There, Back Again:THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE WAR OF THE ROHIRRIM

Turns out Peter Jackson remains a reliable guide to Middle Earth. Ten years after his last Hobbit movie, he’s now produced The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim, an animated movie that takes its narrative from a couple pages in J.R.R. Tolkien’s appendices and somehow spins satisfying feature-length story out of it. The two listless seasons of Amazon’s The Rings of Power, which are undeniably expensively made and appealing on that surface level, but are largely dramatically inert, had me doubting that the voluminous prequel lore of this fantasy world was worth mining for more filmmaking. But Jackson isn’t involved in those, and Rohirrim takes full advantage of what he can bring. Here are the Howard Shore themes, as well as the look and pace of his take on Middle Earth, as well as a knowing love of the source material that sets off the right mythopoeic resonances which make it feel suitably epic and involving. This is both familiar and fresh, by dint of giving anime director Kenji Kamiyama the reins. Once I adjusted to the look of Japanese animation, which is here more restrained and subtle in its embellishments than one might expect, I found it plays mostly like Jackson’s Tolkien. That’s doubly nostalgic for both the prose and world building of Tolkien's books and the now-classic flavor of Jackson's original trilogy. The result also has the deep pleasure of seeing hand-drawn animation on the big screen, an all-too-rare sight and one that feels more beautifully classical and hand-crafted. What an unexpectedly good match.

Set well before the narrative of the earlier movies, this story, adapted by Jackson’s co-writer Philippa Boyens and others, finds the Riders of Rohan fending off an invasion. You might remember them from the siege of Helm’s Deep—the spectacular action climax of The Two Towers. This is a couple hundred years before that. The King of Rohan (Brian Cox), the awesomely named Helm Hammerhand, turns down a marriage proposal on behalf of his daughter (Gaia Wise). She’s a classically heroic princess who knows how to ride a horse and use a sword, which will come in handy as war approaches and she’ll be key to their people’s defenses. She’s painted as a cool archetype, which helps fill in the details of her personalty. (She’s also designed like a blend between a Miyazaki tomboy, a red-haired Celtic queen, and an hourglass-shaped anime pinup.) The man her father rejects (Luke Pasqualino) decides he’d rather have the throne than her hand, so he gathers an army and the story proceeds through their clashes. The battles that follow are also a little Kurosawa in their scared villagers and amassing armies. There are also warrior princes and wise elders and magic creatures, and it builds to well-drawn combat and nicely rendered catharsis. This gives it the feeling of an old legend recalled to life. (Even the requisite small number of clumsy fan-friendly references aren't that bad.) It’s all suitably fantastical and epic and makes for a satisfying excuse to return to this world.

Least Wanted: KRAVEN THE HUNTER

I wonder how many awful superhero movies in a row it’d take to put a stop to the genre for a while? After the last few years it sure seems like we might be getting close to finding out. The latest dismal effort is Kraven the Hunter, and although it probably won’t end the superhero genre quite yet, it does seem poised to be the killing blow to Sony’s attempts to make a Cinematic Universe out of solo movies for Spider-Man supporting players. This Oops! All Side Characters approach, born out of a contractual need to have projects in the works in order to keep the Spidey rights in joint custody with Disney, has led to these Spider-Man-less curiosities that ask: what if some of his villains are heroes in their own stories? It works for Venom, at least once and fitfully twice more, and I kind of liked parts of Morbius when it leaned into its comic book monster movie intentions. Even Madame Web had its shambolic charms with oddball energy resulting from a hacked apart and barely reconstituted narrative buffeted by corporate meddling. Kraven is the most dead on arrival, though. It’s just boringly proficient, endlessly setting up future potential that’s never going to pay off. If not in this movie, then when? Looks like never, unless the whole gang is revived for a cheap jolt in a future Deadpool gag.

Kraven is played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson in a performance that’s mostly nostril flares and ab clenching. He’s the son of a wealthy mobster played by Russell Crowe, who’s given so little meat with which to ham it up that he doesn’t even seem to enjoy putting on a thick Russian accent. (Compare it to his fun Pope’s Exorcist, in which he chows down on Italian with delicious genre delight.) The bad dad takes his son big game hunting, where the lad is mauled by a lion. Through convolutions too stupid and convenient to get into here, he ends up super-powered and dedicates his life to stopping international criminals. Also Spider-Man, eventually, presumably, although he is unmentioned, as is typical with these half-hearted attempts at spin-offs. The movie’s all flatly grey and boringly violent, with eruptions of CG blood indifferently staged as if the whole thing was only turned R-rated on a whim. Kraven’s killings are over-the-top and merciless in the boringly impersonal style of all bad vigilante movies. Kraven himself is as generic as these comic book anti-heroes come. Johnson’s given nothing to play, and the plot is somehow so grindingly predictable and totally cliched without ever caring about its own premise. It slogs from one flat, underwhelming sequence to the next with all the vigor of a sleepwalker doing his taxes.

