TWISTERS

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

It was a somewhat surprising experience watching Twisters in the theater last night, a 6:15 p.m. showing with perhaps ten other people in the theater—from what I could tell, all of them young. And I did not survey them, but it seemed likely that many, if not all, of them had never seen the original 1996 film, Twister—which, I really have to say up top: was much better. After re-watching that film only a couple of weeks ago and being genuinely impressed by how well it stands up, particularly in terms of its special effects, I could not help but be just slightly disappointed by this new one. I found myself envying those kids: they were clearly having a great time, while I was over here, nitpicking.

And in so doing, I am going against what I have long stated I stood for: which was that films should be judged on their own merits. The problem is that, in creating a “legasequel” such as this, the filmmakers are openly inviting comparison. And when you do the comparison: Twisters falls short. Not by a wide margin, but it falls short nonetheless.

And there’s a bit of a double-edged sword to this comparison. The 1996 Twister knows exactly what it is: a blockbuster disaster movie showcasing special effects (many of them shockingly practical) that does not pretend to be anything else. The premise being preposterous is incidental; the stock characters elevated by broadly charismatic performers. It had two teams of scientists chasing tornadoes in Oklahoma in pursuit of new data they can get from a new device they called “Dorothy,” which they hope will help extend advanced warning times by launching sensors up a tornado funnel from its base. One of the groups is the clearly villainouse one because their leader is ”in it for the money, not the science.”

The 1996 Twister was also a product of its time, its shamelessly knowing execution, of a dumb plot in the name of thrilling sequences, being something that would just never play the same way today. The unfortunate result is that the 2024 Twisters infuses an element of self-seriousness not present in the previous film, which really doesn’t work either. Which begs the question: Why make this movie at all? Box office would have to be the only answer. I’m sure the relative disinclination of young moviegoers to rewatch “old movies” (Twister came out 28 years ago) has not changed and never will.

So why not just make a new movie about tornado chasers? What purpose does it serve to ride the coattails of a movie from three decades back whose coattails petered out long ago? Especially when this movie’s connection to Twister is tenuous at best? I actually found this point lacking in clarity, the only “character” in this film that was actually seen in the first being “Dorothy” herself, the contraption that releases sensors . The young scientists in pursuit of grant money even make derisive references to how old she is. This is never stated explicitly, but Dorothy must have just been handed down by their scientific forebears and that’s it; there is no other narrative reference to the first film at all.

There is a meta connection, however, when James Paxton, the late Bill Paxton’s son, appears briefly as an aggressive customer trying to check into a hotel while he and his girlfriend willfully ignore a gigantic tornado approaching. There are also other subtle references, such as when the film’s primary protagonist, Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones), visiting to assist an old friend for a week to get new data, responds to someone saying “Welcome back!” with “I’m not back!”—the latter being an exact line Bill Paxton delivers in the first film. Also, this movie’s story beats are nearly identical: opening flashback of a traumatic event in the midst of a tornado; survivor later pursues an understanding of this enigmatic force of nature; two teams of people compete with each other to catch up to multiple tornadoes in a single day of several tornado outbreaks.

All of this is to say: the script here did very little for me, it’s such a rehash of the first film, which itself took no pains to be any work of staggering genius. This time around, director Lee Isaac Chung (pivoting rather hard after the quietly wonderful 2021 film Minari) and co-writers Mark L. Smith (The Revenant) and Joseph Kosinski (who directed Top Gun: Maverick) introduce a character named Tyler (Glen Powell, by far the most charismatic presence in this movie—the man is a star) who we are clearly meant to read as an analog to Carey Elwes’s pompous character from the first film. Kate’s old friend Javi (Anthony Ramos, whose ample talents are criminally wasted here) has been employed by a guy with real estate connections, and between Tyler and Javi, Twisters ultimately “flips the script” from the first film that is clearly meant as a “twist” from initial expectations. But, it never amounts to much.

So what does that leave? Tornadoes, of course! This would be the whole reason I’m not sorry I saw Twisters, because it still features countless tornado sequences that are genuinely thrilling, and what else is anybody going to this movie for? Plus, in spite of this movie’s characters on average not being half as compelling as those from the first film, even with the down-time, “character” scenes, the run time is a perfectly decent 122 minutes, keeping it from overstaying its welcome or feeling bloated.

Still, this does feel worth mentioning: the effects in the 1996 Twister hold up surprisingly well after 28 years. The effects in Twisters hold up about as well as you would expect: they aren’t bad but they don’t push anything forward; they aren’t any more impressive than they were in the first film, although there are several shots with more comprehensive composition. This movie isn’t going to continue impressing thirty years from now in the same way, though. Not that it appears to have any intention to; it only exists to entertain us all in the present moment, and on that point it succeeds.

And that brings us back to the cast, and specifically Glen Powell, without whom Twisters would not be nearly as good as the just-fine movie it is. Here he plays a storm chaser with a whole crew who post videos to a YouTube channel with a following of 1 million, who at first seems like an arrogant ass but of course (spoiler alert!) turns out to have a heart of gold. I would argue that, on a character level, Powell is the single person who makes Twisters worth seeing. He actually manages to elevate his contrived material with a performance that is as nuanced as it is undeniably charming. (Admittedly, some viewers don’t find his character so charming; this is not a universal response. But, the critical and box office success of his most recent four films in only the past two years speaks for itself.)

