Perspective Change: NICKEL BOYS

In just two features, director RaMell Ross has proven himself a distinctive filmmaker with a purposeful, personal style. He has a roaming, poetic eye that alights on small details and from them grows a larger whole. It plays like Frederick Wiseman’s intensity of place through durational observation meeting Terrence Malick’s spirituality of focus. His first feature, documentary Hale County This Morning, This Evening, was a vividly intuitive montage of observation from its subject setting. It’s a portrait of the contemporary South through the lived experience of life in a small, majority-Black, town. The picture is attuned to its own rhythms of insight and awareness, rooted in what Ross would tell Filmmaker magazine was his intention to use his camera to “participate, not capture; shoot from not at.” His new film, a fictional feature called Nickel Boys, is a further extrapolation of that concept, taking the camera into an ever more personal perspective, erasing the distance between character and audience and ultimately using the very form of its making to embody its themes. It starts out seeming like a limiting trick, but builds its own persuasive vocabulary to the point where the act of joining two shots with a cut—the basic foundation of cinema itself—becomes revelatory anew.

Ross’ Nickel Boys is an adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s novel of the same name, but it’s more of a transformation of that source material. He finds a way to give a movie a similar closeness of identification and fullness of interiority more associated with prose, and that more quotidian adaptations feel incapable of making cinematic. It tells the story of a young Black boy (Ethan Cole Sharp) growing up in Jim Crow Florida. We see through his eyes. Ross shoots the film in first-person, a trick rarely attempted, and almost never so successfully. The quiet boy’s occasional voice comes from behind us. Jomo Fray’s cinematography has the frame see only what the boy sees—bending and nodding; drifting away with his attention; looking at his grandmother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), a television, the sky, a mirror, a teacher (Jimmie Fails). At first it seems to deny the film the power of looking at a performance, especially as the boy becomes a young man (Ethan Herisse) and we come to privilege the ways in which we can understand him by seeing him reflected back at us through the ways others treat him. But Ross’ daring gambit starts to pay off as the movie confidently—moving style as substance—finds form meeting function. It denies the basic shot/reverse shot construction and pins us in this one perspective to better rebuild our sense of cinematic grammar with its artful intent.

The story shifts into a harder, more harrowing mode as the young man gets in unlucky accidental trouble with the law and is detained in Nickel Academy, a strict reform school. From here the boy encounters inequalities and injustices as it’s clear the school’s idea of juvenile rehabilitation for its segregated Black students means a curriculum of labor and abuses and no chance for freedom before the age of 18. By placing an audience within the perspective of a person in this circumstance, it gathers an exceedingly powerful point of view, living and breathing through this traumatic experience, and yearning after every glimmer of grace and hope within it. Ross’ screenplay, with co-writer Joslyn Barnes, builds out evocative details with dialogue perched on the edge of poetry, while production design docudrama convincing provides an immediacy of dramatic intention in each new moment of struggle and connection. Frames flow intuitively. And this is also where Ross expertly modulates the parameters of the filmmaking to draw us closer into a vivid explication of its central animating themes and characterization. I feel it’s almost a spoiler to explore how the visual conceit of the film shifts from this point; it’s such a bold surprise that builds to a few key emotional knockouts. At Nickel Academy our main character gets close to another thoughtful young man who becomes a close friend (Brandon Wilson). Suddenly, we see from his friend's perspective, too, and it returns to us the basic shot/reverse shot construction in their conversations. It’s like a breath of fresh air—an overwhelming moment rooted in recognition of the power of friendship, of being seen.

It's all about perspective. We see our lead through his friend’s eyes. We now have two main characters, and their relationship to each other, and to their situation, grows and complicates as the movie arrives at an ending that’s as perfectly poetic as it is bluntly true about the long lingering after-effects of living through such violent prejudice. A third visual strand of the movie has emerged slowly in flash-forwards to an adult (Daveed Diggs) researching Nickel Academy in something closer to our present day. He’s shot from a first-person angle just behind him, putting us in a place not unlike that of floating behind the avatar in a video game. At first these glimpses threaded throughout feel like mere differentiation, but the movie saves a late moment of stylistic adjustment for a thunderclap recognition of the motivation behind that choice. It’s another one deeply rooted in the context of character, in the disembodiment of trauma, and in the hope that one day this man will be able to fully see himself and his context. Ross’ remarkable control over his style and storytelling is evident in these deliberate choices. What could be alienating or limiting is instead only richer as the film grows absorbing as narrative and character study without sacrificing the artful ideas behind its enveloping form. How rare to see a movie so unified on every level, and so satisfyingly complete in its intentions and execution.

Rings of Power: SONIC THE HEDGEHOG 3

I have no defense of Sonic the Hedgehog 3 except that I was once an 11-year-old boy. My adult self sat watching this sequel slightly bored by the shiny, proficient formula on screen. If you’ve seen director Jeff Fowler’s first two Sonic the Hedgehog movies, this will be totally familiar—a simply plotted, gently silly scurry across brightly-lit colorful settings while the super-speedy animated blue hedgehog of Sega video game fame tries to protect his adopted human family, and the world, from the villainous machinations of evil scientist Jim Carrey. These are narratively flimsy, emotionally shallow, predictably told cartoon-logic movies. And yet, sometimes movies like this invite the Ghost of Moviegoer Past to step in and watch instead of the Present for a while. In that spirit, I had a good time. This isn’t even the best Sonic movie—that’s 2 by a nose, a perfectly pleasant pileup of kids’ adventure cliches and a good balance of human funny business. But 3 and the others are movies I would’ve enjoyed as a boy. It has likable leads with a funny ensemble, and a brisk pace with varied and imaginative-enough adventure sequences. This one has an early hedgehog versus motorcycle chase down a busy Tokyo street, and later a fight in a vault with tiles that are randomly anti- or extra-gravity. There’s just enough cleverness there. And then there’s Carrey hamming it up, this time in a double role as the villain and his own grandfather. His antics along with the Sega aesthetics are key 90s throwbacks. Is it any wonder the movie has two of the humans high-five and declare it “best decade ever?”

