Benoit Teves

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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.

This afternoon, my husband and I took our four-year-old nephew on a Guncle Movie Day, filled with popcorn, gummies, and a stop at the donut shop afterwards, as promised. On the way out of the theater, with a vocabulary fueled by one of Illumination’s trailers, our nephew offered his review:

“That movie was despicable. I never want to see it again.”

While even I am not so harsh a critic, I can’t deny that he’s on to something.

Over the past week, I had the pleasure of catching up on this series of animated films for the first time. Released from 2008 to 2016, they vary in their degrees of success, but there’s a heart that ties a through line across them. Eight years ago, the third movie was undoubtedly planned to be the finale, wrapping up a trilogy of family trauma, self-discovery, and belief in one’s self. Now, the franchise has returned from the Spirit Realm with a hollow, heartless 90 minutes that feels like little more than a cash grab.

Master Shifu (Dustin Hoffman) has decided: Po (Jack Black), our beloved panda and Dragon Warrior, is to become the spiritual leader of Peace Valley. He must pass down his mantle of “Dragon Warrior” to a successor of his choosing; Po has a difficult time with accepting this change. All the while, a witch chameleon (known only as “The Chameleon”, voiced by Viola Davis) with shapeshifting abilities and non-existent motivation is bent on collecting the kung fu abilities of masters from the Spirit Realm to use in her conquest of China. The catch? She needs Po’s Staff of Wisdom to do it. Teaming up with newcomer fox Zhen (Awkwafina), Po sets out to stop The Chameleon.

Animation has jumped leagues in the near-decade since the last Kung Fu Panda movie, and it’s visible all over the screen. There’s a depth of field to many shots that didn’t exist previously, and a fluidity to the character movement (particularly The Chameleon) that’s really impressive. The environments are also much more ambitious, this time around bringing us to a massive, bustling city (that, in a running joke, has never heard of Po or the Dragon Warrior). The Chameleon herself is an interesting visual feat as well, changing shape and size frequently and, when necessary, in a pretty frightening manner. The production makes a smart choice of keeping her scales in the texture of whatever character’s skin she is in, making identification easier for audiences.

Unfortunately, both The Chameleon and the film itself are lots of fun to look at, but fail to thrill otherwise. Where Po’s previous nemeses were driven by relationships and paranoia, our villain this time around simply sets her eyes on world domination for the heck of it. Similarly, Po’s personal journey of growth has fallen completely by the wayside to allow for the inclusion of a bland new protagonist, Zhen, voiced by an underwhelmed Awkwafina. Ian McShane turns up to briefly voice Tai Lung, along with James Hong and Brian Cranston as Po’s dads (long story), but other than that, there is an absolutely deafening silence from the stars that previously voiced the Furious Five. Though their absence is quickly explained away, it reads glaringly as both a lack of belief in the material and as a cost-cutting measure.

Po’s arc had been completed; through discovering where he belonged in the world and who he belonged with, he unlocked his own true potential for kung fu mastery. Here, he’s predominantly been dragged back out to facilitate the introduction of what’s positioned to be the new headliner for the foreseeable future.

Don’t be too surprised when we get Kung Fu Fox in a few years.

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.

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.

Like the Atreides family atomics, Dune: Part 2 just blasted every other 2024 film into oblivion. Believe your friends: it’s really that good.

It’s been a rough start to 2024 for theaters, with most movie releases ranging from middling to fine. That’s not totally uncommon for this time of year — “Dumptuary”, as it’s sometimes referred to, is usually a disposal ground for movie studios to drop off their projects that don’t have much going for them. But if there ever was a clear demarcation of the end of that time for 2024, it is Friday, March 1st.

