THE ORIGIN OF EVIL

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

Here’s something I’ve never said about a movie before: The Origin of Evil might just be too French or its own good. Full of unlikably arrogant people, with an inflated sense of self. Not all of the French are like that, I’m sure; these are stereotypes. But this movie isn’t doing them any favors.

In spite of its bevy of talented performers, The Origin of Evil lost me early on. It gets progressively weirder, in less compelling ways. Nathalie (Laure Calamy) is visiting a father, Serge (Jacques Weber) she’s never met before. She progressively gains his trust, to the suspicion of his wife, Louise (Dominique Blanc); his daughter, George (Doria Tillier); his grandaughter, Jeanne (Céleste Brunnquell); and their longtime housekeeper, Agnès (Véronique Ruggia), all of whom live in a giant, overly cluttered house together. I won’t spoil the many narrative left turns that follow, even though one of the few things that impressed me about this movie is how unremarkable it is for all its twists.

I will say this: we never get a sense of Nathalie as a whole person, or what really informs her actions. I knew little about this film going in, and when Nathalie is shown dialing Serge on the phone, she appears nervous to the point of terrified—a detail that makes less sense in retrospect once the film is over. “What are you playing at?” is something she is asked at one point, and I was already asking it. There are moments early on when it feels like The Origin of Evil will be a straightforward family drama, the title notwithstanding, but things prove to be far more complex than that. Just not in any way that particularly satisfied me.

This film has many unearned pretensions, not least of which is the title—these are shitty people, basically all around, but evil is a bit loaded for what ever actually happens onscreen. Nathalie works at a fish packing factory, and the opening title card appears superimposed over lined trays of fish, with ominous music. You would think the fish, or the factory, would play a particularly crucial part in the plot. They don’t.

If there is anything to love about The Origins of Evil, it’s the ensemble cast of nearly all women, with only one exception: Serge is the only principal character who is a man. He’s an asshole, but all the other women also prove to be either assholes in their own right or sociopaths, with the possible exception of Jeanne—but given the fucked up family she’s in, give her time.

The film runs slightly over two hours, though, and the first half in particular moves so slowly, it might play a lot better with a good fifteen or twenty minutes cut out. Things do pick up in the second half, and get a bit more exciting, but for me it was too little too late. I spent more time thinking about when this movie would end than I did about what was going to happen next.

I have to mention the cinematography, because some of it just plain sucks. Why the hell is a movie like this employing the use of retro split screens, with thick black lines separating the different feeds? The first time it happens, Nathalie is just sitting at a table having dinner with Serge and his family—five people, three sections of a split screen, each of them cutting to a new person saying something or making noise, including every time Jeanne gets a text notification. Why do we care about all this? I have no answer. A few later scenes employ the split screen as well, and you get the sense that director Sébastien Marnier thinks he’s doing something clever with this material. He isn’t.

I have to acknowledge that talent went into the making of this film, particularly the cast, and the set design. I’d love to see all of these people’s work in a less tiresome movie.

It’s not nearly as fun as this might suggest.

Overall: C+

MUTT

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

I’m sure I shouldn’t be, but I’m a little stuck on the title of the film Mutt. Ironically, googling slang meanings of the word brings up, among a few other things, “stupid person,” and I feel a little stupid not getting it in the context of this film. Evidently it can also be a derogatory reference to someone being multiracial, which indeed, the film’s protagonist, Feña, is—he has a Chilean father and a White mother. Feña’s racial background is not in the least bit a driving force in the story here, however.

His transness, on the other hand, is. And the story here takes place over the course of one 14-hour period, in which quite a lot happens, not least of which are his reconnection with, in turn, an ex-boyfriend, his younger sister, and his father. All of them have been estranged, to one degree or another, from Feña since he started his transition.

John (Cole Doman) is returning after a year and a half in Philadelphia, to look after a sick mother. Zoe (MiMi Ryder) has run away from school for the day to hang out with Feña in the City. And Pablo (Alejandro Goic) is flying in from Chile to see Feña for the first time in two years.

Mutt has a fair amount of exposition, all of it well integrated. Anyone with a cursory knowledge of Spanish—and Feña is bilingual—would expect Feña to be a feminine name, but Feña is actually specific about this: “It’s one of the few gender neutral names in Chile.” This film is also unusually frank about a young trans person still fresh from the transition process. Feña is revealed only to have had boyfriends and relationships with men all his life, and this desire does not change after transition—an aspect of transness not often represented onscreen. John, the strikingly gorgeous ex-boyfriend, shows no signs of his physical attraction abating post-transition, nor is there any hand-wringing about sexuality on anyone’s part, something I really respect. John also delivers the cutting line, “People don’t hate you because you’r trans, people hate you because you’re an asshole.”

