"Small Things Like These

  ☆☆½ 

Small Things Like These begins and ends quietly. It is quiet in the middle. It is quiet when it needs to be quiet, and it is quiet when it needs to be loud. It is made by filmmakers who must believe that much is said in the spaces between words. I surmise they believe that, because they've made a movie that is nothing but the spaces between words.

What sparse dialogue these is in Small Things Like These is largely whispered, or spoken in hushed grunts, in the tones saved for words that struggle to convey the meaning they intend.

Your appreciation of Small Things Like These will, then, depend on your patience for listening, carefully, to bits of dialogue, to watching long, wordless passages, and determining for yourself what is happening. There is a plot in the film, but it is non-linear, it is hinted at rather than conveyed, and it's filled with missing pieces of information that the filmmakers leave for us to determine.

Is that a flaw in the film? I found it so, but other critics have been more kind. They call it intense and understated. It certainly is the latter, so much so that there are times it can't be bothered with trivialities like exposition and character development. The movie reminded me of film courses I took in college, in which the professor told us that plot was an unnecessary device, that everything in cinema is conveyed through the mise-en-scène, the way the images are put together, the way the film flows.

I'm not sure I bought that theory then, and I'm not sure I buy it now. And yet, it's all the movie really gives us to go on. Cillian Murphy plays Bill Furlong, a stoic man of few words, a Catholic "coal man" who makes the rounds every day before going home to his wife and his five daughters. He cleans the grime off of him. He tries his best to make a living.

One of the places he delivers coal is the convent. It's a place where girls live—the kind of girls we used to call "wayward." Bill suspects some things about the place. Or sort of suspects. Maybe. We're not sure. He doesn't let on much. His wife suggests that whatever he might or might not think, some things are better left ignored. The Mother Superior at the convent is played by Emily Watson, and she's a woman with a lot to hide. One scene between Bill and the Mother Superior could have been an incendiary showdown between his suspicions and her defenses, but here, as everywhere else in the film, we're meant to pay attention to the quiet moments between the words. The glances. The half-smiles.

There's another story being told in Small Things Like These, which after some initial confusion we learn is the story of Bill himself growing up as a little boy.

What are we to make of these scenes with young Bill? That's impossible to know for sure. The movie presents them, then moves on. Even if you try to look between the spaces in these scenes, no answers are going to come your way—not even about what we see on the screen. How do these memories impact Bill as an adult? We're left to figure that out on our own.

Small Things Like These is not going to offer easy answers. It's not going to offer many answers at all. It's a glum story about a glum man who discovers something shocking—except it's not really about that, at all. The novel on which it's based is, I've read, about kindness and compassion, and it's been billed as the "anti-Christmas Carol." The movie is not successful in translating any of those ideas to the screen.

It isn't a failure, though. Small Things Like These does have good performances, leads us (with the final title card) to want to research what Bill finds on our own, and, once we have, to go and watch one of the documentaries made about this period of time. The topic is distressing, sordid and interesting. Small Things Like These is none of those things. As it moves from moment to moment, scene to scene, it's calm and intriguing, and after a while there's a clear sense it's building to something significant in its final moments.

But it doesn't. This movie isn't about that. It's about the meaning between the spaces of those final moments. It's about subtext. And it turns out that subtext isn't a particularly interesting idea for a movie.

Viewed November 16, 2024 — AMC Universal 16

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"Heretic"

  ☆☆☆½ 

There's so much right about Heretic, the new horror movie that doesn't cast Hugh Grant against type as much as it casts him against all good judgment — yet it's just one of the many, many things that work in this unique movie that comes dangerously close to redefining the concept of a psychological thriller.

But Heretic pulls its punches, setting us up for a final act that will blow our minds but delivering a final act that gets bloody and gory and ultra-violent and, at times, ultra-stupid. And yet, because the first two thirds are so terrific, and because that third act contains at least one cinematic trick that is among the best trick shots in movie history (yes, I know that's a big, big statement — it's a big, big shot), I want to be lenient with this film.

It's essentially a claustrophobic three-person exercise in tension that continually feels the need to open up the action. In a pretty ironic twist for a movie about the meanings of faith, Heretic doubts itself once too often. That's a shame, since confidence is its primary strength.

The setup is remarkably simple and no-frills: Two Mormon missionaries, Sister Barnes (Sophie Thatcher) and Sister Paxton (Chloe East), follow up on leads as they try to preach their gospel, and visit the secluded (is there any other kind?) house owned by one Mr. Reed, an affable fellow who carries the embarrassed, halting charm of Hugh Grant. Good thing he's played by Hugh Grant.

He invites them in. They accept. Bad move.

Nothing feels right from the moment they step into the living room and smell the blueberry pie that Mr. Reed insists Mrs. Reed is baking in the kitchen. In fact, he says, the pie will be ready soon—so, while they wait, they should sit and talk.

Turns out Mr. Reed knowns a thing or two about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. More, it seems, than Sister Barnes or Sister Paxton. A lot more. About other religions, too. Just as things start getting really uncomfortable, the Sisters decide maybe it's time to leave. Mr. Barnes says he won't stop them. Needless to say, he's lying.

Tense, claustrophobic, uncomfortable and awkward, the first act of Heretic is nothing more than a setup, and it moves to a riveting half-hour stretch in which Grant takes center stage and takes Heretic into wild and fascinating directions. A long diatribe filled with histories of religion, pop music, board games and the very nature of belief is delivered with remarkable effect: In the midst of a horror film, the audience begins to think. (Or, I imagine, begins to get awfully antsy that nothing seems to be happening.) Heretic marks the first time I've come out of a horror film desperate to know more about music history.

Then, just when the movie has us in its thrall and can lead us down any path it chooses ... writer-directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods take it to an ultra-bloody, violent place that doesn't let the interest flag even as it feels like a letdown. It also opens up some gaping plot holes and some flimsy narrative logic that never quite fits. After watching Heretic, I read one of those "the ending explained" articles, and it couldn't explain the ending. Or most of the last 20 minutes. I've worked it around and around in my head, and I can't quite make sense of some key questions about Heretic, though I won't give anything away by suggesting what they are.

