"Wicked: For Good"

 ☆☆☆

Now, wait just a clock tick.

On Broadway, Wicked runs 2 hours, 30 minutes with a 15-minute intermission. On film, Wicked: Part 1 and Wicked: For Good together run two minutes shy of five hours. And despite finding much to enjoy about the first movie, now that I've seen the second, the big question the two films together leave behind is simply: Why?

It was easy to forgive the first movie its excesses, at least watching it the first time. Like many admirers of the Broadway spectacle on which it's based, the film version had been two decades coming, and it was a thrill to see Elphaba and G(a)linda brought to life by Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande-Butera. But on an at-home rewatch, the movie lost its lightness, and labored under all that had been added to it.

The swirling CGI shots of Oz, the dizzying and impossible camerawork made possible by visual effects, the expansive scenery, the elongated musical sequences all overwhelmed the story and even the performances. Even last year, I had been worried about Part 2 of Wicked, and there was good reason to be.

The director, John M. Chu, is fond of excess in everything, and has turned the 60-minute second act of Wicked into 138 minutes of grandiosity. Everything in Wicked: For Good (a nonsensical title, since the first movie was simply subtitled Part 1) is big, big, big. Big. Very big. Except the emotions.

And this is the crux of the problem with the Wicked sequel — instead of focusing on the internal struggles of its two main characters, instead of watching them grapple with the unintended and enormously problematic consequences of the choices they made in the first part, the film version of Wicked piles story point upon story point upon story point, adding in massive visual effects sequences (including a specific visual reference to 1939's The Wizard of Oz that is super-brief and super-clever), until Elphaba and Glinda are almost buried.

On stage, the biggest visual effect in Wicked is a black-draped performer being lifted on a hidden cherry picker. It's low-tech, but boy does it work. On screen, the biggest visual effect in Wicked is, well, all of them. They're all high-tech, and very few of them work. They take us out of the story, they revel in their excess, and they suffocate what on stage becomes a surprisingly intimate exploration of the two character searching their souls to justify their actions.

What should move snappily plods along, with two shockingly bland — and also unnecessary — new songs that add nothing to the story but pad out the running time even further. The emotional beats rarely land, in part because they're staged so awkwardly. When Elphaba sings to her lover about her feelings as they lay together in post-coital bliss, the film chooses to have her walking anxiously away from him before they've even touched each other ... even though the lyrics are about their physical proximity.

Because the movie spends so much time away from Elphaba and Glinda, it also makes some of the stage musical's weakest points even weaker. On stage, the integration of the original Wizard of Oz characters is clunky and rather non-sensical (why would the Scarecrow, knowing now who he actually is, at least in this story, join the little Kansas girl on the mission to kill that particular witch?). The movie's production design recalls a lot of the 1939 film, but then ignores both that movie and the original story by having Elphaba (the Wicked Witch of the West, after all) nowhere near Munchkinland when Dorothy arrives.

The stage musical moves along so briskly that there's no time to worry about questions like this. The movie gets so granular about the detail, it leaves only time to ponder such peculiarities.

Only when the movie gets to its climactic number, the titular For Good, are both Erivo and Grande-Butera really given the opportunity to shine — and they take it. Even if Chu's framing favors far too many close ups and too much cutting, these two performers show us why they're so right for the roles, and for just a minute have us really believing in the characters, the deep emotion of an objectively moving song, and in the relationship that should be the centerpiece of both movies.

By that point, it's been a long time coming. A very long time. But for those few minutes, Wicked: For Good, thanks to its stars, delivers real movie magic — the kind we came for, and the kind Wicked deserved to have much, much more of.

Viewed November 23, 2025 — AMC Burbank 16

1610

"Bugonia"

☆☆☆☆☆

A word of warning for those about to watch Bugonia: Afterward, expect to find yourself falling down a rabbit hole of inquiry about the latest Yorgos Lanthimos movie, which is, in every sense of the word, a Yorgos Lanthimos movie.

