THE FIRE INSIDE

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

The Fire Inside opens with an overhead drone shot of Ryan Destiny as Claressa Shields, as a preteen, future Olympic gold medal-winning boxer, jogging across town in Flint, Michigan, to a gym where she’s determined to learn to box. It’s a very effective establishing shot, in spite of how overused drone shots are in movies anymore. But this particular shot illustrates a key point in filmmaking, which is that the tool doesn’t matter so much as how it’s used.

I suppose the same could be same of Claressa herself (commonly referred to in the film as “Ressa”). After telling her he doesn’t train girls, coach Jason Crutchfield (Brian Tyree Henry) sees something in her defiance after the boys he’s been training in the ring give her shit. He invites her into the ring, he gives her some pointers, she takes them on like a natural, and a great relationship is born.

This movie follows pretty standard sports movie story beats, until it doesn’t. Maybe two thirds of the way through, Claressa has worked her way through regional and national boxing championships, and ultimately gets her gold medal. (That’s not a spoiler, given that this is based on a true story.) But then the story jumps forward six months, and we see how Claressa has settled back into her life in Flint, little changed from her life before traveling the world. She resents her male athlete counterparts enjoying lucrative endorsements while those opportunities remain out of her reach.

The Fire Inside is directed by Rachel Morrison, in her feature film directorial debut—and she does an adequate, if not spectacular, job. She has many other credits as a cinematographer, most notably having shot Black Panther. She works with a different cinematographer here, Rina Yang, who brings a fresh visual perspective to a pretty standard genre. The script writer, though, is Barry Jenkins, who here seems to be tackling unusually standard fare compared to his previous work, having written and directed both the absolute masterpiece Moonlight and its follow-up, If Beale Street Could Talk. Both that and The Fire Inside are undeniably compelling and pretty to look at, but Moonlight is a tough act to follow.

The thing is, if you dig deep enough—some might even say nitpick—it’s fairly easy to find fault and flaws in The Fire Inside. Claressa’s mother, Jackie (Olunike Adeliyi), is depicted as a pretty bad mother at the beginning of the story, and gains some maternal instinct by the end, without us ever seeing how she got there. I was relieved to see her humanized, at least; it would have been easy to villainize her. Then there are Claressa’s siblings, including a sister who becomes a teen mother, a detail we are shown without any real connection to Claressa’s overall story.

And yet—there’s a lot in The Fire Inside that makes up for all of this. Ryan Destiny is fantastic in the lead part, portraying a teenager who is equal parts driven and petulant. Brian Tyree Henry is well cast as the father figure Claressa needs, although her father’s release from prison complicates the relationship (something this movie actually simplifies a bit, in a kind of Hollywood-movie way). The boxing scenes are staged well enough to make someone like me, who could not have the least bit of interest in boxing outside of a movie like this, invested in the outcome.

Although the story here focuses more on her first gold medal, her status as a singularly accomplished athlete is her second gold medal, which finally helped her accomplish some of the goals that seemed out of reach at first. Perhaps most notable of these is how she demanded that women Olympic athletes in training get the same stipend as the male athletes, who previously were given three times the amount women got. There’s a fair amount of feminist inspiration in The Fire Inside—let women get away with saying they enjoy beating people up!—and it feels notable that it has nothing to say about race in Claressa’s story. Perhaps I am jumping to conclusions that there is any need for it to, though. It’s enough that this is a film with a majority-Black cast with what feels like honest depictions of their community, including several allusions to Flint being a city that got unfairly ignored.

This is a flawed film with some narrative inconsistencies, and which I also really enjoyed watching. And an imperfect movie is a great hang, how much do the flaws matter?

You can ignore the bullshit if you keep your eye on the prize.

Overall: B

NIGHTBITCH

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

I’ll give Nightbitch this much: it’s deeply engaging from start to finish. Some of the time you may not quite understand what’s so compelling about it, or indeed what the overall point is, but it’s still engaging.

It’s also very, very odd. It’s a layered film, in that it has layers of oddness. One particularly odd thing is how it moves back and forth from being a little too on the nose, and being metaphorically opaque.

