THE ZONE OF INTEREST

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

The Zone of Interest is a film that challenges you to pay attention, then makes you uncomfortable, forces you to sit in that discomfort, and regularly reminds you of the ease of complacency. It is within this context that I found how it ended to be one of the greatest endings of a film, perhaps ever.

Jonathan Glazer, who co-wrote the script and directed this film, previously gave us such wildly disparate films as Under the Skin (2014), Birth (2004) and Sexy Beast (2000), certainly takes his time between feature films, and has evidently honed his craft over time. Under the Skin in particular, a film now a decade old, is similarly subtle in both its profundity and provocative themes; it definitely has something to say. And, while it is imperfect, its ideas, its visuals, and especially its tone has me returning to it every few years.

The Zone of Interest is a bit more direct in its challenge, a slight irony given how it shifts nearly all the horrors of the Holocaust outside the borders of the frame. This is a story focused on Rudolf and Hedwig Höss (Christian Friedel and Sandra Hüller), and their children, living their seemingly ordinary, every day lives in a home literally on the other side of the fence surrounding the Auschwitz concentration camp. Rudolf is the commandant of the camp, Hedwig is his wife, and in their minds, they are living the dream: everything they want in a home, with an elaborate garden, and a loving family.

The Jewish people loom large in this film, in that to the German family we are following—as well as the rest of their family, friends and colleagues—Jewish people are entirely incidental, no more or less worth considering than generic cargo. Their conscious thought about Jewish people is limited to questions of whether the few of them being used as slave labor on the grounds should be allowed inside the house. Occasionally an unusual consideration punctures their idyllic existence, such as when the ashes of human remains float down a nearly river and reach them while obliviously fishing or swimming. (That image of the ash flowing down the river toward them is not one I will soon forget.)

Glazer is a master of tone, particularly of the deeply creepy sort, but in The Zone of Interest, he quite intentionally does away with tone altogether. The proceedings are generally very matter-of-fact, the same approach the Höss family has toward Rudolf’s work. This only changes in sporadic fits, with Mica Levi’s truly nightmarish score, which reaches occasional crescendos over seemingly mundane images, like flowers growing in the garden. But, there is always something insidious under the surface of any particularly domestic image: those flowers are grown with human remains in the soil.

I might be tempted to call The Zone of Interest the 21st-century answer to Schndler’s List, except Jonathan Glazer is far removed from the kind of populist director that Steven Spielberg is. Even a film like Schindler’s List, which I would still regard as essential viewing, is similarly pointed in how it challenges its audience, but would never have reached the same number of people without the Spielberg name attached to it. Glazer, by contrast, is a longtime critical darling whose films just don’t get widely seen. Even with The Zone of Interest fairly likely to become his most-seen film, it’s never going to get genuinely mainstream exposure.

It’s too bad. The Zone of Interest is the kind of film you don’t particularly want to watch, but which you’ll be glad to have seen. I would hesitate to call it “homework,” but plenty of people would likely see it that way. For those who actively seek it out, and you absolutely should, it is likely to be seen as a profound work of art.

Is it a masterpiece? It’s too soon to tell. I was deeply impressed by almost everything about it—including Sandra Hüller, who also gave a spectacular performance recently in Anatomy of a Fall—but was left with mixed feelings about that jarringly severe score. I could feel differently after some time. And that is a specific thing The Zone of Interest plays with, time: nearly all of it is set in the last couple years of World War II, and that changes briefly only once, in a way that is incredibly effective.

I left this film thinking a lot about “the banality of evil,” and how easily it become part of our day to day existence. Rudolf recounts to Hedwig over the phone how he spent a party thinking mostly how he would gas everyone in the high ceilinged banquet room, and those were all people ostensibly on his side. This is a portrait of people far more concerned with logistics than humanity, and the casual way it invites us into their world is the most frightening of all.

The Banality of Evil: The Movie

ORLANDO: MY POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY

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

Within the first few minutes of Orlando: My Political Biography, one of the young people sitting in the row behind my said, “This movie is so French.” Indeed,

The person who said it seemed mildly amused, not particularly irritated. I’ll say that this film reached me a bit more successfully as it went on, but also that it regularly lost me, then pulled me back in, then lost me again, then pulled me back in again. Some of this was, perhaps, indeed its very French-ness. I suspect some of it was that I was almost certainly the oldest person in that audience, a gender-nonconforming elder receiving an interpretive lesson on how today’s trans and nonbinary youth approach gender identity.

To call Orlando: My Political Biography “high concept” would be an understatement. Writer-director Paul B. Preciado, who is himself 53 years old (and, importantly, a trans man) assembled 26 trans and nonbinary people to introduce themselves by name on camera, declare that they are “playing Virginia Woolf’s Orlando,” and wear a ruffled collar while doing so. This is all a riff on Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando: A Biography, which might work better should you have read the novel recently, or at all. I have never read it, but the film makes many references to how the novel’s namesake protagonist famously suddenly switches genders midway through the story. It does not, however, make any reference to Tilda Swinton playing the role in a 1992 film adaptation.

It should be noted that the 26 subjects featured in the film range from 8 to 70 years old, which would suggest a broad range of ages, but there are only a group of three kids, and one 70-year-old. There’s a couple of clearly middle-aged people, but the majority of them are clearly young, ranging from their teens to their twenties. But there is intention to this as well: the subjects on the edges of this spectrum serve as both contrasts and anchors for the others, who become a collective portrait of contemporary trans and nonbinary experience, of a kind of defiant joy, in the face of persistent societal pressures.

In a sort of parallel to blurring gender lines, Preciado blurs the line between subject and performer, having his subjects recite lines—sometimes directly from the novel; sometimes other written material—as well as having his subjects simply share their thoughts and experiences. The early scenes are perhaps the most avant-garde, which unfortunately makes them the least inviting. At one point, a subject essentially makes out with the trunk of a tree.

This film is garnering rave reviews, but I can’t help but wonder who will be that into it, outside those who are both extensively literate and academically interested in gender. This Orlando features a few funny moments for levity, but is for the most part a very highbrow exercise. I find myself imagining college students in a Gender Studies class patting themselves on the back for how brilliant they think it is, while neglecting more effectively straightforward documentaries about trans history, like Disclosure (2020) or Paris Is Burning (1990).

Don’t get me wrong: I can easily see why some people love Orlando: My Political Biograph, which is genuinely unusual in what it captures in trans pride and trans joy, as well as its cross section of individuals whose very existence transcends the binary, the assumption of shame regarding certain body parts, or the historic insistence that transness necessitates surgery. For all I know, this film is something for contemporary trans and nonbinary people to connect to; I cannot speak for them. All I can say is whether I managed to connect with it, and at its most experimental, I could not.