There is plenty of talent elsewhere in the cast, mind you; they just aren’t given enough to do. Besides Ramos in a fairly thankless role, Tyler’s crew also includes critical darling Sasha Lane (American Honey, How to Blow Up a Pipeline), whose career trajectory never quite went where it should have. Here the most interesting thing she’s given to do is remote pilot a drone for aerial shots of the tornadoes.

As always, though, here is the bottom line: is Twisters entertaining? Yes. Does it give you what you come to see? Absolutely yes. No one’s coming to these movies for dimensional character portraits, they’re coming for the thrills, of which Twisters has countless. I’m just nitpicking because it’s what I’m here to do. Granted, the 1996 Twisters has thrills that are just as good, with a better cast, and more successful wit in its dialogue. But even then it was only the thrills that mattered, and it’s really all that matters here. I didn’t quite get everything I wanted out of this movie but I certainly got what I came for.

The two leads in this picture are ready for their close-up.

Overall: B

FLY ME TO THE MOON

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

I lost my patience with this movie within about two minutes.

I want to give the writers of the abysmal script the benefit of the doubt. I’m magnanimous like that. But, a team of three writers is the first of many red flags. The fact that this is the first writer credit on a feature film for all three of them is another. One can only assume they were deluged with boneheaded “notes” by studio executives, because the entire film is packed to the gills with old-school formula.

Let’s skip straight ahead to the moon landing, a pivotal event in this story. This was a real, historic event, a watershed moment, something everyone who lived to witness it never forgot. This was an unforgettable moment for everyone on the planet, but especially for Americans—something that seared itself into memories in a way that was on par with the assassination of President Kennedy, or the attack on Pearl Harbor, or 9/11. The key difference is that this event filled people with awe, gave them hope, and opened their minds to the idea of unlimited possibility. Has such an event ever happened again? Well, I can tell you this: Fly Me to the Moon takes something with massive historic import, and reduces it to a cheap Hollywood plot contrivance.

The more I think about this, the closer I get to being legitimately angry about it. Does nothing have meaning anymore? Maybe I’m just becoming an old crank. Fly Me to the Moon bombed hard, earning all of 10% of its budget its opening weekend. The people who didn’t bother were the correct ones. Much like the endless parade of gullible goofs who cross paths with Scarlett Johansson’s Kelly Jones character, I fell for a skilled but misleading marketing campaign.

It’s a fun premise, after all: an advertising wiz is hired to sell the dream of the Moon Landing to both the American people, who are losing interest after nearly a decade of promise; and Congress, who are skeptical that NASA is worth the cost. Kelly Jones butts heads with Cole Davis (Channing Tatum), the director of the program, all while telegraphing their utterly predictable romantic arc. A shady government official (Woody Harrelson, in a part that truly can’t decide on the character’s vibe) representing President Nixon shows up to order a live shoot of the Moon Landing on a soundstage, “just in case.” Kelly hires a down-and-out director (Jim Rash) who is an over-the-top gay stereotype.

If there’s anything genuinely good to say about this movie, it’s the undeniable onscreen presence and charisma of its two leads—although it must be said that Tatum’s haircut looks stupid. To be fair, Johansson’s teased-out hairdos are often not much better. Still, they perform their dialogue with genuinely impressive commitment. If they were passionate about this project, though, I just don’t know how to defend that.

This is a movie with a running bit about a black cat crossing paths and causing bad luck, which figures prominently in a pivotal moment of the shoot. There are too many details in this movie that I can’t get past, which never once feels like a plausible representation of what actually happened at NASA in 1969. In one scene, Kelly is the one who calls “action” in the moon landing rehearsal, even though her hired director is right there. In another scene, Kelly Jones is shredding documents at a shredding machine . . . that happens to be right there on set. What? We literally got to see her get introduced to her office, why the hell would she pull a photo copier-sized paper shredder out into the middle of what is functionally an airplane hangar? Well, that “moon landing” set makes for a nice backdrop.

Whoever greenlit this movie should be horsewhipped. It completely wastes genuine talent while making a mockery of the historic record, and disingenuously pretending to have respect for science. Fly Me to the Moon clearly thinks it’s being uniquely clever, taking a longstanding (and, by definition, idiotic) conspiracy theory about the moon landing being faked, and presenting a scenario in which an attempted fake (spoiler alert!) actually failed.

I genuinely could not get over how dumb this movie is. There are times when a movie is contrived in typical ways, but it somehow wins me over, with its performers, or how entertaining it is, or perhaps even a self-knowledge about what kind of movie it is. There doesn’t seem to be any self-awareness to Fly Me to the Moon at all. The way the scenes are edited, the transparently manipulative score, the way none of the dialogue has any ring of truth to it—all of this was clear from the very start. I’m a fan of Scarlett Johansson, a rare specimen of equal beauty and talent. There are scenes in this movie where she actually, somehow, manages to captivate. But they are few and far between, and I spent all that other time marveling at every stupid narrative choice. I feel dumber for having seen it.

They only chose this angle for this screenshot so that Channing Tatum’s hair would look less stupid.

Overall: C-

ROBOT DREAMS

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

Robot Dreams is an utterly delightful, adorable animated feature without any dialogue and with an undercurrent of melancholy. It’s about friendship, love, and a meditation on the transient nature of relationships. It’s uniquely lush in spite of being almost exclusively set in cityscapes, with dark lines around rounded shapes filled with vividly solid colors that somehow combine to create a visual warmth.