This is the story of a woman (Amy Adams) who turns into a dog, after all. It’s confusing to her at first, but ultimately becomes her means of being set free, specifically from her resentment toward motherhood being far more overwhelming than she expected. Why a dog? You got me there. It occurred to me that it was possible I was having a gendered reaction to this heavy-handed yet unclear metaphor—I cannot have children, so who am I to judge? Sort of to my relief, it appears that other critics’ reviews of this film are pretty evenly mixed between the genders, whether they quite liked it or they didn’t.

The script, co-written by director Marielle Heller, is far more muddled than the previous feature film for which she wrote the script, The Diary of a Teenage Girl. And if the script isn’t great, it matters less when everything else is great. Nightbitch opens with the mother and son at the grocery store, and when another young mom sees her and asks how she’s doing, she immediately fantasizes about unloading all of her frustrations. It is no doubt very relatable to just about any mother, but also filled with sentiments we have heard many times over. One might even be tempted to call it deeply unoriginal.

The curious thing with Nightbitch is that Amy Adams’s stellar performance makes up for far more than it ought to. She’s incredible in this movie—both as a frustrated mother, and as a woman turning into a dog at night. She bites into this role with no vanity, giving us a performance on film more memorable than anything she’s done in nearly a decade. Nightbitch is almost worth seeing just for her alone.

I’m glad I saw it, anyway. I’m not going to urge anyone else to rush out and see it. I do love that Heller is uninterested in taking any particular moral stance on motherhood: there is no judgment here, and if there is anything done deftly in this script, it’s the adorable little boy (played by twins, Arleigh and Emmett Snowden), who is never anything but a perfectly normal toddler. There are no “special needs” or unusually challenging behaviors that set the mother off the edge. He won’t fall asleep when his mom wants him to, just like virtually any other kid. This is about motherhood being overwhelming no matter what the kid is like, and Nightbitch exists only to empathize with that—and with the quiet cluelessness of a husband (Scoot McNairy) who assumes he’s being supportive while never truly seeing the burdens of parenthood that he rarely thinks to engage with.

All of that is what I understand about Nightbitch. It’s the whole dog business that throws me. She develops heightened senses, particularly of smell, and starts to attract other neighborhood dogs to her door, who bring her dead animals as offerings. She starts to deeply hate the household cat, which makes for a few moments of good comedy even if it’s a little weirdly off the mark: dogs tend to be very affectionate toward cats if they are part of the same household. There’s a particular group of three dogs that keep coming around, and I began to wonder if other women are turning into dogs too, and perhaps we are meant to understand these dogs are actually the three other moms that keep chatting up our protagonist at the storytime group she brings her son to. But, there is never any clarity on this.

I do wish Heller had drawn a bolder line between what might be merely in this mother’s imagination, and how “real” what she’s going through actually is. The mother tells her husband about strange hair growths, but never shows him the tail that starts growing out of her lower back, or the extra sets of nipples that appear on her abdomen. The husband just keeps moving along in blissful ignorance, which I suppose is part of the point.

There are no named characters in Nightbitch’s primary family, by the way—this is why I have not referred to any of them by name here. Amy Adams is credited as “Mother”; Scoot McNairy as “Husband,” and the different types of descriptors there seems very deliberate. The little twin boy actors are credited as “Son.” Even in flashbacks, Kerry O’Malley is credited as “Mother’s Mother.” There’s something to this, how family roles erase previous identities. Again, it could have been illustrated with greater clarity.

Mother does use the word “Nightbitch” at one point in the film, because of her getting snippy with the Husband in the middle of the night when it’s only reasonable he take a turn dealing with the boy. Heller then very much literalizes the idea, and turns Mother into a bitch. Maybe the idea is that being a bitch is surprisingly freeing—although, as a dog, Mother sure sprints through the streets in the middle of traffic a lot. If this happened in real life, she’d get run over by a car her first night out. Even this interpretation of “bitch” as a metaphor has no clean application, however, as Mother is only a bitch in the behavioral sense a couple of times. She turns into a dog to get some space away from the tedious frustrations of motherhood, which is pretty distinct from being a bitch. Then again, many people would judge such a woman to be a bitch whether it’s fair or not, so maybe I’m walking right back into the point here.

There’s some real weight to that maybe though, when Nightbitch is arguably—and admirably—Marielle Heller’s most ambitious work to date, but also her most challenging to make clear sense of.

