BLACK BAG

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

Black Bag begins with an extended dinner party sequence, the kind of scene that usually happens much later in a movie. George (Michael Fassbender) and Kathryn (Cate Blanchett) have invited four colleagues over, because George has been warned that they are among five who could possibly be the source of a leak in the intelligence agency they all work for. As it happens, George has been informed that Kathryn also has both the motive and the capability.

This is the third Steven Soderbergh film in as many years to be written by David Koepp, and it’s the best one yet—Kimi (2022) had a production limited by covid restrictions, but still takes a sudden and very satisfying turn at the end; Presence, from earlier this year, had a fascinatingly novel premise limited by a story not fully fleshed out. No such limitations exist in Black Bag, which is all of 93 minutes long and still achieves what many spy series only aspire to, and in a fraction of the time.

And this brings me back to that dinner party. Through deft writing, skilled editing and solid performances all around, we learn a great deal about all six of the characters at that kitchen table in a very short amount of time. What could have been clunky exposition in someone else’s hands, Soderbergh and Koepp reveal key character details while also moving the story forward—all with just a group of people sitting around a dinner table. Granted, it does culminate in an act of violence which is, in context, both shocking and delightful. Soderbergh has a unique way of keeping us on our toes.

Black Bag’s suspense both starts and ends around that dinner table. In between, a lot of time is spent with all of these characters in the UK intelligence office where they all work, with only occasional scenes shot on location. The central mystery shifts and moves, but with an unusual grace, never a particular jolt of plot turn. George and Kathryn’s four colleagues are in two known romantic pairings as well, but over time we learn who’s been sleeping around with which of the others in the group. Ultimately, their actions serve as a test of George and Kathryn’s marriage—it’s telling that others in the group call them “psychos” because they put their devotion to each other above all else.

This is a story largely about trust, and the type of work that tests it. George and Kathryn aren’t the only couple who use the phrase “black bag” as code for something that is work-confidential, something they cannot talk about. Somehow, though, they are the only ones who manage to make it work—even as they get playful with it: “Would you lie to me?” George asks. “Only if I had to,” Kathryn replies.

Cate Blanchett is 55 years old, and she’s as luminous as ever—this time with long, luscious brown hair. Michael Fassbender is a bit younger, 47, and he’s had showier parts in other movies. But he and Blanchett have a crackling chemistry, the kind without which this film would instantly fall flat. It is unclear to us early on whether George has reason to suspect Kathryn, or if the source of the leak is among the other four characters. The evidence ebbs and flows, and so do our ideas of what’s actually going on between George and Kathryn.

Black Bag is intrigue at its finest, a feast of sleek production design as a backdrop for a mystery both complex and concise. Not a moment is wasted in this movie, which is so well done, it leaves you wondering why so many other similar movies dwell on their own plotting so pointlessly. There is an irony to this film in that, by not engaging in any pretense of self-importance, it achieves an unexpected excellence.

Blanchett and Fassbender teach us about trust in the face of suspicion.

Overall: A-

MICKEY 17

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

It was always going to be a challenge for Bong Joon Ho to follow up his 2019 film Parasite, which turned out to be a watershed moment in both cinema and Oscar history. This is a guy with a penchant for genre mashing, and actually never more so than in Parasite—but no one would expect him to match that, and it makes sense that he would return to his oddball science fiction sensibilities with Mickey 17, a movie with neither hopes nor aspirations for Oscar glory. This is a movie just made by a bunch of people who are clearly having fun.

None more so than its star, Robert Pattinson, who plays two parts: Mickey 17 and Mickey 18. Technically he plays 18 parts, all of them the same person: Mickey has signed up to be an “expendable,” offering his body for fatal research on a planet marked for colonization, his body “reprinted” every time he dies, each time with his memory restored. Bong, who co-wrote the script, wisely doesn’t even try to explain what kind of science could make this possible, because it doesn’t matter, not pertinent to the story being told. This is just used as a tool for exploring other things that are on his mind.

In this future world, it has been declared unethical to allow “multiples” to exist at the same time: a person can only be reprinted after death. After we are taken through a pre-credits montage of Mickey’s first through 16th bodies, an unexpected twist of fate has 17 surviving when everyone assumes he has died, thereby printing 18 without realizing 17 is not really dead. These two characters are the leads in Mickey 17, and Pattison gives a performance that is unique, delightful, and illustrative of a breadth of talent wider than many realize.

Pattinson and Kristen Stewart have followed similar career paths after the Twilight series made them young movie stars—ironically, in both cases with objectively unremarkable performances (in Stewart’s case, that’s putting it diplomatically) in that subpar vampire fantasy series. In the years since, both of them have taken on far more interesting roles that have revealed surprising depths of talent. It would be fascinating to see them paired in a film again, but in a film that was actually good.

In the meantime, we can get a kick out of Mickey 17 in Mickey 17, a copy of a copy of a copy who is somehow frightened and insecure. When he meets Mickey 18, he discovers 18 to be very much over it, much more aggressive and even prone to revenge. You might even say nihilistic. I thought a lot about what might account for such drastic change in personality in the exact same person, and could never quite come up with anything. Mickey 17 is clearly fatigued by the memory of 16 different deaths. There is a fascinating thing to think about, though: with Mickey 17 still alive, presumably Mickey 18 can only be revived with the memories of Mickey 16, which means this is the first point at which two different versions of Mickey’s experience diverge.

