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.

It's A Live: SATURDAY NIGHT

I suppose it’s fitting that a movie set behind the scenes of Saturday Night Live’s first episode is only fitfully funny, but coasts along on a combination of high spirits, energetic impersonations, and its musical guest. That’s the typical SNL experience. Is there a television program with a bigger disparity between its cultural importance and its actual potential week-to-week quality? Nonetheless, the sheer number of talented performers and writers who’ve cycled through the show over the course of 50 seasons is staggering, and the hit-and-miss quality is nonetheless an essential part of the appeal. It puts the variety in variety show, turning up occasional fun even long past its semi-countercultural origins. What other show can go whole episodes, or seasons, or decades, in decline and still have people wondering what they’ll do next? With Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night, the movie is primarily interested in that creative chaos that somehow, inevitably, makes it on air. He gets a little extra charge of dramatic tension by setting it on the show’s first night. Will it even get on the air, in its amorphous, evolving form where no one quite knows what it’ll even be or become, when the actors and executives are nervous, before it’s codified and corporatized into cultural expectations? That we know it does saps the movie of some of that charge, but he makes up for it by letting his events—heightened extrapolations of real showbiz lore—play out in real time. It’s a flurry of activity as producer and co-creator Lorne Michaels races from room to room—a pretty convincing recreation of the famous studio—as creatives of all departments clash and scurry as the ticking clock of showtime draws nearer.

In each scene we are met with broad performances of recognizable figures, as if to suggest in a fan’s shorthand that they’re just as much cartoons off screen as on. With an Andy Kaufman, the unknowability could be a point; with a Belushi or Chase or Aykroyd or Henson (or or or…) they’re just a flavoring in a large dish. They're all energetic and amused performances, even though no one gets to be characterized beyond a little shtick and a few tics, each member just one fluttering piece of a larger swirling ensemble juggled and scrambled in a frenzy right up until the show must go on. (I wondered what someone unfamiliar with SNL would make of all this unexplained commotion.) It’s all of a piece with Reitman’s typical approach to faking verisimilitude. His films’ ideas of reality are often communicated through movie language more than reality itself. Here he gives the proceedings a kind of studied glossy shagginess that uses shaky-cam, high-grain, whip-pan, roaming camerawork to sell energy and excitement and reality, even as its cast bites into thinly written characters with performative gusto. It’s all smiling recognition and tickling good intentions, bathed in hindsight. Meanwhile a jazzy Jon Batiste score chugs along in bits and riffs until blasting into a screaming-sax impersonation of the show’s theme song after the film’s predictable final line. Reitman’s superficial vision doesn’t ultimately claim to understand the people involved or the show’s place in culture—there’s the classic oral history co-written by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales for that—but makes up for it in pleasant tone. The let’s-put-on-a-show momentum keep things brisk and amiable and the inevitable triumphant climax sends it out on a high note.

The Last Laugh: JOKER: FOLIE À DEUX

Todd Phillips’ Joker: Folie à Deux puts his own Joker on trial and declares it guilty. That makes for a pretty interesting gambit, but awfully hollow results. Still, I admired its commitment to putting the biggest supervillain on the stand to ask its audience: why do you even like this guy? He’s a narcissistic murderer and seeing him in something approaching our reality—in a news show interview, in a courtroom, surrounded by normal folks in a serious setting while looking a clown—has a frisson of discomfort. Such glum intent makes sense flowing from the 2019 origin story that took the usual flamboyant clown we see fighting Batman into something closer to a believable scenario. There he was a street performer on whom abuse had been piled for decades leaving him lonely, harassed, mentally disturbed, and violently delusional. By the time he became a serial killer in a loud suit, dancing down the street caked in makeup, and taking a loaded gun onto the set of a late night show, he was a scary, and weirdly compelling, blend of inchoate ideas about what makes people a danger to themselves and others. That that movie flirted with turning him into a kind of folk hero—Travis Bickle meets Bernie Goetz, fitting reference points for a movie so self-consciously vintage—added to the queasy-making mood. Batman’s most famous foe often has that sort of outlaw nihilistic appeal in other projects. As much as Jack Nicholson or Heath Ledger’s Jokers are clearly villainous, there’s also that chaotic charisma that makes them appealing to watch. But Joaquin Phoenix’s emaciated oddity is so pathetic and repellant in Phillips’ vision that it’s hard to square the antihero his film’s world percolates with. Same, too, its feints at moral complexity that just reads as simple sensationalism.