If the common complaint of the first picture was that it put Sonic in the passenger seat to pleasant live-action family comedy from James Marsden, Tika Sumpter, and Natasha Rothwell, this third Sonic goes the other way. It reduces the humans to glorified cameos and spends most of its time with Sonic (Ben Schwartz) and pals Tails (Colleen O'Shaugnessey) and Knuckles (Idris Elba) on the hunt for an evil hedgehog named Shadow (Keanu Reeves) who escaped containment in a secret base and is rampaging across the world looking for revenge against those who captured him. We get lots of flashbacks explaining why he’s upset, and seeding the ground for his eventual change of heart. (Though weirdly it is unacknowledged how one key character in those flashbacks has to be closely related to a key character in the present.) This series, like Fast and Furious before it, is very good about setting up villains to become sidekicks in future entries. And, better than Marvel lately, knows how to tease a new character in the credits of one entry and pay it off immediately in the next. (And easily incorporates events of a streaming series quickly, too.) This might be the ideal form of the modern franchise: cheap, efficient, reliable quality and return on investment, self-referential and fan-flattering without bogging down in self-seriousness, and exactly as ambitious as its target audience wants. It’ll never be great, but it’s always consistent.  Bring on Sonic 4!

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.

As the Romans Do: GLADIATOR II

Ridley Scott’s Gladiator movies work by wrapping sports movie logic around the trappings of ancient warfare. They meet in the bloody overlap between the two genres. Armies clashing are distilled down to opponents in the arena. It has the basic structure of competition—the athlete with promise rising through the ranks, suffering some precarious setbacks, and then emerging victorious in the end—to drive it through its Ancient Roman intrigue. The sequel even adds a complicated coach for its scrappy warrior, as Denzel Washington, wielding his charisma with a light, playful touch, swoops in to mentor an underdog gladiator. That underdog, played by Paul Mescal, who here adds a flavoring of muscle to his sad-young-man persona, turns out to be the long lost son of Russell Crowe’s heroic gladiator from the first film. So it’s the Creed of Gladiator movies, though never quite that serious, despite its efforts to bend a knee to its predecessor. Scott clearly has the urge to enjoy recreating the earlier film’s setting and mood. He whips up the spectacle of the Colosseum with all its attendant echoes of our modern stadiums—box seats, preening announcers, and a crowd clamoring for action. The combat is as bone-crunching, blood-spouting, and brutal as expected. Add a rhinoceros or a monkey and it gets even gnarlier.

Overall, the sequel is a little less interested in wallowing in tragic backstory, although it’s there, and a little more amped up with political intrigue and class warfare. This Rome is crumbling under vain boyish twin emperors (Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger), a fine vector for Scott’s recent interest in the slimy eccentricities of the super-wealthy. Sensing their weakness, Washington’s scheming aristocrat is planning to use his gladiators to grow his social status and angle for more power. Meanwhile, a celebrated general (Pedro Pascal) and his wife (Connie Nielsen, returning from the first film) plot a coup of their own. Mescal will end up a pawn in these competing plots unless he can wrest control of the narrative for himself. Hard to do in chains. Easier when given a sword. (Also, good luck having us root against Washington’s ostensible villain, who elevates the movie in his every moment on screen.) The result is a fine, thin sword-and-sandal spectacle, with galloping horses and hurtling weapons and splats of gore. Its actors are having fun, and Scott’s such a pro at helming these period-piece action efforts that he could do it in his sleep. (With his worst movies, you might suspect he has.) It’s not a great movie, but it’s often a fun one, full of diverting period detail and exaggeration and committed to its live-by-the-sword, die-by-the-sword ethos. Washington stares Mescal down early in the movie and explains: “Violence is the universal language.”

Which One: WICKED

Director Jon M. Chu is a reliable steady hand behind the camera. He simply makes movies that work well with broad audiences. He honed his skills on two Step Up movies and a G.I. Joe effort, an underrated Jem and the Holograms pop musical, a couple Bieber concert docs, and an adaptation of rom-com novel Crazy Rich Asians. That he’s not strictly a big-budget franchise player allowed him to develop some skill with bodies in motion and human-scaled emotion. He clearly has an old-fashioned love of blocking and staging, but enough modern facility with digital embellishments to give it a contemporary unreality. Those efforts are often pretty appealing. But all of that made him especially situated to modulate his modes of filmmaking into adapting Broadway hits. They bring his skill to life in even more vibrant, earnest ways with clear passion for the material and the genre. These bottle up some extra passion in the sturdy professional polish. His version of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights has a great sense of place and mood in a heightened block party appeal. Its best moments have a kind of rolling crescendo of dance and high spirits. That movie, about thwarted and kindled hopes and dreams for family and friends and careers and romances, has such a joyful expression of character and community that it’s hard to resist. It’s a mode to which his career’s been building.

