THE SOCIAL RECKONING

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

Aaron Sorkin is a rightly celebrated screenwriter. This is the guy who wrote A Few Good Men, The American President, The West Wing, The Social Network, and Moneyball. His most recent four movies, however—Molly’s Game, The Trial of the Chicago Seven, Being the Ricardos, and The Social Reckoning—were both written and directed by Sorkin. You can tell at a glance what the issue is there: other directors have historically raised Sorkin’s work to the level of excellence. Sorkin manages to direct his own material to a level one or two steps below that.

So it is with The Social Reckoning, a follow-up to The Social Network sixteen years later, thus qualifying as a “lega-sequel.” Critics left and right constantly hail The Social Network as “a masterpiece,” and I’ve never been willing to go quite that far—it’s a really good movie that I gave an A-minus, but it’s not perfect. I still clearly did myself a favor by not rewatching it before seeing The Social Reckoning, in which both David Fincher’s direction and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s score are sorely missed.

It feels a little like Aaron Sorkin feels like he is the only one who can truly bring his visions to light, and he is mistaken. Parts of The Social Reckoning feel pointlessly heavy handed, and there’s a couple of editing choices that are genuinely baffling. Twice there are cuts to shots of only a set of people’s calves and feet walking on a sidewalk, with the audio deliberately going in and out. I don’t get it.

What I do get is the point of making this movie, though—I’m not really on board with the people saying the movie itself is pointless. Anything that keeps people talking about Facebook and its now-widely-known dangers is a good thing, however ineffectual it may ultimately be. “Based on a true story” movies don’t always have the intended impact when they are set less than two years before its release, and this one gets to within about five years ago. A lot of what was going on in the world then is still pretty vivid in our collective memory, and depictions of the covid years remains a tricky business. Yet again, we get shots with characters here and there wearing masks, but only just enough to jog our memory, and not nearly enough for it to be realistic. We have to keep seeing all these actors’ beautiful faces, right?

Covid is deeply relevant to this story, though, because it’s used as one of countless examples of Facebook being culpable in the spread of damaging misinformation. A brief but key scene is set in a grocery store (the one scene in which nearly everyone is actually wearing a mask), with a mask-less woman shouting at everyone “You’re a sheep!” And we all know she got this idea from Facebook.

Which is to say, of course, that The Social Reckoning is also often pretty on the nose. Is this movie actually providing any insight? I suppose it might be to some, who pay far more attention to movie entertainment than actual news, which sadly is most people—but most people seeing this movie aren’t necessarily going to care. I’d say you can just find the 17-part series The Facebook Files that was published in The Wall Street Journal in 2021 and the writing of which forms the basis of this film, but a) most of it is behind a paywall; and b) you wouldn’t likely read it even if it weren’t. (I haven’t read it, nor do I have a subscription to The Wall Street Journal.)

Still, by and large The Social Reckoning is pretty engaging, mostly because of being very well cast. This isn’t exactly a showcase for Mikey Madison, who plays the awkward and nerdy Facebook employee whistleblower Frances Haugen, but if you happened to see her in either the Scream reboot or her Oscar-winning performance in Anora, you’ll get a sense of her incredible versatility. This is a showcase for Jeremy Strong, whose performance as an almost sociopathic Mark Zuckerberg is almost worth the price of admission on its own. Nearly all of his scenes are set during a rehearsal for testifying before Congress, however, and we only get one scene in which Zuckerberg and Haugen are even in the same room (and they don’t even speak to each other). Sorkin’s choice to set this rehearsal on the same day the January 6 insurrection is one of several things that make this script feel a little over-written.

Jeremy Allen White is a great actor, but here he’s in a role—as Wall Street Journal investigative reporter Jeff Horwitz—that any competent actor could have played. The same could be said of Betty Gilpin, who plays Horwitz’s editor; or Bill Burr, who plays an evident frenemy of Zuckerberg’s implausibly brought into the rehearsals to help with crisis management. But, it’s still really fun to see them both.

In any case, The Social Reckoning is packed with performances that range from competent to quite memorable, and I’m not sorry I saw it. That’s a very different sentiment from being thrilled by it, I realize. Some of the writing choices are deeply contrived and corny, but I still left with a certain appreciation for the overall experience. I certainly hoped for better, but my highest praise for this movie is that it could have been a lot worse.

Watching pretty people look at Facebook internal documents is so exciting!

Overall: B

THE HISTORY OF CONCRETE

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

It seems I kind of missed the boat on this John Wilson guy. I never saw his HBO series How To with John Wilson, but if I had, I suspect I would have a more settled expectation of his deeply meta documentary feature, The History of Concrete. Perhaps I should still check it out; it sounds relatively similar. There’s certainly a very odd experience to The History of Concrete if you have no other behind-the-scenes context to it. I left the theater overhearing a couple of young women discuss whether Wilson is “laughing with or laughing at” his subjects. Based on this film alone, it’s genuinely hard to tell, given his evident knack for finding compellingly quirky people—but one hesitates to think he’s laughing at people who are truly no more oddball-nerdy than he is.

Certainly, if you have never experienced John Wilson before, he is an acquired taste. As he apparently did in his TV show, he narrates in the second person, though clearly talking about himself. He also has a very specific and distinctive way of speaking, stopping and starting mid-sentence in ways that often feel unnatural, in a rather nasal voiceover. And the premise of The History of Concrete is hard to put in any succinct way, as early on in the film, Wilson attends a workshop on writing Hallmark movies, then ostensibly tries to apply the rules to this very documentary. He takes such a meandering approach, though, that I can’t even remember how he settled on the topic of concrete. What’s easy to remember are the multiple shots of his own Zoom meetings attempting to secure funding for a project with that title.