There are a lot of characters and variables here, but none land with any impact or develop into anything of interest. For a superhero, Kraven has little distinguishing powers other than strength and agility—a few hints of communication with animals goes more or less unused aside from some flashes of psychedelic dreams of wildlife footage overplayed with runes—and his interactions with other characters are vaguely defined and barely believable. His strained relationship with a singing half-brother (Fred Hechinger) is one thing. But his magical savior, maybe-assistant, potential love-interest lawyer played by Ariana DeBose (this, after Wish and Argylle, further cements the West Side Story co-star in one of the most disastrous post-Oscar runs I can recall) is a total nonstarter in every direction. Even villain The Rhino (Alessandro Nivola) just has few kooky line readings—a couple high pitched chortles and a few gargled threats—to distinguish him from the wallpaper. I preferred the villainy of Christopher Abbot’s hypnotic hitman, who waltzes in at random carrying zen-weirdo vibes as if he meant to end up in Madame Web’s zonked-out tone instead. It’s a movie that’s constantly tossing in new people and places with only the slightest intentions of actually putting them to work. If this is really the last of these Sony experiments, I’ll admit some sick disappointment in not getting the promised team-up movie. Alas, that’s par for the course for the whole endeavor as it is for these individual parts: lots of setups that never get close to paying off. Of course they’d give up on the whole thing before getting something like a conclusion.

The Sense of an Ending: OH, CANADA

Paul Schrader’s films have always been political and spiritual and death-haunted. He is the screenwriter of Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ and Bringing Out the Dead, among others, some of that master’s most doom-laden and theologically minded. As writer-director on his own, Schrader has given us everything from the incisive work of contentious race-relations and union-building as Blue Collar and the sorrowful ecological and religious angst of First Reformed, his late, fiercely philosophical, intense masterwork. His newest film, Oh, Canada, is especially funereal. Here’s a work from an elderly filmmaker who uses his own closeness to death—the 78-year-old’s recent hospital stays have been well-documented—to make a film perched on that precipice. He’s adapting a Russell Banks novel for the second time in his career, after the powerful alcoholism drama Affliction. This new one stars Richard Gere as a terminally ill filmmaker—a famously draft-dodging documentarian—who agrees to an interview for a movie about his life made by one of his former students (Michael Imperioli). The old man is seated in front of an Interrotron, the camera setup invented by filmmaker Errol Morris to allow the interview subject to comfortably stare straight down the lens by using mirrors to put the questioner’s face directly above it. Gere, looking convincingly frail and confused, inhabits this director as he is asked to tell the story of his career. 

What follows is a slipstream of memories flowing into flashbacks. Schrader plays with time as he plays with color and aspect ratio to visualize a man lost in his own times. Jacob Elordi plays the younger Gere, and then Schrader freely mixes between the two actors in the flashbacks, sometimes Gere playing opposite younger actors. He also has Elordi play scenes against Uma Thurman, who plays two roles, one past and one present, as do some other key cast members. As you age, faces and names blur like this. It makes for a film that’s shot within a sense of an elderly man remembering and inhabiting his memories in the same moment. In this man’s confessions of past failures and foibles, the effect is demystifying—showing life is more complicated and less dramatic than the myths that build up around us—and clarifying. He can’t keep it straight, even as he tries to set the record straight. Most Schrader films pull inward even as they move outward. This one goes only inward—politics and business and war and art all caught in the undertow of a man’s life as his reminiscence finds fleeting connections and lingering divisions. It’s not so much a movie of an old man’s regrets. It’s a movie about an old man’s accumulated hypocrisies and misalignments as he realizes, perhaps too late, that these fragments add up not to a unified whole, but a fragmented one. The result is a fragmented movie, frustrating and yet somehow complete all the same.