Everything about it invites and envelopes you, even as the story takes unexpected turns. This is a universe filled with anthropomorphized animal characters, packed with endlessly charming visual details. “Dog,” the protagonist, wags his little tail any time something makes him happy or excited. He reads a copy of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary when he crawls into bed at night, making us wonder what a society of animals keeps as pets (which we never do actually see).

I am certain I could watch this movie again and discover many charming details I missed the first time around. One of my favorites is when Dog and Robot take a row boat ride in a lake, amongst many others doing the same. One other boat with two companions contains an elephant and a mouse, the elephant weighing down one end of the boat so heavily that the mouse is pushed high into the air at the other end.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. “Robot” is our other main character, a companion Dog has ordered through the mail via a number provided in a television ad. “Are you alone?” the ad copy onscreen reads, and we have already gleaned that Dog is lonely. This was where I first noticed the penchant for background detail in Robot Dreams, actually: as Dog eats his TV dinner alone in his apartment, we can see through his window and again through the window of an apartment across the street, an affectionate couple (a cow and a giraffe, if I remember right) snuggling on a couch in front of their own TV, feeding each other popcorn.

These are details we, as viewers of the movie, notice first. But then Dog notices, and he longs for something of the same in his own life. Enter Robot, who never exists as a character to provoke any thoughts about robotics or AI or anything particularly science-fiction in tone or theme. He’s more like a platonic mail-order bride, and in the end he doesn’t even have any particular personality defects that might cause tension in Dog and Robot’s relationsip. In the end, it’s more about how things can change even between people who never love each other less, but due to circumstances beyond their control. It’s the unhappy accidents of life itself that get in the way.

Robot Dreams is an unrated film, but if it were to get an MPA rating, logically it would get at least PG—not because of vulgarity or violence, which this film really has none of whatsoever, but just because it could be a bit sad for small children. There’s a moment in Robot’s journey, something that happens to him, that broke my heart. And I’m 48 years old.

Well before that, though, we just watch an extended sequence of scenes with Dog and Robot’s blossoming relationship. They walk to the park, go roller skating, and go to the beach. This goes on long enough that I found myself wondering how and when some kind of conflict will enter the story, as there is no story without one. And this is one of the many great things about Robot Dreams: it checks off the obligatory story beats, but always in unexpected ways. In this instance, Dog and Robot get separated at the beach because neither of them realized Robot would rust if he went swimming. He is rusted frozen on the sand, too heavy for Dog to drag away after they have napped clear through evening, and the door through the fence barrier to the beach not only closes at the end of the day, but until the next spring! Dog is dragged away by a cop for trespassing, given no chance to try and repair and retrieve Robot, who then spends the entire winter under snow and ice, quite literally dreaming of ways he might get reunited with Dog (hence the film’s title).

Dog marks the date he can go back (June 1), but in the meantime is forced to go on with his life. He’s still lonely, he tries to make friends, with varying but never complete success. By the time June 1 actually comes around, circumstances have changed significantly for both of them. I won’t spoil it except to assure that Robot does not stay stuck in the sand forever, and this is actually part of their diverging fates that take Robot Dreams to its surprisingly bittersweet conclusion. It’s not often that a film ends with its characters not unhappy, but perhaps fated with a lifetime of wistful yearning for what could have been.

Through all of it, the story is told almost exclusively in a visual manner, the closest to any dialogue being characters snickering or hollering out, “Hey!” I suppose you could say Robot Dreams thus features “voice acting,” although not in a way that particularly showcases anyone’s talent. The story and the animation are what make this the wonderful movie that it is, along with the soundtrack: the only time we hear actual words being vocalized is in song, tunes played on the soundtrack or from a character playing a cassette tape.

Director and co-writer Pablo Berger sets the story in 1980s New York, a plainly deliberate choice that adds to the nostalgic tone. Everything seen onscreen is a celebration of what we see, right down to the teenage animal punks who flip off Robot as he walks by them (oh wait, I guess that one moment could be seen as a “vulgarity,” even though even that plays with charm). Many shots feature the twin towers of the old World Trade Center in the background, always lovingly rendered, just like everything else we see onscreen. This is a movie that loves New York, and all of the characters in it. It loves Dog and it loves Robot, and it loves all the characters they meet along their respective journeys. It loves the art of storytelling and it loves animation in all its forms, and perhaps most of all, it loves us: the people watching the movie.

Robot and Dog swim in a sea of innovative storytelling devices.

Overall: A

MAXXXINE

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

There was a time when actresses famous or their roles in horror films were called “Scream Queens,” and that is indeed what the title character in MaXXXine aspires to be—even though no one ever uses the phrase in the film. As it happens, Mia Goth has carved out a similar niche for herself, although it exists a few steps to the side of “Scream Queen.” I’m not sure what similar title we could give her—Feature Eater? Picture Witcher? Wackadoodle Chicken Noodle? We can worship it.

One thing that’s for certain is that Mia Goth has a vibe. And it’s one of a woman barely feigning stability. Such is the case as Maxine Mix, a porn star attempting to break into Hollywood in 1985 with the backdrop of the Night Stalker serial killer. People close to Maxine keep dying, and it’s made clear early on that the homicide detectives investigating suspect someone besides the serial killer, just trying to make the murders look like the work of the Night Stalker.