He is the director who made Poor Things, The Favourite, The Lobster and The Killing of a Sacred Deer, among others, all of which are movies that developed fervent admirers and bemused detractors in equal measure, and Bugonia is like those movies only — and here's the real kicker — more so.

While I'd never advise doing too much research into a movie before seeing it, in the case of Bugonia even the most spoiler-filled description of the movie is going to be insufficient to prepare you for the experience of watching it, which is glorious, bewildering, offensive, hilarious, gory, off-putting and thought-provoking, sometimes in the same scene. It's also blessed with one of the best scores of the year, by Jerskin Fendrix, and reading about the creation of the music is like finding a rabbit hole that branches off into another rabbit hole that leads to its own set of rabbit holes.

There is a simple way to explain the basic plot of Bugonia: A pair of conspiracy theorists kidnap a wealthy CEO believing her to be an alien who wants to destroy Earth. Astonishingly, this is not the first time that story has been told on film. Bugonia (caution: this is the first step into the hole) is based on a 2003 South Korean film called Save the Green Planet. Lanthimos may seem the ideal director for Bugonia, but he wasn't originally going to make the film — the original director, Jang Joon-hwan, was going to remake it, but bowed out, in what may be one of the most fortuitous moments in moviemaking history.

Emma Stone plays the CEO, a woman named Michelle Fuller, who is one of the world's worst practitioners of faux empathy. Jesse Plemons, in his best screen performance to date, is Teddy, a man who has spent far too much time on the Internet, which is ironic because that's what watching Bugonia makes you do. He doesn't just believe Fuller is an alien emissary from Andromeda, he has staked his entire identity on it. He's also convinced his autistic cousin Don (an astonishing Aidan Delbis), and together they redefine the idea of focused commitment, as the CEO might say.

To try to explain anything more about Bugonia would largely be impossible, except that it's worth noting that the movie opens on a closeup of a honeybee, and Teddy is an amateur apiarist. He knows how to keep things. He believes it is his mission.

Remember, please, that this is a film by Yorgos Lanthimos, which means that a description of the plot is only an approximation of the experience. As the film progresses, it muddies and confuses — with all intention — what it's trying to say, and hides its true intentions, until we're as mixed up as Don professes to be. Who are we supposed to be siding with here? Is the film really making the bold, angry, unexpected pronouncements that it seems to be making, or is that all for show?

Lanthimos is a master at bringing the audience along on stories that by all accounts should be unwatchable. (More than a few people claim they are unwatchable, though I'm not among those.) The things Lanthimos shows us, the things he gets us willing to believe, are often outrageous and offensive to delicate sensibilities. Bugonia goes even farther than he's gone before, in many respects, and Stone, Plemons and Delbis are right there with him, doing things that should, and do, shock us, even while they get us to think, laugh and avert our eyes at things that other, less daring directors wouldn't even think about putting up there on the screen.

When it's over, you'll want to know what it all means. Just be careful in that rabbit hole. It's a long, long way down.

Viewed November 18, 2025 — AMC Century City

1935

"Die My Love"

☆☆☆½

Some people will argue (its director, Lynne Ramsay, says wrongly) that Die My Love is about post-partum depression. I agree with Ramsay, but that begs the question: what is it about? And few people who see Die My Love are likely to agree on an answer, if post-partum depression really is off the table.

First and foremost, I'd argue that it's about a very specific mood, the dangerous one that comes from something much deeper than melancholia and maybe even transcends depression. It's about despair and hopelessness, and the unexpected ways that life, in all its weird beauty and expressiveness, can slice through that heaviness but never relieve it.

It's also, on a more complex level, about moviemaking itself, and the way images and sounds, dialogue and performance can all co-exist and never quite tell a cohesive story yet also never fail to tell a story, anyway. In that regard, it's a little like watching an anguished, existential, homebound 2001: A Space Odyssey. It's in love with moviemaking, the way Ingmar Bergman was, and like his films (especially Persona and Cries and Whispers) it's possible it will leave you scratching your head, but still feeling ... something. But what? Hard to tell.

