EMLILA PÉREZ

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

There’s a lot going on in Emilia Pérez—some might argue too much. It’s a Mexican cartel movie; it’s a story about a trans woman’s self-actualization; it’s a musical. I kept wondering how this movie might most succinctly be encapsulated as a logline or an elevator pitch.

More than anything, the musical element is the easiest to be ambivalent about. I remain unsure as to what the point of it is. Never mind the somewhat dubious nature of Zoe Saldaña playing the protagonist when hers is not the trans character, within minutes we witness her as Mexico City defense attorney to crooks, Rita—who breaks into song while walking through the streets, providing some exposition in a fairly economical way. The crowded streets become part of an intricate ballet of modern dancers around her, with choreography that is undeniably impressive. Saldaña’s singing is competent, and this scene provides a preview to what’s to come: a film that is a musical in the most fundamental and traditional sense of the word, characters sometimes even singing lines that would make far more sense uttered straight.

Mind you, the presentation of musical numbers is the only conventional thing about Emilia Pérez. How many traditional musicals have you seen about drug cartels, or that revolve around the transition of a trans woman, let alone both? This movie has songs about gender-affirming surgery, and there really is a moment when a Chinese surgeon in Bangkok utters the line, “From penis to vagina?”—in song.

The quality of the songs, by French singer Camille (with a score composed by Clément Duco), is spotty. The singing of lines between Rita and an Israeli surgeon upon their first meeting makes little sense. But there are deeply touching musical moments too, such as the child of a post-transition parent singing about how she smells like the father he remembers.

That brings me to Karla Sofía Gascón, the 52-year-old trans actress who plays the title character and the Mexican cartel leader pre-transition. We see her first as “Manitas Del Monte,” and when we later see her as Emilia, it is a stunning revelation. Gascón’s performance as Manitas is astonishing in retrospect, an unusual sort of layered performance that skirts the boundaries of meta storytelling. She is also incredible as Emilia, filling the screen with her unforgettable presence. Gascón, as it happens, has 41 acting credits on IMDb, 37 of them from before her transition in 2018. If nothing else, we can rest assured that director Jacques Audiard cast a trans actress for this role.

Oh, did I mention that Emilia Pérez is actually a French film? As in: it’s a French production, filmed in a studio near Paris. No French is spoken, however, due to the setting being largely in Mexico City—recreated in studio. Presumably the same was done in other settings, from China to Switzerland to Israel to England. A surprising amount of the dialogue—and singing—is done in English, a logical choice given how common it is for people who don’t speak each other’s native languages to default to English in order to communicate.

I was particularly struck by Selena Gomez as Jessi, a woman convinced she has been widowed when Emilia’s transition coincides with the faking of Manitas’s death. Gomez is reportedly dissatisfied with her performance of Spanish dialogue, as she is not fluent, but for those of us watching who are also not fluent, she was excellent. Furthermore, Gomez gives a consistently flat and muted delivery of her lines in the Hulu series Only Murders in the Building, and if that’s the extent of your familiarity with her as an actor you would never expect the kind of performance you see here. I might be tempted to say she has a shot at an Oscar nomination, if not for the fact that she is given far less juicy material than her costars.

How in the world does Rita fit into all of this, you might quite reasonably be asking? Rita herself asks this, when a pre-transition Emilia has her abducted and then offers millions for her assistance in finding a surgeon who can be discreet enough not to endanger her. Rita is merely a high-powered lawyer. In the end, you could say she was tapped for her powers of persuasion.

To the significant credit of Jacques Audiard and his co-writers Thomas Bidegain, Nicolas Livecchi and Léa Mysius, Emilia Pérez takes frequent unexpected turns, is utterly unpredictable, and is always absorbing. It’s also a tad chaotic, and there is a shocking moment at the end that I truly did not see coming and am still unsure how I feel about. This film is already being met with deeply mixed responses, some finding it an incredibly original work of art and some finding it outright offensive. I find myself falling in the middle, but leaning slightly toward impressed by how well its boldness somehow actually works. This is an international feature in every sense of the phrase, and its very existence is extraordinary.

The cashew gaze: Zoe Sadaña offers some star power assistance.

Overall: B+

CONCLAVE

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

I have to respect a movie that throws out a last-act twist I not only absolutely did not see coming, but I never could have seen coming, and yet it works. This is the result of solid acting, skilled and assured direction, and most importantly, stellar editing. Conclave had me in its thrall from start to finish.

Admittedly, I struggled a bit at first to keep the characters straight, but this was partly by design: this is a story of people vying for power among 120 electors deciding on a new Pope. But, director Edward Berger, who brought us the great All Quiet on the Western Front in 2022 and is now presenting his first English language feature film, narrows the focus to four of them in particular: Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes), who is tasked with managing the conclave and its electoral process; Bellini (Stanley Tucci), a liberal cardinal who has public support and transparently pretends not to want it; Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati), an African cardinal with unprecedented support who faces predictable roadblocks; Tremblay (John Lithgow), another cardinal with dubious motives; and Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto), a deeply conservative cardinal whose support terrifies the more progressive cardinals.