It feels serendipitous that I watched Digger and The History of Concrete back to back, as these are perhaps the two most meta films of the year. The latter is actually far more successful at it, if still perhaps less clarified in its own purpose. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a documentary feature made this way, which is not only in constant commentary on its own construction, but comes across as a documentary form of stream of consciousness. Wilson uses concrete as a jumping off point, and will then wind up somewhere completely unrelated, from a hard rock cover band to the funeral of an elderly Asian woman judge.

The most amazing thing about this movie is that, in the face of every implication from its title, it is never dull. It should be noted that it features very little history (he does travel to Rome where the oldest concrete can be found, but that’s about the extent of it), and in the end this movie really isn’t about concrete. Wilson does constantly come back to concrete, both as jumping-off points and as ways of closing his endlessly tangential narrative threads. He does sprinkle in a good number of interesting things about concrete, but mostly he just gets people’s mostly nonexistent takes on the concrete in the environment around them. With a few exceptions (Rome; Bellefontaine, Ohio; Los Angeles; Brownsville, Texas), the vast majority of the film is shot in New York City. There is a filmmaker out there who could make an actually-compelling film that’s actually about concrete’s history, how it’s used, and what it means to our environment. John Wilson is just not that filmmaker.

The History of Concrete is so meandering that, about halfway through, I really couldn’t decide if I liked it. You begin to wonder: hey, what about all that stuff about applying the lessons of Hallmark movies? Well, in its way, the story being told here actually does come back around to that—as well as other arbitrary rules later applied by other people, such as the potential funding source who evidently misunderstands Wilson’s joke about this being “a rockumentary,” and states that the inclusion of a prominent musician is a condition of their providing funding. In the end, Wilson does discover a connection to a very prominent musician in a way that is genuinely shocking, and gives the film an overall truly unexpected and satisfying conclusion.

There’s something extraordinary about John Wilson’s work, where he can take you from thinking, What am I even watching? to That was actually kind of a blast. The History of Concrete is a visual work of art if nothing else, packed with striking images of regular but memorable people living everyday lives, so skillfully edited together that you have to wonder how much total footage he sifted through to get so many fantastic shots in a clean, 101-minute runtime.

The History of Concrete almost feels like a mockumentary, except its subjects are real, and it falls just short of ever actually mocking them. There’s a strangely consistent humanity to all of the offbeat character on display. It’s unlikely anyone in this film had any idea what John Wilson was actually going for, with the likely exception of Tim Robinson, who makes a split-second appearance at a dinner party in honor of Kim Kardashian. Speaking of which, to say this movie goes in random directions is an understatement, and yet it ends by slowly revealing an evident method to his madness. It’s not often you leave the theater strangely satisfied by how baffling it all was.

It’s more interesting than it looks—especially when it’s not even about what it appears to be.

Overall: B+

DIGGER

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

Digger opened five days ago, and it is already well-documented what a huge flop it is: made with a production budget of over $125 million and a marketing budget of around $100 million, it landed at #4 at the box office its opening weekend, grossing a paltry $8 million domestically and $23 million worldwide to date. This is a movie many media outlets are reporting needed to make $300 million in order to break even, and instead is Tom Cruise’s worst opening weekend in nearly two decades—likely longer in adjusted dollars, considering $8 million in 2007 was the equivalent of $13 million in 2026 dollars.

All of this is to say: Digger being not for everyone is the understatement of the year. Reactions have been sharply divided, to the point that word of mouth is actively working against it. It’s too bad, because there is a hell of a lot to say about this movie, and such conversations can be fun as hell. So: is Digger for me? I really couldn’t decide for a while. I actively thought about this while in the middle of watching the movie, which does not say much for it. And yet, I found it really stuck the landing in the end, on an unsettling note that was somehow both incredibly on the nose and subtle at the same time. There is no way of predicting this, especially in today’s siloed media consumption landscape, but this is a movie I can easily imagine being reclaimed sooner than later. It could be as soon as it releases on a streamer somewhere (it’s a Warner Brothers film, so probably HBO Max), or it could be a decade from now. Someone is going to discover this movie and wonder how they slept on it. The question is whether that someone will be in the company of significant number.

More than anything, because this movie is not for everyone, Digger has a marketing problem. For instance, let’s talk about that quite-obviously animatronic cat, which was featured prominently in the trailers. No context is given for why the cat looks and moves like that, and the result is something that seems to suggest the production skimped on budget and wound up with a pet that looked bafflingly artificial, given the state of visual effects capability today. And I don’t really know what the answer is here, as it would be a notable spoiler for the trailers to give context—maybe they should not have shown that cat in the trailers at all? Because the film itself does provide context to how that cat looks and moves, and it’s something that actually makes sense. But who would know that, watching the trailers? Whose boneheaded choice was this?

All that aside, I can’t say that Digger always worked for me, but it certainly worked better than I expected it to based on the reviews. This is perhaps one of the most critically polarizing films of the year, and usually a MetaCritic score of 46 is a reliable indicator that I will not like a movie. There are occasional exceptions, though, and this is one of them—fascinatingly, the user score on MetaCritic is a much more respectable 6.8 out of 10, so evidently I am not alone. (The user rating over on Letterboxed is a similarly respectable 3.8 out of 5 stars.) It’s worth noting that this is only among the few people who actually bothered to see the movie.

I just love what a swing Digger is—not that unusual for director and co-writer Alejandro G. Iñárritu (this guy directed both Birdman or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance and Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths; thankfully this movie’s title is shorter), but very unusual for Tom Cruise, who hasn’t taken a swing this big since his appearance in Tropic Thunder in 2008. I want him to keep taking swings like this, as it makes him a far more interesting actor. I was afraid the poor box office performance might scare him off such swings in his late-career years, but evidently he’s been defending Digger, which is a good thing.

