thomas eventually finds himself in the weird castle of Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgard), who is…well, you know. He barely survives the encounter, then sets off in pursuit of Orlok, who is headed to Germany, drawn by an almost spiritual bond with the terrified/visionary Ellen.
Meanwhile Ellen’s mania is throwing into turmoil the household of friends Friedrich and Anna (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Emma Corbin). Their family physician (Ralph Ineson) suggests bringing in his old professor (Willem Dafoe) who has been thrown out of the university for his occult obsessions. This eccentric suspects that evil is on its way.
Well, duh.
In terms of plotting, then, this is standard-issue stuff. But Eggers and company toss in some nifty variations.
For instance, there’s the look of Orlok. The filmmakers have rigorously avoided letting any image of Skarsgard in costume reach the Internet…although they’ve posted some early makeup designs that were abandoned.
The Orkok of Murnau and Herzog was almost rat-like. But this Orlok feels more, well, human. His bald head shows some patches of decay, and his face is dominated by a hooked nose and a droopy mustache. Skarsgard delivers his lines in a sort of growl.
What’s surprising is the aura of inevitability as the vampire makes his way to his rendezvous with Ellen. The Count may be a monster, but he’s a surprisingly romantic monster, driven by forces even he cannot understand.
Depp’s performance is dominated by wide-eyed dread. But she has a couple of scenes of demonic possession that are “Exorcist”-level freaky.
And I haven’t even mentioned Simon McBurney as Knock, Thomas’ boss and this version’s equivalent of Renfield. It’s a kick-out-the-jams performance highlighted by the character’s devouring of a live pigeon.
There’s some grotesque blood-letting and brief nudity, and viewers with a rodent phobia are warned that there’s a supporting cast of several thousand rats.
At its best this “Nosferatu” suggests more than it shows. Particularly effective are scenes in which the Count appears only as a shadow.
Films have for so long catered to male ideals of eroticism that“Babygirl” feels almost revolutionary.
Writer/director Halina Reijn’s examination of female frustration and desire offers a situation that we’ve seen many times before: A person in a position of authority gets sexually involved with a person in their employ.
Except this time around the individual in power is a woman and her lover a young man working as an intern at her robotics company.
When we first see Romy (Kidman) she’s having very noisy sex with her husband Jacob (Antonio Banderas). Looks like an ideal relationship — hot action in the bedroom, plenty of money, two teenage daughters, a posh NYC address.
As we’ll learn, Romy has been faking it. She’s never had an orgasm, at least not one that wasn’t self-administered.
Enter Samuel (Harris Dickinson), an intern whose weird blend of assertive cockiness and laid back coolness Romy first finds maddening, then intriguing. She reluctantly agrees to mentor Samuel during his stay at the firm…and things start to heat up.
Reijn pulls off the near impossible here by delivering a huge blast of eroticism while avoiding the whole male gaze thing. It’s the most overtly sexual performance of Kidman’s career, but it never veers into exploitation.
Samuel initially brings Romy to a noisy orgasm just with his hands (she’s lying on the floor, fully clothed); when he’s not playing the dominant lover he’s actually quite sweet and attentive.
The problem, of course, is that Romy’s infatuation — her growing recognition that she’s a sexual submissive — threatens her job (h.r. departments frown on this sort of thing) and her marriage.
And when another intern (Sophie Wilde) attempts to blackmail Romy over the affair, her life is turned upside down.
“Babygirl” (that’s Samuel’s nickname for his boss) ends on an upbeat note I’m not sure I buy. And the film’s first 30 or so minutes felt brittle and off-putting.
But eventually the plot, the performances and the aura of guilty pleasure click into focus.
Ryan Destiny, Brian Tyree Henry
“THE FIRE INSIDE” My rating: B-(In theaters)
109 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13
“The Fire Inside” follows the usual arc of a sports movie, tracing the career of an athlete from childhood to triumph on the world stage.
But it throws a couple of changeups.
First, this is the true story of Claressa “T-Rex” Shields, the first woman to win an Olympic gold medal in boxing — at the tender age of 17. Guys who want to fight are a dime a dozen, but a girl? And one that young?
Second, the film views the fights themselves as an afterthought. They’re brief and not particularly violent; mostly they provide the background for a couple of solid character studies and for the emerging theme of female empowerment.
Claressa is played by Ryan Destiny, who nicely captures the drive and determination of a young woman determined to pull herself out of an oppressive domestic situation.
And she’s paired here with Brian Tyree Henry as Jason Crutchfield, the volunteer boxing coach who initially was reluctant to have a girl training in his Flint, Mich., gym, but went on to become Claressa’s mentor and de facto father.
Henry can play just about anything (he was memorable as a oft-perplexed rapper in “Atlanta”), but his ace in the hole is his ability (we saw it opposite Jennifer Lawrence in “Causeway”) to express basic human decency without a trace of self-consciousness. A character like this one makes you want to be a better person.
“The Fire Inside” was written by Barry Jenkins (“Moonlight”) and directed by Rachel Morrison, and in addition to exploring a character’s physical and psychological development over several years, it also takes on the struggle of female athletes to achieve economic parity with their male counterparts.
Drew Starkey, Daniel Craig
“QUEER” My rating: B- (In theaters)
136 minutes | MPAA rating: R
The novels of William S. Burroughs have rarely been made into movies. In part it’s the unapologetic subject matter. Also, there’s rarely anything like a conventional plot.
In tackling “Queer” director Luca Guadagnino (“Call Me By Your Name,” “Challengers,” “Bones and All” ) works hard to find a cinematic equivalent for Burroughs’ distinctive literary style. And for the first hour or so he pulls it off.
The protagonist (and Burroughs’ alter ego) is William Lee, an American living in Mexico in the 1950s. Apparently Lee has family money. He doesn’t work. Mostly he cruises for young men.