As you can see, Conclave has quite the stacked cast. An ensemble packed with movie stars can often bog down a movie, but not here. Even if there were competing egos among the cast, that would only help the performances. Even the couple of more modest characters have an air of intrigue or mystery about them: Benitez (Carlos Diehz) is an unknown cardinal who has worked in parishes of several different war-torn regions; and Sister Agnes (a fantastic Isabella Rossellini) turns out to have a surprisingly significant role in the story. Granted, she’s the one solitary principal character in the film, who only ever speaks once to another woman—and yes, it is about a man. No passing the Bechdel test for this movie.

To be fair, this all makes sense in the context of this movie, set among the pillars of authority in a church that has infamously shut women out of real authority for centuries. This is brought up in the narrative, and it is directly relevant to the twist that comes at the end.

As such, Conclave is very much a genre film, a mystery thriller that happened to be populated by cardinals of the Catholic Church. It would be interesting to see how average Catholics respond to this movie. There is a lot of subtle implication to the plotting, from its fairly broad depictions of “liberal” or “conservative” views, to the separation of duty and authority by gender, to the human fallibility of vaunted individuals supposedly guided by God. For a genre film, there’s a lot of smart stuff going on here—perhaps not with the greatest individual character depth, but that’s beside the point. Conclave should be judged within the parameters of its genre structure, and within that context, it succeeds spectacularly.

I keep thinking about the twist, and how deeply happy I am that I did not have it spoiled. It would have changed everything about how the film is experienced, and the reveal that we get is especially delicious—not to mention a delicate subject that is handled with surprising respect. God knows this movie treats it with more respect than anyone can reasonably expect the Catholic Church would treat it in reality. There is an aspirational element to Conclave that is actually quite fun.

Sure, there is also an element of contrivance, particularly in a couple of speeches that veer into moralism pertaining to interfaith tolerance. There is little doubt of just about every person involved in this movie having bleeding-heart points of view, and my being aligned with them on very basic levels doesn't change how formulaic their presentation can be. Conclave is just so fundamentally entertaining that it’s easy to forgive these minor quibbles, especially with a a cast that works this well together.

Conclave has multiple plot turns, of the very sort that is to be expected of a mystery thriller. What makes this movie exceptional is how deftly they are handled. There is more substance at play here than it seems on the surface, with each character motivation given its own subtly provocative implication. There are many ways to enjoy this movie, and I had a blast on all fronts.

Deluded ambition never felt so good.

Overall: B+

YOUR MONSTER

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

I’m happy to buy into the rules of the world of a movie, so long as it clearly establishes what those rules are. This is how Your Monster fails from the ground up: Laura is a young woman just home from cancer surgery, she shacks up in the childhood home her mother has long not been using for reasons never clearly stated—and she is confronted by the childhood monster who lives in her closet. And sometimes under her bed. We don’t get any clear patterns to go on here.

Your Monster wants to be a quirky riff on the Beauty and the Beast story, and instead flounders as it becomes less and less clear exactly what writer-director Caroline Lindy, here making her first feature film, is going for. I found myself losing patience with its fuzzy plotting long before I had a chance to consider what the point of any of it was.

I’ll give it this much: the actors are okay. Melissa Barrera plays Laura with a certain charm, as far as it can be taken as written anyway. We get a montage of her crying after being taken home by her friend, Mazie (Kayla Foster), who will become a pivotal plot point, and nothing more, later. It should be noted that when Laura and Mazie are together, they never feel like authentic friends. They always feel like a couple of actors pretending to be friends. This is the subtle vibe throughout Your Monster, which is populated with actors who seem talented enough but can’t muster any chemistry to speak of as an ensemble.

Oddly, Edmund Donova gives maybe the best performance in the film, as Jacob, the boyfriend playwright who wrote a part for Laura in his play but then broke up with her while she was in the hospital. Jacob is clearly set up as the villain of the story, and he really is a bit of a douchebag, notwithstanding some genuinely valid responses to Laura’s unhinged behavior after auditioning for the part he clearly assumed was no longer hers. In keeping with characters in this movie doing things that don’t make a lot of sense, he still offers her the part of understudy. Ultimately, though, as well as Donovan channels him, Jacob is never written as villainous enough for us to care that much. We’re left to wonder if this entire film was just mounted as a metaphorical exercise in revenge on a dipshit guy who broke up with his girlfriend while she was in the hospital.

I’m a little ambivalent about Tommy Dewey in the part of the monster, who is only ever called the incredibly original and creative “Monster.” Underneath the extensive face makeup and prosthetics, Dewey has a delivery that is eerily similar to that of Bill Hader. I thought a lot about the costume design. Who decides what outfits a closet monster wears? Except for the face and the long hair, he looks like a disheveled professor. At a Halloween party (don’t even get me started on the wildly contrived way this party is announced at a play rehearsal), Laura is dressed as the Bride of Frankenstein and Monster shows up in slightly more formal attire, saying “I’m a business monster.”

Your Monster is peppered with little gags like that, which made me giggle in spite of my increasing contempt for the movie overall. What irritates me most about this movie is its squandered potential. It has a compelling premise, with a promise it utterly fails to meet. In the hands of a better writer, this could have been really fun. Instead, it simmers in a weird stew of baffling character choices and utterly predictable plot turns. This is a movie that never quite comes together. It ends in a way that clearly regards itself as clever but is actually incomprehensible, coming right back to the complete absence of established rules of its world.

