WONKA

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

An argument has been made that, well, Wonka is for kids, and kids deserve movies too, right? Well, here’ s my counter-argument: the likelihood that kids will indeed enjoy Wonka notwithstanding, there are still kids’ movies out there that are actually good. This is not one of them.

Mind you, it’s not terrible either. But that’s just the thing: there is a Roald Dahl legacy to live up to here, as well as a Gene Wilder legacy, and Wonka falls short on both counts. This movie doesn’t even live up to the 2005 Tim Burton film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which I still insist was wonderful, I don’t care how many haters there are out there. Of course, that’s not to say any of these films have held up to the truly classic, enduring 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory—which, astonishingly, was rated G—but, on the flip side, kids today are neither likely to know anything about that film, nor have much interest in watching it if they do. It would be the equivalent of me having any interest in a film released in 1934 when I was ten years old.

The bummer of it right now is, if you want to take your kids to the movies, Wonka is nearly the only option. The only others in multiplexes right now are the animated films Migration and Wish, which are both getting worse responses than Wonka. Wonka, at the very least, is sprinkled with several genuinely charming moments, of the sort that are a signature of director Paul King. (King directed both of the Paddington films, and both of them are far superior to this.) If you’re one of the adults taking kids to this film, well, you’re kind of shit out of luck.

And, to be fair, it’s not just that it doesn’t live up to Roald Dah’s cinematic legacy. From the opening scenes, in which Timothée Chalamet dances with a bunch of people holding “Wonka” umbrellas behind him, the choreography middling and the lyrics unmemorable, I thought: Oh. This isn’t going to be great. The sequence ends with Wonka getting charged a fee for daydreaming, a brief gag that works better than any of the extended theatrics that came before it.

My biggest issue with Wonka is the visual effects. This movie was made on a budget of $125 million, and I just have to wonder: where the hell was the money spent? Just on the talent? Chalamet’s $9 million paycheck is objectively ridiclous, and yet even that is but a fraction of that budget. Once again, the shockingly good Godzilla Minus One comes to mind—that film was made for $15 million, and it looks far better than this.

Wonka is appropriately color saturated for a film that is clearly presented as a musical fantasia. And yet, a huge amount of it is rendered in subpar CGI, giving it a far more artificial look than films about the same character released 52 and 18 years ago. I was especially mystified by the one Oompa Loompa, whose movements are noticeably jerky-jerky. How can a film this expensive to make look so bad? To give credit where credit is due, Hugh Grant imbues the Oompa Loompa with more personality than any single other character in the film, which almost makes up for the bad visual effects. Almost. (Side note: it’s also in this film’s favor that the Oompa Loompa is given full autonomy, and never becomes the stand-in for slave labor that the Oompa Loompas were in either of the previous films.)

To be fair, Timothée Chalamet, an objectively great actor, does his best with what he has to work with. As do a bevy of other big names who make up the supporting cast: Olivia Colman as Mrs. Scrubitt, the innkeeper who tricks Wonka into indentured servitude; Keegan-Michael Key as the Chief of Police, so easily bribed by Wonka’s rival chocolatiers with chocolate that he gains a ton of weight over the course of the film (and I find the idea that this is “fat shaming” to be debatable at best); Rowan Atkinson as Father Julius, also easily bribed with chocolate; Jim Carter as Abacus Crunch, one of the other indentured servants slaving away in the inn basement; even Sally Hawkins, the mom in the Paddington movies and here playing Wonka’s mother in a few flashback sequences. In none of these cases does the actor get as much to chew on as they deserve, in spite of Olivia Colman’s extensive screen time as one of many villains, but the one who most directly steals Wonka’s luck away from him.

Fundamentally, Paul King seems to have missed the point entirely, of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which is about a possibly-corrupt, borderline sociopathic chocolatier weeding out the one good little kid in a group of spoiled brats. The only way Wonka’s return to that character’s story, particularly as a prequel, would make sense would be for Willy to learn the same kind of lesson himself as a youngster. Instead, Wonka is presented as pure hearted, and constantly taken advantage of by the adults around him who are the spoiled brats.

There is only one genuine kid in this movie, Calah Lane, who plays Noodle, also toiling away indefinitely in the inn basement. Lane is quite lovely, actually, one of the best things about Wonka, with onscreen charisma that helps keeps the proceedings watchable. But Noodle and Willy are both similarly pure of heart, dealing with heightened, standard kids-movie villains. Willy Wonka is supposed to be backed with subtext, and Wonka, generally pleasant as it is to watch, is all text.

All of that brings us back to this: kids will have a great time. The group of kids in the row of seats behind me, who did not shut the fuck up the entire film, certainly did. Surely they neither know nor care anything about Gene Wilder’s or even Johnny Depp’s iterations of Willy Wonka. For them, there is only Timothée Chalamet. But here’s the key difference: none of those kids are going to grow up regarding this as an unfortgettable classic from their childhoods. It’s just another passable outing at the movies, and in the context of its cinematic legacy, that’s a real shame.

Hugh Grant’s ample charms can’t elevate a middling achievement.

Overall: B-

MAESTRO

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

There’s a scene somewhere in the middle of Maestro, when Leonard Bernstein has an argument with his wife, in a large Manhattan room with the door closed. The camera remains distant, so we watch both of the characters in a wide shot, for the duration of their argument. There are no close-ups of either one of them, in the manner you would typically expect of a scene like this. It’s actually much closer to the real experience when you witness people arguing in person: you don’t get close into their personal space, and yet the tension in the room reaches you as though there were no distance at all. It’s a very unusual style of shooting, and it works perfectly, punctuated at its end by a sort of visual gag, an overture—if you’ll forgive the term—toward the heightened experience of moments like this.