Die My Love, as the title suggests, is probably not going to leave you buoyant, and yet it's filled with such indescribably good things that if you like movies it will be hard not to feel at least a little energized. To begin with, there are the central performances — and not just Jennifer Lawrence as Grace, a woman whose mind is coming undone, and whose breakdown may or may not be related to her new motherhood. Her husband Jackson is played by Robert Pattinson, who is powerful as a man who does not understand the person he married, or, worse, the person that marriage has made him become.

Also delivering interesting, worthy performances here are Lakeith Stanfield as a man whose sexuality is so alluring it seems unreal (and may be); Sissy Spacek as Grace's mother-in-law, who wants to be supportive but understands fractured reality more than she lets on; and, briefly but memorably, Nick Nolte as Jackson's father, who is both sick and haunted by his own demons.

For much of its running time, Die My Love is a series of images rather than a coherent story. If the book was written as fractured internal monologue, the film takes on that busy, anguished mind through images that are sometimes hard, occasionally brutal, to parse. When the story does kick in, it's minimal, which is only sometimes a problem because the film's images are so daring and brave, brought to life by a cast that is willing to do remarkable things to make us believe in these people.

Lawrence stands at the center, raw and ... what? Frightened? Exasperated? Exhausted? Hopeless? Yes, all of those things, but Die My Love is wise not to try to name them. The novel on which it's based was told in first-person form and made Grace its focus; in the film, the story is no doubt hers, but the way her behavior affects others and the way the others affect her behavior become important factors. Grace does some terrible things in Die My Love. (Fair warning for those who are sensitive: some of them involve animals.) Most of the things she does are incomprehensible.

But what Ramsay seems to want to convey, and does with unnerving flair, is that life is often incomprehensible. The things people do often make no sense. Her goal here seems less to be one of explanation than lyrical, sometimes beautiful, often empathetic observation, but always from a distance, always with remove — a remove that may make the film feel cold and inaccessible, though in fairness that's also the way Grace feels most of the time.

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Note: Days after watching Die My Love, I added a half-star to my rating. The film remains challenging and even problematic, but few movies have stuck with me as persistently or convincingly. It's a tough film to shake, and that deserves a higher rating.

Viewed November 19, 2025 — AMC Topanga

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"Nuremberg"

☆☆☆

It's an awful, damning truth that far too many Americans — and, based on global affairs, it can be assumed citizens of many other countries — don't know enough about World War II and the atrocities committed by Nazis in Germany. For those who don't know enough, Nuremberg will be an effective introduction into the famous war-crime trials and the still-incomprehensible acts that they covered.

For everyone else, Nuremberg feels like a three-part network miniseries from the 1980s, filled with recognizable actors of normally fine quality hamming it up and delivering performances of such varying quality and efficacy that you wonder if they were all called in to film their scenes on different days.

Reducing Nuremberg to the same level as, say, War and Remembrance or the movie in which George C. Scott played Benito Mussolini undermines a little of the film's intended importance, and there are some moments in Nuremberg that attain the gravitas the filmmakers were going for, but they are too few. More often, it's a movie in which English-speaking actors strive mightily to emote with distracting, unintentionally funny German accents. It's a movie in which the raw truth of what happened during and after World War II is overwhelmed by too much gloss and an ill-conceived glamour.

It's possible Nuremberg might have worked a little better if it had been made a few years ago, before the harrowing, sobering Zone of Interest, but with scenery-chewing lead performances by Russell Crowe and Rami Malek, both of whom are rather badly miscast, it's hard to imagine this version of Nuremberg being anything but a big-budget, glossy, slickly edited misfire.

And yet ... 

Halfway through Nuremberg, scenes from the real black-and-white documentary shot by John Ford that was used at the Nuremberg Trials take center screen, and they are as harrowing now as they were 80 years ago. To watch this footage is to feel the overwhelming pain and the mental inability to process the images of so much death, torture, incomprehensible violence and cruelty, to understand that what you're seeing is pure, unadulterated evil. The decision to show this footage is the best decision writer-director James Vanderbilt makes in this long, disjointed film. How Ford and his crews managed to film these images, much less to edit them together and supervise their production, is itself a great wonder.