Several scenes feature Laura and the rest of the cast performing the play that Jacob wrote, and is apparently now directing. It’s a musical, and Melissa Barrera has a great singing voice she gets to show off—but in a play-within-a-movie that we as an audience can never get a handle on. Is it supposed to be the elevated feminist work that Laura indispensably helped workshop, or is it the driveling work of a pretentious dipshit? Your Monster can’t seem to make up its mind about that, and meanwhile the scenes we see actually performed on a stage are bland and utterly forgettable.

And that’s where we are with Your Monster: by turns bland and unintentionally cringey, its one genuinely memorable moment being (spoiler alert!) a literal sex scene between woman and monster. The incomprehensible ending suggests that maybe Laura was the monster all along (I think?), in which case we have to wonder what was really happening in the sex scene. Your Monster has no interest in clarifying what’s baffling about it, however, so perhaps it’s better for everyone involved if we just embrace how forgettable it is in the end, and move on.

More like Your Blah

Overall: C

GOODRICH

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

Michael Keaton plays Andy Goodrich, a gallery owner who is both a good guy and a rich guy. Maybe this is nominative determinism.

Some might debate both points. Andy is so distracted by his career that he’s the only person in his life who didn’t know his wife was addicted to pills. Keaton is a singular actor, though—a guy who can play dark and brooding as well as winning personality. As directed by Hallie Meyers-Shyer (Home Again), he is very much the latter. We can’t help but root for him. As for being rich, that’s relative. I suppose the character Andy Goodrich might think of himself as “middle class.” Not from where I sit, looking at that guy’s house.

Goodrich is a solid, standard family drama, with a premise that it uses to convince itself it’s “modern.” The title character is an older man—age never stated, but if we are to assume he’s the same age as Michael Keaton, then he’s 73. He has a grown daughter, Grace, played by Mile Kunis, and Grace’s age is stated: 36. With that math, Andy would have been 37 when she was born. He also has twin childen who are only 9 years old. Andy would have then been 64 when they were born. Kunis gets an amusing line about how being 27 years older than your siblings is “pretty much unheard of. Except maybe in L.A.” Of course, this movie is set in Los Angeles.

The film opens with Andy’s call from his wife, informing him in the middle of the night that she’s checked into rehab and she’s leaving him. She trusts he can take care of the twins. People in Andy’s life sure have a lot of faith in him for a guy who’s so clueless. Even his 9-year-old daughter comments on how many pills her mom was taking. The one exception is Grace, who resents watching her dad mature in parenting the twins in ways he never did when she was their age.

Grace is also pregnant, which is a great way for the script to provide opportunities for Andy to both step up and disappoint. Goodrich is overall kind of slight as a film, but I can’t deny that I locked into it. Keaton has a singularly weird charisma even as an old man, which he knows how to calibrate in ways few other people would. I got several good chuckles out of this movie, and and it made me cry in all the spots it was clearly designed to.

I hate to pick on children, but the twins didn’t work as well for me. I’ve been spoiled in recent years by countless movies featuring child actors who are incredibly well cast and perform with a convincingly naturalistic style. I used to think kids just naturally can’t act, and then I was proved wrong. Goodrich is like a throwback to a time when weirdly precocious kids were cast in movies. I’m not blaming the kids, really; they might very well grow into some useful talent. And they’re not terrible, they’re just a little off most of the time. This is more a reflection of the direction than anything, and perhaps Meyers-Shyer is just better at directing adults than kids.

And then there’s Michael Urie, a welcome sight in a part it’s easy to be ambivalent about. He plays Terry, the divorced gay parent of a classmate of Andy’s twins, and he and Andy bond over their separations and become friends. There’s a scene where things get, let’s say, awkward between Andy and Terry. It’s both really entertaining and incongruous in the overall plot, something that makes little sense in its inclusion. At least Urie gives Terry more dimension than the script does.

There’s a couple other big names in relatively small parts, notably Kevin Pollack as Andy’s business partner, and a criminally underused Andie MacDowell in just a couple of scenes as Andy’s ex-wife, Grace’s mother. We need more movies with both of these actors in parts with more substance. And that’s not to say Goodrich doesn’t have substance—it has a fair amount—but their parts don’t particularly.

It’s Keaton and Kunis who are the heart of Goodrich, and if anything makes the movie worth seeing, it’s them. Keaton is great most of the time, but for a couple of scenes that allow his delivery to sort of trail off oddly. Kunis is lovely all of the time. There’s an overall warmth to Goodrich that just about makes up for its unevenness.

A father-daughter dance that warms the heart. Most of the time.

