HOUSEKEEPING FOR BEGINNERS

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

I don’t know why, until I actually watched Housekeeping for Beginners, I thought it was a Spanish-language movie. It even took a few minutes into the beginning of the movie for it to register: this doesn’t sound like Spanish. For a hot second I thought it was Portuguese. Was this movie Brazilian? I looked it up: of all places, this film is from North Macedonia. Have I ever seen any North Macedonian films before? Apparently, I have—Honeyland, a documentary I actually felt was the best film of 2019. And while that one was the true story of a rural beekeeper, this one is about an urban, blended queer family in the North Macedonian capital of Skopje. (It turns out, I even saw the previous film by the director of Housekeeping for Beginners: You Won’t Be Alone, about a shape shifting witch in 19th century Macedonia, which I did not like nearly as much, and did not have North Macedonia as a producing country, while this one does.)

One might rightly wonder how the hell I started from Spanish to that: within a European context at least, this film could hardly be further from Spanish. Such is the legacy of colonialism, I suppose—the English are hardly the only ones in the world to have such a history. Spanish is actually the second-most spoken native language in the world (behind Mandarin), which can make it easy to forget: there are 16 times as many people in the world who speak some other language. In North Macedonia, the dominant language is Macedonian, but there are other officially recognized languages, including Albanian, Turkish, Bosnian, Serbian, and one that becomes a key plot point in Houesekeeping for Beginners: Romani. That last one is the language spoken in the neighborhood of Shutka, an autonomous Roma community on the outskirts of Skopje.

It turns out, there is a lot to learn about this small corner of the world—a country of just under 10,000 square miles (barely larger than Vermont), a population of 1.8 million (about the population of West Virginia), its capital a metropolitan population of 537,000 (about the metro population of Huntsville, Alabama). Such is the case with just about every international location you can think of, actually—but here, writer-director Goran Stolevski, an openly gay thirtysomething man born in Macedonia who grew up in Australia, finds a unique way to turn our attention to it.

It’s not often we get queer stories in global cinema that blend queer life with racial and ethnic concerns, making Housekeeping for Beginners an unusually intersectional story. When the film opens, we see what appears to be two teenagers, Ali (Samson Selim) and Vanesa (Mia Mustafi), belting out along to a song they both apparently love, using household items as fake microphones. It’s a deceptively charming and simple scene, and only moves into a portrait of a rather chaotic household.

And the home includes a lesbian couple, Dita (Anamaria Marinca) and Suada (Alina Serban), and their gay housemate Toni (Vladimir Tintor). As we just hang out with this household for several minutes, it takes a little while to fully register what all the relationships are. Vanesa, and insanely cute little Mia (Dzada Selim) are Suada’s children. Ali, just a few years older than Vanesa, is Toni’s 19-year-old hookup—the opening scene of him singing with Vanesa really driving home how he’s rather young.

But, there are several other queer teens who also hang out at the house, which serves as a de facto safe house for kids who are rejected by their families or communities. And here, in a country with no legal recognition of same-sex couples or their children who are not blood relatives, this chaotically supportive mini-community they have created for themselves is massively disrupted when Suada is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

The first third or so of Housekeeping for Beginners focuses on this lesbian couple, how they deal with a prognosis understood early on to be hopeless, and how they drag their feet in regards to informing the family. It’s not a spoiler, per se, to say that Suada dies, because the overall point of this film is Dita dealing with both her promise to Suada that she will be the children’s mother going forward, and in particular Vanesa’s passionate rebellion against that scenario, all while navigating the legal hoops and deceptions necessary for her to stave off any threat of the children being taken away. Toni, for his part, is resistant to being pressured into playing the part of a straight father / family man type. Ali organically settles into his own position in the family, his relationship with Toni having complications of its own.

I was fully absorbed and moved by ths movie, a rare feat of ensemble storytelling in which every principal character has dimension and character development. It should be noted, also, that both Ali and Suada happen to come from the aforementioned Shutka community, a people for whom “gypsy” is considered a bigoted term, and they are people of color—making Dita and Suada not just a lesbian couple, but an interracial couple, and then Dita a White woman raising children of color. There are many references to this dynamic in the film, and when Vanesa insists on seeking out a grandmother in Shutka she hasn’t seen in several years, deep cultural differences quickly become apparent.

I can only imagine Housekeeping for Beginners would be seen in a far more intricate way by Macedonian audiences, and I would be fascinated to learn how the film was received there—it was indeed their submission for the Best International Feature award from North Macedonia, but, criminally, it did not make the cut among last year’s nominees. This is a film that absolutely deserves attention, both in its home country and abroad—even the most frustrating characters are deeply human, and the domestic situation portrayed is emblematic of evolving ideas of family the world over. I won’t soon forget this one.

