Benoit Teves

VIP

3

When my filmmaker friend told me this movie was the best thing he’d seen this year, I knew it had to be good. But wow, did it exceed my expectations. I agree - this is absolutely the best film I have seen this year.

From the top, you’re hit with the 1970s pastiche all over this movie and there’s an immediate coziness to it that never goes away. Whether we’re isolated at a New England boarding school with four characters over winter break or in the middle of Boston, there seems to be a sense of lived-in belonging that you just want to be a part of. (Perhaps part of that, for me, comes from a massive amount of nostalgia for a New England holiday season.)

All of the characters, for all of their flaws and quirks, are immediately likable - you want to know more about them, and the movie gives you that in the best, most natural way: through conversation, and sometimes, quiet moments alone. The three leads - Paul Giamatti, Dominic Sessa, and Da’Vine Joy Randolph - bring such truth and humanity to their roles that you don’t want to separate from them.

The plot moves slowly, but the atmosphere and characters are the real draw here. Don’t get me wrong - this movie is FUNNY. Dry, yes, but I laughed a lot. I also cried a lot. This movie touches on abandonment, depression, loss, and the deprivation of potential - but also the power of conviction, connection, found family, and the power in the unknown laid out before you.

Now, I’m not terribly familiar with this musical (I’ve only seen the stage show once, with Cynthia Erivo). But to put it simply, just like its stage counterpart, The Color Purple left me beautifully devastated.

There were, of course, MANY cuts and changes in the transition to film. But not only is this a good thing, it is an ESSENTIAL thing. The two forms are so vastly different that a direct port would work against itself. (I only wish the events directly preceding “I’m Here” hadn’t been altered quite so much.) But what remains is the powerful story of a woman named Celie, told across 38 years (the years being show on screen were a helpful touch), and the people that came in and out of her life. There’s a heavy layer of communication with God, but it’s not necessarily religious, if that makes sense. I felt as though even I could feel and understand what the characters were saying, and I haven’t been to a church service in over a decade.

At the heart of this film is Fantasia Barrino’s performance in the role of Celie, and it is stellar. She has a way of playing such a wounded bird that when true joy erupts from her, it cracks your heart right open with the beauty of it. She hits you hard with a deep undercurrent of wistful melancholy, even in those happy moments, until a major turning point changes that. The rest of the female cast is excellent as well, but Fantasia really stands out. The men are generally good as well - it’s just that, because of either the direction, script alterations, or performances, most of them come off a little flat.

So, YES, it is a musical (there seems to be a ton of confusion about that in the general public) but this story is absolutely elevated by the story form, and it absolutely deserves to be seen.

Disclaimer: I have never played these games, nor was I familiar with the franchise in any way going into the movie.

That being said - I just really don’t understand the bad rap this movie is getting! I overall enjoyed this movie for what it was: a relatively engaging PG-13 adaptation of a camp horror franchise.

I think we’re all familiar, at least, with the premise: a security officer working at a not-quite-Chucky-Cheese has to deal with the animatronics coming to life and becoming murderous machines. Succinct and self-contained. What I actually think this movie does well is delving into the lore behind WHY this is happening (which a quick search tells me has basis in the third game in the series). I initially thought this movie was taking itself way too seriously in a few moments, but given the background here, the tone is appropriately heavy at times. This stuff gets DARK and involves kidnapped and murdered children.

The family drama plot that this movie grows out of actually worked pretty well for me. I think it dovetails with the existing “dead kids possessing animatronics” story. Sure, it’s not Shakespeare, but it doesn’t need to be. What I take issue with is some of the stuff that isn’t explained or addressed whatsoever. How did Mike end up with sole custody of his sister? What happened to their parents? (SPOILER: Why did the police officer help her father whatsoever?)

A complaint I’ve seen a lot of is about the level of gore, and I gotta say, I actually think it’s appropriate. Not every horror movie needs to be a hack-and-slash phantasmagoria of blood and guts. There’s just enough here to make you uncomfortable while also staying at the “camp” horror level.

