FRANKENSTEIN

Directing: B-
Acting: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: B
Editing: B-
Special Effects: C-

We need to start by discussing how terribly miscast Jacob Elordi is as “The Creature” in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein. Not because he’s bad—he’s actually a talented actor. But, and stay with me here, because he’s too hot. I’m not sure what del Toro was thinking. Did he think that just because Elordi is 6’5”, that would make him a frightening and imposing figure? Hardly. He’s far too youthful, too healthy looking, too strapping—and more than anything, too thin. This movie should have been called Frankentwink.

Indeed, once The Creature is brought to life, by this story’s namesake, Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac), we are treated to a memorably large number of shots of Hot Creature in little more than what looks like a sort of mummy-loincloth. I found this distracting enough to hope there is a costume design featurette somewhere called “Frankenstein’s Bulge.”

If you have been living under a rock for the past 207 years and don’t know this, The Creature is made up of the body parts of many different cadavers, assembled into a new being. Whenever injured, his wounds heal with magical swiftness—in this film it’s nearly instant, as opposed to the weeks it takes in Mary Shelley’s original 1818 novel. So, I suppose we’re not meant to think of his flesh as rotting. The Creature is not a zombie. He just can’t die. I still can’t imagine he smells great. He’s too hot in this movie for that to matter, Elordi’s whole body made up to look unsettlingly like an assemblage of disparate body parts. Except that Dr. Frankenstein finds all these different body parts from recently killed soldiers in battle. How did he get them all so perfectly proportioned?

Frankenstein does direct his assistance in the search to find larger bodies, “for scale.” Perhaps you could argue that most such men would indeed be young. This is a change from the novel, in which the body parts are found in charnel houses, slaughterhouses, and graves. I just keep thinking about the idea of The Creature being terrifying. You’d expect such a being to be both tall and thick. I saw Jacob Elordi’s Creature character and I just wanted him to spoon me.

He does have superhuman strength, so I guess I’d have to concede that can be scary, even if it’s an adorable 6’5” 28-year-old. Del Toro is far too indulgent with a lot of these details in this adaptation, however—at one point, The Creature single-handedly frees a dutch sailing ship from the clutches of arctic ice.

And this is where we must move on to the other marks against del Toro’s Frankenstein—namely, how indulgent it is, but also its truly terrible special effects. It does have impressively detailed period production design, but it’s also packed with truly subpar CGI. Fire in particular looks terrible in this movie, whether it’s from a giant explosion or just flames on candles. It practically looks animated. This film had a budget of $120 million; did they spend it only on production design and cast salaries?

It’s also too long, clocking in at two and a half hours. Ten minutes of this are the end credits; another ten are the “Prelude” We otherwise get “Part 1,” which lasts about 80 minutes and is narrated by Dr. Frankenstein; “Part 2” makes up the remaining 49 minutes and is narrated by The Creature. Jacob Elordi’s distracting hotness aside, The Creature’s section is by far the most compelling, as written by del Toro himself in his singlehanded script adaptation. I just wish it wasn’t so often bogged down by such bad special effects, as in one scene in which The Creature is attacked by a pack of wolves who might as well have been pixelated, they are so obviously not real. What the hell are we watching here, The Twilight Saga: New Moon?

I don’t know why it’s so hard for anyone to make a decent modern cinematic adaptation of Frankenstein. Kenneth Branagh’s 1994 film Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is so awful that I have never been able to tolerate more than half of it before turning it off to end my misery. To Guillermo del Toro’s credit, this 2025 Frankenstein is far better than that, but that bar is in the basement. At least I was still relatively entertained by this movie, my many complaints about it notwithstanding. Some trimming, particularly of the overlong Part 1 from Dr. Frankenstein’s perspective, would have improved it. I did like that, when the perspective switches, it still continues The Creature’s story right where Dr. Frankenstein’s left off, rather than rehashing anything we’ve already seen.

This film does waste some other major talent, though. Christoph Waltz plays Harlander, Dr. Frankenstein’s benefactor, but he’s just never a very compelling character. Mia Goth is cast as Elizabeth, Harlander’s niece who is also engaged to Dr. Frankenstein’s younger brother William (Felix Kammerer), but all she ever does is dote over The Creature as the only character who ever has any fully informed empathy for him. Goth has made a career of playing fantastic freaks, and this character is just too normal for her. We even get Charles Dance, gone after just a few scenes as Victor and William’s authoritarian father; and Lars Mikkelsen (Mads’s brother) as the captain of the aforementioned Dutch ship. The most interesting of these older character actors in the film is David Bradley (best known as Argust Filch in the Harry Potter films), as the blind man who treats The Creature with kindness and no judgment because he cannot see him.

Finally, and this is where I get a little more nitpicky, there are the lapses in logic, such as when The Creature, in pursuit of revenge against Dr. Frankenstein, allows a stick of dynamite to blow up in his hands. The resulting explosion is huge, the shockwave alone hurling Dr. Frankenstein’s body like a rag doll, and yet The Creature remains standing, unbroken. This would not have at least dismembered him? I suppose I can’t expect a story that ignores science to pay attention to simple physics.

Frankenstein is now streaming on Netflix, and there are multiple reasons why this is a huge part of what kept the film from realizing the potential it clearly had. Netflix has a reputation for allowing auteurs to realize their full vision, and on the one hand that is to be commended. On the other hand, it also means that filmmakers don’t get any notes when maybe they needed some. Had this film gotten a full theatrical release, it might just have gotten some much-needed guardrails. Would The Creature still have been played by Jacob Elordi? Probably, just because he’s a hot young star. The Creature should be a genuinely grotesque being with heart, though—not a young hunk cosplaying as a loinclothed monster like some dude at the West Hollywood Halloween parade. Frankenstein’s monster should elicit pity, not lechery.