Love makes a family, and so does not taking any shit lying down.

Overall: A-

CIVIL WAR

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

A movie about a modern American civil war should have a clear point of view, and it should have balls. Alex Garand’s Civil War has neither. It should be noted: the premise alone does not qualify.

I’m not even saying this movie has to make explicit what the political issues were across the country that resulted in armed forces in many states turned secessionists. Garland’s choice to avoid that kind of specificity is actually one of his smart ones. That does not, however, preclude a point of view, something beyond vague notions of “war is bad” or “journalists are soulless.” And notwithstanding the empty complaints among people on the right who clearly haven’t even watched this movie, Civil War really offers very little, story-wise, to hold onto. It’s just a road trip through war-torn country that happens to be America, with some incredibly well directed, gripping, beautifully shot battle sequences.

Even the comparisons of this movie’s American President (Nick Offerman, seen onscreen far less than expected) to President Trump are exaggerated. We know this president is in his third term, that he has ordered air strikes on American citizens (but not how or why), and we know that unlikely groups of people are allied against him. He’s never characterized as a buffoon, or of particularly low intelligence. And yet, the “Western Forces” of California and Texas are allied against him—something that has caused a great amount of chatter among people, on all sides of the political spectrum, as straining plausibility. My stance on this is that far weirder things have happened in times of war, which makes strange bedfellows. Besides, a line early in the film has really stuck with me: “When D.C. falls, they’ll turn on each other.” Indeed, once a common enemy is pushed aside, people previously on the same side are free to find fault with each other.

There are other references to aligned states in throwaway lines in Civil War, such as “The Florida Alliance,” or Midwestern states still loyal to the U.S. government, where small-town residents live their daily lives pretending like none of this is happening. Our protagonist, hardened photojournalist Lee Miller (Kirsten Dunst, truly fantastic) has parents in Colorado doing exactly this. Her very young acolyte photojournalist, Jessie (Priscilla’s Cailee Spaeny, actually 23 years old during production and playing 23, though she barely looks even 18), has parents in Missouri doing the same.

A major problem I have with Civil War is the same problem I have with many dystopian visions of a near future: its refusal to acknowledge race. Does anybody really think there would be a second civil war in the United States and race would have no relevance? There’s a very tense sequence in which Jesse Plemons plays a blithely murderous militia man, and the scene uses two men of Asian descent to illustrate his pointed xenophobia. This is in the same neigborhood as racism, of course, but it’s still distinct from it. But Alex Garland just isn’t interested in going that step further.

This is the fundamental problem with Civil War, which is the cinematic equivalent of a product with claims of nutrition when it actually has none. And don’t get me wrong, there is still a lot to recommend Civil War, which is genuinely gripping from start to finish. But, much like the 2006 film Children of Men, it has too many “why” questions it refuses to answer while it wows us exceptional production. (Children of Men, at least, is far more impressive on a technical and production level, creating a world that feels far more lived in, if just as implausible.)

It’s the ideas themselves that are the problem—or, the lack thereof. This is the kind of movie that you really get into while it’s happening, and can only leave saying it was great if you don’t think too hard about it. Garland, however, is challenging us to think about it, without fleshing out what it’s trying to say. There’s certainly the idea that there are not truly “good guys” in active warfare, and we are never given a side to root for—something these journalists don’t even want, as they pride themselves on supposed objectivity.

And yet, even with journalism being looked at through by far the most critical lense in this film, even that winds up muddled in presentation. Too many of the details make too little sense. “They shoot journalists on sight in the capitol,” we are told early on. Somehow, the armed forces closing in on the capitol welcome press with open arms, no questions asked. Come on, really? And this is hardly a new observation: far too few of the journalists in this film are seen taking video (in fact, I think we see only one or two doing so, and only with a professional news camera—literally not one single character is seen taking video on their smartphone). Lee and Jessie engage with still photography exclusively, albeit with many of the still shots they take being equal parts beautiful and horrifying.

A lot of Civil War is gorgeously shot, which is part of the deeply misleading journey it takes us on. All the plot connections are shaky at best, making this a kind of low-rent Apocalypse Now, even with its often beautiful imagery. I just watched this movie feeling a bit lost as to the actual stakes, and what I was supposed to take away from it. And what I took away from it was its top-notch cinematography, direction, and acting, particularly on the part of Dunst, who has never been better. But what is the whole thing that these parts are coming together to make? Yet another in a long line of supposedly anti-war movies that wow us with its rendering of war, in this case with nothing of any real substance to say.

The Expendables: four journalists face their various fates.

