WILL & HARPER

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

A particularly fascinating way to experience the documentary feature Will & Harper is to watch it effectively as a double feature with Paris Is Burning, which was what I did. It was sort of by accident, a serendipitous result of scheduling and calendar availability. And while both films are absolutely worthy viewing, only one of them would I insist is essential: Paris Is Burning is widely (and rightly) considered to be one of the most seminal cinematic documents in both queer and cinema history, a tight 71 minutes of brilliant editing and even (particularly rare for documentary) some brilliant cinematography.

There’s no reason to be quite that effusive about Will & Harper, which exists less as an truly insightful documentary about the trans experience than it is an expansion on pretty well-worn insights—but still a solidly competent one.

Granted—and predictably—Will & Harper also offers some illustration as to how little progress has been made in the past 35 years, how the ability of a trans person to live their best life has perhaps gotten better only in some regions of America, and in other regions has stayed the same or even gotten worse. Rather than take a snapshot of one city subculture, Will & Harper jumps off from a vantage point that could not possibly me more mainstream (Will Ferrell) and paints a picture from coast to coast, as Farrell takes a cross-country road trip with his longtime close friend Harper, who only came out and transitioned a few years ago, in the middle of the pandemic.

Harper Steele had been a Staff Writer, and then Head Writer, at Saturday Night Live for many years. If you Google the film title Will & Harper today, Harper and Farrell’s names and photos come up at the top the results, as cast members. Steele’s photo is still from before transition. Someone at Google needs to get their shit together.

The fact that these are two older White people, and one of them not just a hugely popular older White man but a massive celebrity, really contributes to the specifics of content and vibe on this road trip, presented as a sort of experiment for these two longtime friends. Harper is fairly pointed about being open to people she considers friends asking “all the questions you’re not supposed to ask trans people.” Farrell’s presence is implicitly used as multiple layers of protection for Harper, who has a longtime love of cross-country travel to divey places she used to be partial to but is unsure she can still feel safe at (a hint of the White, male privilege she herself had at hand for protection in the past). Farrell offers security just as a “regular guy” friend she has along for the ride, and sometimes as a celebrity.

I can’t quite decide how I feel about the celebrity element here. There’s a kind of self-indulgence for a giant star like Will Farrell to be involved in a project like this, and it creates moments of at least mild discomfort onscreen. We see multiple places where Harper finds herself surprised by how kindly the locals treat her—as she is consistently very open about having recently transitioned—but it’s not always clear to the degree the local kindness is merely because Will Farrell is around.

To be fair, even though most of it seems to go fairly well, Will & Harper does not always depict this trip as a rosy experience. They make a stop at a huge restaurant in Amarillo, Texas, where the two of them order the huge steak they are supposed to try eating within an hour, surrounded by countless people filming them on their phones. Much of the film is shot with a camera mounted on the hood of their car, pointed at them through the windshield while they are driving, an it is here that we later see both Will and Harper acknowledge the Amarillo scene as a misstep. Sometimes, not even giant celebrity can shield Harper from concentrated hate, and this is the only time in the film when we see a montage of hateful tweet. “Fuck liberal Will Farrell” is among the least hateful.

This isn’t quite the point of Will & Harper, though, but rather an acknowledgment of the world Harper—and all trans people—are having to navigate. It’s clearly insightful to Will Farrell, who has never had a trans person this close to him come out before. Presumably the film will thus be insightful in similar ways to plenty of viewers as well, and here is where his celebrity is actually likely to do some good: probably not as many people would watch the film if Harper were traveling across the country with some other person Americans don’t already know.

At its heart, though, Will & Harper is just about the two of them, reconnecting, navigating the uncharted waters of a recently transitioned, longtime friend who is now in her early sixties. Farrell is learning how to reconcile who he had thought was one of his close guy friends, but had actually been a woman friend all along. And Farrell should be given a lot of credit here, for not just his open mindedness but his open heartedness, as clearly he worries less about how this will affect their friendship than about a dear friend being happy. And that is certainly what we can stand to see more of onscreen.

More ups than downs, like any ride should have.

Overall: B

THE WILD ROBOT

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

If you are partial to unusually beautiful animated features, then look no further than The Wild Robot. It has a subtly unique and warm animation style, and every frame is gorgeous.

I also find myself interested, for the first time, in the 2016 middle grade novel of the same name by Peter Brown. Brown both wrote and illustrated a series of books about this character, and if you look them up, you’ll see that the illustrations are much different from the film adaptation—far simpler, less detail, harder lines, black and white. The visual palate gets quite a transformation via DreamWorks Animation, which makes sense when shifting from the more imaginative medium of novels to the visual medium of film. It works incredibly well.

How closely is the story adapted, I wonder? I might just have to check out these books. The film, directed and co-written by Chris Sanders (Lilo & Stitch, How to Train Your Dragon), whose historic penchant for visual style over narrative consistency continues here. To be fair, all of his films are easily compelling to kids, with a delightful undercurrent of slightly bent humor. The Wild Robot, for instance, acknowledges death consistently and in a variety of ways—sometimes sad, sometimes with deliciously dark humor. A wonderful group of supporting characters is a mother possum (Catherine O’Hara) and her rotating litter, who practice playing dead. One of the kids, when taken to task by a sibling for not becoming “dead” fast enough, counters that he’s dying of meningitis. “It takes a while!”