Now, there are many big swings in Digger, and some of them work better than others. Cruise’s performance is excellent, especially considering he actually plays two characters—oil tycoon Digger Rockwell himself, and Curtis Markson, the actor playing Digger in a satirical play. This is where Digger leans hard into meta territory, something I love when done well, but the jury may be out on that point here. When the film suddenly shifts to the same actors we’ve been watching all along playing actors rehearsing a stage play, for a while it’s very confusing. It doesn’t help that clarity comes after these “actor” characters are suddenly arguing about whether this is a satire or a farce and whether it is funny. Up to that point, some of the comedy in Digger has landed well, but some of it also has very much not. I got several good laughs out of this movie, but also experienced multiple attempts at it that just fell flat. And if you are very directly asking us to consider whether what we are watching actually works as a satire, I’m not sure it’s actually working as intended. Or was that the point? Here Digger starts to get lost in its own convoluted plot machinations.

Digger has a sister, Emma, played by Sandra Hüller, an actor rightly celebrated as her profile has been raised in recent years. But this may be the worst performance I have ever seen her do, she spends so much time just shrieking at her brother, and it never quite feels genuine. Or was that a deliberate choice, and the actor playing Emma is not that great at her craft? It seems Iñárritu has built in a clever excuse for what appears to be subpar acting. The same can be said of John Goodman, as the idiotically bombastic President of the United States. His performance is so over the top it makes Digger himself—also an outsized character—seem subtle. And again, suddenly, we see the play actors discussing how different their play characterizations are from the real people they are playing, and how that is all part of the satirical intent.

There’s a lot going on on Digger though, and I have a feeling a lot of people are missing the point in what seems on the surface like a narrative mess, much like the characters themselves are missing the point of how they got themselves into the climate catastrophe that forms the basis of the story. There is a barely-detectable, unsettling truth seeping through Digger, about the hypocrisy of “advanced” societies reaping the benefits of the technology that they self-righteously deride as ignorantly self-destructive. There is a key scene in which Digger addresses a room full of world leaders prone to speaking out of both sides of their mouths, and again, much of what he says is very on the nose—and still, I listened to his screaming monologue about environmental hypocrisy and just found myself thinking: Well . . . he’s right.

I wonder what the carbon footprint of this movie’s production was, incidentally? Not that that’s part of Digger’s point either; this is not a movie that is preaching to its audience—if anything, it’s a skewer aimed at people prone to preaching to their audience. And there’s a lot in it that’s really fun, including Riz Ahmed as Digger’s Head of Environmental Safety, Dr. Ganesh, who seems to be a slightly stereotypical character at first but then proves to be satisfyingly nuanced. We also get Michael Stuhlbarg as the Vice President; Jesse Plemons in a ridiculous red wig as the play’s benefactor; and House of the Dragon’s Emma D’Arcy, who it took me a while to fully recognize in the part of Digger’s assistant.

There are some baffling choices in Digger that only come halfway around to making sense later, such as the scene in which Digger, the President and a host of other government officials are watching a live feed of environmental destruction in Europe, but the camera only ever shows the reactions of the people in the room and never what they are actually watching. Was this also a budget choice? Clearly not; we later see news feeds of the same destruction, rendered quite impressively. Was this a staging choice if we were to later consider how it would have been performed in a play? That idea also falls flat when you consider the extensive use of screen imagery in the play. I still don’t have an answer to this one.

Some of Digger may always remain a mystery. Some of it may become clearer after repeat viewings. Will I ever rewatch Digger? Probably, although I couldn’t say whether it will be any time soon. I can only say it had my undivided attention from its first moment; it veered dangerously close to losing me in the middle; and by the last scene, which is expertly staged and edited, I found myself surprisingly satisfied, if not exactly blown away.

There is so much more going on than you think,

Overall: B

FORGOTTEN ISLAND

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

I have mixed feelings about Forgotten Island. On the one hand, it ultimately proved surprisingly moving, and I loved its focus on friendship in a way that is universal but is rendered between two young girls—who are also young women in the movie. On the other hand, it almost buckles under the weight of its self-consciously frantic editing, like it’s made for kids raised on Instagram reels and has no self-confidence to hold attention any longer than your average algorithmic dopamine hit.

It was so bad that I nearly gave up on this movie halfway through. It had been fairly entertaining for a while, with relatively well-rounded characters and moderately clever humor. But then Jo (H.E.R.) and Raissa (Liza Soberano) get ported to the titular island, things quickly go antic, and a kind of fun way at first, but then it just becomes such a mess of action that my eyes started to glaze over. Why was I supposed to care about them again?

It’s too bad too, because there are so many cool things about Forgotten Island, which underneath its visual chaos has an understanding of universality through specficity. This is a story steeped in Filipino lore and mythology, with a bunch of specific mythological creatures. Filipino actor Manny Jacinto voices Bungi Tiyanak, a giant, three-eyed demon baby. Filipino singer Lea Salonga voices Manang, the bat-winged creature that can detatch itself at the torso. Jo Koy voices Datu, leader of the tree giants. The most prominent island character is voiced by Dave Franco (not Filipino), a “were-dog” named Raww, inspired the aspin, a mixed-breed dog of the Philippines. Unfortunately the script never quite comes to what exactly is going on with Raww, why he only occasionally turns into a human boy, and spends the rest of his time either as a humanoid dog or “full dog” whenever there’s a stick around.