Choke me Frankendaddy

Overall: B-

PREDATOR: BADLANDS

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

I would not likely have had much interest in Predator: Badlands based on its own premise alone, if not for the fact that it was directed and co-written by Dan Trachtenberg, who directed and co-wrote the quite pleasantly surprising Prey (2022)—easily the best film in the Predator franchise. Okay, fine: full disclosure, Prey was only the second straight-up Predator film I ever saw, and I saw the original, 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger film so long ago I don’t even really remember it. But, I feel confident of this perspective based on critical consensus on al these films, which is generally a reliable barometer of quality. I guess I should say that “by all accounts” Prey was the best film in the franchise. It’s certainly remains the best of those I have seen.

The definition of which “Predator” films I have seen is a little murky, however, as is the degree to which Predator: Badlands should be regarded as a crossover with the (far superior) Alien franchise. The two Alien vs. Predator films are widely not regarded as canon in either franchise, the first of those being the sort of so-bad-it’s-good that I still never bothered to see its 2007 follow-up, which thus makes that one to date the only major film featuring a xenomorph that I have never seen.

Predator: Badlands has no further connection to the Alien vs. Predator films, however, beyond its inclusion of “synthetics” manufactured by the Weyland-Yutani corporation, two of which are played by Elle Fanning, without whom this film would not have worked at all. There are no xenomorphs in this film, but Weyland-Yutani and its synthetics are very overt pulls from the Alien universe, and I remain unconvinced that it was necessary. Certainly plenty of other science fiction franchises have their own forms of robot characters; why not Predator? Trachtenberg goes one step further by making the Kalisk, the impossible-to-kill monster on Genna, the planet on which most of the action takes place, the “specimen” that Weyland-Yutani is seeking to capture and bring home for its bioweapons division—just as had been the xenomorphs before it, though they get no mention here.

I did enjoy Predator: Badlands, and the critical response to it has been roughly equivalent to Prey, but I very much prefer Prey. That one had a far more efficient self-containment, within only the Predator franchise, but with what I found to be a far more novel premise: the earliest Predator sent to Earth, who winds up doing battle with North American Indigenous people of the early 18th-century—and specifically, a young woman. Predator: Badlands does a lot that has never been done in a previous Predator movie, but it’s all stuff that has already been done in other film sequels: turning the villain into the hero (which we’ve now seen in many films, from Terminator 2: Judgment Day to M3GAN 2.0); giving robots human feelings; turning a dangerous creature into something merely misunderstood. Even the manner in which the villain is destroyed in Terminator 2 has a very direct echo in this film.

Which is to say: Predator: Badlands is plenty entertaining, but lacks the cultural depth of its predecessor, and is certainly less rewatchable. There is a great deal of action in Badlands, which was a big selling point—for a film like this, I will go the uncharacteristic route of saying it could have used more relentless action, based on how it’s being sold to audiences. This film also features the first Predator ever to be given a name: Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), who is immediately emblematic of the “weakness” the must be “culled” from a “Yautja” clan (Yautja being the name given to the Predator species). He is much smaller in stature than others of his kind, and when his older brother protects him from being killed by their father, their father kills the brother instead. Dek then goes on to Genna, seeking the apex predator no one has ever captured on the widely lethal planet, and planning to bring it back home as a trophy to prove his worth, and also seek revenge against his father.

It’s a lot of detail, much of which is revealed in the cold open before the opening title. All this “honor” talk among the Yautja is just another form of machoism that I have little interest in, the rest of the film slowly inching Dek away from that mindset notwithstanding. But if he returns with an even slightly altered idea of honorable behavior, to a fictional culture created specifically to be loyal to such ideas to the death, what then? Badlands doesn’t really bother with these questions. Perhaps another film in the Predator universe will, but I’m not sure how interested I’ll be.

All the Weyland-Yutani stuff aside, it’s when Dek discovers the synth Thia (Elle Fanning) that Badlands gets really interesting. This film actually has no human characters at all, as the Earth mission to Genna is comprised entirely of synths (all played by only two people: Fanning, or Cameron Brown, who plays all the “drone synths” who ultimately serve as this film’s version of Star Trek “red shirts”—nameless and easily destroyed). Thia has had a run-in with the Kalisk, and her body from the waist down is missing. Dek spends much of the film carrying Thia’s upper half on his back (this also being a clear reference to C3PO in The Empire Strikes Back). One of the better parts of Badlands is when Thia’s upper half and her lower half, still separated, work as a team fighting off the aforementioned drone synths.

Perhaps the biggest selling point of Predator: Badlands is the creature design—not so much that of Dek, who looks basically like the many other Yautja we’ve already seen, but that of the many alien species on the planet Genna, from carnivorous plants to animals, to even razor sharp blades of grass. This film is also packed with visual effects, and while I can’t say the CGI particularly wowed me, it was pretty decent. At the very least, unlike far too many other CGI-heavy films, it doesn’t look distractingly artificial.

Badlands has further twists that are not necessarily had to see coming, but at least it’s an exciting ride while it’s in motion. Dek and Thia befriend a small, monkey-like creature that later proves to be an important detail on which the plot turns; Thia names him “Bud” and he’s weirdly cute, like a cross between a chimp and a bulldog. To Badland’s credit, a great deal of impressive work went into its production, from the creation of an entire language for the Yautja by linguist Britton Watkins, to very believable animal behaviors specific to different fictional species. I’d have liked a bit more originality in the story beyond “twists” that are just rearrangements of well-trodden ideas from other films, but anyone with a thing for sci-fi action films with detailed world building is going to have a good time here.

Teamwork makes the dream work in Predator: Badlands.

Overall: B

DIE MY LOVE

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

Die My Love is very much in conversation with If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. The key difference is that If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is much more straightforwardly about motherhood; Die My Love is about a mentally ill woman who also happens to be a mother.