It's worth seeing for yourself. Heretic is very much worth watching, even if the rabbit hole it promises viewers turns out to be pretty shallow and not nearly as topsy-turvy as might be hoped. Heretic tries a lot and achieves a lot ... just not quite enough.

Viewed November 10, 2024 — AMC Topanga

1330

"Juror #2"

 ☆☆☆☆½ 

Director Clint Eastwood's 42nd film may well be his last, and if that proves to be the case the 94-year-old filmmaker has saved one of his best for last—Juror #2 is a crackling legal thriller, one that could well be so familiar on the surface that Warner Bros. is barely releasing the film in theaters, eager to send it straight to streaming.

Missing this film in a theater would mean missing out on one of moviegoing's true pleasures: Watching a film with an appreciative audience. In recent months, we've had The Substance, Conclave and Speak No Evil has movies that rile up moviegoers. Sitting there in the dark, they become absorbed by the story, and in this case by the flawless filmmaking, and can't help themselves when the surprise twists come.

They do come in Juror #2, and in the packed auditorium the night I saw it, the audience gasped during a couple of key moments, laughed appreciatively at a couple of others, and it's that sort of audience participation (as opposed to the talking-and-texting kind) that helps clarify just why moviegoing is never, ever going to disappear.

Nicholas Hoult, who has long since moved past being "the kid from About a Boy" and grown into a compelling, Hitchcockian sort of "every man," plays a Savannah man named Justin Kemp, who obeys his summons for jury duty. His truthful answers to the stern judge (Amy Aquino) presiding over a murder trial make him the "perfect" person to serve on the jury. Or so everyone thinks. It turns out, Justin might well be the reason the victim in the case died.

That may seem like a spoiler, but it's revealed within the first 15 minutes or so of this tense courtroom drama, which also turns out to have a not-so-hidden deeper side.

Justin is married, with a baby on the way. He's a good man with a difficult past, and he really is unaware of his connection to the case when he is empaneled. As soon as he makes the connection, though, he's stuck: If he comes clean, he could be facing 30 or more years in prison. If he stays silent, he could condemn a man to murder even though that man is innocent — and he may be the actual culprit. 

And, of course, he can't tell a soul.

One of the people he can't tell is the local DA, played by Toni Collette — who, in a neat twist, played Hoult's troubled mother in About a Boy. Here, she represents the worst part of the criminal justice system, and Juror #2 isn't shy about its beliefs that it's a flawed and broken system. Sending a message is on the movie's mind, and the message is a bitter and angry one, but it's not the primary motivation. It wants, more than anything, to tell a good story—and it does.

The more Justin learns about the case, the more he realizes he's in the hottest of water. Not many people care if he gets burned—they need to make sure the state gets its man. It all leaves Justin in one of the most tortured legal quagmires since Paul Newman in The Verdict, yet Juror #2 is not a heavy drama. It's a fast-moving, engrossing thriller that also has quite a lot to say about the jury system and about the way conscience can weigh you down even when you try to clear your mind.

Eastwood has never shied away from infusing his films with deep, sometimes difficult (and sometimes juvenile) messages. This time, he gets it just right.

Warner Bros., for reasons that are entirely unfathomable, has determined Juror #2 will play best on TV, so it's giving the film only a very limited release to qualify for voting. If you can see Juror #2 in a movie theater, you won't regret it. Based on the effectiveness of this film, Warner Bros. owes one of its biggest directors a huge apology for botching what may be his last work. Whether it is or isn't, it's surely one of his best.

Viewed Nov. 2, 2024 — AMC Burbank 16

1920

"Conclave"

  ☆☆☆☆½ 

The movies used to be filled with gems like Conclave, a terrific thriller with what they used to tout as an "all-star cast." It's a movie that assumes the audience possesses a certain level of intelligence, and while I'm tempted to say Conclave is "sophisticated," that might make it sound like something it's not — this isn't a dull, ponderous examination of politics in the church, it's a corker of a movie, a fun an unpredictable bit of entertainment.

Let's get something out of the way first: Conclave is about the process of picking a pope. I know, that doesn't sound too promising, at least as far as thrillers go, and because I went into the movie armed with absolutely no foreknowledge, I made a strange assumption it was going to be one of those overwrought Catholic horror movies. It's not, thank God.

Ralph Fiennes stars as Cardinal Lawrence, whose unenviable task is to manage the process of picking a pope when the current head of the Catholic church dies. A couple of hundred cardinals are flown in from around the world, ready to be sequestered for as long as it takes. They include ambitious American clerics played by John Lithgow and Stanley Tucci, an equally ambitious Nigerian cardinal played by Lucian Msmati, a deeply conservative Italian (Sergio Castellito), and a surprise last-minute addition: a previously unknown cardinal secretly appointed by the late pope, played by newcomer Carlos Diehz. He's been serving in Kabul, and his liberal views align with the cardinal played by Tucci, threatening to upend the process.

Or, at the very least, to make an already difficult process even more difficult, because Conclave is eager to show that this is a process filled with politicking, backbiting, campaigning and name-calling. You know, all the good stuff.

A group of nuns supports the priests. They're led by Isabella Rossellini, and if she seems to be awfully quiet in the background, rest assured movie producers don't hire Isabella Rossellini for nothing.

She's very good, in one key moment earning an appreciative cheer without saying a word. All the performers in Conclave are uniformly strong, and while it's easy to single out Fiennes for a fine, serious and often deep performance, no member of the cast makes a wrong move.

That's critical in a movie like this, which starts out as an earnest drama before making moves, small at first, into thriller territory. By the end, it does thrill indeed, particularly as the outside world — unknown to the sequestered cardinals — boils over as vote after vote fails to yield results. It's all compulsively watchable, even in the moment or two it veers a little too closely to silliness, though the deft work of a cast like this and of director Edward Berger, working with screenwriter Peter Straughan to adapt the novel by Robert Harris.