The cast is diverse, but with a bent toward Filipino heritage: H.E.R. has a Filipina mother; Liza Soberano is American-born but largely grew up in the Philippines with her Filipino father. Jenny Slate (not Filipona) comes in to voice the quasi-villainous Batiba, a large, cat-like demon who steals memories. This forms the backbone of the story, written by Joel Crawfod (not Filipino) and Januel P. Mercado (American but with Filipino parents), both of whom also co-directed. Jo and Raissa strike a deal with Batiba in which they exchange memories in order to get back home, which turns out to be a bigger sacrifice than expected. As they desperately attempt to salvage their shared memories in a very well-executed climactic sequence, it would appear that these directors have perhaps seen Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind a few times. A valuable lesson here is that if you’re going to steal, steal from the best.

To be fair, Crawford and Mercado do make it their own. They just take a while to get there, or for them to fully bring us in through all the visual mess. That memory sequence had me thinking about my own friends-as-chosen family with tears streaming down my face, forcing to admit that okay, this movie isn’t bad—and then it jumps back into being pointlessly frantic.

It doesn’t really help that some of the humor is disappointingly witless, using pee and farts as tired punch lines. Raww gets kicked in the crotch and he says “My nards!” before you see him walking with a limp. How often animation so directly acknowledge the existence of testicles, I wonder? Will Raww one day be able to breed? Does Forgotten Island want me to be pondering these questions?

On the upside, Jo and Raissa represent friends who are flawed but deeply supportive of each other, one a talented artist and one so smart that she’s planning to attend college at CalTech in America. This is one of the sources of their unexpeceted tensions, as the two grow into young women and must decide on their individual paths forward. There’s a lot of depth to plumb in Forgotten Island, you just have to wade through a bunch of noise to get to it.

Clearly your mileage may vary.

Overall: B

YOU HAD TO BE THERE: HOW THE TORONTO GODSPELL IGNITED A COMEDY REVOLUTION, SPREAD LOVE & OVERALLS, AND CREATED A COMMUNITY THAT CHANGED THE WORLD (IN A CANADIAN KIND OF WAY)

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

Between The Cycle of Love and You Had to Be There, I’m not sure I have ever experienced such heartwarming uplift strictly from documentary filmmaking—particularly within the space of just a couple of weeks. People expect “feel-good movies” to be fictional narratives, but this are easily the most “feel-good” of movies I’ve seen all year. It’s too bad so few people will actually see them. This is exactly the kind of uncynical storytelling the world needs.

It’s all about sharing love—and in the case of You Had to Be There, it’s love in many directions: cast mates in a 1972 original production of Godspell in Toronto quickly developing deep love and affection for each other, and individually blossoming over ensuing decades to become truly beloved figures in the entertainment industry. To be fair, there are varying levels of beloved-ness, perhaps sitting at the top including Martin Short; Eugene Levy; and Gilda Radner, who remains a mythical figure in comedy circles nearly forty years after her passing. But this original-run cast of Godspell also included Paul Shaffer; Andrea Martin; and Victor Garber (who is now perhaps best known as the ship designer Thomas Andrews in the 1997 Titanic). Also included in that cast—and all of them giving contemporary intervies for You Had to Be There—are Second City veteran Dave Thomas; Jayne Eastwood; local Toronto performer Rudy Webb (the only Black person in the cast, something not discussed here); Valda Aviks; and Avril Chown.

Chown, as it happens, represents the one moment of darkness in You Had to Be There, revealing apparently for the first time, on camera. the reason she did not stay in the entertainment industry for very long. After Godspell, she was cast as the sole woman on a children’s show with five men, and she was repeatedly sexually assaulted. This turned her off of the industry, but she still keeps in touch with that cast—You Had to Be There ends with what appears to be one of a regular reunion between all of them, still close friends, more than fifty years later. What happened to Chown is clearly an important detail to note, but it does not fit very comfortably within the narrative of this story. That’s not to say it needs to be comfortable, far from it—but, director Nick Davis transitions a bit abruptly from that anecdote, straight into how beloved Gilda Radner was.

Given that the Toronto run of Godspell was in 1972—not the first run of the show, but after only the Off-Broadway debut and a London run, both in 1971—it’s not a huge surprise that all the subjects are now in their seventies or older. I found myself thinking about how much longer these wonderful reunions will be able to continue. You Had to Be There is itself thus a deeply appreciated record of this particular history, of a group of actors who went on to do great things from Second City to Saturday Night Live to SCTV to great film roles and much more. Nick Davis is rather playful with the documentary production, starting with the official, full title: You Had to Be There: How the Toronto Godspell Ignited the Comedy Revolution, Spread Love & Overalls, and Created a Community That Changed the World (in a Canadian Kind of Way). That’s thirty words.

Plenty more people are interviewed for the film, from directors and writers who worked on the play, to a smattering of contemporary, younger artists who speak reverently about the people from the Toronto Godspell. It’s not always clear what connection they have or why they would be especially relevant for inclusion; among the most prominently featured are Lin-Manuel Miranda; Janeane Garofalo; and SNL cast member Heidi Gardner. This rounds out all the interviews a bit, but the clips with present-day interviews with Godspell cast members are by far the most compelling, especially when they are surprised with a video clip of one rehearsal that most of them appear to have no idea ever existed. The emotions and delight it elicits is very touching.

Other than that, and one illegally captured tape recording Martin Short made of a single performance, no footage of this prodiction of Godspell exists. This means a lot of recreation has to happen to break up the talking heads, much of which is rendered in animation flourishes in a very old-school style, kind of like 1970s episodes of Scooby-Doo. Sometimes this is synced to Short’s taped audio, and sometimes it's just matching interview anecdotes. It works fine, if also somewhat transparently a trick for visual filler.

By far more than anything, what makes You Had to Be There work is the chemistry among this cast, how fondly they all remember not just launching their careers with Godspell but decades of resulting friendship. The reunion sequence is the perfect way to conclude this story, as it illustrates a group love that has endured for decades and will live on. I left the theater feeling buoyed by it.