I don’t know if we’re meant to think Feña is indeed an asshole, but Lio Mehiel, the trans actor who portrays him, never gives any indication that he is, per se. Maybe he was an asshole to John? In an early scene, he references how they made each other worse when they were together. Feña is so earnest and well-intentioned, if somewhat of a basket case, it’s difficult to imagine.

There’s a lot I really liked about Mutt, but I had trouble with a lot of the dialogue, particularly in the first half of the film, as it felt underwritten, not quite contrived but bordering on inauthentic. Not in terms of anyone’s background or identity, just as regular people and how people in the real world talk. If often felt just “off” from regular conversations.

This changed with pivotal scenes, both between Feña and John, and between Feña and Pablo. In the end, I was moved and I shed a couple of tears. There’s something to be said for a film which, while imperfect, offers a unique point of view.

In the process of writing this review, I came across a GoldenGlobes.com article in which Lio Mehiel is quoted as saying, “I really identify as a mutt. I got that phrase from a filmmaker friend of mine. I am a mutt in that I am of mixed ethnicity (Puerto Rican and Greek). I have mixed genders. I am also a Gemini.” Setting the dubious relevance of astrology aside, this brings the film’s title into sharper focus—particularly in terms of both ethnicity and gender, simultaneously. See, we went on a journey in this very review itself. I still maintain that a film’s title should not need external explanation.

The dialogue may not be strictly contrived, but the plotting is, a bit. We’re telling a lot about Feña in just one 24-hour period, starting late at night and ending late the next night, and the conceit doesn’t do much for the storytelling. To its credit, however, I did feel enriched after seeing this film.

Feña is a walking example of intersectionality, or so we’re supposed to gather.

Overall: B

FREMONT

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

There’s a fantastic shot, in the last quarter or so of Fremont, in which the protagonist, Donya (Anaita Wali Zada), is sitting on one of the twin beds in a hotel room, facing a large white figure of a deer, like a lawn ornament, standing on the other twin bed. I really wanted to find it as a still online to use as my image for this review. Alas, I can find no images online of Anaita Wali Zada with the deer.

It was about this point in the film that Fremont finally endeared me to it. There is an oddly deadpan tone to most o this film, directed by British-Iranian Babak Jalali and co-written by Jalali and Italian writer-director Carolina Cavalli. There’s a surprising depth to Fremont that only gradually reveals itself, ultimately rewarding the patience asked of its audience. The almost universally stilted line deliveries take some time to get past.

Donya herself leads a very solitary life, in the Bay Area suburb of Fremont, hence the film’s title. She is among a known community of Afghan immigrants who live there, as Fremont has the largest concentration of Afghams in the United States (a trivia fact not ever mentioned in the film; I looked it up). She works in a “hand made fortune cookie” factory in San Francisco. Another fact the film does not bother to mention: it takes about an hour and a half to commute that distance by train. But, Donya herself confides in a therapist that she took the job to be around Chinese people during the day rather than surrounded by other Afghans all the time.

She’s visiting a therapist, a man played by Gregg Turkington as a vague sort of comic relief, in her pursuit to procure sleeping pills due to persistent insomnia. This is a guy who speaks in deadpan snippets with long pauses, same as Donya, same as Joanna (Hilda Schmelling), her coworker friend at the factory. Nearly everyone speaks the same way, I can only assume the director told them all to deliver their lines this way.

On a day trip to what she thinks is a blind date, Donya comes across a mechanic played by Jeremy Allen White. This is the only truly famous member of the cast, known for both Shameless and The Bear, and as a result White nearly qualifies as an untenable distraction. That said, he’s also the one performer in this film with line deliveries that make him feel like a real person, with a truly naturalistic performance. It only occurred to me just now that this may have been by design: his mechanic character is clearly meant for Donya as a romantic interest, and although the entirety of Fremont is shot in black and white, the contrast is as though Donya were Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, walking into a world of color.

There is something about Fremont that has really stuck with me, and the more I consider the film, the more I appreciate it. I’m still not a fan of most of the line readings, and yet the measured pace really works for it. Even before Donya meets the mechanic, Fremont takes a tonal turn, as she has been hired to write the fortunes for the cookies, and she inserts a secret message into the pile. We get a brief montage of randos reading their fortunes, and they are actually the first people we witness speaking like real people.

Who actually winds up finding the secret message is a sort of plot twist, but it has no bearing on Donya’s fate. In the end, Fremont is a romance, about a lonely Afghan woman with a quiet strength about her, who fled her native country with a dose of PTST. When this movie began, I had no idea I would leave at the end feeling light and uplifted. Fremont is a sneaky charmer.

I wanted to show you the deer, but this will have to do.

Overall: B

ARISTOTLE AND DANTE DISCOVER THE SECRETS OF THE UNIVERSE

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

And here we get yet another charming, moving, gay coming-of-age story that just makes me wistful for what I could never have. Even if I could never have had the experience of the young characters in this story, what might it have been like for me had there even been a movie like this to watch when I was a teenager? When I was sixteen, I was alone in my bedroom, secretly lusting after the gay men in Madonna’s “Erotica” video.

