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

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-

INSIDE OUT 2

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

Here is the most important thing you need to know about Inside Out 2, a very fun movie: absolutely do not rewatch the original Inside Out from 2015 soon before going. The original was such a spectacular film, holding up astoundingly well on rewatch even nearly a decade later, having that film fresh in your mind will only taint your experience of watching the sequel.

There is an inescapable, inherent flaw in revisiting a universe that was so wildly imaginative and inventive. The wildness and inventiveness is already established, so it cannot wow you in the same way. It’s impossible, because you are not visiting any place new. On the contrary, you are simply returning to something familiar, if (in my case, anyway) beloved. It’s a comforting and warm journey, to be sure, but it still suffers from the trappings of even the best of sequels.

To be fair, it is possible to top an original film with a sequel—Pixar did it in 2010 with Toy Story 3, after all. But for that to happen, to overcome the issue of returning to a world that cannot be fully fresh, you have to have an amazing script. In the case of Toy Story, it also improved upon the computer animation technology. That film had both as major advantages, largely because its iconic toy characters were brought to an entirely new environment.

That is a key difference with Inside Out 2, which has neither a better script (because how could you improve on perfection) nor a new environment—we are still visiting the inside of young Riley’s head, the one key difference being that now she is hitting puberty. The headquarters of her brain are demolished by a wrecking crew, and the one truly new element are the new emotions brought in as new characters: Envy (Ayo Edebiri), Embarrassment (Paul Walter Hauser), Ennui (Adèle Exarchopoulos), and by far most significantly, Anxiety (Maya Hawke).

And this is to say: Inside Out 2 definitely still has its clever conceits, such as when the original five emotion characters are banished to the back of Riley’s mind, thus becoming “suppressed emotions” who then have to go on a long journey, both to retrieve Riley’s fragile sense of self, and to bring it back to Headquarters. The primary characters of Joy, Sadness and Anger are still voiced by Amy Poehler, Phyllis Smith and Lewis Black respectively, but Fear and Disgust are now voiced by Tony Hale and Liza Lapira. Honestly, the loss of Bill Hader and Mindy Kaling isn’t that big a deal; these are just animated characters, after all, and these voices in particular are not distinctive enough to make the characters seem all that different.

What is different is the pacing, where Inside Out 2 rushes through enough of its plot points and packs in enough new characters that, even though at 96 minutes it’s actually a minute longer than the original, it feels shorter. In the first act of the film, I felt like it wasn’t quite giving us enough space to breathe in the story chugging along—although, to be fair, that’s kind of how it feels to be a young teenager, with changes coming hard and fast and without warning.

Another particularly new element in Inside Out 2, which I have mixed feelings about, is the far greater time sitting in the deep awkwardness that comes with a 13-year-old trying to make new friends while lacking the sophistication to realize she’s hurting the friends she’s leaving behind. Most of the film takes place over a stay at hockey camp, where Riley encounters an older player she worships, and yearns to make the team as a Freshman the next school year. She makes some very bad decisions, mostly at the behest of misguided Anxiety while her initial, core emotions struggle to make their way back out of the back of her mind.

I do love the structure of how all of this plays out, and it should be stressed that, while the first half of the film is both solidly entertaining and a variation on familiar themes, it eventually finds its way into a uniquely profound emotional space. I cried a lot more than I expected to at the end of this movie, not because it was sad (as many Pixar films infamously are) but simply because it was so moving, as we watch Riley become a complex, nuanced person.

And that brings us around to this point: the original Inside Out was thematically inaccessible to very young children, and Inside Out 2 is even more so. Both will likely entertain young children regardless, just because of its colorful and sometimes wacky characters, but the sophistication of the storytelling will only register to adult viewers, and possibly some teenage ones. There’s a gag in this film about a character named Nostalgia, rendered as a sweet old lady, who keeps coming out before any of the other emotions want them to. There may be some unintentional symbolism there in terms of the life of Pixar itself, which has now lasted far beyond its glory days, with a record in the past decade or so that’s far spottier than would have seemed possible in the first 15 years of its history.

What this means is, Inside Out 2 is a high quality film for “late-stage Pixar,” but pales in comparison to the vast heights of its early years. Pixar was far ahead of the curve for ages, the only studio consistently churning out reliably excellent content, but now the rest of the industry has caught up with them, both with writers and with impressive animation. The very existence of this film is an invitation to feel nostalgic for a better time, but it was still an invitation I was happy to accept.