The film does feature some clips of the earliest post-operation transgender women to speak to the media, and when Orlando connects that history to the present day, and then features a few young trans and nonbinary children as beacons of the future, then it connects with me. For viewers with just the right amount of patience, this film does have its rewards.

A bit esoteric on the approach.

Overall: B

MEAN GIRLS

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

When I saw the original Mean Girls in 2004, I felt even then that it was overrated, an ultimately unsuccessful attempt at being the 21st-century contemporary answer to the 1988 cult classic Heathers. I felt at the time that Heathers was a far superior comedy, with biting humor that Mean Girls lacked. Ironically, not even Heathers has aged especially well from a 2024 vantage point—and it should be noted that Mean Girls was released 16 years after it; this new iteration of Mean Girls is coming out a solid twenty years after the first one. (The Broadway musical adaptation of the 2004 film, on which this new film is based, had its first production in 2017—thirteen years after the movie. Are you following all of this?) These days, surely far fewer viewers of Mean Girls have any idea what Heathers even was than viewers in 2004 did, making Heathers far less relevant to this movie than it was to the 2004 movie.

It’s been so long since even the 2004 film, all that truly matters now is how well the current film works, within a 2024 framework. And I’d say it works . . . fine. I enjoyed this one more than I seemed to enjoy the first film twenty years ago, but not by a wide margin.

I was relieved to find the music catchy, if relatively forgettable. There has been a bit of press about the promotion of all the musicals released in the past couple of months, most notably Wonka, The Color Purple, and Mean Girls: the trailers for all of them were edited so that it was not clear in any of their cases that they are actually musicals. Are promoters afraid audiences aren’t interested in musicals? If so, why they hell are they making them at all? And god knows, Wonka was a genuine hit—with utterly forgettable music throughout—and the 1 p.m. Saturday screening of Mean Girls I went to was far from sold out, but still had a surprisingly robust crowd at it.

I’ll say this: I had a good time, and I can’t imagine ever going out of my way to see Mean Girls, the musical adaptation of a Broadway adaptation of a movie adaptation of a novel originally called Queen Bees and the Wannabees, again. The 2004 film was famously co-written by, and co-starred, Tina Fey, whose profile was much higher at the time than it is today; she also wrote the book (though not the lyrics) for the Broadway musical, and gets sole writing credit for this new film adaptation, while appearing, yet again, as one of the teachers at North Shore High School. To Fey’s credit, the script is updated well to 2020s sensibilities, if possibly a little off the mark when it comes to how high school teenagers actually behave toward each other anymore.

Last year’s Jennifer Lawrence comedy No Hard Feelings felt a little closer to the mark with this, with high school kids much more sophisticated than they used to be, and far less tolerant of bigoted or sexist behavior—granted, these things can easily still be very regional, and bear in mind I have not personally spent any real time inside a high school myself in a solid thirty years. Nevertheless, there is a thematic undercurrent to this Mean Girls which, being based on something twenty years old, feels a bit dated.

I still have a basic complaint about it: Mean Girls doesn’t have mean enough girls in it. It might be more appropriately called Girls Who Hurt Each Other’s Feelings, which is, just as before, the basic, simplistic lesson: girls can be uniquely catty with each other, they fight, and the ones with a genuine conscience ultimately make up.

Fair enough, I suppose, especially for audiences who are, let’s say, adolescents. On the upside, Mean Girls is cast with exceptional performers, with Angourie Rice (first seen as the 13-year-old in The Nice Guys; later the young-adult daughter in the HBO limited series Mare of Easttown) in the part of Cady Heron. Rice fits comfortably in the role of both awkward newcomer and one of the so-called “Plastics,” the clique of vapid popular girls. Reneé Rapp is especially effective as Regina George, the thoughtless leader of the Plastics, her musical numbers consistently the best vocal performances in the film.

Among Regina’s two main acolytes, I have more mixed feelings about casting a brown woman (Avantika) as the pointedly dumb one. In fact, the supporting cast is fairly diverse, including Auli’i Cravalho (who had voiced the title character in the Disney film Moana) and Jaquel Spivey as the queer kids who first befriend Cady at her new school. But, there’s no getting around the fact that casting the two leads as White girls was no accident, and thus centers Whiteness with all this array of other, diverse characters revolving around them. I love Tina Fey, but this does seem to be a lasting blind spot with her. (One might argue that this particular story doesn’t work the same way if the leads aren’t White, but I would not accept that argument.) Taken in isolation, Mean Girls could be given a pass on this front; the issue is that it’s part of a long established pattern, which not enough people talk about.

Casting considerations aside, Mean Girls is relatively harmless, a pleasant enough time at the movies, a fairly successful capitalization on nostalgia for something that was never that special in the first place. As with its predecessor, Mean Girls comfortably sidesteps a whole lot of potential, leaving us with both a sense of what it could have been, and a satisfying experience of something hovering just one or two steps above mediocrity.

I want to see the movie about the supporting players.

Overall: B

THE BOOK OF CLARENCE

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

LaKeith Stanfield is great. David Oyelowo is great. Tayana Taylor is great. Omar Sy is great. RJ Cyler is great. Alfre Woodard is great. Anna Diop is great. James McAvoy is fun and Benedict Cumberbatch is a delight. Basically, everyone in this movie is great—jarringly, incongruously. Would that The Book of Clarence were great. Alas.

It begins with great promise, for about five minutes coming in hot with verve and excitement: a chariot race, through “Old Jerusalem”—one that’s just between two racers settling a bet. It’s shot with a knowing urgency, but with a light touch. Drivers get knocked out of their chariot and onto the ground, the camera offering POV shots of them crashing and rolling, an immediately clever and well-executed conceit. The opening titles appear, and they are in an old-school font in an overlay style that evokes old sword-and-sandal epics like Ben-Hur, a knowing reference that will be lost on any of this movie’s younger viewers.

And then . . . within the first ten minutes, The Book of Clarence lost me. It has production value as great as the best that Hollywood has to offer, which writer-director Jeymes Samuel (The Harder They Fall) then uses to spend too much time on characters we struggle to care about, doing little of interest. At a runtime of 129 minutes, this might have been at least slighty improved by shaving off about twenty minutes.

Maybe. The thing is, it’s the story itself that’s the problem. It can’t decide what it wants to be, while performed by exceptional actors who are taking no part in that decision. It starts off irreverent, like it might be sending up the story of Christ, perhaps in the vein of Life of Brian. It then morphs into something surprisingly earnest, about the power of faith, I guess, except it can’t convey its themes coherently. We literally get a crucifixion, complete with blood and whips and dramatic, wailing tears. I found myself imagining Mel Gibson patting himself on the back for liking this movie.