I wish I had been there—disciple clowns and all!

Overall: B+

PRIMETIME

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

It’s hard to put my finger on exactly how I feel about Primetime, which feels intentional. I went in expecting to feel pretty icky about it, from virtually every angle—and that’s nearly where I landed. What I didn’t quite expect was not being able to tell what this movie has to say about its subject, if anything. If it’s intended as a showcase for Robert Pattinson’s talents, it certainly succeeded there—but I left wishing I’d gotten a bit more.

Shouldn’t a movie about a show as exploitative as To Catch a Predator have something clear to say about it? There is so much to say about the actual television series, which aired twenty episodes between November 2004 and December 2007 (most of them just between February 2006 and July 2007), that it feels odd that Primetime has so much less to say. If nothing else, it reflects the moral bankruptcy of the entertainment industry as it blurred the line between “news” and entertainment—after all, To Catch a Predator was part of Dateline NBC, but was transparently more concerned with ratings than with actually catching child predators. When the most elaborate sting the show staged inevitably ends in a kind of tragedy no one can particularly feel good about, we see the show’s producer (a wonderful Merritt Wever) say to show presenter Chris Hansen (Pattinson), “I can make this work.”

What does something like this do to the “performers” who play the decoys, anyway? Skyler Gisondo plays “Decoy Dan,” the 23-year-old actor cast to impersonate boys as young as 13. Gisondo does a great job of conveying the wild emotions that must go through someone who sees a guy whip out his dick and spray whipped cream all over it. (This never actually happened on the show, by the way, although some did get caught completely naked.) This is indeed a wild situation to be in, being a young man impersonating a teenager, who then becomes subject to a genuinely pedophilic act—all of which is caught on camera. One wonders whether “Decoy Dan” needed therapy after this.

Director Lance Oppenheim’s film is thus ripe for examination of the psychological effects of all this, but what we get instead is something presented as a media satire. Is it really satire, though, if it’s inspired by things that actually happened? Just because Oppenheim is taking artistic license doesn’t mean he’s not reflecting real life here. Hollywood has a long history of films depicting a dystopian media future, and here we have something that winds up being pretty disgusting from all angles, and it happened two decades ago.

I haven’t even gotten to how many of these sting operations, which were done with the cooperation of local law enforcement, stink of entrapment. No one wants to be defending pedophiles, but there are proper ways to catch criminals, and this isn’t quite it. Among the many ways To Catch a Predator was criticized, Charlie Brooker wrote at the time, “When a TV show makes you feel sorry for potential child rapists, you know it's doing something wrong.” This is worth noting because in many cases, Primetime does exactly the same thing, and it does not seem to be commenting on the fact that To Catch a Predator was itself doing it. We see actors portraying the entrapped predators, and we feel conflicted because of how close we get to sympathizing with them.

And, to be clear, I do hold the controversial stance that even pedophiles should be treated humanely. There have been a couple of films in the past, most notably the 2004 Kevin Bacon film The Woodsman, that dared to challenge their audiences with this notion. It’s a provocative idea worthy of debate, and an idea not particularly explored in Primetime, which is far more concerned with Chris Hansen, his (fictional) producer Andie Bender, and their insatiable quest for ratings. These people don’t really care about the supposed righteousness of catching these predators, except that it is this idea of righteousness that brings in audience numbers. There are multiple scenes of fans talking to Hansen and saying things to him like, “You’re doing the Lord’s work.” Of course no one is considering the damage being done to the people actually doing this “work.”

There is a subplot involving The National Inquirer hounding Chris Hansen for comment on photos taken of him with a woman he had an affair with, a clearly juicy angle given his purported moral crusade—as if a simple affair is in any way equivalent to pedophilia. Primetime’s cinematographer, David Bolen, shoots a ton of the action in incredibly dark rooms, almost to the point of distraction. I know the show’s crew did a lot of its work in hiding, but if they are all in separate rooms, am I to believe they still kept the lights off? This combines with a heightened style of shooting to really drive home of the darkness at play. And yet, everything onscreen is designed to entertain us more than to elucidate us, which kind of makes Primetime guilty of the same thing To Catch a Predator was guilty of.

And I won’t deny it—I was very engaged by this movie, maybe even entertained, albeit at someone of a loss when it ended. The acting is excellent, especially on the part of Robert Pattinson but also Skyler Gisondo as “Decoy Dan,” as well as Merritt Wever. I just can’t come up with a purpose to this film that sits well—the same as any sane person would feel about To Catch a Predator. I’d have loved to be enlightened by this film in some way, and instead I was entertained. There are certainly some who feel that the publicly humiliating punishment of pedophiles is just and right as well as entertaining, but I’d rather we just find an efficient way to protect our children from them. Using them for entertainment is not it.

A media satire about a sickening subject, what fun!

Overall: B

RESIDENT EVIL

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

I might as well start off by saying that I am not the target audience for Resident Evil, per se. If this kind of movie is very much your jam, you will likely love it, and take anything I have to say about it from here on out with a grain of salt. Maybe don’t even keep reading. Go read something else! All the issues I have with this movie are my issues alone, and I am going to work through them now.

Now you are perhaps thinking I must have hated this movie, and I did not—far from it. There’s actually a great deal about it that I liked a lot. My major problem is that I fell prey to the hype—a rookie mistake that I keep making—and went in expecting this movie to be something it clearly is not. I thought I was going to experience something thrilling and exhilarating, and instead found myself sitting through a movie that is merely amusingly scary. Thanks to too many people I listened to talking about it, I expected Resident Evil to be both much funnier than it actually is, and far more action packed than it actually is. It spends much more time building tension, and when considering the creature effects, to me it occasionally came across like a cross between Alien (which gets very directly referenced, with bodily fluid burning through floors like acid) and Beetlejuice.

