MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE - DEAD RECKONING PART ONE

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

I am of two minds about this, the seventh entry in the Mission: Impossible film franchise—starring a sixty-one-year-old Tom Cruise, twenty-seven years after the first of these films was released. Which is to say, Tom Cruise’s evident desire to one day die on a movie set, perhaps during yet another stunt on a train, is starting to run out of steam.

And I am a bona fide fan of this fanchise, in spite of having actively ignored it for its first fifteen years. It was Ghost Protocol in 2012—the first of the sequels not to be given a number—that made me a convert, largely on its spectacular sequence on the outside of the Burj Khalifa building in Dubai. That remains my favorite in the series, but I would not argue with anyone who asserted that the films actually got better with each installment from there, from Rogue Nation in 2015 to Fallout in 2018. I consistently gave all three of these movies a highly recommended B-plus.

This is a better action franchise than the wildly uneven Fast and Furious, and far more fun than the self-indulgent John Wick series. Well, until now, anyway.

I’d say Dead Reckoning Part One takes a bit of a dip. “Bit” is the operative word here; it’s not a very big dip. This movie is an undeniably exciting watch, but I can’t say it does much in the way of innovation. Previous installments have had signature set pieces that really make them stand out, from the Burj Khalifa to clinging to the side of a plane to a practically shot skydive sequence. Dead Reckoning spends a lot of time referencing things we’ve seen already: a fight atop a runaway train that recalls the first Mission: Impossible; a car chase through Venice that recalls similar sequences in both John Wick and James Bond movies; an admittedly spectacular set piece involving train cars sliding over a cliff that, if you’re old enough anyway, recalls a very similar sequence in the 1997 film The Lost World: Jurassic Park.

We do, at least, get to see our hero, Ethan Hunt, ride a motorcycle right off a cliff to lean into a parachute dive, only to cut soon after to a very funny moment when he crashes through a window into one of the cars of the aforementioned train. This cliff jump was seen ad nauseam in the trailers, which effectively racheted up the anticipation. It’s a great, beautifully shot stunt, which is one of the few moments in this movie that don’t last long enough.

Which brings me to the thing about Dead Reckoning Part One that genuinely impressed me. This is by 16 minutes the longest of the Mission: Impossible films, but you’d never know it from watching it: at least two different action set pieces go on quite a long time, but there are actually fewer such set pieces than usual in a movie like this—in fact, this time around, director Christopher McQuarrie (who has now done the most recent three of these films) moved away from the traditional cold open with a huge stunt. Instead, we start with a submarine sequence that is more concerned with suspense and intrigue than with action, one of several elements that deliberately harken back to the very first film. (Henry Czerny also returns as Eugene Kittridge, having last been seen in the 1996 original.) And still, not a moment feels particularly wasted, at least in terms of being entertained.

Did this need to be split into two parts, though? I’d have been much happier with a film of this run time, with the same number of action sequences, with an actual resolution at the end rather than a literal cliffhanger. Evidently McQuarrie and Cruise were so enamored with all the set piece ideas they had that they wanted to cram them into one, ridiculously long story. But, I mean, why not just save some for the inevitable next sequel?

That said, I’m not sure how many sequels this franchise needs. Once we get next year’s Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part Two, maybe we can settle on the idea that eight is enough. This is the first time in roughly a decade that the franchise has felt less rather than more propulsive than the prior installment. Honestly, as great as McQuarrie has been, it may just be a matter of getting some fresh directorial blood into the franchise. Tom Cruise will be kicking ass with whichever director it takes until one final kick throws his back out.

A quick side note: I do love how many women get showcased in these movies. We do get Ehtan’s beloved buddies yet again, Luther (Ving Rhames, the only other person besides Cruise himself who has been in every one of these movies) and Benji (Simon Pegg, who has been in all of them since Mission: Impossible III). We also get Rebecca Ferguson returning for a third outing as Ilsa Faust; Vanessa Kirby for the second time as The White Widow (doing an excellent job as both that character, and a different character disguised as her); and franchise newcomer Hayley Atwell as Grace, a skilled pickpocket who gets yanked into the proceedings. All of them play pivotal roles in the story, and none of them are particularly objectified or the subject of womanizing. In fact all three of them are ass kickers, although honestly as characters Grace is the least memorable of them.

I would say Dead Reckoning does have a slight villain problem, in that any human villain really only counts as a henchman—and the real villain this time around is an artificial intelligence. The whole plot, ridiculous as always (and we would expect nothing less from this franchise) revolves around a global race of nations to get their hands on a key, which will potentially unlock control over this AI that can be used to take over the world, but which is essentially well on its way to that all on its own. How this plays out gets predictably muddled, as it’s all just fodder for the aforementioned action sequences. It also results in a massive threat that has no personality. And a movie is always better if its villain has personality.

We do get Esai Morales as Gabriel, someone returning from Ethan Hunt’s distant past (but never having been in the franchise before), who ultimately functions as a meat-puppet of the AI. Gabriel could have been infused with some personality, but Morales doesn’t give him much, nor does the script.

Don’t get me wrong, I was very engaged with and entertained by this movie. When it’s “same shit, different year,” it’s easier to cope with when it’s still good shit. I just didn’t have quite the same level of emotional investment as in previous installments, not so much because of the characters, who have never had all that many dimensions to them, but because the same level of cinematic inventiveness isn’t quite there. It’s still a serviceable outing that gets the job done as an action movie.

This franchise is still hanging in there.