The Wild Robot’s frankness about death is surely a big part of the reason it is rated PG: parents with small children may want to wait to show them this one, which veers a bit into Bambi territory. The story begins with a very clever introduction to Roz the robot (Lupita Nyong’o), who has crashed on an island in transport during a storm. She is clearly programmed to serve humans, but here only encounters animals, and struggles to communicate with them—starting with an adorable family of otters. After a series of harrowing experiences in the forest, Roz crushes a goose’s nest after a fall, leaving the one unharmed egg orphaned. Sanders does have a sensitively artistic eye for how to convey such things: Roz lifts a limp feathery wing from the ground for a brief moment, and we understand what has happened. Within minutes, the egg hatches, and the gosling imprints on the first thing it sees: Roz the robot.

The Wild Robot is a little bit scattered in its depiction of a robot adapting to an unfamiliar environment based on programming. Not that any kids will care: this is where I, the geezer, get pointlessly nitpicky about a cartoon. This, however, is where I would be particularly interested in how similarly the source material treats these ideas. The broader message of this film is personal growth, and becoming something “better than what you are programmed to be.” This makes sense for human characters, of which there are none in this movie (save for a few brief shots of programmers in the place from which the robots come). Using an AI robot as well as wild animals who grow beyond their instincts as metaphors is, by contrast, a little messy. How are all the animals of an island wilderness really going to survive if predator and prey have chosen instead to become friends? What happens to the food chain?

I know, I know: no nine-year-old is going to be asking these questions. Just me! I should stress that I really enjoyed The Wild Robot; it just doesn’t quite match the success of early Pixar films, as some of suggested. Those are movies that work equally well for both child and adult viewers, finding ways to speak to them simultaneously at their separate levels. This is something The Wild Robot, which is incredibly successful as a kids’ movie, does not quite manage. I wouldn’t nitpick about it, except that it does feel a bit like it’s trying to speak to adult viewers as well.

A particularly fascinating element of the story here is its setting, in a future where robots this advanced are possible. It might have made more sense to leave more of Roz’s backstory out of it, keep her origins more of a mystery, and focus on a robot character adapting to the wilderness. But the story briefly takes us off the island, both when the geese leave for migration and when Roz is finally located for retrieval. There are very brief shots that offer some surprisingly global context to the story: twice we see the Golden Gate Bridge from the clouds, amongst the countless migrating geese, the road portion of the bridge submerged in water, whales swimming by above it. In another we see the tops of buildings poking out of the water.

I suppose more light could be shed on this in potential sequels, and admittedly I will be very interested in it. For now, there’s a lot hinted at in The Wild Robot that does not get fully explained, and over time, what starts as a pointed focus on Roz as a robot who can only understand things based on programming evolves into a story of self-actualization. Perhaps this movie is Trojan-horsing a story about the singularity.

In the meantime, we are treated to many delightful details, and wonderful voice work by many great actors (Pedro Pascal as a Fink the fox; Bill Nighy as Longneck the grizzled old goose; Mark Hamill as Thorn the bear; Heartstopper’s Kit Connor as Brightbill the young goose; and more). When Roz wakes up with the rest of the animals who hybernated through the winter, spring now upon them, she is half covered in moss. When the migrating geese stop for rest in a kind of biome city, we see giant machines engaged in automated agriculture. There’s also a bunch of robots of the same model as Roz, though it’s not clear what purpose they serve milling about in fields of corn.

All that matters, really, is that this is a story of both robot and animals who learn how to be friends and support each other. To a degree, the relationship between Roz and Brightbill serves as an allegory for the way parenting never comes with a training manual—something the script could have leaned a bit more into. If nothing else, The Wild Robot elicits a lot of questions, but of the sort that aren’t frustrating so much as creating a desire for learning more: about the characters, about the world. This feels like something that can be expanded on in ways that will engender much interest, with the hope that DreamWorks will eventually do just that. Or I suppose I could just read the books.

Logic is beside the point when a benevolent robot goes wild.

Overall: B+

MEGALOPOLIS

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

Undoubtedly there is a niche group of people who are convinced Megalopolis is a crowning work of staggering genius. Those people are wrong.

Here is how I would characterize my experience of Megalopolis: it was 138 minutes of me having no idea what the hell is going on. I went in fully expecting it to be a mess, after endless press coverage of writer-director Francis Ford Coppola self-financing the film to the tune of $120 million and mixed responses at film festivals. But, I thought: it might have some redeeming value. The cast, the acting, the visuals, the production design. To one degree or another, all of these things disappoint.

Megalopolis does have a few images I very much enjoyed, at least in isolation, taken out of a context I could make absolutely no sense of. My favorite is an old satellite crashing in pieces onto Manhattan, a beautiful image that culminates in an overhead shot of nothing more than dust plumes puffing into a single intersection. The fact that this is not the kind of movie Coppola intended to make notwithstanding, it has the promise of a visual thrill that then delivers nothing. It’s the cinematic equivalent of a ruined orgasm. Given that the narrative moves forward with zero clarity on exactly what kind of effect this event had on the city, that description could apply to the movie as a whole.