Admittedly, my position here is arguably a little tricky: I am an atheist, just as the titular Clarence (Stanfield) professes to be. It’s easy to see people of faith—who make up the majority of this movie’s potential audience—getting on board with this movie, and staying there, going along with Clarence’s arc of mildly comic selfishness, cynicism, and redemption through genuine miracles. I might become a believer too if I witnessed a miracle, at least one that could be proven not to be a figment of my imagination. So, where’s my miracle? Judging by this film, that’s what it takes to turn a person around. It’s going to take a miracle to turn this mess of a movie into something worth taking seriously. Unfortunately, it shifts from jest to taking itself way too seriously.

Jesus Christ is also a character in this movie, played by Nicholas Pinnock. He spends much of his screen time a faceless shadow under a red hood, like the Ghost of Christmas A.D. Jeymes Samuel gives him far more magical powers than even the Bible ever ascribed to him, making the character the very definition of “extra.” He coexists with Clarence—just as Jesus coexisted with Brian in Life of Brian, incidentally—and as time goes on, it becomes increasingly predictable that he will become a critical factor in Clarence’s story.

The Book of Clarence is an unusual idea conveyed through a majority-Black cast, including Jesus himself, a detail that is rightly incidental. There are some clear racial dynamics at play, with all but one of the White characters being the Roman oppressors. The one exception is the character of a beggar, who is so filthy at the start of the film I didn’t even realize he was White—a visual choice that I suppose skirts the edges of blackface, though that’s not an idea this movie toys with at all, at least not with any clarity.

Clarence decides he wants to try being one of Christ’s apostles, one of which is his own twin brother (also played by Stanfield, except in that case in a very unconvincing beard). When that proves unsuccessful, he decides he’ll just be a Messiah himself. This proves perilous for him when Rome decrees that “all Messiahs” must be crucified. By the time LaKeith Stanfield was being strung up and nailed to a cross, I found myself thinking: What are we doing? Why are we here? I could not come up with a clear answer.

One could argue that The Book of Clarence just isn’t for me, a White guy without any miracles to convince him God exists. My argument is that not even this movie truly knows who it’s for, in spite of a stacked cast who are all deeply committed to the bit—whatever that bit is. There is far smarter, more clever and more authentically expressed emotional arcs out there. Try American Fiction.

Not even LaKeith Stanfield can save this movie.

Overall: C+

ALL OF US STRANGERS

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

How do I adequately convey how much I loved All of Us Strangers? How do I even explain what it’s about? Except, perhaps, to say it’s a beautifully melancholy, queer love story with an emotional through line that cuts deep?

Mind you, I say this as a gay viewer, and this is incredibly relevant. I can’t help but wonder how the response to it might be different among audiences that are not gay men. I am certain anyone open to the experience of this film can be deeply moved by it, and even have an intricate, nuanced understanding of what the characters are feeling. But for me, in a way few other movies ever have, this story wrapped my very soul into a warm embrace.

Will I love this movie as much upon rewatch, I wonder? There’s only one way to find out.

In the meantime, I must say there is plenty of All of Us Strangers that evades straightforward understanding. That is beside the point. You need only to feel it. And boy, did I.

Adam (Andrew Scott) and Harry (Aftersun’s Paul Mescal) are two gay men, living in the same London high-rise apartment building. It must be a new building, very few other people living in it, as they discuss how distractingly quiet it is living there. We really never see them interact with anyone else in the building, only each other. When a fire alarm has Adam exiting the building, he sees Harry’s silhouette in his sixth-story window, looking down at him. After Adam returns to his unit on a much higher floor—with spectacular, panoramic London views—Harry knocks on his door, drunk, and introduces himself.

Adam and Harry’s steadily blossoming relationship expands beyond that first meeting, which is tentative, cautious, a bit shy. They don’t hook up immediately. They do a bit later, though, and it’s some of the most beautifully shot and tender, gay sexuality I’ve seen onscreen since Moonlight (2016). It’s both highly erotic and genuinely moving—a feat of narrative execution that has me tempted to call director and co-writer Andrew Haigh a cinematic magician.

And All of Us Strangers is indeed magical, even when it defies logic, and quite deliberately so. The story of Adam and Harry runs parallel to the story of Adam and his late parents, who died in a car crash when he was twelve years old. And yet, he takes a train across town to his childhood home—and finds his father (Jamie Bell) and his mother (Claire Foy) there, the same age they were when they died, somehow unsurprised to find their son coming home, now a grown man they had never actually gotten to see grow up.

Mum and Dad have an understanding that about 35 years have passed, but have no knowledge of what has transpired in that time. Their knowledge and relative ignorance remains stuck in, we can only estimate, about 1988. And as premises go, this is a little out there, because All of Us Strangers never makes explicit exactly what’s going on, and there’s a physicality between Adam and his still-young parents during their visits that negates any idea of them as conventional ghosts. It’s a little more like they exist as flesh and blood, but in a different dimension.

What it does allow for, however, are conversations Adam never had a chance to have with his parents otherwise. He comes out to them both, in separate conversations. It’s notable that his mom has a more complicated, slightly more negative reaction than his father, who is much more quickly accepting—a scenario that defies the stereotype of gay experience, and is likely more common than many realize. This, among many other conversations Adam has with his parents, packed a unique emotional punch for me, and so far as I could tell, I was crying before most of the rest of the people in the theater.

All of Us Strangers features gorgeous cinematography, and is edited with unparalleled finesse, transitioning between Adam with Harry, and Adam with his parents, with seamless grace. There’s a sequence in which Adam and Harry go out dancing, do some drugs, and then proceed into a sort of montage of domesticity, with the club music continuing uninterrupted through it all. It’s beautifully executed.

There is a bit of a twist at the end, very directly related to Harry, which ultimately had me baffled. It calls into question a great deal of what has been seen beforehand, but then, there is even a moment when Adam asks his mother, “Is this real?” The answer, evidently, is that if it feels real, then it is. And All of Us Strangers is all feeling, which therefore makes it real. Adam tries to introduce Harry to his parents, and for most of this sequence, Harry seems to be the only one existing in a grounded reality. This is now a film that will allow things to be that simple.

This is a movie I will be thinking about for a very long time, maybe for years to come. I haven’t been this in love with a mood-piece queer love story since Moonlight. Indeed, that film and All of Us Strangers would make for a spectacular double feature. From end to end, it is beautiful and sad and cozy and charming and erotic and mysterious and bewildering. It would seem there is no end to the riches it has to offer.

Nowhere to go but up: together,

Overall: A

SOCIETY OF THE SNOW

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

Fifty-one years ago, in 1972, a chartered Uruguayan Air Force flight, carrying a rugby team alomg with many of their family and friends, crashed in the Andes mountains on its way from Montevideo, Uruguay to Santiago, Chile. There were twelve initial fatalities among the forty passengers and five crew onboard, a number that steadily grew larger during the seventy-two days the survivors spent stranded in the mountains.