This is all fertile ground for a fun homage to eighties slasher flicks, replete with a banger soundtrack of mid-eighties pop hits. (Frustratingly, movies like this never assemble the featured pop tracks into soundtrack albums anymore; search for the title on your music streamer of choice and all you’ll get is the motion picture score. Boring!) And, for a little while, MaXXXine really is fun, with a protagonist who is delightfully damaged and demented.

We’re made to expect that Maxine can handle herself even in the face of danger. In arguably the most memorable scene in the film, she turns the tables on a would-be attacker in a dark alley, forces him to strip naked at gunpoint, and forces him to suck on the barrel of the gun before she does something kind of hilariously grotesque to him. And there was something I really liked about this scene, the way it flips the script on so many of those old slasher movies with helpless women victims: here, it’s the man who is degraded onscreen, the woman with the agency. It has the exact same exploitative vibe, just with the gender roles reversed.

But, strangely, I’d have to say that’s where MaXXXine peaks, although there’s another pretty great scene involving a man trapped in a car getting compacted. MaXXXine has nearly all the elements you’re looking for in a movie of this sort—except that it presents itself as something with more depth than what it’s imitating, and in the end, it actually doesn’t.

As time goes on, and we get hints of Maxine’s secret past, our protagonist proves to be more helpless than you might expect—resourceful for sure, but she gets out of multiple scrapes only with the assistance of others, mostly men. And when her secret past is revealed and becomes an integral part of a climactic sequence around the Hollywood sign, it’s all fairly disappointing. I wanted more out of this movie, which starts out with an inventive spirit and then just gets lazy with it.

On the upside, MaXXXine still has a compellingly retro-moody tone, and more importantly, very good performances, particularly by Goth, and by Elizabeth Debicki as a ruthlessly ambitious film director. Several other actors are a bit wasted, though: Bobby Cannavale and Michelle Monaghan as the two relatively dull detectives; Kevin Bacon as a dirtbag private investigator; Giancarlo Esposito as a shady agent. I just wish the script were better. For all its retro neon-mood recreations, this film still feels very much a product of its time, when homage runs rampant without anything new to say.

I don’t know if she’ll blow you away but she might cock your gun.

Overall: B-

KINDS OF KINDNESS

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

I don’t quite know where to start with Kinds of Kindness, which itself is rather on-brand for director ad co-writer Yorgos Lanthimos, who previously brought us Poor Things (2023) and The Favourite (2018) and The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017) and The Lobster (2016). This is a guy with a knack for making movies I find more compelling with each time I watch them, which was especially the case with his last two movies. The key difference with Kinds of Kindness is that I found it plenty compelling, if fucked up in that specifically Lanthimos way, but not in a way I can imagine going out of my way to watch it again.

This is his first feature that is an anthology, which largely explains its 164-minute run time. It features three separate short films, with titles that make less sense as they go on: The Death of R.M.F.; R.M.F. is Flying; R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich. Spoiler alert! No one flies in the second short and no one eats a sandwich in the third. Or maybe they do and I missed it? I learned later that this film features a post-credit sequence, although based on the description it doesn’t sound like I missed much. That’s the thing with Lanthimos’s work, though: it’s easy to miss what you’re missing.

It should be noted, it was several minutes into the first of the film’s three chapters before I even began to get an inkling as to what the hell was going on. To say a Yorgos Lanthimos film isn’t for everybody is to state the obvious, but his more recent films have been a lot more mainstream in their writing and construction, whereas this film harkens back to his earlier work, at times obtuse and frequently fucked up. He also kinds of pulls one over on us from the very beginning, with “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)” by Eurythmics playing over the opening distributor logos—the kind of thing you typically find at the start of stylized blockbusters, an indicator that you’re about to have the very kind of blast you came for. It then cuts to the titular R.M.F.—the only character who forms any kind of connective thread through all three chapters—walking into an opulent home where a character played by Margaret Qualley opens the door in a sort of miniskirt version of a robe, and invites him in. We hear her have a relatively disjointed conversation over the phone, about R.M.F., but are otherwise given very little in the way of context clues.

Qualley, like all of the other principal actors, appears in all three chapters, in each one playing a different character. With the exception of Yorgos Stefanakos as R.M.F. in all three chapters, the others include Emma Stone as three different characters, along with Jesse Plemons, Willem Dafoe, Hong Chau, Mamoudou Athie, and in much smaller parts, Joe Alwyn. It would take too much time and space to get into a number of characters three times the number of these seven actors; suffice it to say that The Death of R.M.F. involves Plemons as an employee with a cult-like devotion to an employer played by Dafoe; R.M.F. is Flying involves Plemons as a husband deeply suspicious that the wife (Stone) who has returned after being marooned on an island is not really her; and R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich involves a literal cult led by both Dafoe and Chau, in which Plemons and Stone are searching for a miraculous healer.

None of these brief synopses do any one of the short films justice, in which odd details abound. Each of them exist in a universe that is just removed from the real world, one that somehow normalizes things that are deeply disturbing, from consensual murder to self-mutilation to the rape of an unconscious woman. That very last one was something I stumbled over immediately: Lanthimos finding ways to cross boundaries in a disturbing way is a signature move, but I found that one entirely unnecessary, and kept waiting for a narrative turn that somehow justified its inclusion, which never came. It would be misleading to try and argue that the scene is shot in a way that is not gratuitous, because its very inclusion is gratuitous.