Big credit goes to Focus Features for bringing Conclave to the big screen rather than releasing it straight to streaming, as happened with Berger's last film, All Quiet on the Western Front. It's thoughtful, compelling, exciting and best enjoyed in the dark, with some popcorn and an appreciative audience that laughs and gasps and even cheers at all the right moments — the gasps are the best part, and there are a lot of them.

Viewed October 27, 2024 — AMC Topanga 12

1330

"Megalopolis"

  ☆☆½ 

After seeing Megalopolis, the film director Francis Ford Coppola has been dreaming about for 45 years, I searched the Internet for articles about the plot of the movie I had just watched. I wanted to be sure of what I had seen. After reading many of these articles, the only thing I am sure of is that nobody is sure of exactly what they saw happen in Megalopolis.

I had read that there were characters, ideas and entire plot points that somehow go missing in Megalopolis, but I was loathe to believe it because Francis Ford Coppola may have a history as a maverick filmmaker but he is a good filmmaker. He is always interesting. Some of his movies are among the most literate pieces of cinema you'll ever want to see.

But, in fact, Megalopolis has characters, ideas and entire plot points that somehow go missing. The whole movie is a weird, put-it-all-in-a-blender kind of affair — you can make out specific ingredients, but only for a moment, as they swirl together into something else, something that, it must be said, is disappointingly bland and probably not very nutritious.

But there are visions! Oh, there are visions. And there are ideas! Oh, there are ideas. A lot of them, it appears, have to do with ancient Roman history, and forgive me for being an ignorant American but I am not as well versed in the nuances of intrigue in Rome nearly 2,000 years ago. That's on me. I've got to go with what I see in front of me, and what I might gather it means from the character names, the ways of dress, and the fact that New York is referred to here as New Rome. To quote Close Encounters of the Third Kind: "This means something."

Just what it means isn't readily clear. Better to just watch. The images are strong, powerful, sometimes surprising and often beautiful (though, it must be said, once in a while cheap-looking). They are all in service of a story that follows a visionary architect and, apparently, chemist who has won the Nobel Prize for creating a revolutionary new building material. He wants to use it to remove urban blight (never mind that people live in what he considers the blight) in New Rome, but the corrupt mayor isn't having it. His wild-child daughter decides he likes the architect, who can stop time—literally, except not literally, well, sort of. There are some other characters. A lot of them. Like the crazy banker who runs New Rome and gets married to a media personality name Wow Platinum. 

Yes, there is a character named Wow Platinum.

Adam Driver is the architect, Giancarlo Esposito is the mayor, Nathalie Emmanuel is the daughter, Aubrey Plaza is Wow Platinum. Aubrey Plaza is a performer with near-perfect taste. She is good in almost everything. Note that I said "near-perfect" and "almost." Francis Ford Coppola must have made her a deal she couldn't resist for this one. The movie also features Laurence Fishburn in a minor role and also as the narrator, who reads words that appear on screen, rather unhelpfully. Dustin Hoffman pops up for a couple of scenes of attempted flamboyance, and Shia LaBeouf rather quizzically spends most of his time in drag. Nothing is explained. Nothing at all.

Let me say that again: Nothing in Megalopolis is explained. Maybe Coppola felt explanations are for dumb people. That may well be. I felt pretty dumb watching a lot of Megalopolis. I didn't understand what I was looking at, but it was mostly pretty and almost never boring, and when I went to bed afterward I was discomfited to find that in my dreams were some of the buildings and characters and cityscapes I had just watched. It worked its way into my brain, and on that level, I guess Coppola has done something few filmmakers get a chance to do. It also appears he made exactly the movie he wanted. I hope he did. I hope he feels satisfied in a way most audiences will likely not.

Viewed October 27, 2024 — AMC Burbank 8

2030

"My Old Ass"

 ☆☆☆☆☆ 

Barely 90 minutes long, My Old Ass packs into its brief screen time more wit, fun and genuine insight into the human condition than a film twice its length. Positioned as the latest in a mildly offensive but funny string of comedies fronted by young women, My Old Ass turns out to be something very different, not at all as sarcastic and acerbic as its marketing suggests.

Very near the end of its compact story, My Old Ass throws a wallop of a punch, not a plot twist as much as a plot development so unexpected that, in retrospect, it seems obvious. It's not a trick, and it elevates My Old Ass into something rare indeed: a comedy made for and about young people that offers even more for grown-ups.

The story sounds like Freaky Friday or 13 Going on 30 for a looser era—on the night of her 18th birthday, Elliott (Maisy Stella) and her friends experiment with hallucinogenic mushrooms. During her trippy high, a 39-year-old version of Elliott (Aubrey Plaza) shows up without notice and offers a glimpse at life as an early middle-ager. She also drops her number into young Elliott's phone, and provides a vague warning: At all costs, avoid guys named "Chad."

Turns out, that's the name of the geekily handsome kid working on her father's cranberry farm in rural Ontario. Elliott figures she doesn't have much to be concerned about, since she's comfortable with her own sexuality, which precludes dalliances with men of any name, including Chad.

But Old Elliott knows some things Young Elliott doesn't, and though she won't reveal much about the potentially dystopian—yet comfortably there—world in which she lives, she does urge her younger self to be more focused on appreciating the things she has in her not-yet-complicated life.

As Elliott's last summer with her family winds to a close, she finds herself taking solace in the sage words of wisdom her Old Ass offers ... until the older Elliott stops responding, and life takes on infinitely more complexity. 

Shot in sun-soaked, golden tones that evoke the kind of summer life that exists, perhaps, only in memory, My Old Ass never lets go of its comedic sensibilities, which are impressive, but layers in astonishingly deep emotion in even the smallest of moments. Elliott's home life seems simple, even pastoral, yet as she looks closer she discovers nuances she never noticed. This richness of director Megan Park's screenplay lends a serene wistfulness to every scene in the film—as soon as Old Elliott appears, it's clear the most important idea she wants to convey is that Elliott needs to pay attention to all the things that will slip away. And yet, since they haven't happened to Young Elliott yet, she can't notice—one of the paradoxes, like the gentle version of time travel at its core, the film relishes.