Granted, in what is arguably Die My Love’s best scene, Jennifer Lawrence’s Grace character chats with another mother at the party who specifically mentions post-natal depression, which would suggest that is specifically what this film is about. What’s curious about this is how Grace, for the most part, seems to have no problem with motherhood itself, or her baby. Indeed, at one point she says of her baby, “He’s perfect. It’s everything else that’s fucked.” But, perhaps that is the point: depression is not marked by logic. Furthermore, many of Grace’s frustrations actually make sense: her husband, Jackson (Robert Pattinson) has suddenly lost his sexual appetite for Grace, even though Grace’s sex drive has not waned. And Jackson travels for work, leaving Grace to feel crushing boredom as a stay-at-home mom.

It’s worth noting that Die My Love is directed by a woman (We Need to Talk About Kevin’s Lynne Ramsay), and co-written by two women (Lynne Ramsay and Lady Macbeth’s Alice Birch, along with Small Things Like These’s Enda Walsh, who curiously gets top billing among the writers). Maybe there is something about Die My Love that is just impossible to understand if you have never been pregnant or given birth to a child. Except, I must admit, I found If I Had Legs I’d Kick You to be much more coherent, even with its sometimes abstract style, and certainly more substantive in content.

Die My Love takes a far less linear approach, jumping back and forth in time, from the beginnings of Grace and Jackson’s relationship, to the period shortly after the birth of their child. The film leans so far into its nonlinear structure that, when it moves to a wedding sequence, I assumed it was a flashback to before the child was born. But, then you see the baby at the wedding. And this occurs well after many things happen that any reasonable person would think maybe these two should break up.

To be clear, Die My Love is very much about Grace’s mental illness—but within the context of her relationship with Jackson. Jackson is understandably befuddled by Grace’s crazy behaviors, but he’s also kind of an asshole. Shortly after the birth of the child, he’s not very locked into parenthood, and seems to operate under the assumption that Grace will assume all such responsibilities. And any guy who brings a dog home as a surprise to a spouse already dealing with a toddler is an asshole in my book. That dog, who is immediately quite literally an incessantly whiny bitch, becomes a significant plot point. Usually the audience wants to side with the dog in any movie, but I’m not so sure in this case. The dog can’t really be blamed. I blame Jackson, who expects Grace to take care of it, and certainly never bothers to train it.

It’s a bit difficult to parse, with Grace, how much of her erratic behavior can be attributed to innate mental illness and how much is a result of her crushing boredom spending all of her days with no one but a toddler—with the exception of a mysterious figure she has an affair with, played by LaKeith Standfield. Stanfield is an incredibly gifted actor and he keeps getting cast in parts that waste his talents, including this one. There is a single scene that reveals Stanfield’s character’s own life, and although it gives him some dimension, it does nothing to broaden his context or purpose in Grace’s life beyond sexual release.

Grace, for her part, does some wild shit—not least of which is approaching Stanfield’s character when she sees him with his wife and their wheelchair user daughter in a store parking lot. She has a propensity for injuring herself in truly startling ways, such as hurling herself through a sliding glass door, in a desperate attempt for attention from her husband. Grace’s mental illness is quite apparent far earlier than anyone does anything about it. You’d think smashing through a sliding glass door would be a pretty big red flag, but Grace does at least two more things at least as dangerous, if not more so, before she is taken to get any professional help.

To be fair, I suppose, not everyone understands when things are truly critical under these sorts of circumstances. And god knows, Jackson isn’t the most understanding person in Grace’s life. In fact, it’s Jackson’s mother, Pam (an always-wonderful Sissy Spacek), who is the only person who grants Grace any true empathy or understanding. Even she tells Grace, “Everyone goes a little loopy in the first year.” Grace doesn’t understand at first that Pam is talking about motherhood, and even when it becomes clear she avoids the issue by cutting her visit short.

The performances are excellent all around, but there is something about Ramsay’s style that leaves me a bit ambivalent about Die My Love, which falls a bit short on coherence and is long on metaphor that lacks full clarity. Again, perhaps people who have actually given birth will see some clarity here, but this was the sort of thing that If I Had Legs I’d Kick You did far better. I understood the frustration and desperation in that film thanks to Rose Byrne’s breathtaking performance. Jennifer Lawrence is also excellent, but I also kind of didn’t get it. I suppose that may be the point. With metal illness, there isn’t a lot to “get.” Die My Love, then, is a film that spends more time demonstrating that fact than giving us reason to empathize with Grace.

Die My Love is also pretty grim and hopeless, especially as it pertains to Grace, even after she has gone in and out of a mental health facility. Ramsay gives us no clean answers, no neatly tied bows to the story, and I respect that. There is even a dark beauty to the metaphorical forest fire that ends the film. There’s a peculiar dissonance to an artistic beauty that also conveys a deep sense of despair, and that might just be what you leave this film feeling.

It looks like the baby is trying as hard as we are to make sense of his mother’s behavior.

Overall: B

IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT

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

I wonder if I’m over here on Weirdo Island, thinking about Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho while watching Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident? There is almost no thematic connection between these two films, although Psycho features a serial killer and It Was Just an Accident features a near-murder. What the two films have in common are their unusual narrative structure, particularly an opening, extended sequence leading us to think one person is the main character, only to find out it’s actually another person. Indeed, the first character is even attacked by the second.

We are first introduced to a nuclear family, driving through the night: a seemingly loving husband and father (Ebrahim Azizi) with his wife in the passenger seat and pop music-loving young daughter in the back seat. The cinematography is fascinating here, as it appears to be a simple mounting of the camera on the dashboard, and a lot happens in a single shot—including other cars passing, in one case with several barking dogs chasing in the other direction. Within moments, we hear the bump of an animal being hit, and the man stops the car, gets out, and investigates. The camera never shows the animal—this technique is repeated later in the film in a pointed way—but we do see bits of the man’s shadow, a view of city lights on the hills in the distance behind him, as he drags the animal out of the street. He returns to the car, and the little girl’s chipper attitude has soured. “You killed it,” she says. And the mother tries to console her. It was just an accident.

