I'M STILL HERE

Directing: A
Acting: A
Writing: A-
Cinematography: B
Editing: A-

The more I think about I’m Still Here, the more impressed I become with it—and not just because Fernanda Torres, as the central character, Eunice Paiva, is easily the best thing about it. That’s the most obvious thing to be impressed by, actually. I found myself saying, a bit prematurely, that this movie was good but didn’t blow me away. But “blowing me away” is not what director Walter Salles is going for. He’s going for something far more subtle, something that succeeds in impressing those who pay attention to detail.

This is based on the true story of a wife and mother, and her five children, and their resilience in the face of a brutal dictatorship—specifically the military dictatorship in Brazil between the 1960s and the 1980s. And the word “brutal” is not used lightly here. It’s easily to imagine graphic violence when thinking of such things, but one of the many takeaways from I’m Still Here is that there are many forms of brutality. Some of them hide in plain sight, while society goes on as though everything is normal. Families still go to the beach, barely noticing military trucks driving by.

There’s a memorable quality to the editing in this film, as Salles initially immerses us in the Paiva family’s daily life, showing us a casually comfortable, happy marriage, and five kids clearly being given a great childhood. All of this changes in a matter of hours, when unfamiliar men show up at their door, and declare that “Congressman” Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello) must be taken in for questioning. Rubens has not been a Congressman for several years, and has even recently returned from exile after being ousted from his position, but the reference is pointed.

This is the last time anyone in that family sees Rubens, and I’m Still Here is the story of how the family left behind coped with this injustice. This includes both Eunice and one of her older daughters shortly thereafter being detained as well, questioned, pressured to identify other people in a binder of mugshots. Eunice is held for 12 days, the entire time having no idea what they’ve done with her daughter—who is sent home after only a day, but Eunice doesn’t know that. Meanwhile, she can overhear the torture of other detainees in other rooms.

There is a key moment in the sequence of scenes at the place Eunice has been taken, a young man, a guard, who escorts her from her cell to questioning and back. Just before her release, the young man says to her, “I want you to know, I don’t approve.” And that means what, exactly? This young man represents something far too few people think about: that terrible regimes thrive on the willing cooperation of people who “don’t approve.”

This whole experience, as well as years of experience thereafter, changes Eunice. She does everything she can to get the government to admit her husband was arrested, and accepts him as dead within a couple of years. She becomes a lawyer and an advocate. And most critically, she still insists on raising a happy family. When a local reporter comes to get a family photo and says the publisher asked for them to look more serious, Eunice refuses. All the kids giggle, she encourages it, and insists that they all smile for the photo. Eunice is an inspiring woman for many reasons, not least of which is her refusal to let anyone steal her joy—even as she still works tirelessly for justice.

I’m Still Here makes two unusually large time-jumps, first 25 years from 1971 to 1996; then another 18 years to 2014. Both of them function as epilogues of a sort, first when Eunice finally gets some closure, if not quite justice—the regime change is to her advantage, although it’s also noted how even when regimes change, the perpetrators of the worst crimes are far too often never held to account. The final sequence, in which little occurs beyond a portrait of how the extended family has grown to that point, Eunice is played not by Fernanda Torres, but by Torres’s real-life mother, Fernanda Montenegro—an accomplished actress in her own right, and who starred in Walter Salles’s previous film from 1998, Central Station.

With I’m Still Here, Salles has created something so straightforward that it doesn’t seem all that profound while watching it. But there is something ingenious about its construction, a subversive thread that is a indicator of the sinister nature of dictatorship, especially when daily life seems basically unchanged for anyone besides those directly affected. This is a film that could not possibly be more timely.

Don’t let the bastards get you down.

COMPANION

Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: B
Editing: B

Companion is nothing if not consistent. Everything about it comes together at the same frequency, which I suppose might be best characterized as adequate fun. It’s better than average, but I’d hardly call it exceptional. It’s a science fiction thriller with nothing original to say but with a satisfying economy of storytelling. Writer-director Drew Hancock can be credited with at least that much.

If you want to keep your film budget capped at $10 million, just set the story in a secluded mansion in the woods, limiting the primary characters to five. There’s a few interactions with extraneous minor characters, but in this entire film, we only ever see ten people onscreen. A good majority of the 97-minute runtime is focused on the five people staying for the weekend in the house: the rich Russian who owns the place, Sergey (Rupert Friend, really laying on the Russian accent thick); his young trophy wife, Kat (Megan Sure); and the two couples visiting: Josh and Iris (Jack Quaid and Sophie Thatcher), and Eli and Patrick (Harvey Guillén and Lukas Gage). Side note: Guillén and Gage are both gay, and both have been cast in multiple roles as gay characters, which is a nice bit of consistent representation.

As for the story in Companion, here lies a dilemma. This is the kind of movie that is very difficult to market in a way that both gets people to buy tickets and avoids revealing too much. Ditto writing a review about it. I go to the movies multiple times a week, which means I sat through the initial cut of Companion’s trailer, with its caginess and vague hints at what’s going on in the story, countless times—never feeling especially compelled to go see it. Then a second cut of the trailer was released, and suddenly I thought: oh, I do want to see that. And yet, the details revealed in the new trailer certainly robbed me of some of the joy I’d have gotten had I come into it knowing far less.

It does make me wonder if I’d have been more immediately impressed with Companion had I known less about it going in. This film is written and cut in such a way that, for the first quarter or so of its runtime, all you know is this small group of people has come to spend a weekend together—and, for some reason, Josh’s friends all regard Iris with an odd reticence and borderline suspicion. Something’s up, but we’re not meant to know what, until the inevitable turn that reveals what’s really going on—and then the story can unfold from there.