This is much different from playing twins, and is more akin to playing clones, who are produced as people of the exact same age. It’s a deeply fascinating premise that Bong really doesn’t dig into deeply enough. The closest is when Mickey’s girlfriend, Nasha (Naomi Ackie), delights in the attempt at sleeping with two Mickeys at once. Mickey 17 is understandably baffled, and Mickey 18 is into it—even at one point running his fingers through 17’s hair. The scene gets interrupted, but I found myself relating to all three people involved. Who wouldn’t want to sleep with two Robert Pattinsons at once? And even though he’s not so much “hunky” as possessing a kind of stringy handsomeness, if I had Pattinson’s body I’d sleep with myself too.

But I haven’t even gotten to the “creepers,” the alien life on this planet so named by the very Trumpian character Kenneth Marshall (Mark Ruffalo, mugging in oversized teeth) and his wife, Ylfa (Toni Collette, stealing scenes as usual). These creatures have a vague resemblance to the “super pigs” in Bong’s 2017 film Ojka, only this time they’re closer to a cross between a muskox and a giant caterpillar. One of several nitpicky criticisms I have of Mickey 17 is how the “creepers” are the single form of life we see on the planet Niflheim. What sustains them? What do they eat? How do they thrive in a vacuum devoid of biodiversity? So far as we can tell, Nilfheim features only ice, and these creepers.

They do prove to be surprisingly intelligent, and a “translation device” gets introduced that, plot-wise, is a little too easy and convenient. Still, Bong manages to shoehorn in a lot of undeniably liberal talking points about colonization, and who is really an “alien.” And don’t get me wrong, of course I appreciate that, but much of it is a bit too on the nose.

Mickey 17 is undeniably entertaining, but also a bit too simple in its storytelling given the premise and its setting. The creepers are all impressively rendered, but I would have liked a bit more of the dazzle promised by this film’s marketing—either in terms of the visual effects, which lack color with its endless focus on white ice and snow contrasted with the metal and browns of the spaceship or the creeper creatures, or in terms of its plot turns. There’s not even as much action in this movie as you might expect. To be fair, it still has oddball sensibility to spare, which at the very least we can always expect of a Bong Joon Ho film. This is a movie that did not quite meet the excitement of my expectations, but the more I think about it, the more I think it will likely work well on rewatch.

Robert Pattinson doubles our pleasure in Mickey 17.

Overall: B

MY DEAD FRIEND ZOE

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

Spoiler alert! Zoe is dead. But, Natalie Morales plays her throughout My Dead Friend Zoe—never as a ghost, but only either as a memory in flashback, or as a figment of her best friend Merit’s imagination. Sonequa Martin-Green plays Merit as a woman with a very peculiar form of PTSD, who has been court-ordered to attend group therapy for veterans after an incident at work. It’s always clear that Merit feels guilt about Zoe’s death, but the specifics of Zoe’s death are not revealed until nearly the end of the film. It turns out to be a bit of a narrative zag that real-life veterans will likely find unsurprising, as it’s a pervasive problem among veterans.

My Dead Friend Zoe is a film that is both very much veterans-forward, and seems somewhat cautious with its themes and representations. Nearly the entire supporting cast is made up of actors who are also veterans, which is very cool; the end credits feature stills of the actors from the film and then photos of them in uniform. This includes Morgan Freeman, who served in the U.S. Air Force from 1955-1959, ages 18-22. Freeman, who has been a professional actor for over sixty years and remains at the top of his game at age 87, plays Merit’s group therapy facilitator. The other members of the group are all also actor-veterans hired for the parts.

This is a film that pointedly sidesteps politics, instead focusing on what traumatic experiences while serving does to people in the military. Indeed, it is noted to have been “inspired” by the stories of two veteran friends known to director and co-writer Kyle Hausmann-Stokes, himself an Iraq War veteran. The two different friends are shown to have been men, but Hausmann-Stokes makes the compelling choice of making the two friends in this film young women—one a Latina woman (Morales) and one a multiracial Black woman (Martin-Green). Indeed, Ed Harris, a veteran of acting if not of the Armed Forces himself, plays Merit’s grandfather Dale, who is the most significant supporting character in this story.

There is a lot of socioeconomic issues at play between Zoe, who characterizes herself as a person with no familial support to go back to after serving; and Merit, who points herself out as “a Black woman in America” just before Zoe points out that she’s one with a lake house. “I don’t have a lake house,” Merit counters. “My grandpa does.” Hausmann-Stokes seems to be playing a bit with common notions of power and privilege, and subtle ways. Whatever the reason for it, it’s unusual to see a multiracial family like this depicted on film, although aside from the one aforementioned reference, there is nothing discussed regarding the differences of cultural experience between Merit, a young Black woman, and her grandfather, an old White man—who does make a point of contrasting veterans of more recent conflicts being welcomed home after they served in Iraq or Afghanistan with how terribly veterans of the Vietnam War were treated when they came home.

There could be some ambivalence with seeing such a depiction of an old White man inferring that a young Black woman should count her blessings, and My Best Friend Zoe makes no effort to even illustrate how their experiences might be different outside the specific context of being veterans. It’s possible Merit’s grandfather was cast as a White man because so few people of color could have risen to the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the Vietnam War—though, not impossible: only 5% of Army Officers in Vietnam were Black, but they did exist—the highest-ranking, Roscoe Robinson Jr., having been the first African American to become a four-star general. How many of them might still be around today is perhaps a more challenging question, especially considering the number of them to reach the rank of Lieutenant Colonel or higher amounted to merely a handful.