Overall: B

WICKED LITTLE LETTERS

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

Well, I’m going to stay on brand and go right to the race discussion—or rather, the odd point of view that Wicked Little Letters seems to have that there is no need to have one. One might try to argue that this film’s director (Thea Sharrock) and its producers had their heart in the right place, casting key characters in 1920s Littlehampton, England with actors of color, but I would counter that this was wildly misguided. Not so much because it gives dipshit conservatives ammunition in their stupid arguments against “color blind casting,” but because race is never even acknowledged in the film, thereby creating the sense that, while sexism plays a significant part in this story, somehow this was some kind of racial utopia, where skin color meant nothing to anyone. This is tantamount to revisionist history.

And what’s the point of that? This is no reflection on the actors, who are lovely—particularly Anjana Vasan as “Woman Police Officer Gladys Moss,” and Malachi Kirby as Bill, boyfriend to Rose (Jessie Buckley), the woman accused of sending profane letters to people all over the town, but particularly to her self-righteous neighbor, Edith (Olivia Colman). I mean, I’m genuinely glad these actors of color are getting work. I just wish they would get offered roles that made more sense: it isn’t hard to find out that, in the real life story on which this film is based, both of these people were actually White. Because in all likelihood, in 1920s small-town England, such people would be.

This deliberate choice to ignore race in a story steeped in sexism and misogyny is always irritating. It’s the exact same problem that existed in the Hulu adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale, which ignored race in a dystopian near-future. In what universe would this ever be the case? Willful ignorance of intersectionality only serves to further White feminism, which serves no one.

So, that is the major flaw in Wicked Little Letters, and it is a pretty glaring, consistently distracting one—if you approach a movie like this with critical thinking, anyway. This is a small movie that carries no such expectation, but I hesitate to regard that as a good excuse.

All that aside—and admittedly, for me it’s a pretty big aside—Wicked Little Letters is a genuinely charming watch, with solid performances, particularly among its two leads, Olivia Colman and Jessie Buckley. both of who already have well established track records as stellar performers. In this case, Colman’s Edith is a middle-aged, never-married woman living a deeply repressed life with her parents and particularly under the thumb of her oppressive father, Edward (Timothy Spall). Buckley’s Rose is the free-spirited, foul-mouthed young mother and widow who moves in next door.

The film opens with what is identified as the “19th letter,” addressed to Edith and read by her parents, all of them sitting at their dining table. They are all convinced, with no more evidence than her general demeanor, that Rose sent it. Soon enough, Edith is giving an official statement to the police, and that is how we get half-truths from Edith about some backstory, where these two women actually spend some time as friends, but then fell out after Rose head-butt a man at Edward’s birthday party. I could have used a little more about how the two women got from there to here, as this backstory gets a bit glossed over, robbing them both of some character dimension.

Wicked Little Letters starts with a title card reading, This is more true than you’d think. Mmm, after seeing how it was cast, maybe not. The “mystery” of who is actually writing the letters becomes clear rather early on, henceforth focusing on where Edith and Rose go from there. For what they are, they do both make compelling characters, a great deal of which can be credited to the actors. I did enjoy the extensive amount of time spent on long strings of increasingly creative profanity. Even the end credits are seen over script appearing on letter papers, with phrases like “ten cocks a week minimum.” So that’s fun.

This is a movie that could have been a lot better with the right guidance, but some of its production choices are baffling. I can’t even fault the writer (Jonny Sweet), as his script makes no reference to ethnicity whatsoever—because why would it? In the end, it’s a charming story that did not aim for fantasy but kind of landed there.

These bitches

Overall: B

MONKEY MAN

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

I really, really wanted to like this movie. I have long enjoyed Dev Patel as a leading man. This being his feature directorial debut was a compelling idea. Most exciting of all, Monkey Man is a Hollywood-style action movie set entirely in India, specifically Mumbai, fully embedded in Indian culture. There’s only one White character in the entire movie, and he’s a South African underground boxing emcee (Sharlto Copley). There’s no American characters to be found anywhere, giving Patel—actually a British actor—the space to showcase the culture of his heritage. What’s not to love?

There’s a lot not to love, it turns out. Patel so directly wants us to think of Monkey Man as “John Wick in Mumbai” that his character, credited as “Kid” (side note: Dev Patel is 33), buys a gun from a man who directly references the Keanu Reeves films: “Have you seen John Wick?” the guy asks. “This gun was in it.”

Here’s the trouble with comparing this to John Wick—a franchise that consistently puts out solid-B action movies: there’s a purity to John Wick’s premise, which is also less serious but delighted audiences: some assholes kill Wick’s beloved dog, a crime worse than human murder to dog lovers, and he spends the first movie getting revenge for this wrong. As the series has gone on, the world of assassins in which John Wick inhabits gets increasingly ridiculous and elaborately structured, but at least it stays in its lane, and consistently offers moments of levity in between its many extended “gun fu'“ action sequences.