Shortly thereafter, this family’s car breaks down, and the man asks for help from men in a nearby home. This is where the perspective suddenly shifts, to another man, Vahid (Vahid Mobasseri), who is hiding on the second level of the home, out of sight. Panache’s camera only ever sticks with Vahid for the rest of the film, and it’s quite a lot time before we have any idea why. This includes Vahid following the man back to his home, and following him the next day to the place his car is towed to for repair. In his own van, Vahid creeps up on him in the street, opens the passenger door hard against him, and then knocks him out with a shovel.

All of this is essentially the first act. What follows is an unsettling sort of road trip story, Vahid eventually gathering several more characters: Shiva (Mariam Afshari), a woman working as a wedding photographer; Goli and Ali (Hadis Pakbaten and Majid Panahi), the engaged couple getting their pictures taken; and Hamid (Mohamad Ali Elyashmehr), Shiva’s former partner. what is gradually revealed is that nearly all of these people, with the one exception of Ali, were once arrested by the Iranian regime, and tortured for months by a man with an identifiable limp due to a prosthetic leg named Eghbal—and they are all varying levels of convinced that the man we met at the start of the film is this man.

It may seem that I have revealed a lot of detail about this film, but believe it or not, that is all mostly the setup. It does take a good deal of time to get through, but it’s how we get here: the way Panahi, who also wrote the script, explores the psychological effects of a deeply oppressive and authoritarian regime. The man who might be Eghbal easily plants a seed of doubt in Vahid’s mind as to whether he’s got the right guy, which is why he goes on an odyssey of sorts, gathering acquaintances who had also been arrested in the hopes that they can confirm the man’s identity, even though they were all blindfolded the entire time they were held captive and never actually saw him. They heard him, they felt him, they smelled him. For some, the familiarity they find is not quite convincing enough. For others, it’s triggering to the point of instantaneous rage. For all of them, it’s maddening.

Eventually all of them are traveling the city in Vahid’s van, maybe-Eghbal’s drugged, bound and unconscious body locked in a trunk that is curiously the perfect size for a grown man. There’s a number of exterior, urban shots of this cast with said van, and I often wondered how this film was made. Much like the similarly excellent The Seed of the Sacred Fig, directed and written by Mohammad Rasoulof and opened earlier this year, this was filmed in secret in Iran. Indeed, Panahi and Rasoulof are just two of many artists who have been arrested in the past for speaking out against Iran’s authoritarian regime.

And the roving band of characters in It Was Just an Accident have many of their own conversations about it. They talk and they argue, they debate and they yell—often about the tension between desire for vengeance and what it means to become just as violent and cruel as your oppressors. Many of their exchanges bring to mind parallel points of view here at home in the United States. This is less a reflection of cross-cultural commentary than of universal tensions among different societies. We eventually find nearly all these characters pushed to the emotional brink in one way or another, and It Was Just an Accident proves sneakily unsettling in the end. Panahi often holds a shot for a very long time, always with purpose, and especially in the very last shot of the film, which calls into question whether Vahid did the right thing in the end, or indeed what the point of any of it was. This makes It Was Just an Accident sound pretty bleak, and I suppose it is. It also paints a vivid picture of what authoritarianism does to the regular people subjected to it.

Overall: A-

BUGONIA

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

If director Yorgos Lanthimos can be counted on anything, it’s that he’ll make a film with something in it that is very, very weird. It can be an actor, it can be a peculiar performance, it can be the entire story, or it can be a specific turn of the story. In Bugonia, it is very much the entire story, and a specific turn of the story.

In fact, Bugonia takes a turn toward the end that is truly wild, even by Lanthimos’s standard. It’s very easy to feel ambivalent about, the way the script suddenly leans into it, in a narrative space that many will quite reasonably declare is either corny or outright dumb—or at the very least, somewhere in the space between the two. There are some costume designs that are definitely . . . a choice. I found myself with a strange sort of appreciation for it, at least for the huge swing of it all, but I’d also have to admit the movie might have been elevated with this particular sequence removed entirely. That said, there follows a kind of montage that is both beautifully executed and deeply unsettling.

Emma Stone, now having starred in the last four Yorgos Lanthimos films in a row, plays Michelle, the CEO of a pharmaceutical company. Emma is abducted by Teddy (a stellar Jesse Plemons) and his intellectually disabled cousin, Don (Aidan Delbis), who are convinced Michelle is a disguised alien intent on destroying the planet. Very much to put a finer point on it, the pharmaceutical company Michelle runs is very much an active part of destroying the planet—not to mention a key part of treating Teddy’s ill mother (Alicia Silverstone, a strange casting choice considering the character is almost never conscious). Teddy also keeps bees, and we get many discussions about collapsing bee colonies while Michelle is tied to a bed in Teddy’s basement.

I can’t decide how I feel about the choice to make Don an intellectually disable character. I still can’t see the point of it, except maybe that it makes him easily manipulated by Teddy. Aiden Delbis, in a strong feature film debut, is reportedly on the autism spectrum, which at least lends the performance some authenticity. Somewhat ironically, Delbis apparently has no strong feeling about whether autistic characters should be played by autistic actors. None of this provides any answer as to what the purpose of making Don intellectually disabled was, but at least it gave an actor with some similarities to the character some work, I guess.

I went into Bugonia eager to find out whether Michelle really turns out to be an alien or not, which I suspect was the intent. Given Lanthimos’s history of wildly unpredictable films, it was clear he could go either way with this—or even end it with pointed ambiguity. He does make a choice about this, and the surprise about it is how hard he leans into that choice once it’s made clear. You might even leave the theater thinking: Okay, that was a little much.

One of Lanthimos’s many talents is to present a film with no particularly sympathetic characters and still make it compelling. Michelle, human or not, embodies the soullessness of a pharmaceutical CEO with subtle precision. Teddy is a grubby-looking conspiracy theorist few people would take seriously, which of course can be a huge mistake, given the circumstance—for instance, if he has you tied up in his basement. Michelle spends a lot of time trying to reason with him, and it’s clear very quickly that this is not a winning approach. All that said, Don is the one character who is sympathetic, and who even has any clarity of conscience—again, a dubious use of a character who is intellectually challenged.