None of these considerations detract at all from Harris’s performance, which is great as Dale, Merit’s grandfather who is diagnosed with early-stage Alzheimer’s. If anything, it’s kind of a bummer to see Harris, like so many older actors, getting relegated to roles like a grandpa with dementia. On the up side, Dale is just as multi-dimensional a character as Merit, a character written well enough to make playing the part worth the effort.

Zoe, as a character, is easily the most complex, and is also fleshed out impressively well, although I would have liked more detail in her backstory. In My Dead Friend Zoe, Zoe exists half the time as her actual self, and the other half as a projection in Merit’s mind. Hausmann-Stoles skillfully illustrates how, in the latter case, Zoe is actually an extension of Merit, and her guilt, however unfounded it might be. Merit blames herself, even though what actually happened to Zoe is not quite what the story leads us to believe for most of the time it’s being told. She’ll say things that Merit fears are how Zoe would feel, but we get to know Zoe well enough to know her better than that.

Merit is a woman dealing with far more than she should have to: the loss of her best friend; the resulting distraction at her job that ultimately got her court-ordered to therapy; the just-discovered dementia in her beloved grandfather. The one positive, which is a welcome subplot, is a barely-budding romance with Alex, the man taking over the assisted living facility previously run by his parents. Alex is played with warmth and compassion—and a dash of snark—by Utkarsh Ambudkar.

There is a bit more I would have liked out of My Dead Friend Zoe, but it has a unique twist on a well-worn premise, and winning performances all around. Its pointed message of supporting the needs of veterans who have given so much to this country, especially in ways the rest of us can barely imagine, is well taken. This film puts its money where its mouth is in ways few others do, offering resources for how to offer that support beyond just seeing the movie, which is still worth the time on its own merits.

A haunting of a different sort, courtesy of Zoe and Merit.

Overall: B+

UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE

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

An odd and unusual thing occurred when I went to SIFF Film Forum to see Universal Language tonight. When I arrived, about 15 minutes before showtime, there was a surprisingly large group of people already waiting—I would guess at least 30—outside the theater, which was not yet open. I, like probably many others, assumed maybe they did not open until shortly before the one showtime they had tonight, and waited patiently, even though we could see two or three people skulking around the dimly lit lobby through the glass walls. The minutes passed, and the crowd grew larger. Who knew this many people were eager to see this obscure Canadian-Iranian film, six days into its run at SIFF’s smallest theater?

Shortly after 7:00, the listed showtime, a young woman finally opened the door to announce they were still waiting for someone to arrive who could run the projector. She thanked us for our patience, said they hoped to let us in within five or ten minutes, and declared she also had a ticket and was excited to see this movie. Within minutes after that, finally, we were all let inside, and filtered into the theater as quickly as possible. There were no concessions for sale, but this crowd didn’t seem to care. The house was nearly sold out (in a theater capacity of 90), and within moments of the film starting, the audience was eating up this film—generously laughing at the most subtle of humor, a crowd typical of SIFF Cinema, eager to bridge gaps across cultures through cinema. Just like the characters in this movie.

What is my take, then? Honestly, I’m relatively ambivalent—I found Universal Language’s self-consciously absurdist charms to be effective, but often had no idea what the hell was really going on. I still can’t decide if that even matters. I’m not as eager as the rest of that crowd clearly was wholeheartedly to embrace this film regardless of how much sense it made, and yet, I found it a fun experience, in a rather bemusing way. I was impressed by how successfully it conveyed an often surrealist sensibility, without the use of camera tricks or special effects. This movie was clearly made on a shoestring budget, and still it looks great, thanks in large part to cinematographer Isabelle Stachtchenko.

Much of Universal Language went over my head, but I got this much: it straddles the line between absurdism and realism, and its odd sensibility and tone belie great narrative depths. There is a peculiar fusion of both culture and language, between Tehran, Iran and Winnipeg, Manitoba (in spite of a running joke with multiple characters mistaking it for a city in Alberta). Director and co-writer Matthew Rankin is himself a native Winnipegger, who plays a character in the film named Matthew, a government employee in Montreal who sheds his identity and hops on a bus to Winnipeg. On this bus he is joined by the “French immersion class” teacher (Mani Soleymanlou) who is never seen again after the bus breaks down outside Winnipeg, one of the narrative threads that kind of threw me for a loop—especially given that the film opens on that class.

But, there are two other interwoven storylines, and one of them involves a couple of girls from that class, who discover money frozen in ice and then go on a quest through the city to find the tools to chip it out of there. In this location, I was under the impression that we were all still in Montreal, but their quest later has them in Winnipeg, as though the two cities are easily traversed back and forth—even though it is specifically noted on the aforementioned bus that they have to ride all the way through Ontario between the two. But, maybe I missed something. I may have missed several things.

Finally, we meet Massoud (Pirouz Nemati), employee of the “Winnipeg Earmuff Authority” who freelances as a tour guide through amusingly absurd and innocuous “points of interest” in Winnipeg. This includes a briefcase abandoned on a park bench in 1978, and a stop at the memorial site for 19th-century Manitoban resistance fighter Louis Riel, where the tour group is asked to observe “thirty minutes of silence” in his honor. Eventually we learn that Matthew has returned to Winnipeg to reconnect with his ailing mother with whom he long ago lost touch, and who in her failing memory of old age has long been mistaking Massoud for her son, after a few years of him shoveling show for her. Ultimately this provides opportunity for connection through shared elements of identity, although for me this metaphor lacked clarity.