The script is arguably fairly predictable either way, but it is especially so when you go in knowing what the basic premise is. I’m not certain I would have thought this movie was better had I not known, but I almost certainly would have had more fun. And I did find this movie pretty fun regardless.

With all that in mind, I am taking great pains not to reveal much about this movie at all, even though there’s a lot more I could say about it if I did. I will say that the casting is interesting, for different reasons all around, but especially Sophie Thatcher, an undeniably beautiful young woman with minor physical imperfections that get underscored by the nature of the character she’s playing. Also, Companion has a moment or two of suspense but is never particularly scary, but has a couple moments of graphic violence. And the sparing use of such moments does increase their inpact.

So here’s what it all comes down to: Companion is a fun diversion, if not one you absolutely need to see in theaters. I would recommend watching it on whatever streamer it later winds up on, though (it’s a Warner Bros. Pictures film, so, probably on Max). Just make a note of this title, don’t learn anything more about the story, and watch it blind when you get the chance. You’ll have a good time.

It’s unexceptional but fun!

Overall: B

THE SEED OF THE SACRED FIG

Directing: A-
Acting: A-
Writing: A-
Cinematography: A
Editing: A-

It has been widely reported that The Seed of the Sacred Fig was made in secret, and that is the first thing we see in the film, white text on a black background: This film was made in secret. There is a second line on that title card, though, something that will stick with me for a while: When there is no way, a way must be made.

A way was certainly made by writer-director Mohammad Rasoulof, who made this film in Tehran, shortly before he was sentenced to eight years in prison, flogging, a fine, and confiscation of his property. He had already faced legal troubles from the Iranian regime for previous films, dating back to 2010. He has since fled the country, a painstaking journey that took 28 days but allowed him to be present at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2024. As far as I can gather from extremely limited information online, Rasoulof’s wife (Rozita Hendijanian) and child are still in Iran.

People love to use the word “brave” to describe all manner of involvement in art, and particularly in film. Anyone be hard pressed to outmatch Rasoulof when it comes not just to his dedication to art and craft, but the use of art to speak truth to power—something we rarely see employed to the same degree in America, though we may see more of it here soon. It’s unlikely Rasoulof used The Seed of the Sacred Fig as any kind of allegory for where the U.S. is headed, but it’s difficult not to make the comparisons as American audiences. This kind of fascism is very much the direction in which we are headed, which is also stepping in the direction of theocracy.

Iran, of course, is already there, and Rasoulof pulls of an astonishing accomplishment with The Seed of the Sacred Fig. Just knowing the entire film was made in secret puts everything we see onscreen in a different light, as none of it looks like a film made with any such constraints. This includes several scenes of characters driving through Tehran streets, and I kept wondering how he could have mounted cameras on the vehicles without looking conspicuous.

There are so many things I love about this film, I’m not even sure where to begin. Perhaps with the title itself, which, after the initial title card, the film offers a brief explanation: the “sacred fig” is a species that wraps itself around another tree and gradually strangles it to death, until it can stand on its own. This is a symbol of the story to follow, which centers around a family of four: regime-loyal parents Iman and Najmeh (Missagh Zareh and Soheila Golestani, respectively) and their much more progressive and idealistic teenage daughters, Rezvan and Sana (Mahsa Rostami and Setareh Maleki, respectively).

This film is unusually long, at two hours and 47 minutes, but a lot goes down, it is never slow, and almost none of it feels like wasted time. The run time allows for an illustration of how ideologies can gradually either strengthen or unravel, depending on the person and the circumstance. Iman has been working as a government “investigator,” then given a promotion, in a new job where he is asked to approve sentencing with no time to actually review the cases. He starts with some level of indignity but ultimately an inability to shed his dedication to this government; Najmeh can only tell him it’s his job so it’s what he has to do. They spend a lot of time giving what appear to outsiders to be clear oppressors the benefit of the doubt. Rezvan and Sana respond to increasingly violent government crackdowns on student protests with the healthy skepticism of their youth.

It’s when Rezvan’s friend from school gets mixed up in a violent clash with police at a school demonstration, and she is brought to this family’s home to dress her wounds, that things get thorny. Najmeh does this only begrudgingly, having already spent a great deal of time admonishing her daughters to be extremely careful about their associations and their public behavior as a reflection of their father in his new position. This friend, Sadaf (Niousha Akhshi), maintains her innocence, that she just happens to have been outside her dorm when the police attacked, and so Rezvan maintains the same, to the last. Rasoulof never makes explicitly clear whether Sadaf and Resvan really are “innocent,” perhaps because it doesn’t matter.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig is set during the 2022 protests in Iran, and Rasoulof’s editor, Andrew Bird, who did his work after the footage was smuggled out of Iran to Hamburg, pointedly cuts in real footage of some very distressing violence in the government crackdown. Much of it just feels chaotic and without direction; several show some pretty shocking images. The characters in the film are divided in a way presumably many families in Iran were: parents taking television news at their word; younger people watching clips online posted by protesters.

The plot takes a very specific turn, quite a while into the film, when Iman’s gun goes missing. This is a pistol lent to him by a colleague as self-defense against oppositional forces already known to find and publish the home addresses of judges and associates hauntingly down clearly unjust convictions and sentences. The disappearance of this gun sows distrust between all four members of this family, and serves as a kind of central mystery to the story: what happened to this gun? Which one of them took it? For some time, I was convinced Iman, over-stressed by his job, just left it somewhere he forgot. Of course, things get much more complicated than that.