Lee is portrayed by Daniel Craig, an unlikely choice since Craig is one of the sexiest men in movies and William Lee is an embarrassingly transparent letch on the downside of desirability. But Craig pulls it off, mining the pathetic yearning of an aging man for some sort of physical and emotional transcendence.
He finds it (he thinks) in Eugene Allerton (Drew Starkey), a curiously non-committal American (is he gay? straight?) only recently discharged from the military. The guy oozes indifference, which only makes Lee’s clumsy attempts at seduction all the more wince-worthy.
But talk about creating an environment! As sumptuously photographed by Sayombhu Mukdeeprom, “Queer” is simultaneously dreamlike and grittily down to earth. Moreover, it radiates “Under the Volcano”-level decadent dissolution.
There’s also an amazingly good supporting performance by Jason Schwartzman as Joe Guidry, a character clearly based on Alan Ginsberg. Overweight and astonishingly hairy, Schwartzman utterly loses himself. It’s some of his finest work.
The film’s second half finds Lee and Allerton trekking to South America to dabble in psychedelic plants. There they hang at the jungle research station of a renegade scientist (Lesley Manville, all but unrecognizable), getting ripped on ayahuasca.
By this time the film’s lack of anything like a real plot becomes a drawback. As does Starkey’s one-note performance. At well over two hours, “Queer” begs for some tightening.
Still, at various moments it’s a genuinely hallucinogenic experience.
Some filmmakers spend a lifetime to become merely competent at their craft. With only his third feature Brady Corbet has delivered a masterwork.
We’re talking Orson Welles-level talent.
“The Brutalist” is the saga of a Holocaust survivor’s post-war life in the U.S.A. It features an indelible sense of time and place, two Oscar-worthy performances, a running time of more than 3 1/2 hours, and contains perhaps the fiercest indictment of capitalism ever proffered in an American film.
That Corbet and co-writer Mona Fastvold (they’re a couple) pull this off without resorting to strident polemics or soapbox grandstanding is nothing short of miraculous. The film doesn’t tell us. It shows us.
And it was shot in just 24 days on a budget that could hardly accommodate a chamber piece, much less an epic.
Adrien Brody is Lazlo Toth, a Hungarian architect who survived the Nazi death camps and has now been sent to live with an Americanized cousin (Alessandro Nivola) who operates a Philadelphia furniture store.
Lazlo’s transition to his new home isn’t easy. For starters, his wife Erzsebet (Felicity Jones) and niece Sofia (Rafael Cassidy), who were sent to a different camp, are still in Europe, tangled up in red tape. It will be several more years before they are reunited.
After an existence marked by imminent death, Lazlo is uneasy in this land and of security and plenty. Surely something bad will happen. Not to mention that everything about him quietly shouts “alien” and that in Eisenhower-era America his deeply-held esthetics are viewed as useless affectation.
His cousin’s wife (Emma Laird) is a Catholic uneasy with having a Jew under her roof.
And of course Lazlo is desperate to resume his architecture career, the one thing in which he is free to reveal his true essence.
Once the preliminaries are out of the way, “The Brutalist” (the word, never spoken in the film, describes a school of monumental modern architecture reliant on blocky forms and raw concrete construction) settles on its major theme, that of Lazlo’s relationship with an American millionaire who hires him to design a community center.
Guy Pearce gives the best performance of his career as industrialist Harrison Van Buren, a man so rich he has to work overtime not to come off as an entitled asshole. The film’s major theme is the minutely detailed power struggle between the man with the money and the man with a vision.
Guy Pearce
It’s an old saw that money corrupts (“Citizen Kane,” anyone?), but I’ve never seen a film — or a performance — that depicts that idea so succinctly or with such insight. Van Buren tries desperately to present himself as open minded and progressive. He makes of show of treating Lazlo as a friend — an honored guest, in fact — but the imbalance in their relationship (and it goes deeper than just employer/employee) is ultimately ruinous.
For starters, Van Buren is a mercurial character whose enthusiasm for the project waxes and wanes. He’s all too eager to make compromises on design and materials that violate the architect’s ambitions.
Brody’s Lazlo must walk a fine line between deference and assertiveness. How much personal dignity and professional standards can he cede to achieve his dream of concrete and glass?
The marvel of Brody’s work here is that we’re in Lazlo’s corner even when his actions are counterproductive and self-destructive (early on he discovers the potential for escape in heroin). I know of few performances that so perfectly distills the fire of artistic ambition in all its pain and triumph.
The film’s big flaw (it’s what keeps me from giving the movie an A rating) is a plot development well into the third hour that struck me as contrived and wholly unexpected. It involves a heinous act by Van Buren that feels totally out of whack with what we’ve seen up to that point. It’s as if Corbet and Fastbold were desperate to wrap things up with a shocker and pulled this one out of thin air.
(Yeah, I get it from a thematic point of view…the millionaire does to Lazlo literally what he does to the world figuratively on a daily basis…but it still feels like a weak Hail Mary effort.)
So “The Brutalist” isn’t perfect. But the very fact that it got made is a miracle. The movie is in a class by itself…the only other films I can compare it to are those of Paul Thomas Anderson.
I cannot wait to see what Brady Corbet comes up with next. But even if this is a one-shot deal, it will be regarded as a cinematic landmark.
Adams’ Mother (we never get her name) once had a career as an artist. But she gave it up to get married to a nice guy (Scoot McNairy) who’s away on business four nights a week, leaving her to deal with their four-year-old son (played by twins Arleigh and Emmett Snowden, who are weirdly reminiscent of Cary Guffey in “Close Encounters…”).
She’s slowly going nuts. Weirder still, Mother starts growing a tail and multiple nipples. Neighborhood pooches leave piles of dead wild animals on her front porch…evidently as tribute. She develops a taste for raw meat and sex in the, well, you know…doggie position. Eventually she becomes (or imagines she becomes) a beautiful red Huskie running freely through the night.
