A DIFFERENT MAN

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

A Different Man is a great companion piece to The Substance, and would make an incredible, deeply provocative double feature. Both examine vanity and beauty; both get deeply meta; both veer into body horror—but in very different ways, on all counts. There is less of the body horror element in A Different Man, but it is still definitively there: a disfigured man is given a procedure to give him a “normal” face, but instead of it slowly altering his face, the disfigured folds and mounds of skin peel off in fleshy pieces. This stuff gets far less screen time in A Different Man, but it was still gross enough that I had to look away from the screen.

The Substance gets much more into misogyny and celebrity, neither of which play a big part in A Different Man, which more specifically gets into the fine line between grotesquerie and exceptionalism. That said, much in the same way Demi Moore was cast in The Substance as an older actress giving into expectations of youthfulness, A Different Man casts the physically singular actor Adam Pearson, who has neurofibromatosis type 1 (a genetic condition that causes benign tumors to grow along the nerves), as an aspiring actor with a significant facial disfigurement.

In Pearson’s case, notably, his character, Edward, is given even more lumps and bumps all over his face than Pearson actually has. We follow Edward through roughly the first half of the movie, during which time it can be difficult to decide what to make of it. He meets his neighbor, Ingrid (Norwegian actor Renate Reinsve, previously seen in the 2022 film The Worst Person in the World), a young woman who takes an unashamed liking to him, something almost like a crush. This creates a fascinating dynamic, because she never directly addresses Edward’s condition. They get to know each other, both visiting his apartment and going out for pizza, and she doesn’t seem to notice all the people passing outside the window who turn to look at him. This only changes when a random guy knocks on the window and smiles and waves at him, which Ingrid finds strange but Edward says happens to him all the time.

And then, we learn that Ingrid is a playwright, humble at first but successful later, and she writes a play about her relationship with Edward, and the play she writes is all about how his condition plays into it. We’ll get back to that in a minute.

Because that all happens in the second half of the film, after Edward undergoes his procedure, and eventually pulls his face off, and is transformed into not so much a gorgeous man as just a regular, middle-aged guy—played by Sebastian Stan (best known as Buckey Barnes in the Marvel Cinematic Universe). Writer-director Aaron Schimberg never makes it explicitly clear why Edward, post-procedure, makes this pivotal choice: he isn’t honest about who he is with anyone, not Ingrid, not even the doctor who performed the procedure and shows up at his apartment not recognizing him. Edward, as played by Sebastian Stan, just assumes a new identity on the spot: Guy Moratz (in keeping with the meta threads of this film, someone later tells him that name “sounds made up”).

It was after this turn that I became more sure of how I felt about A Different Man, and I became more impressed with it. I’m not crazy about Adam Pearson’s performance as Edward, pre-procedure. He has a lot of mannerisms, the way he puts his hand on his hip or shrugs with a hand wave, that feel unnatural—like it’s someone you can tell is acting. Then it comes clear how intentional these mannerisms are, because once Sebastian Stan takes over the role, he mimics them impeccably. Edward remains the same deeply insecure man he always was, even when he suddenly looks “normal.” Ingrid, whom Guy meets after he crashes the auditions for her play, starts to get to know him, and more than once she calls him “jumpy.” You’d think she would recognize how his vibe reminds her of Edward, but maybe not; people can be blind to a lot when context changes.

Guy, who finds himself missing the exceptionality of life with his disfigurement, lands a part in the play. This is where the meta stuff really starts to fold over on itself: a cast had been made of Edward’s disfigured face for the procedure, which Guy then brings to wear when playing the part of Edward in the play. And as if that weren’t enough, another random person walks in during rehearsals, and it’s a man with the exact same condition—played, again, by Adam Pearson.

This guy’s name is Oswald. He’s played by a “realer” version of Pearson, still with the same striking facial features but without all the extra lumps and bumps we saw on Edward. Also: he’s British. Pearson himself is British, in fact: this is only his third feature film role (he’s also been in eight different TV shows, ranging from documentary to reality to narrative), his first in the 2013 science fiction thriller mood piece Under the Skin, a UK production. This means Pearson does accent work in A Different Man, which is completely convincing.

And Oswald could not be more different from Edward. He’s totally sure of himself, comfortable in his own skin, moves through the world as though his condition is entirely incidental. But Ingrid’s obsession with the use of this condition in her art gradually pulls Oswald into the production of the play, and one of the more amusing parts of A Different Man is now Oswald may be comfortable with himself, but he’s all for high-minded discussions of how he—and his condition—is used in art. Schimberg seems less concerned with moralizing about how we treat people who are different (or to some, even scary looking) than with examining how art stretches the lines of authenticity when incorporating real-life elements. This is ultimately what makes A Different Man work.