Dev Patel’s movie is also a revenge tale, but seeped in sectarian and religious tensions that have characterized India for decades. “Kid” is out to get back at both the police chief (Sikandar Kher) who killed his mother when he was a chid, and the Hindu nationalist politician (Makrand Deshpande) who gave the order to destroy the settlement on the land later used for his temple. This turns what could be a movie about good clean, personal vendettas into an action “thriller” that amounts to little more than political violence. I struggled to understand how I was supposed to sit in the theater and root for it—and make no mistake, Monkey Man is not a Dune-style commentary on the pitfalls of hero worship. It simply glorifies violence for its own sake, using the dressing of social justice in a way that is far more transparent than it realizes.

There is also a significant presence of transgender characters, known in India as hijras, which I have very mixed feelings about. Setting aside the fact that the prinary trans character is played by Vipin Sharma, a cisgender man—I cannot find any confirmation whether any of the other hijra characters were played by trans actors—the Kid character’s position among them never sat quite right with me. The way the hijra characters help Kid felt only a step or two away from a queer Indian version of the “Magical Negro” trope; the way Patel is clearly proud of himself for offering unprecedented trans representation in his film feels like a straight-Indian version of White saviorism.

In short, it never quite feels like the trans presence exists for the right reasons. And Monkey Man clearly wants us to applaud it for featuring these trans characters as badasses, an idea I very much support in theory—except they just engage in the same gruesome violence as anyone else, their saris shot spinning in slow motion while they slaughter nameless enemies with the same ruthlessness with which they themselves are targeted. Somehow, we’re supposed to feel good about this?

The fundamental problem with Monkey Man is that it’s convinced it has a righteous point of view while its moral center proves nebulous from start to finish. This applies to Kid’s showdowns with both the corrupt police chief and the Hindu nationalist politician running for Prime Minister. What should have been fun movie violence, with only very sporadic moments of minor humor, gets weighed down in South Asian politics with real-world implications that are muddled at best—a phrase that would be aptly applied to this movie as a whole.

The Hindu legend of the hanuman has more clarity than this movie.

Overall: C+

PROBLEMISTA

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

Problemista is a kind of movie that takes some time to win you over. I spent the first several scenes unable to decide how I felt about it, as a young El Salvadorian immigrant named Alejandro (Julio Torres) found himself in the tentative employ of a manically eccentric art dealer named Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton), in the desperate hope of getting a work sponsorship so he won’t be deported.

If Tilda Swinton can be relied on for anything, it’s that she’ll play a part wildly different from any other part she’s ever played. She practically invented “disappearing into a role,” and it’s almost like magic how you instantly forget it’s her you’re even looking at. Here, she wholly embodies Elizabeth and her high strung emotional distractions, to a degree that she is genuinely annoying, and when another character says to Alejandro, “I don’t know how you put up with her,” you’re already wondering the same thing. The even more impressive magic trick is how, by the end of Problemista, you are emotionally invested in Elizabeth in spite of all this.

Swinton is the perfectly cast actor who is just the right size star for this size of a movie, but it’s even more important that we discuss Julio Torres, who not only plays the lead part in this movie, but he also wrote and directed it. I was not very familiar with Torres before seeing this movie, but have heard of some of his other projects: Los Espookys, the Spanish-language comedy on HBO; My Favorite Shapes, his comedy special on the same channel. This guy has been around a few years—and he is nothing at all like Alejandro in Problemista.

It would seem that Julio Torres and Tilda Swinton are a match made in oddball heaven. They have wildly different energies, and yet they have chemistry. Alejandro is very mild-mannered and struggles to assert himself; Elizabeth is oppressively assertive. She never quite crosses over into bitch territory, though; all it takes to rein her in is someone who knows how to speak to her in just the right way.

Here’s my one major note for Torres. The way Alejandro walks is . . . a choice. A rather baffling one, honestly: he moseys forward with something between a shuffle and a hop, little tiny almost-bounces with each step. What the hell is that about? Torres’s performance is stellar otherwise, but having Alejandro walk everywhere in this manner was legitimately distracting.

Problemista is clearly intended as both a charmer and a comedy. and although I got a few legitimate chuckles out of it, it’s much more the former than the latter. There are production design choices that contribute to this, little fantasy vignettes casting Elizabeth as a monster and Alejandro as a hero in a fairy tale for him to conquer, both of them wearing decidedly low-rent costumes. It’s like Problemista is actively trying to charm us by calling out its own low budget—and somehow, it succeeds.

Granted, some things in Problemista work better than others. Rza as Bobby, Elizabeth’s cryogenically frozen artist husband whose painting subjects are exclusively eggs draped with different colored cloths (depending on the painting), isn’t quite as indelible a performance. In fact, I wasn’t super keen on the whole “FreezeCorp” thing where that’s how Elizabeth and Alejandro meet, where Alejandro loses his latest desperate attempt at employment. On the other hand, it does create a setup for the swing at the very end that pays off rather amusingly.