There’s a bit of irony there, the means I had of tapping into dark sexual fantasy, as compared to Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, which is almost shockingly innocent, about the blossoming of young love, of a kind the protagonist does not understand nearly as well as, amazingly, his parents do. This story, actually, is comparatively chaste, the physicality never moving beyond a couple of kisses, the holding of hands. It’s a good two thirds of the way through before it even gets to that. This movie is perfect for young kids around the age of puberty, maybe just past it. And what a beautiful thing, to get something legitimately age-appropriate that explores these themes, asserting that kids of all kinds are perfect just the way they are.

This kind of shit gets to me, it’s so far removed from the experience of my youth. Some stories work by being relatable, and others are more aspirational. I can only guess as to what it’s like to be a young person today with access to a movie like this—which, incidentally, is based on a multiple-award-winning 2012 young-adult novel by Benjamin Alire Sáenz, which I have immediately put on my reading list.

It appears, though, that this film is a pretty faithful adaptation, with many lines of dialogue lifted directly from the source text. If I have any genuine criticism of this film, it would be that sometimes the dialogue doesn’t necessarily translate perfectly to the screen—I must admit, at times, I found the script, co-written by Sáenz himself and director Aitch Alberto, distractingly just outside the realm of real-life delivery. Some of the lines feel a little oversimplified and slightly stilted.

Ultimately, it’s a small quibble—there are just so many other things to love about this movie, not least of which is the very specific universe in which it exists, about Mexican-American families in 1987 El Paso, Texas. Aristotle (Max Pelayo), or Ari for short, is a solitary boy who is unaware of his own abiding loneliness. He’s been faltering at swimming lessons, and then meets Dante (Reese Gonzales), who volunteers to teach him how to swim. They become fast friends, and maybe the first third of Aristotle and Dante is just a lovely, leisurely paced portrait of the evolution of their friendship. Nothing more is even suggested until Dante’s family moves to Chicago for a year thanks to his professor dad’s job, and in one of Dante’s letters he slightly scandalizes Ari by bringing up masturbation (this is the most frankly sexual the movie ever gets).

During their year apart, both Aristotle and Dante pursue relationships with girls, presumably because that’s all that occurs to them, and it’s just what’s expected. It’s great to see that, unlike many other films about gay people, the interactions with girls stay healthy and never end in any melodramatic heartbreak. This is much more about these boys slowly realizing who and what they are.

The truly unique element here is Ari’s parents, who are giving him knowing looks largely from the start. Ari has a beloved aunt who visits and when she tells him “You are perfect just the way you are,” it feels incongruous to him, and to a degree, even to us as viewers, that early on. I wasn’t even sure at first whether we were meant to understand that Ari’s parents know he’s in love with Dante before Ari does. I found myself thinking of the deeply empathetic father played by Michael Stuhlbarg in Call Me By Your Name. The key difference here is that these parents are not as articulate, maintaining a family secret about Ari’s incarcerated brother that keeps them, and especially his father, largely silent.

Perhaps most notable is how Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe avoids stereotype at every level—quite plausibly because both writer and the director are of Latin-American descent, telling a story about Mexican-American characters. There is a uniquely heartwarming mix of specificity and authenticity here, while also avoiding any of the cliches of toxic masculinity in parenting. Ari’s parents are clearly imperfect, just like anyone, but their love and concern for him is never in doubt.

We don’t get as much about Dante’s relationship with his parents, perhaps because they are portrayed as progressive intellectuals and we are meant to assume they’ll be fine. Dante does worry in one of his letters about their reaction to him, but the narrative never revisits that thread.

I suppose you could say that, had I been a producer of this film, I’d have had notes. On the other hand, sometimes imperfections add to the charm. While I found myself debating exactly how good I thought this movie was in its first half, it really came together for me in the end. I was both charmed and deeply moved by it, practically weeping by the time these boys finally come around to their inevitable fate. That’s not a spoiler, because you should know that this is a coming-of-age love story and not a tragedy, and that’s how they go; besides, the value is in the journey, the experience, both for them and for us. This is one movie I will likely seek out for a rewatch.

Sometimes a connection becomes an opportunity for discovery.

Overall: B+

BOTTOMS

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

If you want to be truly impressed by some acting talent and versatility, watch Nicholas Galitzine as posh gay Prince Henry in Red, White and Royal Blue on Prime Video, and then go see him as meathead football player Jeff in Bottoms. To be fair, neither movie is exactly “highbrow” and neither seems especially challenging for its performers—but, these two characters are wildly different from each other, almost opposites, and yet Galitzine embodies them both believably, He’s the kind of actor whose talent you don’t truly realize until you’ve seen him in multiple roles.