Adams is terrific as a burned out woman rapidly going to seed. But “Nightbitch” feels less like a feature than a one-hour episode of “Twilight Zone” or some other dark fantasy. At 129 minutes it spends much of its time repeating itself.
Andrew Garfield, Florence Pugh
“WE LIVE IN TIME” My rating: B (Apple rental)
108 minutes | MPAA rating: R
Given its subject matter, “We Live In Time” might easily have been a by-the-numbers romantic weeper, a standard-issue Lifetime Original.
It transcends those limitations thanks to a couple of super lead performances from Andrew Garfield and Florence Pugh), sensitive direction from John Crowley (“Brooklyn”) and a screenplay by Nick Payne that embraces a time shifting narrative that keeps us invested and guessing.
The film follows the courtship and marriage of Tobias, (Garfield), who has a job in online marketing, and Almut (Pugh), a chef with her own London restaurant. They will marry, have a child, and deal with Almut’s struggles with cancer.
But none of this is straightforward. We’re always jumping jumps back and forth in time. We eventually figure out where we are in the continuum through little tells.
For instance: Are Tobias and Almut living in the country or in the city? In any given scene are they dinks (double income, no kids), or has their precious bundle arrived? (This film offers the most unforgettable childbirth scene in movie history.) Almut’s hair is a big tell…is it long and flowing or cropped chemo-style?
Throughout Garfield and Pugh ignore the narrative sleight of hand and concentrate on giving deep, fully-rounded performances.
“We Live in Time” could have been no more than a cinematic gimmick. Give it a chance and it will move you.
“LOOK INTO MY EYES” My rating: B (Prime rental)
105 minutes | MPAA rating: R
Psychics.
Are they for real? Con artists? Are they and their clientele awash in self-deception?
Those are the questions you’d expect of a documentary about a handful of NYC psychics plying their trade — questions Lana Wilson’s “Look Into My Eyes” utterly ignores.
This cinema verite effort (no exposition, no narration, no explanatory graphics) mostly records sessions between the psychics and their customers.
If there’s manipulation and flimflam going on here, it’s not obvious. The psychics are humble and empathetic (yeah, it could be a performance). Most have an uncanny knack for zeroing in on whatever loss or trauma the client hopes to address.
Sometimes there are obvious emotional connections with attendant moist-eyed moments.
Wilson’s camera also follows some of the psychics in their off-time. Curiously, most of them appear to be in some way damaged or struggling. One fellow is an obvious hoarder (and hopeful musical theater performer); most seem to have come become psychics by accident. They simply realized that something extraordinary was happening to them.
:”Look into My Eyes” won’t convince anyone of anything. But the film does suggest that psychic readings may provide emotional benefits for both parties, irregardless of any paranormal implications.
Maybe we’re looking at it all wrong. It’s therapy.
Daisy Ridley
“YOUNG WOMAN AND THE SEA” My rating: C (Disney+)
129 minutes | MPAA rating: PG
Despite its timely feminist message and impressive production values, “Young Woman and the Sea” is a very old-fashioned movie. It feels like one of those TV bio-pics produced by Disney in the ‘50s and ‘60s.
Daisy Ridley stars as Trudy Ederle, who in the 1920s overcame rampant chauvinism in the sports world to become the first woman to swim the English Channel. Think of it as “Nyad — Junior Division.”
Ridley is surrounded here by some solid “name” players. Christopher Eccleston appears as her first coach, a creep who actively sabotages her first attempt. The seemingly inescapable Stephen Graham (he’s been in six films or TV series this year) plays a bearded fellow channel swimmer who takes our girl on as a protege.
Kim Bodnia does as nice job as Trudy’s German-American father, who reluctantly gets sucked into her quest; Jeanette Hain is the Missus and Tilda Cobham-Hervey is Trudy’s ever-supportive sister.
The biggest issue here is Ridley’s performance. Aside from a determination to succeed, there’s not a whole lot of interesting angles to Trudy’s personality. She’s essentially colorless — at least until she gets in the water.
After viewing D.W. Griffith’s silent classic “The Birth of a Nation,” President Woodrow Wilson was supposed to have called the experience “like writing history with lightning.”
I’ve always regarded that comment as hyperbolic and perhaps a bit naive (after 70 plus years of moviegoing I’m rarely left in awe), but watching Tim Fehlbaum’s riveting docudrama “September 5” I now understand what old Woodrow was feeling.
The subject is the terrorist attack on the 1972 Munich Olympics. But Fehlbaum and co-writers Moritz Binder and Alex Davis depict neither the Arab perpetrators nor the Israeli athletes who were their hostages. We don’t witness any gunfire. We don’t see any bodies.
Instead the tale is told exclusively from the perspective of the crew from ABC Sports, whose broadcast studio was only a few hundred feet from the dormitories where the drama was playing out.
These guys (and a few women) were there to cover the world’s biggest sporting event. In a matter of a minutes they had to pivot from sports/entertainment to a far more electrifying human drama.
They acquitted themselves admirably…but not without facing some thorny ethical dilemmas along the way.
These games were the first time a sporting event could be seen live around the world, thanks to a lone satellite that could pick up an audio/visual signal and distribute it globally.
The first challenge facing ABC sports chief Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) was commandeering satellite air time. That lone satellite was being shared by all the broadcast networks; each had staked out several hours each day in which to transmit their coverage.
Then, as it became clear just how dangerous the situation was, Arledge had to defy his bosses back in the States who wanted ABC News to take over. Arledge’s argument: We’re journalists, too, and we’re only a stone’s throw away from the scene of the crime. How’s a talking head in New York supposed to do any better?
Fehlbaum and company make extensive use of the actual broadcast footage from that day. On the studio monitors we see sports anchor Jim McKay providing commentary and interviewing various players in the unfolding tragedy.