Still, between Matthew, Massoud, the girls, and even a couple of other students from the French immersion class, in the final act these seemingly disparate storylines connect in startlingly satisfying ways, puzzle pieces that suddenly fit together almost as if by accident. All the while, we are taken through a fictional version of Winnipeg where it has such a large population of Iranian immigrants that every sign is written in Persian, right down to those on a version of Tim Horton’s that is a teahouse that also sells doughnuts. Indeed, the vast majority of the dialogue in Universal Language is Persian, with merely a sprinkling of lines in French.

This blend of East and West is very much borne of the collaborators on this film, with Matthew Rankin co-writing the script with Iranian-Canadian friends Ila Firouzabadi and Pirouz Nemati (Nemati being, again, who plays Massoud, and Firouzabadi appears in a cameo as the bus driver, who argues with an old lady passenger who complains about having to sit next to a live turkey—who, the driver points out, had its own paid ticket).

Universal Language has a clear love of Persian culture, at the same time it has some fun with the notion of Winnipeg as a dull city with nothing worth attracting tourists (something I am certain is not true). It has a “Grey District” and a “Beige District.” Ironically, it is shot beautifully, with stark, almost Brutalist simplicity, often framing characters against a backdrop of grey concrete and white snow. I don’t know what it is about Winnipeg that apparently inspires wildly absurdist films; I couldn’t help but also think of the 2003 film The Saddest Music in the World, set in a Depression-era Winnipeg in which Isabella Rossellini gets two glass prosthetic legs filled with beer. The director of that film, Guy Maddin, also a native of Winnipeg, later directed the very strange 2007 film, a sort of local history through a dreamlike lens, My Winnipeg. Rankin seems very much to be following in Maddin’s footsteps, just with a much more multicultural bent.

If there is anything Universal Language decidedly is not, it’s American—it’s very Persian and very Canadian, with no American sensibility whatsoever. These days, that comes as a relief: a celebration of diversity through quietly fantastical cultural fusion. I didn’t always know what to make of Universal Language, but I enjoyed the journey through its tightly structured if untethered narrative.

Matthew Rankin and Pirouz Nemati embrace their differences.

Overall: B

PADDINGTON IN PERU

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

With two preceding films that have long been beloved and arguably became instant classics in their time, Paddington in Peru has a lot to live up to. I’ll get right to the point there: it doesn’t quite make it.

Paddington in Peru is fine. But, you want these movies to be better than fine. I suppose I should confess I really missed the boat—two boats, actually—with both Paddington and Paddington 2. Having been released in 2014 and 2017, respectively, I had already been reviewing movies for years by the time they came out, but I did not see either of them in theaters, I guess because I thought they looked too corny and cutesy. Little did I know! I finally watched them both in 2018 and was utterly—and predictably—charmed by them, although I seem to be in the minority position that the first is actually the better of the two. I have now seen them both three times, the third time in anticipation of Paddington in Peru—this practice often being a mistake. Indeed, I don’t recommend it. If it’s been a while since you saw either of the previous two films, do not rewatch them shortly before seeing this new one. You might actually enjoy it more.

And don’t get me wrong, I still enjoyed Paddington in Peru, in a whimsically nostalgic way that director Dougal Wilson clearly intended. This is Wilson’s debut feature film, after a long career directing music videos and film shorts, and the absence of Paul King, who directed the previous two films, is keenly felt. Granted, King went on to direct Wonka, which was definitively worse than this movie, so I’m not sure where that leaves us. In Wilson’s hands, while changing the setting away from London to Paddington’s country of origin is quite compelling, much of the film just feels like a franchise running out of steam.

This time out, we get new characters played by both Antonio Banderas and Olivia Colman, both apparently jumping at the chance to be in a Paddington movie in spite of their characters being undercooked. Banderas makes the best of a character haunted by generations of ancestors looking for treasure in Peru, a boat captain named Huner Cabot, but as written, he never fully clicks into the story. Colman certainly fares better as the “Reverend Mother” who turns out to be a villain a step slightly back in the direction of Nicole Kidman from the first film. This is not really a spoiler, as Colman only stops short of literally winking at the camera, in a way that’s one of the most endearing elements of the film. She lets the word “suspicious” slip out in amusingly suspicious ways.

The entire Brown family is also back, cast with mostly the same actors, which is comforting—once again we get Hugh Bonneville as Henry; and Madeleine Harris and Samuel Joslin as the kids, Judy and Jonathan, now seven years older than they were in Paddington 2. Julie Walters also returns as Mrs. Bird, but for reasons apparently unknown, Emily Mortimer replaces Salley Hawkins as May Brown. It’s an okay replacement, I guess, as I didn’t even realize the actor had been replaced until I looked at IMDb. In any case, it’s nice to see the whole family again, but as they all take a family trip to Peru with Paddington to help him find his Aunt Lucy who has gone missing from the Home for Retired Bears, they seldom serve any purpose besides fitting into slots of obligation.

In the early scenes, when Paddington gets photos taken for his passport now that he’s become a British citizen, it’s easy to be charmed. When the Browns travel to Peru, the momentum peters out a bit, the deceptively hilarious whimsey of the previous films largely absent. Boat captain Hunter Cabot shows up with his concerned daughter Gina (Carla Tous), and the vibe is a bit incongruous. Olivia Colman’s Reverend Mother isn’t a perfect character either, but Colman is clearly having such a great time, I couldn’t help but have fun watching her.

Of course things do come full circle in a way with Paddington in Peru, the third film set in the country he came from, and the action picks up in the last act in a fairly satisfying way. The story closes in a way that really tugs on our nostalgia strings, and I was not immune to it. In spite of the story sagging a bit prior to that, I got a little teary eyed. This movie works as a coda of sorts to the Paddington franchise, even if it’s undeniably inferior to what came before it—an all-too common turn in the third part of a film series.