A good literary adaptation hits all of the same story beats as its source material; a great literary adaptation steeps you in so deeply in the established world and lore that you can instantaneously imagine infinite stories in that universe. That’s what happens while watching Dune: Part Two: an astoundingly complex political conflict with a vast roster of players and allegiances sprawls across not just Arrakis but many star systems, while centuries of religious zealotry from the witch-like Bene Gesserit stokes massive unrest and ultimately a holy war. There’s a sense of indifference for the audience here — the hand-holding found in many a recent screenplay is nowhere to be found. Scenes often start and end in media res, leaving us to parse the amount of time that has passed and who is where, doing what; but, like a steam locomotive of old, it all has the feeling of something absolutely massive chugging rhythmically along, building momentum to a velocity that soon becomes impossible to halt. An almost three hour runtime slides by in what feels like 90 minutes; at ten minutes longer than Part One, it feels remarkably shorter.

After watching the first film at home on what was then called HBO Max (during the Great WB Dump of 2021), my opinion and my experience were both elevated and amplified when I had the opportunity to see a rerelease in a Dolby Theatre by AMC. Part Two is of the exact same nature, if not more so — the scale of things is so dynamically enormous that you can feel the movie begging to be experienced in the biggest, loudest, most bone-rattling theatre that you can find. You thought one sandworm was impressive? How about three? Were you amazed by the thousand-man battle in Part One? How about tens of thousands of men? Everything about this movie and the conflict it portrays takes what you may expect and exceeds it in scope. I can’t imagine what the next one holds.

The cast, many returning from the first film, have been impeccably placed in their roles. The only face that was, perhaps, a bit jarring, was Christopher Walken as the Emperor; but give him a moment to show who the Emperor really is, and it’s easy to move past. Of particular note were Javier Bardem, who gets much more time here to develop himself as the eager-to-believe Stilgar, and Austin Butler, who is almost unrecognizable as the sadistic Feyd-Rautha. Timothee Chalamet continues a career-defining performance as Paul, getting the opportunity to do more than brood this time around; anguish, empowerment, and even bloodlust all have their way with him.

It’s not clear how many installments Villenueve’s film series is going to eventually have, but what is exceedingly clear is that there is a vision and a plan for how it is all meant to pan out. Unlike other high-profile cinematic universes of late, the Dune films have a coherence and a binding relationship that holds these separate pieces together as a creative whole, much like Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. (You’re liable to find comparisons to The Empire Strikes Back abound as well.) Part Two picks up mere minutes after the events of Part One, and the strength in continuity creates a sensation that we never left, despite the three years in between these movies.
As for the next installment? I don’t care how long it takes (and in fact, I hope Villenueve takes his time like he has here); I’ll eagerly be awaiting our next return to Arrakis.

There are a lot of surprises packed into Drive-Away Dolls. An 80-minute runtime is one of the first (and one of the only welcome), and in that brevity comes a dense slew of inexplicable choices in direction, writing, and casting.

After a pseudo-noir opening sequence involving a botched handoff and a beat up old brown car, we meet Jamie and Marian: two lesbians in 1999 Philadelphia. Jamie (a raunchy party gal played by Margaret Qualley) and Marian (uptight and repressed, played by Geraldine Viswanathan) have been friends for years. When they both come to the conclusion that their lives are not satisfactory, a roadtrip to Tallahassee, Florida becomes their solution. They pick up a drive-away car to use for the trip (a vehicle that someone needs transported, which you can drive for free if you happen to also be heading in the same direction); of course, it’s the same beat up old brown car we saw in the opening, containing some contraband goods. The girls, oblivious to their cargo and the nefarious men pursuing them, drive towards Florida and towards personal and sexual reckoning.

If that sounds generic on paper, it’s because it reads as generic on screen. The queer aspect of this movie is doing so much of the heavy lifting that someone should be spotting it. Without that overlay, it’s a typical raunchy rom-com, with a dash of crime and some light political commentary (which is really too afraid to say much of anything). What’s bizarre is the tendency to seem shy about the sexuality. This movie is raunchy, make no mistake — but in many cutaways (amid other wildly off-the-mark scene transitions) there is a sense of embarrassment about showing or doing too much.