The setting, incidentally, is never identified as New York, even though every image of the city is very clearly that. Instead, this story takes place in “New Rome,” the center of an empire on the verge of collapse, images of architectural columns and modern iterations of coliseum entertainment. We see Shia LaBeouf in a toga (much of the time, inexplicably, dressed as a woman, his character treating the act as a kind of lark), and Aubrey Plaza literally lounging in opulent surroundings and feeding herself grapes. Meanwhile, we get sporadic glimpses of unrest around the city, police cars passing by with “NRPD” stenciled on their sides.

I could never quite ascertain whether “New Rome” was supposed to be a country or a city. At one point it’s referred to as the “greatest country the world has ever known,” but we only ever see city leadership: the Mayor (Giancarlo Esposito), facing off against his powerful rival, architect and Chairman of the Design Authority of New Rome, Cesar Catilina (Adam Driver). Is New Rome a city-state, or what? Some “empire.”

Coppola leans so hard on this, “a fable”—that being literally the subtitle of the film—being Shakespearean that, in a very odd press conference scene early on in the film, Cesar Catilina delivers Hamlet’s “To Be or Not to Be” monologue in its entirety, playing it as an amusing performance for the press. The problem with Coppola’s script overall, combined with the entire movie’s fever-dream editing, is that everything happening is seen at a distance, a peculiar remove. On the surface, Megalopolis plays like a cross between Terry Gilliam’s 1985 film Brazil and Damien Chazelle’s 2022 film Babylon; beneath the surface, it seems to aspire to be a spiritual sequel, or the 21st-century answer to Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece Metropolis, only stripped of any recognizable substance.

There’s a lot of familial relationships in Megalopolis, complete with offhand suggestions of incestuousness. John Voight plays Hamilton Crassus III, the city’s resident multibillionaire and Cesar’s uncle. LaBeouf’s Clodio Pulcher is Crassus’s son, and Cesar’s troublemaking cousin, trying to stir up unrest around the city (complete with an awkward cut to a Black family, one of them stoically raising a fist to one of Clodio’s pandering speeches). Nathalie Emmanuel plays Julia Cicero, the Mayor’s daughter who winds up as Cesar’s love interest.

When I see a movie like this and all the talent involved, I can’t help but wonder: did they just want to be able to say they worked with the Francis Ford Coppola? Even though he hasn’t produced a masterwork in 45 years? This is the guy who gave us The Godfather, The Godfather Part II, and Apocalypse Now—but he also directed Robin Williams as an overgrown man-baby in Jack, and I don’t care what anyone says, 1992’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula is unwatchable.

Even three decades after that, we still get the likes of Laurence Fishburne as a driver and assistant; Dustin Hoffman as the Mayor’s fixer; Aubrey Plaza as a TV newsmagazine host named Wow Platinum; and Jason Schwartzman as a member of the Mayor’s entourage in Megalopolis. Some of their comparatively limited screen time is amusing; most of it feels like a waste. They all move about in a hyper-stylized world that feels rendered on a limited VFX budget, interacting according to a plot that feels as though it’s been poured into a blender.

I haven’t even mentioned that Cesar has invented an ultra-sustainable material called Megalon, which he’s been granted license to use to rebuild the city (get it?). Somehow, it also grants Cesar the ability to control space and time. How that fits neatly into his dream of converting the city (country??) into a utopia, I couldn’t tell you; Megalopolis lost me from there. It did, however, allow for a lovely romantic image of a couple embracing on suspended building beams, a dropped bouquet of flowers suspended in midair just below them. If only I could harness Cesar’s power and harness that one moment, and stretch its impact across the rest of its utterly convoluted runtime.

One moment in time can be very misleading.

Overall: C+

THE SUBSTANCE

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

There is a lot going on in The Substance, both metaphorically and metatextually. It takes a wild, uniquely gory look at self-destructiveness (a pretty literal take on that, actually), self-loathing, obsessions with fame and celebrity and youth.

Writer-director Coralie Fargeat is looking at all this through a decidedly feminist lens. I’m honestly surprised it doesn’t seem to be getting review-bombed by users at places like MetaCritic or IMDb, and my working theory is that Fargeat is offering so much legit body horror that the incels are too giddy to notice. This movie is entirely set in Hollywood, begins and ends with a shot of a (fictional) star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. One brief shot of it actually getting snowed on seems a little odd, yet still emblematic of how stylized and heightened everything is. Nobody talks like a normal person. The do, however, say things we’ve heard said in earnest a million times, like “Pretty girls should always smile!” It just gets a delivery with a kind of exaggerated effusiveness that only underscores how ridiculous it is.

Dennis Quaid is the third lead in The Substance, and he’s the one who utters that line, as a slimeball TV producer—multiple times. He is perfectly cast, and as performer, he knows the assignment.

Best of all is Demi Moore, in a lead part more significant and high-profile than anything she’s done in well over ten years, arguably even twenty years. She plays a bit of a has-been as Elizabeth Sparkle, who won an Oscar once upon a time but long ago pivoted to many years of leading an exercise show on television—shades of 80s-era Jane Fonda there. When she learns that the producer is looking for a much younger woman to replace her, Elizabeth finds herself facing an offer: turn into two selves, one young and beautiful, the other her current version. They must switch back and forth every seven days. It gets complicated.