And there are mini-dramas playing out against the bigger story. Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro) was getting his first crack at directing Olympic coverage when he found himself in charge of images that were being seen in every corner of the globe. A real trial by fire.
Producer Marvin Bader (Ben Chaplin) raised moral questions. For instance, the families of the hostages were undoubtedly watching ABC’s coverage. How should the ABC team handle the on-air murder of an Israeli athlete? And what if the terrorists are watching the ABC broadcast in the dorm?
“September 5’s” is also mesmerizing in its depiction of TV technology of the era. ABC had no handheld video cameras. To get images of the crowd milling outside the dormitory, they had to haul an incredibly heavy studio camera out a door and across a patch of grass.
TV graphics were dumbfoundingly low-tech. To have the name of an interviewee appear at the bottom of the screen, a graphic artist had to spell out his name in white plastic letters (like a theater marquee), then superimpose that onto the broadcast feed
There are all sorts of head-smacking revelations. The German hosts of the games were so worried about raising memories of their Nazi past that they banned the military from providing security. Instead that job went to local police who were untrained and untested in terrorist situations. They cops at the games weren’t even carrying firearms.
Language was an issue, too. Incredibly, no one in ABC Sports spoke or understood German. Once the crisis broke a local intern (Leonie Benesch) was tasked with translating all the German communications for her without-a-clue employers.
More craziness…while the hostages were being held, athletes continued to compete just a block or two away.
“September 5” plays out in a breathless 95 minutes, but it’s got enough going on to stand up to repeated viewings.
So, yeah, it’s like writing history with lightning.
One of the great satisfactions of moviegoing is seeing a familiar face become so immersed in a role that you forget who you’re watching.
It happens to Angelina Jolie in “Maria,” a sorta-biography of opera singer Maria Callas. It feels like the high point of her acting career.
Directed by Pablo Larrain, “Maria” follows the retired 53-year-old diva in the week before her death in September of 1977.
In her Baroque Paris apartment Maria sleeps late and is tended to by her butler Ferrucio (Pierfrancesco Favino) and housekeeper Bruna (Alba Rohrwacher). These two domestics are devoted to their mistress, but harbor few illusions.
Maria is imperious and demanding — although she assumes an ironic attitude meant to defuse what otherwise might come off as pure bitchiness.
She has Ferrucio move a huge grand piano around the apartment for no other reason than to satisfy her whims. When she attempts an aria — she hasn’t given a public performance in several years — she expects Bruna to swoon appropriately, even though it’s pretty clear Maria’s voice is way past its expiration date.
(The singing in the film blends original Callas performances with Jolie’s vocal efforts. The results are convincing.)
She’s also heavily into self-medication. Ferrucio and Bruna periodically make a sweep of her bedroom looking for hidden pills.
When she does go out, Maria is desperate for attention (she tells a waiter she only comes to restaurants to be adored) but dismissive when people fawn over her. A hard person to satisfy.
To the extent that screenwriter Steven Knight has given us a narrative, it centers on Maria doing a series of on-camera interviews with a documentary maker (Kodi Smit-McPhee). Some take place in her apartment, others on the streets and in the parks of Paris.
Thing is, we soon realize that the filmmaker is a figment of Maria’s imagination. But he gives her a chance to talk about her life, at which point the film reverts to black-and-white flashbacks.
Angelina Jolie as Maria Callas, Haluk Bilginer as Aristotle Onasis
Thus we witness her courtship by shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis (Haluk Bilginer), who somehow manages to turn his physical ugliness into a charming asset. (Being filthy rich probably helps, too.)
We see young Maria (Angelina Papadopoulou) during the occupation of Greece being pimped out by her mother to German officers. (Was actual sex involved? Don’t know.)
She has a chilly encounter with President John F. Kennedy (Caspar Phillipson), whose widow would of course go on to marry Calla’s paramour Onassis. (Jeez, famous people are incestuous.)
And we get snippets of her musical triumphs on stages throughout the world, often presented in grainy 8 mm footage.
The result is less a coherent story than a series of impressions painting a rather sad portrait of self-absorption and fading talent.
Now here’s the thing: I have no idea what Maria Callas was like as an individual. A montage of clips of the real Callas at the end of the movie suggests a woman far happier and charming than the one portrayed by Jolie.
But taken at face value, this is a great performance. True to the real Maria? I don’t know. But it works for me.
The torn-from-the-headlines crime drama “The Order” offers the spectacle of two Englishmen — Jude Law and Nicholas Hoult — portraying distinctively American characters with smoldering intensity.
They’re terrific.
Perhaps even more salient is the way that Aussie director Justin Kurzel’s film, though set almost 40 years in the past, resonates ominously with our current zeitgeist.
When we first encounter Law as FBI agent Terry Husk, he’s almost unrecognizable. Law has for so long been a sex symbol that seeing him slightly overweight, with a droopy mustache, puffy features and a slightly disheveled look, our brains can hardly take in the transformation. (He did much the same thing earlier this year by beefing up to play King Henry VIII in “Firebrand.”)
After a long career fighting organized crime, Terry has been assigned to reopen the bureau’s dormant Idaho office (the setting is the early 1980s). It’s a low-keyed assignment, presumably to reward him for years of high-intensity, dangerous work. His main concern is finding a house for his wife and kids (whom we never see).
Uh…no. A missing person report turns into a murder case; the victim is a white supremacist whose loose lips apparently teed off his swastika-lovin’ buddies. And before long Terry is neck deep in an investigation of a growing terrorist threat.
Nicholas Hoult
Hoult plays Bob Matthews, a charismatic/conniving hater who, frustrated that the Aryan Nation leaders are too slow to begin a race war, has created his own spin-off sect, “The Order.”