Mind the button that brings a nuclear level of change … in a movie that isn’t that different.

Overall: B+

HIT MAN

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

It’s been a dismal June so far for theatrical wide releases, and I’ll have to include the end of May in that: May 31 had no major movie releases at all, less because of the inevitable shift of moviegoing habits in a post-covid world—although that’s certainly part of it—than because of countless postponements after last year’s writer and actor strikes. And for the record: any movie studio crying about the sad state of box office returns so far this year has only themselves to blame, as they could have accepted the unions’ quite reasonable demands from the start instead of digging in their heels for months in 2023.

So, here we are. This weekend, there actually are theatrical wide releases—a couple of them—it’s just just that I don’t personally have any interest in them. If you thought you might come here for my take on Bad Boys Ride or Die, you were mistaken. (I don’t flatter myself that any of you particularly did, mind you. Still, I’d have to be actually getting paid for it to write a review of that movie, in which I would likely write much about my undampened distaste for Will Smith. And even if Smith had never slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars, I’d have little faith that his new film was any good, given 2020’s Bad Boys for Life certainly wasn’t.) The other is The Watchers, by Ishana Shyamalan, which is clearly “M. Night Lite,” and: no thank you.

What to do in the absence of anything worth seeing in theaters, then? Something I haven’t done in five months: turn to a streamer—specifically, Netflix—for a significant release to watch and review. And releases like this going to streamers instead of theaters, at least some of the time, is clearly here to stay. There is no question that five years ago, a film starring Glen Powell, cowritten by Glen Powell and Richard Linklater, and directed by Richard Linklater—this is the guy who gave us Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise, School of Rock, and Boyhood—would have gotten wide release in theaters. It was indeed five years ago when his last live action narrative feature got a wide release, and that one wasn’t even particularly good.

Admittedly I found something immediate to get past about Hit Man—which was originally set to be released around the same time as The Killer (also on Netflix!), ostensibly similarly themed but a very, very different movie. The visual vibe of the movie, I can’t quite put my finger on it precisely, except to say that it feels a little . . . low-rent. A bit like a “TV movie,” to be honest. And yet, as the story unfolds, it somehow fits: both as a Richard Linklater film in particular, and as part of the film’s knowingly yet deeply subtle cornball tone.

Unlike The Killer, and hundreds of other films before it, Hit Man openly acknowledges that “hit men” as we think of them in pop culture are a myth: “Hit men don’t really exist,” says Powell’s title character, Gary Johnson. But Gary has been hired by the New Orleans police department to pose as the “hit men” would-be murderers expect to see, in sting operations to arrest them before the kill can actually happen. And this is a side gig: Gary’s day job is as a psychology and philosophy professor, scenes of which provide fertile ground for scenes exploring the nature of identity, which fall just short of metatextual.

It takes a while for the real crux of the story to take hold: after helping arrest several would-be criminals, Gary, in one of the many disguises he’s thrown himself into with this job (many of which are subtly but very effectively funny), comes across a young woman who is meeting him about killing her asshole husband. But this time, seeing a young, beautiful, and seemingly very vulnerable woman named Madison (all of it expertly played by Adria Arjona; hopefully with a great career ahead of her), Gary—as “Ron”—convinces her to change her mind, much to the consternation of the NOPD.

There are too many fantastic plot turns that ensue from there, so I won’t spoil them. Just do yourself a favor and watch the movie on Netflix. Viewers should be forewarned about one thing, though: I truly don’t know why anyone is listing this movie under “action” as a genre. Crime and comedy, sure; but action—there is none to speak of in this movie. If you have any familiarity with Richard Linklater whatsoever, you’d know not to expect it, as his films are all constructed around dialogue. We see a literal gun onscreen maybe once, and in neither case does it even get fired.

And yet: people do get killed in this movie. This is the genius of Richard Linklater, if you know how to appreciate his specific brand of art. Hit Man has some uniquely clever story turns, if not outright plot twists, and they are quite satisfying. He has an impressive knack for economy of storytelling, particularly on a budget: consider the police officer Jasper (Austin Amelio), a thorn in the NOPD’s side due to his suspension after violent excessive force on some teenagers, an incident that was caught on tape. This information is only ever revealed through well-written dialogue you barely even register as expositional, and (thankfully) we never see the video footage—although the Police Chief does hold up his phone at one point while talking about it, while his phone isn’t even on.