And this is where the metatextual elements begin, very early on: it’s Elizabeth Sparkle’s 50th birthday, but Demi Moore is 61. With that knowledge, she looks amazing—even factoring in how much work she must have had done. Which begs the question: if you can tell you’re faking a youthful appearance, then what’s the point? Ironically. this may be the lease vain performance Demi Moore has ever given. Dare I say: yes, brave. Within minutes after The Substance starts, we see countless extreme close-ups. This includes close-ups of Dennis Quaid, including a scene of him eating shrimp in a restaurant that is just as disgusting as anything else in this very, very gross movie. But there are also many close-ups on Demi Moore’s face, as Elizabeth becomes self-critical to the point of insanity, but we are seeing Moore’s actual face, her actual pores, her actual blemishes. It’s an incredible commitment to the art.

Mind you, Moore gets much uglier later in the film—but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The Substance is a film that nearly transcends its obvious imperfections simply by being uniquely compelling. It’s less concerned with saying anything new than it is with illustrating extremities, particularly of women and the pressures to be young, beautiful, and entertaining, by themselves as much as others. The finesse with which Coralie Fargeat draws these illustrations is perhaps a larger question. The Substance is 140 minutes long, its length perhaps being a part of its statements on excess, except it could have been even more effective had it clocked in just under two hours.

There’s also the fact that everything The Substance does, the 1992 horror comedy Death Becomes Her did better. Trust me on this: if you have never seen that film, find it, and watch it. The way it skewers celebrity and youth culture is both evergreen and unparalleled. It even starred “aging” actors Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn (who were 43 and 47 at the time, respectively). Fargeat basically took that film and crossed with with notorious the notorious gross-out horror movie The Fly (1986). There’s even a close-up of a fly drowned in a wine glass, making one wonder if that is a deliberate reference.

In the last 20 minutes or so, Fargeat really puts the pedal to the metal, amping up the gore to such a degree that it comes across like the climax of Carrie as directed by Quentin Tarantino. The allegorical elements of The Substance kind of blend together after a while, making the narrative lose focus. Until then, we get standout cinematography by Benjamin Kracun (Promising Young Woman), and a script with such straightforward simplicity on the surface that it’s easy to forget how layered it really is. This is the very thing that gives this film a surprisingly broad appeal. At least, theoretically: it made only $3.2 million last weekend, on a budget of $17.5 million. It’s also competing against a lot of more straightforward horror movies, without the tiered depth.

If you’re looking for something that will gross you out, though, then look no further than The Substance. Margaret Qualley, as Sue, the “younger, better version” of Elizabeth, basically giving birth to herself out a slit in Demi Moore’s back is just the tip of the iceberg. You’ll also find plenty of vomit, pus, and deformed breasts and sometimes fall off of bodies. I’m a little bit lost as to why Marget and Sue, who are impressed upon that “You are one,” evidently don’t have memories of what their other selves are doing in the alternate weeks they have agency. But Elizabeth can’t let go of the dream of youth, while Sue has zero concept of the wisdom of age, and as a result they both make wildly stupid decisions, which only make things worse for themselves. Or herself.

Margaret Qualley is well cast as Sue, if not given quite as meaty material to tear into. Ironically, she seems cast more for her beauty than anything else. Indeed. there are many pointed, gratuitous shots of young, supple bodies, and I kept thinking about what the audition process must have been like for this movie itself. It’s participating in the very grotesquerie it’s critiquing. How effective that makes it as a living work of art is up to you.

Young or old, pick your poison.

Overall: B+

THE KILLER'S GAME

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

When it comes to a movie like The Killer’s Game, going in with seriously low expectations is an effective way not to hate it.

I hardly loved it either, mind you. This is a transparent ripoff of John Wick, with its own gimmick: Instead of a hitman avenging the death of his wife and his dog, we get a hitman who contracts a hit on himself after finding out he has a terminal disease, only to find out he’s been misdiagnosed. He’s going to live after all! Except, the other assassins—and one in particular—are bent on “honoring the contract.”

This would all be more fun if The Killer’s Game could be watched cold, with none of this known beforehand. The problem is, there’s nothing else interesting enough about this movie to pique anyone’s interest. What other reason is there to watch it? Even with this twist made crystal clear in trailers, it landed in theaters last movie with a thud, coming in at #6 and earning a paltry $2.6 million at the box office.

With a better script, The Killer’s Game might have worked. Instead, wedged in between some action choreography that is actually pretty good, it veers perilously close to self-parody. Leaning a tad more into earnestness, or even in the other direction into over parody, might have been an improvement. What we get, in this film directed by (of course) John Wick stuntman J.J. Perry, are characters who actually utter lines heard in countless other movies to the pint of ridiculous, with a straight face. When Ben Kingsley, as Dave Bautista’s hitman mentor, says “Don’t hate the player, hate the game,” not only is it played as preposterously profound, it’s at least the third time we hear a line that dumb and overdone.