The entire film is otherwise compelling, if that counts for anything, in which case your mileage may vary. I would say Kinds of Kindness is strictly for the die-hard Lanthimos fans, of which I am one—even though some arguably misguided choices also make this his weakest feature film in at least a decade. Overall, it feels very much like an exercise in artistic self-expression borne of opportunity Lanthimos eagerly took in the wake of relative commercial and massive critical success. Kinds of Kindness will only go so far on either front, but it still has this uniquely odd element that you just can’t look away from.

For instance, somehow the largely deadpan dialogue delivery actually works for it rather than against it: it feels like rote delivery with directorial intent, as opposed to actually bad acting. This applies mostly to the plethora of supporting players, though: across all three chapters, Plemons, Stone, Dafoe and Chau are all excellent as always. Whether it was them or the actors in smaller parts, though, I found myself wondering how many of them read the script and were eager to be the vessels of this director’s brilliant vision, or if they were just grateful to have gotten some acting work.

I will give Kinds of Kindness a large amount of credit for its deft execution of endings, at least. R.M.F. is Flying ends in a way that is truly wild, something some people will find so ridiculous as to justify completely dismissing it—and I found it hilarious. R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich ends in a way that is deliciously poetic irony, and I got a good belly laugh out of it.

It would seem, indeed, that Kinds of Kindness is intended as a unique brand of black comedy. It’s not that funny, but if you’ve got a truly black sense of humor, it has moments that will hit just right. It depends entirely whether or not you are part of the strictly limited club of people who are on the same wavelength.

I didn’t even get around the subtle queerness woven throughout the three chapters of this film.

Overall: B

A QUIET PLACE: DAY ONE

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

A Quiet Place: Day One is a serviceable science fiction thriller, which suffers by standing in the shadow of John Krasinski’s original and great A Quiet Place (2018), and its sequel that was nearly as good, A Quiet Place Part II (2021). The sequel has its own incredibly exciting opening sequence set during “Day One,” and it has more finesse than all of A Quiet Place: Day One, except that it’s just fun to return to this world, now in the setting of New York City.

We get opening title cards telling us what decibel the average noise level of New York City is, and that it’s equivalent to “a constant scream.” This is never spelled out explicitly. but the subtle implication is that this makes New York the primary target area of these predatory alien creatures that prey on anybody that makes noise.

I was relatively entertained by this movie, but I do have a lot of nitpick questions—at least one of which actually extends back to the opening scenes of the 2018 original film. In that movie, we see abandoned stacks of what look like the New York Post, with ironically screaming headlines that read, IT’S SOUND! At what silent printing press were these newspapers printed, I wonder?

In Day One, the discovery of how the alien creatures hunt happens astonishingly quickly. It’s set on the first day, right? No, wait—spoiler alert!—it does go through at least Day Two. The primary character we follow here is Samira, a terminally ill woman played by Lupita Nyong'o. She’s been granted a field trip into the city from her hospice clinic, and this is when the alien meteorites start crashing to the ground, and then mayhem ensues when the creators attack. Samira is blown against a glass wall by the force of an explosion and knocked unconscious. When she wakes up, apparently by magic, every human alive already understands that the way to protect themselves is to be quiet. Helicopters flying overhead shout through megaphones that “the attackers” can’t go into the water. All of this was apparently ascertained in a matter of hours, during which everyone alive would just be in a state of panic.

I have a lot of questions about these alien creatures, which apparently have no idea how much they owe their very existence to the Alien franchise. The predatory animal behaviors and reproductive practices of the “xenomorphs” in that franchise are made clear early on, though, and they make sense. The creatures in A Quiet Place hunt based on sound, that much is clear—but, to what end? We see them slash through people and snatch them, but we never see them eat people. Are people food to these things, or what? What bought them to Earth to begin with, anyway? How did they travel through space? Who designed the spacecraft, if all these guys know how to do is attack humans?

Day One is the first of these films not to be directed by John Krasinski, although he does get a story credit on the script. This film is otherwise written and directed by Michael Sarnoski, whose previous feature film was Pig, an unusually great acting showcase for late-career Nicolas Cage. The script here gives us an unprecedented glimpse into the alien creatures’ natural behaviors, a scene in which they pull open what look like eggs of some sort. But instead of hatching, the creatures open these pods and feast on their contents. We are given no context for this at all, no sense of what is actually happening there or why.

By the way, Samira has a cat, which she takes around with her everywhere, on a leash. The cat’s name is Frodo, and apparently Frodo is one of those rare cats, quite conveniently, who never meows. He runs off during chaos more than once, but he never gets lost. He’s less a cat than a convenient plot device. He captivates a random dude named Eric (Joseph Quinn) who winds up being the second lead of the film.

It doesn’t sound like I enjoyed this movie very much, does it? This is one of those movies I’m not sorry to have seen, that engages me just as much as it means to, but at which I cannot help but ask a great many nitpicky questions. It’s amusing to think of Samira, whose terminal illness changes the stakes of her fate as compared to everyone else around her, on a quest through New York City for one last meal of Patsy’s Pizza. Samira, Eric and Frodo walk deeper into the abandoned city while the other people still alive are making their way toward boats evacuating the city.