All of this political unrest serves as the backdrop for this conflict, which becomes the—pardon the pun—trigger point for what might finally, truly tear them apart. Iman can’t imagine any of the three of them taking his gun from him, but is effectively forced to regard all three of them as suspects in the matter. And when the inevitable happens and they have to flee their home due to their address getting shared online, conflicts come to a head between the four of them in a secluded house far outside the city.

This was the one stretch of The Seed of the Sacred Fig where I disengaged slightly, as the narrative shifts to something closer to a conventional thriller than the dense story and plotting that led up to it. In the end, the conflict shifts to the patriarch against all the women, which also feels (rightfully) pointed. I do love that Rasoulof has made a film where all of empathies, and nearly all of its depicted perspectives, lie with the three women central to the story.

Then, the “climactic” sequence involves an extended foot chase through some desert ruins, which went on long enough for me so start wondering what exactly we’re doing here. This was the only point in the film where I felt some cutting for time would have been fine, even as I can acknowledge that Rasoulof might very well have had specific intention with how he dwells on wife and mother, daughters and sisters all running in panicked, labyrinthine circles around the man trying to dictate their lives. I felt slightly ambivalent about the very end, but not enough to move how deeply impressed I am by this film overall.

We should all be spending more time hearing the voices of women like these.

Overall: A-

DOG MAN

Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-
Animation: B

Dog Man is a cute, sweet, sporadically very funny movie, based on a series of graphic novels of the same name by Dav Pilkey, which were themselves a spinoff of Pilkey’s original Captain Underpants illustrated novel series. Dog Man is also overstuffed with antic plotting, and feels a bit overlong even at an 89-minute runtime. Surely young kids will love it; they don’t care about nuances of criticism. As for how the adults will like it when they take children to see it? Well, they won’t likely hate it, at least.

On the topic of animated feature films that manage to reach both children and adults at their own levels simultaneously, Dog Man is impressive in how often it manages this, even without particularly sophisticated or subversively “adult” humor. This movie is wholesome top to bottom, and is only rated PG, I would assume, because of the cartoon violence in it. The protagonist is a loyal dog’s head transplanted onto the body of his beloved police officer master, after all, and director and co-writer Peter Hastings (collaborating with Pilkey on the script) somewhat pointedly skirts past the darker implications there. This means Officer Knight is effectively dead, right? Someone tell all the children in the screenings so they understand! Actually, I’d have more respect for this film if it found some way to say Officer Knight—or his head, anyway—had gone to live on a farm.

Indeed, there is a vibe of some missed opportunity with Dog Man, a film that is filled with self-awareness and packed with jokes and sight gags—I enjoyed the gag where two characters argued on opposite sides of a split screen and one of them literally grabbed the line splitting the image. It’s that kind of subtly meta stuff that really works in this movie. Unfortunately, while many of the jokes land, plenty of them don’t, and the latter happen when the story sags under the weight of its own bloat.

I keep thinking of the halcyon days of the 75-minute animated feature film, something that was far more common roughly thirty years ago and earlier. This is much more appropriate to the attention span of young child audiences, and many animated features in the past decade—specifically those meant for kids—have leaned closer to an hour and 45 minutes. Given the desire for theaters to maximize showtimes and therefore ticket sales, I’m at a loss as to what the endgame is there, unless the skill of the storytelling justifies the length, which is rare. And getting to Dog Man, this is a film that would land far more effectively for adults and children alike with a runtime closer to 75 minutes, but for some reason filmmakers seem to think they need to “flesh out” these stories.

But Dog Man is exceedingly simple: once Dog and Man combine, they become a “Supa Cop,” easily capturing OK City’s biggest villain, Petey the (of course) evil cat—voiced pretty entertainingly by Pete Davidson. He plots to take over the world and rid it of all “do-gooders,” going so far as to clone himself, not realizing the clone will appear as a kitten who won’t grow up for 18 years. “Li’l Petey” (voiced adorably by Lucas Hopkins Calderon) comes out of the clone machine—easily ordered by mail by Petey—with an innocence that, naturally, brings everyone together in the end. Spoilers!

Anyway, Petey is just as good at escaping prison—in an admittedly delightful montage—as Dog Man is at catching him, so this just becomes a cycle until Petey ups the ante with all manner of wild inventions, including my favorite: a robot he calls “80-Hexatron Droidformigon,” or “80-HD.” The robot becomes a quasi-character in its own right, although the rest of the cast is much more amusing, including Lil Red Howery as Dog Man’s bumbling police Chief; Cheri Oteri as OK City’s comically corrupt Mayor; Isla Fisher as ambitious TV reporter Sarah Hatoff; Stephen Root as Petey’s deadbeat dad; and Ricky Gervais as the movie’s most baffling character, an evil fish villain named Flippy. (Look for the obvious Aliens reference when Flippy goes after Li’l Petey and Petey shouts, “Get away from him you fish!”)

Flippy makes a nice segue into what doesn’t work all that well in Dog Man. Flippy serves as a villain to unite all the others against, but the plot mechanics are unnecessarily convoluted, and the “climactic” sequence this ushers in is less exciting than it is baffling. Literal buildings are brought to life as sort of building-monsters that wreak havoc, almost Gozilla-style. Dog Man winds up operating a giant “Mecha Mail Man” to battle them with. It’s all very: what? Although it still gets a few funny gags, none of it really works as well as the rest of the movie does.

Ultimately, Dog Man falls into the same trap nearly every other superhero movie does, predictably ending in a massive, ridiculously high-stakes battle blowout. Who the hell created the rule that every superhero movie has to end this way? Peter Hastings does smuggle in a subtle (and very brief) commentary on this very trope, but while also fully participating in it. I’d have much preferred a resolution only between Dog Man, Petey and Li’l Petey without any involvement with a supervillain fish and monster buildings. And haven’t we had enough of Ricky Gervais anyway? There’s a man who started off strong and then long outlasted his welcome.