In spite of all that, I was locked in with Bugonia, thanks to performances that very much elevate the material, which itself isn’t particularly bad either—it’s just not up to Lanthimos’s highest standards. It’s worth noting that Lanthimos did not write this script, which was written by Will Tracy (The Menu), based on the 2003 South Korean comedy horror-thriller Save the Green Planet!, written by Jang Joon-hwan. I can’t say there’s a huge amount of comedy in Bugonia; there are some funny moments, and a couple of laughs that are elicited by chock more than humor. This film is certainly twisted in a recognizably Lanthimosian way, which is something I can always appreciate.

To be sure, Yorgos Lanthimos is not for everyone. His films can be very entertaining, or they can be memorably unsettling. Until the very last scenes in Bugonia, it’s more tense than anything, with the anticipation of potential violence at all times—which sometimes happens, and sometimes doesn’t. In the end this script gets into the violent and self-destructive nature of humanity that’s pretty on the nose, so again, your mileage may vary. I have a lot of love or Lanthimos, so in spite of some clear flaws, I got a lot of mileage out of it.

Is she or isn’t she? That is the question.

Overall: B+

A HOUSE OF DYNAMITE

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

All my life, I had this vision the thirty minutes or so it might take for a nuclear missile to reach the United States, and how I would spend those last moments, counting down the clock to obliteration. This vision always presupposed knowledge of the oncoming missile at the moment of its launch, giving time for us to . . . what? Prepare? Well, A House of Dynamite, directed by Kathryn Bigelow (Zero Dark Thirty) and written by Noah Oppenheim (Jackie), and streaming on Netflix now, has completely disabused me of this notion.

Once people even realize a missile is on its way, the countdown has already begun. And these are government and military employees with high security clearance, far removed from average citizens. These people have to spend precious minutes ascertaining whether the threat is even real. It occurred to me, while watching A House of Dynamite, that I really should have considered this long ago: the people spending all that time making decisions first on what's real and then on the select few who get whisked to some version of safety—they're not spending any time sending credible warnings to the masses. Hell, in this movie they spend several of those crucial minutes just ascertaining what the target is. In all likelihood, as is what happens in this movie, anyone just living their lives in a target city would simply be obliterated before they had any idea what hit them.

Is there a strange comfort in that? Maybe there is. One could argue it's not the worst way to go, with no fear or panic preceding it.

And that's a ton of what we see in A House of Dynamite: a huge, ensemble cast of characters having the reality of impending cataclysm settle in. A missile launch is detected, and in the first moments, everyone is blasé about it. They keep track of the trajectory, and realize it's not slowing down and it's headed for us. It soon enough becomes clear that in the best case scenario, ten million Americans are killed instantly and global destabilization ensues—and that is if we don’t fire any retaliatory shots.

There’s a fascinating angle to this film, in that the aforementioned 30 minutes are not enough to ascertain who fired the shot and thus who we should even fire against. Quick discussions are had about preemptive strikes against we could reasonably expect to take advantage of the situation. But Bigelow and Oppenheim never provide us with any of those answers—not what country the missile is coming from; not whether the bomb even detonates (sometimes the don’t, we’re told); not what the President decides about whether to launch our own strikes. This is the Cath-22 of the modern age, not quite as good as that classic film but with much to recommend on its own—because this is about the questions themselves, not the answers. This is about moral dilemmas under the deepest of pressures.

The three-part stucture of A House of Dynamite is arguably a bit of a gimmick: it’s told in real-time, from the moment of detection to the moment of impact, three times over: first in the Situation Room in communication with The Pentagon and Fort Greely, where attempts at ground-based interceptors will be lauched; then at United States Strategic Command (STRATCOM) in Nebraska; and then, inevitably, from the White House. Each of these chapters showcases separate groups of the ensemble cast, all of them interacting with each other: among the many familiar faces are Rebecca Ferguson as a Situation Room senior officer; Anthony Ramos as the commander at Fort Greely; Tracy Letts as the warmongering commander at STRATCOM; Jarred Harris as the Secretary of Defense; and Idris Elba as the President. In many cases, we first see important characters as only a face in one among many screens like an emergency Zoom meeting, then shift to the perspective of the room they are in, in another chapter.

Kathryn Bigelow unfolds this story in a very straightforward, procedural style, much like her multiple previous films set in wartime, but even more procedural in this case. The few moments that characters pause to show emotion are all the more effective. All of this doesn’t allow for a great deal of character development, but that is entirely beside the point: this is about making choices in the face of urgency. And side note, this is maybe not the best movie to watch about such a scenario with the current people actually in charge in Washington, D.C. This is unsettling shit, not the least because it quite pointedly reminds us that while things like climate change have long rivaled it as an existential threat, the nuclear threat to the world is very real and still goes on.

There are precious few genuinely amusing moments in A House of Dynamite, but one of them is when the President himself says how this phrase, “a house full of dyanmite,” was something he “heard on a podcast.” It’s something that feels both on the nose and very plausible. For the most part, these are just a whole bunch of regular people caught up in extraordinary circumstances. Even those who are on evacuation lists among all connected staff across these agencies can feel arbitrary. One character is extracted even though she’s only been in the position for a few months. “Why does she get to go and we don’t?” another woman asks. A fair question. Who in their right mind could expect things to be fair in these moments? But who in these moments would be in their right mind?

I feel a little ambivalent about what purpose this film serves, exactly—I found it to be riveting and unsettling, but to what end? It opened my eyes to at least one stark reality, I guess: not only would I not have any hope of escape from this sort of attack, but in a targeted city I wouldn’t even know it was coming. Surely Seattle would be on the list of targets. Whew! What a relief!

Yeah, you heard that right. It’s time to put you head between your knees and kiss your ass goodbye.