In the end, we can say what we want, but this movie was made for a certain demographic that’s going to eat it up: teenagers with nothing better to do this Hallo-weekend that can’t get into rated-R films yet.

(I chose to watch it at home on Peacock for that very reason.)

While I think this is a relatively successful 2020s horror movie, I kind of fail to see it as comparable to or part of The Exorcist story. It has some fun horror moments, but what it lacks is the stillness that the original had. 50 years ago, we had a movie that focused on less than 5 characters and gave both them and the plot room to breathe as events evolved at a logical pace, which makes the ending exorcism extremely tense. In “Believer”, there are far too many characters and the plot rapidly accelerates as all of their threads vie for attention. The end result is an exorcism (of course) that feels abrupt and sort of low-stakes.

I like the philosophical questions asked here regarding all types of faith and how they approach possession and exorcism, giving us an interfaith effort to save the girls. However, I think the writing could have gone way deeper on this. Perhaps the next two movies in this trilogy will do so.

Two notes:

1. Why bring Chris MacNeil back, just to sideline her after 10 minutes of screen time?

2. I think using the actual, real-world Haitian earthquake as a jumping off point for the movie is in a bit of poor taste.

If I counted correctly, the big guy shows up four times in this movie, and that is a-ok. The primary focus is on the human story here, with Godzilla being a driver for trauma and representative of the aftershocks of World War 2 on Japan (his atomic breath is more like an actual atomic bomb here). While I wish the writing was a bit more engaging, it’s still interesting enough that I never truly got bored - just excited for Godzilla to appear again. It asks what we really owe to our legacy, those we love, and even those that we don’t.

The action scenes are great; my favorite was a relatively pulse-pounding sequence reminiscent of Jaws, where Godzilla pursues a boat woefully unprepared to meet him as he dwarfs the vessel in frame. There are a few implausible things here (like some physics and survivability questions), but then again, we’re talking about a movie featuring a giant monster rising up out of the ocean. So I don’t judge too harshly.

One of my favorite things about Japanese Godzilla films is that they seem to treat the monster reverentially, portraying him almost as a sort of god or awesome, terrible divine power on Earth; and that makes him indescribably more scary. I say this in opposition of the American adaptations, which tend to commercialize and anthropomorphize the monster by grafting a sort of teammate-to-humans layer onto him. This is another great addition, and I highly recommend Shin Godzilla from 2016 as well if you’re in the monster mood!

This is one of those movies that absolutely requires you to watch until the last shot with intent, because it colors everything before it. However, hanging in to get there can be somewhat of a challenge.

The premise is interesting - in the not-too-far future, the earth is becoming uninhabitable, so the government is conscripting random citizens as test subjects for off-world habitats. They are, in some situations, replaced with AI bots of themselves. As a married couple are approached, they find only the husband has been selected. Their relationship is not a happy one, and the tests and questions involved in properly preparing the AI crack those marital problems wide open.

I do think that this movie loses focus and coherence in favor of some self-indulgence here (the same can be said about Paul Mescal's performance - it's awkward when you catch actors acting) but a reveal in the third act pulled my interest back in, and the ending sticks the landing. In what I assume is an intentional misdirect and attempt at mirroring the characters' confusion, the audience is sort of left wondering what the hell is going on and why this character is acting this way for a solid chunk of the movie; there's a way to do this, but Garth Davis didn't really nail it. What he did nail is a satisfying ending in spite of the clutter just previous to it.

He’s done it again, folks.

Mike Flanagan has again proven that he’s a master at what he does, creating a tragically stunning Frankenstein’s monster combining “Succession” and “Final Destination”. This series beautifully weaves in and out of Edgar Allan Poe’s canon, from his headliner works like “The Raven” and “The Telltale Heart” to the lesser-known ones such as “Gold Bug”. Names, locations, episode titles; it’s all in reference to Poe. Some inclusions are extremely clever in how they’re worked in (Rue Morgue) while some are not quite as smooth/slightly too anachronistic (the names Tamerlane and Prospero).