The sequel starts with him in prison, occasionally beaten by guards while awaiting trial. The course of the movie follows that trial, as his lawyer (Catherine Keener) tries to get him an insanity defense, while District Attorney Harvey Dent (Harry Lawtey) seems to have a slam-dunk case since the Joker himself can’t help but work against his own best interests. It’s in his nature. He’s also in love with a toxic fan, Harley Quinn (Lady Gaga), a psychiatrist with a flair for the dramatic. She’s fueling his delusions with her own. As the movie winds its way through testimony that recaps the first film’s crimes, Joker drifts into fantasy sequences in which he romances Harley through musical numbers set to slow, jazzy covers from the Great American Songbook done up like MGM dream ballets and 70s variety show numbers. As I go through the film’s component parts it sounds pretty good: a prison movie, a courtroom drama, a tragic romance, a dark musical, and all with recognizable comic book names. Yet in practice, the thing is a blend of fascinating and dull. Every choice is striking and theoretically interesting, with lots of neat work with smoke and spotlights in the cinematography and an eerie sound design. But cumulatively the whole project says nothing much. It loses even a loose sense of psychology as it edges closer to growing outsized without ever quite getting there, stranded stylistically stifled between something uncomfortable and small and something more epic and excessive. It simply stretches thinly over two-and-a-half hours, losing a sense of Joker’s complexity in its repetitions and never bringing Harley into as clear focus, despite Gaga’s great look and tone. For some reason, she’s all rising action, and never gets to pop off like Phoenix did the last time around. I kept imagining a Harley Quinn movie as committed to her as the first Joker movie was to him. And I liked the idea of a comic book movie (atypical of that genre as these are) entirely focused on the immediate consequences of the previous one. But, despite the best efforts of the cast and craftspeople, the movie never develops into anything more than an extended epilogue to the first, letting its potential drain away.

Robot Dreams: TRANSFORMERS ONE andTHE WILD ROBOT

It’s difficult to care about the Transformers as characters. They’re alien robots that turn into cars. We need them to come to Earth to make any sense. That at least gives them human characters to provide a sense of scale and stakes. When stuck on their own planet and left to their own devices, it tends to be just a bunch of boring nonsense. So here we are with Transformers One, a thinly-plotted prequel that intends to tell us how heroic Optimus Prime and villainous Megatron started out friends and then had a falling out that led them to war across the galaxy for centuries. I guess I never wondered that before. Unlike the enormous live-action efforts from Michael Bay that brought this toy franchise to the big screen—and, for my money, made it entertaining for once—this is a computer-animated family film that plays like a cheaper, smaller effort all around. It’s an eyesore, blandly designed in simple, smooth surfaces, dreary dull colors, and a limited emotional range. Its short runtime—not quite 100 minutes before credits—is as padded as the characters are thin. Every scene is flatly expository, dully trudging through three basic bits of plot information, the first two usually bits of exposition repeated from the previous scene. The leads are given functional chipper voice performances from Chris Hemsworth and Brian Tyree Henry. They seem to actually believe this Saturday Morning cartoon-level emoting asked for them. The rest of the Transformers are voiced by recognizable celebrities and given grating one-note personalities that exist to drive the dreary cliches forward. It’s about a plot by a cheery robot overlord to keep the vast working class robots down. Not a bad idea in theory, but in function it takes most of the movie to click into place and then ends with a tease for a theoretical conflict with the real Big Bad next time. Ah, well, nevertheless. By the time the robots learn how to transform, there’s a modest charge of visual candy to the swooshing and clicking. But that’s too little, too late. It’s another one of those meager brand deposits that thinks its audience is so eager, or so desperate, for more, they’d sit through a whole movie of preamble with the vague promise of getting to the good stuff in another movie entirely.

A far better animated family film about a robot is DreamWorks’ The Wild Robot. That studio has been experimenting with style for the last several years, finding fresher textures and designs than the usual rounded, plasticky Hollywood CG look. The Trolls sequels have terrains of felt and yarn, Ruby Gillman Teenage Kraken has noodly arms and legs, Puss in Boots 2 has sketchy hand-drawn embellishments and painterly backdrops. Those films look neat, even if they’re not always entirely successful unto themselves. Leave it to Chris Sanders, co-director and writer of Lilo & Stitch and How to Train Your Dragon, to paint with a specific brush. His movies are unusually distinctive animated studio product—personal, emotional, with a relaxed approach and comfortable emotionality. He builds characters with heartfelt presences and compelling dilemmas in quickly-drawn worlds bursting with lovely visual touches. His latest is no different. It has a soft watercolor look painted over the wire-frame animation, a dappling of primary colors dancing in the light over figures that move with precision. This makes its central interplay between nature and machine all the more vivid. The Wild Robot of the title is a missing personal assistant—think something the Jetsons might’ve ordered if Miyazaki was an Apple engineer—with a silver ball body, a pair of big, round, blue eyes, and telescoping arms and legs. She wanders around chirpily offering to help in a smoothly artificial Lupita Nyong'o performance. But because she’s crash-landed on a wilderness island, she finds a job for which she’s not prepared: adopted mother for an orphaned baby goose. The movie has a gentle cartooniness that marries its futuristic implications with old-fashioned wildlife gags around a morbid mother possum and a sneaky loner fox and gossipy geese and more. And on this charming smallness it builds a lovely allegory for motherhood—of kindness, protectiveness, cooperation, resourcefulness, self-sacrifice, unconditional love. It might threaten to sound too simple and formulaic—Bambi meets WALL-E with design inspiration from French impressionists; oh, wait, that sounds incredible. And then there’s a scene in which the bird's taking flight, flying fast, soaring higher and higher as the sun sets in the sky and its robot mother races to keep him in sight, and, look, I’m not made of stone. Here’s a movie that looks sensational, moves quickly, feels light and sprightly and funny and warm. It has gags and action and sentimentality. And then the tears flow.