Who Let the Dog Out: NIGHTBITCH

Its title suggests it could be some combination of David Cronenberg body horror and John Waters provocation and Universal Monster Movie metaphor. But Marielle Heller’s Nightbitch is, after all, a Marielle Heller movie, and therefore up to something more intimate, contained, and subtle. It atypically speaks its thesis loud and proud, early and often, but does so as a quiet domestic drama indulging the occasional flight of magical realist fantasy. Heller is the writer-director who gave us the warm-hearted A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood—a sideways Mr. Rogers’ biopic via appreciation by watching his ethos warm an unsuspecting journalist’s heart—and the prickly Can You Ever Forgive Me?—a con woman publishing story that balances mordant humor and real empathy for its desperate and unpleasant lead character. Those movies feature strong, specific performances that enliven their characters with nuanced observation of their situations. Nightbitch is similarly wedded to a strong lead performance as Amy Adams plays a stay-at-home mom who starts to suspect she’s turning into a dog at night. It’s an obvious metaphor for motherhood as a time of transformation that can leave a person unfamiliar to themselves. This mother used to be an artist, and now spends her days alone tending to her angelic son’s every need. He’s not a difficult kid; he’s just two years old. Her husband (Scoot McNairy) is often away for work, and when he’s home rarely offers to help, and needs lots of help himself even when he does. We get montages of her repetitive schedule, moments of loving connection with the child interspersed with receptive tasks and building frustrations. She makes mistakes, she harbors resentments, and harbors resentments for the way a mistake—not committing to breaking her son’s co-sleeping habit, say—can get harder to fix the longer she lacks the patience to do so.

We hear her inner monologue full of frustrations and resentments, toward her husband, toward the other moms in her social groups, toward her former artist colleagues, and especially toward herself. It’s a picture of motherly obligations and duties, fleeting satisfactions, and growing depression. She’s in a crisis of self-worth in a life of unbalanced routines. All of this is so precisely noticed and complicatedly enacted—it’s a real, messy, complicated picture of a woman trying to rediscover herself after growing alienated and isolated through the process of giving birth—that the whole dog transformation thing is both too much and not enough. It’s never a full-bore high-concept horror comedy—imagine the cult classic we’d have from the 80s or 90s with this premise, where people would feel smart for saying actually it’s about the conflicted emotions of motherhood—although it’s best in those moments when it emerges as an awkward social moment. Instead, the high concept is rather thinly stretched, mostly playing as separated embellishments of (sometimes gross) fantasy, moments where she imagines a taste of animalistic freedom that matches the burbling bodily transformations that have made her seem different in every way, and which she must reconcile to become her new, best self. Adams is really good at embodying those contradictions and making them work.

Hate Crime: THE ORDER

The Order is a tense and absorbing real-life thriller set against a backdrop of the American northwest, with stunning views of mountains and forests and rivers and farms on which plays out a standard procedural about good men with guns in pursuit of the bad men with guns. This gives it the feeling of a Western, albeit one with machine guns and pickup trucks from its mid-80’s milieu. It’s only fitting for a true crime story that’s about the very conflicts that continue to drive our country’s madness to take on the trappings of a genre that’s always about American identity. This picture finds an FBI agent (Jude Law) investigating the works of a white-supremacist militia. He’s a grizzled and exhausted veteran who rolls into town and soon teams up with a boyish local cop (Tye Sheridan) to start asking the right questions, and some wrong ones. The militia under suspicion is a recent breakaway group from a larger, slightly more sedate hate group. It’s led by a hot-headed extremist (Nicholas Hoult) who’s leading his small band of men in robberies and bombings, leading up to planned assassinations and more. Ominously, there’s a shot of blueprints for the United States capitol tacked up on his bulletin board. I half expected a title card at the end to tell us one of their group would go on decades later to storm it. Or be elected to Congress.