This series does feel quite different from Flanagan’s other Netflix projects in a few ways. It has more levity to it (though there still isn’t much) and it’s significantly more sprawling. Where his other shows have generally stayed focused on a small group of people in one location, House of Usher springs from locale to locale with a huge ensemble of characters (all marvelously portrayed by Flanagan’s usual coterie of actors, particularly Carla Gugino). It works spectacularly.

My only critique of the show is that, by the second episode’s end, you can see the formula that each episode is going to follow. I only wish there was slightly more surprise to it like Flanagan’s other works. However, despite a semi-foreseeable ending, the final episode still had me in tears, and some scenes throughout the series still viscerally shocked me.

This is a great addition to the Flanagan/Netflix canon - and just in time for Halloween.

Unfortunately, the streak of flops to start 2024 continues with the newest Blumhouse property, Night Swim.

The movie doesn’t start poorly – it’s actually interesting enough. As so many horror movies do, it begins with a flashback to the “first haunting” when a young girl vanishes from the pool in her backyard late one night. 30 years later, a major league baseball player who recently suffered an injury moves with his family to a suburban home near his wife’s new job…and yes, it’s that same house. With the same pool.

A string of mysterious hauntings begin to appear to the family members as they each individually spend time in the pool (I’ve never seen a family who swims more than this one). What is totally unclear are the correlations between the apparitions, and also the rules that govern them – most of the time, they appear in the pool, but other times, they are around the pool, and there’s even an instance where one seems to make something happen inside the house. The pool seems to haunt some people, but the father seems to be healed by it. Like - what? The lore surrounding what’s going on is incredibly, frustratingly vague. This is only made worse by an intentional obfuscation of the truth, and most of the movie is spent wasting time while the characters really do nothing to investigate what’s happening.

After a sudden and confusing crescendo at a pool party, the movie totally derails. Wyatt Russell’s performance also falls apart here, with some line deliveries that are extraordinarily questionable (you’ll know what I mean when he asks, “is he ok?”). The most egregious mistake here, though, is the decision to explain the entirety of what’s going on in the movie in a five-minute conversation with a somewhat related character who, up until that point, had not been involved with the plot whatsoever. What cripples the effect of this reveal even more is how late in the movie it comes; once we know what’s happening, there’s no more room for tension to build or dread to creep, and therefore, it limps across the finish line with a climax that attempts and fails at multiple solemn emotional connections.

The only thing I agree with here? The decision on what becomes of the pool in the last scene. Finally, logic.

Wish isn’t bad, but it’s not great either. There’s a sense of letdown for me here, probably because Disney touted this as a 100th anniversary crowning achievement, and it’s a pretty generic, run-of-the-mill fairy tale. There are sparks of whimsy that are lifted by references to other Disney films, which are fun (and they are manifold); but a string of Easter eggs do not make a movie.

The animation style didn’t bother me as much as I thought it was going to, but the colors were more washed-out and bland than other Disney features.

What DID stick out to me was the music. It’s bad. The prosody is TERRIBLE, and the lyrics not only seem to miss the mark so badly that it sounds like these songs were written at the last minute, but they’re so generic that they could have been written by AI trained to imitate a poor man’s Lin Manuel Miranda.

All this to say, I still shed a tear at the end, because Disney knows how to pull on heartstrings, hopes, and dreams and has for 100 years now. I just wish that, rather than a relatively shallow parade of references, we would have gotten a deeper and more subversive plot from the pretty good basis here to celebrate the centennial.

The title “Civil War” may conjure mental images of combat galore, pulse-pounding action sequences, and glorious scenes of battle and valor. Alex Garland’s new film has some of these things, but your heart is less likely to be jolted by action than it is to be slowly cranked to a frantic pace by the unrelenting tension that is laid thick across the entire runtime.