I will say this: Paddington in Peru looks spectacular. The visual effects are top notch, especially in the Peru sequences, where the detail in the rendering of Paddington bear is incredible. I won’t say it makes up for a relatively mediocre plot, but this movie is visually dazzling, and that’s still something. And of course, Paddington himself—especially as voiced by the delightful Ben Wishaw—is as lovable as ever. This one may not be an instant classic, but it still invites us back into a world we know and love, still a warm and cozy place to visit.

Not as great as we wanted, but we can make the most of it: maybe use Paddington’s approach to all things when watching this movie.

LOVE HURTS

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

Ke Huy Quan deserves a successful, fun, smart action movie that proves he’s bankable beyond the stunning alignment of stars that was Everything Everywhere All at Once. We’re now three years beyond that film, and Quan has been cast in the starring role of the action comedy Love Hurts, which is . . . not that movie.

It’s difficult to express precisely how bad this movie is. To be fair, there was some talent that went into it—Quan himself is in it, after all, and he’s the one person in it giving a passable performance. But oh my god, the script! Something truly unexpected comes to mind: the old Christian quote about how Jesus answered when asked how much he loves us: “This much, he answered: then he stretched out his arms and died.” Time to flip the script, so to speak: that’s how much I hated the writing in this movie. I should really be admitted into a hospital.

Love Hurts was written by a team of three writers, whom I will do the courtesy of not naming here. The possibility that any of them might be proud of this work makes me despair for humanity. I could have written a better script in a single evening with one hand tied behind my back. While on a triple dose of Ambien.

It’s almost worse that the premise could have actually worked. Marvin Gable (Quan) is a real estate agent who has reinvented himself after a life of crime working with his brother, Alvin (Daniel Wu), who has sent several of his goons after Marv after hearing that Rose (Ariana DeBose), who was supposed to have been killed for stealing from Alvin, is actually alive and has returned. Hardly original, true—but it doesn’t have to be. All that’s needed is some chemistry, charisma, and wit, and you have the makings of passable entertainment. But Quan has no chemistry with DeBose; all of the supporting actors have zero charisma; and the story is completely witless. I suppose I should be fair. I did laugh a couple of times when it was unintentionally funny.

Did I mention that Alvin’s nickname is “Knuckles”? Or that Sean Astin shows up, quite randomly, as Marv’s boss with a cowboy hat and an exaggerated Southern accent?

Everything that happens in Love Hurts is unbearably rote and obvious. Every character exists as nothing more than an exposition factory. Given the streamer’s executive notes to creators that characters should repeatedly say aloud what they are doing, this should have been released on Netflix. I’d say that why anyone would waste their time seeing this movie in the theater escapes me, except that’s precisely what I just did. There were four other people in the theater. All those empty seats were the sensible choice. The rest of us need a wellness check.

I knew this movie was headed nowhere good as soon as it began, with excessive voiceover narration, declaring Valentine’s Day a day full of delightful surprises. Marv gets on the phone with depressive his assistant, Ashley (Lio Tipton), who is getting ready for the office Valentine’s Day party. What office ever throws a party for Valentine’s Day?

Three of Knuckles’s henchmen get what pass for subplots in this movie. One, “The Raven,” becomes a love interest for Ashley when she discovers his book of poetry. Then there are Otis and King, played by André Eriksen and Marshawn Lynch respectively, who spend a lot of time shooting guns at people but not hitting their targets, with one exception that is played for one of the many laughs that fall flat. I don’t fault anyone for being a fan of Marshawn Lynch, he seems like a delightful enough guy, but that does not make him a good actor. His relatively unnatural line readings could perhaps be forgiven if not for nearly every other performance being phoned in. Seahawks fans might get a minor kick out of hearing Lynch literally say “Beast mode!” when he tackles someone during a fight, but to me it felt like an Easter egg in the wrong basket. Anyway, King keeps giving Otis advice on how to mend his relationship with his wife and, you don’t care, do you? God knows I didn’t.

If Love Hurts has any redeeming quality, it’s the fight choreography—this is the only time the movie stops being oppressively stupid and becomes genuinely fun. But these moments are fleeting, largely because we don’t get nearly enough of them. While they are happening, the fight choreography flits between clever and corny, but appears to have been done practically, if sometimes obscured by frenetic cinematography. But it’s as though these martial arts exist in a different movie. If only they did.

Ke Huy Quan, to his credit, is the best thing in this movie, which isn’t saying much for a film that so brazenly sets the bar low. The bar is in the basement. It’s in the Earth’s core. But Quan is game and appears to be having fun. Still, I have to wonder about his judgment. The fact that all of these actors read this script and thought it was worth shooting makes me wonder about their reading comprehension.

Maybe this was a test, for all of us. Where is the reward? I sat through an 83-minute movie that felt like an eternity and all I got was this ridiculous review.

Yes, that is correct. This movie misses the mark.

Overall: D+

I'M STILL HERE

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

The more I think about I’m Still Here, the more impressed I become with it—and not just because Fernanda Torres, as the central character, Eunice Paiva, is easily the best thing about it. That’s the most obvious thing to be impressed by, actually. I found myself saying, a bit prematurely, that this movie was good but didn’t blow me away. But “blowing me away” is not what director Walter Salles is going for. He’s going for something far more subtle, something that succeeds in impressing those who pay attention to detail.