Among these people is Henri, the character played by Djimon Hounsou who was also featured in A Quiet Place Part II, the one clear strand of connective tissue between this and the previous two films. He even talks a bit about the boat evacuation in Part II, though a lot of what plays out in Day One doesn’t quite match the descriptions provided by characters in the other, definitively better movies.

A Quiet Place: Day One features a lot more action sequences than the other films, which relied much more on suspense—but, Day One also ratchets up the tension effectively in its own way. I did find myself wondering why we should care about these particular characters as opposed to anyone else barely escaping the city with their life. I suppose the terminal illness is a relatively clever conceit, in how it drastically changes the character’s motivations.

Ultimately, though, I’d have to say that A Quiet Place: Day One is really only for the franchise diehards. I never saw the first two films in theaters because I was afraid to; I literally saw them both for the first time only last month—and then was incredibly impressed by both of them. If you’ve never seen the others and you start with this one, it would just be a compelling but standard alien invasion action thriller, albeit with very good performances. If you have seen the other films, you’ll spend a lot of time thinking about how much better they both were.

The star making performances in this film are by Nico and Schnitzel, who play Frodo the cat.

THE BIKERIDERS

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

The Bikeriders has an odd, very unusual thing working against it—which is Austin Butler. And not because he’s bad, but because well, frankly, he’s too beautiful. It becomes a liability to suspension of disbelief. This is a story about a Chicago motorcycle gang in the sixties, and with Butler’s pretty face taking up so much of the screen space, it doesn’t feel that far from a biker gang in which one of them is a beauty queen.

It’s probably safe to assume Austin Butler himself would not be pleased to hear this. He has already made a name for himself in which he fully immerses himself into wildly divergent roles, from Elvis to Dune Part Two—so much so that, indeed, I have actually taken to seeing him in movies solely for the chance to see him act. Indeed, it’s the sole reason I decided to see The Bikeriders at all: because I love Austin Butler as an actor. It’s ironic that it should be his beauty that becomes the movie’s greatest liability.

I mean, Butler himself and director Jeff Nichols seem to think that the way to make his Benny character more “rugged” is just to give him some facial scruff. Well, he’s got piercing blue eyes, perfectly quaffed hair, and most incongruously, perfectly straight and shiny-white teeth. He’s also a 6-foot tall, perfectly lean, 32-year-old man. How is a little scruff going to combat any of this to make him fit in with all these other scruffy bike riders who look like they haven’t showered in a week?

So here’s the other thing about The Bikeriders, which, as a story, is fine. There’s nothing inherently wrong with it, and honestly the distraction of Austin Butler’s appearance is the only thing that qualifies as a real liability—others might argue the same of either Jodie Comer’s or Tom Hardy’s accents, but on those points, I disagree. The performances, across the board, are actually phenomenal. It’s a level of talent that seems wasted on a story this unremarkable.

The narrative point of view comes from Comer’s character, Kathy, who winds up marrying Benny. She undergoes several interviews with a photo journalist played by Mike Faist (previously seen as Riff in the wonderful 2021 Spielberg adaptation of West Side Story), thus becoming the film’s voiceover narration. The Bikeriders is “inspired by” a book of the same name, and Comer’s vocal performance, with a very distinctive Midwestern accent not used by anyone else in the film, is reportedly uncannily similar to that of the real Kathy the character is based on. Some people are distracted by it; for me, it works.

The leader of The Vandals, the motorcycle club Benny is an eternally stoic member of, is named Johnny and played by Tom Hardy, an actor with similarly immersive methods. His vocal performance is also a pointed choice, giving Johnny a very working-class Chicago accent that is pitched at a slightly higher register. These three characters form a sort of love triangle that is mostly lacking in animosity, the struggle mostly being between Johnny and Kathy vying for Benny’s time and loyalty.

I won’t go so far as to say The Bikeriders bored me, but there were times when it got close. I’d love to see performances this great, from these specific people, perhaps even together as they do have chemistry, in a better story. I just didn’t care that much about the fate of this motorcycle club, the dark arc of which has already long been a matter of public record and told many times, if not about this specific club. It’s a strange thing, for there to be so many great things about a movie, but if the script isn’t quite there, the rest of it doesn’t make as much of a difference as you’d hope. Ultimately The Bikeriders is a film showcasing a ton of talent, but is definitively less than the sum of its parts.

He’s pretty to look at: which was all I could think about.

Overall: B

GHOSTLIGHT

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

Ghostlight is the kind of movie whose excellence comes at you gradually. In the beginning, it’s just a small family, two middle-aged parents dealing with the exasperating antics of a teenager, who is facing expulsion from school for her behavior, but if some cards are played right she might get only suspension.

The great thing about it is what seems at first to be so unremarkable about them all. Daisy (Katherine Mallen Kupferer) is not the precociously eloquent teenager seen in most films like this. She’s clearly genuinely smart, but the ways she acts out, the things she says, are meant only to disrupt, and since that takes little actual effort to do, what actually comes out of her mouth is often just plain dumb. She punctuates her mouthiness with annoyingly unnecessary profanity.