I suppose that’s the best phrase for this movie: rather amusing. Not hilarious, not dramatic (Elizabeth’s theatrics notwithstanding), not particularly moving—but rather amusing. It’s also a singular vision, I’ll give it that much. And sometimes a rather amusing, singular vision is all we need.

A diaspora of people exceeding the expectations of the small world they inhabit.

Overall: B

LOVE LIES BLEEDING

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

As 21st-century noirs go, Love Lies Bleeding is pretty great—until it takes an inexplicably wild swing at the end. I would recommend this film, but I would have to warn you about that at the same time. I won’t spoil what happens, except to say it’s somewhat debatable whether what happens is something we are meant to believe is actually happening, or if it’s a character fantasy. I am not averse to wild swings as a concept, mind you; I just want them to be clear in their purpose or what they represent, which is really lacking here—in spite of several allusions to it earlier in the film, which only make at least that much sense in retrospect. Without the wild turn at the end, I might have felt confident that this could be one of the year’s best movies.

It could be argued that, so far at least, it still is. There’s a lot of far worse stuff out there, after all. It’s just that there’s a sequence of maybe five minutes in this movie that really straddles the line between subversive and bafflingly weird.

All that aside, Love Lies Bleeding is a dark, twisted, violent, lesbian romance thriller that is absolutely worth a look. It’s beautifully shot in New Mexico, starting with an opening shot that we only realize well into the story later was the camera lifting out of a ravine that plays into the plot. And it’s edited with a unique sort of precision, moving the plot forward without any excess bloat while keeping the pace at a steady clip. Best of all, it’s exceptionally well cast, with Kristen Stewart as gym manager Lou, who falls for mysterious body builder Jackie, played actual body builder Katy O'Brian, wandering in from out of town. They both get increasingly mixed up with Lou’s gun range owner and insect enthusiast dad Lou Sr (Ed Harris, with both his telltale bald head and a ring of hair that is nuts-long, and somehow it fits the character.)

We learn early on that Lou doesn’t speak to her father, and one of many refreshing elements of Love Lies Bleeding is that this estrangement has nothing to do with Lou’s sexuality—evidently he couldn’t give half a shit about that. I expected some kind of cathartic confrontation between Lou and her father by the end, but much of the story goes by without giving a sense of any catharsis coming with an earned payoff. This is where director and co-writer Rose Glass’s expert construction of the story comes in, because eventually we get just enough revealed about Lou’s dark history with her father, and we understand perfectly why she doesn’t speak to him.

In the meantime, both Lou and Jackie find themselves suffering the consequences of impulsive, violent mistakes. It should be noted that, in at least two scenes, something pretty gruesome occurs. In the first, we see the same shockingly horrid wound so many times, it begins to feel like Rose Glass is toying with us. She’s certainly having fun with this movie: the comic moments are few and far between, but when they do come, they are pretty hilarious.

And that’s the bottom line with Love Lies Bleeding: this is a postmodern take on film noir, with its own sensibility, in a world that is dark and dangerous and yet you love being witness to it. It takes a brief detour into “Wait, what?” territory that I could have lived without—but then immediately reeled me right back in with one final bit of humor, and then a bit of interpretive dance over the end credits. You kind of have to be there. Just because it isn’t perfect doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go there.

I don’t know if you’ll root for them exactly but you’ll still want to know where they’re going.

Overall: B+

ONE LIFE

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

More than eighty years on, with a seemingly infinite amount of books and movies and television shows produced about the Second World War, it’s easy to forget the stunning breadth of that global conflict. The holocaust, Hiroshima, Nagasaki—these are the most enduring symbols of World War, and they are really just the tip of the iceberg. Will we ever run out of new stories to tell about that period of history? Just last year, Oppenheimer asked us to consider the horrors we unleashed upon the Japanese, while also imagining where we would be had the Nazis managed to split the atom first.

And yet, there remain countless, only seemingly smaller stories left untold, a whole lot of them coming from places outside the locations that dominate typical World War II narratives, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, or Japan. The many places affected by both Japanese and German expansionism of the time are just as worth considering.

And that brings us, now, to One Life, a new film based on the amazing accomplishments of Sir Nicholas Winton (a wonderful Anthony Hopkins). Winton, a man of Jewish descent and son of immigrant parents who fled the Germany of World War I, traveled to Prague in late 1938 with the intent of assisting humanitarian efforts with refugees there. He led the impossible task of compiling lists of refugee children, most of them Jewish, getting them British visas with the help of his mother (played by Helena Bonham-Carter), lining up British foster parents to take the children in, and transporting them from Prague to London by train.