Overall: B+

IF I HAD LEGS I'D KICK YOU

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

You don’t want to know what a childless man thinks about If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. Not even an empathetic girly-man has thoughts of any true relevance, although that’s less because of the “girly” than still because of being childless. It’s possible no one of any gender who does not have children can truly relate to what’s going on in this movie. So why are you reading this, then? Go find a review by someone who actually knows what they’re talking about!

. . . Okay. Are they gone? It’s just us now. We can still talk about movie making, right? Maybe skip the wondering questions about how easily some people might be triggered by this movie, or how anyone who is easily triggered might want to steer clear of this movie? After all—trigger warning!—this movie features themes of both suicide and child abandonment (by multiple characters, no less). Oh, wait. I just put those questions right here. Crap!

Here’s what I can tell you with actual authority: If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is deeply stressful, from beginning to end. There have been many comparisons to Uncut Gems because they are apt: the main character is in every frame, and the camera’s point of view leads our desire, with increasing desperation, for this character to make anything but the bad, worst choice. In this case, it’s Linda, a married mother who is at the end of her rope as she cares for a sick child while her husband is away for work for weeks at a time.

Here is the most important thing you should know about this: Linda is played by Rose Byrne, who gives a breathtaking performance. She absolutely should be in the Best Actress Oscar conversation—and reportedly, thankfully, she is, for now at least. The challenge, maybe, is getting enough people to see this incredible film with its stunningly versatile lead actor. I think writer-director Mary Bronstein should also be in the Oscar conversation, but she is, alas, a lot less so.

I knew I was going to be into this movie from its opening sequence, in which Linda brings her child home, the child is first to notice flooding on the bathroom floor, and when Linda moves into another room to investigate, she sees water leaking through the ceiling—and then a giant hole suddenly bursts through, gushing water all over the room. The camera pulls into the darkness of the hole, until the screen goes black, except for some curved streaks of light that suggest an ultrasound. It’s very unclear whether this is actually a dream or not, and this is when the opening titles appear. And this was where I was immediately locked in: This is my kind of movie.

Bronstein makes a lot of stylistic choices that are both very unusual and work almost shockingly well. The child is never named, and until the very end, we never even see her, even though she is often in the scene, and we hear her. Like any normal child, she talks a great deal and nags her bedraggled mom about trivial things. It’s just that they also have conversations about when and how a tube will be removed, and how much food she needs to eat so she can gain enough weight for doctors to allow it to happen. We never learn the exact nature of the child’s health condition, except that it requires a great deal of maintenance by her mother, refilling bags of liquid and making sure machinery is beeping in ways that are not alarming.

Bronstein is on record about her choice to keep the child out of frame at all times: because this is Linda’s story and not the child’s, and because the natural instinct is always for the viewer to empathize with the child first, Bronstein doesn’t even give us that opportunity. Not only is the focus exclusively on Linda, but Byrne is shot frequently in uncomfortable close-ups. I have seen this technique many times in film, and I often kind of hate it. Here it works, because it underlines the claustrophobic feeling of Linda’s entire life. And this is one of the many amazing things about If I Had Legs I’d Kick You: not one other character is shown being empathetic toward her—not her husband (Christian Slater, the one casting choice that’s somewhat distracting, because after hearing him on several hostile phone calls you don’t actually see him until the end); not her doctor (played by Bronstein herself); not even her own therapist (a part Bronstein write specifically for Conan O’Brien, who accepted and gives a solid performance in his first-ever serious role). For the most part, they actually have good reason to be exasperated rather than empathetic with her. And yet, Bronstein has crafted a story with such delicate skill that we, as the viewer, cannot help but empathize with her.

And Linda does some very bad things. She makes bad choices, mostly because she can’t take the pressure anymore. That hole in her ceiling turns out not to be a dream, but a real incident that results in her having to live in a hotel with her daughter—in a unit with a thanklessly nice neighbor played by A$AP Rocky. Linda is herself a therapist, making the very odd choice of getting therapy treatment from a colleague at her own practice, and we see three different clients who all have problems that seem trivial compared to Linda’s. Or, maybe they aren’t—but this is how Linda is seeing them, which is not the best professional position to be in. One particular client (Danielle Macdonald) becomes the source of one of the many things that go terribly wrong for Linda.

It would seem the central theme of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is the inherent guilt of being a mother, particularly one who can never feel like she’s not underwater. Linda even says at one point, “I’m not supposed to be a mom!” We can tell she loves her daughter, but she also feels overwhelmed, and has no support network, although it’s hard to tell whether there might have been a network that she just sabotaged with her own behavior. The question is whether she’ll ultimately just give up, and there is a sequence in this film where that is harrowingly unclear. “I’ll be better” is something daughter and mother say to each other at different times, and it’s perhaps not an accident that they don’t say “I’ll get better.”

This is a film that ends on the kind of hopeful note that comes with a ton of baggage. I’ll be thinking about this one for a long time, and that’s a good thing. If I Had Legs I’d Kick You is constantly harrowing, sometimes darkly funny, heartbreaking and uniquely humane.

Rose Byrne gives arguably the best performance of her career.

Overall: A-

SPRINGSTEEN: DELIVER ME FROM NOWHERE

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

Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere is an unconventional biopic in a multitude of ways, not least of which is it’s definitively, pointedly unexciting. This is a movie about three things: the making of Bruce Springsteen’s 1982 album, Nebraska, one of the lesser-known albums of his 53-year career; depression; and childhood trauma.

This film really leans into the childhood trauma part, opening with a flashback to Bruce at 8 years old, with his parents played by Stephen Graham and Gabby Hoffman. This era of his life, always presented in black and white, is returned to consistently throughout the film. As we return to Bruce as an adult, dating a composite-character woman (Odessa Young) we never particularly care about, Springsteen is working on this album we are clearly meant to understand is informed by these childhood memories. It’s a bunch of acoustic songs, a major departure from his previous rock albums, and Springsteen is very particular about how it’s recorded, how it’s released, and how it’s marketed—which is to say, not at all.