Her parents, construction worker Dan (Keith Kupferer) and teacher Sharon (Tara Mallen), actually aren’t that much different. They don’t resort to profanity, but resort to other things that are just as unhealthy, such as Dan’s violent outbursts or Sharon barely managing to communicate with either of them. The script, by Kelly O'Sullivan, takes some time to reveal exactly what this family’s damage is, and since the story unfolds this way I won’t spoil it here. Suffice it to say that they suffered a horrible tragedy, and they are actively engaged in a lawsuit against another family in response to it. This would qualify as another unhealthy approach to dealing with their trauma.

The real hook of the story here is Dan’s random invitation to join a local community theater troupe, which is putting on a production of Romeo & Juliet. He meets an ex-professional actor who is around his age, Rita (Dolly de Leon) when first she asks him to try keeping the noise down with his construction work. But later, after she witnesses one of his outbursts, she explains to him that “You looked like someone who might like to be someone else. For a while.”

Dan’s organic integration into this play, in which they are forced into the backward yet somehow charming representation of teenage leads played by middle-aged actors, proves to be a way for him to process his deeply repressed emotions.

It only occurred to me just now to consider how often Shakespeare’s work featured a “play within a play,” and eventually we see a fair amount of this Romeo & Juliet in production in this film: another play within a play. Clearly a concept that dates back four hundred years, but here co-directors Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson do something very different with it: we see the performance of this play acting in real time as a visceral metaphor for the grief the actors themselves are going through. To see the nuance performed in this context, particularly on the part of Keith Kupferer, is breathtaking. Shakespeare’s writing alone is moving enough, and on top of that we see Dan finally acknowledging his own grief in his delivery of it.

In another person’s hands, the performance of Romeo and Juliet by older actors might come off as corny or cheap. Here, it’s deeply moving. So, yes, Ghostlight is in its way a tearjerker, but it has plenty of levity as well. I got several good laughs out of this movie. But whether it’s comical or tragic, there’s an unusually grounded representation of these characters, all of whom look, and act, like regular people. No one in this film looks like a movie star, and that is as it should be; if they did, it wouldn’t work. This especially applies to the rest of the characters rounding out the cast of the Romeo & Juliet production, most of them older people pursuing theater as a hobby. There’s a couple of younger men too, because when it comes to community theater, it takes all kinds. But without a younger woman, Rita gets the part of Juliet, simply because she gave the best read at her audition.

Ghostlight is secretly one of the best films of the year, because it feels like a “small movie” and yet it’s so much bigger once you wade into its gentle waves of emotional resonance. It exists in a cocoon of fondness for its own characters, no matter how flawed they are, and it’s impossible not to feel warmed by it.

A genuinely new take on Romeo & Juliet is an impressive achievement indeed.

Overall: A

THELMA

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

The marketing for Thelma would have you believe that it’s “The Beekeeper with senior citizens.” Both movies are about the seeking of retribution for criminals scamming an old lady out of her money. The key difference is that although Thelma features the old lady herself setting off to get her money back (as opposed to outright revenge, another critical clarification), it’s also firmly grounded in reality. Viewers might be surprised to find the degree to which Thelma leans into the challenges of getting really old.

It’s also genuinely funny, and incredibly sweet, something very much enhanced by the casting of real, genuinely old people rather than younger actors playing old. June Squibb, a revelation at age 83 when she was featured in the 2012 Alexander Payne film Nebraska, is now 94. That she can so successfully carry a film at this age is an inspiration, something that made me think of Rita Moreno, who is now 92. Those two should star in something together—they’re much closer in age than Moreno was to her costars in 80 or Brady.

There are multiple other elderly actors in Thelma, but the most notable of them is Richard Roundtree, who died last fall at the age of 81. There’s something bittersweet about these great roles that occasionally come along for older actors, that are about the perils of aging, and then they die shortly after production. Roundtree’s character, Ben, is an old friend of Thelma’s with whom she has not been in touch since he made the wise choice to move into assisted living—something Thelma is obstinately refusing to do because she can’t let go of her independence.

These are not new themes, of course, but in the hands of writer-director Josh Margolin, who reveals in the end credits the real Thelma who clearly inspired this film, we get a genuinely fresh take. Not a whole lot actually happens in Thelma because it takes so long for them to get accomplished: Thelma retrieves the address where she was tricked into sending $10,000 by someone impersonating her grandson on the phone, and makes it her mission to go there and get it back. She no longer drives, and so she attempts to steal the scooter owned by Ben. Ben attempts to thwart her, but cannot stop her, and so they ride on it together across town.

All the while, they successfully avoid the family looking for her: most notably her young adult grandson, Daniel. And I really must shout out 24-year-old actor Fred Hechinger, who gives an astonishingly authentic performance as a uniquely anxious young man who deeply loves his grandma. I have never seen him before, but would still say he was superbly cast in this part—as were Parker Posey and Clark Gregg as his hovering parents, giving a clue as to how Daniel grew up like this. Only Thelma treats Daniel like she takes it for granted that he’s going to be fine, and he’s too young to worry about whether or not he will be.

To be fair to Daniel’s parents, they clearly love him dearly, just as they do Thelma, who plays Posey’s mother. Thelma convinces Daniel to drive her to the assisted living facility where Ben lives, and when Thelma and Ben disappear, Daniel beats himself up for losing her. There’s a key scene where Daniel is angry with himself about this, calling himself a “stupid little bitch,” and Hechinger’s performance is so nuanced and vulnerable, it’s genuinely heartbreaking.