It might be my favorite scene in the film, one of countless great scenes. Honestly I’m not sure I could even count the ways I loved the experience of watching Maestro. I expected to like it, and to say it exceeded my expectations would be an understatement. I’m gushing so much over it now, I fear it may make readers set their own expectations either impossibly high, or with an unfair amount of skepticism. I can only speak my truth: I loved this film.

I have said many times how seldom I like biopics that cover decades in a person’s life. It’s just not possible to distill someone’s life story within the space of two hours. Along comes Bradley Cooper, to whom I can only say: I stand corrected.

Thus, perhaps more than anything, Maestro is a triumph of editing. It begins in 1943, when Bernstein was working as an assistant conductor but had to fill in at short notice when the conductor came down with the flu; and it ends just one year before his death in 1990—which means the story spans 46 years. And yet, every single scene has much to say about Berstein and his life, and fits together to make a holistic picture of a man’s life.

Without focusing on just one moment in the man’s life, Bradley Cooper, who directed and co-wrote this film, instead focuses on Bernstein’s relationship with his wife, Felicia. More specifically, how his bisexuality affected their marriage. And the thing is, before watching this film I knew very, very little about Leonard Bernstein, but hey, wait a minute, he was queer? Well there’s the perfect doorway for me to leap right through—suddenly I’m very interested.

There has been a fair amount of coverage and discussion about Cooper’s decision to cast himself in this role, playing a Jewish man, wear a prosthetic nose, also playing a man who was queer. These are the things that increasingly invite crticisim: why not cast an actor who was actually both Jewish and queer? I still have no answer for that. I can only say this: Cooper’s performance is so astonishing, all of those concerns just fluttered right out of my head. I suppose it helped that he cast Matt Bomer, an openly gay actor, to play one of the objects of his affection.

Cooper is hardly new to making movies that left us wondering why we needed it, only to find it surprisingly accomplished. A Star is Born (2018) was the fourth version of that story on film, and in my opinion, turned out to be second only to the very first one, released in 1937. It also signaled to the world that, as both a director and an actor, audiences had long underestimated his abilities. Maestro goes even further, and cements Bradley Cooper as one of the great actors of his generation. I spent my time watching this film alternately marveling at Bradley’s incredibly lived-in performance, and being practically unable to believe it was really him. There’s “disappearing into a role,” and then there’s Bradley Cooper in Maestro. The fact that he did that while also directing the film is arguably the most amazing achievement I have seen in film this year.

And yet: we must not glean over the stellar Carey Mulligan as Felicia, in a performance without which Maestro would simply not work. She may not make the same kind of dramatic physical transformation as Cooper, but she stands as every bit his match onscreen. Her top billing, above even Cooper himself, is wholly justified. I have long loved Carey Mulligan as an actor, and she has never been better, in a part that in lesser hands may have been pitiful. Here, she strikes a fascinating figure, as a woman who goes into a marriage with a man whose proclivities she is perfectly aware of, and then, over time, discovers she overestimated her ability to tolerate them.

The scenes depicting the early years of Leonard Bernstein’s life and career are shot in beautiful black and white, and I think I may need to watch again to get a better sense of why the point at which it switches over to color was chosen. At the moment, I am unsure about that, and it’s the only thing about Maestro I can even come close to being critical of—except that, everything else works so well, I simply don’t care.

Maestro was edited by Michelle Tesoro, whose previous credits are mostly in television (including the spectacular limited series The Queen’s Gambit), and I am fully convinced she deserves the Oscar for Best Editing—setting aside roughly ten minutes of end credits, this film ends at an even two hours. And, with so much of a man’s life to convey, Maestro employs several unusually clever visual transitions from one scene to the next, a character walking through a doorway and suddenly they are on a new set. In every case, it’s an organic transition that propels the narrative forward, always serving the story.

Before today, perhaps the only thing I might have known or remembered about Leonard Bernstein was that he composed the music for West Side Story—as it happens, he also composed the score for On the Waterfront, for which he received his single Oscar nomination (but did not win). He’s also credited as the composer of the score for Maestro, which is indeed scored with many of his compositions. One scene even features a section of the West Side Story overture, and these musical choices are also consitently, expertly chosen.

Leonard Bernstein was the first American composer to receive international recognition, something I learned merely by virtue of watching this fantastic film. To have Bradley Cooper tell it, however, the most interesting thing about him was his marriage to Felicia, something unconventional especially for the time: they were married from 1951 until (spoiler alert!) Felicia’s death in 1978. They had three children, who don’t get prominence in this film and yet they are given appropriately vital presence, all of them in some way a reflection of the consequences of how Bernstein chose to live his life.

In the end, however, at least as far as Bradely Cooper is interested, it was about his genuine love for Felicia. I don’t have a clue how true to life the events in Maestro are, which I don’t see as especially relevant—we’re dealing with ideas and themes here, conveyed through immensely compelling characters. It does go to a very sad place toward the end, which only left me marveling at the man’s emotional—and romantic—range. Whether or not Leonard Bernstein was a good man is not really something Maestro is concerned with, which is to its benefit. He is a deeply fascinating, towering historical figure, and all we can ask for is that a biopic like this do him justice. Mileage among viewers may vary, but for me it all came together in perfect harmony.

This is actually Bradley Cooper, if you can believe it.

Overall: A

FALLEN LEAVES

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

Fallen Leaves is reveiving virtually universal acclaim, and I’m over here thinking: I must be missing something. It’s fine, but with all due respect, it has yet to strike me as being something particularly special. This is a very simple, surprisingly short (81 minute) tale of two middle-aged people awkwardly falling in love.

This film is being billed as a “romantic comedy.” Romantic, I can get on board with it being. I got a light chuckle out of it maybe three or four times. Otherwise, I’ll concede that Fallen Leaves has a unique sort of sweetness to it. This is about two people who lead very solitary lives, one a little more content with the solitude than the other. They meet at a karaoke bar, and in this particular scene, I did enjoy the furtive glances back and forth between a man and a woman who seem subtly taken aback by how attractive they’re finding each other.