One Life focuses largely on Winton’s humility, cutting back and forth between Hopkins’s version in the late eighties, and the younger version working tirelessly on this project in 1938 and 1939, much of it later focused on logistics and paperwork back in the UK. The younger Winton is played by Johnny Flynn, exceptionally well cast as a man you could easily believe as a younger Anthony Hopkins. Hopkins, for his part, spends the first half or so of the film milling about his home, cleaning out his clutter, trying to come up with a use for a decades-old scrapbook of all these children, and otherwise just contemplating his past.

Winton’s stunning feat was saving 669 children from almost certain death; Germany invaded Czechoslovakia as expected, and rounded up virtually all of the parents of these children and sent them to concentration camps—the small number of survivors amounted to about a third the number of children Winton and his cohorts saved. This all went mostly unknown until Winton went looking for a place to conserve his scrapbook, and then a usually-silly British television program called That’s Life! picked up the story in the late eighties, reintroduced him to dozens of the former children he saved, and had the British press celebrating him as the “British Schindler.”

That phrase never actually gets used in One Life, somewhat wisely, despite the obvious parallels. The key difference is that Winton was among people who saw what was coming very early on, and took action immediately. All these children boarded trains, saying goodbye to their parents with the idea that they would return to them once it was safe to do so. There are many scenes of goodbyes on departing trains, and it’s impossible not to think about how this was actually the last time these kids ever saw their families. One Life is a somewhat unusual World War II movie in that it shows very little in the way of the grotesque violence of war—but is steeped in the widely understood expectation that it is coming. This was a time of panic, which those who kept their heads had to leverage into organized action.

The trailer to One Life gives way too much of it away, but doesn’t take away the effects of those later scenes that are sure to get the tears flowing. Anthony Hopkins is 86 years old, still working, and I watched this movie thinking about what a treasure he is—he was already 53 when he became truly famous as a deliciously wicked cannibal in The Silence of the Lambs, as iconic a role as there could ever be, and still has since embodied a stunning array of characters since. More often than not anymore, he plays a sweet old man, and Nicholas Winton would have to be in the hall of fame of such characters. Hopkins evidently really loves to work, because he’s been in plenty of films that aren’t as great as others, but he offers a performance here that is really worth a look, especially in the second half, when Winton shifts from silent rumination to getting caught up in the world’s discovery of his stunningly accomplished past.

As with any story like this, there is always the reminder of the far larger number of people who could not be saved than the number who could. In this case, just as the Nazis were arriving in Czechoslovakia, the last train was stopped, and more than a hundred children who were loaded on it did not get to leave. Winton never knew what became of them, but it’s easy to imagine. This is how we keep hope alive, however, by focusing on the 669 children he did help save, and the large number of them reunited with him 40 years later. It’s very difficult to watch those reunion scenes without weeping, and taking away from this movie the notion of hope and perseverance in the face of unimaginable horrors. Some people break through, and so does this movie.

Anthony Hopkins is a the top of his game leading yet another untold story deserving of remembrance.

Overall: B+

ARTHUR THE KING

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

I’m just going to level with you right out of the gate: if you love dogs and you like movies about dogs, regardless of the countless number of them already made, then you are going to love Arthur the King. That’s really all you need to know.

Well, except perhaps that the titular dog does not factor much into the story here, until maybe a third of the way in. That said, this is actually one of several elements that made Arthur the King a better moviegoing experience than I was necessarily expecting—full disclosure, this isn’t usually my kind of movie, but I agreed to see it with a friend precisely because I knew how much she loves dogs. As long as the reviews did not indicate it was terrible, I would go. In the end the reviews are decidedly mixed, and yet I would argue the movie is better than that might seen to suggest.

Based on a true story, this is the tale of a stray dog who bonds with Michael (Mark Wahlberg), well into his final stint captaining an adventure racing team through The Dominican Republic in 2018. The man Michael is based on is Swedish athlete Mikael Lindnord, but for the purposes of this film they made the protagonist an American. I guess Wahlberg isn’t exactly known for his accent work. Still, they pretty effectively diversified the rest of Michael’s four-person racing team: Simu Liu as Leo, an Instagram-star athlete who posted a viral photo of his and Michael’s failure at the 2015 race; Palestinian actor Ali Suliman as Chik, the team navigator who actually does speak with an accent; and Nathalie Emmanuel as Olivia, an expert climber. In addition to this team, and sporadic appearances by other team competitors, the narrative occasionally cuts back to Juliet Rylance as Helen, Michael’s wife back home in Colorado, showing their little girl his racing progress online.