Overall: B

BIOSPHERE

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

I have wildly mixed feelings about Biosphere, which I really wanted to like. I also went into it quite eager to find out what this movie about two men stuck for years, with only each other, in a sealed biosphere after a global catastrophe, would have to say about sex, and attraction, and what having no other option does to people. We’ve all heard the stories about prison, right? Presumably this would be a similar scenario, just minus the criminal aspect.

What I did not expect was for it to tackle sexuality within minutes, and head on, and then effectively make it part of the entire premise. It just didn’t do it in anywhere near the way I thought it might, or even that I particularly wanted it to. I won’t spoil the turns the story takes, but I will say it felt a little bit like a copout, and like a movie that thinks it’s progressive is actually being a little regressive.

Beyond that, the premise has vast potential for deeply nuanced discussion of sexuality and gender roles, of which director Mel Eslyn, co-writing with Mark Duplass who also co-stars, barely scratches the surface. Instead we are presented with a pair of childhood friends who are now dealing with the fallout—quite literally, it would seem—of the most recent U.S. President’s deeply bad decisions, in the face of the advice of a best-friend advisor (from the opposing political party, no less).

The fact that these characters are middle-aged men who were recently the President and his advisor turns out to be utterly pointless. Very few truly political ideas get explored, and this backstory seems to exist only as a handy backstory and nothing more. I’d have found Biosphere much more successful were it about two best friends who happened to build a safe haven in a post-apocalyptic wasteland that was not of their own making. That way the story could focus on their relationship as friends and regular people, Americans sure, but the idea of their political leadership (or lack thereof) feels very awkwardly shoehorned in.

It also has nothing to do with the supposed “evolutionary jump” that occurs to the fish in their tiny pond, as well as to Billy and Ray themselves. And here we come to my biggest hangup about Biosphere, the same issue I had with last year’s Crimes of the Future: the preposterousness of a so-called leap in evolution that does not, could not, and will not ever happen. The fact that they even directly reference the “Life finds a way” quote from Jurassic Park is meant as amusing but just underscores how derivative this truly hair brained idea is. This could have been so much more incisive a story had Eslyn and Duplass merely stuck with an exploration of what forced, extended isolation with just one other person does to people in ways that are actually plausible.

To be fair, that is not especially the Duplass brand. Mark Duplass plays Billy, the former president; Sterling K. Brown plays Ray, the guy who was really pulling the strings—this being one of the sources of resentment between them, which could just as easily have been done without making them titans of politics now rendered restless man-children.

What eventually happens to them borders on otherworldly. A bonkers as the plot becomes, they are fun to watch together, and the one real compliment I will give to the writing is the fact that this is a two-hander in the truest sense of the phrase—we see no other actors onscreen, ever, except these two—and the film still manages to hold the viewer’s attention. Duplass and Brown feel like childhood friends.

But, the more Biosphere went on, the more embarrassed I became by it, as it couches itself in what it wants us to take on faith are extrapolations of real-world scientific ideas. Except that fish are not amphibians and humans are not fish, and Biosphere is finding ways to conflate them all in ways it hopes we won’t notice.

I might be willing to forgive a lot if, for instance, the fantastical things that occur were a springboard or nuanced examinations of human relationships. I think Biosphere is crafted to make us think that is indeed what it’s doing, except that every idea it examines, it does little more than regard as a slight amusement. This is a movie deeply confused about what it wants to be, which is a disservice to any of the legitimate ideas it touches on.

The laws of nature get thrown right out the biosphere window.

Overall: C+

JOY RIDE

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

The surprising irony of Joy Ride is that it’s when it gets earnest that it actually works best. There are moments of seriousness, and even more moments of genuine sweetness, that really land, and endear us to every one of the four lead characters, who are on a road trip in China.

It’s in the comedy that Joy Ride falters, about half the time. The gags are spotty at best, with punchlines landing effectively maybe half the time. The writers, comprised of a team of three, seem to have taken a kitchen-sink approach, throwing in seemingly every idea they’ve got, without a lot of honing. The result is a comedic mixed bag. This means there actually are plenty of laugh-out-loud moments, and if you’re willing to just roll with it all, you’ll have a good time. But, because of the rapid-fire nature of the comedy, plenty of it also falls flat. At least there’s never enough time spent to linger on the flatness, as we quickly move on to the next attempt.

I never want to say this about a movie, but I actually feel like Joy Ride could have benefited from some focus groups. On the other hand, how the hell they could find a representative sample of who they think is this movie’s target audience, I have no idea.

Part of it is the marketing, which bills this movie as a “raunchy comedy”—which, to be fair, it is. But, the trailers really don’t indicate that there’s a lot more to it than that. What’s more, Joy Ride actually avoids the pitfalls of countless “raunchy comedies” from the early 2000s, which persisted in revealing a supposedly wholesome core, which always felt disingenuous. Nothing about Joy Ride feels disingenuous, even though a lot of it is pretty contrived. No one is learning any lessons that feel shoehorned in from a totally different tone of a movie.

These characters grow and develop, rather than learning lessons, per se. And the best thing about them is the actors who play them: Ashley Park as Audrey, an Asian girl adopted by White parents; Sherry Cola as Lolo, Audrey’s very sexually liberated best friend since childhood; Stephanie Hsu as Kat, Audrey’s roommate from college; and Sabrina Wu as Deadeye, Lolo’s socially awkward cousin. When lifelong overachiever Audrey is sent on a business trip to China to close the deal, Lolo tags along as her ostensible interpreter; Deadeye tags along as a hanger-on; and they meet up with working Chinese actress Kat while there, even though Lolo and Kat don’t get along (for now).

