"The Brutalist"

   ☆☆☆☆ 

Few movies have ever felt as much like a novel as The Brutalist, a film that defies easy categorization; that saves the revelation of its most important themes for the last few pages—sorry, I mean minutes; and that doesn't shy away from the kinds of moments of introspection that are largely impossible to film. It's a big, sprawling movie that engages the mind more than the heart.

Perhaps the biggest surprise for most people who see The Brutalist—it certainly was a surprise for me—is that it's fictional. The central character of Laszlo Toth feels very much like someone we've known through history, whose story we've read.

Perhaps that's because Toth's story in The Brutalist is such a concise crystallization of the story of American immigrants, and in that regard The Brutalist comes at the most compelling and perhaps the most heartbreaking time in American history to consider all it has to say. After surviving the horrors of World War II and separation from his wife and niece, Hungarian Toth (Adrien Brody) makes the journey to the U.S. and, over time, again becomes what he already was: an architect of grand vision.

The Brutalist is the long, epic story of his life and work, though about halfway through it becomes focused on one project in particular, a project that is so specific it is part of the reason we're astonished to learn that the movie is a fiction. In Doylestown, Pennsylvania, Toth crosses paths with a wealthy industrialist (Guy Pearce), who provides both every financial and creative largesse necessary to create a massive, ambitious cultural center.

Divided both into five chapters (including prologue and epilogue) and into halves (thanks to a 15-minute intermission), The Brutalist becomes a tale of obsession and madness—not just Toth's, but the even stranger and darker millionaire Harrison Van Buren, who becomes an inextricable part of Toth's life.

When Van Buren helps Toth bring both his wife (Felicity Jones) and his niece (Raffey Cassidy) to the U.S., nothing goes as planned, and the massive, all-consuming construction project takes over every part of their lives.

The Brutalist surprises with a labyrinthine story that never goes quite as we expect, which helps the film hold our attention for more than three and a half hours. If its central characters, particularly Toth and Van Buren, never quite reveal themselves in satisfactory ways, they do become grandiose, overpowering icons—it is to the film's great credit that we spend the entire running time assuming we are watching fictionalized history. If these characters didn't really exist in the world, they should have, they must have; that's how convincing the movie is, even as it always feels a little hollow at its core. It's hard to know any of these characters, to empathize with their obsessions, or to be emotionally invested. Much as Toth's architecture, they are cold, impersonal, brooding, and huge.

But it's the film's epilogue that clobbers us with a secret the film has been keeping—and rightly so. 

(SPOILER ALERT) 

"No matter what the others try and sell you," a character (I won't say which) tells us as the film's final line, "it is the destination, not the journey." In its final moments, The Brutalist hits us hard with the truth of art and creation: We are left only with the end result, and the rest is for us to determine for ourselves. When we know the truth behind it, the creation takes on a different meaning. So it is with this big, confounding, absorbing film itself.

Viewed January 19, 2025 — AMC Burbank 16

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"The Last Showgirl"

  ☆☆☆ 

Pamela Anderson and Jamie Lee Curtis deliver heartbreaking, grounded performances in The Last Showgirl, a movie that otherwise feels aimless, as if as much in desperate need of purpose as its titular character.

Shelly is 57, and since she was in her 20s she's been starring in "Le Razzle Dazzle," an old-style Las Vegas revue, the kind with topless showgirls tastefully showing off their large breasts while tottering in high heels and balancing enormous feather hats—the kind of R-rated ogling that doesn't offend Republicans. Occasionally, men mistake Shelly and her co-stars for prostitutes, but it doesn't happen often, and it's something they've gotten used to. They've gotten used to a lot—especially the idea that, even in the age of Cirque du Soleil, $3,000-a-seat musical residencies and a sports-oriented reinvention of Las Vegas, "Le Razzle Dazzle" will continue.

Until the day it doesn't. The show is going to close. What will become of Shelly? That's both the setup and, unfortunately, the plot of this sometimes meandering and often deeply affecting look at the way it becomes harder with age to adapt to the ways the world changes. But the movie has little sense of what to do with an excellent setup.

There are some secondary characters that float around the edges of the screen, but only one, the cocktail waitress Annette played by spray-tanned Jamie Lee Curtis, stands out. The Last Showgirl never allows Shelly to question her abilities, to explore the reality of her situation, or even enough agency to make definite decisions about her future.