We never learn the names of the characters, but Ansa is played by Alma Pöysti, who is 42; and Holappa is played by Jussi Vatanen, who is 45. Curiously, the story seems to be set over-so-slightly in the future: after getting fired at her supermarket job for taking expired food, Ansa is seen in the kitchen of a bar where she’s hired as a dishwasher, and a 2024 calendar is seen hanging on the wall. This might seem an insignificant detail given how close we are indeed now to 2024, but for the many scenes in which Ansa’s radio plays news reports of Russian attacks in Ukraine.

I had difficulty ascertaining the point of these news clips, in the middle of a love story between two people in Helsinki, Finland. Granted, Finland is the scandinavian country—indeed, the European country—with by far the longest border with Russia. But, there is no political element to the story here otherwise, and if there were supposed to be some symbolic element to these news briefs of war, they sailed right over my head.

Furthermore, the performances across the board are rather flat, muted, almost monotone. This was clearly a deliberate choice, something that happens in a lot of independent and/or foreign films. I wonder how this film is playing in its native Finland. Critics in America are loving it. Am I just jaded after being in my own relationship after twenty years? I’m inclined not to think so, but I’ve been known to be off base about things.

Holappa is a heavy drinker. Ansa doesn’t much care for it. Before they confront that issue, far more minor things occur that result in persistent missed connections: Ansa’s written phone number falling unnoticed out of Holappa’s pocket. Ansa’s playful but ill-advised decision to wait until their second date to tell Holappa her name. They both get fired from their jobs, although Holappa’s drinking is a good reason for it.

That’s not especially a spoiler. There aren’t any major plot turns in Fallen Leaves, which is appealingly unsophisticated in its execution. There’s not a lot to unpack here, really. Nor is there much in the way of emotion. Some movies are wildly emotionally manipulative; Fallen Leaves is the antithesis of that approach. Some might argue that this beautifully underscores the very simple love story at play, one about two people finding love much later in life than most people do. I would argue that this is just a pleasantly simple, straightforward love story and there doesn’t seem to be any more to it than that.

Yep. That’s about all that’s going on here.

Overall: B

POOR THINGS

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

I’m having somewhat of a difficult time deciding what to make of Poor Things. It does seem excellent, but to what degree am I coming to that conclusion because so many others have already said so? Indeed, I can come up with very few criticisms. Does my take that much of it struck me as a cross between Edward Scissorhands and Mars Attacks! count as a criticism?

Poor Things is the kind of film that, perhaps, requires multiple viewings. But we’ve just recently been over this: who has the time for that? Well, I do love director Yorgos Lanthimos, and this may actually be one of the few films I do go out of my way to see again. This guy has a knack for taking a premise that might seem derivative on the surface, and transform it into an innovation. That just may be what he’s doing here.

Of course, just as Edward Scissorhands was before it, Poor Things is a riff on the Frankenstein story. Except, in this case, the doctor (Willem Dafoe) is the mutilated monster, and the “monster” is the radiant Bella (a genuinely remarkable Emma Stone). Bella is the revived corpse of a woman who threw herself off of a bridge, but with the brain of her unborn child transplanted into her head.

Lanthimos is entirely unconcerned with pracitcal matters like fitting a tiny infant’s brain into the head of a grown woman. This is entirely beside the point, in a highly stylized universe that mixes Victorian aesthetics with 21st century sensibilities, a color-saturated world that presents itself as fantasy but mirrors the realities of Western ethics and morals, however bent they might be.

I thought a lot about the potential timelessness of Poor Things as I watched it, with its stunning production design that places it in a sort of outer region of time. This is a film that will hold up after many years, even as it references ideas, and even films, that came long before it. There’s some of The Wizard of Oz at work here, quickly shifting from the brilliant color of a pregnant woman leaping from a bridge, to stark black-and-white scenes of Bella, an infant growing into the world from the vantage point of an adult human body. The black and white lasts a surprisingly long time, Bella clapping like a baby, stumbling around like someone who is just learning to walk, because she is.

It’s only when it flashes back to Dr. Godwin Baxter (Dafoe) performing the brain transplant does it briefly shift back to color, and only when Bella has grown a bit, learned enough words and absorbed enough ideas, and has decided to go on a grand adventure, does the shift to color become permanent. I’m slightly ambivalent about this as a concept, but it’s mesmerizing to look at.

Poor Things, it turns out, is very interested in sexuality. This is one of the things that makes the movie great, with the fascinating premise of an incredibly innocent mind making the discovery, before society has had a chance to instill any shame in her about it. This makes for a lot of confusion and comedy among those around Bella, such as when she masturbates at the dining table with a fruit. I hope they use that as Emma Stone’s clip at the Oscars.

Baxter has an assistant, Max (Ramy Youssef), hired to collact data about Bella’s progress, in the process of which he develops feelings for her. Baxter decides they should marry, as a purely practical decision, and brings in a lawyer to draw up the legal documents—Duncan (Mark Ruffalo). Duncan is immediately smitten with Bella, and, over time, alternately flummoxed by her self-interested and self-assured behaviors. Ultimately Duncan becomes a clear microcosm of male reactions to women, and particularly their sexuality and their autonomy. There were times I found this played out very insightfully, and at others it just seemed really on the nose. Either way, Ruffalo is wonderful, in a role that showcases his talents far more than any of the countless Marvel movies he’s been in have managed.

We glean that Baxter has performed many amputations, swapping heads of different species of animals, a chicken with the head of a pig, or a dog with the head of a duck (these were the things that reminded me of Mars Attacks!). I hesitate to call any part of Poor Things “over the top,” but it might be fair to call some elements “a little much.” This is definitely the case with a sort of gag at the very end, without which I think this film would be notably improved—and it’s already uniquely impressive.