Park previously made the extraordinary, deeply affecting teen drama The Fallout, which explored the complicated reality of teen life with sensitivity and honesty, and My Old Ass builds on it further, offering a vision of modern youth that feels less despondent but equally deep.

It's worth noting, since she is such a strong screen presence and rarely makes a misstep, that Aubrey Plaza plays a supporting role in My Old Ass—the star is Maisy Stella, who is radiant. She commands the screen with ease in a film that demands a lot from her. There's more complexity to her role, to her character, and to the film, than meets the eye, and it's both a surprise and a delight that My Old Ass turns out to be one of the best films of 2024, and the most emotionally rewarding.

Viewed September 28, 2024 — AMC Universal 16

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"The Substance"

  ☆☆☆☆ 

The Substance is demented, completely unhinged, and insanely grotesque, and those among its best qualities. It's a satire, and a good one, but it's also—maybe even primarily—a body-horror movie, a film that in many scenes directly recalls and references David Cronenberg's 1986 masterpiece of body horror The Fly. I suppose what you will make of The Substance depends in large part on your feelings about The Fly, since much of The Substance makes The Fly look like a G-rated Disney movie.

The Substance, which also recalls a lot of Kubrick, is written and directed by French filmmaker Coralie Fargeat, and few filmmakers dare as much as she does in this film, which, it cannot be stated enough, is not for the squeamish. When I saw The Substance, some audience members got all the way to about the two hour mark of this 140-minute film and then decided they had seen enough. It's that kind of movie. You may decide you've seen enough long before that, or you may decide that too much is never enough—which certainly would seem to be Fargeat's attitude.

In The Substance, Demi Moore, an actress who became known in her 20s and is now in her 60s, plays a celebrity named Elisabeth Sparkle who became known in her youth and is now far from young. As The Substance begins, nobody comments on how ravishing she looks (which she does), or how extraordinarily well she has aged (which she has), they just know she's old. So they fire her.

At the same time, she encounters a mysterious come-on for a substance called, well, The Substance. She watches a slick advertisement for a neon-green liquid that makes some mighty big promises. There appear to be two customers for The Substance, and you may wonder how something like this, which couldn't have been cheap to develop, much less market, manages to keep going with just two customers. It's better not to ask. It's better not to ask about most things in The Substance—inner logic is not one of the movie's strong points, nor does it need to be.

The Substance also doesn't have much in the way of instructions. Like Apple products, it's one of those IYKYK sort of things, and apparently Elisabeth figures it out, because as soon as she injects herself with The Substance, out pops (and, boy, does it pop) another version of herself: young, big-breasted, tight-assed, effortlessly beautiful. But, as the people behind The Substance keep explaining, it's not a separate person: There is only one. Elisabeth has been divided. But her other half, a perky ingenue known as Sue, sees herself as something wholly separate. And there's the rub.

One of them, at least. The other is that The Substance comes with a few rules. Chief among them is: Never, ever feed them after midni— wait, wrong horror-comedy. It's that the two halves of Elisabeth must switch every seven days. If Sue doesn't give up her sexy body and newfound fame in the seven days, well ... something will happen.

And it does. With increasingly horrifying results, most of which are also painfully, awfully funny. The Substance really does excel as satire of the highest sort: It's genuinely funny, even while being utterly absorbing and fantastically unpredictable. As the movie careens around its steep, dizzying track, it threatens to go off the rails, but Fargeat keeps it going even as she forces the audience to watch through closed eyes or through their fingers. (I don't know that I've ever really, actually watched a movie through my fingers ... until now. The Substance offers moments that go beyond mere cringe.)

Just when you think it can't get any more outrageous, Fargeat offers a surprise. It's one that almost works, even when, with unexpected glee, the movie layers in Bernard Hermann's love theme from Vertigo. The whole thing comes so close to perfection that its penultimate scene falls unexpectedly flat. It's the one moment that Fargeat ought to pull back but doesn't. Yet the whole thing recovers for one of the most bizarre and unforgettable final shots in movie history.

Anchoring it all are Demi Moore, who gives herself entirely to the role, and Margaret Qualley as her literal other half. Individually and together, they make The Substance work, even in its wildest and most impossible moments. They and the film are fearless, and if fearlessness takes it into territory it can't quite make work, that's more than all right: Few films are as bold, as interesting, and as full-bore bonkers as The Substance.

Viewed September 22, 2024 — AMC Century City 15

1530

"Speak No Evil"

  ☆☆☆☆ 

As an exercise in suspense and tension, Speak No Evil works fantastically well, so well that it's not until after the credits have rolled and you're in the car and on the way home that you might begin to start questioning some of the basic elements of the plot, especially in the last 20 minutes or so.

At that point, it's far too late to matter, so if Speak No Evil feels a little weaker in retrospect than it did while on screen, it seems pointless to quibble. This movie does what it does with ruthless efficiency, it's got a great, long wind-up, and when it sets everything in motion it's almost impossible to turn away from the screen, even in the bloodiest moments, when you most desperately want to. Speak No Evil is, in the moment, so good that it forces you to watch.

This movie is based on a Dutch film, also called Speak No Evil, that I've never seen, though from what I've read the title of that film may make a little more sense than the title of this film. In both, a friendly couple and their daughter meet a boisterous, borderline irritating, couple from the middle of nowhere. They have a son who has difficulty communicating. The more gregarious couple invites the more reserved one to visit their country home.

In this film, the fussier couple is American, and their backstory is convoluted, though suffice it to say they are the kind of people who have moved to London and can afford both a stylish apartment and a Tesla. When they get the invitation to the boondocks—the "West Country," in this version—one of them is hesitant, the other is effusive, but they end up going.

That's where they reunite with Paddy, who says he is a doctor; his wife, Chiara, who does seem a tad young for the man; and their son, Ant, the one who doesn't talk. Ben is the American, a man who has lost his way, though his wife Louise and his daughter Agnes are trying hard to reconcile the family's many complications.

That the weekend doesn't go as planned won't come as a surprise, though exactly why and what the nice American couple discover is something you should know as little about as possible before watching the film.