Bitch please.

Overall: B

ALL WE IMAGINE AS LIGHT

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

All We Imagine as Light is the most critically acclaimed wide-release movie of the year, so I went in primed to love it. Since I liked it just okay, that rendered it kind of a letdown.

Maybe there’s something I’m just missing. Maybe I’ll watch this again one day and think: What was I thinking? This is a masterpiece! But I doubt it. I’ll be too busy watching other new movies. This is a good example, though, of how stupidly caught up I can get in the score at review aggregate sites like MetaCritic. A “Must-See” score of 94? It must be amazing! No, not really.

I should have trusted the feeling I had when I watched the trailer. I could find nothing in there that looked particularly worth getting excited about. This is not to say that I can’t find incredibly quiet movies—a huge amount of the dialogue in this film is delivered barely above a whisper—to be deeply impressive. It’s just that this movie, in particular, I am a bit at a loss when it comes to the universal praise it’s getting. Side note: the MetaCritic user score of “Generally Favorable” 7.1 out of 10 is much more in line with how I felt about it.

Which is to say, I don’t have any harsh criticisms of it either. This is just another example, of many films that critics gush over but audiences aren’t nearly as impressed by. There is a perennial divide between the intellectualist consumption of film critics and the populist tastes of audiences, and once again, I find myself falling somewhere in the space between.

And it’s not like I am incapable of gushing over films that general audiences don’t really connect with. Consider TÁR (2022), a film I loved. But there are key things that sets that film apart, including its cinematography, its editing, and most significantly, a stunning performance by Cate Blanchett. I suppose it’s not really fair to compare that to All We Imagine as Light, an international independent film with naturalistic actors totally unknown to American audiences.

I should note that this does not mean they are unknown at all. The lead actor, Kani Kusruti, has more than forty other acting credits. She plays Prabha, a nurse working in Mumbai a year after the husband she was arranged by family to marry went to Germany to work and now no longer even calls her. Her younger and more carefree roommate, Anu, is played by Divya Prabha, who has 16 other acting credits. They work at the same hospital, along with Parvaty, the hospital cook played by Chaya Kadam, who has 60 acting credits. Parvaty is a widow who is getting forced out of the home she’s lived in for 22 years because she has no papers to prove her residence, her late husband having never discussed it with her, and now developers want to build on the land.

I was pretty compelled by the framing of All We Imagine as Light at the start, writer-director Payal Kapadia opening with tracking shots of everyday life in the crowded streets of Mumbai. This is accompanied by anonymous voiceover voices, each in a different language, sharing their impressions of life in that particular city. The differing languages serves to underscore the cosmopolitan nature—if still strictly from the Indian subcontinent—specific to Mumbai. It’s an effective setup for a film primed to be a uniquely accurate portrait of a city, which is the kind of thing I tend to be really into.

Once that introductory vignette is done, it cuts to Prabha, commuting on one of Mumbai’s ubiquitous trains. We only very slowly get to know her, and her living situation, her job, her absent husband, her young roommate who asks her to cover rent this month. There is an aspect of this film using just a few characters to convey a sense of living in the city, and it is indeed done very well—if quietly, and at an incredibly measured pace.

Somewhat surprisingly, only the first half of the film is set in Mumbai. When Parvati decides to stop fighting the developers and move back to her coastal home village 150 miles south of Mumbai, Prabha and Anu help her move, turning it into their own trip to Ratnagiri. This is comparatively very remote, green, serene, and near the beach, and it’s where the second half of the film is set. It’s also where All We Imagine as Light briefly turns into a kind of fantasy on Prabha’s part, and after such gritty realism it had me momentarily very confused.

There is also a subplot regarding Anu engaged in a romance with a young Muslim man named Shiaz (Hridhu Haroon), and I had slightly mixed feelings about its fairly rote “forbidden love” aspect. There’s a scene in which Anu is going to sneak out to Shiaz’s neighborhood when his parents are gone to a wedding, but in order not to attract unwanted attention she buys a burka to wear as a disguise. How do Muslim audiences respond to this, I wonder?