To be fair, as “superhero movies” go, Dog Man is unlike any other. It just would have been far more successful, even on its own terms, with some script polishing and tightening of the editing. It wasn’t what I wanted nor what it could have been, but to its credit, I still had a good time. And none of my criticisms will mean anything whatsoever to a seven-year-old who will certainly have a blast watching it.

Just do your job Dog Man!

Overall: B

NICKEL BOYS

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B-
Cinematography: A-
Editing: B-

America—or, I guess I should say, White America—has a stunning capacity for sticking our heads in the sand, for ignoring our own perpetrated horrors in our history. We aren’t told about things like what happened at the Florida School for Boys, the school that inspired “Nickel Academy” in RaMell Ross’s unforgettable new film Nickel Boys. The school in the film is thinly veiled in fictionalization, but the horrors that occurred there are not. The staff at the Florida School for Boys in Okeechobee, Florida, opened in 1955 and finally forced to close in 2011, really did abuse, torture, and in many cases even murder the Black students at that school, with dozens of unmarked graves discovered and excavated only into the 2010s.

Nickel Boys exists to force us to confront these horrors, and there should be no mistake: this is a difficult watch, of Schindler’s List proportions. I still have a deep appreciation for having seen it, even though it left me feeling even more dispirited about America than I already was. Much like two different Presidential elections in the past decade, it’s just another layer peeled off revealing who we really are as a nation. Any argument that “it was a different time” holds no water here—this is not a story set in colonial times, or during the Civil War. People are still living today with vivid memories of this stuff, and any idea that the permissive social structures that allowed this to happen no longer exist is preposterous.

The story presented here uses the Civil Rights Movement of the early sixties as a backdrop, largely as a way to underscore how the two teenagers whose points of view we see are beaten down in even worse ways than they could have imagined: inspiration and hope for change was in the air, only to be gleefully and cruelly crushed by local authorities. Elwood (Ethan Herisse) is an incredibly bright and promising student, on his way to a new school recommended by his high school teacher when the car he got into hitchhiking is pulled over. The car is apparently stolen, and in spite of Elwood’s clear innocence in the matter, he is arrested and sent to Nickel Academy, where he is expected to stay until he graduates. He doesn’t even learn until much later that when his guardian grandmother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) first tried to come and visit him, the staff lied and said he was sick and could not take any visitors.

Early on at the school, Elwood makes a friend, Turner (Brandon Wilson), and Nickel Boys switches back and forth between their perspectives. And I do mean this literally, as in, with the cinematography, used as first-person perspective, the camera showing us exactly what is seen through the eyes of each character. The entire film is shot this way, and is what makes it truly stand apart on an artistic level—it really is a film experience unlike any other, and a stylistic choice, it turns out, I have very mixed feelings about.

Until Elwood meets Turner, the camera perspective is always that of Elwood’s. In the scene where they meet, at the school cafeteria, the perspective suddenly shifts from Elwood to Turner, and we see the entire exchange repeat from his perspective. Showing the same scene from both perspectives only happens a couple of times in the film, which otherwise just keeps moving the story forward each time the perspective shifts. This is how we finally start seeing both of the boys actually in front of the camera. A few times, we see very cleverly shot scenes where we see reflections in windows or mirrors, of course with no view of the camera (I found myself wondering if that was somehow done practically with camera angles or if some kind of special effect was used; either way it’s impressive). In one scene we see the two of them looking up at themselves together in mirrors mounted on a ceiling above them. Elwood spends an awkwardly long time looking straight up, even once they start walking along.

Nickel Boys is one of the most critically acclaimed films of the year, and based on what I knew about it beforehand, I went in both expecting and wanting to really love it. What I did not expect was the extent to which its story gets obscured by its artistic abstractions, which permeate every scene, from beginning to end. The story this film is telling is essential, but I found its manner of telling to be frequently disorienting. Even with its first-person camera points of view, the editing and cinematography are so florid, sometimes even dreamlike, it was easy to get lost. Certain technical choices often took me out of the movie, such as how the perspectives of Elwood and Turner as teenagers were literally of their own sight, but when the narrative sporadically flashed forward to one of them as an adult, RaMell Ross and his cinematographer Jomo Fray pull the camera out and behind his head: those scenes all play out with us just behind the man’s head.

To be certain, the performances are great across the board, with one possibly key exception: when we are inside either Elwood’s or Turner’s heads, and we hear them speak, there’s a naturalism missing from their delivery, that is very much there when we see them perform onscreen. It seems obvious that Nickel Boys is a wildly impressive achievement on a technical level, with intricately planned blocking and choreography to make the scenes work, especially with everyone onscreen playing to a camera rather than to a fellow actor. I’m just not fully convinced this stylistic choice was the best way to tell such a story—or, one wonders, any story. In this case, there is actually a narrative twist at the end, and largely because of the ample technical and artistic abstractions, it took me longer than it should have to register what had really happened.

When it comes to the aforementioned horrors, it may do well to note that we see very little of it onscreen. What we see more of is the terror the kids feel at the expectations of these horrors, as in a pivotal scene where kids wait outside a closed door listening to the savage beatings of corporal punishment and knowing they await the same fate—a fate that has one of our two protagonists later waking up in the infirmary. A lot of abuse and torture goes well beyond the physical, however, and Nickel Boys also makes that clear. In the end, in the flash-forward scenes, we discover that the school was far worse than we even realized, or even those students realized. It’s these sorts of details that make it no less difficult a film to sit through.