This is the kind of movie that takes place in a rambling old country home with neighbors whose proximity is measured in miles, not meters. In the history of film and literature, nothing good has ever happened in a country home like this one (that even extends to the heartbreaking conclusion of Call Me By Your Name), so it should be no surprise that things go very, very badly for the Americans.

Much blood is spilled, and many words are shouted or whispered at the screen during the course of Speak No Evil, and the movie is so tautly made that none of its iffier elements matter at all, not even when that one character pushes that other character into the water at the end in a moment that defies all logic and credibility. But, still, you're likely to be with the movie because you just want to know how it's going to end, who's going to get out of this alive, and how. Or if.

In that, my understanding is that Speak No Evil comes to a radically different conclusion than the original, much in the same way, I suppose, as the twisted, evil, shocking ending of George Sluizer's exemplary 1988 thriller The Vanishing "had" to be revised for Hollywood. Since I've not seen the original Speak No Evil, all I know is that this remake of the film has an efficient, effective and satisfactory—if not entirely satisfying—ending, but one that is vastly different than the original.

Yet with a towering central performance by James McAvoy that is matched in enthusiasm, if not volume, by the full cast, and a sly satirical manner that offers a lot of humor amid the bloodshed, Speak No Evil works well. Maybe not as well as the first, from all I've heard, but quite well enough on its own terms.

Viewed September 15, 2024 — AMC Burbank 6

1400

"Alien: Romulus"

  ☆☆☆ 

Alien is a masterpiece of suspense and horror, a haunted-house film in outer space. Aliens is a masterpiece of tension and anxiety, an unrelenting action thriller set on another planet. These two movies are about as good as modern science-fiction movies get, so it was reasonable to have high expectations for their prequels, Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, both of which turned out to be duds that—to be fair—have their fans.

Those two Ridley Scott-directed films were so bad, and direct sequels like Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection were also awful. The less said about the Alien vs. Predator films, of which I've seen only segments, the better. In short: Eight Alien movies, two gems, six duds.

The track record going in to Alien: Romulus is pretty miserable, and its director, Fede Alvarez, directed a horror film called Don't Breathe that I found one of the most repugnant and offensive films I've ever watched. I sat down to watch Alien: Romulus with the lowest of low expectations.

That the film far surpasses those expectations is a genuine surprise. While Alien: Romulus will be nonsensical if you've never seen at least the first two films—and will test your power of recall for Prometheus, a film otherwise best put out of your mind—as Alien movies go, it's in the top three.

It can't come close to the pure visceral terror of Alien or the exhilarating, exhausting experience of watching Aliens. Those movies are rare achievements. Alien: Romulus is a streaming-era reboot, a movie that at every turn recalls both the 1979 original and its 1986 sequel, steals from them gleefully (and sometimes unwisely), and does its best to match their style.

The most difficult trick Alien: Romulus needs to achieve is getting the film back into space and finding a sufficiently tight location to set its action. To that end, the set-up of Alien: Romulus is both perfunctory, contrived and almost needlessly complex, but it works. A young woman who has lived her entire life on a mining colony 65 light years from Earth is ready to leave the unhappy world, which is cloaked in eternal darkness. But the company for which she works—the company that, in the world of Alien, rules everything—won't let her go.

She and a ragtag group of young friends hatch a scheme that strains credulity as they hijack a ship they intend to use to go to a ... well, look, never mind. It's all complicated and dense, not helped by a sound mix that emphasizes loud noises over crisp dialogue. Just know that in many regards, Alien: Romulus could also be called Teen Alien. With one glaring and awkward exception, the main cast here is young, reasonably good-looking, and filled with comparisons to characters in the earlier films.

They wind up on a space station called Romulus (well, half of it is, at least), where they run smack into the aliens, which fans know as Xenomorphs. There are the face-hugger versions that previously lived in eggs, there are the full-scale versions, whose metamorphosis we see in slimy, icky detail here, and all of them move fast. Of the group of kids who walk onto the space station, only one or two will survive, that's a given. The purpose of Alien: Romulus, then, is to dispatch the others with as much suspense as possible.

It's done pretty well. The movie is sometimes suspenseful, almost never scary, and moves quickly. In its final act—driven by the unwise reappearance of a character from an earlier Alien movie, which feels inappropriate and grotesque—it becomes downright silly. A plot twist that relies on information from Prometheus is at first head-scratching and then borderline laughable, but Alien: Romulus moves at a fast enough pace that we never care all that much.

That's really the biggest downside to the film: It doesn't give us characters that resonate. Except for its lead, Rain (played by Cailee Spainey from Civil War), and David Jonsson, who's very impressive as her android, Andy, the cast of characters is interchangeable and unmemorable. But the movie moves swiftly, it looks fantastic, and it has a muscular, impressive score by Benjamin Wallfisch that, like the rest of the movie, nicely recalls the first two films.

Alien: Romulus has been given one task: make a better Alien movie than we've seen in the last 38 years. It does that task well enough. Considering what's come before it, that's a pleasant surprise.

Viewed August 24, 2024 — AMC Burbank 6

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"Longlegs"

  ☆½ 

After years and years of slasher films, moviemakers got the idea way back in 1999 with The Blair Witch Project that less on screen is more, and while it wasn't the wrong idea to get, a quarter century of "restrained" horror films demonstrates that far too often less is actually less.

Horror movies have become a kind of Rorschach test for a certain kind of moviegoer. If you don't get subtle meanings and cinematic references of "elevated" horror movies, you're somehow inferior. That's my biggest takeaway from Longlegs, which has received rapturous critical acclaim but is one of the dullest, least interesting movies—horror or any other kind—I've seen in a long time.

In Longlegs, tedium largely substitutes for tension, though there is a fair amount of the latter in the claustrophobic first few minutes, in which a young girl leaves the confines of her snowy white house to investigate the arrival of a very weird and disturbing stranger. This is the "Longlegs" of the film's title, an uncomfortably androgynous character. The movie is careful to describe him as a man, lest we get the wrong idea and think that Longlegs might be venturing into some dicey transphobic territory.

