Princess Protection Program: SNOW WHITE

Disney’s live action Snow White arrives with a blizzard of phony controversy drummed up by the usual bad buzz mongerers. (Those angry influencers who make money off of algorithmically goosed phony fanboy outrage are bad enough. Those harping on the looks or race or progressivism of the lead are extra suspect.) Add that to the understandable doubts about another of its particular kind, as we’re now fifteen spotty years into the company’s project of remaking their animated classics. Look past all that and you’ll see a perfectly okay movie. It certainly doesn’t come close to matching the magic of the 1937 original. What possibly could measure up to one of the early milestones of cinematic history? That film is so stolidly in the canon that it’s practically a museum piece, it’s every note and design a part of the cultural firmament. It’s also still hypnotically magical in its breathing life into drawings, in a robust, fluid way for the first time at a feature length. It pioneered a whole new form of moviemaking. This new one is just a backlot musical with a fine star turn. The cramped sets and CG embellishments are almost quaint in a matte-painting-behind-three-fake-trees way; I wish they’d gone fully there, especially for the dwarfs, who are ghastly digital creations caught uncannily between the classic designs and photo-real monstrosities. That the reworked plot has Snow White also meet a band of seven bandits—played by actual humans—makes the fake guys all the odder a fit. Still, for all the padding with new complications that fall apart like tissue paper if you try to make it lore, it’s been nicely tinkered with to avoid the worst impulses of the other Disney live action remakes.

Under the anonymously proficient direction of Marc Webb, it’s at least not a thoughtless photocopy of the original—in which case, why’d you even see it, a la the 2019 The Lion King. Nor is it a pointless shedding of the original’s iconic charms—in which case, why take out the only reasons to remake it, like the 2020 Mulan. These usually fall in between those two extremes, and White’s just on the right side of the balance. Here she’s given a few new songs from The Greatest Showman’s Pasek and Paul and performed with fresh star power from Rachel Zegler. Her ballad “Waiting on a Wish” is a better “I Want” song than any in recent flop original Disney princess musical Wish. Here her White is a fine blend of sweet naivety and dawning G-rated political consciousness. She’s one of the only performers of her generation who could pull off such sweetly guileless innocence. (The movie also gives her another of what’s becoming a standard Zegler hero shot, like in her Hunger Games, with her leaning into a closeup so her big eyes look bigger and the determination behind her crooked smile gives off a sense of impending catharsis.) The plot gives her more of a confrontation with the Evil Queen (Gal Gadot, whose frictionless shallow villainy is put to smooth use). And there’s some nice ideas about cross-class solidarity against fascism, even if its hashtag-Girl-Boss logic leads to a tacit royalism. Isn’t it always thus with princess problems? Here’s a passable matinee diversion. Disney’s done way worse.

Stylish Substance: PRESENCE and BLACK BAG

The usual haunted house movie is all about how scary it would be to live with a ghost. Here’s one that goes a step further: it’d also be scary to be a ghost. The formal conceit of Steven Soderbergh’s Presence puts us in the ghost’s skittish perspective. The camera is the specter’s point of view. It lurks. It glides. It peers around corners. It eavesdrops on the family drama of the home’s new inhabitants. The mother (Lucy Liu) has looming legal trouble related to her job, the son (Eddy Maday) is a grumpy high school swimmer who is clearly a bit of a bully, the daughter (Callina Liang) is mourning the recent death of a friend, and the father (Chris Sullivan) is just tired of all this stress. Even without a ghost in the house, they’d be a troubled bunch. David Koepp’s screenplay tensely suggests these dilemmas as glimpsed from the haunted perspective. Joining the melodrama to an elliptical telling gives the story an extra eerie frisson. These are convincing, concisely drawn characterizations with a casualness that’s powerfully expressive in the performances. And the style lends all of that extra power as the camera floats and darts and stares and hides. It compounds the tension in interesting ways. It makes the audience lean in to fill in the gaps. And then there’s the additional electricity in seeing a typical ghost story scene in which a sleeping character awakens with a start and stares into a room’s dark corner, clearly sensing the supernatural presence, and seeing the character’s fearful eyes looking directly at us. Have we been spotted? The short movie (not quite 90 minutes) never outstays its welcome as it draws to a fine genre close—a kind of percolating teen drama slowly descending into horror—and takes a few gut-twisting swerves. The final shots pay off both the style and the story simultaneously with a shivering gasp. This is a fine example of playful style matching sturdy function.