During Bella’s adventures away with Duncan (during which she also meets a young, self-described cynic played by Jerrod Carmichael), Baxter finds another body to revive. This one is played by Margaret Qualley, but nearly all of her screentime depicts her in a state of arrested development. It seemed a waste of Qualley’s talent. On the other hand, clearly there are actors simply eager to work with Yorgos Lanthimos.

I’m having an unusually odd reaction to Poor Things, a somewhat middling response to a piece of excellence with slightly wobbly foundations. This film spoke to me, but not in the visceral way I have responded to Lanthimos’s previous work, be it The Lobster (delightfully twisted) or The Killing of a Sacred Deer (deeply disturbed) or The Favourite (a provocative and funny period piece that has the unusual distinction of consistently improving with repeat viewings). If there’s one thing I can count on Yorgos Lanthimos for, though, is for him to keep pulling me back again. Either I will distance myself from this film as time goes on, or time will strengthen my affection for it—and this is a filmmaker with a talent for achieving the latter.

We find ourselves analyzing what Bella is learning.

Overall: A-

GODZILLA MINUS ONE

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

There are many impressive things about Godzilla Minus One, but the one that sticks with me the most is its technical achievement: no special effects-laden American film has ever looked this good on just a $15 million budget.

It should still be noted: you can still recognize the effects here as CGI—this doesn’t have the jaw-dropping effects of, say, Avatar: The Way of Water. What it does have, however, is a far better story, one that references a decades-old history of a global pop icon without being derivative (something James Cameron has never managed). And when it comes down to it, the effects here are far more impressive on such a comparatively meager budget, than stunning effects that are the result of a limitless budget could ever hope to be.

There are arguments either way when it comes to how impressive that $15 million budget really is. A Japanese production has no unions for actors or filmmakers, and far greater potential for exploitative practices than even Hollywood. Of course, to suggest that Hollywood isn’t exploitative, unions notwithstanding, is preposterous, and these considerations hardly account for how expertly executed Godzilla Minus One is on virtually every level, at literally a fraction of the budget of American tentpoles that spend $250 million to make—and often still look like shit.

This much I can tell you for certain: Godzilla Minus One does not look like shit. And, far more importantly, it has a story that is compelling in its own right, even without a giant radioactive sea creature entering the picture. This was the first Japanese-production Godzilla movie I have ever seen, and it’s far better than any of the several American Godzilla films I have seen (Roland Emmerich’s 1998 Godzilla was a downright embarrassment; Gareth Edwards’s C+ 2014 Godzilla squandered its potential; Michael Dougherty’s C- 2019 Godzilla: King of the Monsters was a mess of chaos; Adam Wingard’s C+ 2021 Godzilla vs Kong was merely a minor relief in not being quite as bad). Godzilla Minus One is a clear indicator that it’s best to go to the source: this is the 33rd Godzilla film to come out of Japan since the first one was released in 1954, and I can verify it’s a great introduction.

Not a lot of those 33 films are outright sequels, and neither is this one. In fact, it takes the “return to roots” so seriously that writer-director Takashi Yamazaki sets it at the very end of World War II—when Japan has already been leveled. Rare is the blockbuster monster-movie that offers the level of nuance at play here, much of which likely went over my head just by virtue of my not being Japanese. Still, there’s a lot to consider even for the global audience, particularly this film’s fascinating point of view, which clearly indicates a cultural shift in Japan in which kamikaze missions are no longer seen as the ultimate in honor.

We meet the protagonist, Koichi (a truly wonderful Ryunosuke Kamiki), landing a fighter plane on an island for repair, and quickly revealed to have backed out of a kamikazi mission. His guilt over abandoning his “duty” informs everything he does from then on, including his inability to shoot the creature that suddenly appears and wreaks havoc on the military installation. (It’s clear to us, though, that he makes the right decision not to shoot at it: “What if it just makes it angry?”) He meets a woman, Noriko (Minami Hamabe), who also has no family left, and who is taking care of a baby whose parents died in the war. They become a sort of tentative family, coping with all their own forms of PTSD in the wake of war, only to then be faced with a giant monster.

Okay, so let’s talk a bit about the monster, because I have some ambivalence about its design. Godzilla doesn’t look so much like a radioactive lizard as a barely-disguised guy in a monster-lizard suit—even as rendered in CGI. I understand the impetus to do this, as Godzilla is such an iconic character, and one might argue he should look, at least roughly, like he always did. Nevertheless, in many of the wide shots, which make Godzilla look like a strangely buff lizard-man, I just found the look distractingly hokey.

When Godzilla is swimming in the sea with his back spikes slicing through the surface, though, or he’s powering up to spew nuclear-strength heat rays out of his mouth, the look is pretty damned cool. The corny looking wide shots notwithstanding, Godzilla Minus One is packed with set pieces that are fantastically shot and edited, always giving us a strong sense of place with the characters, and using the effects shots exclusively in ways to convey the shock and awe of what the characters are witnessing.

And this is really what it comes down to: countless moments in this movie are genuinely thrilling, which alone would make it worth a look. But the drama unfolding between the characters grounds the story in a way that blockbuster disaster movies never bother with, because we are expected to be thrilled without consideration for expendable characters. This only raises the stakes when the thrills actually do happen, resulting in final scenes that actually offer a genuinely emotional payoff.

Here’s another great thing about Godzilla Minus One: this movie never asks us to think of the creature as just a misunderstood animal, something that deserves our empathy because he’s just acting on instinct. That’s often a good perspective to have with real-life animals—which Godzilla is not, and with Godzilla, that is not the point. In many Godzilla films, the creature is a symbol, and the possibilities of meaning are endless. In this case, he’s a stand-in for Koichi battling his own demons, and it really works.

There’s a lot going on in Godzilla Minus One, but in this case, it’s beautifully orchestrated chaos. This, right here, is the way Godzilla should be done, and a slew of American directors could learn a lot from it. Or, of course, we could just continue looking to the Japanese for how to shepherd one’s own aging creation into a vital future.