Jasper inevitably becomes a crucial plot point himself, worming his way in between Gary and Madison. Jasper is a deeply annoying douchebag of a man, which is a credit to how Austin Amelio plays him, which makes his fate by the end of the film, thematically complex as it is, deeply satisfying. Just about all the performances are great in Hit Man, but none are as great as Glen Powell’s, an undeniably handsome man who manages to be believably dorky as a professor and then convincingly hot as “Ron,” who is the guy Madison is into. Still, the montage of character disguises Gary takes on is great fun.

Hit Man on the whole is just a fun hang, an impressive achievement for a film in which little more than talking and plotting actually takes place onscreen. I suppose we could argue that’s what makes this perfect for a streamer release—there are no special effects and no action set pieces to make anyone insist it should be seen on the big screen. I would counter that there’s something to be said for seeing a fun movie of any sort with an audience, where there can be a sense of collective enjoyment. On the other hand, no theatrical release would have the breadth of reach that Netflix now does, and it does make me happy to think how many people will see, and likely enjoy, this movie.

This is the most action you’ll see in this movie—but it’s still really fun I swear!

Overall: B+

IF

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

I found this movie utterly baffling. A story can be any kind of fantasy it wants to be, but once it establishes the rules of its own universe, it needs to follow them. If does not do that.

Ater having written and directed A Quiet Place and A Quiet Place Part II, John Krasinski has clearly built up a lot of goodwill—arguably too much. With If, he turns his attention away from horror and toward family-fantasy fare, and brings with him the voice talents of every movie star imaginable, from Steve Carell to Louis Gossett Jr. to Phoebe Waller-Bridge to Awkwafina to George Clooney to Bradley Cooper to Matt Damon to Bill Hader to Bill Hader to Richard Jenkins to Christopher Meloni to Matthew Rhys to Sam Rockwell to Maya Rudolph to Amy Schumer to Jon Stewart—and more!—all of them voicing a different, animated “Imaginary Friend” (IF). For some reason, somehow, they are all still hanging around Manhattan after their kid friends have grown up and forgotten about them.

All of these “IFs” might have made for a fun combined cast of characters, were this movie to have as much pep as the trailer clearly aimed to suggest. None of the marketing for this movie suggests how incongruously wistful it is in tone, sometimes downright melancholy, certainly downbeat. There are certainly peppy moments, but virtually all of them were in the trailer. You come to this movie and instead find a story about a 12-year-old girl who is growing up too fast due to the death of her mother.

Lest we miss an opportunity to get even more maudlin, our little-girl hero, Bea (Cailey Fleming), is now worried about her dad—played by writer-director John Krasinski—staying in the hospital for a major surgery. What kind of surgery is never explicitly stated, although the gag of his “broken heart” suggest perhaps heart surgery. Bea has already lost one parent and is now facing the risk of losing another. What fun, family entertainment!

Honestly, in spite of several genuinely fun “IF” characters that get too little screen time, I can’t see IF really working for children viewers of any age. This seems to be more aimed at adults who feel wistful about their own inner children.

While Bea’s dad is in the hospital, she goes to stay with her grandmother (Fiona Shaw), where she and her dad had also stayed when her mother was dying. It’s in this building where Bea discovers all the IFs hanging out in a sort of junk room up on the top floor, alongside the one evident human who can also see all the other IFs. This man is played by Ryan Reynolds, who gives a serviceable if surprisingly muted performance. Every once in a while, IF would give me genuine chuckles, among them a running gag where Ryan Reynolds keeps tripping over the one who is invisible.

What purpose these IFs serve in the movie, though, is never presented in a way that quite makes sense. First Bea is helping Ryan Reynolds match IFs with potential replacement kids, like they are running some kind of imaginary orphanage. When that doesn’t pan out, they set about reuniting the IFs with their original kids who are now adults. In one cast, a nervous adult played by Bobby Moynihan gets reassurance from his own IF right before some kind of job interview. What we are supposed to understand is happening there exactly, I couldn’t tell you. This guy’s Imaginary Friend would have been an original figment of his own imagination, right? So he’s gaining confidence for an interview (or presentation, or whatever the hell it is) by tapping into the imagination of his own childhood, in a way that’s beyond his control? What?