The plot gets a little more convoluted as it goes along, with Audrey only finally being convinced to track down her birth mother as a means of impressing the guy with whom she’s meant to close a business deal (played by Malaysian comedian Ronny Chieng). The foursome of delightfully brassy young women travel by plane, by bus, by train and by boat, from Seattle to Beijing to rural China to Seoul, South Korea—all of which are represented by location shots in and around Vancouver, B.C.

There’s a fair amount of sex along the way. Plenty of genuinely hot men come and go in smaller parts. The core cast of four have real chemistry with each other, and Joy Ride has a refreshing amount of diverse representation in it—both across the Asian nationalities and across sexuality and gender lines. By the end of the film, Deadeye is being referred to casually with they/them pronouns, and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen that get worked into a film’s narratively so subtly and organically.

All of which is to say, there is a lot to like and enjoy about Joy Ride. It’s just that the comedy isn’t always one of them, which is a bit unfortunate given that the comedy is supposed to be the reason to see it. In other words: you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and you’ll occasionally think it’s a bit lame. I wanted, and kind of expected, a laugh-a-minute riot. I’ll settle for what I got, which was a good laugh every ten or fifteen minutes, with some sweet connections between friends in a silly movie.

Filthy minds and golden hearts: the foursome of JOY RIDE.

Overall: B

THE LESSON

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

The Lesson is a fine movie with a serviceable story, and will hold the attention of plenty viewers with no particular interest in looking upon it with a critical eye.

You can perhaps see my predicament in that context. I won’t make the blanket statement that I am incapable of looking upon a film without a critical eye; plenty of wildly entertaining titles are built for that very purpose—although even those have had varying levels of success. The issue with The Lesson is that it actively invites a critical eye, and in so doing underscores its own flaws.

Any film about literary figures, and particularly any film about a supposedly brilliant writer, can only truly succeed if its own script features brilliant writing. Unfortunately, the writing is the weakest thing about The Lesson. None of the fictionalized prose written by J.M. Sinclair, famed novelist, comes across as particularly brilliant, as it frequently gets read aloud. I almost feels ironic that the script, written by Alex MacKeith for his first feature film, is an original work. Maybe he wrote it as a movie instead of as a novel is because it wouldn’t quite work as a novel—there would be far too much expectation to see many more paragraphs of Sinclair’s “brilliant” work.

Another irony is that Sinclair is actually played brilliantly by Richard E. Grant, who elevates the material, as he is wont to do in virtually any role he plays. Now 66 years old, his very talent seems to get richer with age, and he disappears into his parts. Here, he plays a narcissistic and pompous old man who has let a lifetime of adoration get to his head. And, along with his wife Hélène (Julie Delpy) and his son Bertie (Stephen McMillan), they are still in the throes of grieving the loss of the favored son.

Thrown into this mix is young writer Liam (Daryl McCormack), who has been hired on as live-in tutor to Bertie, to assist in studies for a prized college admission. We see the story play out from Liam’s perspective, through which we are subject to multiple plot twists, more than one of which can be seen coming from a mile away.

And yet: this ensemble, even including the stoic butler (Crispin Letts), is esceptionally well cast across the board, and I felt The Lesson was worth seeing for that reason alone. Grant is the clear standout, but Delpy brings a mysteriously quiet presence, and McMillan plays Bertie’s petulance under enormous pressure wonderfully.

When it comes to the story, I will only say this: at the outset it seems to be about the relationship between Liam and Bertie, with even a very brief hint of romance that quickly gets shut down; I was actually a little disappointed, not that romance doesn’t blossom between them per se, but that neither of their sexuality ever gets directly addressed at all. And in that case, why hint at it just that once? Ultimately, The Lesson becomes about all of these people’s relationship with Sinclair, and whether he will respond to people with cruelty or neglect, depending on his mood. This shift in focus could have worked if not for the story playing out from that point forward so conventionally. There are moments of contrivance that are unnecessary at best, and one shot, meant to trick us into thinking Liam is about to smother Sinclar to death with a pillow and then turning out to be a fake-out, borders on unforgivable. That was a moment that genuinely deserved an eye roll.

There is an element of frustration to watching The Lesson, because it offers no insights whatsoever, with the possible exception of skilled performers making the best of what they were given to work with. The story plays out almost as an ode to mediocrity, but the actors are anything but. Which is to say, they’re all worth watching here, but they’ve all been in better things before.

Have any of us learned anything here today?

Overall: B

NO HARD FEELINGS

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

I’m a little mystified by the decidedly mixed reviews for No Hard Feelings, a modern take on the sex comedy that, I felt. did a solid job on updating the genre. Granted, the premise is both utterly ridiculous and a little cringey: a 32-year-old woman (Jennifer Lawrence) is hired by the parents of a 19-year-old young man (Andrew Barth Feldman) to date him and bring him out of his shell as preparation for college. I wouldn’t necessarily begrudge anyone unable to get past that as a setup. Pun intended.

The thing is, No Hard Feelings actually manages to transcend any potential cringe factors, and winds up being surprisingly sweet—in addition to being consistently funny. Now, it’s not hilarious, and I can’t say it has the rewatchable factor of, say, the 2019 comedy Booksmart, which I think may be the funniest movie of the past five years. I hesitate to call it “lacking” in humor, though, especially given its high-caliber performances that rival any drama.

I also feel compelled to stress that No Hard Feelings is definitively better than its trailer might have suggested. When I first saw the trailer, I was cautiously optimistic at best, but fully ready to be disappointed by this movie. I wasn’t at all.