At the end of the film, we get title cards informing us that even with no tour and no singles to support it, Nebraska still reached #3 on the album charts. It doesn’t bother to say that the album sold a million copies—an impressive number out of context to be sure, but his previous album, The River, sold five times that much; and his next album, Born in the U.S.A., sold 17 million, by far his greatest success and the 7th-best selling album of the eighties. To say that Nebraska was overshadowed by these other albums is an understatement, and it never would have sold nearly what it did without Springsteen’s other massive successes.

I had never listened to Nebraska myself. I’m listening to it literally as I write this. I have never been a Springsteen guy—I think he’s fine; he’s just not my thing—but, knowing I tend to like it when an artist does what a record executive in this film (played by David Krumholtz) calls “a folk album,” I expected to be into it. Well—it’s okay. My response to this album is about the same as my response to this film. Somewhat similarly, I noted with last year’s Bob Dylan Biopic—a far better film than this one—A Complete Unknown that I was never a Dylan guy either. I did like Timothée Chalamet’s singing performance as Bob Dylan, though; in fact I preferred that to the real Dylan. Jeremy Allen White does a pretty spot-on performance as Bruce Springsteen, including performance. But I also prefer Timothée Chalamet-as-Bob-Dylan to this.

At least A Complete Unknown, and several other music biopics before it, had moments of thrilling musical electricity. Such things are beside the point with Deliver Me From Nowhere, which is about a deeply personal album that clearly was, and clearly still is, very important to Springsteen. He was reportedly on set every day, which indicates that this film is similarly important to him. This is probably not the story most of his diehard fans would be interested in, but it’s the story he wants them to know. It’s also very drab and melancholy.

If you approach Deliver Me From Nowhere from the perspective of childhood trauma and adult depression, it becomes quite unconventional for a biopic and a fascinating examination of something rarely discussed in this context. On the other hand, the extent of this relationship with Bruce’s alcoholic father, and especially with his protective mother, is never given a great deal of depth, even with the large number of flashbacks. Most of this movie is just Bruce quietly moving through his life, recording a studio album that baffles his record label, and dwelling on these memories.

Jeremy Allen White does a very good job in the part, and Jeremy Strong gives a fine performance as his manager and friend Jon Landau, if not necessarily one that seems to justify his notorious method acting approach. Paul Walter Hauser appears as a guy helping Bruce with the recording, and Marc Maron as a studio engineer is so underused that in the first several scenes in which he appears he doesn’t even speak. At least he got to hang out and chat with Springsteen on set, seven years after Springsteen opened up about his struggles with depression on Maron’s WTF with Marc Maron podcast.

I’m all for cinematic examinations of trauma and depression, if they’re done well. They just don’t make for a very exciting music biopic, which, a bit ironically, the marketers of Bruce Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere basically promised. I find myself wondering if studio executives responded to the final product of this film the way executives did to the Nebraska albums: what are we supposed to do with this? Throw it to the wall and see if it sticks, I guess.

Deliver me to something more exciting.

Overall: B-

BLUE MOON

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

Lorenz Hart, the lyricist who was composer Richard Rogers’s professional partner for 24 years, was about five feet tall. So this was a big sticking point for me with Blue Moon, in which 5’10” Ethan Hawke was cast to play the part. This is a film directed by Richard Linklater, which by definition means it’s a low budget film, and really none of the ways in which Hawke is made to look like a small man look real or authentic. It’s a constant distraction. Are there really no talented short actors who could have been cast? Where’s Joe Pesci when you need him? Being way too old now, I guess. And too Italian-American. Lorenz Hart was Jewish.

They accomplished the physical transformation, reportedly, with “old stagecraft” techniques, including camera angles and forced-perspective similar to how they made the Hobbits look smaller in the Lord of the Rings films. At least those films also had spectacular special effects to distract from when these camera angles might otherwise be noticeable. The real issue with Hawke, however, is that he still has the proportions of a much taller man. When you see his hands, or even his head, in the same frame as those of another character, they look strangely large for how small a man he was supposed to be.

I really found all of this difficult to get past, making Blue Moon one of the most distractible films of Richard Linklater’s career. It’s also very much like a stage play, having been written by Robert Kaplow, whose only previous screenplay credit is the 2008 film Me and Orson Welles. There have been other exceptions, but this is a rare case of Linklater directing someone else’s work. And with the singular exception of an opening flashback of Hart’s death in an alley eight months later, the entirety of the film is set in a single bar, on the opening night of Rogers and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!

This is a transitional moment, the opening night of Rogers and Hammrstein’s first collaboration—and, essentially, the nail in the coffin of Rogers and Hart’s collaboration. Hart did contribute five songs to one more Hammerstein musical before his death, but that was it. On this night, in this movie, Hart sits at the bar, chatting up everyone who will listen: the bartender, Eddie (Bobby Cannavale); the bar pianist and aspiring composer, Morty (Joanh Lees); the writer E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy) who happens to be sitting at a nearby table; Richard Rogers himself (Andrew Scott) once the show has ended and the cast and crew has come here for a celebration; and Hart’s biggest obsession, Elizabeth Weiland (Margaret Qualley).

Hart’s sexuality is a constant touch point in this script, because of this obsession with Elizabeth, with whom Hart spent a weekend some months ago. Given that Hart at one point literally and unironically calls himself “a cocksucker,” I suppose we could call him bisexual. Hawke does play him with well-observed nuance, giving him a subtly queer vibe that still does not take away our belief in his desire for Elizabeth. Hawke is an objectively good actor, but given that he is neither queer nor short, there are multiple distractions to his very existence in the part.

Blue Moon is getting widely positive reviews, and for the record, I did like it. I just did not find it exceptional. Even for a Richard Linklater movie—and that’s saying a lot—Hart talks too much. I can’t fathom the number of lines Hawke memorized for this, and most of the time he’s engaging even when the character is being frequently deluded. But there still came a point at which Hart yammered on for so long at that bar that I thought: all right, enough! Shut up!