Mostly, The Last Showgirl is an exercise in mood and restraint. In keeping with its theme, it's lovely to look at, quiet and melancholy, and Pamela Anderson does more than prove she has transcended her origins as a sexpot. The role is tailor made for her, an opportunity to remind the world that while she was traipsing about topless and showing off her ample assets, she was learning, growing, changing—in short, that she's a real person, interesting and multi-faceted, and with genuine talent.

But just as Shelly needs a better vehicle than "Le Razzle Dazzle," Anderson needs a better vehicle than The Last Showgirl, which mistakes quiet for thought, and restraint for introspection.

Viewed January 18, 2025 — Screener

"September 5"

  ☆☆☆☆½ 

On the first day of 2025, the day I saw the expertly crafted thriller September 5, two possible terrorist attacks took place, possibly committed by people possibly affiliated with known terror groups or possibly acting on their own but possibly collaborating with others for crimes that might or might not be terrorism.

Many media outlets reported as much as they knew as fast as they could, in a race for clicks, the 21st century version of giant headlines or Nielsen ratings. It's common parlance that we live in a "24 hour news cycle," and that "mainstream media" are often too hasty, too sensationalistic, too inaccurate. Famously, they've been branded "the enemy."

September 5 takes us back more than a half-century ago to a time when news might break at any hour, but people at newspapers and especially broadcast news actually went home for the evening. A group of broadcasters—the movie takes great pains to remind us that they were not journalists—from ABC Sports is creating one of the first truly international live broadcast events: the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics. Their entire operation is dedicated to making sure people a half a world away could watch the events unfold live.

When armed gunmen storm the Olympic Village, killing some members of the Israeli Olympic team and taking others hostage, this sports team has its boots on the ground. That fact forms the setup of September 5, an utterly absorbing and captivating movie that explores the machinations and ethical dilemmas of the group of producers and technicians as they beam the pictures and information live to the world.

It's a little surprising, in the best possible way, that a movie like September 5 even exists—much less that this German production, in English with an international team of performers, was picked up and distributed by Paramount Pictures. I can't remember the last time a major studio took what must now be perceived as a risk by presenting a movie filled with wall-to-wall dialogue, that expects a certain level of awareness and intelligence from its audience, and that never tries to pander with excess violence or unnecessary action.

Swiss director Tom Fehlbaum, who co-wrote the taut screenplay with Moritz Binder, has made a tense and claustrophobic thriller, a movie that is not as interested in the politics or background of the terror attacks themselves as in the outsized influence this one day had in the way media packages and we consume news. It's also a fascinating and authentic appreciation for technical craft of broadcasting—throughout September 5, producers and engineers and camera people and technicians need to use their brains to solve problems no one had ever seen before.

At the heart of it is a sports producer named Geoff Mason, who's played by John Magaro. Although Peter Sarsgaard, as Roone Arledge (who would parlay this moment into a career as one of the most influential news executives in TV history), is given top billing, it's Magaro whose anxious intensity and passionate commitment to his work holds the film together. Equally impressive is Leonie Benesch as a German translator who is thrust into a job she has no idea how to do. No one does, really, but they do it anyway, and September 5 is, despite its grim subject, a celebration of ingenuity and commitment.

It's certainly one of the best films of 2024, but it's important to emphasize that it's in no way meant to be an examination of the politics and causes behind the Munich massacre. While the film must delve into the specifics—often through the character of Peter Jennings, who was covering the Olympics, and was known as a geopolitical expert—and doesn't shy away from complexities, it's not about the gravity of the event on the world stage. It's about the way the moment changed media forever, and for anyone with the slightest interest in journalism and media and the way the world gets its information, it's not to be missed.

Viewed January 1, 2025 — AMC Century City

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"Nosferatu"

   ☆☆ 

Now that it has been seen, online chatter about Robert Eggers' remake of Nosferatu is divided: It's a love-it-or-hate-it movie. I did not fall on the "love it" side of things. It's a splendid-looking film, one that aims for and hits a target of being an overwrought gothic melodrama. Perhaps its vampire story is fitting, because despite its visual merits, the whole thing feels curiously undead.

The original incarnation of Nosferatu is more than a century old, and its imagery is so famous that almost everyone knows it even if they've never seen the film. Eggers doesn't try to replicate the original as much as deconstruct it, and by doing so he's performed a task that reminded me of Gus Van Sant's infamous remake of Psycho: He proves that replication doesn't equate with inspiration.

Opening with a nonsensical scene in which a young woman named Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) seems to summon the evil known as Nosferatu, who in this version is hilariously mustachioed, the movie then fast-forwards "years later" to 19th century Germany, where Ellen's new husband Thomas Hutter is sent by his estate-agent boss Herr Knock to close the deal for mysterious Transylvanian Count Orlok to buy a decrepit castle in town.