This is based on the true story of a wife and mother, and her five children, and their resilience in the face of a brutal dictatorship—specifically the military dictatorship in Brazil between the 1960s and the 1980s. And the word “brutal” is not used lightly here. It’s easily to imagine graphic violence when thinking of such things, but one of the many takeaways from I’m Still Here is that there are many forms of brutality. Some of them hide in plain sight, while society goes on as though everything is normal. Families still go to the beach, barely noticing military trucks driving by.

There’s a memorable quality to the editing in this film, as Salles initially immerses us in the Paiva family’s daily life, showing us a casually comfortable, happy marriage, and five kids clearly being given a great childhood. All of this changes in a matter of hours, when unfamiliar men show up at their door, and declare that “Congressman” Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello) must be taken in for questioning. Rubens has not been a Congressman for several years, and has even recently returned from exile after being ousted from his position, but the reference is pointed.

This is the last time anyone in that family sees Rubens, and I’m Still Here is the story of how the family left behind coped with this injustice. This includes both Eunice and one of her older daughters shortly thereafter being detained as well, questioned, pressured to identify other people in a binder of mugshots. Eunice is held for 12 days, the entire time having no idea what they’ve done with her daughter—who is sent home after only a day, but Eunice doesn’t know that. Meanwhile, she can overhear the torture of other detainees in other rooms.

There is a key moment in the sequence of scenes at the place Eunice has been taken, a young man, a guard, who escorts her from her cell to questioning and back. Just before her release, the young man says to her, “I want you to know, I don’t approve.” And that means what, exactly? This young man represents something far too few people think about: that terrible regimes thrive on the willing cooperation of people who “don’t approve.”

This whole experience, as well as years of experience thereafter, changes Eunice. She does everything she can to get the government to admit her husband was arrested, and accepts him as dead within a couple of years. She becomes a lawyer and an advocate. And most critically, she still insists on raising a happy family. When a local reporter comes to get a family photo and says the publisher asked for them to look more serious, Eunice refuses. All the kids giggle, she encourages it, and insists that they all smile for the photo. Eunice is an inspiring woman for many reasons, not least of which is her refusal to let anyone steal her joy—even as she still works tirelessly for justice.

I’m Still Here makes two unusually large time-jumps, first 25 years from 1971 to 1996; then another 18 years to 2014. Both of them function as epilogues of a sort, first when Eunice finally gets some closure, if not quite justice—the regime change is to her advantage, although it’s also noted how even when regimes change, the perpetrators of the worst crimes are far too often never held to account. The final sequence, in which little occurs beyond a portrait of how the extended family has grown to that point, Eunice is played not by Fernanda Torres, but by Torres’s real-life mother, Fernanda Montenegro—an accomplished actress in her own right, and who starred in Walter Salles’s previous film from 1998, Central Station.

With I’m Still Here, Salles has created something so straightforward that it doesn’t seem all that profound while watching it. But there is something ingenious about its construction, a subversive thread that is a indicator of the sinister nature of dictatorship, especially when daily life seems basically unchanged for anyone besides those directly affected. This is a film that could not possibly be more timely.

Don’t let the bastards get you down.

COMPANION

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

Companion is nothing if not consistent. Everything about it comes together at the same frequency, which I suppose might be best characterized as adequate fun. It’s better than average, but I’d hardly call it exceptional. It’s a science fiction thriller with nothing original to say but with a satisfying economy of storytelling. Writer-director Drew Hancock can be credited with at least that much.

If you want to keep your film budget capped at $10 million, just set the story in a secluded mansion in the woods, limiting the primary characters to five. There’s a few interactions with extraneous minor characters, but in this entire film, we only ever see ten people onscreen. A good majority of the 97-minute runtime is focused on the five people staying for the weekend in the house: the rich Russian who owns the place, Sergey (Rupert Friend, really laying on the Russian accent thick); his young trophy wife, Kat (Megan Sure); and the two couples visiting: Josh and Iris (Jack Quaid and Sophie Thatcher), and Eli and Patrick (Harvey Guillén and Lukas Gage). Side note: Guillén and Gage are both gay, and both have been cast in multiple roles as gay characters, which is a nice bit of consistent representation.

As for the story in Companion, here lies a dilemma. This is the kind of movie that is very difficult to market in a way that both gets people to buy tickets and avoids revealing too much. Ditto writing a review about it. I go to the movies multiple times a week, which means I sat through the initial cut of Companion’s trailer, with its caginess and vague hints at what’s going on in the story, countless times—never feeling especially compelled to go see it. Then a second cut of the trailer was released, and suddenly I thought: oh, I do want to see that. And yet, the details revealed in the new trailer certainly robbed me of some of the joy I’d have gotten had I come into it knowing far less.

It does make me wonder if I’d have been more immediately impressed with Companion had I known less about it going in. This film is written and cut in such a way that, for the first quarter or so of its runtime, all you know is this small group of people has come to spend a weekend together—and, for some reason, Josh’s friends all regard Iris with an odd reticence and borderline suspicion. Something’s up, but we’re not meant to know what, until the inevitable turn that reveals what’s really going on—and then the story can unfold from there.

The script is arguably fairly predictable either way, but it is especially so when you go in knowing what the basic premise is. I’m not certain I would have thought this movie was better had I not known, but I almost certainly would have had more fun. And I did find this movie pretty fun regardless.

With all that in mind, I am taking great pains not to reveal much about this movie at all, even though there’s a lot more I could say about it if I did. I will say that the casting is interesting, for different reasons all around, but especially Sophie Thatcher, an undeniably beautiful young woman with minor physical imperfections that get underscored by the nature of the character she’s playing. Also, Companion has a moment or two of suspense but is never particularly scary, but has a couple moments of graphic violence. And the sparing use of such moments does increase their inpact.