The majority of Civil War is a road movie. Lee (Kirsten Dunst) is a war photojournalist who is traveling from New York City to Washington, D.C. with fellow journalists Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and Joel (Wagner Maura), along with a young upstart photographer, Jessie (Cailee Spaeny). Years into an American civil war, parts of the United States are desolate, dangerous places; of course, these are the parts that the group must pass through. Lee and Joel are intent on interviewing and photographing the President (Nick Offerman) before the conflict comes to what they believe is its inevitable end with his execution. With a pretty on-the-nose deadline of July 4, the clock starts clicking.

Interestingly, this film shies away almost completely from political conversations surrounding the nuances of the larger conflict. The provocative title and concept evokes our national anxiety, particularly in a contentious election year, but then subverts what we expect from it in a fascinating way. We hear snippets of background, like a disbanded FBI and the “Antifa Massacre”, but generally speaking, it’s not about who did what to start the war — instead, it’s about the war already in progress, and how it has devastated the country. Rather than investigating the division between Republican and Democrat, Garland (ironically, a British filmmaker) is much more interested in the human response to war. The film is a series of vignettes illustrating this point as the journalists come across various set pieces throughout their journey to D.C. In Pennsylvania, a small group of men have taken command of a gas station and string up looters in the car wash; in West Virginia, an entire town is going about their business as though the war is not happening; and in what is undoubtedly the most tense sequence in the film, just outside of Charlottesville, VA, our group is held up by several nationalist soldiers digging a mass grave filled with those they deem un-American.

Alex Garland creates an interesting take on the idea of an American civil war by examining it through the lens of a group of journalists. Rather than an extravaganza of CGI battles, this begs for a much more grounded and practical approach to the conflict, which is exactly what we get. It puts the disquieting notion of what a war-torn United States could look like front and center without gratuitous spectacle to cushion the blow. I couldn’t help but reflect on the way the 2023 Academy-Award-winning documentary 20 Days in Mariupol made me feel; I was deeply and profoundly disturbed by that film, but months later, I am able to mentally demarcate those events and images in Ukraine as being halfway across the globe. I am safe from them. Civil War forced me to consider: what if they weren’t, and I wasn’t?

With Civil War, Alex Garland has reached into an all-too-plausible future and pulled out a nauseatingly anxious portrait of an America that has fallen. The public discourse surrounding this movie is undoubtedly hurtling towards contentious debates, and with intentionally vague in-text politics, it’s relatively easy for almost anyone to claim that this film justifies their current political ideology and intolerances; one can readily adjust who is “us” and who is “them”. This dichotomy sounds divisive, but if the sides are so easily characterized as one or the other, doesn’t that actually mean that they’re much closer than you’d think?

In investigating our differences, Garland has made a poignant argument — and perhaps a desperate plea — that Americans are, maybe, more alike than we are different.

I didn’t want to leave my apartment this afternoon. I had the day off, and I’d spent most of it wasting away in my bed and on my couch, reveling in the nothingness of an empty schedule. But as the clock ticked towards 3pm, my desire to see all of the Oscar-nominated films finally overpowered my lethargy. I gathered myself up, found the motivation drive to the theatre, rewarded myself with a little snack from concessions, and sat in my seat for Perfect Days just as Nicole Kidman was telling the audience that “we make movies better”. I’m so glad that I went.

Hirayama (Koji Yakusho) is an aging sanitation worker in Tokyo who has every part of his day down to a science: wake up, fold the linens, brush his teeth, water the plants, grab a coffee, go to work cleaning public restrooms, come home, wash up at a bathhouse, go to dinner, go home, read, and go to sleep. Rinse and repeat, day in and day out. It’s a modest life, but it’s immensely pleasant. There really couldn’t have been a more appropriate mood for me to be in for this film. Much like me earlier in the day, Hirayama takes pleasure in the small things; listening to 80’s cassette tapes on his commute (which is, in a masterful production decision, the only music we hear in the film), tending to his plants, or taking photos of the trees during his lunch breaks near a temple. His indulgence in his commute environment is relatable to anyone who does the same; while waiting in traffic, we create a domain of our own within our vehicles that feels impenetrable by the outside world, despite the only barrier being transparent glass. We see his eyes light up when a homeless man dances alone in a park, or when a tourist is delighted by the technology behind Tokyo’s transparent restrooms.