To be clear, Thelma moves in and out of such heavy tones, alternating with genuinely lighthearted, almost always incredibly sweet, and occasionally hilarious moments. Most of the time spent with Daniel and Thelma together, Daniel is just sweetly worrying that Thelma is safe. But then, of course, she and Ben speed off out of the assisted living home on Ben’s scooter, turning Thelma into a sort of road movie.

After a few requisite plot turns, they do make it to a point where they can confront the person who scammed her out of her money—and it’s another elderly man, played by Malcolm McDowell. He also has a young man cohort, and there is a moment during the confrontation where Thelma sort of opens the young man’s eyes in a way that’s far too easy and contrived. It was the one time in the entire film when something happened and I immediately thought: well, that was dumb. Few movies are perfect, I guess.

That said, few comedies are as beautifully shot as Thelma is, here by cinematographer David Bolen. In a way, Thelma is greater than the sum of its parts, as so few films with a premise like this would place such quality on elements of filmmaking that others could get away with phoning in. The script is far deeper and more layered than you might realize even until considering it in retrospect, it looks fantastic, and the performances are great. Thelma is a bittersweet experience that leans into the sweet part, in all the best ways.

You’ll want to keep your eye on these two.

Overall: A-

TUESDAY

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

It can be astonishing when something comes along that is utterly original, unlike anything you have ever seen before—sometimes, to the point that it comes close to inexplicable. Since when does Death manifest itself as a deep, scratchy-throated parrot, anyway? Ever since Daina Oniunas-Pusic thought to write and direct Tuesday, I guess.

Maybe it’s just that the black cloaked figure with a scythe has long since played out. Tuesday offers no explanation whatsoever as to the use of a parrot instead, but rather, presents him as a character with challenges and internal struggles like anyone else. Not even that is a particularly novel approach, but how it gets contextualized here certainly is.

Death can be tiny, and he can grow to a giant size, a detail that becomes a surprising plot point later on in the film. When we first see him, he is so tiny he is nestled into the corner of a man’s eye, something we don’t even realize for the few seconds it takes the camera to pan out. This is part of an opening montage that makes it quite unclear what the tone of the film is going to be, in which we see Death release random people around the world from their pain, waving his wing over them.

I had a peculiar experience with this film on a number of fronts. I never saw a trailer for Tuesday, and chose to go see it based on a fairly high MetaCritic score of 70, and a brief synopsis I found both odd and compelling: a mother and teenage daughter must confront Death when it arrives in the form of a talking bird. That honestly sounds a bit whimsical, possibly bordering on corny, but late-career Julia Louis-Dreyfus has made some very interesting choices, tending to be in movie projects that are both a bit off the beaten path and reliably entertaining.

All that said, when Tuesday opened on a shot of Earth from outer space and the ominous sounds of countless people longing for death, shifting between voices like the movement of a radio dial, for a minute I wondered if I had gone into the wrong theater. Is this a horror movie? Not quite. Is it a comedy? Definitely not, even though it has a through line of irreverence that gives it several genuinely funny moments. Is it ultimately a tear jerker? Definitely yes, but still in a way that leaves Tuesday a movie that defies categorization. It’s sort of a sad mood piece with a surprising amount of humor. You don’t see that every day.

“Tuesday” is actually the title character, the terminally ill teenage girl played by Lola Petticrew, who Death (voiced by Arinzé Kene) is summoned to visit by the sounds of her wheezing, evidently indicating that tonight is her time. But rather than freaking out when the bird appears on the table in her backyard, Tuesday suddenly launches into a joke, an earnestly cute one that involves penguins in the back of a car and actually made me laugh. (I did wonder how that would play on rewatch, when the punch line is already known.)

Death is disarmed by this, which causes him to hesitate, and then agree to wait until Zora, Tuesday’s mother, gets home.

This is where Julia Louis-Dreyfus comes in, as she is perfectly cast in the role, which becomes more significant as the story plays out. She is more than anything what makes Tuesday worth seeing. Ultimately, Tuesday is a movie about accepting the inevitability and ubiquity of death. It just uses a wild premise and some very odd turns to get us there, a journey you might have mixed feelings about on the way but in the end you’ll be glad you went on.

Given how low the budget for Tuesday clearly was, Daina Oniunas-Pusic does a lot with very little, focusing most of the movie on all of two characters, with one supporting character, an in-house nurse (Leah Harvey) as a third who comes and goes. Oniunas-Pusic manages to use subtle cues and sparingly used special effects to render the apocalyptic consequences when Death is taken out of commission for a while—thanks to some jarringly inventive tactics on the part of Zora, who cannot cope. In a way, Tuesday is a demonstration that our very universe does not work if death does not happen in it.

As is often the case, it’s the terminally ill person who accepts their fate, and the people who love them who cannot. When Zora meets Death, she isn’t freaked out by a magical bird so much as the knowledge that he is there to take her daughter away. Zora then quite understandably acts out of desperation, ultimately only prolonging the inevitable.

As odd as this movie is, I can see it being deeply moving to anyone who lost a loved one, particularly one gone before it should have been their time. It has far more depth and far more nuance than its simple premise might suggest. And Louis-Dreyfus gives a magnificent performance, by turns funny and heartbreaking. It may be a challenge to open your mind to it at first, but if you can manage it, you’ll be glad you did.

No, this isn’t a family comedy: it’s an exploration of our emotional connection to Death (which is also a bird).