So, off Thomas goes, over the deep protestations of his wife, encountering local folk along the way who, naturally, warn him that Orlok is evil ... evil ... eeeeevvvil I say! Drat, he doesn't speak their language. When the two men meet, Orlok carries none of the suave countenance of Count Dracula, on which this character is based. (The original Nosferatu was a low-budget, copyright-infringing knock-off of Bram Stoker's Dracula that led to legal challenges.) From there, the movie follows the basic outlines of Dracula, but does it all ... very ... very ... very ... very slowly.

Eggers has directed effectively dread-laden films like The VVitch and The Lighthouse, but in Nosferatu the stylization can't mask the unhinged, increasingly hysterical screenplay that requires too many logical leaps by the audience and too much from actors who seem entirely ill equipped to meet the demands of such high-pitched nonsense. Even Willem Dafoe, who last year was so impressive and moving in a similarly over-the-top role in Poor Things, is undone by the movie, which requires him to act ever more crazed and overwrought.

By the end, timelines make no sense, motivations are non-existent, and Nosferatu seems mostly in a hurry (after taking its own sweet time for the first 90 minutes) to find a way to wrap things up, no matter how nonsensical they seem. Adding nearly an hour to the running time of the 80-minute original has done the story no favors, nor has the choice to make Count Orlok a deep-croaking, mumbling mess of a creature, a silly (did I mention mustachioed) concept, a man in a creepy suit that is designed to make him look like he's decomposing but mostly makes him look like he spent a lot of time in a makeup chair. There's nothing seductive, grotesque or interesting about him, and despite all the hype the role gives Bill Skarsgård almost nothing to do.

Lots of people are finding lots to love in Nosferatu, and I'm not about to say they're wrong—online debates about this movie are not fascinating, rather (as happens so often today) devolve almost immediately into name-calling. If this movie proves to be your thing, then more power to you; but aside from the visual style virtually nothing about Nosferatu worked for me, except the moment the lights went up and I was able to leave the theater.

Viewed December 30, 2024 — AMC Topanga 12

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"Emilia Pérez"

  ☆☆☆☆½ 

The best way to see the Spanish-language, French-produced rock-opera crime thriller Emilia Pérez is on the big screen, but it is a depressing fact that we live in a largely post-cinema world, when streaming services have replaced the communal act of moviegoing.

What will people watching this genre-defying, hyperactive, unpredictable musical at home make of it? Judging by some of the viewer comments I've seen, Emilia Pérez loses something on the small(er) screen—and movie lovers lost something when deep-pocketed Netflix bought the film after its rapturous response at the Cannes Film Festival. Though it got released on a handful of movie screens (I was fortunate to see it one of the few cinemas screening it a month after it opened), this movie, which took no fewer than 15 funding sources to bring it to life, is going to be seen at home.

Emilia Pérez isn't easy enough for today's watch-while-doing-a-dozen-other-things audiences, but in the cinema, it is a wonder to behold, a movie that casts a spell and never lets it be broken, even if it loses some of its musical razzle-dazzle in its second half, when it veers more toward pure, adrenaline-fueled over-the-top melodrama.

The less you know about Emilia Pérez going into it, the better. The general outline of the story follows Rita Mora, an overworked, under-appreciated attorney in Mexico City, who finds herself recruited by the leader of a powerful cartel and its biggest, baddest boss, Manitas del Monte. Manitas has a secret: He wants to become a woman, and hires Rita to take care of all of the details — not just arranging his surgery, but ensuring the world, including his family, knows of his death.

Manitas becomes Emilia Pérez, who sets about changing everything in her life. As Emilia discovers who she is, she develops an astonishing sense of destiny, though the movie, which is based on an unproduced opera libretto that, in turn, was inspired by a novel, has a lot of ideas about fate and destiny and the ways the past gets invited to intrude on the present.

As Emilia Pérez races toward a climax entirely in keeping with its operatic sensibilities, it's anchored by two excellent performances—Zoe Saldaña as Rita and Selena Gomez as Manitas' wife, Jessi. But the film belongs to Karla Sofía Gascón, an actress who brings Emilia to life in a way that thrills and delights. She commands the screen with no effort at all, finding a bold and unexpected heart at the core of a woman who thinks she knows enough to outwit her past.