Schimberg is working on multiple planes here, with a script that is somewhat reminiscent of the work of Charlie Kaufman. I think perhaps he is a slightly better writer than director, and it would be fascinating to see a script he wrote directed by someone else. I found myself a little closed off from A Different Man during its first half, a bit skeptical of its performances, but then it took multiple turns that really won me over. Watch this movie with someone you can have a long conversation with about it afterwards, which is one of the greatest joys of the communal experience of cinema.

Both the same and different: the man, the men.

Overall: B+

THE OUTRUN

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

How The Outrun hits may depend largely on your relationship to alcoholism: if you are or have been close to an alcoholic, or perhaps if you are one yourself. I don’t have a lot of direct exposure to the worst effects of the disease of this particular addiction, and still there are lines that feel a bit obvious when taken out of context, but are deeply heartbreaking when uttered in this film. It will be some time before I forget Rona (Saoirse Ronan) saying, “I can’t be happy sober.”

Rona is a woman in her late twenties, to whom we are introduced as a pretty sloppy drunk, downing the leftover booze in other people’s glasses at closing time in a London pub. After she’s thrown out onto the sidewalk, a man in a car pulls up and offers her a ride. We know this is ominous, but don’t know exactly how until we return to flashback later.

This is a big part of what makes The Outrun work, how it stands as an exceptional film even among countless others about alcoholism. The narrative jumps back and forth in time, to seemingly random points in Rona’s life—a lot of them flashbacks during her extended stay in rehab. That opening scene notwithstanding, it is well into the runtime of the film before we get a truly clear picture of the depths Rona’s life sinks to. It’s the kind of thing that suggests “rock bottom” has its own set of tiered levels.

Rona is from the Orkney Islands, a deeply remote archipelago off the northern tip of Scotland. Her long-divorced parents still live there: Andrew (Stephen Dillane), whose long history of mental illness still has him vacillating between manic and depressive episodes; and Annie (Saskia Reeves), who has found solace in religion. Rona helps Andrew on his sheep farm, but still faces temptations, which she runs from by moving to ever-more remote islands in the region. She seems to be trying, in vain, to find a place to settle where there is no alcohol near her. She finds a job on a further-out island, and when she visits the local grocer, the wall behind the checkout counter is fully stocked with wine and liquor.

This environment provides a uniquely beautiful backdrop to the story: rocky shores and cliffs, hilly fields of green grass, islands seen through fog and rain and wind. It also has a personal connection for Rona, as this is her home, and does not offer the same smorgasbord of temptations that London did. Or so it seems at first, anyway. We also witness the rise and fall of her relationship with boyfriend Daynin (Paapa Essiedu), in snippets, entirely in flashbacks.

Eventually Rona meets an older man who recognizes in her a fellow sober person. He’s got over twelve years. She asks him, “Does it ever get easier?” He replies: “Yes. But it doesn’t ever get easy. It just gets less hard.” It may seem on the surface like small comfort, but it’s something for her to hold onto. This is the essence of The Outrun, really.

This is the kind of movie where it’s impossible to predict whether Rona, a deeply messy young woman we can’t help but root for thanks to Saoirse Ronan’s stupendous performance, will find happiness, or indeed even stay sober. Director and co-writer Nora Fingscheidt brings us to a conclusion that is a bit more ambiguous than it seems, until you think about it. Hope itself is not a promise, but it’s a great note to end on.

The more I think about The Outrun, the more impressed I am with it. Fingscheidt has created a nonlinear narrative that is easy to surrender to. Only once or twice did I find it hard to decipher where in time it was, but it also occurred to me that someone like Rona can easily get lost in time. I quickly cared deeply for her, to such an extent that when she was tempted by a forgotten wine glass in her dad’s home, it was like watching a horror movie: Don’t do it! But if The Outrun demonstrates anything, it is that sobriety is a process, more often than not with fits and starts. Rona learns in rehab that only ten percent of them make it through.

The Outrun also features some narrative flourishes that elevate its storytelling, not least of which is occasional voiceover narration by Rona, telling us about the myths and folklore of the islands, from how the land is formed to how the local seals (of which we see many) fit into the culture. There is also the subplot of a job Rona takes in which she recruits local farmers to participate in research on an endangered local bird. She spends a lot of time hoping to hear its specific bird call, which leaves us hoping to hear it eventually as well. There’s a connection to be made there, among many in this elegantly intricate story.