Hirayama barely speaks; he’s a man of so few words, he appears to be belligerently quiet in some situations, like when his yammering coworker goes on and on about a woman he’s hopelessly attempting to woo. Hirayama isn’t rude — he simply has nothing of substance to contribute at times, so he abstains; something that I think a great deal of people in modern society could learn from. He is, however, listening and observing at all times, waking up when most of Tokyo still sleeps, and moving through the city like a ghost. There’s a commentary on the social treatment of public servants here (which is revisited later), particularly in a poignant moment when Hirayama returns a lost boy to his mother. The mother does not acknowledge Hirayama whatsoever, but the boy turns to wave goodbye to him as they walk away. Hirayama, always enamored with simple joys, simply laughs and waves back.

At roughly the one-hour mark, Hirayama’s steady rhythm of workdays is disrupted when his niece appears, having run away from home after an argument with her mother. This point flips the perspective that we’ve seen thus far, taking us out of Hirayama’s comfortable monotony and showing us how it looks to someone else who doesn’t know it to be theirs. He shares a few of his days with her, and imparts a profound piece of wisdom on her: “Next time is next time. Now is now.” When Hirayama’s estranged sister inevitably comes to collect her daughter, pulling up in a Lexus driven by her chauffeur, she asks him with thinly veiled distaste if it’s true that he’s cleaning toilets for a living. As they drive away, Hirayama is overwhelmed with a sense of shame inflicted by his sister’s question.

Shortly after, Hirayama has a chance encounter with a man undergoing cancer treatment with weeks left to live. It’s a seemingly unrelated occasion, but the masterful thing about this movie is how such separate moments can affect someone’s state of mind so completely. I won’t spoil the resolution, but it involves a long take and an incredibly cathartic needle drop of Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good” that’ll hopefully have you reenacting the moment in your car.

On paper, Perfect Days doesn’t sound like a particularly interesting movie. But through a touching performance by Koji Yakusho, deft editing, carefully measured reservation, and a solid selection of well-placed needle drops, the film delivers a powerfully cleansing examination of what it means to live a simple life, and to savor every small joy that it brings.

Thumper said it best in Bambi: “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all.”

I try to avoid writing lengthy pieces about material that I do not enjoy. If it wasn’t fun or interesting the first time around, revisiting it for another hour or two while I ruminate on all of the intricacies isn’t exactly an attractive premise; the lack of a statement is usually a statement on its own. However, when that movie is nominated for five Academy Awards (Best Picture among them) and has a hefty momentum going into the season, it’s hard to simply say nothing.

It has long been my mantra that just because you or I don’t like a piece of art, it does not mean that the piece of art is, in and of itself, bad. Not everything is for everyone. A far more meaningful (and interesting) question beyond if you merely liked something, then, is why you did or didn’t enjoy it. It puts the conversation back into criticism and creates an invitation.

All of this being said, I am simply baffled by The Zone of Interest.

Finally receiving a wide release from A24, the premise behind this film is borrowed from a 2014 book of the same title by Martin Amis: a Nazi commander in charge of the Auschwitz concentration camp lives with his family next door to the site of unspeakable horrors and atrocities. The trouble I run into with giving a brief synopsis is that that’s about it – nothing much else happens in this movie. The idea is startling on the surface, but when most of the movie is long takes of mundane day-to-day actions, I find that the startling nature of the idea is somewhat diluted by how stagnant the action is. There is much to be said about the impartiality with which the characters go about their lives even as thousands are being tortured and murdered just yards away – the “banality of evil” conversation is a heavily-trod path in discussions about this movie.