The genre lovers out there are raving about this Resident Evil—a kind of franchise reboot that, it turns out, is actually the eighth adaptation of the popular video game series that dates back a solid thirty years—and I kind of get it. I, on the other hand, am a film lover first, and while this Resident Evil is undeniably entertaining, it feels like at least a minor step down from director and co-writer Zach Cregger’s first two films, Barbarian and Weapons. Both of those films featured genuine innovations of the narrative form of cinema. Resident Evil certainly features fun tweaks to video-game-to-film adaptation conventions, but here is where I would argue “innovation” is a rather strong word.

When it all comes down to it, Resident Evil is just another zombie movie. Okay, so the zombies here have tentacles, and have a few other tricks up their sleeves. There are certain shots where creature design looks like the demogorgon from Stranger Things (itself a retro sensation without any original ideas) by way of Little Shop of Horrors. I realize most of the audience seeing Resident Evil will be far too young to even get that last reference. This Resident Evil has been characterized as “breaking all the rules,” and yet I can think of better movies that also broke the same rules.

But, again, if you love zombies, then this is a movie for you. To be fair, this film is still far better than most of the other zombie movies, and certainly horror movies, that have ever been made. Of course, given the genre we’re talking about here, it would not be inappropriate to say that the bar is in hell. Zach Cregger doesn’t have to do that much to be relatively impressive.

So here are the ways Resident Evil did impress me. After so many pointlessly over-indulgent movies racking up runtimes of increasingly more than two and a half hours, this one clocking in at 95 minutes—which means less than 90 minutes at the point the credits roll—is a genuine dream. I’ll give the movie this much: there is not a second wasted in it. Thrilling or not, it’s never boring, and it plays like The Odyssey if all the traveling vignettes were grotesque monsters that existed for their own sake.

And Austin Abrams, who also had a key supporting part in Weapons (the very distinct difference between the two showcasing his versatility of talent), deserves special mention. He is Bryan, the young man whose point of view we follow from the beginning until the end. He’s couriering a package, which he assumes to be an organ, to Raccoon City General Hospital, and you’ve got to hand it to him—the guy never loses that package. Abrams plays a guy with a grunt job running an extra errand for double pay very well, and his ineptitude with guns in real life is well observed. He even talks about how he only shoots guns in video games, one of the few references to gaming in the film that I actually clocked, out of presumably a bunch.

I wish I could say the same for the rest of the cast, except that it features fun casting in bit parts by players who are ultimately wasted in far too little screen time: Paul Walter Hauser; Griffin Newman; Severance’s Jack Cherry; True Detective: Night Country’s Kali Reis. Hauser in particular is saddled with some of the film’s clunkiest dialogue.

I do wish more horror movies would dispense with the backstories ostensibly added to give the characters more depth. People come to these movies to see horror and mayhem, not an examination of the characters’ psychological damage. This is often a fatal flaw, as in They Will Kill You from earlier this year: every time the movie returns to the sisters’ damaged past, the movie grinds to a halt. Mercifully, we get none of that shit in Resident Evil. We do get a minor backstory involving potentially life-altering news from Ryan’s girlfriend (who we only ever hear as a voice on the phone), but only in two brief scenes, and in the end it largely only builds up to one of the movie’s better punchlines.

In other words, there’s a lot for even me to enjoy in Resident Evil. It just doesn’t stack up to Cregger’s previous work. He was very open about wanting to pivot with this film and just do something super fun, and he clearly had fun making it. And I’m glad! I’m just not willing to go so far as to consider this movie anything special.

Something about that woman doesn’t feel right.

Overall: B

THE CYCLE OF LOVE

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

If The Cycle of Love isn’t the most earnestly romantic documentary ever made, then it must be close. Director Orlando von Einsiedel does fill about half of the film with narrative recreations of the two lead characters’ pasts, using very pretty young actors and blurring the line between documentary and narrative feature—but, in so doing, he actually intensifies the romance. Much of the literal narration comes from present-day interviews with PK Mahanandia and Lotta von Schedvin, who are also the subjects of the film.

This is the true story of a young man who traveled, in 1977, nearly 7,000 kilometers from Delhi, India to reunite with the traveling Swedish woman he’d fallen in love with in in India at her home in Borås, Sweden. The road distance between these two points is 7,355 km (4,570 miles), but PK was not able to make this trip as a straight shot—he had to bypass Pakistan altogether due to not having a passport, and endured a number of setbacks along the way. He was also offered very moving assistance from kind strangers along the way, allowing him to travel by train in certain segments. What makes his story so distinctive and unique is that he traveled more than half that distance by bicycle.

This couple’s relationship is a matter of public record, but Orlando von Einsiedel’s edit of their story is decidedly coy about their fates. We get present-day interviews with both of them, but we do not see them together. PK is seen in India, and Lotta is seen in a home presumably in Sweden. We see her reading some of the letters PK wrote her while making his journey that took him over four months, and she even comments, through tears, that she hasn’t read them since shortly after receiving them. You spend much of the film wondering if PK didn’t make it all the way there, or maybe he took so long that Lotta was forced to move on and wound up with someone else. It feels very much as though von Einsiedel intended this. The story of this guy riding a bike from India to Europe would be extraordinary no matter what, but amping the intrigue and raising the stakes is what great filmmaking is all about.

Now, is this movie great? I must admit to some ambivalence about it. There is a sort of plaintive tone to much of it, with a pacing that can generously be described as reserved. The Cycle of Love has a 98-minute runtime and it kind of feels like two and a half hours. And yet, by the end it had completely won me over, I was so moved by its purity of heart and uplifting sincerity. It’s extraordinarily rare to see something so completely uncynical.