Broadly speaking, that comment can apply to most aspects of the film. With a script that wants to be bonkers, the direction and pacing are oddly laid-back; the presentation of the material is at odds with the material itself. For each moment that reaches an effectively high level of hilarious camp — and there are a few, I give credit where it is due — there’s a strange tangent into reflective dreamlike reveries or completely inexplicable and drawn-out transition sequences heaping on 70’s drug trip pastiche (an odd choice for a film taking place in 1999).

For a movie that feels like it was made for a streaming debut (and one without much fanfare, at that) there are a surprising number of recognizable faces. Pedro Pascal, Colman Domingo, Matt Damon, and even Miley Cyrus appear here — and all are wasted with either little screen time or pointless, constrained material. Beanie Feldstein, as an angry ex, makes a meal out of every scene she gets, chewing up both the scenery and her scene partners. Unfortunately for the entire production, our two leading ladies (Qualley and Viswanathan) have virtually no chemistry. Qualley is a cute little sex-pistol doing her best with a committed southern drawl, while Viswanathan, on the other hand, presents an obstinate performance that refuses to either let the audience in or bring much out. The combination of the two results in a fizzle rather than a bang, and when they inevitably end up beneath the sheets, the character swings to get them there are enormous.

There’s no rush to catch these drive-aways. They’ll pull into a streaming service soon; and even then, you may want to give them a parking violation.

I have been vocal about my distaste for the Broadway musical adaptation of Mean Girls. I didn’t think that it worked well, I think it was the epitome of commercial cash-grab Broadway, and the music in particular really struck me as poorly written. (Not everything has to be Sondheim, but we can certainly do better than “imagine a party with dresses and cake/and singing and dancing and cake”.) So when I attended a screening of the movie adaptation of the Broadway musical, I wasn’t expecting much.

I was very, very wrong.

This movie entirely changed my opinion on the material. It not only updates the musical’s material, but combines it with an aesthetic update that speaks directly to Gen Z, predominantly with a new visual language. In moments where characters would have been addressing the audience, we instead watch them recording a TikTok in their garage or going live in their bedroom. It’s a genius way to retain the idea of direct address by having the actors speak to a different kind of audience. Social media plays a large part in this update: the beginning of “Sexy” has the screen covered with TikTok and Instagram lives of students preparing their Halloween costumes, and when Regina weaponizes the Burn Book towards the end of the movie, it’s not with photocopies of the pages like in 2004, but by leaving it where it can be found and immediately shared online by the entire school.

The music also gets an update here, with new orchestrations in every song. Gone is the blaring brass that typically accompanies a musical theatre score – this is pure pop. A lot of the vocals are toned down from what fans of the musical will be used to hearing, but these changes work extremely well on film. (See “Stupid With Love” for the best example – it’s been turned into a gentle, dreamlike pop piece that fits right where it is in context.) That’s something that’s important to remember, if you are coming into this viewing experience as a fan of the stage musical. These art forms – theatre and film – are extremely different, and therefore, stories cannot be adapted exactly the same way. In actuality, a 1:1 transition would be detrimental to the material.
Another advantage of being on film is the ability to play with the formatting, and Mean Girls uses this in an incredibly smart way: all of the musical numbers are widescreen, while scenes are full screen. This allows a visual and aesthetic shift when moving into the world of song and dance, even leaning into music video territory, in the best way. (The cinematography on “Someone Gets Hurt” is probably my favorite in the entire movie, a dark, glitzy, and seductively confusing move through a crowded living room.) Everything moves smoothly from scene to scene, often cleverly using stage tricks to blend a transition. Kyle Hanagami’s choreography showcases a talented ensemble that has been brilliantly styled by Tom Broecker to truly resemble high schoolers in 2024.

The cast is brilliant, particularly Reneé Rapp as the queen bee, Regina George. Having played the role on Broadway, she’s no stranger to the material, but it’s really remarkable how well she was able to adjust her vocals to the pop-leaning reconstructions of the pieces. The combination of her performance and the way her scenes are shot creates a truly captivating and intimidating illustration of a villain; she’s hot, and you should be terrified of her. Auli’i Cravalho and Jaquel Spivey devour every scene they are in as Janice and Damien, clearly having the time of their lives while filming this movie – for Cravalho, this is a long way from Moana and Little Mermaid Live. And, in a full circle moment, it was nice, if not a bit jarring, to see Tina Fey and Tim Meadows reprising their 2004 roles as Ms. Norbury and Principal Duvall (with a new twist on their dynamic).