Overall: B

Tasveer Advance: KATLAA CURRY [FISH CURRY]

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

Katlaa Curry is only the second film ever made in the Gujarati language to tell a queer story (the first was a 2013 film called Meghdhanushya — The Colour of Life), and it happened as a stroke of fate, a quasi-accident. There is a key scene in which two characters who are destined to fall in love have a conversation over a dead fish, caught in the Narmada River (India’s fifth-longest river, and the longest one that flows through the state of Gujarat), a fisherman teaching the other one, who is very squeamish, how to get used to handling fish. The squeamish character, originally written as a woman, is meant to stick their finger down the throat of the fish—which the original woman actor refused to do. The production’s solution was to make the story a gay love story—simply because the only actors willing to stick their fingers down a fish carcass’s throat were men.

This was the second film I saw at this year’s Tasveer South Asian Film Festival, which was how I learned this behind-the-scenes story, as well as some other relevant details. The cast was made up of local theater actors. Director Prajapati Rohit shot the film in ten days. And there was no particular intention of pointed progressiveness when they first set out to make the film, but once the turn to a gay love story happened, the implications for how it might move the needle of local attitudes blossomed.

Side note: Gujarati is the sixth-most spoken native language in India, with over 55 million speakers. It is the official language of the state of Gujarat, spoken natively by 86% of the population there. Prajapati Rohit pointedly leans into this, with opening titles written in both English and the Gujarati script. There is no Hindi to be found anywhere in this film, which is Gujarati first and Indian second.

Katlaa Curry moves at a measured pace, first introducing us to Raaymal (Priyaank Gangwani), a local fish merchant. This is also notable as most of the Gujarati population is vegetarian, but Raaymal takes his boat further up the Narmada River to fish, then brings what he caught into villages and towns to sell. This is how he meets Ratan (Ranganath Gopalrathnam), who has attempted suicide and gets caught in Raaymal’s fishing net. Raaymal revives him, and ultimately befriends him.

A lot of time is spent on Raaymal and Ratan just getting to know each other, and it takes a while for it to become clear why Ratan has attempted suicide—because his lack of interest in girls has left him hopeless. Meanwhile, Raaymal helps build a kind of beach shack home for Ratan to live in since he doesn’t feel he has any family to go back to. The element of queerness kind of seeps into the narrative slowly and organically, first with a confession by Ratan that Raaymal responds to with laughter and a “What does it matter?” attitude. This attitude, among the characters of this film, becomes a bit of a theme, both quiet and extraordinary in the barriers it breaks.

They settle into a routine, Raaymal visiting Ratan every day, and eating the fish curry Ratan has learned to make even though he doesn’t eat fish, and which Raaymal loves. It’s when Raaymal gets pressured into marrying a woman that things get complicated—for all three of them. Kumati, the wife, is played lovingly by Kinnary Panchal, and I was left with a lot of questions about this whole scenario. At last night’s screening, it was noted that 80% of gay men in India are married to women, and it’s very common for these women to know about it and completely accept it. What they care about, we are told, is that they have shelter and food.

It struck me that sexual desire and fulfillment for women was never part of this conversation—neither within the narrative of the film nor in outside conversations about it. And I was sitting there thinking: What about her? Of course and as always, there is a great deal of cultural context to consider here, not least of which is how devalued women are in South Asian cultures, especially if they are unmarried (to say the least of when they are widowed). And in the discussion at the screening last night, to be fair, there was a brief comment on how, if movies like this can move the needle on cultural attitudes, perhaps over time fewer women will have to settle for situations like this. Still, all the conversations about gay men (and specifically Raaymal) falling in love, and getting their physical needs met, have this glaring ignorance of any of the women involved getting their needs met. I’m a little hung up on the fact that housing and food are not the only basic necessities they should be granted. Are we supposed to assume Kumati is asexual? That she’s content never having children? It’s odd that we never see any of the characters here even mention children.

This is Raaymal’s and Ratan’s story, and it’s a warm and lovely one—if a little overdone with dreamy close-up shots of dead fish swarming with flies. But it also has a very slight unevenness to the story that fails to address the many implications raised. There’s a deeply memorable scene near the end between Raaymal and Kumati in which they come to an understanding that shocks and relieves Raaymal. And we are happy and relieved for him, as we should be. But I am left with a feeling of sorrow for Kumati, which Katlaa Curry clearly does not intend, as we are meant just to be grateful to her, as Raaymal is.

It was also striking to me how, reportedly, none of the cast of this film is queer-identified, even though Priyaank Gangwani and Ranganath Gopalrathnam have a palpable erotic energy between them and real chemistry with each other. Here is where we get into cultural differences again, because in Hollywood the conversation has moved into the space of giving queer actors the queer roles. In India, they are still in the space of queer people being grateful for “representation” granted by straight actors. And what more could they ask for? The Indian film industry, Bollywood or otherwise, is not exactly swarming with queer actors who are out of the closet. These things can only happen one step at a time, and Katlaa Curry is but one of those vital steps.

A love that dares speak its name, at just the right time.

Overall: B

WE LIVE IN TIME

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

Make no mistake: We Live in Time is a tragic story and a bit of a tear jerker. I walked in pre-equipped with tissues and I suggest you do the same.

It is not a spoiler to say this is about a woman dying of cancer, as that’s the whole premise. Now, director John Crowley (Brooklyn) and writer Nick Payne (The Sense of an Ending) sprinkle in some classic rom-com elements, some of them a bit far fetched, from a meet-cute where Almut meets Tobias by running into him with her car, to the delivery of a baby in a gas station bathroom. I was easily able to lock into this stuff, largely because it illustrated the life worth living even in the face of it being cut short.