We do get to see a smattering of film clips and photos from PK’s and Lotta’s youth, but mostly we see flashbacks recreated by actors, who are both decidedly prettier than the real people they are playing: Chirag Lobo as PK; and 24-year-old Norwegian actor Mina Dale as Lotta. We see them meet when Lotta is visiting Delhi after having traveled the so-called “Hippie Trail” for 22 days from Sweden, and she sits for one of PK’s portrait drawings. When Lotta returns to Sweden and PK eventually follows after her on his second-hand bicycle, these very impressive drawn portraits are largely how he supports himself along the way.

Orlando von Einsiedel takes yet another fascinating approach in the construction of this film: Chirag Lobo and Mina Dale are actors, but as we see depictions of PK in the flashback scenes encountering many people along his travels, who are clearly real people and not actors. This raises a lot of questions. Did these people know they were part of a recreation? Did they know Lobo was an actor and not really a guy traveling to Europe to be reunited with the woman he loves? I haven’t found answers yet with the specificity I desire, but it sounds like they simply took a camera crew on a road trip and had conversations with people met along the way, and then creatively and cleverly edited the ineractions into the film’s narrative. Von Einsiedel told The Movable Feast that the real PK traveled along with them, and was moved by experiences not exactly like this own but evidently similar enough.

These sorts of details leave me more impressed with The Cycle of Love as a cinematic accomplishment the more I consider it after the fact. This is a truly unique endeavor, using mostly real people even in recreations made with an actor for a documentary. There may be a solid helping of genuine performance in this film, but its sentiments are entirely genuine. There is even a brief moment of Lobo-as-PK chatting with a diverse array of young people going through letters at a post office, and one of them explains a tattoo to him, which turns out to be in solidarity with a queer friend struggling with the possibility of being disowned by his family. In plenty of other hands, this would come off as corny tokenism, but this is a film of such sincerity that I deeply appreciated it.

There is a quality to The Cycle of Love that might be best described as “you have to be in right mood for it.” And I don’t mean its jarring lack of cynicism and its unapologetic hope for humanity—I mean the somewhat labored way in which the story unfolds. An action movie, this is not; this is the kind of movie you want to quietly marinate in, should that be the vibe that you’re looking for. I must admit that, on this level, I wasn’t quite feeling it for a while. But again, that ending—truly contrived as it was—perfectly landed the plane. If you’ll pardon the discordant metaphor for a movie about a guy on a bike. I left misty-eyed in the best way, and any of the hopeless romantics out there are bound to be moved by PK and Lotta’s incredible story.

You might be taken aback by how charmed you are in the end.

Overall: B+

PRACTICAL MAGIC 2

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

There’s an oddly contemporary dissonance to whatever math there is supposed to be in the timeline of Practical Magic 2—which, as it happens, is based on the novel The Book of Magic by Alice Hoffman, itself a sequel to the original novel Practical Magic. These novels were published in 1995 and 2021, respectively; a 26-year gap—though the timelines in their stories were apparently roughly 20 years apart. Plus, The Book of Magic is the fourth in the Practical Magic series of books, but this is only the first film sequel to be made—28 years after the first. But, although specific ages of characters are never revealed in either film, we certainly know that Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, Diane Wiest and Stockard Channing have aged 28 years—albeit with Bullock and Kidman having had work done, making them appear unnaturally younger than they actually are (this isn’t quite as much the case with Wiest and Channing, who are 78 and 82, respectively). Bullock and Kidman are now 62 and 59, respectively; but their characters’ two daughters, who were played by girls who were 10 and 7 years old in the 1998 film, are now played by 28-year-old Maisie Williams and 26-year-old Joey King. One of them was a toddler and the other not even born when the first film was released, but, I guess everyone is playing younger here across the board. (Incidentally, 46-year-old Lee Pace is playing Bullock’s love interest in this movie. Get it, Sandy!)

Anyway, realistically, Bullock and Kidman’s Sally and Gillian Owens sisters would realistically be contending with grandchildren closer to the age of the kids in the first film by now, but, whatever. In Practical Magic 2, Antonia (Maisie Williams) is a medical intern, and Kylie (Joey King) appears to be still in college—and falling in love with Gideon (Xolo Maridueña). Anyone familiar with the first film knows where this is going, which is the predictable concept around which the plots of both films revolve: the Owens family has been suffering a curse for generations, in which any men who fall in love with their women meet an untimely death.

I must admit, I have some questions. Does the Owens family never produce any male offspring? Evidently not. And why do we never learn anything at all about Sally and Gillian’s mother, except that she “died of a broken heart” because—of course—her husband met with an untimely death? The original Practical Magic ended happily with Sally mated with an Arizona cop played by Aidan Quinn, but by the time we’re seeing Practical Magic 2, we learn quickly that that character has also met with an untimely death. In response, Sally casts a spell to make her daughters forget about being witches and makes Gillian promise never to tell them. To call this contrived could be the understatement of the year, but we have to get a further storyline from somewhere, don’t we?

Again: whatever. Movies like Practical Magic are built to withstand nitpicks like this, because they exist only to charm audiences coming for fluff and magic. I have always thought the original film could have been better, but still had its charms; I’ve seen some reviewers of this sequel characterize it as lacking “the magic” of the original, evidently forgetting how the original played in its time. Practical Magic is more of exactly the same, which actually makes it the exceedingly rare “lega-sequel” that actually matches and lives up to its predecessor. Anyone fond of the original is just as likely to be fond of this one, particularly if you are fond of the older principals in the cast.

We don’t get broadly successful movies like this with so many main characters who are women, after all. And by all accounts, the fluff-and-magic of the movies honor the books on which they are based; there is no serious depth getting missed anywhere here. It does make a difference that characters this thinly drawn across the board are played by such deeply talented actors, without whom the film would easily pass by totally ignored.