To be fair, Red, White and Royal Blue and Bottoms do have a couple of key things in common: they both have two gay protagonists (gay men in the former; lesbians in the latter), and both put their own unique stamp on modern camp. That very thing is what makes both films worth watching.

There’s a lot more to Bottoms to recommend it, not least of which is equally (if not more so) versatile Ayo Edebiri, whose Josie in Bottoms is also wildly different from her Sydney in Hulu’s The Bear. (Josie is a bit more similar to Janet in Theater Camp, another surprisingly delightful comedy from this year.) It’s also great to see two gay main characters who are lifelong platonic friends, and this story is not about them having sex or falling in love with each other. In fact, there is an old-school sex comedy element to this, as it is about them aiming to get laid. Just, with other people. It’s like a typical sex comedy with dudes trying to get pussy, replacing the dudes with ladies . . . trying to get pussy.

They’re also incredibly socially awkward, which Rachel Sennott (Shiva Baby), as PJ, plays just as well as Edebiri. It’s a delight to see a movie like this that acknowledges the continued existence of homophobia but only in a cursory way, and instead characterizes a sort of evolution of how characters like these get sidelined in high school—not just for being gay, but for being “gay and untalented.”

I should stress here that Bottoms goes out of its way to be over-the-top silly, in a way that almost miraculously works. I may want to watch it again just to catch more of the gags in the details and in the background. Many times a funny detail comes and goes so quickly it can easily be missed, making it a potentially rewarding rewatch.

It doesn’t hurt that we also get a winning performance by none other than Marshawn Lynch as Mr. G, the unlikely teacher duped into serving as teacher “advisor” to the self-defense club devised by PJ and Josie as a scheme to get under some cheeleaders’ skirts. Lynch plays a doofus who is only sexist until some high school girls prove that they can be badasses.

Now, I must admit to a certain amount of disappointment, particularly in the nature of this club that becomes a surprisingly violent “fight club.” The trailer made me expect a lot more comedic ultra-violence, and I suppose I should be grateful that director and co-writer Emma Seligman uses it more sparingly than expected. I just thought this would be a bit more of an action comedy, based on the marketing, but it’s really more of a campy teen comedy. By those standards, though, Bottoms still succeeds, and is consistently funny. What more should I want from it?

Besides, there is a fantastic brawl between the fight club and an adversary I won’t spoil here that serves as the climactic sequence of the movie, and it’s kind of worth the wait. I had a somewhat odd experience with Bottoms, leaving the theater feeling like I enjoyed it but still wished it had been better, or funnier. But the more I’ve thought about it since, the more I’ve decided I placed unfairly high expectations of it, and on its own terms, it delivers on its promise.

Sometimes it’s shocking what some people do in pursuit of pussy.

STRAYS

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

Strays falls prey to its marketing campaign in a very conventional, almost traditional way: it burns through a lot of its funniest bits in the trailer. I have to wonder how much more fun I might have found this movie if I didn’t already know what was coming several times—gags I did laugh pretty hard at, the first of the half dozen times or so I already saw them.

But, what are you going to do? You have to share some of it in order to market a movie as something with the tone it has—which is to say, an “animal adventure” film crossed with a raunchy comedy. These are talking dogs, which also say “fuck” and “shit” a lot.

This supposed tonal dissonance is hardly new in itself, considering movies like Paul (2011) and Ted (2012), respectively about a stoner alien and a foul-mouthed Teddy bear, came out more than ten years ago. The biggest surprise with Strays is that it didn’t get made sooner.

But, here’s the thing. How much you enjoy Strays is absolutely going to depend on how much of an animal lover you are. If you have any appreciation whatsoever and also love dogs, you are going to have a blast watching this movie, which is about a small dog (voiced by Will Ferrell) making his way back from the city to a suburban human (Will Forte) he doesn’t realize doesn’t actually care about him. He befriends three other strays along the way, voiced by Jamie Foxx, Isla Fisher and Randall Park, who form a sort of “chosen family” pack with him and assist on his quest.

Much hijinks ensues, as you can easily predict. A lot of it is very entertaining, a good portion of it very funny. A movie like this really needs more “laughs per minute” than it actually has, which essentially means it would be far more effective as a film short. But, who the hell watches film shorts, outside of film festivals? It’s a bit of a catch-22, having to spread an otherwise great premise thin just so it can have some hope of an actual audience.

Still, I’m trying not to spoil too much here, so that if you should decide to check this movie out, you’ll have a better experience with it. The less you know going in, the better. All you really need to know is that it takes what is traditionally a kids’ genre and runs it through the prism of R-rated comedies. You can just imagine all the foul language they use and all the inanimate and/or inappropriate things they hump.