The fundamental problem with IF is the evident blank check Krasinski was given after his previous success, where no one else bothered to step in with some guard rails outside his own passion. This movie clearly means something to him, and presumably it made sense in his head. It has some fairly imaginative ideas in it, to be fair, but it also feels like it came from the imagination of someone who recently had a lobotomy.

The story improves, slightly, by the time IF reaches its final half hour or so—a fact that is undermined by the real fear that maybe Bea’s father will also die. Somewhat ironically, the best part of this movie is Fiona Shaw as the grandmother, a character who spends most of the film seemingly unrelated to any of the IFs (although you can probably predict where things are going there). Cailey Fleming as Bea is clearly a talented young performer, but a little mismatched with this movie, having that precocious quality of so many child actors that stops just short of unsettling.

Furthermore, no one in this movie has a conversation that sounds like actual people talking. There is a subplot of a budding friendship between Bea and another little boy in the hospital (Alan Kim), and after their first conversation I literally thought to myself, That was really weird dialogue. In short, Krasinski threw so much talent at his passion project that he could not properly organize it, and the final result is a total mess. If there was anything that genuinely impressed me was how a mess could be not so much chaotic as strangely dull. At least some more consistent gags might have kept me awake.

I’m very sorry to inform you this movie’s condition is terminal.

Overall: C

BABES

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

Finally, another movie that actually lives up to its promise! It’s been nearly a month since I saw a narrative feature that was actually as good as anyone could expect it to be (the last one being Challengers—a very different kind of movie). Much more to the point, I can’t even remember the last time I saw a mainstream studio comedy that actually lived up to its promise. One could make the case for last year’s American Fiction, although that’s more of an intellectual dramedy. Although a couple of other comedies in the meantime have also been good, the best comparison I can come up with is You Hurt My Feelings, which features a similar caliber of laughs, and was released a year ago this month.

The point is, mainstream studio comedies that are this good—and this genuinely funny—are a rare thing anymore, largely because people don’t go to the movies to see them anymore. Why bother, when it costs far less to wait until it’s either on VOD or a streamer, and it will be available to watch that way within a month or two? There’s no visual spectacle to make the case for seeing it in a theater, leaving me as one of the few holdouts left who love seeing movies in the theater no matter the genre. But am I going to tell anyone they need to rush out and see Babes in theaters? Nope. The trick, I guess, is to get you to remember that I still say it’s very much recommended, once you do see it on streaming.

I hesitate to call Babes a “gross-out comedy,” mostly because you don’t really see anything particularly gross onscreen. What you do see, is people discussing gross things onscreen—specifically, things relating to childbirth. For instance: “Oh my god, did I just shit on my baby?” “No, it’s more like you babied on your shit.” The comparison to Bridesmaids is an apt one insofar as this is a film with female leads who talk about gross things you don’t often see discussed in movies, but in a genuinely funny way.

The impressive trick of Babes is how it follows the standard beats of a romantic comedy while avoiding the most common tropes. This is a love story between lifelong platonic best friends Dawn (Michelle Buteau) and Eden (Ilana Glazer), where one of them, Dawn, is married and has two kids—one of which is born in the opening sequence of the movie—and the other one, Eden, decides to keep the baby that is the result of a one night stand.

And even though the overall story arc is fairly predictable—there is a rift between them which they must eventually overcome—it’s the details of storytelling here that really set Babes apart. What becomes of the man Eden hooked up with is surprisingly not revealed in the trailer and is such a genuine surprise I won’t spoil it here, except to say that it effectively gets that guy out of the way of our story of two best friends without demonizing him. Similarly, Hasan Minhaj plays Dawn’s husband, Marty, and with two young children he proves just as challenged as Dawn, yet supportive, when other movies might characterize him in a far less forgiving way.

Maybe my favorite thing about Babes is its run time, a perfectly respectable 104 minutes, never rushed but also not overlong the way countless studio comedies of the past couple of decades have been. Last year’s No Hard Feelings, which I also very much enjoyed, was about the same length, and I’d love for this to become an identifiable trend. When comedies make the sensible choice of not overstaying their welcome, they lower the risk of narrative lulls, and pack all their punch lines in much more tightly.

And Babes has a lot of punch lines. I laughed a lot at this movie. It could be argued that that’s the only important measure of success with a comedy, but I prefer they also be integrated into a coherent story. Otherwise we might as well just watch a standup special. Ilana Glazer and Michelle Buteau have great chemistry together, and their improvisational styles complement each other well. These two have reportedly been friends in real life for twenty years, which makes the successful execution of this film—their “baby,” if you will—all the sweeter.