Ben Kingsley, even at age 80, clearly just likes to work. Sometimes he’s amazing (Sexy Beast, Hugo), and other times . . . not so much. This is one of those other times. Don’t get me wrong; the B-minus level acting in this movie is the best thing it has going for it when we aren’t being treated to creative gruesome hit jobs. Granted, Perry ups the ante with each introduction of a new assassin or team of assassins. But then it goes so far that we wind up with Chilean martial artist and actor Mark Zaror as “El Botas,” doing a kind of one-man tango, complete with boot spurs as lethal weapons, as he cuts through his victims.

There is also more than just a splash of Kill Bill in this movie, with stylized introductions of characters with fun names, and blood gushing out all over the place. We get plenty of broken bones and dismemberment and bodies blown apart, some of it in a church—where, conveniently, there happens to be a priest handy when a couple decides on the fly that they want to get married. But not before the hitman must confess the entirety of his sins!

I won’t deny that I actually had a bit of fun watching The Killer’s Game. But that only works when there’s nothing better to choose from in theaters, and we’re setting a pretty low bar here. Bautista is barely serviceable as a leading man playing an actual human (as opposed to, say, an alien, or a Harkonnen), but the fact that he’s so giant and jacked it’s almost otherworldly makes it a challenge to accept him as someone who is in any way normal. Not that a hitman is normal, although a big part of the plot here is how he falls in love with a professional dancer played by Sofia Boutella. When they were shown in bed together, all I could think about is how dangerous it would be for them to literally sleep together, when he could just roll over and crush her to death.

The most frustrating thing about The Killer’s Game is its wasted potential. No one goes into a movie like this expecting high art—we’re here to watch people maim and kill each other. That’s the standard by which it should be judged: how well that is executed. Sadly, even by that metric, it’s pretty substandard, a constant riff on themes and concepts from far better influences that this movie completely fails to innovate in any way.

Dave Bautista demonstrates his acting range.

Overall: C+

REBEL RIDGE

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

Rebel Ridge is not like other thrillers, and not just because it just gets better as it goes on. This is the kind of movie I wish I could have seen in a theater, except the fact that it was released on Netflix this week instead is precisely why we are able to experience a purity of writer-director Jeremy Saulnier’s vision. Such is the contradictory state of the modern film industry, where certain compromises must be made in order to produce the highest quality product—at least this way a lot more people are apt to see this, a film that absolutely deserves your attention. I went into this expectng to enjoy it, and still it significantly exceeded my expectations.

What’s so great about it, I imagine you wondering. Where do I start? With the premise: a Black man, Terry Richmond (a stupendously controlled Aaron Pierre) is railroaded by local small-town Southern law enforcement when they knock him over on his bike, find a large amount of money on him, decide to declare it suspected drug money, and seize it. The rest of the film is an extended riff on the revenge thriller genre, and although it takes its time, the way Saulnier innovates the narrative really is a thrill to watch. We’ll come back to that.

Because we have to come back to how it starts: with a real thing, an actually-legal practice called civil asset forfeiture. As stated by Summer (AnnaSophia Robb), a helpful clerk Terry encounters, “Your property has no civil rights.” Law enforcement can take whatever is yours, keep it for as long as they want, and in many cases even sell it. This is a longstanding practice, often abused by local police departments to make up for budget shortfalls. Anyone watching Rebel Ridge may watch this play out in its opening scene and feel incredulous that it feels too unrealistic—but this is one of those things where truth is wilder than fiction. This shit actually happens, and you rightly feel infuriated on Terry’s behalf.

There are countless stories and countless ways in which civil asset forfeiture fucks people over. In Terry’s case, the reason he has all this cash is because he sold a car and is taking it in to post bail for his cousin, who has been detained for possession. Terry is facing a sort of countdown because there is a plan to transfer his cousin to a prison where he faces a lethal threat from a gang he testified against.

All of this is just setup. The thrill of the story is in seeing Terry get thwarted at enough turns to make him desperate, and force him to take drastic action. But here’s where the narrative innovation comes in: this is not Rambo. Spoiler alert, Terry never kills anyone in this movie. I can only think of one death at all, and it’s not part of any of the scenes of hand-to-hand combat. Among the many things that make Rebel Ridge stand out is that, while we do get some pretty significant injuries in an excellent climactic battle scene, all of the combat in it is nonlethal. And still it’s just as thrilling as the best-choreographed gun battles in other movies—in many cases more so. Just watching him disarm his opponents, over and over again, is incredibly cool.

It should be noted, however, that Rebel Ridge is still much more suspense thriller than it is action movie. There’s a lot of plot, which Saulnier simmers expertly. It may test some viewers’ patience, but I would argue such people are missing the point, not understanding what this movie is and should be. There’s a difference between “lackluster” and “restrained.” In another writer’s or another director’s hands, this could quickly go over the top. We’ve been served more than enough decades’ worth of those movies already.

Saulnier gives the story the time and space to breathe, allowing us to understand Terry’s motivations—and, as it happens, those of the local police upending his life (and the lives of countless others) for their own gain. They are headed by Police Chief Sandy Burnne, played by Don Johnson in a bit of perfectly inspired casting. Although Terry faces off with many different cops, several of whom get their own showcase of narrative thread—particularly Zsane Jhe as an officer caught in the cross-combat at the police station—ultimately this is a battle of wills between Terry and Chief Burnne.