An iconic performer of human imperfection.

Overall: A-

MY OLD ASS

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

There’s something to be said for savoring the great moments in your life as they happen. Big moments, small moments: their apparent size can be misleading, and they can diminish or expand in retrospect. It’s the savoring that counts.

On a couple of trips I’ve taken over the past few years, I’ve thankfully had the wherewithal to look around and think—sometimes even say out loud: “I’m having a great time.” Too often, the best times are only appreciated in retrospect.

This was what I thought about watching My Old Ass, which uniquely captures this idea. It certainly does it in an unorthodox way: on her 18th birthday, Elliott (a superb Maisy Stella) takes a boat to a lake island with a couple of friends to trip on mushrooms. The three of them have individual, distinct trips, but what happens with Elliott, is she somehow conjures her 39-year-old self (Aubrey Plaza, always welcome but without enough screen time overall to be what truly makes this movie special). For a good while after this, Elliott things this was just a one-time hallucination, and so do we. But then Elliott discovers her older self—her “old ass,” if you will—has put her phone number from 21 years into the future into young Elliott’s phone.

Elliott calls the number, and is shocked to discover it works. Just as she did on the island, Elliott is able to have conversations with her older self—a self who, incidentally, is just as amazed from her own vantage point. Writer-director Megan Park deploys a clever conceit here, skirting any need for sci-fi explanations by having both versions of Elliott say to each other: “I can’t believe this is working!”

When they are done so well, I love movies like this, which have a deeply fantastical premise that is rendered immaterial to the larger ideas it’s trying to convey. And, to be fair, a lot of the elder Elliott’s advice is pretty obvious: spend more time with your family, your parents, your two brothers. Don’t be so blasé about moving away from the second-generation cranberry farm in favor of the city (this being a Canadian film, here “the city” means Toronto). But, the obviousness is the point: the things that don’t appear to matter actually matter much more than you realize.

Then, Older Elliott tells Younger Elliott: “Stay away from any boy named Chad.” Naturally, we soon meet Chad (Percy Hynes White, also excellent), and just as Elliott spends a lot of time doing so, we wonder what horrible thing comes with his presence in the future. The more time we spend with Chad, the more wonderful he seems, both to us and to the younger Elliott. It doesn’t take long to realize the precise type of heartbreak the older Elliott is trying to warn against, and how even “dumb youth” can come with its own kind of wisdom.

Predictable or not, here’s the thing: My Old Ass really got its hooks into me. I surrendered to it completely and unapologetically, because of Megan Park’s finesse as a filmmaker, and because of the irresistible performances of its cast. By the end, I was wishing someone had forewarned me that I should have tissues handy. The marketing of this film—and certainly its title—belie the emotional depth it actually has.

I should also mention a peculiar element of Elliott’s character: she identifies as a lesbian, but she falls in love with a boy. (There’s even the memorable line, “I’ve never had dick sex.” It just made me want to use the phrase “dick sex” more often.) But, amazingly, in My Old Ass, there is nothing homophobic or even heteronormative about it. If anything, it’s an honest depiction of the fluidity of sexuality that queer people have been talking about for decades. The fact that Chad is just a nice young man you can easily see Elliott falling in love with is actually kind of refreshing.

The older Elliott does offer a few glimpses into the future, just from her dialogue—both illuminating and amusing. She makes an offhand reference to a girlfriend. She also tells the younger Elliott to savor salmon while it still exists, and scoffs when younger Elliott asks if they’re married and have three kids: “No one’s allowed to have three kids anymore.” This is all just the welcome sprinkling of comic elements, enhanced by Aubrey Plaza’s delivery. All of it comes back to savoring the good things you have before they’re gone.

Park makes the smart choice, though, not to suggest that the elder Elliott lives in a horrible world, or that her life is terrible. My Old Ass is much more concerned with themes that transcend such things: the kinds of longing and regret any of us might feel when looking back on our youth, and what we might say to our younger selves if we could. This is a story of that scenario actually playing out, and from the point of view of that younger self. The younger Elliott actually takes the advice to heart, and in different ways, both the younger and older Elliott learn how they have been wrong minded.

My Old Ass is far less the cute romp it appears to be, and much more of a deeply affecting meditation on aging, regret, and living openly in the face of life’s risks. I stand firmly on the side of its point of view, which is to mindfully savor the great times as they unfold, be they moments or whole periods of life. I savored the very experience of this movie.

Wistfulness never felt so good.

Overall: A-

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+