Director Justin Kurzel is a good fit for the material with his interest in man’s capacity for violence and the ways in which aimless men can bond over a sense of duty, misguided or not, that can emerge from its pursuit. (This makes for an interesting companion to Kurzel’s Macbeth, Assassin’s Creed, and True History of the Kelly Gang in its exploration of bloody codes of conduct and grim perspective.) He has a straight-faced somberness of tone and a steady grip on suspense erupting into violence. Here are long, crackling sequences of law enforcement jargon and investigation, jostling personalities behind the scenes of cops and criminals alike, and then the inevitable shootouts and bombings and chases. (There’s also an event that’ll be familiar to anyone who knows it inspired Oliver Stone’s electric underrated Talk Radio.) Kurzel moves the plot with a well-paced progression of clues and escalations, keeping a close eye on the revealing gestures of the performances. Law convincingly plays an older agent who was hoping to slow down, but finds he just can’t stay out of the game. He moves like an old pro, interrogates with a gruff edge, and runs with a hard-charging fervor that had me worried the character would give himself a heart attack. Sheridan is a fine youthful idealist coming into his own, making a fine pair with Law’s grizzled determination. (Jurnee Smollett is a good by-the-book third wheel when they call for backup.) They’re easy to root for. As their Hoult is scarily blank, a void of charisma that nonetheless has other racist young guys enthralled to his promise of a better, whiter America. There’s a sick dread to the FBI’s righteous pursuit of their group, as we know the sick appeal of their target's evil message will continue to linger past this particular flashpoint.

Other People: A REAL PAIN

“Moments from yesterday and from centuries ago—  
…they dwell in us,  
waiting for a fulfillment.”
—Czeslaw Milosz

A Real Pain is a quietly profound little movie. It’s a gentle dramatic comedy with a light touch and a deep well of sadness and insight underneath. Star Jesse Eisenberg, who also confidently wrote and directed this well-observed feature, plays an anxious New Yorker who joins his semi-estranged cousin (Kieran Culkin) on a Jewish tour of Poland. They’re mourning the recent death of a beloved grandmother, who left them money for the trip in her will. The goal is to find her old home, the one from which she fled the Holocaust, a fateful decision that made her family Americans and left her grandsons with a commingled sense of gratitude, grief, and curiosity. The movie follows the pair as they reconnect, wandering through a tour of deep family meaning while accompanied by pleasant strangers—a nerdy Gentile guide (Will Sharpe), a divorcee (Jennifer Grey), an older couple (Liza Sadovy and Daniel Oreskes), a survivor of the Rwandan genocide (Kurt Egyiawan). Each stop along the way has them confront all manner of pain—personal, inter-personal, societal, historical—as they try to imbue their trip with meaning that’s so readily apparent in every step. They try to connect with a homeland they never knew, and find a vacation that’s ready-made to expose insecurities, conflicts, raw nerves in their sense of self and their relationship to each other, as well as their family legacy. And yet that makes it sound so heavy, when what we see are charmingly complicated performances of people trying their best to have an enjoyable, meaningful vacation.

Eisenberg films with a travelogue’s eye set against a playwright’s sense of language as he lets scenes play out in teasing dialogues and tense silences, the sort of easygoing chatter of a tour group in landscapes and monuments and hotels, always with the potential for sudden shifts into awkwardness as one character or another is suddenly more vulnerable or less agreeable. His character is the high-strung one, carefully planned and trying to please. Culkin’s is the wild card, an open psychological wound, clearly struggling with grief and imbued with a spiky social conscience, but so filter-less he’ll say anything without thinking, and so open-hearted that he can’t help but feel for everyone and everything. Eisenberg is simultaneously annoyed by and protective of his cousin, while Culkin is both supportive and bickering. It’s a family relationship that feels totally real. The supporting cast fills out the ensemble as well-calibrated accents to the central pair’s concerns while living their own lives. The whole picture plays like a well-observed character piece told with the beauty and concision of a finely detailed, neatly structured short story. It’s ultimately a warm and lovely little movie. The characters make for great company and it’s easy to get invested in their emotional journeys while enjoying their fumbling repartee. And then there’s that sneaky heaviness just underneath that lightness, occasionally stepping to the foreground in moving moments of tender awareness. It’s a sweetly thoughtful movie about how, once you're truly open to encounter the humanity of other people, your heart will never stop breaking.