This has long been a story widely known around the globe, and I haven’t even yet mentioned the most notorious aspect of it, the very thing that made those who ultimately survived able to do so.

I’m old enough to remember the 1993 film Alive, starring Ethan Hawke, and how riveting and harrowing the crash sequence was near the beginning. It was long ago when I saw this film, and I don’t remember much of it—although I certainly remember the passengers flying out the back of the torn-open plane after it hit the mountain ridge. I also remember the dramatic drop to the knees after the first time one of the survivors takes a bite of human flesh.

This might be the key difference between Alive and Society of the Snow, which does employ some fairly typical cinematic emotional beats, but doesn’t lean much into those kinds of rote dramatic moments. Curiously, the two films were based on different books: Alive was adapted from Alive: The Story of the Andes Survivors, which was published in 1974, only a couple of years after the actual events, but was written by British historian Piers Paul Read. Society of the Snow (La Sociedad de la Nieve) was written far more recently (2008) and thus without the event as fresh in anyone’s memory, but it was by Uruguayan writer Pablo Vierci.

It’s easy to see the potential pros and cons of these two literary accounts, but the disparity becomes wider when we look at the adaptations, with Alive coming straight out of Hollywood, and Socity of the Snow being directed and co-written by Spanish-born J.A. Bayona. Ideally, of course, Society of the Snow would have been made by an actual Uruguayan director. And there is some irony in the fact that Bayona also directed the 2012 film The Impossible, about the 2004 tsunami in Thailand—which cast Naomi Watts, Ewan McGregor and Tom Holland to tell a story based on a Spanish family’s real-life experience.

Socity of the Snow, at least, is a Spanish-U.S. coproduction, told in Spanish, based on source material that came from a Uruguayan voice. By all accounts, although there have been many adaptations of the 1972 Andes flight disaster, this one is the most accurate and the most realistic. In fact, there is a sequence well into the film in which one of the survivors takes out a camera and starts taking photos. It made me think: surely there are real life photos that were taken, then, of survivors posing around the wreckage? Indeed, there are—and Society of the Snow recreates them with impressive accuracy.

This is, indeed, a very harrowing film to watch. Thirty years makes a big difference in filmmaking capabilities, and the plane crash sequence in this film is rendered in far greater detail, on a comparable budget (in adjusted dollars). There is clear CGI at work in this movie, but it is put to good use, as the scene is no less jaw dropping for it. In just a few moments, what we see is very violent and horrifying.

The thing to remember about this whole experience, though, is that the crash was only the beginning. It happens about 12 minutes into the film, and the notorious cannibalism doesn’t even start until about 45 minutes in. Another major incident occurs well after that, which is just as harrowing as the initial crash itself. Even though I should have seen it coming, I was so absorbed by the film, it scared the shit out of me. Beyond that, many attempts are made at finding help, a nearly impossible task in the middle of the Andes mountains, unknown miles and miles from civilization.

This entire ordeal is a stunning story, and one could argue that, in motion picture form at least, Society of the Snow has done the best job of it. Everything about it is amazing, even how long many of the people who survived the initial crash lasted before later dying for various reasons. Only 16 of the 45 onboard that plane made it in the end, and this is the story of how those few made it—and many of those nearly didn’t. The film’s runtime is two hours and 24 minutes, but a solid 15 of those minutes are the end credits, which makes this film a solid, standard length, all of which is impossible to look away from. If you have even cursory survivalist interests, this movie, currently available streaming on Netflix, is definitely one to watch.

It wasn’t as much of a party as it looked.

Overall: B+

AMERICAN FICTION

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

Being a White guy who loves a movie about Black people pandering to White audiences with misguided love for stereotypical depictions of Black people can be . . . tricky. Is there a version of MetaCritic out there that just aggregates the reviews of Black critics? That would be so helpful! How do I know whether or not I am being complicit in the very thing this film is critiquing and satirizing?

Well, there is the fact that the Black Film Critics Circle named American Fiction its Best Film of 2023. Whew. What a relief! So I don’t have to worry about this anymore . . . right?

I will say this, to other White people watching this movie: there are no White people in major roles, but there are plenty of them in small parts throughout, and they are worth paying particularly close attention to. The vast majority of them serve as one example or another of White people convinced of their allyship while being unable to see their own latent racism. This usually comes through in some kind of subtle gag, always very well executed, the only possible downside being that it might go down too easily. These are behaviors that stem from genuine truths, and are worth reflection.

Side note: the one example of a white character I can think of who isn’t used as an example in this way is the one White gay character. And honestly, racism in the queer community is something that could really use its own kind of exposure—comic or otherwise—in cinema, but writer-director Cord Jefferson and co-writer Percival Everett, upon whose novel Erasure this film is based, already have enough going on in this movie.

Speaking of gay characters, Sterling K. Brown plays Jeffrey Wright’s gay brother in this film, an interesting tidbit when it comes to representation in casting. Increasingly films are criticized for casting straight actors in queer roles, but given the topic and premise of American Fiction, I can’t see many people having the balls to criticize it for this. And I’m not going to either, actually—both because I felt Sterling K. Brown was objectively well cast and did a good job. I also loved that no effort whatsoever was made to make Brown’s character, Cliff, any “gayer” than Brown is as a regular guy himself. There’s a scene in which Cliff has two gay guys around, one of them the aforementioned White guy—wearing nothing but a Speedo—and those guys lean a bit more into obvious queerness, but in a way that was comfortably subtle. It actually felt like a reasonable representation of the diversity of queer expression.

But this is largely the point of American Fiction, in which the protagonist, Monk (Wright), is a well-off author from a wealthy Black family of doctors, Monk being the self-described “black sheep” because he is a novelist. He is also a highbrow writer, a professor, and a terminally flawed character. He’s deeply frustrated, both by the low sales of his beautifully written, complex prose, and by fellow Black writers (one in particular is played by the always-welcome Issa Rae) who seem to exploit stereotypes in order to write best-sellers.

American Fiction is kind of two movies in one, only one of which got much acknowledgment in the film’s promotion: the unusually successful satire, about “Black art” and how White people respond to it. The other is a family drama, in which Monk deals with multiple deaths in the family, as well as the gradually worsening dementia of his widowed mother, Agnes (Leslie Uggams). There are some who find it difficult to reconcile these two sides of the film, but Cord Jefferson strikes a delicate balance with this narrative that ultimately works. An important element here is how the characters of this film are multidimensional while the characters in the books and movies they talk about (or write) are one-dimensional.

The last act of American Fiction suddenly gets very meta, in a way the film had not at all been before then, and it almost lost me. I tend to love meta commentary when done well, but for a moment, the narrative of American Fiction itself becomes the narrative of something Monk is adapting into a movie, and I wasn’t sure if we’d ever get any real resolution to the “real life” characters. To Cord Jefferson’s ample credit, he brings the narrative back around, so the story we’d been seeing up to that point, and the story Monk is now spinning, meet up again, in a genuinely satisfying way.