(Has any other actor in recent years played such a wide variety of roles? Hoult has been a war boy in “Mad Max: Fury Road,” a hilariously entitled Russian tsar in “The Great,” a mutant in the Marvel Universe. He’s played author J.R.R. Tolkien, and appeared in “The Favourite” for director Yorgos Lanthimos.)
Matthews has recruited a small army of similarly-inclined social outcasts and begun a campaign of bank and armored car robberies and bombings. They’re printing counterfeit money.
He also orders the assassination of Denver radio talk-show host Alan Berg (Marc Maron), who routinely ridicules the separatist/supremacist mindset.
Hoult is so good you can see why malcontents are drawn to him. But he also deftly explores the character’s growing sense of personal power and the contradictions between the Christian faith he extolls and his clearly unChristian proclivities.
Screenwriters Zach Baylin, Gary Gerhardt and Kevin Flynn stick remarkably close to the historic facts, which provide several opportunities for well-staged action sequences.
Terry is aided in his investigation by a fellow agent (Jurnee Smollett) and a local cop (Ty Sheridan) whose roots in the community prove invaluable in unravelling the mystery.
Hanging over it all is a pall of nervous anticipation that renders even the beautiful Northwestern landscapes somehow threatening and sinister. The hate speech, the waving of The Turner Diaries, the determination to punish “race traitors” — it’s all a bit too familiar for comfort.
Looking around our country today, one concludes that Bob Matthews would be pleased.
Those fortunate enough to have seen 2015’s “Tangerine” will be well prepped for writer/director Sean Baker’s latest screwball sex comedy, “Anora.”
“Tangerine” was about a trans prostitute scouring the streets for her philandering pimp boyfriend on Christmas eve.
“Anora” focuses on an exotic dancer’s whirlwind romance with the son of a Russian oligarch.
Both films treat sex matter of factly; they refuse to demonize (or even feel sorry) for the sex workers who are their protagonists.
And both films feature a riveting central performance by actors who radiate unstoppable energy.
When we first meet Ani (Mikey Madison…she was the oldest daughter in the superb series “Better Things”) she’s pushing drinks and lap dances in a Manhattan gentleman’s club.
Among the regulars is Ivan (Mark Eydelshteyn), a twenty something party boy who mixes conspicuous consumption with a weird kind of innocence.
Ani has seen too much of life to expect she’ll ever find her white knight, but Ivan gives her hope. Invited to his house, she discovers a veritable modern-day Xanadu.
The guy is obviously loaded (or his folks are). He’s sweet and funny. The sex is great.
So when Ivan suggests that they board a private plane for a Las Vegas weekend, Ani happily complies. And when Ivan, suggests a Las Vegas wedding…well, what more could a girl ask for?
“Anora” (that’s Ani’s legal name) begins sweetly romantic, then veers into breathless hilarity.
Initially the honeymooners spend their days shopping on Fifth Avenue, eating at the best restaurants and partying all night.
Meanwhile, Ivan’s parents in Russia are not pleased with this union and dispatch a couple of local flunkies (Kareen Karagulian, Vache Tovmasyan) to demand an annulment. They’ve brought along some muscle, a hulk named Igor (Yura Borisov), who will end up playing a more important role than one imagines.
The upshot: The faithless Ivan panics and runs off for an all-night Big Apple binge, leaving his bride a captive. The trio of hapless goons and the royally pissed Ani spend a night scouring every hot spot where Ivan may have taken refuge.
In a parody of O. Henry’s “The Ransom of Red Chief,” the film has Ani running circles around the dimwitted thugs. They’ll be only too glad to be rid of her.
Madison’s performance is fierce, funny and even philosophical. Ani may be a sex worker, but she’s not a stupid sex worker. She exhibits more common sense than anyone else on the screen (even Ivan’s exasperated father finds her amusing) and appears to be free of self-delusion.
And she’s overflowing with New Yawk Girl attitude. An Oscar nomination seems likely.
“Anora” has a running time of well over two hours, but it doesn’t feel that long. The humor ranges from raucous to slyly satirical, and the film’s treatment of sex is, well, blush-inducing.
I wasn’t expecting much from “Joy.” I knew one of the stars was the always-watchable Bill Nighy, and that the subject was the development of the in vitro fertilization technique in the 1970s.
Maybe I was in for a docudrama or dry medical procedural?
I wasn’t prepared for the sneakily effective emotional journey cooked up by first-time feature director Ben Taylor and scenarists Jack Thorne, Rachel Mason and Emma Gordon.
“Joy” works so well for a couple of reasons. First, the screenplay focuses less on the scientific challenges facing physician/researchers Bob Edwards and Patrick Steptoe (James Norton, Nighy) than on the cultural backlash their work elicited.
Today IVF is opposed by many who associate it with abortion. A mother is implanted with just one of several of her eggs fertilized in the lab; the rejects may be destroyed. If you believe that every fertilized egg is already human, then that’s murder.
Fifty years ago, though, the opposition to IVF was based on the notion that “test tube babies” would be born with defects that would make their lives a living hell. Voices in the media, the church, the political arena and even the medical establishment compared the work of Edwards and Steptoe to that of the fictional Dr. Frankenstein. The doctors were accused of playing God.
As a result they did most of their work in a remote clinic away from prying eyes. Not precisely off the grid, but close.
Also, the filmmakers were incredibly wise in focusing the film on a third member of the team, Jean Purdy (Thomasin McKenzie), a young nurse whose official title was lab technician but whose pivotal role in IVF wasn’t recognized for decades.
When we first meet her Purdy appears to be all business, not particulxarly warm. But exposed to the desperation of the young women who come to Edwards and Steptoe looking for a miracle, she becomes more than a nurse or researcher. She becomes a friend, a confidant, a cheerleader, a shoulder to cry on.
Only later do we realize that she is motivated at least in part by her own inability to have children.
And because of her work Purdy finds herself ostracized by her church and community and disowned by her rigidly moralistic mother (Joanna Scanlan).