I wonder if the uniquely unparalleled cinematography here is meant as a sort of buffer, an artistic space meant to cushion the act of facing horrifying realities. How well Nickel Boys works on an artistic level feels far more up for debate to me than apparently a lot of other people, who simply regard it as an absolute triumph. For me, though, the first-person visuals combined with its nonlinear editing often put the narrative a bit too far out of reach. The story itself, on the other hand, could not be more essential or relevant, although the impact is likely much greater in the Colson Whitehead novel on which it is based.

Elwood and Turner confront the viewers by facing themselves.

Overall: B

SEPTEMBER 5

Directing: B+
Acting: B+
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: A-

A comparison between September 5 and Civil War might not be immediately expected, except that these two movies have a very key thing in common: they are both about journalistic ethics. The key difference is that September 5 does it right, or at least focuses on it when it makes sense contextually to do so. Of course, there is also the fact that September 5 is actually based on a real event.

And that leads us into another question: whose perspective is the most worthy when telling a particular story? September 5 is about how the ABC sports news crew took ownership of the story when 12 people were taken hostage in a terrorist incident at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. President of ABC Sports Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) tells his crew that they need to come up with information about the hostages in order to make people care about them, but this movie about him never gives us more than a cursory glance at any of their backgrounds either.

This is arguably the point, from the point of view of director and co-writer Tim Fehlbaum. September 5 is also about how the media coverage of this incident changed broadcast news going forward. There’s a subtle implication that the news coverage itself actually made the incident worse. Maybe it was just that they were all treading new territory here when it came to news coverage, but in retrospect, it seems astonishing that it never occurred to them that the terrorists might have TVs turned on in the hotel rooms where they were keeping the hostages, seeing the very information they were broadcasting.

And then there is the idea of sharing news that may not be accurate due to a time constraint—or, in this case, the desire to have the scoop—without first getting two verified sources. This might secretly be the entire point of September 5, how news coverage has evolved since then, to become something fewer people than ever feel they can truly trust as accurate. Watching September 5, I thought a lot about how these news executives’ motives were based on exclusivity and ratings rather than the actual safety of anyone involved. Fehlbaum does not lean into this very heavily, but the thread is definitely there.

September 5 is expertly edited in a way that keeps you on the edge of your seat from start to finish, especially as soon as people suddenly hear gunfire in the distance. It’s fascinating, in a fairly depressing way, to consider the historical context of when this hostage crisis occurred: in 1972, it had only been 27 years since the end of World War II—plenty of people were still alive with vivid memories of the Holocaust, which happened in the very country where this incident took place. Unfortunately, in 2025 there are far too few people still around to heed the lessons of the second World War, but in 1972 it still felt to many like a very fresh wound.

Perhaps the most interesting character in September 5 is Marianne Gebhardt (Leonie Beseech), a woman employed by ABC Sports as a German translator. There’s an exchange early in the film when a Frenchman who is part of the ABC Sports crew challenges her, asking if her parents are still around, and alluding to their complicity. “I’m not them,” Marianne retorts, and she proceeds to be an indispensable resource as the only person at ABC Sports who can listen to German police scanners or German news reports or even call local connections in Germany and tell all these Americans more concerned with covering the story what the hell is going on.

It’s impossible also not to think of the excellent 2005 Steven Spielberg film Munich, about the same incident but focusing on the moral implications of how Israel responded to it. Both that film and September 5 have a renewed relevance considering Israel’s current actions in Gaza, itself a disproportionate response to a much more recent terrorist attack. I’d rather like to see a telling of this story, say, from the hostages’ point of view. We keep getting different angles on this incident but none of them from the point of view of the victims.

That’s not to say the point of view in September 5 has no value—only that, perhaps, it obscures the incident’s most relevant perspectives. I’m unsure as to whether this was the primary intent, but for me, September 5 is an indictment of American exceptionalism and capitalism. A fair amount of time is given in this film to negotiations with CBS for live air time, and how a clever solution (by title writer Gladys Deist, played by Georgnia Rich) is in order to give in to CBS’s demand for airing their live feed, they put the ABC logo in the upper right-hand corner. Eleven people’s lives are at stake in this moment, and their primary concern is which network gets the credit for its coverage.

There’s a point at which Roone says to head of the control room Geoffrey Mason (John Magaro), “It may not feel like it, but you did a hell of a job today.” Mason replies, “It was a catastrophe.” This is actual history so it’s not a spoiler to say that all of the hostages were killed, so naturally by the time that happens the entire ABC Sports crew are devastated—especially after a regrettable reporting decision that I won’t spoil here.

The Munich massacre was a dark, watershed moment in world history, something ABC Sports had a minor hand in, simultaneously deliberate and unwitting. I feel uncertain as to how important that particular group’s story was to tell, but if nothing else, this film tells it incredibly well.

Okay let’s all discuss the best way to tell this story.

Overall: B+

PRESENCE

Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

The simple innovation Steven Soderbergh makes with Presence is relatively easy to pick up on from the film’s trailer if you are paying attention: the story is told from the point of view of the ghost. As such, the cinematography embodies the film’s most key character—and, it should be noted, from beginning to end. There’s a clever trick to this, what is arguably a gimmick but in Soderbergh’s hands is done surprisingly well. Just by the way the camera moves, from one room of the house it’s haunting to another, up close or pulling away from the house’s family of inhabitants, or even the way it frequently hides in a closet, we always get a sense of what the ghost is feeling. It’s vulnerable, it’s confused, it has a sense of purpose.