American Fiction is a carefully crafted work of art, the kind in which nothing is an accident and there’s far more to consider than what’s on the surface. Monk, as a character, is someone we are eager to root for, even though he can be kind of an asshole. Just like any person. What this film pointedly refuses to do is either make him a trope or make him a flawless hero. He’s actually very self-involved, which his otherwise very understandable snobbery about literature only exacerbates. And American Fiction pulls off a bit of a magic trick, being a genuinely entertaining movie while also having a whole lot to say that’s worth considering beyond the confines of its narratives. There’s a whole lot more going on in it than I could cover here, but you should just watch it, as it’s all ripe for discovery.

There’s a whole lot of compelling ideas in here.

Overall: A-

FERRARI

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

I don’t want to spoil Ferrari—and if you want to get technical, you can’t spoil history—but I think it might do well for viewers to be warned: something almost absurdly horrific happens in the final act of this film, and I have somewhat mixed feelings about it.

I say “almost” only because it can’t exactly be absurd if it actually happened, and this incident did indeed happen, during the 1957 Mille Miglia, a road race across Italy. I already knew to expect some sort of tragic crash to occur, given what had already been seen many times in the film’s trailer. But, nothing could have prepared me for where that scene goes in the actual film, during which I exlaimed, loud enough for everyone in the theater to hear, “Jesus Christ!” It’s shocking what director Michael Mann chooses to depict onscreen here, which would be dismissed as ridiculous and unrealistic had it not been based on an actual event.

For some, perhaps, hearing this about Ferrari will pique the interest. It should also be noted, perhaps, that the visual effects, in both this and other crash sequences, are noticeably, let’s say, lower-budget. They’re serviceable, and they serve the story. Whether the carnage we see needed to be put onscreen is perhaps up for debate.

Also: Ferrari on the whole is nowhere near as exciting as it sounds, to say it features one of the most horrifying things I’ve ever seen onscreen (albeit clearly using actors who went unharmed). The story here is much more concerned with family drama, with Enzo Ferrari (Adam Driver) in a tense marriage with Laura (Penélope Cruz), a couple still grieving the death of their one son, while Enzo maintains a separate family with a woman named Lina (Shailene Woodley), with whom Enzo has a little boy. On top of that, Laura is effectively Enzo’s business partner, having been given co-ownership of his factory during the war in an effort at thwarting Nazis.

Adam Driver’s transformation notwithstanding, Penélope Cruz is easily the best part of Ferrari, a tough negotiator and a woman with power far ahead of her time. Laura doesn’t take any shit, even if she openly tolerates Enzo’s infidelities. As she directly states within the first ten minutes of the film, they have an agreement.

I did find myself slightly distracted by this American film, telling an Italian story, with non-Italian actors speaking English but in surprisingly subtle Italian accents. (To its credit, Ferrari features none of the cartoonishly exaggerated accents of House of Gucci.) Driver and Woodley are both America; Cruz is Spanish. Are there any actual Italian actors in this film at all? Certainly none of the famous ones are, including Patrick Dempsey as Italan race car driver Piero Taruffi. Among the actors playing all these characters, the accents are so understated that sometimes they just sound like their American selves. Reportedly, some of the people in Europe aren’t thrilled about it.

Nevertheless, I was engaged enough by Ferrari—just not enough to tell anyone to go out of their way to watch it. To be honest, it might be that Michael Mann, a director who has offered a few great movies, has lost his edge. Perhaps he did a while ago; the man is eighty years old, after all. He’s in the same club as Ridley Scott (age 86), who this year gave us Napoleon, a similar film in that it didn’t quite add up to the sum of its parts, but had some memorably executed scenes. Ferrari, for its part, is more tightly edited and thus more coherent, making it a slightly superior film.

Indeed, Ferrari would seem to have a lot going for it: assured editing and cinematography, and uniformly competent performers. There’s not as much actual racing as you might expect, nor did I find most of the racing footage especially exciting—but, it’s well shot. That’s what makes Ferrari a pecular specimen, though: a whole lot of greatness went into its construction, and yet somehow it still can’t manage to be much better than fine.

Adam Driver ironically does not drive much in this movie.