So here’s what it all comes down to: Companion is a fun diversion, if not one you absolutely need to see in theaters. I would recommend watching it on whatever streamer it later winds up on, though (it’s a Warner Bros. Pictures film, so, probably on Max). Just make a note of this title, don’t learn anything more about the story, and watch it blind when you get the chance. You’ll have a good time.

It’s unexceptional but fun!

Overall: B

THE SEED OF THE SACRED FIG

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

It has been widely reported that The Seed of the Sacred Fig was made in secret, and that is the first thing we see in the film, white text on a black background: This film was made in secret. There is a second line on that title card, though, something that will stick with me for a while: When there is no way, a way must be made.

A way was certainly made by writer-director Mohammad Rasoulof, who made this film in Tehran, shortly before he was sentenced to eight years in prison, flogging, a fine, and confiscation of his property. He had already faced legal troubles from the Iranian regime for previous films, dating back to 2010. He has since fled the country, a painstaking journey that took 28 days but allowed him to be present at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2024. As far as I can gather from extremely limited information online, Rasoulof’s wife (Rozita Hendijanian) and child are still in Iran.

People love to use the word “brave” to describe all manner of involvement in art, and particularly in film. Anyone be hard pressed to outmatch Rasoulof when it comes not just to his dedication to art and craft, but the use of art to speak truth to power—something we rarely see employed to the same degree in America, though we may see more of it here soon. It’s unlikely Rasoulof used The Seed of the Sacred Fig as any kind of allegory for where the U.S. is headed, but it’s difficult not to make the comparisons as American audiences. This kind of fascism is very much the direction in which we are headed, which is also stepping in the direction of theocracy.

Iran, of course, is already there, and Rasoulof pulls of an astonishing accomplishment with The Seed of the Sacred Fig. Just knowing the entire film was made in secret puts everything we see onscreen in a different light, as none of it looks like a film made with any such constraints. This includes several scenes of characters driving through Tehran streets, and I kept wondering how he could have mounted cameras on the vehicles without looking conspicuous.

There are so many things I love about this film, I’m not even sure where to begin. Perhaps with the title itself, which, after the initial title card, the film offers a brief explanation: the “sacred fig” is a species that wraps itself around another tree and gradually strangles it to death, until it can stand on its own. This is a symbol of the story to follow, which centers around a family of four: regime-loyal parents Iman and Najmeh (Missagh Zareh and Soheila Golestani, respectively) and their much more progressive and idealistic teenage daughters, Rezvan and Sana (Mahsa Rostami and Setareh Maleki, respectively).

This film is unusually long, at two hours and 47 minutes, but a lot goes down, it is never slow, and almost none of it feels like wasted time. The run time allows for an illustration of how ideologies can gradually either strengthen or unravel, depending on the person and the circumstance. Iman has been working as a government “investigator,” then given a promotion, in a new job where he is asked to approve sentencing with no time to actually review the cases. He starts with some level of indignity but ultimately an inability to shed his dedication to this government; Najmeh can only tell him it’s his job so it’s what he has to do. They spend a lot of time giving what appear to outsiders to be clear oppressors the benefit of the doubt. Rezvan and Sana respond to increasingly violent government crackdowns on student protests with the healthy skepticism of their youth.

It’s when Rezvan’s friend from school gets mixed up in a violent clash with police at a school demonstration, and she is brought to this family’s home to dress her wounds, that things get thorny. Najmeh does this only begrudgingly, having already spent a great deal of time admonishing her daughters to be extremely careful about their associations and their public behavior as a reflection of their father in his new position. This friend, Sadaf (Niousha Akhshi), maintains her innocence, that she just happens to have been outside her dorm when the police attacked, and so Rezvan maintains the same, to the last. Rasoulof never makes explicitly clear whether Sadaf and Resvan really are “innocent,” perhaps because it doesn’t matter.

The Seed of the Sacred Fig is set during the 2022 protests in Iran, and Rasoulof’s editor, Andrew Bird, who did his work after the footage was smuggled out of Iran to Hamburg, pointedly cuts in real footage of some very distressing violence in the government crackdown. Much of it just feels chaotic and without direction; several show some pretty shocking images. The characters in the film are divided in a way presumably many families in Iran were: parents taking television news at their word; younger people watching clips online posted by protesters.

The plot takes a very specific turn, quite a while into the film, when Iman’s gun goes missing. This is a pistol lent to him by a colleague as self-defense against oppositional forces already known to find and publish the home addresses of judges and associates hauntingly down clearly unjust convictions and sentences. The disappearance of this gun sows distrust between all four members of this family, and serves as a kind of central mystery to the story: what happened to this gun? Which one of them took it? For some time, I was convinced Iman, over-stressed by his job, just left it somewhere he forgot. Of course, things get much more complicated than that.

All of this political unrest serves as the backdrop for this conflict, which becomes the—pardon the pun—trigger point for what might finally, truly tear them apart. Iman can’t imagine any of the three of them taking his gun from him, but is effectively forced to regard all three of them as suspects in the matter. And when the inevitable happens and they have to flee their home due to their address getting shared online, conflicts come to a head between the four of them in a secluded house far outside the city.

This was the one stretch of The Seed of the Sacred Fig where I disengaged slightly, as the narrative shifts to something closer to a conventional thriller than the dense story and plotting that led up to it. In the end, the conflict shifts to the patriarch against all the women, which also feels (rightfully) pointed. I do love that Rasoulof has made a film where all of empathies, and nearly all of its depicted perspectives, lie with the three women central to the story.