While the general populace is once again decrying the supposed sudden revelation that this movie is a musical, it works, and it works well. (I would go as far as to say that this particular musical works better on film than it did on stage.) I just wish that film studios would stop being coy about making movie musicals – are they “cringe” and so earnest that it hurts? Sometimes. But that’s part of why I love them, and why it’s so easy for them to make us feel something.

Maybe – just maybe – I’ll go see Les Misérables again when it’s re-released this month.

Picture it: Normandy, 1985.

When 18-year-old David (Benjamin Voisin) rescues 16-year-old Alexis (Felix Lefebvre) from a capsized sailboat in stormy waters of the coast of France, the electricity between the boys is immediate – and not just because of the lightning in the sky. Voisin and Lefebvre have an intensely lifelike chemistry that is thoroughly sensual and almost animalistic in David’s aloof pursuit of Alexis. It’s also glaringly immature, despite the depth that Alexis feels. It’s a painfully realistic portrayal of how first true sexual attraction – perhaps love – is completely and utterly overwhelming, to the point of losing yourself to (or within) the object of your desire. It’s no coincidence that David has to literally retrieve and return Alexis’ soaked jeans to him after fishing him out of the ocean.

The contrast between what the boys bring to the relationship is stark; Alexis is nearly cherubic in his innocence and frantic desperation to be chosen, while David is extremely conformable with who he is and in going after what he wants – he’s just hot and cool, and Alexis becomes enraptured in everything having to do with him. The boys are also at different points in their lives: Alexis is handling a decision on whether to continue with school or to begin work (with plenty of input from his parents), while David has already taken over his late father’s shop with his mother. Even while they begin to form their relationship, there’s a sense that David is circling Alexis, pulling him into an orbit that he’s all too willing to fall into. After their first sexual experience together (and perhaps Alexis’ first at all) things escalate quickly; Alexis becomes completely lost within his obsessive love for David, while David enjoys his time with Alexis, but treats him as a shiny new toy that can be just as easily forgotten as it was discovered. Both boys are fully-formed and complex, and watching their building frustrations with one another come to a head is really impressive in both writing and performance.

It’s no secret that David ends up dead a little more than halfway through the movie. Alexis tells us via narration as the movie flashes back and forth between pre- and post-mortem. He’s a young writer who has a fascination with death; not exactly revolutionary, but troubling when he’s being investigated for his potential involvement in David’s death. While I think this movie does great work unearthing self-discovery through losing yourself to another person, and investigating freedom through loss, I feel that I’m obligated to point out the “Bury Your Gays” Trope happening here. (Former listeners of the podcast and readers of the blog know that this is a constant frustration of mine, still happening currently with the likes of All of Us Strangers.) Alexis needed to experience heartrending loss to then experience the personal growth that we see by the end of this movie, but I’m not convinced that the loss needed to be through death.

Summer of ‘85 is a coming-of-age movie wrapped in a warm, grainy 80’s aesthetic that has a lot to say about first love, sexual discovery, and the pursuit of what we desire (for better or for worse). If you can forgive it for being an example of the aforementioned trope, which I encourage, it’s a heartbreaker that will leave you reminiscing about falling hard and fast, and wondering about how quickly we move along – and who gets hurt along the way.

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)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that when you wake up from a dream, the particulars of said dream almost instantaneously begin to slip away from you. You can remember the big points, and the way it made you feel, but the details and logic are as long-lasting as a Snapchat.

Watching Argylle is, in this sense – and this sense only – like a dream.