Overall: B

Cinema 2023: Best & Worst

Below are the ten most satisfying and memorable films I saw in 2023: 10. Barbie A-   Remember America Ferrara's speech everyone raved about online? I recently heard someone characterize it as "it sounds like AI," and you know what? Fair. Also: beside the point. Barbie's inclusion in my top ten for the year as connected to, but about far more than it being the biggest movie of the year. There's something to be said for a movie like this one becoming the biggest movie of the year, with its seemingly cliche platitudes which nonetheless got mainstream exposure like never before. A cliché doesn't sound like a cliché when you're hearing it for the first time, and both Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling give genuinely award-worthy performances. Greta Gerwig being the director and co-writer of this expertly constructed film is the sole reason I had any interest in it to begin with, and not only did she not disappoint, she massively exceeded expectations. Women can make giant blockbusters too! Women are just as capable of harnessing late-stage capitalism! What I said then: 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. 9. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse A-   How do I account for my inclusion of Across the Spider-Verse here, when its predecessor, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which I also gave an A-minus, did not make it onto my top 10 in 2018? Both films are similarly exhilarating viewing experiences, after all. All I can say, I suppose, is that I saw more films in 2018 that had a deeper impact on me. Furthermore, I would argue, the fact that Across the Spider-Verse matches the previous film's quality in every way, and in some ways perhaps even surpasses it, is an even greater accomplishment. Now, I benefited from the prior knowledge, going in, that this was to be the first of a story split in two parts, so I was not incensed, as some were, by its cliffhanger ending, which I was fully anticipating. And everything up to that point is a mesmerizing kaleidoscope of distinct artistic styles associated with different characters, each of which is given far more dimension than in any average live-action superhero film. Across the Spider-Verse is as often hilarious as it is moving, layered with both thematic and visual meaning. It has far more to offer than can be taken from just one viewing. What I said then: It can be hard to trust any assertion that a movie has everything you could possibly want and more, but in this case, you can take that to the bank. The movie’s producers almost certainly will. This movie is a truly amazing specimen of cinematic craft. 8. BlackBerry A-   Maybe the biggest cinematic surprise of the first half of 2023, BlackBerry may not be quite the instant classic that The Social Network had been, but it's the closest we've come in a long, long time. This movie, about the minds behind the staggering success of the BlackBerry mobile device and its rapid fall in the face of Apple's iPhone, has a propulsive energy unlike any other film this year. BlackBerry deserved far more attention than the little it comparatively got—it barely fell short of $2 million worldwide, on an otherwise tiny budget of $5 million—though it later aired as a slightly expanded miniseries on AMC. In any case, it was one of the more thrilling experiences I had in a cinema this year. What I said then: It’s not the story, it’s how it’s told. It’s good to remember that if you hear that there is a movie about the rise and fall of the first mass-market mobile device, the BlackBerry. Because this film, directed, co-written and co-starring Matt Johnson, is stunningly propulsive, edge-of-your-seat stuff. 7. Past Lives A-   There's something about the way this film is constructed, it's just . . . achingly beautiful. It's also very sad, a story of missed opportunities between a boy and a girl who start of as best friends in Korea, and then the girl, over the years, moves with her family to Canada and then to the U.S. It's a deceptively simple premise, with deeply affecting, if subtle, layers of emotion. In the end, there's a love triangle of sorts, except not quite exactly, a scenario when these two people who have longed for each other all their lives are faced with a romantic conundrum. Past Lives is a quite film with a hell of a lot to say, culminating in a "What would you do?" scenario for the ages. This is the kind of movie that deserves to be remembered and savored for generations. What I said then: Past Lives is a unique experience, in that its emotional resonance takes some time to percolate. I nearly started crying thinking about it on my way home after the movie ended, and I still can’t really say why, except that the movie permeated my soul, and it took some time for me to focus on anything else, rather than continuing to think about this deeply affecting love story. 6. May December A-   What would we do without the mind of Todd Haynes, which isn't so much fucked up as it is concerned with deeply nuanced depictions of fucked up people? This has never been more the case than with May December, a film so directly inspired by the Mary Kay Letourneau story that it blurs the line between fact and fiction. Except, it is also a compelling thought exercise: Latourneau and her husband divorced after 14 years of marriage, but this film asks the question: what if they were still married, twenty years after the affair between an older woman (Julianne Moore) and a younger man (a standout Charles Melton)? And for good measure, let's throw in an actress (Natalie Portman), visiting the family, taking "research" to dubious lengths as she prepares to star in a TV movie based on their story. The dynamic between Moore and Portman is especially fascinating, as is the dynamic between Melton's character and his children, who are unnaturally close to him in age. Of all the movies I saw this year, this one arguably has the most to talk about—and boy, is it fun to talk about. What I said then: 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. 5. Close A   Close has an unfortunate taint to it, in that it was directed by Lukas Dhont, who previously made a film about a trans girl that was rightly critically reviled for its irresponsible depictions. If there is any possibility for redemption, though, then Close is it, a vividly realized example of a filmmaker taking on a subject that allows him actually to write what he knows. This is about adolescent boys, with a deep connection, both emotional and physical in ways that they don't register consciously—and then, in ways they are too young to understand, an insidious bit of homophobia splits their pure and innocent connection in two. Your heart aches for these boys, because you understand what they don't have the ability to contextualize. What I said then: One of many things Dhont deftly handles in Close is the way adolescents experience feelings that have no tools to articulate. Something is definitely happening between these boys, but neither of them knows or understands exactly what. We, as observers in the audience, are the ones who understand: Léo is afraid of being misjudged by his peers; Rémi is deeply saddened and doesn’t know for certain why. It’s heartbreaking to watch, and will make you recall your own cherished childhood friendships that fell apart without explanation or warning. 4. The Holdovers A   If I just went by how the movies made me feel, I might very well have ranked The Holdovers at #1—this was, by a mile, the most heartwarming film I saw this year. The premise isn't even particularly profound: a loner teacher at a private school (a reliably fantastic Paul Giamatti) gets stuck with chaperoning several students unable to go home for the holidays, and first butts heads with and then forms a bond with a similarly contemptuous student (Dominic Sessa). But there's something about the way director Alexander Payne and writer David Hemingson present this story, in a film specifically stylized to feel not just like it's set in, but as though you're actually watching it in the early 1970s, that just works. It may sound conceptually pretentious, but there is such sincerity in the performances and presentation that you leave the theater feeling thoroughly uplifted, for both the characters and for your own experience at the movies. What I said then: It’s difficult to put into words how wonderful I found The Holdovers. It filled my heart. I tried to think of other descriptors that could work. There’s an element of sweetness, I suppose, but that’s not really what the movie is. Maybe “wholesome” is the right word. Yes, I think that’s it: many “feel-good” movies of the 21st century are self-consciously bawdy with a “wholesome” subtext that just rings false. The Holdovers is the kind of movie that is never bawdy although it can be slightly vulgar when it wants to be, and it gets its tone of wholesomeness exactly right. 3. Anatomy of a Fall A   A stunning accomplishment of cinematic craft, Anatomy of a Fall just begs for analysis—in all the best ways. Don't let the two-and-a-half-hour run time deter you: this film is riveting from start to finish, even if some of the earlier scenes seem at first to lack purpose, "at first" being the operative phrase. You'll want to pay close attention, because every moment ultimately proves to be important, making this one of the most compelling crime dramas to come along in many years. To say it's less a "whodunnit" than a "did she do it?" very much undersells the skill and artistry at play in this film, particularly when it comes to interpersonal dynamics between a married couple, their young, blind son, and even their dog. The fact that the wife and mother is German, the husband and father is French, and neither has learned the other's language well enough so they speak in English at home, only enriches the material, as how communication might get lost in translation becomes a key detail, particularly in French courtroom scenes in the second half of the film. Anatomy of a Fall is an intricate family drama as much as it is a murder mystery, and it starts strong and only gets better as it goes along. What I said then: In Anatomy of a Fall, every detail matters. Sandra Hüller’s performance in particular is stellar in its ambiguity, easily gaining empathy but with an undercurrent of doubt, obstinately stoked by the prosecuting attorney, and indeed the inconclusive evidence itself. When all this ambiguity is the result of such deliberate intention, the result is a masterful achievement. 