Maybe just slightly less often, the narrative cuts back to the dog who will be later named Arthur, struggling as a stray on the streets of Santo Domingo. Michael and his team are resting at one of the race’s transfer points when Michael notices the dog, sitting quietly a few feet away. Michael feeds him one of the meatballs from a meal pack, and they move on. The story of the race moves on as well, and the dog catches up with them again 3 days and 200 miles later. From then on, Arthur the King becomes the movie about an adventure racing team and the dog who basically invited himself to become their fifth member.

Naturally we wonder how much of what happened in this movie actually happened in real life, but I’m not sure how much that matters. Only occasionally do director Simon Cellan Jones and adapting writer Michael Brandt (based on Mikael Lindnord’s book, Arthur - The Dog Who Crossed the Jungle to Find a Home) into obvious Hollywood-movie territory, amping up the herorics or the plight of that dog we can’t help but root for.

But here’s where Arthur the King actually won me over: the production values are much higher than we usually get with a movie like this. There’s a great sequence, before Arthur even becomes a significant part of the narrative, with the team crossing a ravine on a zipline with bikes hung off their backs, and one of them gets stuck in the middle. The sequence is exceptionally well shot, offering just the right amount of suspense, and is a big part of giving us reason to be invested in all the human characters as opposed to just the dog. Wahlberg, for his part, gives a pretty basic, serviceable performance, and the actors around him—including the dog—help elevate how they play as a group.

It would seem that “adventure racing” involves many different types of racing activity, from hiking to cycling to kayaking, and between how well the diverse terrain they’re crossing is shot, and how well the parallel narratives of the racers and the dog are edited, until their stories become one, Arthur the King actually works out to a pretty solid entertainment.

You’ll be on the edge of your seat, you’ll cry, you’ll be emotionally manipulated and you’ll love it.

Overall: B+

BAD RIVER

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

When you hear the name “Bad River Band,” if you have no association or history with Native Americans (like me), you might easily mistake it for a classic rock band. Except this is Bad, not Little River Band, and it’s “Bad River” as in Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. Today I learned that a “band” is a smaller group, of varying size, within a tribe—and, there seems to be a whole lot of nuance to this, and how it is defined, that requires a breadth of understanding that certainly surpasses the parameters of a movie review.

Suffice it to say that Bad River Band is a very organized group in Wisconsin, with their own U.S. government website, detailing both their status as a federally recognized tribe of the Ojibwe (as they are mostly known in Canada) or Chippewa (as they are mostly known in the U.S.), and their long fight against “Line 5,” an oil pipeline by Canadian company Enbridge, which runs oil through much of the U.S. around the Great Lakes. This includes Minnesota, both the Lower and Upper Peninsulas of Michigan, and Wisconsin, although “Line 5” specifically refers to its route from Superior, Wisconsin (at the westernmost point of Lake Superior), under the Straits of Mackinac (the narrow waterway separating Lake Michigan and Lake Huron), then through Michigan’s Lower Peninsula to oil refineries in Sarnia, Ontario. Specifically for the purposes of this documentary feature film, Bad River, it runs straight through the Bad River Reservation, which is located in Northern Wisconsin on the southwestern shores of Lake Superior.

There is indeed a literal river of the same name in this location, through which Line 5 runs, threatening an inevitable oil spill, the alteration of the river’s route, and then spilling its contamination into Lake Superior. You can read a three-page handout online about Bad River’s lawsuit against Enbridge over Line 5, which, honestly, might do a better job at spreading awareness of this clearly vital issue, than this serviceable documentary feature about it will. It can be argued that documentaries have greater reach than, say, printed materials, but how many of you have even heard of this film? Well, all of you reading this have now, but that’s not going to put much of a bump in the number of people who watch the movie. It helps spread awareness, at least.

And sometimes there’s just an unfortunate difference in the presentation of urgent information in print versus a visual medium. For much of Bad River the film, I failed to connect, not because of the content but because of its presentation: rapid-fire editing meant to seem “snappy” but coming across as rushed; drone shots of Bad River with quick fast-forward zooms. It felt a little too much like I was watching a standard-issue reality show like The Bachelor or Below Deck, which felt a little incongruous.

Much of Bad River quite rightly focuses on centuries of Native American resistance, but specifically contextualized in the history of Bad River Band, including the all-too common stories of genocide and forced assimilation into Christian culture, including literally stealing children and placing them into Catholic schools, where they were often horribly abused. I’m not proud to admit that I found myself thinking: we know this history already, have been told about it many times, what’s different about this story? But, then I caught myself: the fact that these shameful histories bear repeating never diminishes, and serves as a reminder of the generational trauma that undergirds their resistance today. Side note: this is a great example of how Canada, often lionized as the country with a greater moral compass than the U.S., has a history no better than ours when it comes to this stuff—and they are just a callous in their treatment of Indigenous peoples today, if it serves such interests as a corporation’s bottom line.