The biggest reason it’s easy to engage with We Live in Time, though, is the casting, which can make or break a movie. I might not have even had much interest in this movie, certainly not based on the premise alone, if not for the two leads: Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield. These two are well-established as stellar actors, and neither of them have ever had more palpable chemistry with their costars. Their story unfolds with a warm sweetness that is never saccharine, making you want to hang out with them, even when they face terrible and likely fatal news. Perhaps even especially when that happens. These two are precisely what makes this movie work.

Tobias gets a job with Weetabix, an odd bit of product placement, getting several mentions in the film. Far more notably, and ultimately very key to the story, Almut is a high-end chef with aspirations to participate in a European cooking competition. A lovely subplot involves Almut mentoring another chef, Jade, and their relationship develops both personally and professionally over the course of the story. Jade is played by nonbinary actor Lee Braithwaite, in their debut feature film role, more than holding their own alongside a powerhouse actor like Florence Pugh. I only wish the Tobias character could have gotten an equivalent subplot, although a few scenes with his father (Douglas Hodge) comes kind of close. There’s a sweet scene in which Tobias’s father helps him prepare for a date with Almut, giving him a haircut and even shaving the back of his neck.

Next to the phenomenal casting, though, a key part of what makes We Live in Time work is the editing—very relevant to the film’s title—by Justine Wright. This story is told as a nonlinear narrative, jumping back and forth in time in Almut’s and Tobias’s relationship. It regularly returns to key periods, though: when they first start dating; when they have a baby; and when Almut is given her ovarian cancer diagnosis. Over time, we are even provided more context around her cancer, the risk for which could have been significantly lessened but for her choice to keep the possibility of having a baby. And even with all the time jumps, we always know where we are, and it always feels like the story is unfolding just as it should.

In the cancer-diagnosis era scenes, their little girl, Ella, is played by a tiny actor named Grace Delaney. Even this proves to be excellent casting. Delaney isn’t given a lot of lines, but she is in a lot of scenes, and her presence always feels just as natural as anyone else’s. This is likely more a product of skilled direction and editing than anything else.

In the end, though, it’s Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield who are everything to the success of We Live in Time. Their performances, and their chemistry, are the magic sauce that makes the movie deeply compelling from start to finish. Conceptually, it’s just a romantic drama with just as many joyful turns as sad ones, but on paper does not sound particularly exceptional. What is exceptional is its cast, who make this a movie well worth the time.

Don’t fret! A lot of the movie is way more fun than this looks.

Overall: B+

Tasveer Advance: WAKHRI [ONE OF A KIND]

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

In 2016, there was a 26-year-old woman named Qandeel Baloch who had gained an unprecedented kind of internet fame three years after auditioning on Pakistan Idol. She has been called Pakistan’s first social media celebrity, as she gained both widespread popularity and widespread notoriety posting funny and audacious videos. In July of 2016, she was drugged and asphysxiated by her brother.

Pakistani director and co-writer Iram Parveen Bilal, working with Pakistani trans activist an co-writer Mehrub Moiz Awan; Indian and Bollywood film editor Aarti Bajaj; and Pakistani musician Abdullah Siddiqui (who also worked on the excellent 2023 film Joyland); have made a film largely based on Qandeel Baloch’s story. I did not know this when first going in, at its Opening Night screening at Seattle’s 19th Annual Tasveer South Asian Film Festival, and to be honest, there were moments when I felt ambivalent about the narrative choices. But then, near the end of the film, Bilal includes footage of Balcoh’s actual funeral procession in 2016.

Even a small amount of research reveals that some significant artistic license is taken with the story, which goes with the territory when the only claim is that it’s “inspired by true events”—not even based on true events, although Baloch experienced several things very similar to what the main character in Wakhri, Noor Malik (a luminous Faryal Mehmood, a Pakistani model in her first lead role in a feature film), goes through. Most critically, Bilal subverts how Baloch’s story actually ended, in a kind of empowering revisionist history. In a way, it’s an inverted version of what Quentin Tarantino did with history at the end of Inglourious Basterds.

Noor Malik is a school teacher, teaching a class of young girls she hopes to provide with better education than Pakistan can typically provide: she’s trying to secure funding for a new girl's’ school, predictably meeting with resistance from both potential benefactors and parents who believe all girls need to do is learn domestic pursuits and perhaps English, all to impress a potential male suitor. Frustrated with this, she puts on a disguise of a purple wig and a beaded veil, storms the stage at her best friend’s club, and goes on a rant that multiple patrons record on their phones and post to their socials, quickly going viral.