2. A Thousand and One A   For a solid eight months, I was telling everyone that A Thousand and One was the best movie I've seen this year. The title references an apartment number, in New York City between 1994 and 2005, during which a young mother (Teyana Taylor) struggles to raise a boy she illegally pulled out of the foster care system, shortly after she was released from prison. The technicality of whether she kidnapped Terry (played in different segments by three different young actors, each distinct and equally excellent) is incidental to this story, which focuses far more on the challenges of raising a young Black man, often subtly contextualized in the local city politics—and, in particular, the NYPD policies and practices—of the time. This is a period piece of recent history, an intimate portrait that still serves as a reflection of how America's flagship city has evolved, and a story with a dramatic turn at the end that may spark some debate. I was good with it, because I was so deeply impressed with every facet of this movie's production. What I said then: Rarely does such a vividly drawn portrait so effectively occupy the gray areas of life and history. In this case, writer-director A.V. Rockwell proves to be such a talent with a first feature film that I can’t even say she has potential. She’s already realized it. I can only say that I already breathlessly await whatever she makes next, and if she doesn’t have a vastly accomplished career ahead of her, we will have all been criminally deprived. 1. Maestro A   Simply put, Maestro knocked my socks off. My only regret is that this was one of the Netflix-produced films with such a short theatrical window that I had no choice but to watch it at home—and yet, I immediately watched it a second time the very next day, a rare thing indeed. The way I see it, the people criticizing this film's comparative lack of focus on Leonard Bernstein's career as a conductor and composer are missing the point—Bradley Cooper's intent is to explore how that level of acclaim and success affects a person's relationships, especially his marriage. The fact that Bernstein was also queer, a very important aspect of the story as told here, only enriches this examination—and Cooper is transformative, transfixing, and an astonishing revelation as Bernstein. Some might find my reaction to Cooper's accomplishments here, both as actor and as director, to be unjustifiably hyperbolic, but I stand by it, especially after seeing the film a second time. How he can turn in a performance like this, while also directing the film, defies the imagination. And Carey Mulligan is every bit as impressive—if far less literally transformed—as Felicia, Leonard's genuinely beloved but also understandably beleaguered wife. What I said then: 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. Five Worst -- or the worst of those I saw 5. Babylon C   I know, I know—a solid C grade is merely average, as opposed to bad. Well? If you want me to review movies I already know will be terrible, you can pay me to do it! Any takers? As it is, my "five worst" winds up just being the five films I most misjudged whether I would like them. In the case of Babylon, this film tested my patience from its very release date, at least locally: technically a 2022 film, I could not see it locally until January. It was not worth the wait, and then I had to wait nearly an entire year to complain to you about it! The POV elephant shit and the golden shower, both within the first ten minutes, are the tip of the iceberg in this wildly unnecessary, wildly excessive, 189-minute movie, about the wild excesses of the last days of the silent movie era. Haven't we covered this terrain already? What I said then: I went to BABYLON really wanting to love it. Damien Chazelle has made films I consider to be truly great. This one, though, feels like the last, desperate attempt of an auteur throwing all of his unused ideas into a movie, as though terrified no one will ever allow him to make another one. The sad irony is that none of those ideas were particularly original. 4. Saint Omer C   If the massive critical acclaim Saint Omer received is any indication, it's entirely possible that this is an example of a movie where "Matthew just doesn't get it." I'm not above admitting that. All I can say is, this movie, about a novelist attending the trial of a woman who abandoned her baby on a beach to drown to death at high tide, bored me senseless. If you really want to see a great film that spends an inordinate amount of time in a French courtroom, see Anatomy of a Fall. That one, at least, spends a sensible amount of time outside the courtroom. What I said then: I can’t help but wonder if I am being unfair to this film—a feeling I have only because of its otherwise universal critical acclaim—but I can only be honest about my personal experience with it. When the film ended, after what felt like an eternity of tedium, I felt sweet relief. 3. The Origin of Evil C   Another one with good acting . . . and that's the only particularly good thing about it. With direction and writing that's at the high end of mediocre, and cinematography and editing that skirt the edges of bad, The Origin of Evil is a French family drama with intricate plotting that gets less interesting with each successive turn. It's like Knives Out but without the fun. What I said then: 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. ... It gets progressively weirder, in less compelling ways. 2. The Flash C   Possibly the greatest waste of potential (and resources) in cinema this year, The Flash actually had a lot going for it, with Michael Keaten actually returning as an aged Batman—a good portion of his presence in the film actually being pretty fun. But, why he gets grafted onto this garbage dump of bad CGI action set pieces is a mystery. And all of that's not even to mention how star Exra Miller evidently turned out to be a massive creep. That aside, if this movie could have just been the second act, expanded into its own feature length film, I might have actually enjoyed it on the whole. Instead, the first and third acts are just witless, poorly rendered messes telling a story I couldn't be bothered to care about. What I said then: The bottom line is, The Flash is a shit sandwich with a moderately tasty center, except what’s the point of a tasty center in a shit sandwich? I suppose we could call the two Ezra Millers in it the buns. There are some nice shots of their butt in that suit, for what it’s worth. And for the record I am separating the art from the buttocks. 1. Renfield C-   I actually had relatively high hopes for Renfield, the movie with Nicholas Hoult as the title character, indefinite servant to Dracula, played by Nicolas Cage, who famously loves to work, apparently so much that he can act in his sleep. Which he might as well have been doing here, a bit of an irony for a film that shifts into manic-mode within the first five minutes and never lets up, relying solely on excessive gore as its "humor" and never managing to be funny enough—or even fun enough—to live up to its premise. Someone should remake this movie about a "familiar" coming to grips with his codependent relationship with a vampire, but with writers who have talent. What I said then: I’m sure some people will be entertained by Renfield. Those people have no standards and no taste. Okay, maybe that’s a little harsh. A more generous read on this movie would be that it’s an homage to mediocrity. The run time is merely 93 minutes and I was more than ready for it to be over after thirty. Why couldn’t they hire whoever cut the trailer to edit the movie? Complete 2023 film review log: 1. 1/5 MEGAN B
2. 1/6 Women Talking B+
3. 1/7 BABYLON C
4. 1/14 Saint Omer C
5. 1/16 The Pale Blue Eye B *
6. 1/17 Plane B
7. 1/26 Living B+ *
8. 1/31 Infinity Pool C
9. 2/2 Knock at the Cabin B-
10. 2/9 Exposure B+
11. 2/10 Close A
12. 2/12 Titanic 25th Anniversary (3D) B **
13. 2/14 80 for Brady B-
14. 2/15 Godland B-
15. 3/9 Cocaine Bear B+
16. 3/13 Emily B
17. 3/29 John Wick: Chapter 4 B
18. 3/30 Linoleum B+
19. 4/6 A Thousand and One A
20. 4/11 Air B
21. 4/12 How to Blow Up a Pipleline B+
22. 4/17 Renfield C-
23. 5/2 Polite Society B
24. 5/4 Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret. A-
25. 5/6 Beau Is Afraid B-
26. 5/9 Joyland A-
27. 5/12 The Mattachine Family B+ ***
28. 5/14 And the King Said, What a Fantastic Machine B ***
29. 5/15 BlackBerry A-
30. 5/18 Hidden Master: The Legacy of George Platt Lynes A- ***
31. 5/19 Being Mary Tyler Moore B ***
32. 5/20 Theater Camp B+ ***
33. 5/23 Filip B+ *** / *
34. 5/24 Monica B+
35. 5/27 You Hurt My Feelings B+
36. 5/29 The Eight Mountains B+
37. 6/2 Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse A-
38. 6/5 Sanctuary C+
39. 6/11 You Hurt My Feelings B+ (2nd viewing)
40. 6/16 The Flash C
41. 6/22 Asteroid City B+
42. 6/26 Past Lives A-
43. 6/30 Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny B
44. 7/2 Every Body A-
45. 7/3 No Hard Feelings B+
46. 7/9 The Lesson B
47. 7/10 Joy Ride B
48. 7/11 Biosphere C+
49. 7/14 Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One B
50. 7/22 Oppenheimer B+
51. 7/23 Barbie A-
52. 7/25 Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One B (2nd viewing)
53. 8/12 Barbie A- (2nd viewing)
54. 8/14 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem B
55. 8/18 The Unknown Country B+
56. 8/27 Strays B
57. 9/3 Bottoms B+
58. 9/8 Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe B+
59. 9/18 Fremont B
60. 9/25 Mutt B
61. 9/28 The Origin of Evil C+
62. 9/29 Stop Making Sense 40th Anniversary Rerelease A-
63. 10/1 The Creator B
64. 10/2 Dumb Money B
65. 10/6 The Royal Hotel B
66. 10/11 Strange Way of Life / The Human Voice B
67. 10/21 Killers of the Flower Moon B+
68. 10/22 My Love Affair with Marriage B+
69. 10/23 Beetlejuice B+ **
70. 10/26 Dicks: The Musical B
71. 11/2 What Happens Later B+
72. 11/3 Priscilla B-
73. 11/4 Anatomy of a Fall A
74. 11/5 Killers of the Flower Moon B+ (2nd viewing)
75. 11/6 The Holdovers A
76. 11/8 Nyad B+ ****
77. 11/12 The Marvels B
78. 11/13 The Killer B+ *
79. 11/14 The Persian Version B-
80. 11/16 The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes B-
81. 11/17 Next Goal Wins B+
82. 11/25 Dream Scenario B
83. 11/26 Napoleon B-
84. 11/28 Saltburn B-
85. 12/2 Reinassance: A Film by Beyoncé B+
86. 12/4 May December A- *
87. 12/8 Eileen B-
88. 12/8 Leave the World Behind B *
89. 12/12 Godzilla Minus One B+
90. 12/14 Poor Things A-
91. 12/16 Fallen Leaves B
92. 12/20 Maestro A *
93. 12/21 Wonka B-
94. 12/23 The Iron Claw B
95. 12/31 Ferrari B * Viewed streaming at home
** Re-issue (no new review)
*** SIFF Advanced screening
**** Viewed streaming in the Braeburn Condos theater