It turns out you really can make the old inventive again.

Overall: B+

LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND

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

This is the new power of Netflix, apparently: Leave the World Behind debuts on Netflix December 8, and that very day I get texts from two different friends: Have you watched Leave the World Behind Yet? and I’m watching the movie Leave the World Behind on Netflix have you seen it?

This movie wasn’t even on my radar. It might have been, had there been a wide release in theaters—instead, yet again, it merely got a limited theatrical release on November 22, something that completely passed me by. I look up what’s playing at my local theaters on a nearly daily basis, but that does not include the traditionally last-run theater The Crest up in Shoreline, which is 11 miles away from me—without a car, that might as well be Mars, especially with three separate multiplexes and three first-run, single-screen theaters within three miles of me. I couldn’t even tell you if this movie did indeed play at The Crest, or anywhere locally, at all.

It’s not even clear whether my friends realized the film had just been released on the very day they were watching it, given the question from both of them as to whether I had watched it yet. I had gone to an actual theater to watch a different movie, give me a chance, sheesh! I looked up the synopsis, though, found it compelling, and I suppose I should admit I was also swayed to a degree by its star power: Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke as Amanda and Clay, parents of teenagers who make a sudden decision to rent a house outside the city for a quick, relaxing, “barely off-season” getaway. Then there are Mahershala Ali, as well as Industry’s Myha'la, as G.H. and his grown daughter Ruth, who show up at the house after a blackout occurs, claiming to be the owners of the house and asking for assistance.

I put the movie on, was a bit surprised by the runtime—138 minutes—and, I must confess, there was something about the camera work, as we were introduced to this family of four (Charlie Evans playing horny 16-year-old Archie and Farrah Mackenzie playing inquisitive, Friends-obsessed, 13-year-old Rose). I found myself thinking: This feels like a TV movie. I wonder how differently it might have played in a movie theater.

The plot unfolds very much like a mystery-thriller, and we don’t get anywhere close to concrete information as to what’s behind the blackout until the very end of the film, a kind of quasi-reveal that I only found moderately satisfying. Leave the World Behind is a film that Has Something To Say, and some of the time it’s compelling, but very little of the time is it particularly profound.

What slowly becomes clear as that there is some kind of national cyber attack occurring. G.H. is the only one who seems to know anything, but because he only suspects more than the others know, for a very long time he’s very hesitant to share, which in turn makes him suspicious. Julia Roberts plays Amanda very knowingly as a somewhat typical, urban middle-class White woman, and tensions between her and this Black father-and-daughter straddle the line between her stated mistrust of anyone regardless of who they are, and biases that dare not speak their name (namely, racism). Director and co-writer Sam Esmail (Mr. Robot) is ultimately being coy about these themes in this film, until he bumps right up against being heavy-handed.

Because it soon becomes very clear, you see, that Leave the World Behind isn’t so much about an external attack, as we are clearly meant to believe until certain plot reveals, as it is about how Americans will treat each other in times of crisis, and particularly manipulated times of crisis. Very weird things occur that make you wonder whether something otherworldly is occurring: deer keep gathering around certain characters, in unnaturally large groups, as though trying to communicate something. An oil tanker runs aground on the beach. A plane crash is discovered on another beach. An earsplitting alarm blares across the region. A snippet of radio broadcast through static reveals whatever is happening is wreaking havoc on animal migrations.

In one eerie and exciting sequence, a bunch of self-driving Teslas have driven to crash into each other on the highway, thereby blocking the family’s one attempted route back to the city—a place they clearly don’t want to be right now anyway. This is where the mystery is at its greatest: is this an alien invasion, or a machine uprising? This would technically fall under the genre of science fiction, but the science element really takes a back seat to the fiction, which is meant to be just plausible enough to get under our skin.

Leave the World Behind rarely succeeds at getting under my skin, but even at its measured pace for well over two hours, it certainly succeeded at keeping my attention. This is the kind of movie that will be fun to talk about, if not especially intellectually stimulating. There are moments when the script gets a little close to preachy, about our inability to be kind to each other. In the opening sequence and just before the opening credits, we hear Amanda exclaim how much she fucking hates people. Broadly speaking, this movie is a little on the nose. It’s perfectly tailored to be a middle-of-the-road streamer release—indeed, the modern equivalent of a TV movie, with some seriously under-par CGI. I’m not disappointed I didn’t get to see this in a theater, but it certainly passed the time more than well enough at home.

A quartet of characters trying to ascertain who the real enemy is.

Overall: B

EILEEN

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

It’s a strange position to be in, trying to be careful not to spoil key plot points in a barely better than mediocre movie. Does it even matter? Are any of you going to watch it? I suppose if you read the 2015 novel of the same name by Ottessa Moshfegh, you might have some interest regardless of what I have to say about it. Either way, this is a decent film that I wouldn’t go out of my way to recommend.

Unless, perhaps, you’re an Anne Hathaway completist. And to be fair to her, she is absolutely the most fascinating figure in Eileen, as Rebecca, a charismatic woman hired as a pyschologist in a 1960s Massachusetts juvenile detention center.

The title character, Eileen, is played by Thomasin McKenzie. She’s been working as a secretary at the prison for the few years since the death of her mother, tending to her drunken widower father (Shea Wigham) in the meantime. When Rebecca shows up, Eileen becomes infatuated. And for the first half of the movie or so, you wonder why it wasn’t called Rebecca. (There’s already another famous movie called that, of course, but since when has that stopped anyone?)

The script, written by both Luke Goebel and novelist Moshfegh herself, has a thing for introducing narrative threads and then never fully exploring them. Is Eileen sexually repressed? We see her masturbating more than once, near the beginning of the film, in unusual situations. In one, she’s covertly got her hand down her own skirt at work. In another—the opening sequence—she’s in a car, spying on a couple necking in another car. And then she grabs a handful of snow off the ground and stuffs it down her skirt and into her crotch. What the hell? Eileen never directly addresses what that’s about.