Summer proves to be a much more significant part of the story as it unfolds, with many different turns you won’t ever see coming—she’s the very reason Terry returns to the town he’s been told to stay away from, at the halfway point. Rebel Ridge could be thought of as two one-hour episodes, but still they fit together exceptionally well. I do have some slightly mixed feelings about how Summer is handled as a character, particularly when it comes to agency. But, she remains a compellingly competent character drawn with dimension.

In any case, I was rapt and on the edge of my seat from start to finish watching Rebel Ridge. A significant amount of that could be attributed to the affectingly ambient score by brother-musicians Brooke and Will Blair. There simply isn’t any major misstep anywhere in the production of this movie, with exceptional direction, writing and performances. Much as it pains me to admit it, sometimes one of the best movies of the year is actually a streaming release. I would still argue Rebel Ridge would play better in a movie theater, but we’ll take great cinema wherever we can get it, from the screening room to the living room.

There are many more tensions at play than what’s first noticed in any given frame.

Overall: A-

LONGLEGS

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

We all know Nicolas Cage is in his “I just like to work” era. For some reason, anyone who works with him is also in their “Let Nicolas Cage do whatever he wants” era. It’s that second part that I don’t get—this idea that getting the man is enough. Even a man with massive talent needs creative restraints. Otherwise, you might get a supposedly demonic serial killer with an unnaturally white face singing “Happy Birthday” in a high pitched voice.

Cage isn’t even onscreen all that much in Longlegs. I can’t find a number with an official source, but in a film that’s 101 minutes long, I would guess we see him about twenty of them. To his credit—I guess—he’s certainly memorable in them. I’m just not convinced he’s the right kind of memorable. In a moody horror piece written and directed by Osgood Perkins (Gretel & Hansel), Cage isn’t so much scary as he is ridiculous.

Longlegs feels like a mashup of The Silence of the Lambs and Hereditary, two films that are far superior to this one, which doesn’t take its themes or its genre anywhere new—unless you want to count Nicola Cage playing a killer for the first time. It starts off promising enough, in a seventies winter flashback using an aspect ratio with curved corners reminiscent of printed photos from the time. There are cool transitions between then and the “present” which is the 1990s, where those curved corners slowly expand into a modern, standard cinema aspect ratio across the screen. This includes some nice sound mixing, as with the sound of a little girl’s steps in a few inches of snow.

These clever transitions would mean more if the story amounted to anything more. The protagonist is a very autism-coded FBI agent named Lee Harker (Maika Monroe), hyper-focused on her work and indifferent to social cues. We see her on the phone with her mother a few times, asking how she is in a way that fails to convince us she actually cares. Eventually we see her mother, Ruth (Alicia Witt), whose behavior is even odder than Lee’s.

I had been a little nervous going into this movie, expecting it to terrify me. Instead, I found myself wondering when it was going to get scary. Perkins has a skill for establishing and settling tone, but here it’s “relatively eerie” at worst, and then Nicolas Cage appears onscreen and you’re left thinking: what? The acting is generally competent, with Cage’s overacting bringing down the averages. The rest of them generally speak in deadpan tones, in a way you might expect from a movie that clearly aspires to be like others that are far better.

I might also have liked Longlegs better without the supernatural element at all, let alone one that brings in life-sized young girl dolls. Whatever happened to good old fashioned psychopaths? Evil people are scary in their own right. That evil is undermined by the presence of demon eyes in shadows. In other words, I really wasn’t feeling it with this movie, which starts off promising and then devolves into derivative nonsense. Longlegs is far from terrible, but at least terrible is potentially more entertaining than average. The many people who have declared this movie great have left me mystified.

Ironically, I did nod off during this dark lullaby.

Overall: C+

BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE

Directing: C+
Acting: B-
Writing: B-
Cinematography: B
Editing: C
Specal Effects: B
Production Design: B+

Michael Keaton was 36 years old when he appeared in the 1988 film Beetlejuice—only Tim Burton’s second feature film as a director, it’s easy to forget. He’s 73 now. And this is one of the many elements of the sequel out this weekend, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, where there’s a bit of a dichotomy: in the “Beetlejuice” makeup, Keaton looks roughly the same as he did 36 years ago. But, there was a famously unique energy to his character in 1988 that is frankly lacking now. Beetlejuice just doesn’t have the pep that he used to. He’s still a wild nut, but there’s an undercurrent of tired old man in there.

This can be extrapolated to Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is a film overall, and by extension, to its director, Tim Burton. This is a man who spent the better part of two decades making dark classics for the modern age, from Edward Scissorhands to Batman to Sleepy Hollow to Sweeney Todd. Ever since then, his career has been one long paean to mediocrity.

Is Beetlejuice Beetlejuice any different? The answer is: yes and no. This is only the second time Burton has directed a sequel, and the last time was 32 years ago (and there’s an argument that Batman Returns was one of the best sequels ever made). Beetlejuice is a one-of-a-kind film that has been beloved by multiple generations, an execution of dark weirdness that could never have worked without all the pieces fitting just the right way. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice has thus cultivated a kind of anticipation that a Burton film hasn’t managed in years.