I certainly applaud the conceit of disturbing the audience with telling two different stories, one visual and one audible. Through every scene of the family having conversations about going to school, or getting the groceries, the background noise is permeated by gunshots, shouts, and screams. The characters sometimes even need to raise their voices to hear one another over the charnel sounds coming from Auschwitz, and yet never acknowledge what is going on next door. At night, a warm glow illuminates the rooms of the family home – a glow that comes from the fires bursting out of the chimneys next door. The strongest points here are when we most poignantly experience the contrast between evil and ordinary.

Despite having a really strong concept, this movie’s monotony of plot (or lack thereof) makes it a tough sell for general audiences. It has been polarizing, and will absolutely continue to be no matter the results of the Academy Awards in March. Most of the film is shot at a distance, making us experience the entire thing at a remove. This leads to the characters becoming inaccessible. With nary a plot point in sight, and characters that we can’t connect with, what could have been devastating ends up more provocative in concept than in practice. Though perhaps this indifference is intentional, to mirror the way in which this family treats the horrors just over the garden wall. And as Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel reminds us:

The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.

– U.S. News and World Report (October 27, 1986)

Snack Shack starts so suddenly, so chaotically, you can almost feel someone say “and they’re off” — and not just because it picks up, in media res, at a racetrack betting station.

AJ (Conor Sherry) and Moose (Gabriel Labelle, fresh from his turn in The Fabelmans) are 14 years old and entering the summer after their Freshman year. Obsessed with get-rich-quick schemes, the pair is constantly bending and outright breaking rules to achieve their goal. After one too many busts, AJ is threatened with boot camp in the fall if he doesn’t get a real job. The boys rummage up enough money to rent the snack shack attached to the local community pool, and launch their very own business. With generic bullies wreaking havoc, a generic female character causing cliche hormonal discord between the boys, and generically strict parents, the film follows a well-trodden path through a coming-of-age summer plot housing next to no surprises.

Sherry and Labelle speak to each other with such familiarity, quickness, and excitability that it’s occasionally easy to miss what they’re saying, particularly on Labelle’s side as Moose — he gets excited, and his vocal articulators abandon him. Aside from those brief moments of muddled dialogue, Labelle gives a strong performance full of youthfully ignorant passion, heart and truth. Unfortunately, opposite of this, Sherry’s performance as AJ is surprisingly weak. An almost imperceptible perma-smirk robs his performance of much believability, despite a winning amount of earnestness. However, when these boys begin cooking up their next scheme, their excitement is palpable and often manifests itself in appropriately physical ways, usually the most teenage-boy way possible — playful aggression.

Seemingly taking a page from 1978's Grease, the film is hard-pressed to pass Sherry and Labelle (both in the early 20s) as 14-year-old boys. Their ages are a relatively unimportant detail, but it’s talked about enough times in the screenplay to warrant mention here. There’s a valiant effort to make them appear younger by sizing up every piece of clothing they wear, but it’s not enough. On the topic of wrong ages, production design itself suffers from anachronistic choices throughout. For a film that’s meant to be happening in 1991, both of the lead boys are styled much like any Gen Z teenager would be today. While the film is battling the 2020s vogue of resurgent 1990s style, the lack of attention to detail, particularly in the hair styling, continued to remind me that this movie was made post-COVID.

Despite the troubles that this movie has with performances and aesthetic, there is a charm that’s hard to deny. You can often feel the warmth of the Nebraska summer and smell the pungent mixture of sugar and microwaved hot dogs, while the juvenile thrills of rule-breaking and overwhelming desire are as vicariously exciting as ever. Though they both appear well over their proclaimed ages, the boys both exude a youthful innocence and hubris that informs every decision they make, bringing us along as they learn the lessons that so many have learned on screen before them.

Snack Shack has small but specific ambitions, and it achieves them.

Like Frankenstein’s monster himself, the tropes of the man-made creature just can’t seem to stay dead. Luckily, Lisa Frankestein is a ludicrous, hysterical, and pastiche-smattered adaptation that – pardon the pun – really kills the delivery.