Every moment of Emilia Pérez worked for me, even the most outrageous ones, though after seeing it I read some downright scathing criticism of the film from trans writers who believe the film is an inaccurate representation of the trans experience. I imagine they might have a point if the film were seeking—like, say, Hedwig and the Angry Inch—to portray some sense of realism about its subject.

But Emilia Pérez has no interest in depicting a real world; its vision is one of stylization, of embracing the sensibilities of a Mexican telenovéla, albeit one very much made for the big screen. What a shame, then, that this mesmerizing film will almost entirely be experienced on the small screen, watched by audiences primed to press the "back" button when they are less than entranced. Emilia Pérez is a big, glorious movie, unashamed to revel in its drama, aware that sometimes life is filled with feelings so overwhelming, so complicated, so robust that the only way to express them is by singing, dancing, and just letting it all wash over you.

Viewed December 21, 2024 — Landmark Sunset

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"Queer"

 ☆☆ 

Queer is Luca Guadagnino's second film this year, and it almost everything that made his first 2024 film, Challengers, thrilling, exciting and compelling. More crucially, it lacks the urgency and vibrancy of Guadagnino's earlier Call Me By Your Name, which is curious for many reasons — not the least of which is that Queer is about a gay junkie but doesn't seem able to come up with anything interesting to say about being gay or being a junkie.

Everything in Queer has been done before and been done better. That's something Guadagnino seems to understand, because Queer cribs from a long history of better movies. There are the stylized settings and saturated hues of Querelle and One from the Heart. There are the wild-eyed moments of lust and horror from Reflections in a Golden Eye and Suddenly, Last Summer. There is the languid, lurid, boozy lecherousness of Death in Venice and Touch of Evil. There is the main credit sequence lifted from Call Me By Your Name.

What, then, is Queer trying to do, except maybe liberate Daniel Craig from the legacy of James Bond in a way none of his acting predecessors ever tried to do with as much definitiveness. This is the second gay character Craig has played, after detective Benoit Blanc, and we get it: He is not defined by his macho screen persona. Fair. But we're not five minutes into Queer when Craig is (as discreetly as this can be done) pretending at gay oral sex.

The rest of the time, he's a walking stereotype of desperate, middle-aged gay swishiness. The film's rambling screenplay makes sure he says the word "queer"—in self-mocking reference, as an adjective, as a noun, as an epithet, as a pejorative—as often and as campily as possible.

There isn't a moment of actual recognizable humanity on display anywhere in Queer, which takes its time—oh, does it take its time—finding a story within the descriptive novella by William S. Burroughs. This is a meandering, plodding affair, enlivened by the eye candy provided by Drew Starkey, his well-built and often unclothed body, and his affected Southern drawl.

Craig's character, an itinerant loner living in Mexico named William Lee, becomes obsessed with Starkey's Eugene Allerton. Why? No real reason, other than the boy looks good (and he does look good, Guadagnino makes sure everyone in the audience, no matter their sexual orientation, thinks so). They sweat, they have sex, they do it all over again, and eventually—after a long, long while—we learn that Lee is an addict, and that he wants to go further south to find a legendary hallucinogen. He takes Eugene with him. They have more sex. They sweat some more. Lee has withdrawals. They go to the jungle. They meet an American hermit (Lesley Manville, proving that even the best actors are not capable of breathing life into ridiculous characters). They take the drug. They get really, really high.

Then there's some more weirdness. The movie takes on some of Burroughs' phantasmagoric imagery, but ... why? How did a movie called Queer end up stoned in the jungle?

Then it ends.

Critics seem divided. Audiences less so. I talked with the nonplussed couple next to me, self-professed "Luca" fans. This didn't do it for them. Will Queer do it for anyone? Time will tell. At the very least, you won't only see Daniel Craig as James Bond from this point on; you'll also see him as a straight actor who will go gay for pay.

Queer doesn't just star a prominent heterosexual, it's written by one, too: Justin Kuritzkes, who also wrote Challengers, a movie that teased at its gay themes. Queer isn't meant to be a tease. It shouldn't be a tease. And I suppose—I'll concur with a heavy sigh—that it shouldn't matter whether an actor or a screenwriter is gay. They're getting at a human experience, right?

In Queer, they're supposed to be getting at a queer experience, but it doesn't work. The movie seems clueless about its central theme. It's strange to see Guadagnino flail so badly with this material, despite his visual flair. It leaves me wondering if the reason Call Me By Your Name succeeded so fully is that it was written by James Ivory, a gay man who understood the central emotional conundrum inherent in that film. A perspective like his is what's so desperately, glaringly missing from Queer. 