It’s really rare that a comedy manages to showcase a performer’s broad range of talents. Jennifer Lawrence is as good here as she’s been in anything, and Andrew Barth Feldman is a delightful discovery. Both of them have competent control of nuances you would never expect to find in a movie like this.

The history of film is also rife with examples of actors playing far younger than they actually are—Jennifer Lawrence herself was catapulted to superstardom in the 2012 adaptation of The Hunger Games, playing a sixteen-year-old at the age of 22. Lawrence is now 32 years old, and that is also the age of her character, Maddie. Andrew Barth Feldman is all of 21 years old, 20 when the movie was filmed, and he plays 19-year-old Percy. There’s something refreshing about that, in addition to the flipping of the historic script, with onscreen couples featuring a man far older than the woman.

Somehwat miraculously, No Hard Feelings never gets creepy, or even particularly weird. I told someone before going to see this movie that I was seeing a “raunchy comedy,” and it really isn’t even that. It’s barely even a sex comedy. It’s really about two very different people, at very different points in their lives, finding surprisingly genuine moments of connection.

Of course, “creepy” is not the same as awkward—and this movie has awkwardness to spare. But, it is never once disingenuous, and it is always fun and entertaining. Although I do have to say: there’s a bit of a running joke about Maddie’s friends, who are expecting a baby, not really liking the homemade baby crib mobile Maddie crafts for them, out of an umbrella and dangling surf boards. I thought it was a really sweet gesture that they should have genuinely appreciated—especially as these friends are surfers—but, whatever!

No Hard Feelings is about people making misguided decisions. I suppose the very premise of this movie could be regarded as one, except that the characters in the movie actually develop in satisfying ways. I suppose Percy being this intense recluse who then quite easily starts talking to peers kind of out of nowhere is a possible target for nitpicking. I didn’t care so much, because wherever the material falters—and it only ever does to minor degrees—the acting and the chemistry onscreen elevates it. I had just as much fun as I wanted at this movie and I think others will too.

Jennifer Lawrence and Andrew Barth Feldman are awkward in all the right ways.

Overall: B+

EVERY BODY

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

We are informed early on in Every Body, an excellent documentary on intersex people that predictably not nearly enough people are seeing, that in the United States alone, up to 1.7% of the population “has an intersex trait.” That amounts to an estimated 564,000 people. Much more to the point, up to 0.7% of Americans have clinically identifiable sexual or reproductive variations which may at one point warrant surgery. That amounts to about 230,000 people—or, the equivalent of the population of Spokane, Washington.

The idea that the systemic issues faced by any minority group should be ignored precisely because they are supposedly so small in number is preposterous. It’s mathematically illogical. And I should be frank here, in a way that director Julie Cohen does not bother to be: the queer community has been historically problematic on this front as well—just as we have been regarding queer people of color, just as we have been regarding trans people. Anyone complaining about the inclusion of the purple circle on a yellow background in the design of the progress flag clearly doesn’t get it, especially considering the vast overlap of struggles between the trans and intersex communities, in spite of them being two distinct groups. Again: rejecting their inclusion is illogical. (Side note: there are also fair debates about this.)

Small-minded people have a long, sad history of conflating sex with gender, and conflating sexuality with both. The deeply conditioned obsession with binary systems, which provably do not exist within any strict boundaries in nature (human or otherwise), persist with deeply frustrating tenacity. The film Every Body quite economically underscores this notion by opening the film with several clips of “gender reveal” parties, an idea that rivals astrology as the dumbest thing currently known to humankind. We see expectant parents, of both evident genders confined by the binary, getting truly nuts-excited by the news of their baby being a “boy” or a “girl.” All they are doing, really, is jumping up and down at the news of a visible penis, like an obsessive fan at a Beatles concert. Seriously, what are we all doing?

Cohen then introduces us to the three outspoken, out, intersex activists that Every Body almost exclusively focuses on: Sean Saifa Wall, assigned female at birth and now using he/him pronouns; River Gallo, assigned male at birth and now the only known working intersex actor in Los Angeles, using they/them pronouns; and Alicia Roth Weigel, assigned female at birth and now using she/her/they/them pronouns.

These three individuals provide more than enough content, and food for thought, for a feature film running at a brisk 92 minutes, but I would have liked a few more subjects to illustrate the very diverse array of intersex experiences, because the way being intersex manifests itself is extraordinarily diverse. Weigel is a uniquely fascinating case as she was born with internal testes and has XY chromosomes, but was assigned female at birth simply due to a lack of a penis—and she alone disproves any boneheaded arguments about “basic biology” proving any kind of sex binary. She stood as a physical rebuke to the transphobic Texas “bathroom bill” when she testified against it. By mandating that all people use the bathroom of their “biological sex,” Weigel would be legally compelled to use the men’s room, even though she was raised as a girl based on medical practices and laws inconsistent with what is currently being faced. And what sense is there in denying life-saving medical care to one group while forcing it upon another group that doesn’t need it?

The most important concern here, by far, of course, is bodily autonomy: surgeries forced on children, ranging from infancy to puberty, without their consent, which are regularly performed to this day. There are now decades of this practice, all traced back to a study later revealed to have a false conclusion, based on the case of David Reimer. Reimer had a botched circumcision as an infant, then his mother was advised by doctors just to raise him as a girl. We see a large number of clips of him getting interviewed in the late nineties, speaking out about his horrible experience and how the same horrors are being inflicted on other children based on incorrect conclusions about his case—and he wasn’t even intersex. He is not interviewed for this film because he committed suicide in 2004 at the age of 38.