A movie can be both genuinely funny and a quality film, but not often both at once. This is one of those rare specimens that is packed with delightfully dirty humor that belies an authentic sweetness at its core.

Anyone who thinks of their best friend as family will get it.

Overall: B+

SIFF Advance: THE SUMMER WITH CARMEN

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

There’s a lot of dicks in The Summer with Carmen. It’s largely set at a clothing-optional queer beach in Athens, Greece, where platonic friends Demosthenes (Yorgos Tsiantoulas) and Nikitas (Andreas Labropoulos) hash out the plot points of a movie script. Nikitas is directing and Demosthenes is maybe starring, and they are co-writing the story based on Demosthenes’s recent life experiences, including an ambivalent love life with Panos (Nikolaos Mihas) and a passive aggressively homophobic mother (Roubini Vasilakopoulou). We see the scenes they discuss play out in flashbacks, regularly cutting back to this day at the nude beach, where occasional hookups are playing out in the open around them, but Nikitas and Demosthenes are concentrating on their scripts, occasionally taking breaks to swim.

There is always a subtle, tongue-in-cheek presentation to The Summer with Carmen, where the story playing out pointedly reflects the plot constructions of their script, or even more on the nose, the script writing book Nikitas has with him as a reference. There’s also the unseen producer they talk about, who wants their movie to be “fun, sexy”—and so, Greek director and co-writer Zacharias Mavroeidis wants us to think of The Summer with Carmen as “fun, sexy” primarily by giving us plenty of close up shots of butts and cocks attached to generally hot bodies at a nude beach.

The metatextual approach was once something I found myself really into as a narrative device—I used it a lot in my own writing 25 years ago—but it has long since lost its novelty. What I’ll give to The Summer with Carmen is the casual way it’s used, in a very laid back, beach-stained story. I use the word “beach” loosely here, as this queer beach is mostly large rocks. I have clearly gotten old, because in one scene, Demosthenes bounds up some rocks in the nude, and rather than admiring his incredible body I just worried about how badly he could hurt himself if he slipped and fell.

There’s a fair amount of sex in this movie, but very little of it at this beach where you might expect to see most of it. The few times it does come up is as humorous asides, such as when Nikitas feels bad for an older man trying to get a “pervy peek” at two other guys who tell him to fuck off. The sex actually serving the story happens in the flashbacks that make up the scenes Nikitas and Demosthenes are writing, in which Demosthenes hooks up with guys in the wake of his breakup with Panos, all the while leaving Nikitas unattended to as his close friend.

That is what The Summer with Carmen is about, really: Demosthenes and Nikitas’s friendship. I always enjoy when a movie focuses on friendship more than romance, as it still gets sidelined most of the time, and especially when it’s between two characters that many writers would want to give some kind of romantic tension. Even in stories about gay friends, writers often throw in something about how they tried to be romantic and it never worked. There is no indication that Demosthenes and Nikitas ever had any romantic or sexual interest in each other, only that they have always been close friends and collaborators.

That said, the cynical side of me doesn’t feel that bad for Nikitas. Romance taking priority over friendship is just the way the world works, and it kind of feels like Nikitas is just pouty and doesn’t understand that. Through the course of this movie, though, we get title cards about the rules of script writing, while it identifies Demosthenes as “The Hero” (and Nikitas as “The Heroe’s Friend”), and that according to the basic rules of script writing, The Hero must learn something and change in some way by the end. In The Summer with Carmen, Demosthenes changes, to one degree or another, in both his romantic and platonic relationships. Except he very directly addresses the fact that scripts only end there and never reveal the frequency with which people just go back to their old habits.

There is a certain cleverness to The Summer with Carmen—the Carmen of the title is a dog, by the way, which Panos adopts after the breakup, and then Demosthenes becomes attached to after offering to pet sit, it’s a whole subplot with a somewhat nebulous reflection of the primary plot. It also has undeniable charm, especially with its breezy yet frank reflection of sexuality among gay men in their thirties.

There is nothing profound or deeply memorable about this movie, nor does it aspire to these things. In fact, it’s very direct about its aspirations to be simply fun and sexy—although Demosthenes and Nikitas also discuss the complications of throwing in heavy themes like homophobia and an ailing parent. The Summer with Carmen never gets too heavy with these things, though, and uses them only to give its characters a measure of weight. I felt the editing could have been tighter, the ton of this movie being more suited to a breezy 90 minutes than even the 106 minutes it runs. But, I still had a lovely time with it.