With the amount of money that Universal has dumped into marketing this movie, you would assume that most people with a passing interest in movies would be familiar with the basis: a writer’s novels somehow contain prescient details about an ongoing conflict between warring spy factions, and they are both after her to find out how to win. Interesting, right?

Well, that’s not what this movie is about.

At all.

I would say that the next paragraph contains spoilers, but it’s difficult to spoil something that’s already so thoroughly rotten. The final trailer (which played in front of just about every screening of any movie for the past three months) implores audiences, “once you know the secret, don’t let the cat out of the bag”. This movie so completely abandons its advertised premise that an audience member would be hard pressed to do so; but I’ll give it my best shot.

Ellie Conway is an author whose Agent Argylle books somehow seem to have preordained knowledge of international and political happenings; things in real life tend to happen as they do in the books. Ellie is soon targeted by warring spy factions because of this ability – or so she thinks. Rescued by good-spy Aiden, Ellie is soon swept up into a whirlwind conflict that spans continents. Aiden is depending on her “power of foresight” to help figure out what to do next, but that almost immediately devolves into sleuthing, not supernatural or technological prescience. As the search continues, it’s explained that the events of the Argylle novels happened before Ellie wrote the books…so the idea of her writing things into existence is shattered irreparably, and the entire inciting concept behind this movie is destroyed by how contrary this revelation is to the rules of the plot that were explained in the first hour. And yet, that fact is skipped over with abandon. Toss in gratuitous twists, logic leaps of epic proportions, manufactured shocks, and a ham-fisted attempt at visualizing a sort of schizophrenic break, and you’ve got the brain twisting mess that is Argylle.

If that paragraph confused you, you’re on the right track to understanding what it feels like to watch this movie.
The most notable thing about this film is that it wanted very badly to successfully employ the stylistic devices that Matthew Vaughn’s other action films have in their arsenal. Unfortunately, it had next to none of the flair or style that those films have, and what little it mustered, it borrowed wholesale from these superior films. Vaughn has carried over his penchant for percussive combat choreography matched up with toe-tapping needle drops. A few of the sequences are pure camp (taking out an entire garrison of bad guys while skating over an oil spill on skates made of boots and knives, for example), but in a movie that cannot decide what it wants its tone to be, they feel incredibly out of place. The best moments also come far too late into the movie, when the audience is already too far detached to be won back – a silent theatre after the aforementioned oil spill sequence in tonight’s viewing was all the evidence necessary to assert as much. It doesn’t help that an all-star cast is forced to deliver dialogue like, “Do you know why I’m the secret keeper? Because I keep them,” while mugging like they just dropped the most quotable moment ever seen on film.

If Barbie and Oppenheimer were the height of living up to hype, then Argylle is the lowest point at the opposite end of the spectrum in recent memory.
If you’re in the mood for a camp spy action film, just watch the Kingsman movies.

They’re what Argylle wanted to be anyway.

As performers, we’re often told that if you’re not able to obtain opportunities from others, then you must take it upon yourself to create your own. By writing, directing, and starring in Scrambled, Leah McKendrick has done just that – and created something impressive at that.

The movie follows Nellie (McKendrick) as she faces a weekly maelstrom of weddings and baby showers in her mid-thirties. The rungs on the ladder of life that her circle of friends are swinging up to still seem incredibly foreign to Nellie, and while everyone loves her, she begins to feel socially out of step and alienated. Though she’s single, and doesn’t currently want children, she visits a fertility clinic to learn about what it would look like for her if/when she changes her mind. After some startling information from the doctor, she makes the decision to freeze her eggs.

Millennials, this one is for you.

The egg-freezing process, from figuring out how to pay for it to abstaining from her frequent sexual encounters, is not easy for Nellie. She makes her way through it with the help and the hinderance of a large group of well-defined characters who tick a few characteristic trope boxes (the silently judgmental neighbor, the disapproving father) but who also, with the assistance of McKendrick’s bracingly smart script, resist the temptation to fall into cliche dialogue. Nellie’s world keeps moving on around her even as she tries to take it into her own hands; the tension (and comedy) emerge from the bald honesty and openness of her journey towards self-assurance.