Hart spends a lot of time criticizing the writing in Oklahoma!—right down to the inclusion of that exclamation point—and then, predictably, fawning over every part of it to both Rogers and Hammerstein once they actually arrive. Blue Moon gets some energy injected into it once the crowd arrives, as at least then all the talking makes sense. Until then, it’s a seemingly endless scene in a sparsely attended bar that feels a tad overwritten. Margaret Qualley feels slightly anachronistic, out of time, in this movie, but still has undeniable screen presence. Andrew Scott seems capable of feeling comfortably at home in just about any part he’s in.

It’s a solid cast, and for a movie that seems tailor made to be tedious and dull, I was never bored. I did spend some time wondering when it could go somewhere or get to a point, but this is a hallmark of Richard Linklater movies (especially ones he actually writes), with varying degrees of success. It’s possible this one is just a tad past its time. How many people going to the movies today know who Rogers and Hammerstein were, let alone what musicals they made together? And they were a far more famous duo than Rogers and Hart ever were. Perhaps that’s why the small mess of a man Lorenz Hart was gets a bit of love here. It’s too bad he’s just as forgotten as soon as this movie’s over. Like his career, though, it was pretty good while it lasted.

To call this a towering achievement would be misleading.

Overall: B

THE MASTERMIND

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

I find myself thinking maybe I appreciate The Mastermind more in retrospect, once I have allowed it to settle a bit, but I keep coming back to this pertinent question: does that matter? It doesn’t change my experience of sitting through this movie, which occurred in three stages. First, I thought: this is a very compelling premise; this seems fun. Then, I thought: is anything going to happen in this movie that makes sitting through it worth the effort? Finally, I thought: holy Christ, I’m bored.

If you’re a fan of writer-director Kelly Reichardt, you might reasonably argue that this is a me problem and not the movie’s problem. Might is the operative word there. I quite liked Reichardt’s film First Cow (filmed in late 2018; in theaters for one week in March 2020 but pulled due to covid; available on VOD when I reviewed it in late summer 2020), about a cook and a Chinese immigrant scheming to steal milk from the first cow in Oregon Territory.

But Reichardt definitely has a particular style of filmmaking, with long, quiet shots that are perhaps better suited to period pieces from the Old West. The Mastermind is also a period piece, but in a very different way: this one is set in 1970, first in Framingham, Massachusetts and then through several other states. This movie answers the question: “What if Kelly Reichardt made an art heist movie?” It turns out the answer is: “You may not want to sit through it.”

Josh O’Connor is a great actor, and he’s very good in The Mastermind, but I credit him for that far more than I do anything else in this movie. His James Blaine Mooney is an unemployed, married father of two, and he cooks up a scheme to steal four priceless paintings from a local art museum where his parents are members. His choices are all varying levels of foolish from moment one, and the heist sequence itself, in which he enlists the help of two other guys, is far and away the most exciting in the movie—and the fact that even this sequence is pointedly quiet (they are in a museum, after all) says all you really need to know about this movie.

But, you know. I have to write this review.

There’s a different scene that says the most about my personal reaction to this film. James takes the paintings, each carefully protected inside a fabric pouch sewn together by his wife, Terri (Licorice Pizza’s Alana Haim—also talented, but utterly wasted in this part), and slid into slots inside a homemade wooden box case, out to a farm shed for hiding. Reichardt lingers on James’s every move in this scene, even though all it involves is using a ladder to take the paintings up to a hiding spot in the rafters. But he has to pull the sliding lid off the box case; take the paintings up the ladder two at a time; carefully take the box case itself up the ladder; put the paintings back in their slots inside the box case; replace the lid on the box case; then slide the box to the side and cover it in hay. We see all of this happen in real time, and I can understand the intention here, as we’re observing the efforts this guy is going to for what we can see clearly is going to have no payoff making it worthwhile.

The least a movie like this can do for us, though, is to give us a payoff that makes sitting through a deadeningly dull sequence like that worthwhile. At that point in the film, I was still giving The Mastermind the benefit of the doubt: surely this is a foreshadowing of something yet to come that will somehow make all of this satisfying? Not so much. The narrative does return to this location later, and I’ll grant that it happens in an unexpected way. But it’s also definitively anticlimactic. And that’s the takeaway from this entire movie.

James’s accomplices in the robbery come and go in relatively short order, especially Ronnie (Javion Allen), who is a loose canon and surprises the trio by bringing a gun to the heist, thereby making it an armed robbery. I had very mixed feelings about the casting of a Black man in this part, given that he’s basically the guy who ruins what otherwise might have worked out for these other criminals. He’s the one guy who is immediately incompetent, he’s the one guy with a gun, he’s the one guy who gets physically violent with anyone during the ordeal, and he’s the one guy who gets arrested and then coerced into ratting on the others. I certainly don’t blame Javion Allen for simply getting work—and God knows I can’t speak for how he felt about the implications of the part—but from my perspective, this all seemed a little on the nose, particularly for a movie, and a director, which otherwise traffic in subtleties.

A whole lot of The Mastermind is not so much about James figuring out how to get away with what he’s done, but following him as he’s on the run (hence the aforementioned multiple states), trying to outrun what is clearly inevitable for him. To be sort of fair, this film could also have been titled The Hubris of Mediocre White Men, and O’Connor plays the part perfectly. I just felt in the end that his talents were misused here.

We get a lot of other great actors in supporting parts, including Bill Camp and Hope Davis as James’s parents. James makes a brief stop at the home of friends in the country, played by John Magaro, and Gaby Hoffman without a drop of makeup on, making her almost unrecognizable. Hoffman does a lot with very little screen time, but as great as the cast is, none of them could save The Mastermind from being dreadfully dull at worst and tedious at best. The final moment of the film, when James is becoming dangerously desperate, has an almost flippantly amusing quality to it, leaving you to think: all of that, for this? That is clearly the point, but it was a point I left the theater feeling unenriched by.

Okay, James. Get on with it!

Overall: C+