Sun’s out, plot turns out: Nikitas and Demosthenes rehash their lives in a script written in the buff.

Overall: B

SIFF Advance: STRESS POSITIONS

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

It’s possible I might decide Stress Positions absolutely sticks the landing if I watch it, like, five more times. That’s not likely to happen so I don’t know what to tell you. Except, I suppose, that I feel like, in the end, its narrative conceit went way over my head.

It’s too bad. Director, co-writer, and costar Theda Hammel was at the SIFF screening I attended, and in the post-screening Q&A, she very quickly revealed herself to be whip smart, and ready to answer unusually incisive audience questions with surprising specifics of intention. It’s clear that nothing that happens in this film is an accident, and the intersecting narratives and changing points of view were deeply intentional. For all I know, Hammel could find this very review (I hope not) and deduce that I am an idiot who just didn’t get her art. In that case, she’d be half right.

For a “covid movie” (a pretty reductive way of referring to it, actually), there’s a lot going on here. It’s a movie contextualized by Millennials who came of age in between two era-defining catastrophes: 9/11 and, nineteen years later, the covid-19 pandemic. Hammel finds a way for her characters to refer to this directly by saying ignorant things about Bahlul (Qaher Harhash), the 19-year-old model recovering from a broken leg in the Brooklyn apartment basement of his White uncle Terry (John Early, giving perhaps the best performance I’ve seen him do in anything).

These relationships get sort of convoluted: Bahlul’s mother is Terry’s sister, but we never see her face, only blurry images from behind in flashbacks narrated by Bahlul. There’s a pointed image of her blond hair peaking out from under her head scarf, evidently after she emigrated to Morocco and had a child with a man there. We never fully meet the sister (Bahlul’s mom) or even see Bahlul’s father; we only meet Bahlul, a beautiful young man, often casually lounging around (recovering) in bed or on a couch shirtless, or sometimes in his underwear. This becomes a frequent topic of conversation among Terry’s friends, none of whom seem like great people, which Terry is understandably exasperated by, though his inclination to hide the young man from them, evidently for fear of them exoticizing him, is less understandable.

There’s a lot of voiceover narration in Stress Positions, divided between Bahlul, and Terry’s friend Karla, played by Theda Hammel. It’s relevant to note that both Hammel and the character she plays are trans women, and Karla comes over to the apartment and brings some influence on the impressionable Bahlul. Qaher Harhash is himself an actual model, incidentally, although I cannot find anything online to indicate his sexuality—he certainly read as “queer boy” to me onscreen, but that has no bearing on Harhash himself. Much is made among the characters that Bahlul is straight; whether he is also trans, it seems, Stress Positions leaves open for discussion.

There’s a kind of refreshing irreverence to Stress Positions, sometimes to the point that some might consider taboo. Hammel treats it all very casually, from when Karla says “Tell him your friend who used to be a man says hi,” to one exchange between two cisgender men in which one refers to all the “trannies” who live in the building. It would be a lot easier to get uncomfortable with that if not for the fact that a trans woman directed and wrote the film, notwithstanding a word now widely regarded as a slur being put into the mouth of a cisgender character.

There’s certainly something fun about this depiction of a group of people who have no particularly bigoted attitudes toward each other’s fluid differences of sexuality and gender (ignorance is another story), but are still all messy. They may have no fucks to give about matters that Boomers have spent decades giving themselves aneurysms over, but that doesn’t mean they know what the hell they’re talking about at any given time either. In particular, conversations about Bahlul being a brown person has all the White characters telling on themselves, not understanding the myriad nuances of the Muslim world, the Middle East, and where the two do or do not intersect.

This is especially the case with Terry, a character who provides by far the most comic entertainment, a guy who exudes and attracts chaos (all while Bahlul hangs out calmly in his leg cast), more than once throwing out his back when something startles him and he trips or falls in the kitchen while cooking. Terry is the guy who thinks of himself as a model progressive, while often betraying his own ignorance, particularly when it comes to his nephew’s multi-ethnic heritage. (A couple of funny scenes have characters, including Terry, queuing up a YouTube video called “What Is the Middle East?”)