Soderbergh is a rare modern Hollywood craftsman whose prolific and consistent sense of play with style only adds to the fine-tuned pleasures of his films. He clearly loves moviemaking, and it enlivens the genres to which he brings his touch. Whether a cheap experiment like Presence or his bigger studio productions, his movies reliably have slick surfaces and crisp editing, an intelligent precision to where he looks and what he sees, expertly calibrated with forward momentum and clever thoughtfulness. They are sensational entertainments serious about class and process and the ways our relationships get tangled up in ambitions and betrayals and systems. So of course Black Bag proves the spy movie works well for his style. He does it with an approach reminiscent of his Ocean’s trilogy. This is similarly a story that’s a nesting doll of intricate, intersecting secret plots done with warm colorful cinematography, a jazzy David Holmes score, clever multi-layered dialogue, and sexy stars outwitting one another. The movie, another scripted by Koepp, has a familiar cat-and-mouse game—a digital-age Le Carré mole hunt—enlivened by a cool, clinical, procedural logic. Husband and wife spies (Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett) host a dinner party for colleagues (Marisa Abela, Tom Burke, Naomie Harris, and Regé-Jean Page) that’s a cover for rooting out a suspicious character. Turns out each of them could be a suspect, too. Much sneaking and spying and setting traps ensues. Their boss (Pierce Brosnan) swoops in for a handful of scenes that keep the plates spinning, too. It has that pleasing confusion of the best spy stories, and the psychological gamesmanship you’d expect from wrapping it around a marriage. Soderbergh keeps this one short and sweet, too, playing out the setup to a crisp conclusion with a propulsive editing and clinical eye that suitably straightens out the complications with a satisfying snap.

Wild Child: NE ZHA 2

The bright and bouncy animated adventure sequel Ne Zha 2 is far and away the biggest movie of the year so far at the worldwide box office. It’s gotten nearly $2 billion to date, and shows little sign of slowing down. It’s a global crowd-pleaser, with a likable lead character and epic cartoony action that nonetheless knows how to pause to bring down the hammer of emotion. By the time you get to an emotional peak of the climax and find the title character, a little demon boy with a heart of gold, embracing his mother tightly, both of them weeping as they face certain doom in the fiery pit of the villain’s evil plot, it’d be tough to be unmoved. Yet you probably wouldn’t know much about this movie if you relied on the usual American mass media. Aside from some nods from showbiz reporters tallying up the grosses, this hit has gone largely unreviewed. Metacritic logs just two reviews, and Rotten Tomatoes has only aggregated six. That the movie’s nonetheless accumulated nearly $20 million thus far from American multiplexes is a sign that the word is getting out. And yet that it has done so to near silence from the usual sources of English-language criticism is an astonishing example of the provincial timidity of our media as it consolidates its coverage, contracts its scope, and nervously narrows its aims. It’s what Jonathan Rosenbaum was complaining about thirty years ago, the synergistic, parasitic demands of thoroughly corporate studios, media, and exhibitors artificially putting limits on the audience’s interests.

So here’s Ne Zha 2, a delight from beginning to end despite its 144-minute run time. It continues the story of the first picture, which introduced audiences to little Ne Zha, a scamp who looks like the British Dennis the Menace and acts like an anime hero filtered through Moana’s rounded sentimentality and Dreamworks' spiky silliness. He’s fighting his fate, trying desperately to battle the bad and uplift the good. It’s a story settled firmly in a loosely retold cinematic universe of Chinese mythology, and to a typical Western audience it’ll be occasionally baffling. (Try imagining getting dropped into a dense Hercules riff with no prior knowledge of Greek myth.) But writer-director Yang Yu has crafted a movie that moves like Hollywood blockbuster, even as it is so deeply informed by its cultural perspective. There are wars between immortal gods and trickster figures, jade palaces in the clouds, villages endangered by supernatural forces, gurus training students, martial arts, dragons, comic relief, and massive armies preparing for showdowns. It has the peaks and valleys, and twists and catharsis, a movie on this scale should deliver to its popcorn matinee audiences.

It’s satisfying, and easy to want more from its mythology unfurling as a backdrop to a lovable character just trying his best to be his best. The world is imagined well, with colorful complications and elaborate staging. The characters are vividly drawn and immediately appealing—from little Ne Zha to his roly-poly master, his noble parents, his ice-blue dragon-brother, and a big babyfaced deity. The writing is heart-felt and well-crafted to a sturdy family adventure formula, from escalating tension to kiddie humor asides. The action is well-choreographed, and takes advantage of the careening velocity and precision in framing that only a computer-animated sequence can pull off. Watching it, I got the feeling of being a foreigner looking in on something huge on which I’m almost missing out. This must be what international audiences feel watching blockbusters from us. It’s no more a work of Chinese propaganda than Hollywood blockbusters are visions of American hegemony. If you can believe only New York’s superheroes can stop international supervillains, or only a United States-led coalition can stop an alien invasion, you can hang with some Eastern mythology as it's rendered in vivid colors, appealing characters, and agreeable spectacle.