The rest of Nuremberg can't come close to achieving anything like the magnitude of emotion those few minutes convey. In part, that's because of a script that never settles on a tone, opening with a scene that feels uncomfortably like a romantic comedy before focusing its story on the psychiatrist (Rami Malek) who spent time questioning and getting to know Nazi leader Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe). It's an odd story, no matter how true it is, and an even odder decision to focus Nuremberg on this specific relationship, rather than, say, the here-tangential story of the actual preparation for the trials and the role of Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon).

There are uncomfortable echoes of The Silence of the Lambs as Malek's earnest young doctor gets a little too close to his subject and tries to ply him for information. There's also an extraneous — but undeniably affecting — subplot involving the young translator (Leo Woodall, whose American accent is far superior to his German) who becomes a more important figure as the film wears on. There are so many supporting roles in Nuremberg, so many small subplots, that the film begins to resemble a 1970s disaster movie, and threatens to become more soap opera than disturbing tragedy.

Despite the often-silly performances by its leading actors and the expansive, sometimes meandering script, Nuremberg is never less than entertaining. Maybe that's the problem. A movie about the Holocaust and its atrocities of immeasurable proportion should be a lot of things — insightful, relevant, shocking, uncomfortable, disturbing, depressing, overpowering ... but entertaining? It's both a blessing and curse for this movie that remains worth seeing despite its significant shortcomings.

Viewed November 15, 2025 — AMC Burbank 6

1715

"Roofman"

  ☆☆☆☆

There aren't many pleasant surprises in the world these days, which makes Roofman something to cherish. It's a disarming surprise, a movie that is hardly hinted at by its comedic-crime-caper marketing, which dresses up Channing Tatum in silly clothes and gives him a gun. That's close to false advertising — not quite, but close.

Channing Tatum does wear some silly clothes. In more than one scene, he wields a gun. Maybe it's something about Tatum? It's the same problem that dogged his movie Magic Mike, which focused on the sexy prospect of seeing men strip down to nothing and hid the true depths of that movie.

Roofman also has some real depth. You wouldn't know it from the marketing, and you wouldn't know it from the first 30 minutes of the movie, which are not all that great. Tatum's character, Jeffrey Manchester, is an odd mix of hardened criminal and heartfelt nice guy — he breaks into businesses through their roofs, but really, really doesn't want to hurt anyone. Everyone, even the people he takes hostage, seems to like him.

In a very long setup, the Roofman, as he comes to be called, gets caught, goes to prison, escapes, gets rejected by his family, and goes on the run. It takes a long time for the story to kick in, and the quirkiness of the movie's early scenes feel a little too much like an attempt to ape the Coen Brothers.

But give Roofman a chance. That opening is, at least, entertaining, which is not a surprise coming from director Derek Cianfrance, whose movies Blue Valentine and The Place Beyond the Pines are far more serious but just as captivating. Then something happens.

Jeff finds a place to lay low, to keep out of the way until his prison friend Steve (LaKeith Stanfield) can help him create a new identity. Jeff finds just the place to do this: an out-of-the-way alcove inside of a Toys "R" Us store. Now, you can easily find out what happens by looking up the real story of Jeffrey Manchester, who changes his name to John Zorn. Roofman isn't as much about what happens than who it happens to: a man who knows he's making terrible decisions, and people in his community who don't know a thing about him.

Roofman finds itself — finds its soul, really — by turning itself into a story about someone who gets a true second chance, who can remake himself and finds that he likes the new version a lot better than the old one. As John, he finds himself falling for a woman who works at Toys "R" Us and who has two kids and who isn't looking for anyone new, but finds them anyway.

Kirsten Dunst is the woman, and you may expect you know what her character is and how she'll act, and the real, unexpected beauty of Roofman is that she often does just that. She behaves the way a real person might behave. Most of the people in this movie do, but through the lens of empathy and understanding — the movie takes a kind and forgiving view of human nature, and uses this odd story to discover some of the truths about community and acceptance and moving on.