This visual styling is by far the most remarkable thing about Presence, and the strongest argument for it being worth seeing. I do have one little quibble about it, though. Most of the time, the camera glides here and there, room to room around the house, checking out the middle-aged couple and their two teenage children. When the camera goes down the stairs, however, it doesn’t quite glide seamlessly, and although it’s subtle, you can feel the cameraman stepping down the stairs. There’s no question this film was made on a modest budget (Soderbergh made it for $2 million), but this very minor glitch took me out of the movie slightly. Either that or Soderbergh wanted us to actually feel like an ethereal presence was stepping down stairs, which makes even less sense.

Soderbergh was also the cinematographer for this film, and also the editor—more effective cost-saving measures, surely—and the editing has its own bit of quirk. Presence clocks in at a lean 85 minutes, which works well for it given how many long takes there are, the camera (the ghost) followng members of this family around the house, doing mundane things. But eventually, we start to piece together parts of a family subplot, which Soderbergh never dives deep into but reveals just enough to be compelling. Rebekah (Lucy Liu), the mother who is doting on her son, the eldest, and strangley cold with her daughter, is in some kind of growing legal trouble. We see her on stressful phone calls, or deleting bunches of emails from her laptop (protip: that doesn’t hide them from the authorities), all while her husband, Chris (Chris Sullivan), barely notices. He notices enough, though, to make a clandestine call to a friend for “hypothetical” legal advice for a “friend” whose spouse may be in trouble.

Tyler (Eddy Maday), the older teenage son, is a pretty standard, straight-guy teenage prick, bragging about pranks on school mates which turn out to be far from harmless, and Rebekah easily forgiving him. Tyler has no compassion for his younger teenage sister, Chloe (Callina Liang), who is still grieving the loss of two different friends to apparent overdoses. Chloe is gradually revealed to be the most central character besides the ghost, being able to sense its presence in a way the others can’t. Presence has a fair amount in common with the 1982 horror film Poltergeist, just with the point of view inverted, and with far less histrionics. It even features a woman who gets called in to employ her powers as a medium of sorts, although that word is never used. This woman (Natalie Woolams-Torres) even manages to provide some explanation to the family, and thus some exposition for the viewers.

Chloe is convinced at first that the ghost is her best friend who died, Nadia. Little clues get revealed over time that complicate this idea. Tyler brings a friend around, Ryan (West Mulholland), who only the ghost sees—and therefore we see—is up to no good, slipping drugs into drinks. To Soderbergh’s immense credit as a very economical writer, this does not quite go in the direction we expect it to, even at multiple turns. Still, this is where we run into my biggest narrative sticking point: we are shown very early on, the ghost literally picking up and moving some of Chloe’s things from her bed to her desk. It’s arguably the corniest moment in Presence, and really its biggest mistake, as it establishes clear capability on the part of the ghost—which it does not bother to use again later when it would be most useful. When Chloe’s safety is later threatened and the ghost fears for her, all I could think was: why doesn’t it just do the same thing it did before and just scare the shit out of everybody?

I suppose it could be argued that in that moment the ghost was panicking—except it had already shaken the room once before, effectively protecting Chloe. There is a subtle implication of the ghost’s surprising identity at the very end which makes even less sense to me, unless you look back at the film beforehand and assume there is some kind of time loop going on. The woman who can sense an otherworldly presence does say at one point that time does not work the same way for this entity, so perhaps that was meant as a clue. But the more I try to go down that road, the more confused I get.

It might be useful to watch it again, except Presence is clearly most effective upon first viewing, and not thrilling enough to warrant repeat viewing. It’s a fascinatingly unique approach, to be sure, and if nothing else I’m glad to have seen it. If you don’t dig too deep in its narrative implications, it’s just a haunted house movie that uses longstanding horror tropes in new and interesting ways.

What happens when you cross a time loop with a plot hole?

Overall: B

THE ROOM NEXT DOOR

Directing: B+
Acting: B
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B

The Room Next Door poses a compelling philosophical question. If a terminally ill, close friend asks you to be around—not in the same room as them (hence the title), but around—when they achieve a self-orchestrated death with dignity, would you do it? Should you do it?

Pedro Almodóvar is a singular filmmaker with a recognizably unique style, here having made his first-ever feature film entirely in English. There would be justifiable concern as to whether his cinematic language will translate well, and certainly The Room Next Door has some awkwardly sedate pacing. Strangely, though, the more the film goes on, the more it somehow manages to justify its own existence.

The friends in question are Martha and Ingrid, played by Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore respectively, two older women who knew each other well when they were much younger but have gone many years without keeping in touch. All manner of contemplating death is a running theme in this film, and when we are introduced to Ingrid, she is at a book signing, supporting a successful work that directly examines her own deep fear of death. She learns from a mutual friend at this event that Martha is in the hospital with cancer, and so goes to visit her.

They catch up. They move through the small talk and get to substantive discussions quickly, for obvious reasons. They tell each other anecdotes that get presented to us in tangential flashback scenes with unclear purpose, though I suspect Almodóvar knew exactly what he was going for. A bit of time goes by, Martha and Ingrid get organically reacquainted, and in so doing forge a type of closeness somehow perfect for Martha’s request. Martha has already tried asking her other, closest friends, who have all refused. She can’t ask it of her estranged daughter as it would be an unfair burden to her. A clear argument is made that it is unfair to ask it of Ingrid given her fear of death, but in the end, she accepts: Martha wants Ingrid simply to be in the room next door when she ends her own life before the terminal cancer can.

Martha has a plan, and they leave New York City to rent a beautiful house together for a month in the woods outside Woodstock. And this is the deal: Ingrid won’t be given a heads up. Martha will do it once she’s ready. And Ingrid will know the deed is done by seeing her bedroom door closed rather than ajar as usual. We see Ingrid wake up on several mornings, walk halfway up the stairs, and check to see if the door is open or closed. All I could think about was the emotional agony that would put me through, how it would be all I could think about each night when I attempted, presumably with great difficulty, to get to sleep.