The voice work is decent. The CGI moving mouths, barely rendered better than they were in the Babe movies from the nineties, indicate adequate visual effects work. I’m probably the only person in the audience thinking about this, but a small dog’s body visibly rising and lowering from the effects of panting doesn’t quite fit with calm delivery of dialogue, no indication of it being out of breath. I realize it’s a little extra to be nitpicking the “realism” of a movie about talking dogs. It would have been a note I would have given during production nonetheless.

Strays does have an undercurrent of genuine sweetness to it, and Will Ferrell’s Reggie, the main protagonist, has a charming naiveté about him. Bug is the streetwise stray who befriends him, another small but high strung dog, and Jamie Foxx clearly had a good time voicing him. And I’ll give it this much credit: Strays goes for broke in its climactic sequence in a way that is never even hinted at in the trailer, and borders on shocking. These are dogs that would be flipping their middle finger to the establishment, if they had any fingers. Let’s say they’re shitting on the face of the establishment—with mixed results. I had a good enough time with it, anyway.

It’s all fun and games and then you come across some mushrooms.

Overall: B

THE UNKNOWN COUNTRY

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

There’s a shot in the middle of The Unknown Country of a ticker sign standing high above a gas station, and it reads WELCOME TO MID AMERICA.

If The Unknown Country were more on the nose—and thankfully, it isn’t—that could have served as an alternate title. At a run time of 85 minutes, this movie is unusually short, and yet also unusually expansive, a unique sort of road movie, following its protagonist, Tana (Lily Gladstone, who also cowrote the script with Morrisa MaltzLainey and Bearkiller Shangreaux), from Minneapolis to South Dakota to West Texas.

If you were to go in cold with The Unknown Country, knowing nothing about it, you might wonder what the hell you’re watching. Director Morrisa Maltz really takes her time in revealing what Tana’s story is. At first, all we know is that she’s leaving her snowy home by herself, and on the road. We get constant snippets of talk radio, which last throughout the film.

Soon enough, though, we learn that she’s been invited to a cousin’s wedding in South Dakota, she’s coming from Minneapolis after the death of a family member, and she’s coming back to a town full of relatives she hasn’t seen since she was eight years old.

At this point, I began to think maybe the whole movie was just about Tana reconnecting with her family, who we learn are Native American. I found myself wondering, did the existence of the excellent FX series Reservation Dogs help open the door for the production of a movie like this? I later learned that Lily Gladstone, here in very much an indie film, will costar later this year in the highly anticipated Martin Scorsese film Killers of the Flower Moon.

The Unknown Country is a sort of portrait of Middle America, not just of an Indigenous person and her family—but from their perspective, and particularly from Tana’s, as she navigates the grief over the loss of her grandmother, while navigating the literal middle of the country. Bit by bit, those talk radio snippets reveal a time setting, sometime not long after the 2016 election.

I was a bit annoyed by Andrew Hajek’s cinematography, so shaky was it with handheld camera, following Tana right into her freezing car. As the film goes on, though, the cinematography really augments the tone, which stops just short of dreamlike, with many quick cuts that paint a portrait rather than indicate a short attention span.

As Tana meets many people on her travels, we get brief interludes with select people narrating their own, separate stories. This includes the young couple getting married, who deliberately had a child just so their disapproving parents could no longer try and keep them apart. There is something both very generic and very specific about the wedding sequence, in which none of the dialogue is profound but the weight and sweetness of the ceremony is. When the young couple is pronounced married, their little girl joins them in holding all their hands together.

Tana eventually moves on from South Dakota, though, bringing along with her an old suitcase that belonged to her grandmother, given to her by her great uncle. Tana drives great distances, we see her stop at motels and gas stations and diners, and somehow a 1,400-mile road trip gets rendered in a film clocking in at fewer than ninety minutes without feeling rushed.

It’s not until Tana makes a pit stop in Dallas, the only truly urban setting in the film, and spends an evening hanging out with a local group of young friends, that we finally learn precisely why she left Minneapolis, where she’s headed in Texas, and get a feeling for why she was away from her home in South Dakota for so long. Some things stay unsaid, such as whatever happened to Tana’s parents, who are never even mentioned. This feels okay, because that’s not the story being told here.

The Unknown Country is the kind of movie that seeps into your soul, if you give it long enough. There’s a couple of moments of moderate tension with strange, leering men on the road, but that’s the closest this gets to drama. This is a mood piece. I can see needing to be in the right mood in order for it to work. All I can say is, my mood was right for it, as I left the theater with a feeling of warmth toward it, grateful for having seen it, a lack of resolution or even a conventional story arc notwithstanding.

The road to appreciation for that which has not been much considered.

Overall: B+

TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES: MUTANT MAYHEM

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

How many Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies have there been now, anyway? Seven, apparently—the first one having been released thirty-three years ago. The film franchise has reached the age Jesus did! I suppose one could make the argument that it’s time for a similar self-sacrifice for the greater good, except that Mutant Mayhem is actually kind of fun.