The gender of "Longlegs" turns out not to matter, just like the weird motives of the character really don't matter. Nor does the increasingly bizarre connection that this grotesque and outrageous character (played by Nicolas Cage, in no-holds-barred Nicolas Cage style) has with the FBI agent investigating him.  Very little turns out to matter in this slog of a film.

Longlegs may or may not be responsible for killing multiple families, who die in what appear to be murder-suicides. But there's reason to believe someone is behind the deaths, so the FBI brings in a "half-psychic" agent named Lee Harker (horror fans may try to make something of that last name). She's played by Maika Monroe as a permanently anxious yet stone-faced cipher whose childhood is the one depicted in the first few minutes of the movie.

There are more and more connections between Harker and Longlegs, so many that it seems impossible, after a time, to imagine that nobody put two and two together before this. The coincidences and intersections pile up in the increasingly stupid script by director Osgood Perkins. Trying desperately to be a "slow burn," Longlegs moves at such a glacial pace it sometimes seems to stop altogether. Though it's punctuated by bits of shocking violence and extreme gore, none of it is interesting.

Because both movies deal with young FBI agents trailing serial killers, there have been attempts to compare Longlegs with The Silence of the Lambs, but don't be fooled. Lambs grounded its characters in recognizable reality, and offered no motive for Hannibal Lecter beyond pure evil. Longlegs is all over the place trying to build up a mythology so complicated and nonsensical that it becomes unintentionally hilarious. There's nothing scary or shocking about Longlegs, despite those bursts of gore, because it doesn't exist in a world that looks anything like our own.

It's a dumb, dull exercise in "elevated" horror, a freak show that can't live up to the hype.

Viewed August 11, 2024 — AMC Burbank 6

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"A Quiet Place: Day One"

  ☆☆☆ 

Between the release of A Quiet Place in 2018 and A Quiet Place 2 in 2021, something odd happened: The world almost ended.

Is that hyperbole? Think back exactly four years, when we were inundated with images of death and violence, when we couldn't conceive of a future that hadn't changed in incalculable ways. Now we're in that future, and maybe it hasn't changed all that much, but we have.

That creates an interesting sort of problem for movies about the apocalypse. When we've seen what the world looks like when it's at the brink, it's hard to let go of disbelief, and in a movie like A Quiet Place: Day One that's even more critical than the movies that have come before.

Where, for instance, are the naysayers? Even when faced with certain annihilation, what we know now is that there would be a faction or two hundred that insists the whole thing is a government conspiracy. When told to literally be quiet, there are an awful lot of people who would insist they have every right to be noisy.

On the subject of noise, A Quiet Place: Day One opens with a title card that lets us know that New York City constantly emits sounds that are as loud as a human scream. What we know from the previous Quiet Place films is that the alien invaders are intolerant of loud sounds. Which begs the question: Why would they choose New York? Couldn't they hear the high-pitched squeal of subway brakes? Wouldn't that kill them all upon landing?

Alas, A Quiet Place: Day One offers 90 minutes to ponder such questions even while it delivers a story that is reasonably tense and astonishingly well acted by its three central performers: Lupita Nyong'o, as a poet dying of cancer who ends up fighting for her life in a different way; Joseph Quinn as a law student with a remarkably resilient wash-and-wear suit and tie; and Schnitzel and Nico, who play a cat named Frodo who steals every scene in which he appears (which is most of them).

The movie offers a motivation beyond the obvious for Nyong'o's character, Sam, to try to make her way north out of midtown. It seems like a flimsy sort of excuse to flirt with extreme danger and almost certain death, and when she's joined by Quinn's Eric the willingness of the two to make the journey is yet another one of those head-scratching moments. And yet, it ends up offering a strong and effective catharsis, and a rarity in a horror film: a scene of touching, tender humanity. That scene between the three main characters makes most of the rest of the experience worth it—but can't negate how strange the whole experience is.

Since this is a prequel, we already know most of the outcome, we know what becomes of the monsters, so we're left asking endless questions based on all the information we already have. I couldn't help but wonder about all the plot holes, all the rules of how the monsters behave that are seemingly violated in A Quiet Place: Day One. But then the movie came back to Nyong'o, Quinn and the cat—especially the cat— and that turns out to be, just barely, enough.

The apocalypse won't look like this, but hopefully the cats will cooperate.

Viewed July 4, 2024 — AMC Universal 16

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"Thelma"

 ☆☆☆☆ 

Pay attention in the opening scenes of Thelma, and see if you can spot the scam. You'll know it once it happens. You may even recognize it while it's happening. But the setup, the way the scammers hook 93-year-old Thelma Post into sending them $10,000 in cash, is convincing.

How do "old people" not realize they're being scammed? The same way you might fall for the big lie while you're watching Thelma. And that's sort of the point: Yes, Thelma is old, yes she spouts funny malapropisms, and no, she doesn't entirely understand how a computer works.

Do you?

The phone call Thelma gets sets her off on a grand adventure. It's tempting to call it a minor adventure, but anyone who lives in L.A. will know that Thelma covers a lot of ground in her quest to get that money back from the bad guys who conned her into giving it to them.

Played by 94-year-old June Squibb, Thelma is the widowed grandmother to Danny (Fred Hechinger), a Gen Z slacker who makes Gen X slackers look like overachievers by comparison. He's the one who unwittingly gets the action of Thelma rolling, and though he doesn't have a clue how life works, he's a doting grandson who prefers her to his parents—including Thelma's hyper-attentive daughter (Parker Posey)—and will do anything he can to help her.

Except, here's the kicker, the real crux of Thelma: She doesn't want his help. She doesn't want anyone's help. And she's not just stubborn. She knows she's old, but after such a long life, doesn't she get to live what's left on her own terms? This struggle for independence is what drives Thelma and gives it deeper meaning than a simple granny-with-a-gun tale.

In addition to Danny, her friend Ben, played by the late Richard Roundtree in his final role, wants to help Thelma. She only wants his electric scooter. But pretty soon they're gallivanting around the San Fernando Valley together, doing their best to stay one step ahead of her family.