Noor’s best friend, Guchhi (a very charming Gulshan Majeed), is a striking presence in Wakhri: an openly queer person living their life in Lahore, completely self-actualized and experiencing both sorrows and joy—something queer audiences have reportedly expressed direct appreciation for. It’s difficult to say exactly how Guchhi self-identifies, as the film reasonably never takes pains to make clear; suffice it to say that, most of the time, they present as male, if often in makeup and unusually stylish clothing, but it soon enough becomes clear that this is due to societal pressures. There comes a moment when Guchhi gets their own moment of empowerment, albeit one that comes with dangers that are made plain. More to the point: Guchhi’s club has many patrons all over the spectrum of gender diversity, and this is depicted as a lived-in, vibrant community. There is little doubt that this is a realistic representation, but to American audiences conditioned to regard a country like Pakistan as undeveloped and unsophisticated (neither of which is true), it’s an unusual depiction to say the least.

It should be noted that I saw Wakhri in an audience of probably 90% South Asian people, from a diaspora that is both diverse and has certain distinct cultural characteristics which are very different from mine. The film was received with a kind of enthusiasm—well deserved—that might surprise Americans who would have expected a conservative response, except perhaps that these are mostly immigrants living in a very different culture from their forebears. Indeed, Wakhri received a great deal of virtriolic response very similar to that shown thrown at the Noor character—and to that which Qandeel Baloch endured. On the flip side, it’s worth noting that Wakhri actually had a theatrical release in Pakistan (albeit in the country’s very limited number of movie theaters); got a lot of positive response from people who actually bothered to see it; and it actually does not have any wide distribution in the United States.

There were certain lines of dialogue that felt a bit contrived to me, particularly when Noor is performing her rants for cameras, both at the club and later at home in front of a ring light—but, what do I know? There are multiple factors at play here, from what is inevitably lost in translation, to the English words chosen by whoever wrote the subtitles, to the fact that I’m just a White guy (a queer, girly one notwithstanding) writing a review of a feminist piece of art cinema created for an audience that could hardly be more different from me. They brought the film to the States, after all—but it was screened for a festival mostly aimed at South Asian expats and their descendants. Surely they want the film to gain a global audience that enjoys it, but there’s still little room for someone like me to criticize it with any real authority.

All that said, I still found myself genuinely impressed by Wakhri, and found many of the lines it boldly crossed—if not necessarily within its own culture, then certainly within the context of representation in South Asian cinema—to be extraordinary. The cast has infectious chemistry, and audiences quickly root for every major character onscreen. I am simply rooting for more people, both inside and outside of Pakistani, to get an opportunity to see this film.

Her disguises become less convincing as her audience still somehow doesn’t recognize her—but I suppose denial is a powerful thing.

Overall: B+

PIECE BY PIECE

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

Pharrell Williams really wants you to know how pleased with himself he is that he wants the documentary about him and his music career to be a LEGO movie. Lego Pharrell comments on it multiple times, on camera.

It’s cute. And undeniably entertaining. It’s also a transparent tactic, a way for Williams to put up a wall between him and his viewers, so we never really get to know him. Piece by Piece is little more than a broad overview of his three-decade career in hip hop and pop, touching on all of the key beats, tracks and singles Williams worked on or released. Quite the parade of superstars he’s worked with appears onscreen as LEGO talking heads (Snoop Dogg, Justin Timberlake, Gwen Stefani, Busta Rhymes, Timbaland, Jay-Z, and countless more, including Chad Hugo, Williams’s other half in The Neptunes), none of them given enough screen time to offer anything in the way of real insight.

I went to this movie already knowing to expect this. But director and co-writer Morgan Neville really won me over in the first half of the 93-minute runtime, employing clever visual flourishes that can only be possible by animating the stories being told. Some great visual gags get sprinkled into the narrative, some of them LEGO-specific: a young Pharrell watching Star Trek attempts the Vulcan salute, only to discover it’s not possible with his cylindrical LEGO hands. Plenty of other whimsical delights pass across the screen, particularly when talking heads throw out a hypothetical aside, such as E.T. freaking everyone out at the mall.

So, for a good while, I was thinking Piece by Piece was actually much more fun than I had been led to believe. The LEGO animation is very colorful and imaginative, making this a singular moviegoing experience, even among documentaries that play with form and genre.

But later, things get genuinely weird, and not necessarily in a good way. Making a big deal out of the fact that Williams’s wife, Helen Lasichanh, is giving her first-ever on-camera interview doesn’t quite mean as much when we only ever see her as a Lego Lady. And when the content turns serious, it’s easy to become ambiguous about the use of LEGO to tell this story. There’s a moment when Pharrell breaks down crying, in gratitude for all the friends and family that stood by him over the years. A LEGO version of Morgan Neville—who gets a surprising lot of screen time—offers him a box of tissue. Seeing this scene play out among LEGO pieces is fundamentally ridiculous and undermines the impact.

And I haven’t even mentioned the LEGO representations of moments of historic import, including the Martin Luther King rally on the National Mall, and even the protests in Ferguson, Missouri. I saw these scenes flash onscreen and thought: okay, this is bonkers. Outside of these visual references, the vast majority of Piece by Piece renders its subjects with the same childlike joy that we’ve seen in nearly all the characters in previous LEGO movies. Their vocal delivery, as sitting interview subjects, indicates their expressions are much more neutral most of the time, and yet their LEGO selves typically speak with some manner of smiles on their faces.

