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“THE SECRET AGENT”: Fear and defiance

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , on December 19, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Wagner Moura

“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.

 | Robert W. Butler

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SHORT TAKES: “Sorry, Baby,” “Nobody 2,” “Ballad of a Small Player”

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 16, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Naomi Ackie, Eva Victor

“SORRY, BABY”  My rating: A- (HBO Max)

103 minutes | MPAA rating: R

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.

| Robert W. Butler

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SHORT TAKES: “After the Hunt,” “Eternity”

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 11, 2025| 1 Comment »

Julia Roberts, Ayo Edebiri

“AFTER THE HUNT” My rating: B (Prime)

138 minutes | MPAA rating: R

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.

| Robert W. Butler

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SHORT TAKES: “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” “Nouvelle Vague”

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on December 9, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Rose Byrne

“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.

In other words, it’s a lot of fun.

| Robert W. Butler

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SHORT TAKES: “Hamnet” and “Jay Kelly”

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on December 7, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Jessie Buckley

“HAMNET” My rating: B (In theaters)

125 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

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.

| Robert W. Butler

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SHORT TAKES: “It Was Just an Accident,” “Sentimental Values”

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on December 4, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Vahid Mobasseri

“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.

 It’s what families do.

 Robert W. Butler

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“THE LIFE OF CHUCK”: Dancing at the end of the world

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on December 2, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Tom Hiddleston

“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.  

| Robert W. Butler

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“THE LIFE OF CHUCK”: Dancing at the end of the world

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on December 1, 2025| 1 Comment »

Tom Hiddleston

“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.  

| Robert W. Butler

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“TRAIN DREAMS”: One Man’s Life

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , on November 24, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Joel Edgerton

“TRAIN DREAMS” My rating: A- (Netflix)

102 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

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.

| Robert W. Butler

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SHORT TAKES: “Eddington,” “Hedda”

Posted in Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , on November 21, 2025| Leave a Comment »

Joan in Phoenix, Pedro Pascal

“EDDINGTON” My rating: C+ (HBO MAX)

148 minutes | MPAA rating: R

“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.

| Robert W. Butler

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