Instead, Eileen’s head is turned by the entrance of Rebecca, and even though both of them have otherwise only ever indicated tastes in men, we wonder if this is some kind of budding lesbian romance. There’s something sensual about their budding friendship, with a confidence on the part of Rebecca, and a tentative excitement on the part of Eileen. Until the point at which Rebecca calls and invites Eileen over to hang out at her place on Christmas Eve, I honestly wondered what exactly this movie was supposed to be about.

Eileen arrives at the house. Rebecca is embarrassed by the mess. There’s an odd vibe, as they sit in the kitchen, attempting to visit. And then, when I tell you Eileen takes a turn, it seriously takes a turn. Something comes out of Rebecca’s mouth that I won’t spoil, but it radically alters everything about this film from that point forward, and it’s a moment that compelled me to say “What?” out loud through a disbelieving chuckle in the middle of a movie theater.

I’ll give Eileen this much credit: it is absolutely not about what it makes you think it’s about, for a shockingly long time. It’s also surprisingly straightforward, stunning twist notwithstanding: there’s not a lot of complexity going on here, which would seem to suit the 97-minute run time. And when it gets to the end, both of these women make unexpected choices, most of which lack common sense. When the credits rolled, all I could say was, “Uh. Okay.”

Thus, I can’t really decide what to make of Eileen, which manages to be a simple tale in spite of it folding in elements of patricide, incest, and pedophilia. What nuance this film contains comes from the performances, which are easily the best thing about it. Both of these actors are perfectly cast in roles that are both ultimately bemusing. That may have been the point, and McKenzie and Hathaway embody their roles in a way it’s hard to imagine anyone else doing as well. They make a fine pair on screen together. I just kind of wish they were featured together in a meatier story than something that falls just short of adequate.

Just because it isn’t flat-out bad doesn’t mean these two don’t deserve better.

Overall: B-

MAY DECEMBER

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

I feel like I should watch May December four more times before I can make a truly definitive statement regarding my opinion of it. But, well, I have other things to do so I’m writing the review now.

How often is the average viewer going to watch it, anyway? Critics can watch movies over and over to gain clarity on their perceptions of them, but that won’t change the average viewer’s experience of it. Most people who watch this movie are only ever going to see it once. Well, I can tell you: this movie might throw you for a loop. It might stun you. It might make you deeply uncomfortable. It might fascinate you on concurrent, multiple levels. It did all of the above to me.

Making a movie clearly inspired by the Mary Kay Letourneau story—which I completely forgot occurred right here in the Seattle area (Burien, to be specific, in 1996)—would be one thing. Todd Haynes, the visionary director behind such masterpieces as Far From Heaven (2002) and Carol (2015), compounds the complexity by making a movie about an actress researching a role in which she plays the woman who had an affair with a middle school-aged boy.

It should be noted that there are many key differences between Latourneau and Gracie, the older woman here played magnificently by Julianne Moore (here being directed by Todd Haynes for the fifth time). The most curious, perhaps, is that Latourneau had her affair with Vili Fualaau when he was 12 years old, but Gracie’s affair with Joe (a remarkable Charles Melton) when he was 13—23 years before the setting of the film. I can’t quite decide what to make of this difference. Does making the kid a legit teenager rather than a preteen somehow make the story more palatable? I can’t say it does: Elizabeth, the actress (an astonishing Natalie Portman), complains to her director about how the 13-year-old boys auditioning for the part aren’t “sexy enough,” and we rightly feel a little gross. Later we see a card Joe made for Grace around the time of their so-called “affair” (I hesitate even to call it that), and I cringed so hard I nearly felt like throwing up.

As it happens, Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau separated after 14 years of marriage. Steve Letourneau, Mary Kay’s ex-husband, moved to Alaska with the four children, of which he was awarded custody—all perfectly sensible. In May December, evidently to make things far more awkward, Gracie’s older children and ex-husband all still live in the same town, in this case Savannah, Georgia. This way they can all run into each other at a restaurant the night before Gracie’s twins as well as one of her grandchildren are graduating from high school.

Another key difference: in May December, Gracie and Joe are still married, now more than twenty years, Joe at the age of 36 and Gracie at 59. This is a film that examines the psyche of the people involved in this wildly unusual, deeply unhealthy scenario. There is so much to unpack in this movie, it’s difficult to know even where to start. If you have sexual abuse in your childhood, some of this could be triggering.

The wildest thing about this movie, of course, is that the premise is not just plausible—this has actually happened. How would May December play if the Mary Kay Letourneau story had never happened? Would it feel like too much of a stretch, a test of suspension of disbelief? The only reason this movie exists, of course, is Letourneau—it’s impossible to discuss the film without discussing her. And, just as Elizabeth tries to find ways to understand and empathize with how these people made the decisions they made, we find ourselves making the same exploration, through her.

The stealth surprise of May December is that Elizabeth, as it happens, is just as fucked up as anyone else in this movie. There’s a subtle narrative thread here, touching on the salacious fascination we have with sensationalized stories like this. Natalie Portman is absolutely incredible in this role, as a woman overstaying her welcome as she “researches” the role, taking the task to new and dangerous places, fucking with the stability of people already existing in precarious emotional spaces. Elizabeth engages in her own sort of grooming, gaining the trust of people she is ultimately just using for the purpose of serving her onscren performance. (One of many fantastic touches is how Julianne Moore plays Gracie with a slight lisp, and when we later see Elizabeth playing her, she really leans into that lisp.)

Gracie’s younger children are surprisingly well put together, but the eldest from the previous marriage, Georgie (Cory Michael Smith), is understandably a bit unstable. Everyone in Gracie’s orbit has a different way of dealing with such truly unique circumstances, which compels people to mail literal shit in a box to their house. Gracie herself, while prone to sobbing breakdowns due to endless, barely covert judgment in her community, is fascinatingly unrepentant. She remains steadfast even in the face of Joe coming to an unusually existential moment: is it possible he was too young to be making these kinds of decisons? “You seduced me,” Gracie says to him—a horrid line I’m not sure I will ever forget.