I hesitate to say that it lives up to such expectations. As expected, there’s a lot going on in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, and still, somehow, it drags much of the time, particularly in its first half. This movie is all of 114 minutes long, and it feels longer. Too many scenes linger on things that neither wow nor delight. And if we count Beetlejuice himself as an antagonist, then he is one of three, which is arguably two two many: the others are Jeremy (Arthur Conti), a local boy who befriends Astrid (Jenna Ortega), the teenage daughter of widowed Lydia (Winona Ryder) and is predictably not what he seems at first; and Delores (Monica Bellucci), the soul-sucking—literally—ex-wife of Beetlejuice who is resurrected and hell-bent on reuniting with him. And in both cases, we get very good performers saddled with parts that wind up being of little consequence in the end. Bellucci in particular, here channeling Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas as a dismembered corpse stapled back together, has an electric screen presence, and not enough to do to move the story forward.

This is one of the common problems with these “lega-sequels.” The first film had a straightforward, simple plot around which all the creative chaos could revolve. The second has to tie itself in convoluted narrative knots just to get mostly the same cast of characters back together.

In this case, Lydia’s dad has died. This was a character played by convicted sex offender Jeffrey Jones in the first film, who does not appear in this one. And yet his character, Charles, has a surprisingly large presence in this film. In one sequence, he appears in claymation. It’s actually pretty funny how they handle it.

And that’s the thing with Beetlejuice Beetlejuice: there are many things in it that are hilarious, or super fun. It’s the many other parts that are neither that are the problem, and render the film disappointingly even. This is a movie with some very high highs, and some very dull lulls. It averages out to a movie that is just okay, which is a step down from earlier Burton films that were just wall-to-wall delights. In the end, this is a movie that is just riding on the coattails of its cinematic forebear from three and a half decades ago.

On the upside, it has some reliably solid performers. Catherine O’Hara’s Delia Deetz is the one character who makes the most sense after all this time, clinging to a desperate idea of evolving with the times with her pretentious art. Jenna Ortega is perhaps the best thing in Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, proving she can elevate any material she works with. On the other hand, Willem Dafoe seems miscast as a former actor turned ghost detective, hamming it up in ways that often fall a little flat. And Winona Ryder’s Lydia, now deeply emotionally frail, seems incongruous with the bold but emotionally insecure teenager from the first film, or at least the self-assured version of her by the end of it. (It’s a fair counterpoint that spending a lifetime seeing ghosts could do a number on a person.) In the end, even the cast has better and worse, averaging out to—well, average.

If there’s anything that definitively does not disappoint about Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, it’s the production design. It’s a relief that this film doesn’t try to “update” the look of the first one so much as augment it; there are bits of CGI here and there, but always well integrated into a plethora of practical effects. Beetlejuice’s office staff of shrunken-head workers, like so many other things in this movie, have antics that sometimes land and sometimes fall a little flat.

In retrospect, sadly, I have to say that Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is about as good as I could have possibly expected. I so hoped it would exceed my expectations, but these days Tim Burton is nothing if not consistent. This is a guy with some real creativity left in him, but whose dark mojo peaked a long, long time ago. This is a movie that satisfies insomuch as we’ll take what we can get.

There’s great fun to be had if you’re willing to wait around for it.

Overall: B-

GOOD ONE

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

I’m still ruminating on how I feel about the way Good One ends. On the one hand, the final shot is slightly jarring, leaving us with a feeling of an inexplicably abrupt ending. On the other hand, upon reflection, it could be regarded as a metaphor for the three relationships at play through most of the film, set on a forest hiking trip. Either way, in its indelibly subtle way, it’s really kind of a bummer.

The plan, originally, was for it to be a foursome on this trip: Chris (James Le Gros) and his teenage daughter Sam (Lily Collias); Chris’s oldest friend Matt (Danny McCarthy) and his teenage son Dylan. Things are immediately thrown off when Dylan, a resentful son of divorced parents, refuses to come, leaving only Chris, Sam and Matt to go on the trip.

There’s a key scene somewhere in the middle of this film, in which Sam observes that Matt had been eating snacks in his tent, telling him he probably shouldn’t do that. Chris catches wind of this and flies off the handle, framing it as being “reckless” with his teenage daughter, given how far and wide a bear can be attracted by food. It’s the one time Chris exhibits anything close to fierce protectiveness of his daughter.

But then something happens later, something vaguely creepy that sits somewhere in the space between a gray area and something some might find genuinely triggering. In this instance, Chris is either dismissive or pleads for Sam to let it go. There seems to be a slight connection here to when three young men who are also hiking in the area take it for granted that it’s fine for them to set up camp right next to them. We never see any evidence that these three young dudes pose any threat, but that is beside the point: when Sam gives even the slightest hint that this makes her feel uncomfortable, Chris’s immediate response is to tell her it’s fine. There may be a minor theme building here.

Good One takes a lot of time to get to any details this concrete, as we spend the better part of an hour doing little more than just hanging out with this trio. This film deals almost exclusively in nuance and subtlety, and only through keenly observed detail do we register that both Chris and Matt have some form of arrested development, and Sam has more instinct for both maturity and survival than either of them. As written by writer-director India Donaldson, there is intention behind every single thing we see onscreen, how benign a huge amount of it seems notwithstanding.

