Joseph Quinn, Lupita Nyong’o
“A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE” My rating: B (Paramount+)
99 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13
The latest in the “Quiet Place” franchise is a harrowingly effective survival story, focusing as it does on the 24 hours after NYC is inundated with unseeing, all-hearing alien predators.
But writer/director Michael Sarnoski (who here shares screenplay credit with John Krasinski, who wrote, directed and starred in the two earlier installments) is going for something more.
For starters, the film opens in a suburban hospice populated with cancer victims waiting to die. Among them is Sam (Lupita Nyong’o), a young woman who seems to be holding on mostly so she can share a few more moments with her beloved cat Frodo.
A rare field trip to the Big Apple is interrupted by an alien invasion. Anyone hoping to survive has to deal with a short learning curve…lay low, don’t make noises, stay near water (the creepy crawlers can’t stand the wet stuff).
Initially terrorized by the mayhem around her, Sam resolves to make her way to a pier on the East River where evacuation boats await.
She’s accompanied on this perilous trek by her pussycat and a traumatized young lawyer, Eric (Joseph Quinn), who over the course of the narrative goes from being a whimpering liability to a valuable ally…he risks his neck raiding an abandoned pharmacy to get the trans-dermal fentanol patches Sam needs for pain control.
“…Day One” delivers a scarily effective end-of-the-world ambience…viewers who initially take comfort in not having cancer suddenly find themselves in a world where imminent death seems all but assured. It’s a disorienting shot of reality.
With her thin frame and big eyes Nyong’o makes for an absolutely convincing Sam. Quinn (here almost unrecognizable from his “Stranger Things” role as small-town Lothario Eddie Munson) makes a convincing metamorphosis from quivering wimp to man of action.
And Schnitzel the cat’s performance as Frodo is, well, believably catlike. The filmmakers haven’t tried to anthropomorphize the animal…he’s just a cat.
The special effects are convincing, but Sarnoski is smart enough to know that less is more. We may not see much of the aliens, but we know they’re out there, making clicking noises and waiting for their human prey to reveal ourselves.
Margaret Qually, Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe
“KINDS OF KINDNESS” My rating: (Hulu)
154 minutes (MPAA rating: R)
“Weird” is a popular word in this election cycle. It certainly applies to Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Kinds of Kindness,” a triptych that feels like episodes “The Twilight Zone” and “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” viewed through a paranoid haze.
In a way it’s like a theatrical repertory company — a half dozen actors keep reappearing in different roles.
Two of the stories— the first and third — deal with individuals who have given up most of their free will to serve a cultish leader.
In “The Death of R.F.M.” (R.F.M. is a balding, bearded fellow who appears briefly in all three episodes but says almost nothing) Jesse Plemons plays Robert, an executive who literally lives for his boss, Raymond (Willem Dafoe).
Raymond provides Robert and his wife with a house and car. He gives them expensive if weird gifts (one of John McEnroe’s smashed tennis rackets). He also dictates what they eat and drink and when they have sex.
But when Raymond orders Robert to participate in what appears to be a murder (the titular R.F.M. is the intended victim), he declines.
And so is cast out of Eden.
The bookend episode, “R.F.M. Eats a Sandwich,” finds Plemons and Lanthimos regular Emma Stone (“Poor Things,” “The Favourite”) traveling the country in a souped-up purple muscle car.
They are members of a cult searching for a woman who, according to the prophecies of their leaders OMI and AKA (Dafoe and Hong Chau), has the ability to resurrect the dead. (In this one R.F.M. is a corpse in a morgue.)
Margaret Qualley is particularly good here as twin sisters, a veterinarian with astounding healing abilities and her singularly twisted sibling.
The middle episode, “R.M.F. is Flying,” is my least favorite. Plemons stars as a husband whose oceanographer wife (Stone) is missing at sea.
When she is finally rescued from a tiny island, he suspects that she isn’t really his wife (she now likes chocolate, which she previously hated, and her shoes no longer fit). To prove herself he demands ever more bizarre sacrifices.
“Kinds of Kindness” (the title practically drips irony…there’s not much kindness on display here) has been impeccably made but isn’t particularly inviting on either an emotional or intellectual level.
There are moments of black humor, but rarely of the laugh-out-loud variety — more funny odd than funny ha-ha. There are lots of squirm-worthy sexual undercurrents and some in-your-face nudity.
And the musical score — of dissonant piano doodling and droning Medieval chants — nicely reflects the film’s themes of psychosis and self-denying reverence.
Actually, streaming may be the perfect way to watch it. In a theater with a running time of three hours, “Kinds of Kindness” probably ran quickly out of steam. But on Hulu we can watch it in digestible (well, almost) one-hour chunks.
Joaquin Phoenix, Vanessa Kirby
“NAPOLEON: THE DIRECTOR’S CUT” My rating: B- (Apple+)
206 minutes | MPAA rating: R
Ridley Scott’s “Napoleon” was a major letdown.
Great battle scenes. Terrific production values. But dramatically? Nope.
And things weren’t helped any by Joaquin Phoenix’s interpretation of Nappy as a military savant who in all other aspects is borderline autistic.
Now we have an expanded version 45 minutes longer than the original. And it’s a better movie. But still not a great one.
It’s hard to say sometimes exactly what is new here…in many instances it’s no more than a couple of additional shots and lines of dialogue dropped into existing scenes.
But early on we get a look at what Josephine (Vanessa Kirby) endured before meeting Napoleon. After the execution of her husband in the Reign of Terror, she is sent to prison where she learns some grim truths about what a woman must often do to survive.
Josephine gets a crash course in staying alive from a fellow inmate (Ludivine Sagnier, whose performance was completely cut from the theatrical release)…it’s a sobering experience and helps explain the future Empress’s often witheringly sardonic outlook and general fatalism.
Also getting more screen time is Sinead Cusack as our hero’s scheming mother. In a blackly comic scene she sends the childless Emperor off to sleep with a virgin, hoping it will result in a pregnancy that proves Josephine, not Napoleon, is incapable of having children.
Some minor characters— like the Russian Tsar Alexander (Edouard Philipponnat) — have their stories fleshed out.
But the film’s highlights remain the battle sequences.
And what about Phoenix’s Napoleon? Well, this longer version does expand upon his relationship with Josephine (desperately ill at ease with most women, he adored her enough to tolerate her sarcasm and melancholy). This extended cut also employs more voiceover narration to explore the relationship through the couple’s correspondence.
But the big question nagging “Napoleon” isn’t laid to rest in this version. That being: His military triumphs notwithstanding, how could such a socially inept, introverted, essentially unlikeable figure have gained the confidence of his countrymen and been made Emperor?
(I still wonder if the whole movie isn’t an elaborate Trumpian parody.)
Maybe we’ll learn the answer in the next Supercharged Director’s Cut. Yes, Ridley Scott has a four-hour-plus version of “Napoleon” that, according to the few who have seen it, is the stuff of legend.
We shall see.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 