This is what I keep wondering, though: how many actual teenagers really care? In this new film, which really qualifies as a third reboot of the franchise, a pointed plot point is the fact that our four mutant turtles are fifteen years old. When these versions of the turtle-kids were born, the film franchise was already eighteen years old, and old enough to have been rebooted the first time.

This is an intellectual property based on an original comic book that was first published in 1984. As in, the characters themselves are one year shy of forty years old. I suppose I could be off base here, but I can’t imagine many actual fifteen-year-olds having much in the way of passionate interest in this. Instead, new iterations of this franchise have been trading on nostalgia for it for the past two decades.

Seth Rogen, who co-wrote the script and co-produced, is 41 years old, making him pretty squarely in the target demographic at this point. This is a fun movie for him and people like him. What I’m trying to say is, I don’t think this movie is going to take the youth by storm. It may have been one of many “bonkers-cool” concepts from our childhood, but time is a weird thing, which can turn even the weirdest things into something quaint.

On the other hand, maybe Mutant Mayhem isn’t made for a youth audience. The PG rating is pretty tame, but I found certain elements of it surprisingly dark at times. It actually kind of feels made for the middle-aged fans who have been waiting for a halfway decent film treatment after countless examples of mediocrity, and in that sense, it succeeds.

Not that it’s great. It’s better than mediocre, but not a whole lot better than good. As we watch these teenage mutant ninja turtles pining for a place in the human world outside of the sewer home in which a mutant rat (voiced by Jackie Chan) raised them, we do get a few good laughs out of a sprinkling of cleverly effective gross-out humor.

I suppose I should admit: I think I once saw the original film, in 1990. I would have been fourteen years old. I know I haven’t seen a single one of the other films. I don’t have a whole lot to compare to with authority, at least not that plenty of longtime fans will be apt to compare. The entire premise is, admittedly, pretty stupid. Amazingly, Mutant Mayhem is only the second of the seven films to be animated, and animation is a far better fit for something so over-the-top dumb.

Rogen costars as a mutant rhinoceros goon. He and his co-producers and co-directors Jeff Rowe and Kyler Spears (respectively a writer and artist on The Mitchells vs the Machines) sure managed to get a lot of big names for the rest of the voice cast: Maya Rudolph as mad scientist Cynthia Utrom; John Cena as fellow mutant rhino Rocksteady; Rose Byrne as mutant crocodile Leatherhead; Giancarlo Esposito as the mutants’ scientists father; Paul Rudd as Mondo Gecko; Hannibal Buress as Ginghis Frog; and Ice Cube as the villainous literal Superfly.

When it come to the animation style of this film, I have to say, I’m ambivalent. There’s something deliberately messy about it, falling just this side of scribbles, giving everything an off-kilter look. An unsettling number of human characters have their faces drawn with such mismatched and misshapen eyes they consistently made me think of Sloth from The Goonies (another reference most teenagers won’t give a shit about).

As you may have gathered, I’ve had to get past kind of a lot in order to enjoy Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem. But you know what? I did. Taking myself to see this movie on an early Monday evening—with several other exclusively middle-aged audience members—was not a waste of time. Do I think I would have missed much had I not gone? I suppose not. But it was a fun excursion nonetheless. Even that characterization makes it far better than anyone would reasonably expect the seventh film in an aging lower-tier franchise to be.

Did I mention The Bear’s Ayo Edebiri is also in this? Oh, and the turtles: Micah Abbey, Shamon Brown Jr., Nicolas Cantu, and Brady Noon. They’re all fine.

Overall: B

BARBIE

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

One might not be blamed for ambivalence about the movie Barbie, which is the latest in a long line of “movie adaptations” that seem far from intuitive ideas, perhaps starting with the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie twenty years ago. The flip side of this notion is that Pirates of the Caribbean turned out far better than anyone could have expected a movie based on an amusement park ride to be; and Barbie proves that, with the right director, the right writers, and the right casting, really any movie concept can be great if it’s done right.

And, to be clear: the sole reason I had interest in Barbie from the start was that it was directed and co-written by Greta Gerwig, who previously gave us fantastic works like Lady Bird (2017) and Little Women (2019). Barbie is her third film as a solo director (fourth when counting a co-directing gig), and hardly anything anyone would guess based on her previous offerings. But, her name on the project gave it both specific and unparalleled pedigree that made it something that had to be seen.