It's a delightfully silly and thoroughly absorbing romp, one that recalls the more character-driven goofy comedies of the 1970s and early 1980s like 9 to 5 and Melvin and Howard, all held together by Oscar-nominated June Squibb, now in her third decade of a late-in-life career (her first on-screen role came when she was 56, her first movie role when she was 61). She's droll and straightforward and no-nonsense, a real character in the best sense, a character who feels complete and complicated.

And she is. That's the best part about Thelma. Sure, the jazzy score that could have come from a 1970s caper is fun, and all the performances—especially Hechinger—are top-notch. But it's Thelma's humanity that drives this film, even through it's more preposterous action-driven sections. Toward the end of the movie comes a gentle, human-scaled little scene that takes place on a park bench as Thelma talks to her grandson. Their exchange does something entirely unexpected in a film that has, by and large, lived up to our expectations to that point—it knocks the wind out of you. When I saw Thelma, the packed theater fell completely silent except for some uncontrollable crying jags.

Which isn't to say Thelma is sad or depressing or troubling. It's none of those things—well, maybe a couple of those things, though tangentially. The reason for the emotional response was ... no, on second thought, you'll need to see it yourself to find out. If you do, you'll discover that Thelma is big-hearted, effortlessly entertaining, and, in the best ways, as much a surprise as the woman herself. 

Viewed June 23, 2024 — AMC Burbank 16

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"Tuesday"

  ☆☆☆½ 

Too many movies barely have enough ideas to sustain a scene, much less a full-length feature film, so it seems a little unfair to fault Tuesday for cramming too much into its 111 minutes.

There is so much that works so well in this film, a true flight of fancy that manages the impressive feat of grafting a magical fantasy onto a grounded story of death, grief and denial. In an unexpected dramatic turn (not her first, though you'd never know that from the marketing, though her first that's this aggressively downbeat), Julia Louis-Dreyfus gets a lot of credit for helping the audience navigate some tough transitions between human drama and increasingly surreal fantasy.

She plays Zora, the mother of a terminally ill 15-year-old named Tuesday, who is played perfectly by Lola Petticrew, a performer nearly twice the age of the character. Lola knows she will die of her unnamed disease, and Zora is in utter denial—not just of her daughter's mortality, but of the ways it has forced her to change her life as a single mother in London.

Lola is certain of her impending death because she's been told to expect it by none other than Death itself, in the form of a filth-covered macaw who can shrink to the size of a pea or grow to the height of a giant, and whose eternal job it is to appear to the doomed and cause their demise. The macaw speaks in a gruff, low voice, which is memorably provided by Arinzé Kent.

But Zora is not about to allow Death to take Tuesday, and when the bird presents itself to her and says, "Madame, you need to say goodbye to your daughter," Zora makes a dramatic and violent decision. What she does propels the rest of the film, and takes place against an odd and malevolent backdrop. Even as Tuesday and Zora grapple with the mother's decision, the world they live in seems headed for an apocalypse.

This long middle stretch is where Tuesday tries so hard, and so admirably, to show us the unexpected. It's a shame to say that not everything it tries works, that some of its oddities come across as truly puzzling and often confusing, while others offer up metaphors that don't quite hit their marks.

Tuesday is the rare film that could have benefitted from more screen time, but for its valiant effort and for the astonishing vision of writer-director Diana O. Pusic, it deserves to be seen and even cherished. Not many films try this hard. Tuesday doesn't always fly, but when it does, it soars.

Viewed June 16, 2024 — Laemmle NoHo

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"Hit Man"

  ☆☆☆☆ 

What strange, fractious times we live in, when everything—and, increasingly, it seems everything—can elicit angry arguments and defensive posturing. Take Richard Linklater's latest low-key film Hit Man, which to my mind is just about as enjoyable as movies get. Many disagree. Angrily, defensively, assertively and in no uncertain terms they make it clear: Hit Man is bad.

In fact, Hit Man is very good, though it's got a quirky, oddball approach that fits Linklater's sensibilities, and doesn't care too much if audiences don't vibe with it. Moviegoers of a certain age know that even Linklater's exquisite Before films have met with head-scratching claims of boredom and smug elitism.

Not coincidentally to all this vehement debate about Hit Man is that this laid-back neo-noir comedy, which owes more than a little debt of gratitude and style to Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye (a movie that had its own vocal detractors in its day), is that Linklater's film debuted on Netflix with a minor theatrical release. Almost everyone who has seen the film has seen it at home.

I was fortunate enough to see it on the big screen, and Hit Man is a movie that benefits enormously from the theatrical experience. I'm beginning to think that's the crux of the problem, rather than the film itself. In a movie theater, there are essentially three choices: fall asleep (or do something else distracting, maybe involving the person you came with), leave, or watch the movie. Generally, people don't choose the first two options, though there's an exception for everything.

When you sit down and watch Hit Man unspool (or its digital equivalent) in front of you, it takes a little while to get into the film's funny little rhythms, though Glen Powell is immediately appealing as Gary Johnson, an unassuming college professor with the oddest of side gigs: He builds surveillance technology that helps the New Orleans Police Department in sting operations to capture would-be assassins. He goes along on these jobs, and ...

Well, what happens next in Hit Man is the fun. The movie plays best if you don't know anything else.

It plays worst, apparently, at home on Netflix. That's no surprise. If you have, roughly, three options at the movie theater, you have substantially more at home. You can make dinner or talk with friends or check your phone or look up the movie's stars on the Internet or get a pizza delivered or get high or get drunk or cut your toenails or feed the dog or anything else you want that you cannot do in a movie theater, where your attention is focused on the screen. At home, your attention is often focused almost anywhere but the screen.

Hit Man needs attention. It needs thought. Its jokes, which are many, sometimes take a minute to hit. And when its plot finally gets cranking, the movie assumes you have been paying attention all along. The minute Madison Figueroa Masters (Adria Arjona) walks onto the screen and tells her sordid, sad story, you'd better be listening and watching and keeping track.

Hit Man turns from low-key comedy and quirky slapstick into a captivating neo-noir that has all the classic elements, including some unexpected turns and some dark morality.