After a while, this stuff creates a unique sort of cognitive dissonance, even more pronounced by the use of this gimmick to create some distance between Pharrell Williams and those who are interested in him. Certainly nothing in Piece by Piece reveals what makes him tick, or even gives much of a sense of who he truly is as a person. The whole exercise feels like an attempt at having his cake and eating it too: he let someone make a movie about him, but he didn’t have to reveal anything genuine about himself. I’d have settled for some insight into how becoming one of the first superstar producers ever to exist really affected him on a deep level, but, no such luck.

In the end, we’ll just have to let Pharrell Williams’s work speak for itself, which it does plenty well with or without Piece by Piece. As I write this, I am listening to the soundtrack, packed with all the biggest hits he produced along with five new tracks, and that is a spectacular experience, highly recommend. This is a man with jaw dropping talent, in a movie animated by people with incredible talent, and the two just don’t much inform each other. At least we get clever gags like “PG Spray” used in the room where Snoop Dogg is interviewed, keeping things family-friendly in a story about a guy your young children don’t likely know or care about.

Clap along if you feel like LEGO’s what you want to do,

Overall: B

SATURDAY NIGHT

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

The best thing about the new film Saturday Night—and there are many good things about it—is the casting. Everything revolves around Lorne Michaels as portrayed by Gabriel LaBelle, who is fine. It’s the ensemble abuzz all around him that truly impresses. Ella Hunt is so convincing as Gilda Radner, it’s easy to wish the movie were just about her, and we only get a few brief scenes with her. Cory Michael Smith expertly channels the swagger of Chevy Chase’s early years, a lot of the antagonistic dialogue directed toward him taking on a peculiarly meta tone given how little-liked Chase is in the industry today. And the choice of Matthew Rhys as George Carlin, the first-ever host of Saturday Night Live, seems counterintuitive at first, and yet Rhys knocks it out of the park. I’m sure plenty of viewers won’t even realize it’s him until they see the end credits.

I’m barely scratching the surface here. Dylan O'Brien stands out as Dan Aykroyd, particularly in a scene in which Aykroid is uncomfortable being asked to wear short-short jean cutoffs for a sketch (something that is reportedly an artistic license invention for the film—his being uncomfortable, not the sketch itself, which actually aired later in the season). Nicholas Braun (Succession’s “Cousin Greg”) manages to disappear in two roles, of both Andy Kaufman and Jim Henson. Jon Batiste appears as Billy Preston, an amusing bit of casting in that Batiste is the band leader for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, which currently runs on CBS as the same time as NBC’s The Tonight Show—the very show CBS threatens to run a rerun of instead of airing Saturday Night in this film.

That threat is another film invention, incidentally. This one bring me to one of my few complaints about Saturday Night. Artistic license is to be expected, as is compositing multiple stories from a longer period of time into a story depicting just one evening. And with no knowledge of what’s real or what’s invented, Saturday Night works quite well; it’s certainly a fun time at the movies. That said, creating tension where none is particularly needed seems odd: why tell Lorne Michaels about CBS in the film that “They want you to fail,” if that was never actually the case? Director and co-writer Jason Reitman could have held the tension for the entire film just fine with the case and crew simply trying to get their shit together by the time they went on the air at 11:30. There is no need to create a villain (Willem DaFoe’s great performance as CBS’s threatening proxy notwithstanding), a trap that far too many films fall into when they would work just fine without one.

Saturday Night unfolds largely in real time, taking roughly an hour and 45 minutes to depict the ninety minutes leading directly up to the first-ever episode of Saturday Night Live (then called NBC’s Saturday Night) going to air. This compressed narrative is what gives it very Sorkin-esque pacing and dialogue. There’s a lot going on, as the camera moves throughout the building but mostly in the halls and backstage behind the studio, passing by one famous personality after another. Most of the time it follows Lorne Michaels around, seemingly in a daze, more often than not evidently unable to give concise direction to the myriad questions aimed at him. I did find myself wondering if Michaels really felt that out of it on the first night of the show.

I saw this movie with two people with a far more directly historical connection to Saturday Night Live than I possibly could have: they were in high school or in college when the first season aired; I was a year from being born. I felt a distinct difference in how the movie hits, depending on the generation of the viewer. There may be another distinct, if perhaps less pronounced, difference with people who had their own connection to a later cast of SNL—it is oft repeated that your favorite SNL cast tends to be whichever one it had when you were a teenager. I always liked SNL fine, but even when I was a teenager it was never that important to me. As such, I had a good time watching Saturday Night, especially during all the chaotic backstage antics (and it’s true that when the chaos stops, how compelling the film is shifts as well), but I would hesitate to call this movie something special. I would probably find a published oral history far more interesting.

As Saturday Night is happening, though, it’s undeniably entertaining. The script, while not its strongest element, has several zingers that got good laughs out of me. And if anything makes this film worth seeing, again: it’s the stacked cast, whose performances as generally less like gimmicky impersonations than they are effectively capturing the essence of the characters they are playing. I don’t expect to remember this film long after its time has come and gone, but it’s still as good a way to spend a Saturday Night as any.

Recreating history: the cast of Saturday Night.