While this movie is funny – and I mean funny – it does a fantastic job of investigating how fear of the future can paralyze us, spur us to action, or even sabotage us, depending on our circumstances. Nellie has been frozen in her late twenties, partying and failing to commit wholesale to a single career; her best friend (Ego Nwodim, in a fantastic turn from SNL) has a complete breakdown immediately after her own wedding thinking about the permanence and consequences of her nuptials; and her father (Clancy Brown), in egging Nellie incessantly to secure a sustainable legacy for herself, is really flailing in pursuit of his own legacy as he confronts his mortality. In a deeply moving scene at a support group for parents who have lost children – a group of total strangers to Nellie – it occurs to her that while she may not be in lockstep with the life events of her friend group, we needn’t measure ourselves, our successes, or our failures against those we know and love. Simply looking outside of our circle can reveal just how at-pace we actually are, so long as we keep going and resist the sinister pull of regret.

The typically elusive bit to a movie like this is the balance that must be struck between comedy and poignancy. Too much of either and you end up with something shallow or something self-indulgent. Luckily, McKendrick has written something really wonderful here. The script is equal parts hysterical and tragic, and for a story about Millennials in 2024, is there a more appropriate tone? In a world that’s robbed us of most of the adult life we’d all hoped for, blamed us for the death of a hundred industries, and staggered us with once-in-a-lifetime tragedies every few years, looking back can be just as traumatic as looking forward into the abyss of the unknown. And yet, we still laugh; we still persist in a system not meant for our success; and we still make jokes about it all day long, day after day, on TikTok, because we have to laugh at the absurdity of it. McKendrick’s script encapsulates this in Nellie’s cryopreservation journey, resulting in a story that’s not only resonant, but ultimately, sunny side up.

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.

Nyad (2023) tells the story of Diana Nyad’s (Annette Bening) multiple attempts and failures to swim unassisted from Cuba to the Florida Keys. Having already held multiple world records from her other swims, but this particular route was her white whale – it had eluded her since her first attempt in 1978. 33 years later, at the age of 61, Diana began the next of what would ultimately be five total attempts at the record.

Nyad is a story of perseverance, but in telling that story, the plot gets cyclical – try, fail, make adjustments, try, fail, make adjustments, and so on. It’s the natural progression of attempting something never before accomplished, but in a narrative, it lacks a propulsive interest that keeps the plot engaging. Luckily, Annette Bening and Jodi Foster have an incredibly interesting chemistry as a pair of aging lesbians that once had a fling long ago, but are now lifelong friends. They’ve been nominated for Best Actress and Best Featured Actress respectively, and while I think there’s a magic in the combination of the two, individually, their performances are relatively run-of-the-mill. Bening’s portrayal of Nyad’s complete physical surrender to the purpose of making the impossible possible is impressive, but it’s difficult to get absorbed in the performance when she spends half of the movie face-down in the ocean. I actually remember more of Foster’s performance, given that we spend most of Bening’s time in the water with Foster on the boat. The movie is, for the most part, fine. However, in Nyad’s final attempt at the swim, there is a sequence where the electronic shark repellant devices go dead as a large mako approaches, and the device is, of course, restarted just in time to deter it from attacking. Nothing I can find indicates that this actually happened, and the inclusion of the scene robs the movie of any realism it had going for it. The term “jumping the shark” comes to mind – a last gasp that’s blatantly meant to stir up some semblance of dramatic action.

Maestro (2023) was easily my favorite of these three films, perhaps because of my previous familiarity with Leonard Bernstein’s works (like West Side Story and Candide). Loosely following Bernstein’s (Bradley Cooper) career from his first big conducting gig at age 25, the movie is much more interested in Bernstein’s relationship to his wife, Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan), and his complicated personal life as a queer man. This is to the movie’s benefit, as Bernstein’s career provides a rich backdrop to the tension that quietly grows in, around, and between members of his family. Early on, Felicia tells Leonard that she sees him for who he is, and that she is ok with it. They appear to have an agreement where he can seek out the pleasures he pleases; Felicia seems to agree to sharing. But when Leonard gets more overt with his transgressions, and the tide turns from sharing to being forgotten, Felicia understandably takes issue with what the status quo has become. The tension simmers in near silence – with the occasional verbose explosion – as Leonard refuses to formally reconcile until it is too late.