McKenzie, who was so effective as a teenage survivalist in “Leave No Trace” and had a strong supporting perf in “Jojo Rabbit,” is just about perfect here. She’s attractive without being at all glamorous, and she excels at allowing her character’s inner life to percolate through that stiff Brit carapace.
By the time “Joy” is over (the title isn’t explained until the last moment, and it’s sob-inducing revelation) you’ll be deeply invested in the story and its real-life characters.
Danielle Deadwyler, John David Washington
“THE PIANO LESSON” My rating: B(Netflix)
125 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13
It features near-flawless performances and a script based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning play.
So why didn’t “The Piano Lesson” work for me? Or why did it only work part of the time?
Produced by Denzel Washington, starring his son John David Washington and directed and co-written by yet another son, Malcolm Washington, this production is a family affair.
Which is fitting, since August Wilson’s play centers on a family and the different ways in which its members deal with (or attempt to reject) their shared history.
The piano of the title is a family heirloom, quite literally paid for with the blood of ancestors.
In pre-Civil War Mississippi a plantation owner named Sutter sold members of the enslaved Charles family to buy the upright piano for his wife. Subsequently portraits of the sold slaves were carved into the instrument’s wood by a remaining family member.
In 1911 the piano was stolen by Charles family survivors and it now sits in the Depression-era Pittsburgh home of Doker Charles (Samuel L. Jackson), where it will generate a family crisis.
Doker’s nephew Boy Willie (Joh David Washington in the most astonishingly nuanced performance of his career) has driven up from Mississippi hoping to sell the rarely-played piano. He’ll use the money to buy land long owned by the Sutter clan, now up for sale thanks to the mysterious death of the last Sutter, who fell down a well.
Boy Willie’s plan is fiercely opposed by his sister Bereniece (Danielle Deadwyler). It’s not the loss of a musical instrument she minds (she refuses to play, though her young daughter sometimes doodles on the keyboard); it’s the thought of giving up her last connection to her ancestors.
Also, she suggests Boy Willie may have murdered the last Sutter to get his land. She even claims to have seen a dead white man — Sutter’s ghost — haunting the upstairs hallway.
Though director Washington makes a few attempts to open up the acton “The Piano Lesson” is mostly talk — talk that reveals the various outlooks of a mixed slate of characters (the cast is rounded out by Ray Fisher, Corey Hawkins and Michael Potts). Everyone is excellent.
Here’s where I think things went sour: In Wilson’s play Sutter’s ghost is talked about but never seen. He’s offstage…provided, of course, that he even exists outside the characters’ imaginations.
But in the movie we see him. He even gets into a physical brawl with Boy Willie, amd it threatens to derail the entire narrative. Instead of a figurative haunting we get a literal one.
Now it’s a ghost story. I don’t believe that’s what Wilson had in mind.
Cailee Spaeny and friend
“ALIEN ROMULUS” My rating: C(Hulu)
118 minutes | MPAA rating: R
Going in I suspected that “Alien Romulus” would be a budget-basement spinoff from the long-running monsters-in-space franchise.
You know…cheap f/x, tacky production values, a straight-to-video approach. When Ridley Scott directs (“Alien,” “Prometheus”) you expect top-of-the-line everything…except, perhaps in the script department.
But “Alien Romulus” looks great, and even has been designed with tongue firmly in cheek to reflect on earlier (and much better) episodes. The plot may be one “Alien” cliche after another, but the physical production is solid.
Directed and co-written by Fede Alvarez, this is a teens-vs-aliens movie. On a mining planet a handful of wage slaves plot to hijack an abandoned spaceship and get the hell out of Dodge.
What they don’t realize is that the ship, the Romulus, houses a breeding lab for those nasty, acid-blooded critters. After losing most of its crew to the aliens the ship’s operator, the infamous Weyland-Yutani Corporation, pulled out. The idea was to let gravity suck the ship into the rings that circle the planet, destroying it and its deadly cargo.
But our adolescent heroes know none of that, though once on board they’ll learn quickly.
There are no “names” in the cast. You may recall Cailee Spaeny as the wannabe journalist in “Civil War.” And David Jonsson has a plum role as a replicant (they still prefer the term “artificial human”) whose levels of intelligence and empathy vary depending upon what computer chip is clicked into a slot on his neck.
The real hero here is production designer Naaman Marshall, who has a whole lot of fun recreating the world of the first two Alien films from way back when, right down to the retro/crude graphics on the ship’s computer screens.
Oh…and did I mention that the late Ian Holm has been digitally resurrected? He appears as a worse-for-wear replicant clearly manufactured in the same batch as Ash from the original 1979 “Alien.”
Full disclosure: The first first five minutes or so of “Babes” felt so forced, so over-the-top phony that I was tempted to bail.
Glad I didn’t.
Because rather quicky Pamela Adlon’s film found its voice…or maybe I clicked into its heady mix of raunch and sentiment. Whatever…I ended up lovin’ it.
So imagine a female buddy comedy made by women, …but women with the gross-out sensibilities of Seth Rogan in “Sausage Party”/“Superbad” mode. Think “Bridesmaids” on steroids.
Best buds Eden (Ilana Glazer) and Dawn (Michelle Buteau) have been friends since childhood. Now they live in NYC where Eden, single, runs a yoga studio out of her apartment and Dawn, a dentist, has a hubby (Hasan Minhaj), a four-year-old, and another on the way.
The screenplay by Glazer and Josh Rabinowitz deftly and hilariously dissects the relationships on display, relishing the woke-free sensibilities of two women who’ve known each other so long they don’t hesitate to check each other for vaginal leakage. In public. (I told you it was raunchy.)
But a one-night stand with a sweet but struggling actor (Stephen James) leaves Eden pregnant. She opts to become a single mother…because of course she’ll have her soulmate Dawn to back her up, right?
