"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

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"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

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"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

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"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

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"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

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"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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