Viewed December 13, 2024 — AMC Universal

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"Wicked"

 ☆☆☆☆½ 

It's possible that your response to Wicked will depend on your knowledge and appreciation of the theatrical juggernaut on which it's based, a musical that transcends even the meaning of that word — Wicked is less a musical than a commercial and pop-culture phenomenon. A lot of massive musical sensations have been adapted into films in recent yers, including Les Miserables, The Phantom of the Opera, Dear Evan Hansen, Rent and, yes, Cats. Largely, they have not been good.

Wicked is good. Wicked is very, very good.

That's the best possible news, given that it has taken more than two decades for Universal Pictures, which produced the show on stage, to get it to the screen. On one hand, it's easy to look at the stage show and think, "What could go wrong?" Then again, look at those other movies. They've all been varying degrees of pretty bad, even the Oscar-nominated Les Miserables, which was, despite all the hype, not good.

So, to quote a song from Wicked itself: Thank goodness. Director John M. Chu and screenwriters Winnie Holzman (who wrote the sometimes-maligned book of the stage show) and Dana Fox have taken the show more or less intact but managed to expand on it, deepen it, enhance it. This is a deep fantasy, a movie that depends at the bare minimum on having familiarity with The Wizard of Oz, and ideally with knowing something about Wicked itself.

The show was based on a 1995 novel by Gregory Maguire that sought to re-evaluate the character of the Wicked Witch of the West in L. Frank Baum's novel and the 1939 MGM musical. It's an early example of deep deconstruction of existing pop culture, something that seems to happen on a daily basis today, as movies and TV shows are endlessly taken apart, re-examined, and put back together. But Wicked seemed new as a novel, and newer still as a musical, though it doesn't seem nearly as new as a movie.

Those who know the mythology best are likely to fall madly in love with Wicked. The filmmaking team has satisfied that audience entirely, as evidenced by the ecstatic response of the woman wearing a witch's hat in our audience. But that familiarity could also work against it, so the filmmakers have done two important things: They've created an eye-popping spectacle that incorporates a lot of CGI but also feels impressively physical and real; and they've made two extraordinary casting decisions.

As perky, popular Galinda (soon to be "Glinda") Upland, Ariana Grande-Butera is a dazzling, charming revelation who captures the bubble-headed airiness of the role but finds, astonishingly, a way to make it her own. Since I'm of a certain age, I was unfamiliar with Grande-Butera as a singer or performer, and came away from this film a pink-dyed-in-the-wool fan: She's a mesmerizing screen presence.

I was more familiar with Cynthia Erivo, though as a dramatic performer from her Oscar-nominated performance in Harriet. She's got the dramatic chops — and the role of Elphaba Thropp, otherwise known as the Wicked Witch of the West, demands them. It's her story, after all, and Wicked makes a pretty compelling case that what happened in Oz wasn't really related to Dorothy Gale of Kansas, in any case.

Rather, it's Elphaba Thropp, born with skin of a different color that branded her as an outsider, a young woman with a hard-won and well-developed sense of justice and morality who also has a deep longing to live up to her own sense of potential. Elphaba has one of the best showstopper numbers in Broadway history with "Defying Gravity," but an earlier number called "The Wizard and I" is the distillation of every "I want" song in Broadway history. In just a few minutes, through her powerful singing voice and her fine sense of drama, Erivo helps us understand everything that moves Elphaba throughout the movie.

That proves to be crucial, because the final 30 minutes or so of Wicked is a little muddled — a problem the musical also had. It's strange how completely the film has failed to fix the problems of the musical, which begins to flag around the time Elphaba and Galinda, who are the very definition of "frenemies," get to the Emerald City to see the Wizard of Oz. Questions of who wants what and why become more urgent even as the answers get a little murkier, and Wicked delves a little uncomfortably into issues of politics and power.

This film of Wicked ends exactly where the stage musical deposits audiences into intermission, except instead of 15 minutes we'll have a year to wait. Erivo, Grande-Butera and "Defying Gravity" make it a satisfying place to stop — Chu has turned the number into a grand, emotionally fulfilling spectacle, ending Wicked at a literal high point.

What happens next will be interesting to see. Act 2 of Wicked has never been as fulfilling. It lacks some dramatic thrust and musical chops, and its ideologies have often seemed a little weak and unconvincing on stage. Whether the second part of Wicked the film can fix those flaws is something we won't know for a year. All we know now is that we have Part 1 of Wicked ... and as a whole it's quite wonderful to behold.

Viewed November 24, 2024 — AMC Topanga

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