Overall: B

A DIFFERENT MAN

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

A Different Man is a great companion piece to The Substance, and would make an incredible, deeply provocative double feature. Both examine vanity and beauty; both get deeply meta; both veer into body horror—but in very different ways, on all counts. There is less of the body horror element in A Different Man, but it is still definitively there: a disfigured man is given a procedure to give him a “normal” face, but instead of it slowly altering his face, the disfigured folds and mounds of skin peel off in fleshy pieces. This stuff gets far less screen time in A Different Man, but it was still gross enough that I had to look away from the screen.

The Substance gets much more into misogyny and celebrity, neither of which play a big part in A Different Man, which more specifically gets into the fine line between grotesquerie and exceptionalism. That said, much in the same way Demi Moore was cast in The Substance as an older actress giving into expectations of youthfulness, A Different Man casts the physically singular actor Adam Pearson, who has neurofibromatosis type 1 (a genetic condition that causes benign tumors to grow along the nerves), as an aspiring actor with a significant facial disfigurement.

In Pearson’s case, notably, his character, Edward, is given even more lumps and bumps all over his face than Pearson actually has. We follow Edward through roughly the first half of the movie, during which time it can be difficult to decide what to make of it. He meets his neighbor, Ingrid (Norwegian actor Renate Reinsve, previously seen in the 2022 film The Worst Person in the World), a young woman who takes an unashamed liking to him, something almost like a crush. This creates a fascinating dynamic, because she never directly addresses Edward’s condition. They get to know each other, both visiting his apartment and going out for pizza, and she doesn’t seem to notice all the people passing outside the window who turn to look at him. This only changes when a random guy knocks on the window and smiles and waves at him, which Ingrid finds strange but Edward says happens to him all the time.

And then, we learn that Ingrid is a playwright, humble at first but successful later, and she writes a play about her relationship with Edward, and the play she writes is all about how his condition plays into it. We’ll get back to that in a minute.

Because that all happens in the second half of the film, after Edward undergoes his procedure, and eventually pulls his face off, and is transformed into not so much a gorgeous man as just a regular, middle-aged guy—played by Sebastian Stan (best known as Buckey Barnes in the Marvel Cinematic Universe). Writer-director Aaron Schimberg never makes it explicitly clear why Edward, post-procedure, makes this pivotal choice: he isn’t honest about who he is with anyone, not Ingrid, not even the doctor who performed the procedure and shows up at his apartment not recognizing him. Edward, as played by Sebastian Stan, just assumes a new identity on the spot: Guy Moratz (in keeping with the meta threads of this film, someone later tells him that name “sounds made up”).

It was after this turn that I became more sure of how I felt about A Different Man, and I became more impressed with it. I’m not crazy about Adam Pearson’s performance as Edward, pre-procedure. He has a lot of mannerisms, the way he puts his hand on his hip or shrugs with a hand wave, that feel unnatural—like it’s someone you can tell is acting. Then it comes clear how intentional these mannerisms are, because once Sebastian Stan takes over the role, he mimics them impeccably. Edward remains the same deeply insecure man he always was, even when he suddenly looks “normal.” Ingrid, whom Guy meets after he crashes the auditions for her play, starts to get to know him, and more than once she calls him “jumpy.” You’d think she would recognize how his vibe reminds her of Edward, but maybe not; people can be blind to a lot when context changes.

Guy, who finds himself missing the exceptionality of life with his disfigurement, lands a part in the play. This is where the meta stuff really starts to fold over on itself: a cast had been made of Edward’s disfigured face for the procedure, which Guy then brings to wear when playing the part of Edward in the play. And as if that weren’t enough, another random person walks in during rehearsals, and it’s a man with the exact same condition—played, again, by Adam Pearson.

This guy’s name is Oswald. He’s played by a “realer” version of Pearson, still with the same striking facial features but without all the extra lumps and bumps we saw on Edward. Also: he’s British. Pearson himself is British, in fact: this is only his third feature film role (he’s also been in eight different TV shows, ranging from documentary to reality to narrative), his first in the 2013 science fiction thriller mood piece Under the Skin, a UK production. This means Pearson does accent work in A Different Man, which is completely convincing.

And Oswald could not be more different from Edward. He’s totally sure of himself, comfortable in his own skin, moves through the world as though his condition is entirely incidental. But Ingrid’s obsession with the use of this condition in her art gradually pulls Oswald into the production of the play, and one of the more amusing parts of A Different Man is now Oswald may be comfortable with himself, but he’s all for high-minded discussions of how he—and his condition—is used in art. Schimberg seems less concerned with moralizing about how we treat people who are different (or to some, even scary looking) than with examining how art stretches the lines of authenticity when incorporating real-life elements. This is ultimately what makes A Different Man work.

Schimberg is working on multiple planes here, with a script that is somewhat reminiscent of the work of Charlie Kaufman. I think perhaps he is a slightly better writer than director, and it would be fascinating to see a script he wrote directed by someone else. I found myself a little closed off from A Different Man during its first half, a bit skeptical of its performances, but then it took multiple turns that really won me over. Watch this movie with someone you can have a long conversation with about it afterwards, which is one of the greatest joys of the communal experience of cinema.

Both the same and different: the man, the men.

Overall: B+