The film follows Eden throughout her pregnancy while circumstances push her friendship with Dawn to the breaking point.
Visually “Babes” rarely rises above the level of an ‘80s made-for-TV movie. But Adlon — the brilliant comedic actress whose series “Better Things” belongs in the pantheon of great television — shows in her feature directing debut that brilliant sense of comic timing, along with a big heart and some deep wisdom when it comes to the ups and downs of female friendship.
The big revelation here is Glazer, an actress I don’t recall having seen before. But, man, does she make an impression. She oozes the New Yawk City funkiness and droll hilarity of a Fran Lebowitz. In fact, with her frizzy black hair she looks like the Franster.
“Babes” also features a handful of recognizable faces in small but effective perfs: Sandra Bernard, Elena Ouspenskaia, Oliver Platt and John Carroll Lynch as possibly the most lovable OB-GYN ever depicted on celluloid.
You’ll probably hate yourself for laughing at some of the material tossed out here — there’s a discussion of bowel movements during childbirth that rivals Jeff Daniels’ diarrhea scene in “Dumb & Dumber” — but you WILL laugh. And then probably hit the replay button.
Early in Steve McQueen’s “Blitz” a single London mother tries to convince her reluctant son that he must board a train filled with other children to spend months — even years — in the countryside, safe from the nightly rain of German bombs.
It will be, she cajoles, “an adventure for children only.”
She doesn’t know the half of it.
Rita (Saoirse Ronan) and her 9-year-old George (Elliott Hefferman) share a home with her father, the piano playing Gerald (Paul Weller). They’re a tight bunch, which helps explain George’s dismay and ultimate fury at leaving his familiar streets and being shipped off to God knows where.
So at the first opportunity he leaps off the train and heads back to the city, encountering along the way a regular Pilgrim’s Progress of characters good and bad and more than a few close calls with mortality.
“Blitz” is several things at once, not all of them coexisting comfortably.
It begins with a hair-raising sequence showing civil defense crews fighting the fires caused by the bombing. There’s a visceral oomph to the moments depicting the air raids and the citizenry’s desperate search for shelter.
George’s adventures on the road are, well, remarkable. More happens to this kid in a few days than the rest of us experience in a lifetime.
Sneaking aboard a freight train he shares a few giddy thrills with three brothers who, rather than being farmed out to different families, have gone rogue.
Once in London —basically he’s lost — George finds himself hijacked by a Fagin-inspired crook (Stephen Graham) who uses him to steal valuables from bombed buildings and off dead folk. Very Dickensian.
Hr’d befriended by a civil defense guard (Benjamin Clementine) and spends a couple of nights crammed into a tube station with hundreds of other Londoners. On one of these occasions the tunnels are flooded with Thames water, creating a deathtrap.
Flooded tube station in “Blitz”
Here’s something I haven’t yet mentioned. George’s father was a black man deported years earlier. And his very blackness makes the boy’s journey all the more problematic,
Writer/director McQueen, of course, is a black Brit, and his resume is peppered with titles that delve deeply into the black experience (“12 Years a Slave” and the TV series “Small Axe” in particular). And in fact he was inspired to write “Blitz” after finding a vintage photo of a young black child with suitcase en route to the provinces.
So in addition to just staying alive, young George encounters numerous displays of racial intolerance.
But that’s only half the movie. Meanwhile Rita and her all-female fellow workers at the munitions plant must deal with the chauvinism of the management and unfair treatment. They are particularly incensed that the government has blocked the desperate public from using certain underground shelters. (There’s no explanation of what this is all about…makes one wonder if it was trimmed from the final cut.)
Eventually Rita gets word of George’s disappearance and goes on her own frantic search of London, abetted by a neighbor and civil defense warden (Harris Dickerson) who is quietly yearning for her.
And I haven’t even addressed the extensive flashbacks of Rita’s pre-war romance with Marcus (CJ Beckford) and the inevitable racial fallout from that taboo relationship.
Whew. That’s a lot of plot. Too much, in fact.
The performances are good, the physical production impressive, the handling of individual scenes generally tight and effective.
But there’s just so much going on that I practically succumbed to eye-rolling. More is not always better.
Director Ridley Scott’s followup to his 2000 Oscar winner (what were they thinking?) is less a sequel than a loose remake. It’s forever repeating beats from the original.
You see that right in the opening credits, which unfold over a montage of moments from the original “Gladiator,” albeit this time rendered in painterly animation.
Once again we get color-desaturated dream sequences and flashbacks.
Then there’s the plot, which begins with a massive battle, then becomes the story of an honest man reduced to slavery and a life of fighting in the arena. (Remember the gladiator owner played by Oliver Reed the first time around? This time those duties are fulfilled by Denzel Washington.)
The first film had a crazy emperor. This one has two crazy emperors.
And again there’s an iffy subplot about Roman political machinations with lots of uplifting/dubious oratory espousing democratic ideals that sound more like Thomas Jefferson than Marcus Aurelius. (At one point we even get an “I am Spartacus” moment.)
But here’s the thing: “Gladiator II” is bigger, noisier, faster. Special effects that looked phony in the original are now so sophisticated that one cannot tell a real rampaging rhino from a digitally created one. The city-scapes are awe-inspiring.
The whole thing pulses with visceral/sensory overload.
And it needs to, because dramatically “Glad II” feels like amateur hour. (The screenplay is by David Scarpa, Peter Craig and David Franzoni.)
Our hero (I never caught his name…I now see that this was deliberate) is played by Paul Mescal. I’ll call him Hero.
Paul Mescal
Hero comes to Rome in chains after a Roman fleet destroyed his city on the coast of North African. Having lost his home and his wife in the battle, Hero carries a chip on his shoulder. All he wants before dying is revenge on the general who ruined his life.