And now Chu turns his attention to the biggest musical of the past couple decades: Wicked. It’s also his best movie yet. This is a big-hearted, well-crafted, crowd-pleasing spectacle of music, dance, humor, and pathos. He marries a potentially large canvas of a fantasy musical with something grounded in a simple character story of two women who grow to respect one another before getting torn apart by circumstance and politics and personalities. This Part 1 tackles just the first Act of this well-known reinterpretation of the Wicked Witch of the West and finds enough material for a full, satisfying experience in and of itself. Turns out it’s a great time to revive Winnie Holzman and Stephen Schwartz’s production in which young women experience prejudice, creeping fascism, and dawning political consciousness. That it is in the guise of Wizard of Oz fan fiction gives it a fantastical frisson, even as Chu deliberately steers away from the perfectly outlandish artifice of the 1939 classic inspiration and into something a little softer and more inflected with a rounded-edges pseudo-reality. It’s a little silly, and a little synthetic, but it’s such a wondrously big-hearted experience that believes in itself so fully that it’s easy to get pulled along. The proceedings take place in enormous sets—fake forests, palaces and schoolyards that are lush prosceniums ornately decorated—and find figures in costumes lavishly detailed in jewels and frills and flowing angles. There are some phony computer-generated animals and the usual over-cranked background enhancements movies of this size get these days. But throughout there’s a spirt of the stage to its staging, and even some Disney Renaissance to its wrangling of small crowds, big reactions, and lovely gestures—like skipping across a pond on a row of stones. (This is what all those dire live-action remakes wish they felt like.) It’s comfortably old-fashioned underneath its new-film shine.

Amid all this design, we meet the emerald-green Elphaba (Cynthia Erivo) as she arrives at the magical Shiz University. Her reluctant roommate is privileged blonde striver Glinda, who’ll one day be The Good Witch. She’s played by Ariana Grande in a sensational flouncy performance in which each line reading is deeply motived with both dramatic tensions and comic filigrees, sometimes in the same expression. Those choices flow out of her characterization and into song with a dazzling fluidity. It’d be a star making turn if she wasn’t already a pop star. It’s a performance built to contrast and support the striking stillness and deliberateness from Erivo as a deeply wounded outcast who slowly starts to imagine herself fitting into the mainstream only to be pushed back by said mainstream's callousness toward the marginalized. It’s a tricky role played for vulnerably and toughness, a self-actualization in the face of others assumptions about her used to manipulate and deceive until she takes command of her own power. This tension is embodied in the character conflicts—and then expressed through a fine ensemble of good performers as interesting characters who stir the pot, and inevitably join them in song and dance. Chu shoots these numbers with attention to choreography and finds neatly complicated and rousing ways to stage them, and draw them out with a uniquely cinematic form of theatricality. It’s feels all so casual and effortless as crowds move in sync or drift into moving solos—ballads both tenderly downbeat and triumphantly bellowed. As all good musicals do, these numbers spring out of deep wells of emotion mere dialogue is suddenly inadequate to express. It makes for a full and transporting experience if you give yourself over to it—and ends on such a perfect high that a 12-month intermission seems almost bearable.

Tis the Season:HOT FROSTY, THE BEST CHRISTMAS PAGEANT EVER, RED ONE, and CHRISTMAS EVE IN MILLER'S POINT

How has it been two decades since we’ve collectively added an entry to the Christmas movie canon? By common agreement that last addition has to be 2003’s Elf, which has long since passed into beloved family comedy status. You could also make arguments for its fellow 2003 adult-skewing ensemble rom-com Love Actually and 2004’s motion-capture Polar Express, if only for their perennial appearance in squabbles over their qualities or lack thereof. Since then, though there are small gems of one sort (Kasi Lemmons’ Black Nativity’s blend of musical fantasy and social issues drama) or another (the Kristen Stewart-starring playful closeted-lesbian farce Happiest Season), there’s nothing approaching the New Consensus Favorite. This, despite the past twenty years being a period with more Christmas movies per capita than ever before, thanks to Hallmark Channel’s flood-the-zone approach to made-for-TV holiday fare and streaming services’ attempts to keep up. We get what feels like hundreds of new formulaic Christmas movies every year, and the studios have more or less ceded the territory to the small screen. It’s a genre that’s been oversaturated, and it prevents good—or even memorable—ideas to surface for wide consumption and acceptance.

It says a lot about the state of cheap Christmas movies that the buzziest one of those so far this year is Netflix’s Hot Frosty. It stars Hallmark staple Lacey Chabert as a busy single woman who puts a scarf on a sexy snowman. Unbeknownst to her, it’s a magic scarf, and the snowman comes to life as a flesh-and-blood man (Dustin Milligan). There’s something unnatural and eerie about that whole thing, but an attempt at warmth and cheer follows. The holly jolly Golem proceeds to guilelessly stumble into her life and somehow cause her to fall in love. It’s a little Splash, and a little unhinged, but it’s all so sweetly, smoothly handled that you believe the characters believe it, even if you might never get convinced. It’s perched on the precipice of playing out like a parody of the TV movies it suggests passing resemblance to in its blandly digital sitcom staging. (The director is most recently a Schitt’s Creek veteran.) The supporting cast—Craig Robinson, Joe Lo Truglio, Katy Mixon, Lauren Holly—have certainly been called upon to do arch comic work in the past. But the surprise here is that the movie is resolutely not a parody. It just is an inexpensive unambitious Christmas rom-com. The screenplay by Russell Hainline is earnestly oddball at heart, but in the execution gets its wild premise to run the most routine paces. It picks up some easy, pre-fab would-be heartwarming stuff about small towns and grief and the warmth of the season—even as it doesn’t really have anything to say about that except to have it around like so many multicolored lights and snow machines. It’s not good, exactly, but it sure is what it is. That’s par for the course on the small screen these days, when that’s just one of dozens upon dozens of seasonal time-fillers.