Amnesty International notes that the number of people with intersex traits is comparable to that of people with red hair. Can you imagine forcing some kind of physical “correction” on every person with red hair? Presumably you would find that both preposterous and inhumane. What the film Every Body does best is humanize intersex people, and make the case that it really doesn’t matter how small the number is: barbarism is barbarism.

We clearly have a long way to go in terms of cultural understanding, as the resistance to understanding and accepting intersexuality is rooted in the longstanding, mistaken notion that there are only two sexes, and therefore any aberration is abominable, and worthy only of secrecy, shame, and correction. Anyone with sense can see how wrong-minded such thinking is, and Every Body is a deeply effective tool for directing a spotlight onto that sense.

Ending intersex surgery, one step at a time.

Overall: A-

INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY

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

The longer you trade on nostalgia, the more you’ll get diminishing returns, because, frankly . . . people die. How many people are even still around to keep loving Indiana Jones from their introduction to him in Raiders of the Lost Ark? That movie was released 42 years ago. It spawned two sequels by the time the eighties ended, and for basically a generation afterward, we all moved about our lives thinking Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade was indeed his last.

Then came Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, released 19 years later, and 15 years ago. Harrison Ford was basically regarded as an old man even then, and in 2008 he was 66 years old.

He’s 80 now. And, lest you think I am a year off in my math: he’ll be 81 on July 13. Principal photography occurred on Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny from June 2021 to February 2022, during which time Ford had his 79th birthday.

So how did he do? Honestly, just as was the case in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, surprisingly well. The man still has charm to spare, keeps incredibly fit, and actually feels like he’s doing this for the love of the character as opposed to just for a paycheck (surely he got a nice paycheck, but it’s not like he really needed it). This film, the fifth installment in the franchise, is the first that is neither directed by Steven Spielberg nor written by George Lucas, although both are credited as Executive Producers; it’s directed by James Mangold (Logan; Ford v. Ferrari) and written by a team of four writers, including Mangold himself, and David Koepp, who co-wrote Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

And here’s the thing about Dial of Destiny. It actually captures the spirit of Indiana Jones in a way Crystal Skull kind of didn’t. But, at two hours and 34 minutes, it’s by a fair margin the longest film in the franchise (previously it was Last Crusade, at two hours and seven minutes), and it really didn’t need to be; it sags a bit as a result. Some tighter editing, and I might have been a lot quicker to say this is a better movie than Crystal Skull, which actually holds up better than expected upon rewatch. But then, a lot of movies do: a second run-through cannot disappoint. For all I know, I might watch Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny in another fifteen years—when Harrison Ford may well be dead—and decide it’s actually better than I remember it.

There are really fun sequences in this movie, mind you—especially, a bit surprisingly, the lengthy opening sequence, a flashback set at the end of World War II, in which Harrison Ford is de-aged uncannily well. (Presumably, however, the more advanced that technology becomes, the more dated even this digital work, which is the best I have ever seen, will appear.) There is still some dissonance, just as there had been with the pointless de-aging done in The Irishman (2019): Harrison Ford’s old body may actually move a lot more limberly than Robert DeNiro’s old body did under digital alterations, but there remains the issue of his voice. Harrison Ford’s younger, handsome face is kind of amazing in this movie, but then he opens his mouth and still sounds like a grizzled old man.

There’s far more visual effects work in Dial of Destiny than in any previous Indiana Jones film, and although it’s far from the best I have ever seen, it is serviceable and generally serves the story. It is best used in the dark of night in that opening sequence, set largely on a speeding train. That said, there is a moment in a wide shot of Indy running across the tops of train cars, and when he jumps from one to the other, he just looks like a video game character.

In spite of all that, Dial of Destiny has its characters to recommend it. Fifteen years after Crystal Skull not-so-subtly suggested Shia LaBeouf might have Indy’s iconic hat passed on to him, LaBeouf has been given the boot, his character now dead after enlisting in the Vietnam War. He gets one brief, somber mention here, and is otherwise quite effectively replaced by the fantastic Phoebe Waller-Bridge as his goddaughter, her late father being played in flashback by the great Toby Jones. Waller-Bridge brings a delightfully welcome and slightly different vibe to the proceedings, and has great chemistry with Ford.

Perhaps most notable is Mads Mikkelsen, who, in spite of arguably being typecast as the villain, still makes for the most memorable and effective villain in any Indiana Jones movie since Raiders of the Lost Ark. This movie once again dips into the well-tapped well of Nazis, both in its flashback and in its “present-day” setting of 1969, with still-living Nazis making their best effort to recapture what they’ve lost. Mikkelson’s Dr. Voller is doing it by racing to find the remnants of the titular dial, believed to make time travel possible.

Every Indiana Jones movie gets wildly supernatural by the time its climactic sequence is reached, and Dial of Destiny is no exception. I won’t spoil what happens, except to say that, after five of these movies, I felt little emotional investment in it. It’s much more fun just spending time with these characters again (including the return of now-79-year-old John Rhys-Davies as Sallah), their significantly advanced age notwithstanding, and the extended, silly action sequences no less exciting for how standard they have become.

It may not seem like high praise to say that Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny could have been a lot worse, and thus the final product as another installment of all the same fun you’re used to is somewhat of a relief. The truth is, the movie works far better than one might expect after such unprecedented and notable turnover of filmmakers. (James Mangold is actually better at capturing the Spielberg sensibility than J.J. Abrams.) If it just had some tighter editing, I’d be a lot more enthusiastic about the experience.