THE IRON CLAW

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

Spoiler Alert! The Von Erich family had a total of six children, and five of them died in a variety of tragic ways. In The Iron Claw, the new film by writer-director Sean Durkin (Martha Marcy May Marlene), “inspired by” this family’s story, it sticks to the truth of the eldest child having died as a little boy, one of the elder brothers is written out, reportedly because of the expectation that it would be too much for audiences. Well, here’s my take: more than deaths happen to this family, so many awful things, I honestly don’t see how it would have made any real difference. After the other deaths, illnesses, comas, and dismemberments, The Iron Claw already had me pretty desensitized to the plight of this family.

This is a well-executed film that struggles to justify its own existence. I suppose it is indeed a darkly fascinating story, but I’m kind of at a loss as to why we needed a movie about it. It’s less a story of perseverance or overcoming adversity than it is a tale of one family member who happened to avoid the tragic fates of nearly all the others.

There’s so much tragedy, in fact, that The Iron Claw didn’t even manage to be the tearjerker I fully expected it to be. I took five tissues into the theater with me, expecting to be bawling by the end. But there’s no time for grieving when you’re just enduring the shock of one tragic accident or suicide after the next. Which, I suppose, must have been the Von Erich’s experience, except they didn’t experience it as a simple, 130-minute narrative.

If there is anything to truly recommend The Iron Claw, it’s the performances. Zac Efron plays the son and brother around which the narrative revolves, for fairly predictable reasons. Now almost unrecognizable after reconstructive surgery to his jaw after his own real-life tragic accident, the part of Kevin Von Erich showcases his talents like nothing ever before. Jeremy Allen White both bulks up and disappears into his role as brother Kerry. Arguably most impressive of all is Harris Dickinson as brother David. Dickinson’s performance here isn’t especially showy, but if you’re one of the few people who have also seen him in both Beach Rats (2017) and Triangle of Sadness (2022), making these a trio of wildly different characters, each of them equally convincing, you’ll discover that this is a young man with an astonishing talent. Even if he never graduates to leading-man status, he’s got a great future ahead of him as a character actor.

The fourth older brother, Mike, is played by Stanley Simons, who holds his own onscreen with all of these other actors, as do both Holt McCallany as their dangerously obstinate father, Fritz; and Maura Tierney as their steely mother, Doris.

There’s a fair number of artistic choices in the telling of this family’s story, which range from fascinating to mystifying. This is clearly the basis for The Iron Claw being “inspired by” rather than “based on” a true story. A narrative thread in the film has to do with Von Erich being a last name used professionally by the family, though it’s not their given name—Sean Durkin opts, perhaps sensibly, not to get into the fact that in real life, the name stemmed from Fritz’s early-career wrestling days as a Nazi villain character. The name gets contextualized in the so-called “Von Erich curse,” but the whole Nazi thing is never mentioned. Presumably a lot of problematic (at best) character representations occurred in 1980s professional wrestling, but the only taste we get of it here is a brief glimpse of a villain character dressed as an Arab.

Incidentally, the most mystifying part to me was the depiction of professional wrestling in this film. Durkin spends no time whatsoever educating us on how much of it is contrived, a pre-written narrative, and how much is real (Darren Aronofsky’s far superior The Wrestler made it clear that the stories were made up, but the strain on the body was real). Fritz pressures his sons, different ones at different times depending on how pleased he is with them, to fight for wrestling titles, as though a lot of the outcomes were left up to chance. And yet, a couple of scenes have the brothers discussing planned moves before entering the ring, or in one case, a surprisingly chipper opponent who just got really beat up in the ring telling Kevin “I’ll do a rematch any time” in the same breath as he invites him out for a drink. All of this left me confused.

I was mostly okay letting that go, though, because the point of the story here is the so-called “Von Erich curse,” and in particular Kevin’s fear of it. He’s the only one of the brothers to get married, his wife (Lily James) increasingly frustrated with him because of it. The family drama at play here is far more compelling than anything that happens inside a wrestling ring, notwithstanding the relevance of Fritz pushing all of his sons too hard. Most of The Iron Claw—the title itself referring to a strange Von Erich move in which they supposedly painfully grab the face and head of their opponent—plays like any decently constructed family drama, minus the more typical moment of triumph. I just left the theater feeling a bit uncertain as to why I needed to see it.

A parade of tragedy, in and out of the ring.

Overall: B