At least the big screen has its fair share of Christmas movies this year, too. Multiplexes are currently screening The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, a pretty low-key indie family comedy based on a popular kids’ book from the 70s. It tells the story of preparations for a church Christmas pageant thrown into uncertainty by the town’s troublemakers. A family of poor, neglected children of which everyone assumes the worst show up hoping for free food from the rehearsal snack table, but soon learn the Real Meaning of Christmas. In the process, the so-called Christians involved in judging these poor children reluctantly remember that Jesus asks them to care for such as these. The adaptation is a 70s period piece done on a budget, which means sparse production design and cramped soft-focus establishing shots. It’s not helped by director Dallas Jenkins having no real vision behind the camera, leaving lots of unmotivated camera movement and stilted blocking haphazardly cut together. The thing simply doesn’t flow, and an oddly hollow sound design has a cheap echoing emptiness that does nothing to smooth over the arhythmic editing. It made me appreciate the baseline craft competency of even the most empty-headed homogeneous Hollywood product. Jenkins, best known as creator of the New Testament TV show adaptation The Chosen, clearly has an earnestness, though, and that carries across the movie’s best moments when its obviousness and simplicity strike something sentimental. It’s all a little sweet, if over-determined. But it is so thoroughly undone by its plodding, textureless craft—badly directed down to even the smallest performances, which leaves several cute child actors stranded—that what fleeting moving moments it finds are almost accidental. Not even casting Judy Greer and Pete Holmes as the kind-hearted parents of a family that wants to help the outcasts can lift the overall amateurishness.

And yet, for all that’s awkwardly small and incomplete about that picture, Red One is there to remind us big, galumphing Hollywood competence has its own irritations. Unlike director Jake Kasdan’s better action comedies—the recent Jumanji pictures, which are good crowd-pleasers built with some charm and personality behind the digital noise—this production is an entirely soulless and heartless product from beginning to end. That’s an especially tough sit for a movie ostensibly about Christmas magic. That’s literally the plot, as it follows Santa’s top security elf (Dwayne Johnson) teaming up with a smarmy bounty hunter (Chris Evans) to rescue an abducted Saint Nick (J.K. Simmons) from the clutches of a wintry witch (Kiernan Shipka). She wants to steal his Christmas powers to spread punishments to the bad instead of presents to the good. (Early on, Johnson solemnly informs Santa that this is the first year that more people are on the Naughty List than the Good List. Hmm.) What follows is lots of boring zipping around as we careen from one mirthless action-comedy sequence to the next, before ending in the same endless phony computer-generated fisticuffs in which these things always end up. It’s an enormous production with a fine foundation built entirely out of dependable cliche and then whittled away and sanded down until nothing even that complicated or funny or interesting could possibly survive. It has good makeup effects and bad green screen compositing and shimmering CG backdrops. It cuts together smoothly and always sounds loud. It has a few twinkling sparks of personality from its best actors—Simmons is good on a mall meet-and-greet, and his wife is Bonnie Hunt—and zero from its leads. (Johnson is entirely vacant in a nothing role; Evans is playing his like he’s Ryan Reynolds’ understudy.) And then it swiftly moves to stamp all of the above out, starve them of oxygen, and charge ahead into empty expressions of hollow holiday cheer. It’s a fight to save Christmas, but it can’t even save itself, let alone articulate what the holiday might actually mean.

Leave it to writer-director Tyler Thomas Taormina’s Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point to give us the closest we’ve got to a new great Christmas movie this year. It does so by doing something so simple that it’s really difficult to pull off: it feels like Christmas. This experiential indie is a warm, bustling, amusingly detailed and beautifully busy little picture set almost entirely within one family’s gathering on December 24th. We follow one nuclear family into a cozy house in small town Long Island where a few generations of aunts, uncles, and cousins have squeezed in for food, drink, music, presents, and traditions. Filmed with a grainy warmth by cinematographer Carson Lund, here’s a movie that captures a mood and a place and then lets its eyes and ears wander from room to room and happening to happening. There’s a generosity of spirit and casualness of approach that lets an audience gather an understanding of the characters, their histories, and their interpersonal dynamics through observation and eavesdropping, as if we’re a guest in a stranger’s home trying to figure out how they do things here. It’s a movie that paints in subtleties, attentive to small expressions, fleeting gestures, the unspoken or half said. It gathers up a group picture of this family in this moment, surrounded by a soft-glowing blur of multicolored lights, and with a wall-to-wall wall-of-sound song score (an instant plucking of nostalgia for anyone whose secular Christmas soundtracks are even partially intertwined with Phil Spector, for better or worse). It skips across this holiday night chronologically from sundown to sunup, narrowing to the early-morning experiences of a few youngsters who sneak out to spend hours wandering with other teens underneath flurries fluttering in the glow of street-lamps and strip malls. As we grow aware of various character’s conflicts, foibles, and thwarted ambitions—it’s grandma’s last year in this house, for instance—the movie grows melancholic. It becomes a moving, and quintessentially Christmassy, picture about how tradition and togetherness just barely keeps sadness and loneliness at bay. And that’s what makes it all the more special to find.

Debate Me: HERETIC

Most of the best horror movies of 2024 have been about religious young women endangered by men who want to control them. That’s a fitting reflection of our times in which women’s bodily autonomy is increasingly imperiled by men. Horror can be such a potent force for dredging up real societal fears, staring into the darkness of what is so often only implied by our poor information environment and what little passes for The Discourse these days. So after Immaculate and The First Omen, here’s Heretic, a sharp, pulpy movie about painful theological inquiry. It finds two sweet, innocent Mormon missionaries—The Book of Boba Fett’s Sophie Thatcher and The Fablemans’ Chloe East—knocking on the door of a potential convert (Hugh Grant). He chummily welcomes them in with assurances his wife is in the next room baking a pie. The movie’s somberly steady camerawork and ominous sound design proceed to sell an undertone of threat in his questions about their faith. Soon it’s clear there is no wife, and he doesn’t want to convert. He wants to debate. And he’s locked them in to do so. With that, writer-directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (last seen making Adam Driver dodge dinosaurs in 65) have a screenplay that is smart about how disingenuous debate is really a ploy to trap someone and force an ideological point. It’s all about control.