When it comes to “witchy” stuff, these stories never got super deep into that, either. We see spells and hexes, and actually more onscreen magic than in the first film, with more involved and better (if not perfect) special effects as well. But, as always, this is about the generational relationships between aunts and nieces, and more importantly the bond between sisters. This is always rather slight in characterization, but it all still makes for perfectly pleasant entertainment. I’m not going to be rushing to rewatch this movie any time soon, but I always felt the same about the original, which I’ve probably seen at least four times now. I suppose that still averages out to once a decade. Still, when I inevitably go to watch it again another decade from now when craving something both nostalgic and witchy, I’ll probably inevitably double-feature it with this one. It’s just as good, after all, and as I already clearly demonstrated, it’s fun to overanalyze everyone’s respective ages. Youth is temporary, but nitpicking is eternal!

In any case, predictable pleasantness does not preclude having a good time. Practical Magic 2 is just as blandly cute as you’d expect or want from it.

A family reunion you’d actually want to attend.

Overall: B

HOPE

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

I had such high hopes for . . . well, you know. I was genuinely excited to see this movie, and then walked away disappointed. At the ending, such as it was, I was completely baffled.

What does writer-director think this is, Dune Part One? Sort of, in a way: he reportedly has a script all ready to go for a sequel that he hopes to be part of a trilogy, depending on this film’s success. And what if there never is a sequel? Hope ends so abruptly that I actually said out loud, “What?” And this was after two and a half hours of non-stop armed pursuit of what gradually are revealed to be not just one, but multiple aliens in Hope Harbor, a small South Korean town very close to the Demiitarized Zone.

With a runtime this long, I expected Hope to take its time a bit—which it does, for the first twenty minutes or so, after which it’s fairly effective non-stop tension or action. Na Hong-jin employs a lot of economical filmmaking, clearly saving money on effects shots by having his characters pursue an unseen “monster” that is constantly on another block or out of frame. The many scenes with production design of massive destruction is impressively detailed, but I kept wondering why the town is so quiet and deserted. Apparently it’s mostly elderly people who live here, but you’d think there would still be a lot of panicked screaming and running in the streets. Instead, we get destroyed streets with dead and maimed bodies here and there, with no set pieces involving any more than just a handful of extras.

The camera follows police chief Ko Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) as he follows the trail of an evident monster through the town, gun in hand and terrified. In the beginning, there is a dead cow found in the middle of a road, and the wounds indicate something very large having attacked it. There is speculation as to whether it’s a rogue tiger. But as Bum-seok and assorted others pursue it, at first there is some logic in the idea that whatever it is needs to be killed before it starts killing everyone in town. Never mind the fact that the whole population of the town seems to be gone already—something I could not stop thinking about—but the longer Bum-seok pursues this thing, the clearer it becomes that it is unnaturally gigantic, and he is no match for it. Neither are any of his cohorts, and nor really any of the guns or ammo they possess. And still they persist. Why? I would be thinking about was a place to hide.

Eventually this creature wreaking havoc on the town appears onscreen, and I can hardly convey the depths of my disappointment. It really just looks like a weirdly agile, gigantic cartoon man. I thought this was supposed to be an alien? Indeed it is, we discover soon enough, but another group of men is exploring the forest outside of town, and the more they discover the weirder everything gets. I’m okay with plot twists revealing more questions than answers, but Hope offers no answers whatsoever, just an Escher painting of endless questions, which I found very frustrating.

I really couldn’t tell if Na Hong-jin was just drawing inept characters with cliched mindsets for his own amusement, or if there was some kind of commentary going on. It’s clear to the viewers very quickly that fighting these aliens with guns is ineffective, and not once does it ever occur to a single one of them to try a different approach. Not even after the aliens pick them up and throw them against buildings or trees, or in some cases whack one of them with the hurled body of another. No matter what happens, even after Ko Bum-seok finds himself briefly feeling sorry for the first creature, it’s the same tactic: guns, guns, guns. Na Hong-jin must be going for something a little deeper here, because more than once a person is asked, “Where did you get all these guns?” and the reply is always a variation on “That’s not important right now!”

Over time we find out these aliens aren’t quite what they seem, although none of the characters register this deeply enough to interrogate things like, say, motivation. Actually, Ko Bum-seok thinks about this briefly, one time, and then never brings it up again. He’s too busy angrily shooting at aliens with ineffective bullets. Eventually the movie tells us way more about the aliens than the characters ever discover, but in a way that answers nothing and just leaves us bewildered.

Perhaps the sequel script is designed to dole out some of these deeply desired answers, but after sitting through Hope, I half expect another installment to be just another series of narrative rabbit holes. This movie feels like it’s trying to be some kind of thrilling setup, but instead it’s a series of set pieces that have their share of thrills but collectively amount to nothing more than “Huh?”

I also can’t decide whether I might have liked Hope better if it had better—or at the very least more consistent–special effects. The very first alien creature looks like cheap CGI. Later ones have some surprisingly impressive renderings but then look like they’re in an outdated video game as they move and run. There are some very different creature shapes seen, with some clues as to how they are related to each other but with other examples of differences that have no clear relationship to each other. Much of Hope feels like a lot of ideas thrown at the wall, by an author who is just hoping to come up with ways to make them click together later. For now, how about we just abruptly roll credits!

Very early in the film, we see a sign that references keeping out “infiltrators,” a clear reference to North Koreans. It feels like the suggestion of some kind of commentary, as does a lot in Hope, which are either never more than suggestions or are getting lost in translation. Is it possible that Hope somehow actually succeeds and I just don’t get it? Sure. Is this a movie that simply has no hope of working for me? Absolutely.

I really wanted to see what was around that corner, until I did.

Overall: C+