Terry is also deeply paranoid about covid, this story unfolding in the summer of 2020—in Brooklyn, no less, where covid cases were catastrophic in a way few other places in the U.S. ever got. I have mixed feelings about Terry’s paranoia played as excess, because he actually has a point when he says, “We wouldn’t need a curfew if you all just stayed home.” Yet, he still lets Karla in when she comes to help after he throws his back out, and keeps bringing Coco, the weirdly voyeuristic landlady from upstairs (another trans woman, played by Rebecca F. Wright), inside to fix the Internet even though he’s constantly admonishing her to put her mask on.

There’s a curious element, an odd sort of vibe, about Stress Positions taking place during the height of the pandemic. There was a period where people clearly did not want obvious covid references in their entertainment, as they preferred to use that to escape from it. Now it’s four years on, and people are still getting covid, but it’s no longer the global catastrophe it once was. The audience at the screening last night seemed entertained by the comic references to an era we’re all glad is behind us, but I have no idea whether non-festival audiences will be as into it.

I haven’t even mentioned the fact that Terry has a husband, who has found a new man and served him divorce papers. We actually meet Leo (John Roberts) later in the film, at one of the “social distanced” parties held in the apartment backyard that is shockingly large for a New York City apartment. And his presence gets intertwined with Bahlul, who has already been narratively intertwined with Terry, and Karla, and Karla’s partner Vanessa (Amy Zimmer) who wrote a book in Karla’s voice—it’s a whole thing—and even, at lest in terms of narrative structure, with Ronald the GrubHub delivery guy (Faheem Ali), who himself intersects problematically with Karla.

I’d ask if you were able to follow all that, except it’s unclear to me if it even matters. I’ll tell you this: there are countless scenes in Stress Positions with crackling dialogue, well delivered, a sequence of conversations I could have listened to indefinitely, almost as if written by Richard Linklater if he were a messy queer Millennial. I really, really enjoyed the experience of this movie. I just didn’t quite understand the layers of turns it took in the end.

You might feel like Terry here by the time the movie ends.

Overall: B+

THE FALL GUY

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

The Fall Guy is a lot of fun. I might even agree with the assessment that it’s delightful. It’s also relatively forgettable, but how important is that? This is a movie that merely aims to entertain while you’re there, and it meets that aim.

There’s a line fairly early on, about the movie the actors are making: it doesn’t have to be realistic, it’s just a movie. It felt like it was giving its own audience permission not to get too nitpicky, and just sit back and enjoy the ride.

I, of course, have nits to pick. It takes a bit longer than really needed in order for the story to really get going. The Fall Guy is the kind of movie that could have been a tight ninety minutes, in which case I would have been left with it in much higher regard. There was no reason for this to be 126 minutes long, which provides too many opportunities for the narrative to sag a bit.

Once the story finally does get going, stuntman Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling) gets drugged at a club. There follows a fight sequence that is uniquely weird, a character in the scene itself name-checking the psychedelic sequence in Dumbo, a perfectly apt reference. A running gag involves visions of a unicorn. I’d have loved it if this movie had taken the cosmic-comic vibe of this sequence and stretched it through the whole story.

Maybe I just expect too much of a movie like this. The Fall Guy is perfectly serviceable entertainment. You could call it a romantic action comedy, a fairly rare thing to be done all that successfully. Colt gets injured on the job while endlessly flirting with a cinematographer, Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt), quits the job and disappears for a year, gets convinced by producer Gail Meyer (Hannah Waddingham) to return as stuntman on a blockbuster science fiction romance epic on which Jody is now the director. The primary tension is whether these two can overcome Jody’s resentment for Colt disappearing and Colt’s regret for not staying in touch.

In other words, the stakes never get all that high. Not even when Gail asks Colt to go look for the movie’s missing star, Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), but without letting Jody know he’s going it, let alone that he’s doing it to keep the studio from pulling the plug on the production. Granted, the stakes kick up a notch when Colt goes to Tom’s house and finds a fellow stunt man dead in ice in his bathtub.

Most of what follows is just a bunch of action sequences, actors playing the stunt performers who are, ironically, often replaced onscreen by actual stunt performers. A lot of them are genuinely entertaining to watch, particularly a fight sequence in Tom’s apartment between Colt and Tom’s girlfriend (Teresa Palmer), where they wind up using movie props as weapons; a dog who only understands commands in French and takes rides along on a car chase; and a climactic sequence in which three people fighting in an out of control helicopter over a recording device veers a bit into screwball comedy territory. The car chase across the Sydney Harbour Bridge could have been rendered a bit more convincingly real.