If nothing else, the closing scene is worth the wait. It’s very sweet and touches that nostalgic nerve in just the right way, with a subtle callback to Raiders, bringing the series full circle. It strikes the perfect note for signing off on a beloved, four-decade-old franchise, leaving us with a lasting, warm memory.

Harrison Ford is Waller-Bridging generations.

Overall: B

PAST LIVES

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

How does Past Lives hit, I wonder, depending on the personal romantic history of the person watching it? I have to imagine it varies. A good majority of its audience, I assume, had a “first love” who was not the person they are currently with, and perhaps they contemplate how they would handle being in a similar situation, meeting a childhood sweetheart not seen in person in decades but while currently in a perfectly happy marriage.

I have no way of looking at this movie through such a lens; I had no “childhood sweetheart,” and not just because I’m gay. This story really isn’t about sexuality, nor does it even really reference sex beyond the hypothetical of having children. I am still nearly two decades into the first romantic relationship I have ever had. And, still: this movie made me think, in a way no other movie ever has, about how much I love my husband. He still qualifies as my first love, though, and that’s what this movie is about. So maybe it even worked as intended on me.

Past Lives is a unique experience, in that its emotional resonance takes some time to percolate. I nearly started crying thinking about it on my way home after the movie ended, and I still can’t really say why, except that the movie permeated my soul, and it took some time for me to focus on anything else, rather than continuing to think about this deeply affecting love story.

I desperately want to use a cliché: “an instant classic.” Does anything even qualify as a “classic” anymore? What would be the most recent film for which there is any critical consensus on such a designation? Did it even come out in the twenty-first century? The Lord of the Rings, maybe? Moulin Rouge!? Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind actually gets referenced in Past Lives, and that came out in 2004. How many people even still think about that movie? In Past Lives, it is brought up in the year 2011, when it had been released seven years prior. It comes up when our two would-be lovers discuss Montauk, which I completely forgot was even a setting in that movie.

All I can say is: Past Lives is every bit as worth the time and attention as any of those movies, or arguably any “classic romance” that came before them. It’s certainly unlike any other, writer-director Celine Song establishing a dreamlike tone that evokes every romantic, wistful memory you’ve ever had.

The fact that Past Lives is Celine Song’s first feature film is astonishing. She was previously a playwright, which explains her two protagonists both being writers—I have to admit, I wondered how the hell they could afford living in New York City with such jobs. This is beside the point, as Past Lives is about the life choices we make, and whether it can ever be possible to go back to a particular feeling we loved from the past. In the case of Nora (Greta Lee) and Hae Sung (Teo Yoo), they forged a quick but deeply emotional connection as twelve-year-olds in their native Korea, Nora convinced they will end up married, but having no idea her parents are about to move the family to Canada.

Twelve years later, after Nora has moved to New York, she and Hae Sung reconnect online, and this is when they make their first real connection as adults. This middle act is a peculiar experience, turning the year 2011 into a period piece, their video chats exclusively over Skype, with grainy and sometimes glitchy video. In spite of that, all of the scenes are as deeply romantic as any other in the film. I don’t think I have ever seen scenes of people video chatting so well shot—even this effectively evokes the kind of yearning these two characters are feeling, discovering they are just as desperate to be with each other as they were twelve years before. But, they have started lives and established plans that make meeting up again unfeasible.

About a year later, Greta meets Arthur (John Magaro) at an artists retreat. In spite of Arthur later fretting about possible inadequacies of his place in Greta’s life, the circumstances of their meeting are just as romantic as anything else in Past Lives, which is very much the point. Arhur jests that in a retelling of their story he’d be “the evil White guy,” but here he very pointedly isn’t. There is no villain, which is what makes the circumstances of this movie so ripe for discussion.

Any talk of suspense regarding what Nora and Hae Sung may or may not do when he finally visits New York City for the first time, another twelve years later, misses the point. Everything that actually happens is firmly grounded in reality, and to my mind is not the element up for debate. The bigger question is about the long-term futures for all three of these people. Do Nora and Arthur stay together indefinitely? Will Nora and Hae Sung finally get together, many years from now? Would that even work? There can be a pointed difference between what you yearn for and what it turns out to be once you finally get it.

There is one specific moment that has really stayed with me, when Nora breaks down, and Arthur comforts her, even though her tears are for another relationship. What a strange position to be in, for all of them. This is the kind of thing so rarely seen in cinema, a deeply unusual circumstance that still rings with an almost unnerving truth.

Past Lives starts and ends with these three characters out at a bar, deep into the night. In the opening scene, we overhear others in the bar playing that game where you try to guess what the stories are of people at other tables, and they actually skirt the truth. When we return to this moment, the perspective has long since shifted to that of Nora, Hae Sung and Arthur. There is some debate as to whether Arthur needs to be there, but Celine Song wisely never makes clear how they came to this as a group: for all we know, Nora asked Arthur to be there, perhaps not considering the likelihood that she and Hae Sung would wind up conversing in a native language Arthur mostly doesn’t understand.

It’s so easy to empathize with all three of them in this scenario, and Teo Yoo plays Hae Sung’s awkward nervousness especially well. They all feel that way, of course, and so do we, on their behalf. How often do we get a sort of love triangle in which we deeply yearn for all three of them to be okay? The most amazing thing Past Lives pulls off is how it tells a story with such specificity, and yet it will move anyone who has ever loved.

Past Lives will raise your hopes for their futures.