The movie works its premise with a tight grip and a keen eye to its performances to see the slow-rolling twists, which are as much in the intellect as they are physical. Large portions of the movie are given over to a tense back-and-forth between Grant and the young women as he monologues about his studies in comparative religion and forces them to game out how best to reply in order to ensure their safety. As they descend deeper into the dark corners of his paradoxically labyrinthine little house—with locked doors and shadowy statues and strange noises—they’re led under duress to wrestle with issues of faith and doubt. His feigning doubts melt into stubborn certainties and then real dangers. It’s a neat little trick, as Grant modulates his usual sunny, stammering intellect ever so slightly into menacing mendacity, peppering them with questions and research. His scene partners travel a path from fluttery naivety to sturdy suspicion and then steely determination. It’s a fine genre exercise, with Beck and Woods making plain metaphors out of their right-on-the-surface plotting and intentionally arranged blocking and design. (By the time it becomes slightly more heightened in its finale, we’re ready for that release.) It finds charismatic villainy in a familiar type: one who’d use religious study to feel entitled to inflict cruelty. This makes for suspense in this circumstance, worrying for the victims whose lives, and souls, are on the line as they’re called to use their faith to find righteous strength, even, and especially, through their fears and doubts.

Justice for All: JUROR #2

Clint Eastwood spent the first three decades of his career starring in movies about retributive justice, and the last three decades directing movies problematizing that notion. How beautifully consistent, the iconographic cowboy cop whose might made right aging into a thoughtful interrogator of the systems whose corruption supports such misguided notions, and the kinds of steady professional cooperation that can truly save the day. The distance between Dirty Harry—grizzled, violent, taciturn, impulsive—and Sully—warm, calm, communicative, expert—says all you need to know. He’s always been drawn to darker, more complicated figures, but in his older years, his films slowed down, grew melancholic and doubtful, cast about in the shadows and grays he brought to his images for glimmers of light and truth that still shine through despite the flaws. This receives a clean, clear, lovely, and maybe final, expression in Juror #2, a movie that in decades past would’ve been a basic studio programmer—a legal thriller with a great hook and few fine performances. Now, given the rarity of that form, and the credentials of its 94-year-old director, it gathers an old-fashioned sense of craft and consideration. It finds a juror (Nicholas Hoult) listening intently to the arguments in a murder case, tracking the back and forth between a prosecutor (Toni Collette) and defense attorney (Chris Messina) about the behavior and character of the accused (Gabriel Basso). As the juror hears the facts of a body found by the side of the road on a dark and stormy night some months prior, he begins to suspect the deer he thought he hit on that very day was in fact this victim. What follows in Jonathan Abrams’ script is a sturdy courtroom procedural of motions and objections and testimony and cross-examination and closing arguments and deliberations.

Eastwood makes it a subtle study of actors faces and gestures. And building off such a compelling moral quandary gives the genre’s standard moves a charge of genuine high-stakes philosophical inquiry. To come forward would save an innocent man’s life at the expense of his own. Will he make the right choice? As we learn more about Hoult’s home life and back story, as well as the defendant’s, the movie twists the lines of sympathy as we see the goodness and flaws of each. The right thing starts to feel not so clear cut. What Eastwood’s driving at here is that of faith in the justice system—watching attentively as it goes wrong in this extreme circumstance, and watching patiently to see if just enough will go right. How fitting for an American moment in which we wonder if we’ll ever see justice for what’s so clearly wrong. Eastwood earnestly believes in the goodness of people trying to do a good job, and trying to do what’s right. It may not be a perfect system, and we are certainly not perfect people. But it’s the best we’ve got, and we are all we have. Eastwood builds his case with methodical clarity, adjusting the characters and situation with low-key confidence in letting their complications energize a well-constructed concept. It’s a textured satisfaction as the movie finds its way to a close and lets the fullness of its implications linger in a final moment of harrowing uncertainty and pregnant silence. And yet, because he actually believes there is civic goodness in even a flawed system—he has us watch the jury duty promotional video with his characters, after all—we can, too.

Past Lives: WE LIVE IN TIME and HERE

Movies are uniquely situated to capture time. They’re built of finite moments, assembled with a definite end in mind. Unlike the open-endedness of television, the ephemerality of theater, the personalized pace of literature, or the stasis of paintings and sculptures, a movie is each moment in performance and photography and music temporally unified and held infinitely replayable. And yet to experience it in full is to move through time with its choices and for its ends. Its life-like qualities are also its greatest falseness—that we can return again to experience a life anew. It works on us by working it out through time. So when a movie leans into an idea about time, it’s meeting the medium at one of its great strengths.

This is the case with We Live in Time, which gets quite a boost by emphasizing clocks ticking and timers counting and calendars turning. It tells a pretty conventional tearful story about a couple who fall in love, have a kid, and live through illnesses. It swells with conventional sentiment. But it gets out of feeling cheap by embracing its centering of time. The story is told out of order, bouncing between high-emotion moments within the couple’s relationship. We get a wacky Meet Cute and a sober diagnosis, a wedding invitation and a pregnancy test, a career accomplishment and a medical setback. It adds to a sense of time slipping away, each discreet moment feeling so big and lasting in that moment, and yet so fleeting and short in the aggregate. The leads are played with lovely chemistry—sensual and sparkling with unforced intimacy and an easy flirtatiousness—by Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield, who genuinely connect on screen with quiet teasing and fluttering sensitivity. They have eyes that water with unspoken fears and desires, and then run over when they’re finally spoken.