Water Disappointment: MOANA 2

There’s a telling line about two-thirds of the way into Disney’s Moana 2 in which the demigod Maui (Dwayne Johnson) tells our disheartened heroine (Auli’i Cravalho) that he understands her pain. He sighs and says “No one likes sucking at their job.” Ugh. Such prosaic, contemporary crassness is all you need to know about a sequel that studiously replaces everything magical, warm, and clever about its predecessor with empty, cold, and slapdash effort all around. Where the first had soaring melodies and life-and-death pathos, this one has wet flatulent jokes and ghostly wisecracks and endless repetition of small-scale stakes. So dispiriting. I also wondered, half jokingly, if that line was a secret cry for help from within the writing and animating ranks of the project. Maybe they, too, could see this was a pretty terrible piece of work all around and were trying to send up a flare to let us know that, yes, we’ll think they’re sucking at their job. Simply put: this is not a movie a healthy animation studio would release to theaters. That this hastily reconfigured straight-to-streaming mini-series has fallen into multiplexes as an awkward movie-shaped thing is clearly a panic decision. (I wish it’d stayed a TV show; then I wouldn’t have seen it.) After last year’s flop 100th anniversary princess musical Wish was a critical and commercial whiff, it’s clear the studio wanted something theoretically safer, more guaranteed to win back some attention and money this year. Instead, the resulting feature made me think that, for as half-baked as Wish was, at least it was trying something with its hand-drawn/CG blend and unusual (if undercooked) plotting. Moana 2 is a new low for Disney animation. It tries nearly nothing at all and thinks we’ll eat it up anyway.

It follows up the moving and amusing original 2016 effort’s well-plotted, deeply-felt hero’s journey with catchy songs—the usual Disney mode!—by giving us exactly none of the original’s charms. Its music—without the melodies or lyrics of a Lin-Manuel Miranda or equivalent—are generic poppy nothings. Forget a lack of memorable melodies; this one doesn’t even have one memorable note. Its characters have no interesting inner journeys. Even the actual journey is a flat, predictable, one-thing-after-another trip with little at stake. Moana has to find a mythical island. Then she does. Along the way she meets some new obstacles and new characters—a crew of sailing pals, a semi-villainous demi-goddess, a few wiggly monsters—and not a single one pops with delight or interest. (One’s even a grumpy old guy who keeps complaining about the story he’s in, annoyed by the unmemorable singing, awful clunky rapping, and flat attempts at comedy. I related to him the most.) Some supporting characters just fall off the narrative entirely as if their episode is over and we need not circle back around. Its a symptom of its jumble of half-hearted subplots, abandoned gags, interrupted themes. But its thin plot and dead-end characterizations were a match for the frictionless plotting and bland animation that lacks the detail and glow that the other Disney works manage. I sat stupefied as it kept slipping under my lowering expectations.

I found my mind wandering—and stay with me, this will seem like a tangent at first, but will make sense by the end—to this year’s surprise hit video from YouTuber Jenny Nicholson: The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel. I couldn’t believe I actually liked it, let alone watched the whole thing. The video really shouldn’t work. Anyone with allergies to chirpy, weirdly-lit, direct-to-camera monologues of nerd-culture exegesis (complete with some cute cosplay), not to mention those who’d never want to hear about a stranger’s vacation, would be rightly suspicious, especially as this one ticks methodically toward the four-hour mark. I was skeptical. But it’s somehow improbably one of the year’s best documentaries as Nicholson, an engaging storyteller, only starts with a thorough recounting of her miserable stay at Disney World’s poorly executed, and sooner than later shuttered, Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser hotel. She's comprehensive in her dissection of the attraction's lifespan and every error along the way, threading it into her actual footage of experiencing its failures in person. Her thoroughness itself becomes a great source of humor that accumulates laughs as it goes. Who’d have thought a recurring cutaway to a pole obstructing the view of a dinner show would be one of the funniest moments of the year? Each new stumble in her trip becomes not a self-pitying home video, but a new plank in the scaffolding for a larger argument about the current failures of the company at large.

Along the way she’s built up the evidence to land a bigger point about the dreary state of Disney’s modern business practices. From this one ill-conceived hotel—wrong on everything from the technology to the price to the design of the over-promised, under-delivered role-playing experience—she widens the lens to consider the increasingly consumer-unfriendly corner-cutting at the customer’s expense. It’s a picture of a company that thinks its name-recognition and family fandoms will keep people paying more for less. In her conclusion, she says “…maybe Disney's right, and they're too big to fail, and people won't like it, but they'll just keep coming back and paying more and more…and feeling worse and worse about it.” Moana 2 strikes me as a product of the same corporate thinking. Here’s something vaguely like what you loved before. It’s awful now, but Disney hopes we’ll keep paying for it. I found myself feeling sorry for the kids who’ll be seeing this for how low its opinion is of their interests and capacity. I found myself sad for the adults who’ll get their time wasted chaperoning those kids. I found myself depressed for the fine artists and storytellers at the studio who could do better if given the resources and directive. And I found myself, strangely enough, feeling disappointed for Moana. She was such a strong, interesting, lovable character that it seems insulting that this is what’s she’s been reduced to.