That would be Marcus Acacius (Pedro Pascal), who is now married to the princess Lucilla (Connie Nielsen, reprising her role from the first film). Together they are plotting to overthrow the sibling emperors Geta and Caracalla (Joseph Quinn, Fred Hchinger), a debauched pair of painted syphilitic psychos.
Before it’s all over, Hero’s path will cross those of Marcus and Lucilla in an unexpected (and wildly unlikely) plot reveal.
But then there’s the spectacle. Scott and his production designers have outdone themselves in creating the Colosseum in beautiful downtown Rome.
The first big brawl finds humans battling a troop of killer baboons. Then we move on to that armored rhinoceros, which is about the size of a Sherman tank. Most awe inspiring of all is a naval battle staged in the flooded arena. Those Romans thought of everything, including introducing huge sharks which swim around the galleys to snatch anyone who falls overboard.
The acting? It’s okay. Just okay.
Which is disappointing because Mescal has in recent roles (“Aftersun,” “All of Us Strangers,” “Normal People”) displayed a subtly seductive approach. He’s one of the few actors who can find interesting things to do with “nice” characters.
Ironic, then, that as our vengeful protagonist he’s kind of a one-note creation. Barely suppressed rage gets tiresome after a while.
Washington has been getting some awards-season buildup for his work as the gladiator master and Machiavellian power broker Macrinus. I don’t see it. The character has a few moments of gloating triumph as he turns the tables on Rome’s blue-blooded politicians, but I yearned for Washington to exhibit some wickedly comic impulses. Nope.
Denzel Washington
Everyone else delivers their lines with the sort of bloviating declamatory dialogue that wouldn’t be out of place in an old Hollywood epic from the 1950s.
Here’s the thing: “Gladiator” is all surface and no substance. There are no interesting ideas beneath the grandeur and violence, no emotional engagement.
Like Scott’s last film, the curiously untethered “Napoleon,” “Gladiator II” is a display of elephantine emptiness. No wonder it feels about 45 minutes too long.
“THE LIFE OF CHUCK” My rating: A-(Various PPV platforms)
111 minutes | MPAA rating: R
Mike Flanagan’s “The Life of Chuck” provides the 10 most joyful minutes of cinema I’ve seen in all of 2025.
Which is not bad for a movie that starts out depicting the end of the world.
“…Chuck” is a departure for writer/director Flanagan, possibly our best dispenser of supernatural horror (“The Haunting of Hill House,” “Midnight Mass,” both Netflix miniseries); but then it is based on what is probably the most atypical story ever penned by Stephen King.
I mean, we’re talking a weirdly-structured but deeply moving meditation on the meaning of life.
You know somebody’s tinkering with the time/space continuum when the opening titles tell us that the yarn begins with Chapter III.
Here we meet Marty Anderson (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a middle school teacher struggling (as is everybody else) with the rapid collapse of civilization. First the Internet went down. Now cell phones aren’t working. TV stations are going off the air one by one, but not before announcing that most of Northern California has fallen into the Pacific.
There’s still electricity, but nobody knows how long the juice will keep flowing.
With classes cancelled, Marty wanders the streets of his town, now cluttered with abandoned cars. He has a conversation with a funeral director (Carl Lumbly) about a blitz of billboards, banners and TV/radio commercials that have appeared overnight. These declare “Charles Krantz. 39 Great Years! Thanks, Chuck!” and feature a photo of Chuck (Tom Hiddleston), a pleasant-looking guy wearing a business suit and spectacles. Maybe Chuck is retiring from his job, though he doesn’t look nearly old enough.
And anyway, the world is ending.
A big chunk of Chapter III centers on Marty’s efforts to reconnect with his ex, Felicia (Karen Gillan), a nurse now jobless since all the high-tech medical machines in her hospital stopped working. Reunited, Marty and Felicia sit in her back yard watching the stars blink out one by one.
Next up is Chapter II. We find Chuck (Hiddleston) attending a conference for accountants. On a stroll through the city center he is confronted by a busking street drummer (Taylor Gordon). Listening to the percussive symphony she generates, the buttoned-down Chuck begins swaying tot he music.
Then he starts doing a few dance steps. Before long he’s grabbed the hand of a passer-by (Annalise Basso) and together they put on an impromptu display of big band terpsichorean razzamatazz that draws a cheering crowd.
It’s a heart-in-your-throat “Singin’ in the Rain” kind of moment. Pure movie magic. (Much love to Mandy Moore’s spectacular choreography).
Mark Hamill, Benjamin Pajak
Then it’s on to Chapter I, which depicts Chuck’s childhood (as you’ve gathered by now, “The Life of Chuck” unfolds in reverse order). Orphaned by a car accident, young Chuck (he’s depicted as a middle schooler by the excellent Benjamin Pajak) is being raised by his grandparents (Mark Hamill and Mia Sara).
(Uh, wait a minute. Mia Sara. Wasn’t she Ferris Bueller’s squeeze only a couple of years back? Surely she can’t be anybody’s grandma.)
Anyway, this segment examines Chuck’s relationship with his loving grandparents, and his discovery of dance in an after-school club. The kid’s a whiz…before long he’s the talk of the prom for cutting a rug with a girl two years his senior.
Once again, the dance sequence is magic. But what kind of career is dance for a red-blooded American boy? No, Chuck will grow up to study something more practical, like accounting. But he’ll never forget the thrill of his body moving effortlessly to the music.
“…Chuck” bites off a big chew by attempting (in reverse) to depict one man’s life. What we come to realize is that Chapter III is actually unfolding in the head of a dying man. Chapters I and II tell us how he got there, while introducing figures (Marty, Felicia, the funeral director) who will appear in his end-of-life reverie.
The film has been so deftly directed and acted (even from the unseen Nick Offerman, whose narration provides just the right taste of detached observation) that more than a few veiwers will find themselves in tears.
Butler's Cinema Scene 