It is co-written by her longtime partner, Noah Baumbach, also an unusual and fascinating choice. These are both voices of critical independent films of the past decade or so, and in both cases Barbie qualifies as their first bona fide blockbuster film. I’m not sure anyone expected Barbie to be this huge when it was first greenlit, but this movie based on Mattel’s most famous toy has been the beneficiary of a marketing push the likes of which we haven’t seen in ages, and it’s one that has worked. A year ago, I would have expected Barbie to be the modest success and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer to be the blockbuster. Instead, almost certainly to the surprise of the makers of both movies, who no doubt opened them on the same weekend regarding them as counter programming, “Barbenheimer” became a thing, and a stunning number of movie-goers have committed to seeing both movies on opening weekend, making this almost certainly the biggest box office weekend of the year. What’s more, Barbie is tracking to be the biggest earner of the two.

You might think that comparing these movies is like comparing apples and oranges, but they do have a surprising amount in common, each with a protagonist who deal with the paradigm-shifting consequences of their actions, forever altering the universes that they live in. And from that perspective, I would argue, actually, that Barbie is the better movie.

A different director could have made a film version of Barbie that was every bit as fun, and maybe even worth seeing, but only Greta Gerwig, with the help of her expertly curated ensemble cast, could so successfully pack the movie with subtext. Even better, viewers with no interest in the subtext can just as easily enjoy the movie on a surface level—this doesn’t have to be an intellectual pursuit, or something you have to analyze or deconstruct. Gerwig’s genius is in how she makes that possible without making it necessary.

Barbie does indeed owe a certain debt, in premise, to movies like Toy Story or The Lego Movie (which really just ripped off Toy Story), in which toy characters live in the world of imagination created by those who play with them. Barbie is simply more dense with both meaning and humor. The humor part should really be stressed, because this is a very funny, wildly entertaining movie. Barbie manages the rare feat of taking ideas that were successful before, and making them better.

With a standard three-act structure, Barbie takes place in Barbieland in both the first and third acts, and this is the preferable setting, the more fun place to be. Barbie and Ken’s journey to The Real World is crucial to the plot, however, and this is where the second act takes place—and where I still very much enjoyed myself. I was charmed and impressed by everything in, and everything about, this movie.

Margot Robbie could not possibly have been better cast in the lead role, as what we come to discover is “Stereotypical Barbie.” Few other actors could pull off the balance of wide-eyed innocence and undiscovered pathos. Ryan Gosling is brilliantly cast as Ken, the would-be boyfriend who follows Barbie into The Real World only to discover the patriarchy that exists there, and then bring it back to Barbieland. This theme of patriarchy becomes a huge part of the movie, which will likely rub a lot of men the wrong way—the very men Greta Gerwig clearly wants to rub the wrong way. And those of us all-in on this movie from the jump are here for it.

A diverse array of other women play other Barbies, the ones long known as associated with a specific profession or particular personality trait. Amusingly, no fewer than eleven women are credited with just the same character name “Barbie,” among them Issa Rae (who plays the President of Barbieland), Kate McKinnon (for a while referred to as “Weird Barbie”), Emma Mackey, Hari Nef, and Dua Lipa, among others. Emerald Fennell even appears as Midge, the short-lived pregnant doll that apparently came across as a little creepy. Similarly, several men are credited as “Ken,” including Simu Liu (who is Gosling’s primary rival), Chris Evans and even John Cena. Michael Cera plays Allan, the onetime doll introduced in the sixties as Ken’s buddy, now a bit of an oddball outsider.

As can be expected with a movie like this, Barbie is also cram packed with visual gags and references to “Barbie” characters, careers, outfits and dollhouses throughout the toy’s history, none of which was I particularly familiar with and thus most of which I was unable to catch. But the magic of Barbie the movie is how it pokes fun at all of this, while also acknowledging the nostalgia that still exists for it, as well as the critiques of what the doll has been perceived to represent for women in society. These ideas only get underscored by Barbie and Ken’s journey into The Real World, where the meet America Ferrera as a mother with fond memories of playing Barbies with her now-teenage daughter (Ariana Greenblatt), as well as Will Ferrell playing the Mattell CEO—alongside a cadre of doltish male board members—as a bumbling fool but whose intentions are in the right place.

Given the wide range of perspectives on this doll, not by any means all of them positive, it’s almost extraordinary that Mattel actually signed off on the film as is. There has been some coverage of certain scenes that Gerwig refused to cut as requested, and a bit of hand wringing about the movie’s undeniably corporatized nature regardless of how much it satirizes. I am here to tell you, though, that Barbie is a genuine cinematic achievement, something that transcends its myriad ways of becoming a pop culture phenomenon. It’s actually a great film, an incredibly fun couple of hours constructed and designed by great minds and delightful performers alike. I genuinely look forward to seeing it again so I can catch some of the fun details I missed the first time around.

Barbie discovers that self-doubt and thoughts of mortality will break the spell.

Overall: A-

OPPENHEIMER

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

Oppenheimer is based on a 721-page biography, written by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin and published in 2005, called American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer. For director and co-writer Christopher Nolan to adapt a book of that length and density, it’s of little surprise that this film is a solid three hours long, and doesn’t feel like it due to its own density.