Overall: A-

ASTEROID CITY

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

My feelings about Wes Anderson Films, it turns out, have been pretty consistent over the years. I have reviewed every feature film he has directed since 2004, of which there are now eight, and of those I have given five B-pluses (Fantastic Mr. Fox; Moonrise Kingdom, probably still my favorite; The Grand Budapest Hotel, his biggest commercial success; Isle of Dogs; and—spoiler alert!—Asteroid City) and three solid Bs (The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou; The Darjeeling Limited; The French Dispatch). I can barely remember his first three films that came before I began posting reviews (Bottle Rocket; Rushmore; perennial favorite The Royal Tenenbaums) but could probably stand to go back and revisit them.

It would seem, then, that my feelings about Wes Anderson rarely wavers, except that in my mind, a difference between a B-plus movie and a solid-B movie is a difference between one I would recommend to others and one I would not (but which I was still happy to have seen myself). One could argue, that’s a crucial difference. And by that standard, his last film, The French Dispatch, was a bit of a dip for him, for the first time since five movies (and fourteen years) earlier.

Furthermore, the ones I enjoy the most, I enjoy for different reasons—in spite of the increasingly rigid “diorama” visual style Anderson adopts. Over time, his movies have gotten more visually dazzling, somewhat at the expense of substance; I found Moonrise Kingdom to be exceptional by that measure—and I feel the same about Asteroid City, which is, thematically, very different from anything else he’s ever done. And while the visual style is absolutely recognizable, it’s a tad more self-referential, and has a visual motif unlike any other, being set in a tiny town (the namesake of the film, as well as the play being staged in the film) in the middle of the desert. You might not expect the two-dimensional backdrops of cacti and mountains to work within the duration of the story, but it really does.

More importantly, Asteroid City is like an artisan ice cream sundae, with layered delights. I have to admit, with its Russian nesting doll-like structure, a movie of a TV program presenting a stage play with occasional interludes featuring the director and the actors both in and out of character, all of it dealing with subtle thematic nuances never made straightforward, some of this movie went over my head. I didn’t seem to care, as I was utterly charmed by it. I almost always enjoy Wes Anderson films, but this may be the first one I finished by immediately thinking: I’d really like to watch this again. I’m convinced I would get even more out of it.

There’s another unique quality to Asteroid City that seems tailor-made for me: its quite literally otherworldly elements. I would never known to have expected this, but it turns out Wes Anderson and an extra-terrestrial make for a perfect marriage, at least in tone. There’s even a needle-drop reference to the 1996 Tim Burton classic Mars Attacks!, with Slim Whitman’s 1952 yodeling “Indian Love Song,” and I naively wondered if I was the only one who clocked it (I wasn’t). Mars Attacks! is far wilder than Asteroid City, although by some measures Asteroid City is far wilder than any other Wes Anderson film, and it occurs to me that these two movies would make a truly great double feature.

And by the way, Asteroid City skates on a fairly even path of mild comic amusement, while also moving between genuine poignancy and a good number of laugh-out-loud moments. It isn’t just charming, and it isn’t just surprisingly moving at times, as this tiny desert town, famous for its ancient asteroid in the sand of a giant crater, is locked down under quarantine after an alien visit. If you look deep enough, in its own way, Asteroid City is Wes Anderson’s answer to other directors’ late-career cinema contemplations like The Irishman or Roma or Belfast or The Fabelmans. It’s just that with Anderson, who is 54, it is maybe more of a mid-career contemplation, and also far less straightforward of one. He’s got time to expand on his existential questions, but for now, Asteroid City is the perfect fit for them.

It’s almost beside the point that, as usual, Wes Anderson’s new film is so stacked with stars it almost defies the imagination. The ones most worth mentioning are Anderson stalwart Jason Schwartzman, the protagonist as both a recently widowed father of three finally breaking the news of his wife’s death to his children and the actor who plays him; Scarlett Johansson as a movie star (and the actor who plays her) passing through town; and Tom Hanks, new to the Anderson-verse but well cast and well integrated, as Schwartzman’s emotionally distant father-in-law.

Also worth mentioning are Jake Ryan (previously seen in the phenomenal Eighth Grade and Anderson’s own Moonrise Kingdom) as Schwartzman’s eldest child, and especially real-life triplets Ella Faris, Gracie Faris, and Willan Faris who play his three little girls, their characters with fantastic names I won’t spoil here. I will tell you that in the movie they provide some welcome chaotic unpredictability, and are insistent that they are witches and vampires. These girls alone may have been my favorite part of the movie, and this is a movie with countless things to love.

I can’t mention everyone else in this movie as there are just too many to name, but I want to shout out Tilda Swinton, furthering her long line of unrecognizability in film roles; and Bryan Cranston, who serves as on-screen narrator and occasionally delightful meta-commentator on the transition between “TV show” and “play.”

As always, though, the real star of any Wes Anderson film is the production design, which nearly makes whoever plays the parts immaterial. There is an appropriately otherworldly quality to the visuals here, even as it’s all set on desert land: there are real, working cars on actual roads, but with old-school painted landscape backdrops and artificial landscape props, creating a slight dissonance with the idea that we are supposedly watching a live broadcast of a play, as it blends real-world elements with the artificial, including the most Wes Anderson rendering of a mushroom cloud that could ever be rendered.

And yet, through all of this, even with the pointedly deadpan delivery across every single one of the countless actors (except those truly delightful, energetic little witch girls), Anderson somehow makes you feel a sense of human connection, breaking through the emotional inertness. It’s the contextualization that matters, and even when Asteroid City gets bonkers, it’s all contextualization. This is the reason I expect the experience to deepen in richness with multiple viewings.

Jason Schwartzman and Tom Hanks, making the kinds of connections only Wes Anderson can make.