Lisa Swallows (Katheryn Newton) is an intelligent social outcast goth whose failure to connect is mostly attributed to witnessing her mother’s brutal murder at the hands of a home intruder. When she’s sexually assaulted at a high school party, she flees to a graveyard in the woods that has become a place of solace for her. One odd lightning storm and a drug trip later, a body from that graveyard has reanimated, and is set on becoming Lisa’s lover. He’s just missing a few parts – but never to be deterred, Lisa and the corpse set about collecting these appendages and slowly returning him to his former glory. As the body count rises and getting caught becomes increasingly likely, the unlikely pair romp through the sky-high camp and deadpan comedy to deliver a puddle-deep horror-comedy that’s so incredibly funny, it’s scary – or is that reversed?

It’s apparent here that the entire cast (including Cole Spruce, Carla Gugino, Liza Soberano, and Joe Chrest) was having a fantastic time making this movie, but Katheryn Newton’s performance here in particular proves that her vapid and vacant turn as Cassie Lang in Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania (2023) was a product of poor writing and direction, and clearly not indicative of her body of work. Newtown seems to be carving out a niche for herself in horror-comedy, having delivered handily in Freaky (2020) and additionally starring in the upcoming Abigail (2024). (One can only hope that Marvel learns how to employ her talents fruitfully. I mean, come on – Young Avengers is right there.) Considering the majority of her screentime is spent opposite of an undead mute, her demonstration of moving from a shy, socially awkward writer to a confidently dark, sex-postive murderer contains real depth and is very entertaining to watch, despite the brevity of the screenplay and speed at which this transformation must occur. At roughly 100 minutes, Lisa Frankenstein is the shortest film I’ve seen in a while, and it’s all the better for it; concision in storytelling is essential.

For a movie about hacking and slashing body parts, it is tame in the execution. The PG-13 rating prevents a Tarantino situation, but I think that the absurdity of this movie could have used a bit more of a bloodbath. As the vaporwave aesthetic demands, needle drops are abundant, one of the funniest featuring Jeffery Osborne’s “On the Wings of Love” blaring over a slow motion castration. Regarding those particular parts, this movie is also sexually charged – but again, it is mostly tame because of the MPAA rating. It’s a teenager’s view of sex: exciting, mostly awkward, and completely unconcerned with the details.

With a story that’s sewn up tight by the time the credits roll, the only question I was left with was why this film was released in February, when it is clearly fodder for a massive Halloween hit. I was unable to find anything indicative of a release change due to the strikes, so I’m simply left to assume that the angle was never meant to be Halloween, but rather, Valentine’s Day. In a way, that makes sense; Lisa Frankenstein shows us that love means “until death do us part” – and even then, it’s debatable.

By nature of how many people are involved in them, schools are a hub for the communities that they are a part of. Students, faculty, staff, and parents all move in an around them on a daily basis – so naturally, any sort of scandal on campus reverberates far and wide. The Teachers’ Lounge follows Carla Nowak (Leonie Benesch), a grade school teacher in Germany. When a series of petty thefts occur at the school, the situation is mishandled by administration and one of Carla’s students is accused of being responsible. When the student is cleared, Carla is unsatisfied with the administration’s response, so she takes matters into her own hands by secretly recording a section of the teachers’ lounge. She has every intention of catching the thief, but what she ends up getting on camera escalates the situation dramatically. With yet another mishandled meeting involving an indirect accusation, the problem grows exponentially and ends up ensnaring Carla, the faculty and staff, her students, and their parents in a prickly and precarious position.