Serving as lead actor and director to this production, Bradley Cooper does a phenomenal job in his portrayal of Bernstein. Though there has been some backlash about the prosthetic work done to improve his likeness to the real Bernstein, the hair and makeup team on this movie deserve a huge amount of accolades for their accomplishments here (confirmed by their own Academy Award nomination); not only do they transform Cooper’s face, but they also subtly (and then all at once) age both Cooper and Mulligan across the decades of their relationship with work that is utterly convincing. The actors (again, both nominated for Academy Awards in their respective categories) take the transformative tools that they have been given and use them to craft performances that are entirely gripping; a Thanksgiving Day argument between the two is so real that it’s almost tempting to turn away out of embarrassment for having witnessed something so private. The screenplay and direction of its delivery are reflective of lifelike conversation – characters talk over one another, cut one another off, and quickly interject, and while this can get overwhelming, so can real conversations. It smudges the sheen of perfection that a lot of dialogue tends to have, and instead opts to lean into the imperfect mess that real communication can become, especially when love is involved. In a nice touch of stylistic intent, just like the makeup and the performances reflect the passing time, so to do the visual period pastiches – the film moves from a 4:3 aspect ratio in black and white to a widescreen format in full color, reflecting the film style of the time, and earning another Academy Award nomination for Best Cinematography.

Rustin (2023) is the story of the conception and execution of the 1963 March on Washington. It features many historical figures as characters, including Martin Luthor King, Jr. (Aml Ameen), Roy Wilkins (Chris Rock), and Adam Clayton Powell (Jeffrey Wright) – but most predominantly, Bayard Rustin (Colman Domingo), the man who succeeded in pushing the idea of the march to achieving every bit of potential it had.

It’s a rare thing to call a performance transformative, but Colman Domingo’s turn as Rustin is nothing short of it. In both body and voice, Domingo is so utterly different from any other role I’ve seen him in that it took me a moment to adjust. The voice he uses pitches his typical timbre upwards, but it’s carefully and consciously not a gay stereotype; rather, it’s a significant departure from his norm in a way that allows him to be seen as a different person entirely. While Domingo’s performance is absolutely deserving of the Academy Award nomination, there is a reason that it is the only recognition this film got. Most of the other performances are unconvincing at best and melodramatic at worst, and the screenplay itself cannot decide if it wants to tell the story of the March on Washington or the drama surrounding Rustin’s personal life as a gay Black man in the 1960’s United States. There are some great dramatic sequences of personal strife, but they are then railroaded by montages of march preparation; on the other side of the coin, there are fascinating boardroom scenes of political conversation, but they are quickly forgotten when we cut to a spat between Rustin and his underdeveloped boy toy, Tom. It’s all over the place, and when you have an unfocused screenplay that balances entirely on hooking you with the next famous historical reference, the unfortunate result is a bit of hazy mess.

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.

It’s been a rough few years for Marvel on screen. Despite my opinion that The Marvels was a great time, it fell far short of expectations on a huge budget, and Quantumania flopped at the start of the year with another massive budget and disastrous results both on screen and at the box office. Though Madame Web was not produced by Marvel Studios, I – and most of the world – have had a bad feeling about the perception of this movie ever since the first trailer dropped. It truly never stood a chance: up against the fall from public grace of Marvel properties across the board, and with a writing team known for bombs like 2022’s Morbius and 2017’s Power Rangers, Madame Web was set up for failure from day one. It was already at such a disadvantage that it would have been an uphill battle even if the film had ended up being stellar – something that may have happened in another universe, but certainly not this one. You didn’t exactly need the title character’s powers of foresight to see where this was going.