Overall: B+

THE FLASH

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

When it comes to The Flash, we have to start with Ezra Miller, less because of their relatively competent performance and more because the great life lesson we must all learn from them, apparently, is that nonbinary people can also be massive creeps. Gone are the days of arguing for “separating the art from the artist,” and rightly so: no film exists in a vacuum, nor has it ever. This is why I can no longer stomach watching any film featuring Mel Gibson or Kevin Spacey or Woody Allen. The defenses and justifications just don’t work anymore.

Where does it end, you might ask, when Hollywood is packed with creeps? Do we just avoid all movies altogether? Setting aside the fact that there are degrees of severity (as well as redemption), and the fact that such a question is arguably disingenuous, ideally it ends with people like this no longer being given chance after chance while their behavior remains unchanged.

Your next logical question might be why the hell I went to see this movie, especially if I tell you I already went in with my expectations in the basement, and the answer is simple: I couldn’t help myself. That’s a lame answer, sure. Sometimes people are lame.

I never would have bothered with this movie were it not for the knowledge that Michael Keaton was returning to reprise his role as Batman, for the first time in thirty-one years. Like many people, I feel that Keaton has always been the best of all live-action Batmen, and my all-time favorite movie since my teens has been Batman Returns (1992), which I have seen more times than any other film. By extension, I have a similar, if less passionate, fondness for its predecessor, Batman (1989), which was helmed by the same director (Tim Burton). It is from that earlier Batman that The Flash takes all of its visual references, which is a delight if you’re An Old like me, and maybe pointless for anyone half my age or younger, brought up on endless iterations of the same superhero dreck that, unfortunately, this film also is.

If you were to split The Flash into three acts, both the first and the third are mind-numbingly busy with CGI chaos. (Not to mention witless: in the opening sequence we see a bunch of babies slide out the window of a collapsing building, just so we can hear it called a “baby shower.” Don’t worry about the babies, though: not only do they—spoiler alert—get saved, but they aren’t real!) I have to admit, however, that I found a whole lot of the second act genuinely delightful, as it successfully traded on nostalgia for a time when high-profile, blockbuster superhero movies were still a novelty, only came out every few years, and were elevated by deeply creative, practical production design. Oh, right: and they also had good scripts.

The second act is when we meet Bruce Wayne as played by Michael Keaton, now 71 years old (Jesus, this means he was younger than I am now in Batman Returns), an alternate-timeline version of The Flash’s mentor after Barry discovers his powers allows him to travel through time and attempt to save his dead mother. For a good twenty minutes or so, I was charmed by all the visual callbacks: from Keaton’s very face, to the dusty bat cave, to the Batmobile with the exact same design as in the 1989 film. Even when Barry and his younger, alternate-timeline self (we’ll get back to that) first walk into Wayne Manor, they find themselves in the exact room from the 1989 film when Robert Wuhl as Alexander Knox says to Kim Basinger as Vicki Vale, “Check this out. He must have been King of the Wicker People.”

Later, we even get a jolt of recognition when Batman trots out the Batwing aircraft, which ultimately plays heavily in the story, which quickly becomes a huge mess. The Flash is trying to cheat its way into the long-overused “alternate universes” plot device, which has been used extremely well in Everything Everywhere All at Once and the animated “Spider-verse” films, but hardly any of the far-too-many others. This one might as well be called The Flash and the Multiverse of Numbness. (Granted, the same could have been said for that Dr. Strange sequel.)

Both the opening sequence and the needlessly endless climactic sequence in The Flash are typical examples of what I have complaining about average superhero movies now for years: incoherent action extravaganzas laden with CGI that looks either unfinished or cheap. I am also not a huge fan of packing too many different superheroes into one movie, and this one definitely has too many. If the middle act could have been the whole movie, I’d have liked it a lot more. But, instead of getting the Michael Keaton Batman treatment he deserves, we get him grafted onto a movie with not one, but two Barry Allens. What the hell happened to all these arguments that meeting yourself in an alternate timeline could be cataclysmic? Well, I guess that’s just . . . part of an alternate timeline. How convenient! Here, The Flash and The Flash practically become frat bros. If it were me, and especially if I looked like Ezra Miller, I’d be too distracted from saving the world by all the time spent fucking myself, but I suppose that’s another conversation.

I haven’t even gotten to the cameo by Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman, or Michael Shannon truly phoning it in as General Zod, or Sasha Calle as Supergirl in a part that is completely devoid of any real meaning or gravitas, and ultimately just leaves her rendered in CGI flying around punching people like a cartoon. That’s what these movies are, increasingly literally: dumb animated features. They’re cartoons.

Even the Michael Keaton of it all, that being the best part of this movie by a mile, has diminishing returns. It’s like takin a hit of drugs when we hear Michael Keaton utter the famous words, “I’m Batman.” Did we also need a pointed close-up of him saying, “You wanna get nuts? Let’s get nuts”? No, we did not. In the end, The Flash attempts to tug at our heartstrings with visual references most of the young audience won’t even get, such as a brief CGI rendering of Nicolas Cage as Superman in the movie that never got made—I almost said “famously,” but this happened back in the nineties. Who is going to remember a movie from the nineties that never even happened, let alone give a shit?

The bottom line is, The Flash is a shit sandwich with a moderately tasty center, except what’s the point of a tasty center in a shit sandwich? I suppose we could call the two Ezra Millers in it the buns. There are some nice shots of their butt in that suit, for what it’s worth. And for the record I am separating the art from the buttocks.

Ezra Miller, Ezra Miller, and Saha Calle give us multiple dimensions of mediocrity.

Overall: C