Then, the “climactic” sequence involves an extended foot chase through some desert ruins, which went on long enough for me so start wondering what exactly we’re doing here. This was the only point in the film where I felt some cutting for time would have been fine, even as I can acknowledge that Rasoulof might very well have had specific intention with how he dwells on wife and mother, daughters and sisters all running in panicked, labyrinthine circles around the man trying to dictate their lives. I felt slightly ambivalent about the very end, but not enough to move how deeply impressed I am by this film overall.

We should all be spending more time hearing the voices of women like these.

Overall: A-

DOG MAN

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

Dog Man is a cute, sweet, sporadically very funny movie, based on a series of graphic novels of the same name by Dav Pilkey, which were themselves a spinoff of Pilkey’s original Captain Underpants illustrated novel series. Dog Man is also overstuffed with antic plotting, and feels a bit overlong even at an 89-minute runtime. Surely young kids will love it; they don’t care about nuances of criticism. As for how the adults will like it when they take children to see it? Well, they won’t likely hate it, at least.

On the topic of animated feature films that manage to reach both children and adults at their own levels simultaneously, Dog Man is impressive in how often it manages this, even without particularly sophisticated or subversively “adult” humor. This movie is wholesome top to bottom, and is only rated PG, I would assume, because of the cartoon violence in it. The protagonist is a loyal dog’s head transplanted onto the body of his beloved police officer master, after all, and director and co-writer Peter Hastings (collaborating with Pilkey on the script) somewhat pointedly skirts past the darker implications there. This means Officer Knight is effectively dead, right? Someone tell all the children in the screenings so they understand! Actually, I’d have more respect for this film if it found some way to say Officer Knight—or his head, anyway—had gone to live on a farm.

Indeed, there is a vibe of some missed opportunity with Dog Man, a film that is filled with self-awareness and packed with jokes and sight gags—I enjoyed the gag where two characters argued on opposite sides of a split screen and one of them literally grabbed the line splitting the image. It’s that kind of subtly meta stuff that really works in this movie. Unfortunately, while many of the jokes land, plenty of them don’t, and the latter happen when the story sags under the weight of its own bloat.

I keep thinking of the halcyon days of the 75-minute animated feature film, something that was far more common roughly thirty years ago and earlier. This is much more appropriate to the attention span of young child audiences, and many animated features in the past decade—specifically those meant for kids—have leaned closer to an hour and 45 minutes. Given the desire for theaters to maximize showtimes and therefore ticket sales, I’m at a loss as to what the endgame is there, unless the skill of the storytelling justifies the length, which is rare. And getting to Dog Man, this is a film that would land far more effectively for adults and children alike with a runtime closer to 75 minutes, but for some reason filmmakers seem to think they need to “flesh out” these stories.

But Dog Man is exceedingly simple: once Dog and Man combine, they become a “Supa Cop,” easily capturing OK City’s biggest villain, Petey the (of course) evil cat—voiced pretty entertainingly by Pete Davidson. He plots to take over the world and rid it of all “do-gooders,” going so far as to clone himself, not realizing the clone will appear as a kitten who won’t grow up for 18 years. “Li’l Petey” (voiced adorably by Lucas Hopkins Calderon) comes out of the clone machine—easily ordered by mail by Petey—with an innocence that, naturally, brings everyone together in the end. Spoilers!

Anyway, Petey is just as good at escaping prison—in an admittedly delightful montage—as Dog Man is at catching him, so this just becomes a cycle until Petey ups the ante with all manner of wild inventions, including my favorite: a robot he calls “80-Hexatron Droidformigon,” or “80-HD.” The robot becomes a quasi-character in its own right, although the rest of the cast is much more amusing, including Lil Red Howery as Dog Man’s bumbling police Chief; Cheri Oteri as OK City’s comically corrupt Mayor; Isla Fisher as ambitious TV reporter Sarah Hatoff; Stephen Root as Petey’s deadbeat dad; and Ricky Gervais as the movie’s most baffling character, an evil fish villain named Flippy. (Look for the obvious Aliens reference when Flippy goes after Li’l Petey and Petey shouts, “Get away from him you fish!”)

Flippy makes a nice segue into what doesn’t work all that well in Dog Man. Flippy serves as a villain to unite all the others against, but the plot mechanics are unnecessarily convoluted, and the “climactic” sequence this ushers in is less exciting than it is baffling. Literal buildings are brought to life as sort of building-monsters that wreak havoc, almost Gozilla-style. Dog Man winds up operating a giant “Mecha Mail Man” to battle them with. It’s all very: what? Although it still gets a few funny gags, none of it really works as well as the rest of the movie does.

Ultimately, Dog Man falls into the same trap nearly every other superhero movie does, predictably ending in a massive, ridiculously high-stakes battle blowout. Who the hell created the rule that every superhero movie has to end this way? Peter Hastings does smuggle in a subtle (and very brief) commentary on this very trope, but while also fully participating in it. I’d have much preferred a resolution only between Dog Man, Petey and Li’l Petey without any involvement with a supervillain fish and monster buildings. And haven’t we had enough of Ricky Gervais anyway? There’s a man who started off strong and then long outlasted his welcome.

To be fair, as “superhero movies” go, Dog Man is unlike any other. It just would have been far more successful, even on its own terms, with some script polishing and tightening of the editing. It wasn’t what I wanted nor what it could have been, but to its credit, I still had a good time. And none of my criticisms will mean anything whatsoever to a seven-year-old who will certainly have a blast watching it.

Just do your job Dog Man!

Overall: B