Director John Crowley (he might be best known for the lovely romantic Saoirse Ronan picture Brooklyn from about a decade ago) wisely frames the movie in warm tones and cozy close-ups, letting the performances breathe with natural interaction even as the high-gloss appearance and occasionally cliche moves tilt toward the conventional. There’s such depth of feeling to this acting duet. It adds up to quite a tear-jerking work-out, constantly teetering on the edge of melancholy even in the moments of satisfaction. It’s all those timers and tests and countdowns and waiting rooms and Save the Dates that end up important factors in so many scenes. We feel their time together slipping away. It made me acutely aware that we’re never truly cognizant of how little time we have with the ones we care about. How could we go on if we did? And how will those hundreds of little moments continue to resonate long after we’re gone?

That’s also the subject of Robert Zemeckis’ latest film: Here. In true Zemeckis fashion, it’s one of the more audacious visual experiences in recent multiplex memory. Would we expect any less from the guy who gave us Roger Rabbit’s believable hand-drawn cartoon co-stars, Forrest Gump’s proto-Deep Fakes, and three eye-boggling early motion-capture efforts? He’s been consistently pushing against the limits of popular cinema’s visual forms. This latest experiment, inspired by Richard McGuire’s graphic novel of the same name, tells the entire history of one particular spot. The camera doesn’t move. Its perspective is fixed at one angle, in one position, as everything from the dinosaurs’ extinction to the COVID pandemic plays out. It’s a simple observation, perhaps, but also a profound one, in its way, to recognize that through each and every spot on the planet the entirety of history runs. The movie draws this out by, from a flurry of images across all time, settling down into telling several stories in parallel, each with a small group of character who live here. We see: a prehistoric indigenous couple; a family in colonial America; a family in the early 20th century; a couple in the early 1940s; a family in the late-twenty-teens. Here is a home.

The film cuts freely between all of these stories, each told in chronological order, while the overall history of the place is suitably scrambled. A main storyline emerges telling the birth-to-elderly arc of one Baby Boomer (Tom Hanks) as he grows up in a childhood home that becomes his own in adulthood. He marries his high school sweetheart (Robin Wright) and then pulls a George Bailey trying to chase dreams that always lead him to stay. Life happens anyway. The cuts between the subplots and this main one tend to follow thematic threads—a man holds up his newborn so it can see the moon in one century, then another—or trace rhyming trajectories. Sometimes Zemeckis will draw a panel around one part of the frame, allowing it to stay frozen in time as the rest of the image moves, further exploiting these juxtapositions. Throughout are recurring motifs as we find the characters dealing with children, disease, technology, aging, money, work, dreaming, and despair. Same as it ever was.

The concept is so committed that I found myself tearing up at the sheer sentimental exercise of it all. (One could imagine a 60-second version repurposed for a life insurance commercial. See it and weep.) And yet the movie is also playing out at this formal distance, a tension between visual stillness and elaborate effects to age and de-age that location and its actors. Within these dense digital frames, the writing and performances are actually quite broad and theatrical, each story pretty obvious, each point triple-underlined in explicitly thematic dialogue. It’s presentational within the experimental frame. And yet I found myself so moved by its daring—crying more at the concept than the characters—that the uneven specifics’ sheer volume made up for any particular clanging miscalibration. At times Zemeckis and co-writer Eric Roth lean into their worst Gumpy tendencies, with a few scenes of cutesy cultural coincidence and a few fine ideas undone by their broadness. (Look at the scene with the grad students and wonder how those performers were possibly directed that way for the takes they used.) But the overall affect of the picture is one of visual playfulness and soft-hearted storytelling. Zemeckis is too charming a technician to take it all at face value—his roots in wacky comedies are here mixing it up with his prestige polish—and too much of a crowd-pleaser to risk letting his visual experimentation drown out the emotion. He pitches it all at such a heightened tone—even in blocking that cheats out toward the camera—that you can’t miss the overflow of human drama painted in primary colors. It’s a movie that works because of its big swings more than its small details. It just takes some time to adjust.

The Shallow End: VENOM: THE LAST DANCE

There’s a finale feeling throughout Venom: The Last Dance, a movie that plays like an ending in every way. It’s the supposedly final entry in this particular strand of Sony’s barely-connected Spider-Man spin-offs, though its end credits tease a few potential ways forward, and there’s the looming threat of more Morbius and Madame Web out there somewhere. (At least their movies are hacked-up oddities; maybe Kraven will be, too.) Some of these are fun enough, but here there’s something exhausted about this whole endeavor. It’s tied to the increasingly strained efforts to keep the larger superhero boom from going bust. And it’s the slapdash smallness of these Sony concepts, which are especially thin and stretched to the breaking point here. It’s not for the lack of trying on the part of star and co-writer Tom Hardy, who clearly loves pulling double duty playing the awkward muckraker Eddie Brock in all his shuffling, stumbling tics, while also voicing his extraterrestrial parasite, Venom, in a semi-comprehensible gargle. The title character slithers out of Brock in gooey tendrils sometimes ending in a semi-viscous countenance, and then goops over his entire body to become the anti-hero who’ll wrestle with other alien villains. In this one it’s a pack of enormous creatures—some bizarre, toothy hybrid of wolves and squids—sent to Earth to sniff out Venom at the behest of a Bad Guy who spends the entire movie glowering motionless on an evil throne. So Eddie and Venom are on the run from them, and also the government, after being framed for the events of the previous picture, and scientists, who want to experiment on them. It all comes together in a few sequences of boring, dark, half-comprehensible CG chaos.