It occurs to me, suddenly, that I easily empathize with everyone in this movie, except for the two leads. Gracie declares herself “naive,” which is perhaps true, but in a way that masks a kind of sociopathy. Elizabeth is eager to understand where Gracie is coming from, but in ways that ultimately only serve her narcissism. There is something deeply wrong with both of these women.

There’s a lot that really got under my skin in May December—but in all the right ways. There’s something about the delivery, particularly in the beginning, that feels almost unnecessarily overwrought, and then somehow it clicks and really works. If I had any complaint, it would be about the score, by Marcelo Zarvos, which is incongruously melodramatic. These jarring piano cords will ring out in even the most otherwise quietly performed scenes. I can see what Haynes we going for, but it never quite worked for me.

That said, I have a strong feeling I could change my mind about the score upon repeat viewings. I remain unconvinced as to whether that’s really relevant, though. Even after one viewing, even accounting for intrusive music, May December is a film I will be thinking about for a long time to come. It has far more to unpack than I even managed to cover here, making it a treasure trove of discomfort.

Either you’re Haynes Hive or you aren’t. Count me all in.

Overall: A-

RENAISSANCE: A FILM BY BEYONCÉ

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

There is so much to say about Reinassance: A Film by Beyoncé, not least of which is that subtitle: the film was written, produced and directed by Beyoncé herself. Could I possibly cover everything there is to say about it? My best hope is to cover a fraction of it—I’m just another gay White guy, after all. There are things Beyoncé means to other communities that I could not possibly relate to.

This much is clear: People. Love. Beyoncé. Renaissance is packed with audience clips featuring fans going apeshit, and my best guess would be that, to those people, this film is an outright masterpiece. When it comes to those kinds of fans, the star can do no wrong. The closest to that kind of idol I have ever had is Madonna—who even gets a shoutout here, during the performance of “Break My Soul” that samples Vogue, and literally folding “queen mother, Madonna, we love you!” into the lyrics—and not even I go apeshit at her concerts. (I do get excited in a way I don’t at other concerts.) I quickly run out of patience for excessive fan fawning, and have even left Madonna fan groups on Facebook because of ridiculous backlash to the slightest of criticisms.

And yet, when it comes to Renaissance, here’s the thing: I can find nothing, really, to criticize. It’s a fantastically immersive, documentary concert film, a fairly even mix of impeccably shot live performance footage and backstage and behind-the-scenes footage. If forced to criticize anything, it might be the run time, which comes in at just eleven minutes shy of three hours. It seems even concert films are not immune to the current trend of indulgent editors. Of course, I say this as a genuine fan of Beyoncé, someone with all of her albums, someone who loves her too—but, you know, just not that much. I don’t go apeshit over her.

It should be noted that I went to a 12pm screening on a Saturday. I was one of literally four people in the theater, and one of two people who came alone. Only the two guys who came together, and sat two seats away from me in my row, so much as sang along to a few of the songs. Given what I have heard about packed evening screenings that make quite a contrast to this experience, crowds so rowdy it might as well be at a literal concert, it’s clear that how great an experience this film is will depend a great deal on what you’re looking for, and the context in which you see it.

There are two major things that stayed with me after seeing Renaissance. The first is the audience, and who this film’s editors chose to focus on. It comes as no surprise that Beyoncé’s audiences are largely Black people, but also—holy shit, a lot of gay men. Such a majority of the men seen in the audience display some level of queer sensibility that I made a game of identifying what few men at least appeared to be cisgender and straight. (It’s not lost on me that this is ultimately a regressive exercise, especially in an age when the very concept of “gaydar” is deeply dated.) As you can imagine, there’s a lot of queer Black men.

And nowI have to bring it back to Madonna once again, because of the inevitable comparisons to her seminal 1991 concert documentary Madonna: Truth or Dare. There have of course been several other films inspiring comparison to Truth of Dare, but I’m not sure there as ever been a more apt comparison than with Renaissance. And Renaissance is executed as though it identified the flaws in Truth or Dare—creating a false narrative of the star being “mother” to her dancers; artistic choices that serve only to sensationalize—and dispensed with them.

As someone who is a huge fan of both Madonna and Beyoncé, I see these two artists’ status in the queer community as representative of different eras. Much as I love Madonna and still acknowledge the trail she blazed for others after her, most of her business decisions were ultimately self-serving, and it must be acknowledged how much queer and Black culture (and, in particular, Black queer culture) she appropriated. “Vogue” is the ultimate example of this, mainstreaming Black ballroom culture and ultimately whitewashing it. I suppose you could argue that Beyoncé makes ultimately self-serving decisions as well—I mean, shit, the woman is worth $540 million—but she also elevates other communities in a way few of her artistic forebears have. An entire behind-the-scenes sequence in Renaissance is dedicated to how many of her dancers on this tour are queer Ballroom dancers.

There is an organic flow to how the backstage footage is edited into the concert performance footage. Renaissance begins with a collage Beyoncé addressing whatever city she’s in, saying “I love you” to them, and then launching into the “I love you, I love you, I love you” of “Dangerously in Love”—a conceit that is both simple and clever. She makes the unusual, yet effective, choice of opening her set with a couple of ballads, and then shifts into higher-tempo tracks from the Renaissance album: “I’m That Girl,” “Cozy,” “Alien Superstar.” It’s actually several songs in before the shift from concert to documentary footage occurs, and it happens mid-performance at a concert where the sound suddenly cuts out. Suddenly we’re backstage, seeing everyone scramble, find a quick solution, and then launch right back into performance.