Through all of this, the dialogue is always soft-spoken—not deadpan so much as a sort of an oddly relaxed sadness. Martha has a bottle of sedative pills for Ingrid to use if the stress ever gets to be too much, and it feels a bit like this whole movie took one of those pills. John Turturro as Damian, the climate crisis writer and lecturer who was a lover at separate times in both Martha’s and Ingrid’s pasts, is no different. Even when he blithely refers to the entire planet being “in the throes of death,” putting a pretty fine point on Martha and Ingrid’s relationship here as a broad metaphor.

But, again, the more the story unfolded in The Room Next Door, the more it spoke to me. It took on an almost hypnotic quality in its beautiful melancholy, its very Almodóvarian visual poetry with a consistent color palate of solid reds, greens and blues, from their outfits to the deck furniture. Production design is as much a statement in Almodóvar films as anything else; in some cases more so—the line delivery of the dialogue has a slight feel of being under-rehearsed. And yet, The Room Next Door is such a quintessentially Pedro Almodóvar film that one can only assume the performances are exactly what he wanted.

Swinton also briefly plays Martha’s daughter, Michelle. Swinton has played multiple characters in the same film before (to great effect in the 1992 film Orlando), but here “mother” and “daughter” are so obviously the same person portraying them, I found it so distracting it briefly took me out of the movie. Thankfully the two characters never share screen time, which only would have made it worse.

If The Room Next Door has a thesis, I suppose it would be how to live in tragedy, particularly with grace and dignity. It’s about agency. Almodóvar does include a sequence in which a police officer is inappropriately aggressive with Ingrid because he suspects her of assisting in Martha’s suicide, which he is keen to point out is a crime. It’s a way of acknowledging passionate differences in philosophy when it comes to death with dignity, but Almodóvar throws in a lawyer pretty quickly to smooth out any narrative wrinkles the acknowledgment caused.

But fundamentally, The Room Next Door is about friendship, compassion, and sacrifice in the face of a hopeless situation. It focuses on these two women but with a pretty hard nudge to the global climate crisis, which also provides for a few moments of subtly dark humor. There’s some unevenness to the storytelling, but Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore go a long way to make up for it, even in their muted grief. The Room Next Door merely skirts the edges of “tearjerker” status, mercifully dispensing with any melodrama. I kept thinking less about the story structure than how effective its mood was, for several minutes after I left the theater. It felt like the film had worked exactly as intended.

As artists get older, it follows that more of their art would be about death.

Overall: B+

HARD TRUTHS

Directing: A-
Acting: A
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+

Marianne Jean-Baptiste previously teamed up with director Mike Leigh for the stellar 1996 drama Secrets & Lies, a film about a Black woman who was adopted and surprised to discover her birth mother was White—and her birth mother is surprised to discover her biological daughter is Black, having mistaken which of the two men she had sex with six weeks apart was the father. Watching that film, I found myself wishing we could have learned more about the Black family she was adopted into, even though the “secrets & lies” of the title were very much a logical focus of the biological, White family.

It’s the closest I got to any criticism of that film, which is totally absorbing, heartbreaking, and packed with stellar performances. Now, 28 years later (this is technically a 2024 film, we can talk about the stupidity of delayed regional release dates another time), Marianne Jean-Baptiste and Mike Leigh have teamed up again for Hard Truths, which almost serves as an answer to that lack of Black family representation in the earlier film. This time, the focus is indeed on a Black family, and Jean-Baptiste is a matriarch of sorts, albeit a truly miserable person who everyone else she knows tiptoes around.

The Mike Leigh approach to filmmaking is a fascinatingly unique one. Reportedly, he develops a script collaboratively with his entire cast, settling on character arcs across the board through improvisation in early rehearsals. Leigh has a script finalized before they actually start shooting, which is perhaps why he still gets sole script qriting credit—but, for an old White guy writing a story about a Black family, this very much lends an aspect of authenticity to the story itself: none of these actors would be delivering these sterling performances if any of it didn’t ring true, especially after guiding their own characters’ directions in the early stages of development.

How the Black experience differs from others is touched on in both Secrets & Lies and Hard Truths, albeit very subtly and briefly in both cases. Hard Truths is much more about how Pansy (Jean-Baptiste) is anxious, depressed, and filled with suicidal ideation—none of these words are ever uttered by any character in the film, underscoring how it’s better to show rather than to tell. Instead, Pansy is heard many times saying things like, “I just want it all to stop” or commenting on how she’d like to just go to sleep forever. Pansy doesn’t necessarily set out to make every human interaction in her life a confrontation, but it’s what seems to happen. We see this from the very first scene in Hard Truths, as she lives with a husband, Curtley (David Webber), and a 22-year-old son, Moses (Twain Barrett), both of whom are beaten down just by living with Pansy.

Curtley is the most mystifying character in the story, a guy who works as a plumber and comes home to his wife’s aggressive negativity and never challenges her, or even responds. I’m still baffled by, but thinking about, the moment he takes the flowers their son has gotten Pansy for Mother’s Day, and just tosses them out into the middle of the backyard lawn. Moses, on the other hand, is the character I found myself empathizing with the most: emotionally stunted, worn down by a mother who doesn’t understand why he has no dreams or aspirations. A scene late in the film where a random young woman blithlely strikes up a conversation with him provides a glimmer of hope.