"I turned it off after 15 minutes because nothing happened." "A weak plot." "Awkwardly stitched together." Yes, Hit Man will seem to have all those flaws if you watch it at home while you're doing other things, or while you're wondering if there might be something different to watch. There's always something different to watch. The temptation to pause, mute or go back to the home screen is strong—especially for a movie like this, that depends on your commitment, that feels more like a character-driven melodrama from the Eighties, something like The Verdict or Absence of Malice that assumes its viewers are not distracted and inattentive.

Back to the film: It's a delight. It rewards patience, and cares enough to have a thematic perspective, even when its relative morality begins to feel questionable—which is part of its beauty. When a film is carefully enough made to make us question the decisions its characters make, that's a film worth watching. And Hit Man is very much worth watching.

Viewed June 12, 2024 — Egyptian Theater

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"Margaret" (2011)

  ☆☆☆☆½ 

In 1999, Paul Thomas Anderson's mesmerizing, confounding, challenging, beautiful, depressing, confounding, polarizing film Magnolia caught the uncertain mood most of the world seemed to be in leading up to the new millennium. That long film might well be called "operatic" both for its grand themes and the way it stops the action every now and then to allow its leading actors a moment to show off their skills, much in the way an aria stops the action of an opera just so we can marvel at talent.

Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret was originally shot six years later, but due to the kind of legal and artistic wrangling that seemingly can only happen in Hollywood, it was finished in 2011. Note that I didn't say "released in 2011," because Margaret was largely never released. For years, Lonergan had been trying to get his film to 150 minutes to satisfy his contractual obligations, finally settled on a 160-minute version, but when he did the studio largely abandoned it, and never giving the film a mainstream theatrical release. Meanwhile, Lonergan continued working on Margaret, and ultimately created a 186-minute "extended director's edition." While available on DVD, Blu-ray and streaming, this version has rarely been seen in theaters.

As part of its annual "Bleak Week" series, the American Cinematheque screened the 186-minute cut of Margaret at the Egyptian theater to a sold-out house. Having at last seen it, the rationale behind the studio's decision not to release Margaret is more discouraging than ever: They denied moviegoers an opportunity to experience an exquisite film, a movie that stands alongside Magnolia as an emotional epic that explores the convoluted inner workings of people just as the world was shifting.

Margaret hits even harder than Magnolia — not an easy task — because it was shot and originally intended to be released just five years after terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center. They did more than destroy buildings; they destroyed a nation's psyche, they made Americans, and New Yorkers in particular, painfully aware of the fragility of life and the ways it's impossible ever to really know what is going to happen next. The next 30 minutes could hold anything, a reality Margaret knows all too well.

Lonergan's script for Margaret contains no characters named "Margaret." The film is named after the poem "Spring and Fall," by Gerard Manley Hopkins, which begins:

Margaret are you grieving

Over Goldengrove unleaving?

The poem is written as an adult asking a troubled child if the simple act of leaves falling in autumn has left her forlorn, and sad about the state of the world.

Lisa Cohen is this film's Margaret. She is played by Anna Paquin in a performance that should have been nominated for every possible award. Paquin is revelatory as a girl who we meet when she is confident and teasing, flirtatious and intelligent, happy and eager and bright. By the end of the movie, she will still be some of those things, but she will not be many of them. In the sort of incident that could happen anywhere at any time, Margaret is involved (just how, it's best not to know) in a bus accident that kills a woman named Monica. She is played by Allison Janney, who has only one scene in the movie — but it's a scene that must stay with us for the entire duration of this long, complicated film. It does. You've seen heartbreaking moments in movies, but if you haven't seen Margaret, you've never seen the definitive one.

The accident is a devastating, life-changing moment for Lisa, but not always in the most obvious ways. As the film progresses, Lisa has a fraught relationships with her actress mother (J. Smith-Cameron), a math teacher (Matt Damon), a boy who likes her (John Gallagher Jr.), a boy who doesn't really care about her (Kieran Culkin), and a woman (Jeannie Berlin) who was close friends with Monica.

Relaying the rest of the story would be pointless—there is too much of it. One of the many wonderful imperfections of Margaret is how much story it wants to pack into its running time. The extended director's cut runs more than three hours but plays like a movie half that length. Paquin is at the center of it all, carrying the film with such effortless confidence that we sometimes forget we're watching a piece of fiction; Lonergan, who loves working in a naturalistic style, has created a film that's often packed to the edges. It demands and earns our attention, even in some very strange and problematic moments when Lonergan decides to play a piece of music too loudly or adds in voices that seem to be coming from another scene.

These directorial flourishes make Margaret distinctive, but what makes it special and unlike any American movie I can remember seeing is the way the audience never knows from one scene to the next how a character might respond. Scenes change on a dime in this film, and what begins as a happy and carefree moment might end a few minutes later with lacerating anger. In that, Lonergan understands the way most people actually communicate with each other—poorly, haltingly, unpredictably. Watching Margaret is a stark reminder of how little we can ever know anyone else, their motives, or their fears.

This is a glowing film. It knows how terribly we have been hurt — not just by September 11, not just by technology and communication (it was filmed before smart phones but released after they became ubiquitous, which makes for an interesting commentary), not just by each other. Rather, we've been hurt by existence. Like Margaret in the poem, we have seen the world dying; confidence that it will return again does us no good. We are grieving for what we have lost, right now.

In its final moments, as if it hadn't already been clear through its frequent use of classical music, Margaret shows us what it means to be: an opera, maybe a tragedy, maybe a comedy, maybe a little bit of both — I was surprised by how funny the film is, despite being shown at "Bleak Week." In any event, it is bigger than life. It takes a seemingly everyday kind of tragedy and infuses it with wild, raw emotion. Watching Margaret, you'll careen from laughter to shock, from outrage to tearful emotion, sometimes within moments. Lonergan does not shy away from the hard stuff here, but Margaret is never angry or depressing.

By the end of this fascinating and emotionally draining (but not bleak) film, it is very much "Margaret" you grieve for — the girl who can never be innocent again, and the world that can never be innocent again. But still both will revive themselves. They will remake themselves. They will grow again. One way or another.

Viewed June 2, 2024 — Egyptian Theater

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