Again, you can find out what happened to the real Manchester just by searching his name. But I hope you won't. It's not that anything about Roofman is really surprising — the story ends mostly how you think it will. But through the most charming and self-effacing performance by Tatum, who is downright magnetic here, and through the real humanity of Dunst and the excellent supporting cast (including Peter Dinklage, whose movie The Station Agent isn't too far removed emotionally from Roofman), there's something genuinely revealing about this movie. It ends just as you expect or fear it will, and yet it still feels surprising, disarming and even soulful.

Viewed November 5, 2025 — AMC Topanga

1400

"Good Fortune"

 ☆☆☆½

The easiest and most obvious movie to which to compare Aziz Ansari's Good Fortune is Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, but the comparisons might be a little too obvious — an angel is sent to Earth to help straighten out the life of a down-on-his-luck Everyman who has lost his way.

Yet the two movies I kept thinking most about while watching Good Fortune were two other films written and directed by actors: Warren Beatty's Heaven Can Wait (co-written with Elaine May and co-directed with Buck Henry) and Albert Brooks's Defending Your Life. You sort of have to wonder what it is about actors that makes them think this deeply about heaven, angels and the precious, unappreciated nature of life.

While Brooks and Beatty were primarily concerned with the afterlife, Good Fortune is most decidedly about this life, but Ansari's film shares the whimsical, sardonic, kind-heartedness of those earlier movies while mostly eschewing Capra corn.

So, here's the kicker: While I didn't like it quite as much as Heaven Can Wait or Defending Your Life, I liked Good Fortune quite a bit more than the quintessential American Christmastime classic, largely because of the astonishingly perfect casting of Keanu Reeves as the angel who has to set things right.

Reeves is Gabriel, an angel's name if ever there was one, but as far as angels go he's pretty low on the pecking order. Every angel, it turns out, specializes in one particular area of life that can go wrong — airplane accidents, for instance, or choking. Gabriel's focus is texting and driving. Turns out, humans really like to do that.

Higher angels have higher causes, and Gabriel can't hide his jealousy for Azrael (Stephen McKinley Henderson), who guides people who have lost hope. Chief Angel Martha (Sandra Oh) empathizes with Gabriel's frustration, but her understanding only goes so far. When Gabriel stumbles across hapless gig worker Arj (Ansari), who is at the end of his rope after being fired by tech bro Jeff (Seth Rogen), he intervenes.

Up to this point, Good Fortune isn't far different from Capra or Beatty, but when Martha tells Gabriel she has no choice but to take his wings away and force him to live among humans, Reeves steps to the fore and takes control of the movie. The film's main plot should be about the way Arj and Jeff's lives get reversed, and how once-destitute Arj becomes wealthy beyond all measure while Jeff — who swears he came from "nothing" (his parents didn't give him money, that was his grandfather, after all) — struggles to make ends meet in a dead-end, gig-economy life.

Grappling with his newfound wealth, Arj assumes money will be an aphrodisiac for his former co-worker Elena — but as brought to life by Keke Palmer, she's an idealistic, passionate and grounded woman who sees an opportunity to take a short cut, but refuses it. She doesn't know what's happening with Arj and Jeff, but she sees right through the wealth and sheen and rejects a life that rewards the easy and the effortless.

If the movie had stopped there — if Palmer's role had been like Julie Christie's in Heaven Can Wait or Meryl Streep's in Defending Your Life (and Palmer shines as brightly as either of them) — Good Fortune could have been something special, especially with Reeves as the befuddled angel who struggles (al-)mightily with his fate.

But Ansari makes a last-minute swing for the fences by tacking on a "message" to his movie. Given that this is a movie about heaven and angels and the afterlife, it's fortunately not a religious message — but it's heavy-handed nonetheless, and the movie loses momentum at a crucial moment. The fumble means Good Fortune won't be as perpetual a classic as Capra, Beatty or Brooks, though I wouldn't be surprised if, after it spends a few years on streaming, Ansari's film becomes something of a favorite, thanks in large part to the affable, delightful and disarming presence of Reeves. Watching a fallen angel roam the Earth has never been as adorable.

Viewed November 2, 2025 — AMC Burbank 6

1400