The relationship Hard Truths focuses the most on, though, is that between Pansy and her sister, Chantelle (Michelle Austin—who played Jean-Baptiste’s character’s best friend in Secrets & Lies, incidentally). Shortly after we are introduced to a miserable Pansy and her miserable husband and son, Leigh cuts to who we soon learn is Pansy’s sister, Chantelle, and her two daughters, Aleisha (Sophia Brown) and Kayla (Ani Nelson). The contrast could not be more stark: Chantelle and her daughters are a happy, fun-loving family, quick to smiles and laughter.

All of them are reticent when it comes to dealing with Pansy, of course—all except for Chantelle, who has an easy rapport with Pansy, and has an easier time letting Pansy’s aggressiveness roll right off of her. In a key scene where Chantelle does have a bit of trouble with it, the two of them are visiting the grave of their mother, who only died a few years ago. Pansy is complaining about how often people ask why she can’t enjoy life, and Chantelle counters, “Why can’t you enjoy life?” Pansy instantly shoots back: “I don’t know!”

To some degree or another, we all know a person like this. Pansy is a particularly extreme example, igniting arguments in the checkout line at the grocery store, or just waiting in her parked car for some guy looking for an open spot to come along and yell at her about whether she’ll be leaving soon. It’s almost as though Pansy has a sort of battery inside her that can only be recharged through confrontation. I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before, but leaving the theater, it was pointed out to me that this is a story about a woman with untreated depression. Suddenly it all seems so obvious.

The cast is fantastic across the board in Hard Truths, but Marianne Jean-Baptiste deserves special attention. There’s a scene in which Pansy sort of cracks, slow at first to build into laughing maniacally, shifting seamlessly into heaving sobs. It’s the only time in the entire film we see pansy laugh or even crack a smile, and it’s utterly heartbreaking—it’s the prime example of what elevates this film to something better than the sum of its parts. Her performance alone is worth the price of admission.

Mike Leigh isn’t exactly known for movies with much in the way of uplift. He makes movies about deeply unhappy people, but with a curious knack for sprinkling in truly funny bits here and there—even in the case of Hard Truths. Still, this film does end on a truly downbeat note, with the suggestion that people like Pansy don’t tend to change. Not without treatment, anyway. But this film was something I found to be an emotionally cleansing experience.

Some families have no choice in facing Hard Truths.

Overall: A-

ONE OF THEM DAYS

Directing: B
Acting: B+
Writing: B
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-

One of Them Days aspires only to be a fun, sweet, funny comedy about two young women down on their luck, having something in between the weirdest day and the worst day. It’s the kind of movie you’re meant to escape into, laugh, and just forget your own life for about ninety minutes. And by virtually all these measures, it succeeds.

Keke Palmer and SZA play Dreux and Alyssa, respectively—best friends and roommates in a dilapidated apartment where the landlord is demanding the rent even as he neglects the widespread disrepair in “The Jungle” complex where they live. Dreux has just finished a graveyard shift at the diner where she works, and Alyssa’s dipshit boyfriend Keshawn (Joshua David Neal) has “invested” their rent money in a T-shirt business idea on the same day the landlord has demanded the rent by 6:00 or they face eviction.

Thus, One of Them Days follows Dreux and Alyssa from place to place, where they either cleverly gain or painfully lose the money they need, and it makes for a nice successio of consistently amusing set pieces. They explore their options at a payday loan business, where the guy hanging outside (Kat Williams) is actually the only one talking any sense. Alyssa nabs an expensive pair of sneakers hanging from a power line and puts them up for sale online (in perhaps the quickest seller account setup in history—on a smart phone). They have a run-in with an aggressive woman Keshawn also hangs out with named Bernice (Aziza Scott) who spends most of the rest of the film hell bent on revenge. Through all of this, there are sporadic title cards announcing the hours and minutes until eviction, which a plot twist later takes a clever turn that I don’t want to reveal here.

It’s all generally entertaining, with a genuinely sweet heart at its center, focused on the relatable bond between Dreux and Alyssa, in spite of what is frankly a lot of dipshittery on Alyssa’s part. There’s also a subplot with the one White character in the film, Bethany (Maude Apatow—Judd’s daughter), a young woman who moves into “The Jungle” with her dog and is a pretty overt symbol of representation. But, she is also woven into the story quite neatly, and Dreux and Alyssa find a way to leverage Bethany’s privilege in a way that is both clever and harmless.

All that said, I just wanted One of Them Days to be funnier. It’s undeniably fun, but never hilarious. It’s more like an IV drip of consistently moderate amusements. I chuckled regularly, but never guffawed, and this movie had the potential to go there. Part of it is a pacing issue, with editing that makes the gags lose steam by virtue of their slower tempo. Snappier editing would have helped, but there’s also the fact that none of the gags or punchlines go particularly hard. This is more of a chill ride that keeps a smile on your face than a knee-slapper, and I went in hoping for the latter. Maybe that’s on me.

Besides, winning performances and a wholesome sweetness at its center make up for a lot—and there’s not that much to make up for here. Keke Palmer and SZA have great chemistry as best friends, and One of Them Days is filled with fun bit parts with the likes of Kat Williams, Vanesa Bell Calloway, Lil Red Howery, and Abbott Elementary’s Janelle James.

“Comedy” is a genre broadly applied, where dramedies and romances and animated features and even tearjerkers can all get bunched together under the same heading. But One of Them Days, even with the warmth in its heart, is a comedy in the classic sense: it exists only to amuse, to be a kick. The last time I saw a movie going for a similar effect was 2019’s Booksmart, and that was a much funnier—and therefore much more rewatchable—movie. But, for now, One of Them Days will do fine.

One of them movies—which gives just enough of what you want from it.

Overall: B