Matt is a little difficult to figure out, both as a person and as a created character. He can be a little flaky and boneheaded, overpacking his backpack or hiking in denim jeans or forgetting his sleeping bag. This lends him a bit of shaky ground for plausible deniability, when it comes to the way things turn between him and Sam later in the film. It’s the kind of thing that some might find up or debate: is this man in any way predatory, or is he just a clueless dipshit?

How you respond to this may very well depend on your own personal experiences. I, for one, am leaving toward clueless dipshittery as a cover for predation. It should be stressed, however, that Good One never takes an explicit stance on this matter.

Good One is about as “indie” as an indie movie is going to get, and it certainly won’t be for everyone. To anyone but the keenly observant, nothing of note even happens in this movie until roughly halfway through, until which time it seems we are just watching this trio hike through the forest. Matt is genuinely saddened by his son’s refusal to come on the trip with them, and this is something Sam notices more effectively than her dad—Matt’s best friend—does. This contributes to a sense of empathy that Donaldson effectively creates, for all three of these characters. It’s also a big part of the tricky emotional navigating we have to do when Matt says something to Sam that objectively crosses a line, but without crystal clear intent.

It’s not often a film challenges us in such a specific way, which affords Good One a unique kind of respect. I must admit I don’t know a lot of people who would be into that, as it requires the ability to appreciate pointed ambiguity in art, the kind that diminishes the pleasure or fun in it. I keep thinking about the pivotal moment in this film, but I’m not sure I want to be. I’m left with a deep appreciation for a cinematic accomplishment I would also like to move on from.

She’s told she’s a good one, but not by the right one.

BETWEEN THE TEMPLES

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

Between the Temples is very strong out of the gate, opening with a scene of unusually effective cleverness and wit. We immediately meet Ben Gottlieb (Jason Schwartzman), hearing from his two moms (Caroline Aaron and Dolly De Leon) that they think it’s time he see a doctor. As soon as Ben says he’s open to it, the doorbell rings, and we’re meeting the doctor in question. After she asks him to touch her face, we’re still thinking she must be some kind of “free spirit” therapist or something. The meaning of what we’re seeing becomes clearly something we weren’t expecting very quickly, and for a moment we’re thinking, Wait. What?

It’s very unusual to say this, but this is actually a good kind of “Wait, what?” It’s an expertly delivered misdirect, a kind of opening punch line that sets up an expectation for the entire film. And then the film doesn’t quite live up to that expectation, and never achieves the same kind of precise execution again.

We quickly learn that Ben lost his wife to a tragic, freak accident about a year ago, and is still struggling to move on. He’s the cantor at his synagogue, and has a lifetime of singing experience, but still can’t get himself to sing again. By wild chance, he runs into his music teacher from elementary school (Carol Kane), now asking him to call her Carla. And Carla, who is half Jewish, imposes on Ben’s bat mitzvah class and says she wants to have one because she never got to as a kid.

As a premise, this is all very compelling, with solid performances all around. Jason Schwartzman is alternately sweet and heartbreaking as someone slowly moving out of his grief. Carol Kane is always a welcome presence, although her Carla is a little more difficult to pin down. She’s also a widow, and perhaps is just looking for some company. Carla and Ben’s relationship blossoms into something that skirts the edges of romance.

I may very well have enjoyed this story more, if it were not for cinematographer Sean Price Williams, who makes what I found to be frustratingly distracting choices at every turn. Between the Temples is wall-to-wall with quick zooms, wildly shaky handheld cameras, and off-puttingly tight close-ups, often of people putting food into their mouths. There must have been some intention behind all this, but damned if I could figure out what it was. In practice, it felt like a cinematographer making whatever choice inspired him at the moment, with no connecting overall vision. I tired of it very quickly.

That aside, the cast is wonderful. It’s nice to see a movie in which a same-sex couple is completely incidental. Caroline Aaron is arguably a bit typecast, but still delightful, as Ben’s fretful Jewish mother. Dolly De Leon, as the other mom who converted to Judaism upon her entry into the family, is much the opposite: between this and Ghostlight and Triangle of Sadness, there’s no telling what kind of part she’ll pay next. Madeline Weinstein is perfectly cast as Gabby, the rabbi’s daughter who is also “a complete mess” and nudged into the direction of Ben. Matthew Shear is effective in just the two scenes he shows up in, as Carla’s careless and insensitive son.

There’s something about Nathan Silver’s direction, all these shaky scenes with a lot of rambling mumbles of characters speaking over each other. It’s like “mumblecore” as directed by Robert Altman. I tried, and failed, to identify a clear purpose in this style of filmmaking. I like that Silver leaves us in the end with an ambiguity as to whether Ben and Carla’s connection indeed has any element of romance. Or, at least, whether it’s requited. There’s a big family dinner scene near the end that is one of the most awkward things I have ever sat through.

I guess you could say Between the Temples is less “will they or won’t they” than it is “are they or aren’t they,” but it touches on certain romantic comedy tropes in an effectively subversive way. Some might leave this movie feeling great, and others may leave feeling ambivalent. I had the rare experience of sitting in a space squarely between those two things.

It’s like Harold and Maude if Harold were older, Maude were younger, and both were sad and lonely instead of just morbid.

Overall: B