When The Fall Guy is firing on all cylinders, it really works, mostly due to the undeniable chemistry between Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt. It should be noted that there is some irony in casting Aaron Taylor-Johnson as the hot movie star and Gosling as—well, as the fall guy, the one whose face you’re not supposed to want to see in the movie he’s working on. I mean, come on. Taylor-Johnson is plenty handsome but he’s got nothing on Gosling. Of course, The Fall Guy is the real movie here and Ryan Gosling is the actual star. Oh right, I almost forgot again: it doesn’t have to be realistic, it’s a movie.

It’s just too bad when a solid-B movie could have been markedly better with just some minor adjustments, a tighter polish. I’m convinced this is the real reason behind the film’s underperforming box office—a light action comedy never needs to run longer than two hours. I never got bored, but I did feel like some minor but key thing was missing. Perhaps it was an editor. A shorter film would have been more tightly packed with what are genuinely good action sequences, but as it is, there are too many stretches without much in the way of action.

There is a slightly pointed bit of dialogue about how there’s no Oscar for stunt performers. It’s saying something that, if there were one, The Fall Guy would not likely win it. I’ve seen better stunts in better movies, but this is still pretty fun—the best we’ve got in the genre at the moment.

How great the shot is, is up for debate.

ABIGAIL

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

The marketers of Abigail are kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place. Do they lure us all in with what the film appears to be about in its first half and let audiences get a wild surprise with the massive—and undeniably entertaining—turn it takes, or do they completely spoil the twist in all of the marketing? Well, if you’ve seen the trailer to this film, you know they chose the latter. Going with the former actually worked with some films once upon a time: think The Crying Game (its deeply problematic content being beside the point I am making here) or The Sixth Sense. Unfortunately, we don’t live in that world anymore.

But, let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that you are reading this and have never heard of this film, never seen any trailers for it. Do yourself a favor and just go to this movie, sight unseen. Or, make a note of it for when it becomes available on a streamer. I genuinely envy anyone who manages that experience. I enjoyed this film, but almost certainly would have enjoyed it a great deal more had the twist been the schlocky surprise it was meant to be.

If I don’t want to spoil it here, however, what else can I say about this movie? Well, here’s perhaps the most pertinent point: it was co-directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, the duo who previously gave us Ready or Not (2019) and Scream VI (2023). If you have seen those films, that should give you a pretty good sense of what Abigail is like—you may not want to have the twist spoiled, but you probably want to know the genre, which is horror with a healthy sprinkling of comedy. And, there’s a lot of blood, of nearly cartoonish proportions. So if you’re looking for a tear jerker drama or a romantic comedy, this movie probably isn’t for you.

Here’s the biggest drawback of Abigail. What we’re led to believe the film is about in its first half, during which a team of specialized criminals abduct a rich man’s ballerina daughter (a genuinely fantastic Alisha Weir, as the title character) for ransom, just isn’t especially compelling. In order to keep the twist secret, marketers would have to lead us to believe this is all the movie is about—along with, perhaps, the part where the criminals all find themselves trapped inside the house they’ve taken Abigail to. I suppose trailers could have said something like, “It’s not the job they thought it was” and throw in a few clips of gushing blood without showing exactly what’s causing it. These people should have hired me to be on their marketing team.

All I can say is: I will be keeping a lookout for the streaming release of Abigail, with the intent of showing it to my husband, sight unseen. That will be fun. And if by some miracle you don’t already know what this movie is about, just take my word for it: the turn is worth waiting for. The characters, while fairly stock, are genuinely fun as performed by Melissa Barrera as a former army medic and recovering addict; Dan Stevens as a former detective; Freaky’s Kathryn Newton as a hacker; William Catlett as a marine sniper; Kevin Durand as the “muscle”; and the late Angus Cloud as the sociopathic driver. The movie would be nothing, of course, without the delightful performance of Alisha Weir as Abigail, but I’d rather you just watch the movie to find out why.

Suffice it to say that Abigail is excessive in all the right ways, never takes itself too seriously (although an arguably unnecessary subplot regarding the former medic and her estranged young son comes close), and offers all the cartoonish violence you could ask for. Classic cinema this is not, but it delivered on everything I wanted it to be and that I came for.

Just wait until you see what she’s looking at.

Overall: B