What it doesn’t leave time for is any believable escalation or cause and effect. Instead we have scenes happening for the sake of happening, characters appearing for the sake of appearing, and decisions made just to prolong the plot and facilitate the fighting. It’s constantly asserting ideas about the relationship between Eddie and Venom that aren’t quite embodied in the storytelling. The first in the series was dumb cliched fun; the second was quick, silly and hollow. Neither laid the groundwork necessary for the tearful goodbyes teed up in the final stretch of this one. (How strange to find this is the second dreary Marvel movie of the year with a self-consciously corny sentimental clip-show montage in the end.) But nor does this movie ever really activate its potential, like those earlier entries could. Instead it’s undercutting every action with off-tempo reaction and even its oddball attempts at humor strand characters in disconnected bits of business. Helmed by Kelly Marcel, the series’ screenwriter making her directorial debut, it finds little visual excitement or narrative momentum or character detail. It’s even shed most of its predecessor’s supporting cast, and barely characterizes its new members, leaving Hardy more or less alone in a routine superhero climax that makes the earlier Venoms look like real movies. It’s all so blasé and tired, it almost feels like the dreary ending for an entire genre. As I endured its endless, unsatisfying sequences of glop, I was filled with the same hollowness that accompanied Joker 2 and The Marvels and Aquaman 2 and Deadpool & Wolverine and so on. To paraphrase Keats, I feel we’re watching the last oozings hours by hours.

The Pope-ular Vote: CONCLAVE

Conclave has the soul of a paperback thriller in the trappings of a prestige drama. Now there’s a fun mix. It reminded me of the days in which you could see a John Grisham book turned into a Francis Ford Coppola movie, or a Tom Clancy turned into a John McTiernan, and so on. It’s a welcome throwback to when pulpy mass market bestsellers were regularly given glossy production design and an excellent ensemble cast when sent to the big screen. How better to accentuate the compelling page-turning reveals dropping with regularity at the end of each chapter? Shine them up with the best craftsmanship Hollywood can offer, elevating the airport thriller into something of a reliable cinematic treat. It’s all smooth surfaces and gripping suspense. (And so much better than today’s usual fate for such fare: televised bloat.) So it is here with Conclave, in which Robert Harris’ book becomes a film of fine pleasures and genuine surprise that moves quickly and satisfactorily through a maze of character actors in a knotty plot of twists and turns. It’s set almost exclusively in the sequestered vote for a replacement to a freshly deceased Pope. The movie has a fine, clinical sense of procedure and process as the Cardinals gather in backrooms, angling for power and agitating for votes. This sets a sturdy structure for an engaging drama. The Conclave is overseen by a doubt-wracked dean (Ralph Fiennes), who just might crack under the pressure as he investigates the best path forward. Among the passive aggressive group are the likes of Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, and Brian F. O’Byrne, as well as Sergio Castellitto and Lucian Msamati and a hundred more background figures, including some nuns led by Isabella Rossellini who flutter in the margins. From the leads to the extras, they’re a group with great faces and voices, and they stalk the frames with authority, circling each other as they fall into various factions.

The film moves with steady deliberation and a good feeling for subtle details in broad strokes. The ensemble of Cardinals has great shorthand gestures and fleeting expressions that speak volumes about their leadership styles and religious disputes. The small character touches are also telling, like a man most stringent about a return to the old ways whom one can spy vaping in some scenes. In the Conclave are the hard-liners like him who want to take Catholicism back to the days before Vatican II, or maybe the Counter-Reformation. Then there are the more liberal officials, who want to continue opening up the faith for a more open-minded and loving expression of the Gospel. And then there are those who’d just love to get the Papal power for the prestige, the wealth, or maybe the impunity. Or at least they’d like to align themselves with the one who’ll take the job. Enrobed in their red cloaks and ensconced behind locked doors, the situation grows tense with suspicions and secrets as they press on through rounds of voting. It’s a devilishly good place for drama—and if you’ve seen Nanni Moretti’s We Have a Pope or Paolo Sorrentino’s The Young Pope, you know it’s a pretty reliable one, too. Here director Edward Berger, whose All Quiet on the Western Front was a similarly austere (if less successful) experience, uses a fine eye for luxurious Vatican architecture and well-pressed vestments to emphasize the enormity and import and symbolic messaging of the men’s task. He uses a stinging score to keep the suspense strung tautly beneath their snappy exchanges. He finds pleasingly obvious imagery to accentuate his clear thematic ambitions. And he lets his actors dig into their high drama borne out of a conflict between their theology and their ambition. They’re angling toward crises of faith—in the church, if not in God—as secrets are spilled, prejudices aired, and individuals’ Papal dreams are spoiled. Must we forgive them? They know what they do.

Anything For Love: ANORA

Anora is a hustler who’ll do whatever it takes to enjoy life and afford it, too. She’s a likable striver. There’s an earthy, street smart appeal to her hard-charging, relentless Brooklyn pursuit of her own survival. Yet there’s also something sweet and even romantic about her underdog status. It’s easy to root for her, and hope she’ll continue to grow into her power. She’s making ends meet, however tenuously, as a stripper expert in how to talk money out of her clients. She has a big smile, wears tight dresses, and has a fluttery flirtatious patter to her speech. (It’s like she went to the same elocution and movement lessons as The Nanny’s Fran Drescher or My Cousin Vinny-era Marisa Tomei.) She also seems to enjoy her job, especially getting flattering reactions with her body. At first glance, you might think she’s the stereotypical "hooker with a heart of gold,” but that heart of hers is not quite so golden, and that particular after-hours sex work is an incidental side-hustle here undertaken almost on a whim. She’s invited by the spoiled son of a Russian oligarch to spend a week as a well-paid girlfriend. She sees easy money, but also genuinely enjoys being around the gangly guy, who is enthusiastic and effusive in his praise and through his urges, as well as energetically in need of her coaching to be a better lover. Maybe they’re even falling into something like real love.