I have mixed feelings about the editing, which jumps around multiple timelines, albeit with parallel arcs—more than one detailing a hearing. In one, Oppenheimer, expertly played by Cillian Murphy, is being interrogated as someone with “leftist” and communist ties. In another, Lewis Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) is facing a Senate confirmation hearing for Secretary of Commerce, and at first it seems like he is being scrutinized for his own associations with Oppenheimer, but the dynamics of that hearing evolve over the film’s run time.

Does any of this sound like a movie that commands being shot entirely in IMAX film stock? The expansive marketing for this movie sure made it seem so, which was easy to assume to be true given Nolan’s filmography. To be clear, I was very impressed by this movie, but I did leave it at the end wondering why it was so essential that it be seen at a legit IMAX theater—which I had gone out of my way to do. I am here to tell you: it is not essential. It does look great that way, but also the vast majority of this movie is just people in rooms talking. That can be just as effective at a standard movie theater, or even, arguably, on a home entertainment system.

There are some visually awe-inspiring moments, to be fair. A great deal of time is spent building up to the test of the first-ever atom bomb, which Oppenheimer was perhaps most instrumental in inventing–that being the very reason this film exists. And, much has been made of this movie having no CGI shots in it, which is impressive indeed. The practically rendered (yet still, thankfully, not a real example of precisely what was being rendered) mushroom cloud, a giant plume of fire steadily expanding into the sky, makes a memorable sight on an IMAX screen. I had to lean forward so I could take the image in in its entirety, from the bottom of the screen past the people in rows ahead of me, to the top.

These moments, though, it really should be noted, are comparatively fleeting. Again, this is a solid three-hour film, and only a small percentage of that time is dedicated to explosions. The rest is dedicated to scientific theory, math equations, moral quandaries, a bit of philandering, and a bit of backstabbing. A memorable line: “The truly vindictive have the patience of a saint.” Having not read the biography, which in all likelihood I never will, I wondered to what extent this protracted personal rivalry between Strauss and Oppenheimer was invented, or embellished, for cinema.

I can say this much: seeing Robert Downey Jr. as any character besides Iron Man is truly a breath of fresh air. The man is 58 years old and he actually looks his age in this movie, something that hasn’t happened in so long, it took me multiple scenes before I even realized it was him I was looking at. Plus, he’s finally been given a role that showcases his genuine talent for the first time in about fifteen years.

Cillian Murphy may be the clear star of this cast, but it’s still a huge ensemble, packed with one recognizable face after the other: Matt Damon (also excellent) as General Leslie Groves; Alden Ehrenreich as a Senate aide; Kenneth Branagh as Danish physicist Niels Bohr; Josh Hartnett as nuclear physicist Ernest Lawrence; Matthew Modine as science administrator Vannevar Bush; Benny Safdie as theoretical physicist Edward Teller; Casey Affleck as military intelligence officer Boris Pash; Dane DeHaan as civil engineer Kenneth Nichols; David Krumholtz as physicist Isidor Isaac Rabi; and Rami Malek as an aide whose testimony provides a critical plot turn. (Malek appears in two scenes with no dialogue at all first, and only later gets the pivotal scene with actual lines.) That’s just a liberal sampling, and doesn’t even mention the only two female parts with any substantiveness: Emily Blunt, excellent in a part that’s easy to feel ambivalent about, as Oppenheimer’s alcoholic wife, Kitty; and Florence Pugh as Jean, Oppenheimer’s mentally unstable mistress. Pugh in particular is kind of wasted here, barely recognizable in a minor role that does nothing whatsoever to showcase her ample talents.

All of these people populate multiple interwoven, cross-cutting narrative threads, and that they are edited together with coherence is an impressive achievement, a big part of what makes the film move along at a steady clip in spite of its length. Oppenheimer is getting astoundingly positive reviews, will likely be on a ton of “best of the year” lists, and all but guaranteed to garner a ton of Oscar nominations, perhaps more than any other film this year. None of this presents as a mystery to me; I get it. I even have a feeling that I would gain deeper appreciation for this movie by seeing it multiple times. But, I mean, who has the time!

Whether I can say I think Oppenheimer is overrated, if only slightly, is something only time can tell. I really enjoyed it, and many others clearly have as well. There’s certainly something to be said for the consistency with which Christopher Nolan can make original films, that are not sequels or reboots or part of broad IP, legitimate event movies. The man is in a class of his own, particularly among filmmakers of his generation.

I still feel compelled to reiterate this film not especially worth the premium pricing of the IMAX experience. It’s great on a big screen, but is likely just as much so in a standard movie theater. I’d have felt my money were better spent seeing this using my AMC subscription rather than shelling out an extra $21 for it.

Sure it’s illuminating, but is it worth a special trip?

Overall: B+