Madame Web is, essentially, a setup for things to come – or that Sony hopes are to come. In the 1970s, a team is researching spiders in the Amazon for their effects on the human body. Constance Web (Kerry Bishé) is interested in their healing properties, and Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim), not so much. After a betrayal, Constance is cared for by Amazonian tribesmen who showcase the effects of this spider venom before she gives birth and passes away. Thirty years later, Cassie Web (Dakota Johnson) is a paramedic in New York City who begins to experience psychic visions that she does not understand. It begins with brief flashes of reliving a few seconds, but soon evolves into seeing things hours ahead of time. Acting upon visions he’s been granted by spider venom, Ezekiel Sims has spent the years since the Amazon incident hunting three young women who he believes will one day kill him. When Cassie and the three girls all find themselves on the same train to Poughkeepsie, Ezekiel attacks and sets a conflict into motion that is at times meandering, other times frenetic, and ultimately, meaningless – but we’ll get to that.

The hard thing about this film is that it is not nearly as bad, at least, as I was expecting it to be. It’s a passable origin story that clearly has its ambitions set on a sequel (most of the characters pictured don’t even have their super powers by the end of the movie) and establishes a team of super-powered women that Sony certainly is hoping to hang its hat on. There are just several things getting in the way of this movie being successful. Action scenes fall, for the most part, somewhere in between confusing and interesting. For every moment where the editing was slick and actually did a pretty good job of communicating the psychic slips that Cassie’s mind was having, there was a slapdash hack job leaving you wondering what character was standing where or who said what. (The ADR in this movie is absolutely heinous, particularly in scenes with Tahar Rahim as Ezekiel Sims.) The final sequence of a battle on top of a fireworks warehouse is especially guilty of this, as characters are dodging explosions and debris and suddenly you’ve lost track of all of them. Even small things, like a bad cut of a character removing their mask, are just sloppy. It’s also difficult to really make the big set pieces feel like superhero showdowns when only two of the five characters participating actually have powers.

The story itself is rather interesting, but when it’s propelled by characters delivering the most banal lines in the wildest situations, it saps the plot of any excitement or energy. There’s no way around it: the screenplay feels like it’s written by someone who doesn’t understand what a normal conversation sounds like. It also doesn’t help that most of the cast appeared to either know that the lines they were delivering were poorly written, or were otherwise entirely uninterested in this gig. Not a single performance was dimensional or engaging – particularly painful were Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, and Emma Roberts. Even Adam Scott, who I’m typically very fond of (thanks Party Down and Severance) feels flat here. The screenwriters had the chance to really examine questions of fate versus free will, or of the inevitability of destiny with Cassie’s powers of clairvoyance; but we don’t really get any of that. Instead, it is a mostly fine, altogether safe, and standard intro to new stock characters with powers just vague enough to be twisted in whatever way the plot calls for. They also had every opportunity to make sure that we, as the audience, understood that this is the Sony Spider-verse we’re looking at here (Adam Scott is playing Ben Parker here – that’s right, Uncle Ben to Tom Holland’s Peter Parker), but I had no clue. It wasn’t until I was reading up on it for this review that I learned that this is 2003 in that timeline, years before Peter gets his powers. We’re mostly left wondering why no one is mentioning the striking resemblance Ezekiel’s costume bears to your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, or why an Amazonian tribe getting powers from spider venom seems so inexplicably foreign to these characters.

When I say that this movie is meaningless, it’s not because it’s devoid of anything fun or enjoyable – there were moments that I was engaged. I say it purely because of the reality of the industry. As I mentioned above, even if this movie was incredible, it was never going to perform well at the box office, and as a result, any sequels planned in advance are most likely going to end up getting the chop. That means that all of the leg work that this movie is doing in introducing these characters is, in all likelihood, for naught. I don’t like to write preemptive obituaries, and perhaps this weekend’s bow office numbers will bear glad tidings, but unless Madame Web can see something that the rest of us are missing, all I can foresee is a one-and-done bittersweet installment.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.