This is Anora, the latest character piece from writer-director Sean Baker, who always sends out the shock troops of frank sexual content to clear the path for humor, empathy, and even sentimentality, to rush in while still maintaining a clear-eyed assessment of his characters’ flaws. He also loves a good pressure-cooker that lets all of this play out with full inappropriateness in an immediacy of compressed timelines or high stakes or both. There’s the sleazy porn star hoping to woo a naive 17-year-old into filming with him on her next birthday in Red Rocket. There is the poor single mother and her young daughter about to be evicted from their cheap hotel home in The Florida Project. There’s the trans sex worker chasing down her cheating ex-con boyfriend on Christmas Eve in Tangerine. He fills up their stories with specificity and understanding, even while drawing out the comedy and tragedy of their experiences. So it is with Anora, in which he finds a flurry of activity that matches the whirlwind romance of its opening sequences. The 23-year-old stripper (Mikey Madison) loves the lifestyle the boyish 21-year-old billionaire (Mark Eydelshteyn) provides. He throws huge parties, spends lots of money in every shop and club, and impulsively flies on a private jet to Vegas. She’s along every step of the way, and loving it. But soon he’ll be called back to Russia to work for his parents’ business, and he’s thinking a quick marriage to keep him in America might be advantageous. Besides, they’re definitely attracted to each other. Win-win. Here’s a movie that builds on these human impulses for connections and survival and sex, and finds them grow into a realist screwball comedy as her fiancé’s family makes moves to stop the match. Pressure’s on. The initial whirlwind narrows to a one-crazy-day-and-night momentum that tests this burgeoning relationship, and Anora’s future.

In Baker’s telling, the story breathes with the surprises of life. The movie starts with what seems an obvious trajectory—love conquers all?—and then complicates with the unexpected. The people on screen are characterized on the move as we join them in a consequential few weeks. We aren’t overburdened by backstory or unduly concerned with exposition. Instead, we see them behave and react in the moment and start to sense the complexity and humanity underpinning their foibles and fears, their desires and despairs. The ensemble spinning around them—from fellow strippers to Russian flunkies—are similarly glimpsed in suggestion and sketches as parts of a full world of which we only get a glimpse. It makes their stories feel all the more impactful and believable, playing out in a casual display. Even when the plot pushes against excesses, it does so with an honest sense of what the world is like for the super-rich and the working class alike. (His camera will linger equally on conspicuous consumption and the maids, security guards, and managers making it possible.) Baker lets his actors play even the cleverest, most darting and daring dialogues and situations with an unhurried natural chemistry and matter-of-fact gestures. And he films them with a simple, sumptuous eye that captures the natural cinema of everyday detail, wrapped in the ever-so-heightened gloss of The Movies (he loves a good montage, a well-chosen lens flare, a gauzy primary-color light) brought down to street level observation. That leaves a movie as entertaining and surprising as it is clear-eyed and tender-hearted. That’s a moving mix. Here’s a film that loves its characters, and watches as life catches them unaware and takes them somewhere they’d never have expected.

Tied Together with a SMILE 2

A confident directorial debut, Parker Finn’s Smile was one of the better uses for the recent trend in horror movies to find its fear in metaphors for trauma. It took as its symbolism a supernatural infection—an evil spirit that follows those who’ve witness a violent death, haunting them until they become the next violent death from which a witness will be followed. The link in the chain is visions of the smiling corpse, then smiling apparitions, then, finally, the victim smiling as they’re consumed by a compulsion to die. It’s creepy stuff, full of droning bass noises on the soundtrack, gliding upside-down establishing shots, and dark hallways and long silences—the better to punctuate with jump scares. But these trauma plots now border on cliche, so Finn wisely pivots his Smile 2. It’s not just about tragic backstory, but adds to its intimations of depression and suicidal ideation another form of modern mental anguish: fandom. His victim this time around is a star singer-songwriter (Naomi Scott) on the verge of launching her new world tour, giving this movie lots of sparkly outfits and speaker-rattling original (and pretty good!) pop music. (This makes it the second Eras Tour inspired chiller of the year; a double bill with Trap would be fun.) As the grueling prep to get back on the stage reaches its peak of costume fittings, dance rehearsals, meet and greets, and talk show interviews, she witness the sudden bloody death of her creepily grinning drug dealer (Lukas Gage, channeling Alfred Molina in Boogie Nights). There’s solid dread in knowing the shape of what she’s about to experience.

Her subsequent descent into dangerous madness is familiar to anyone who knows the pattern of the first film, but the trajectory’s images are given a new shivering valence as the normal screams and flashbulbs of a star’s life contrast with the total isolation of her downtime, and add eerie echoes of uncertainty. Then there are the outsized pressures of a manager mother (Rosemarie DeWitt) and zealous fans and record executives and choreographers and so on. They all expect so much from her, so she’s pushing herself to the limit mentally and physically even before the supernatural takes her over the edge. The rarified atmosphere of stardom is a good fit for Finn’s high-gloss imagery, and the slightly wider scope is part of the movie’s general one-upping of its predecessor. It’s just as committed to its lead character’s fraying psyche, keeping a close eye on her teeth-gnashing, wide-eyed bewilderment. But it’s also a longer, louder, gorier movie, more concussive in its jolts and dizzying in its hallucinations inside hallucinations. The ending keeps twisting until it gets somewhere both predictable and surprisingly satisfying in its grim logic and linger implications. It totally delivers on its premise.