The documentary footage is used very sparingly during the first hour or so of the film, but at a measured pace, the behind-the-scenes stuff becomes more frequent. I can’t say that Renaissance reveals who Beyoncé “really is” any more than any of these kinds of films do, but we do get a glimpse of some of her frustrations, particularly when crew around her don’t give her the respect she deserves (this plays out very subtly, for the record, but it’s there). Beyoncé is well known to be fiercely protective of her personal life, and whatever she has revealed, from whatever informed the Lemonade era to anything she shares here, has been meticulously calculated and controlled.

The second major thing that stayed with me after seeing Renaissance is the spectacular costuming. I found myself thinking: I want a feature length documentary on just the costume designs for this tour. Eventually, we actually do get a segment on costume design, which touches on the Uncle Johnny who made the dress referenced in “Heated.” And here we get to some of the best editing in Renaissance, because in nearly every performance, shots will seamlessly cut between different performances of the same song, in either a totally different dress or outfit, or a variation of the same jumpsuit. The edits are so clean that it often looks as though her outfit magically changes mid-movement.

The great costuming extends to the dancers and musicians, perhaps most memorably the trumpeter Crystal Torres, who was very pregnant during much of the tour. She is often seen in the background, elaborately costumed in a way that proudly frames and accentuates her bare, pregnant belly. And this is, perhaps, the magic of Beyoncé: she commands authority, won’t take no for an answer when she knows she doesn’t have to, and also elevates and supports the people who work with her. Or so it would seem from this movie, anyway—and the effectiveness of the film is all I am judging here.

Overall, I had a great time at Renaissance: A Film, even if I found it to be even poorer a substitute for a real, live concert than I expected. I could easily feel differently about that had I seen it in a full house of fans, or if I had managed to attend an actual concert but had to sit in nosebleed seats. Emotional distance aside, there is no physical difference between audience and performance in Renaissance, which is probably the best thing to recommend it. As is typical with films like this, if you are a casual fan, there’s no need for you to go out of your way, necessarily. But if you love Beyoncé the way the fans shown in this film do, then you will have a spectacular experience.

The costumes alone are worth the price of admission.

SALTBURN

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

Saltburn is a beautifully shot narrative with inconsistencies to the point of distraction. It’s fun to watch while it’s happening, then a twist comes at the end that forces a re-examination of everything that came before, with the inevitable conclusion that the twist is unearned.

I came into this movie expecting something fun, sexy, borderline scandalous. I already knew about the infamous bathtub drain and gravesite scenes. Neither of them really lived up to the hype, failed to offer much in the way of shock value, although the bathtub drain was still pretty effectively gross (more because of dirty bathwater than bodily fluids).

The film really kicks into high gear when Oliver (Barry Keoghan) finally arrives at the Saltburn estate of the film’s title, home of the filthy rich college classmate, Felix (Jacob Elordi), who has invited him to stay. Felix’s parents are wonderfully cast with Rosamund Pike and Richard E. Grant, as vaguely oblivious characters whose wealth has made them entertainingly detached, superficial, and catty. The moment Oliver meets them, the dialogue crackles, and you want to watch a whole movie just about this family.

Instead, Saltburn seems to fancy itself a lite version of class satire, except it never has any real bite. Rounding the cast are Alison Oliver as Venetia, Felix’s sister with an eating disorder; Archie Madekwe as Farleigh, Felix’s multiracial cousin visiting from America (details that could be a goldmine for exploration that never happens); and Carey Mulligan as Pamela, a friend of Felix’s parents who is also staying and on the cusp of overstaying her welcome. Mulligan in particular gets surprisingly short screen time and nothing of real substance to work with, even though she gets top billing with the rest of the cast—evidently she just wanted to work with writer-director Emerald Fennel again after starring in Promising Young Woman.

Saltburn is thus Emerald Fennell’s second feature film as writer-director, and a pattern is already emerging, in which a clearly talented filmmaker has some deeply compelling ideas, and then squanders them in various ways with a truly unnecessary twist ending. In the case of Saltburn, the ending practically negates everything that came before it, calling into question the idea that Oliver was ever truly obsessed with Felix, or possibly in love with him, as we were led all the while to believe. Ultimately, during an extended scene in which we see Oliver dancing naked through the estate house for so long we are struck by a body so hot it shockingly nearly rival’s Jacob Elordi’s, we are left to wonder if all he ever wanted was the house itself. And: why? That part is a mystery.

And on the road to this inexplicable ending, there are shifts of power between characters that never get explained. One moment the cousin, Farleigh, is acting pointedly superior to Oliver. In a later scene Oliver gains an upper hand, I guess, by going into Farleigh’s room and, one could argue, sexually assaults him. Why Farleigh would act frightened and intimidated in that scene and then turn around and behave the next day with the same superiority as though the nighttime intrusion never happened, is anyone’s guess. Similar shifts happen between Oliver and Felix’s sister, Venetia.

No such shift ever happens with Felix himself, who seems to remain in Oliver’s thrall throughout—until the end. I won’t spoil what ultimately happens to Felix, except to say that Fennell taks her time to make that specifically clear, during which time I could not stop thinking about it as I was utterly baffled.

Saltburn is a rare breed of film in its quality of visual execution, and great performances, making you feel for most of its runtime that you’re watching something good. Honestly, I wouldn’t mind watching it again just for the georgeous cinematography, of both the sprawling estate and the captured beauty of Keoghan’s and Elordi’s bodies (and, emphatically: both of them). Ditto the eccentric chemistry between everyone in Felix’s filthy rich family, who dress up for dinner, are woken every morning by servants, and are served breakfast as a family in the mornings.

Oliver is subtly manipulating Felix, and then the rest of his family, throughout, which we are meant to understand going in. And then that ending comes, and there’s nothing subtle about it whatsoever, nor was anything that came before it, apparently. Oliver becomes a cartoon, essentially. I left the theater wondering what the point of it all was.

I thought it would burn a little more.

Overall: B-