Anyone who grew up in a small town (myself included – shoutout to Seekonk, Massachusetts) knows that for the most part, there are not typically major happenings occurring all that often. So, when something of interest does happen – say, a scandal at the local school – both the community response and one’s internal sense of proportion are outsized. This film leans into this dynamic, going so far as to remove any representation of Carla’s life outside of school; there is not a single scene that takes place off of the school campus. This is very, very smart. It keeps the pressure building on a situation that really needn’t be as dramatic as it is, and puts us in Carla’s mindset of feeling unable to escape the mounting professional and social pressures of her position. She wants to protect her students, but she wants to be honest with them; she wants to bring the thief to justice, but she doesn’t want to ruin someone’s career unnecessarily; and she simply wants to do her job and teach her students, but she is consistently held up by nosy faculty, inept administration, and a nastily efficient rumor mill.

This film also wields the power of uncertainty with a masterful hand. For everything that we are sure to be fact in this movie, there are multiple decisions, emotions, and conversations based on assumption, guesswork, and rumor. Putting us in Carla’s shoes once again, the filmmakers use this haze of ambiguity to drop our hearts into our stomachs when she is questioned by her students in class, or by parents on open house night – Carla doesn’t know what to say, and we don’t know how to help her. Her decision to make the recording was morally ambivalent and potentially illegal; does that now make her the one on trial, given the strict ethical guidelines teachers are held to? Does the community even care about who the thief was any more, or is all of the interest merely in the social drama? All the while, Carla valiantly holds fast to her devotion to her students, refusing to give up on finding a behavioral diversion from long-lasting consequences for one boy in particular, even when it lands her with a black eye.

The Teachers’ Lounge is an compelling look at the social, political, and systemic dynamics of a small community school. Much like in life, the collective adult focus veers from the court of law to the court of public opinion, while the students gather under the flag of one child with a vendetta. The film starts slow, but just like a real community scandal, when it picks up steam, it grows into something completely different and altogether engrossing.

Origin starts with a reenactment of the final moments of Trayvon Martin’s life. This first scene cuts before his murder – it does play out later, in a very harrowing sequence that features the actual audio tapes of George Zimmerman’s 911 call – and moves shortly thereafter into several fascinating conversations about racism and what it actually means. This, apparently, was enough for some of the audience members in my screening, as several up and left within the first ten minutes. Of note was that everyone I saw leaving was white and of a certain age; I can only assume that an unflinching breach of one’s world view is enough to send some folks packing.

And that’s why we need movies like this.

The story here follows the real-life events that lead Isabel Wilkerson to write the best-selling nonfiction book Caste: The Origin of Our Discontent – among them, the murder of Trayvon Martin, and several personal tragedies. What’s really, very fascinating about this movie (and about the book) is that Wilkerson builds her case around a divisive and incredibly critical thesis. Her claim is that the Holocaust, the Indian caste system, and American racism are all related, and that “racism” is actually an inaccurate term for what Black Americans are up against. (This is an incredibly simplified statement of her thesis - please listen to some of her interviews on this.)

Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor plays Wilkerson here, and her stunning portrayal of Wilkerson’s personal tragedies is staggering. The film intercuts the biographical aspect of the story with her research and journey towards the publication of Caste. Taking us to The Middle Passage, 1940s Germany, 1950s America, and 1950s India as we see the actions and movements that inform and support her thesis, the movie does not just tell us what Wilkerson is discovering, but shows it to us. Often accompanied by Kristopher Bowers’ moving score and voiceovers of Ellis-Taylor delivering passages from the book, these scenes make everything that Wilkerson researched and wrote about leap to visceral, often terrible, life.

This movie is very heavy, but with that weight comes an accompanying impact. Ava DuVernay (the director of the film) hits hard and does not shy away from making us uncomfortable – as with Wilkerson’s original thesis, sometimes that discomfort feels intentional, challenging us to open our minds enough to envelop such a daring idea as this. I personally am still processing and attempting to understand everything that the movie and the book are saying; I certainly will be obtaining a copy of the book in short order. I think that this movie is a magnificent way to interact with these ideas, and it’s a brilliant way to bring the thesis to a broader audience – it’s an unfortunate truth that a 2-hour movie will likely reach a far larger audience than a book of any length.

This is a really stunning work that I will be thinking about for a while.