A very large number of Bad River Band people are interviewed for this film, which greatly personalizes it, on both a collective and individual level. By the end, I did find myself deeply moved, with this film’s novel approach to closing scenes: we see each person’s answer to the question of what they would say to their descendants, many generations from now. The answers vary greatly but have a common through line of love and hope, and if you look at it from the point of view of those descendants they’re speaking to, it’s a literalization of being spoken to by your ancestors. I can’t deny a pretty cynical outlook, myself—both the U.S. and Canada’s histories of relations with Indigenous people, clear to the present day, doesn’t exactly bode well. But that doesn’t lessen the need for resistance, and if nothing else, this film is but one example of a multi-pronged, years-long strategy.

There’s a lot here worth protecting.

Overall: B

THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF MAGICAL NEGROES

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

There were multiple ironies to my experience watching The American Society of Magical Negroes, starting with the fact that the theater I went to see it at started to show the wrong film at first. After deeply confusing those of us in the audience with this very film’s trailer playing amongst all the others before the feature started, they then played American Fiction—a vastly superior film in every way imaginable.

Eventually, once the correct film was playing, after some time I registered another irony. This is a film about Black people whose literally magical job is to ease the discomfort of White people. And this film is so blandly inoffensive, with a premise with great potential to be effectively biting, it plays as though the movie itself exists to ease the discomfort of White viewers.

On the one hand, The American Society of Magical Negroes just can’t win. It triggers the Fox News set by quite directly suggesting the most dangerous animal on the planet is “White people.” Then it rankles leftists by having its Black protagonist risk everything by falling in love with a White woman. (Sort of. We’ll get back to that.)

And here is where we get into the fundamental difference between The American Society of Magical Negroes and American Fiction. American Fiction didn’t give any of its White characters a pass. This movie, by contrast, wants us to think it’s highlighting the absurdity of the myth of the “Magical Negro,” and then gives its White characters a pass at every turn. There’s an impassioned speech near the end, delivered by Justice Smith as Aren, a new recruit for the Society of the film’s title, explaining to his coworker Jason (Drew Tarver) what it’s like for him to live in this country as a Black person. And—spoiler alert!—a minor light goes on in Jason’s head, showing a definitively contrived, if small, step toward White understanding. Except to present all this in the context of literal fantasy genre filmmaking rather undermines the message we’re meant to get from this movie.

This is a film of endlessly missed opportunities. It doesn’t even play with the concept of a “Magical Negro” as a historic stereotype specifically in literature, cinema, and television, where Black supporting characters reliably come to the aid of White main characters. Instead, while trying to convince us it’s using the concept subversively, it’s just continuing the tradition of its use. The only difference is that now, the protagonist of the film is the Black supporting character, and the White main characters are its target audience. The oddest thing about this movie is that it’s like a low-rent Harry Potter but with an undercooked premise and a lead actor who is actually more charismatic and talented than Daniel Radcliffe.

Because this is the one major strength of The American Society of Magical Negroes: the winning cast. Justice Smith embodies his character wonderfully, playing both awkward and increasingly confident with equal skill. David Alan Grier exudes warmth as Aren’s mentor, and Michaela Watkins is a welcome presence, if relatively inconsequential, as his boss. An-Li Bogan has great chemistry with Smith as the love interest for whom Aren ultimately risks everything. The story here rather lacks focus and suffers from uneven tonality, but the cast alone makes up for a lot, and together make this movie watchable, if ultimately forgettable.

A particularly curious element of this film is the multiracial ethnicities of both its protagonist and his love interest. Aren even mentions at one point that his mother was White, yet never offers any clarity on what must be unique to that experience, distinct from either being White or having two Black parents. Lizzie is briefly referred to as “ethnic” but never clarified beyond that—evidently we are to understand that, as a matter of fact, she is not a White woman. At least not fully: she’s Asian and White. But, given that Jason makes a comment about not realizing she’s “ethnic,” it would seem she’s “White enough.”

It may be that I’m splitting hairs here, and overdoing the parsing of ethnic heritage in characters—except that this movie is quite literally asking for it. It seems to give White women a pass in particular, in the end offering Lizzie a last-minute “twist” that underlines the role of women in society as “supportive wives and girlfriends.” This is incongruously problematic on its own, as it creates a a false equivalency between the otherwise very real struggles of women, including White women—something that has its place in film for sure, just not this one and not in this way—and Black people experiencing racism.

The American Society of Magical Negroes has some genuine charms (including Nicole Byer as the Society’s president), but it ultimately fails at what it aims to be, and struggles to clarify its point of view. Everything it aspires to, American Fiction achieves with ingenious finesse. I recommend you just watch that movie instead.

We’re meant to learn how White people are more dangerous than sharks, except this movie has no bite.

Overall: B-