If nothing else, I must say that All We Imagine as Light is executed with tenderness above all, a deep empathy for its characters, particularly the three women around whom the story revolves. These details are all very much in the film’s favor, which is sprinkled with several moments of quiet profundity, occasionally quite memorably framed as a picture. I found very little to criticize in this movie. I just couldn’t connect with it as something enduringly special.

This is much how I looked watching this movie. Well, I wasn’t wearing a sari.

Overall: B

MARIA

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

Maria is the third in a trilogy of films by Chilean director Pablo Larraín about famously tragic women of history, and in a way it comes full circle to connect to the first of them, Jackie—which I adored, enough to make it my #2 film of 2016. Jackie had been about Jaqueline Kennedy, later Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, having married Aristotle Onassis in 1968—right at the end of his eight-year partnership with famed opera singer Maria Callas.

The film in the middle of this trilogy, Spencer, I also adored, enough to make it my #1 film of 2021. As you can imagine, this meant I looked forward to Maria with eager anticipation, even though I was far less familiar with Maria Callas than either Princess Diana (the subject of Spencer) or Jackie Kennedy. There’s just something about Pablo Larraín’s style that speaks to me. And I am fully aware that he is an acquired taste: the three films in this trilogy have had diminishing critical returns (their scores on review aggregate site MetaCritic are, in order of release, 81, 76, and 65), and even Natalie Portman’s performance in the best-reviewed of them, Jackie, proved divisive.

In any case, I went in primed to love Maria based only on it being a Pablo Larraín film, but also having faith in Angelina Jolie’s performance as the title character. Indeed, the acting is by far the best thing about it, including Pierfrancesco Favino and Alba Rohrwacher as Maria’s butler and housemaid in the last years of her life, tragically cut short in 1977, at the age of 53.

And yet, in spite of some lovely cinematography by Edward Lachman (Carol), neither that nor the excellent performances could make Maria speak to me in quite the same way as both Jackie and Spencer did. All of the characters speak in placid, nearly hushed tones, which all contributes to a tone of a famous woman not so much in decline, but whose life is winding down. Maria is over reliant on medication, which gives her occasional hallucinations, the only time Maria slips into the stylized, dreamlike quality I loved so much in Larraín’s previous films. I’d have loved more of that, although to be fair, no artist should be expected to deliver the same thing over and over again.

It’s just that the script, by Steven Knight—who also wrote Spencer—isn’t quite as compelling. It’s the acting, and the cinematography, and to a degree even the editing, that do a lot of work to make Maria rise above a story that isn’t all that memorable. Maria has moments of greatness, and certain scenes that are undeniably great, sometimes even exceptionally well written. It just lacks a certain consistency in its storytelling.

Much of the framing of Maria entails a reporter and a camera man, coming to Maria’s apartment to interview her at a time when she is attempting to re-strengthen a once famous voice that is now in decline. When she tells her butler a camera crew is coming, he asks her, “Are they real?” Even by the time the film ended, I could never quite figure out whether we were supposed to take them as real, or a figment of Maria’s imagination. I suspect the latter, but would have liked more clarity. The reporter, incidentally, is played by Kodi Smith-McPhee, who has previously made deep impressions with his performances in the likes of Let Me In (at age 13) and The Power of the Dog. Here his ample talents are relatively wasted, even as he manages a subtly oddball sensibility opposite Angelina Jolie.

Many will find Marie to be slow and plodding, I suspect. Larraín is clearly being very deliberate here, and it’s something I can appreciate—to be clear, I never drifted away or lost interest while watching this movie. I just came to it expecting and hoping for something exceptional, and got something that, overall, was not. There has been some chatter about Jolie competing for Best Actress, and this would be deserved, but I struggle to imagine this film gaining enough traction for that to happen. I still enjoyed Maria, but largely because I am a fan of the director and the star, and less on the merits of the film itself, which works better contextualized as part of a trilogy—and one that ends on a comparatively weak note. This is a film beautifully constructed in multiple ways, but about a person who, this time around, likely means far more to the filmmaker than to the audience.

Sometimes great composition alone can’t reach the heights of greatness.

BLITZ

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

Blitz turns out to be a collection of great scenes that don’t quite add up to a great movie. It’s a good movie, but one that could have used something a little more. A little more character development, perhaps.

The acting elevates it a great deal. Saoirse Ronan is always so good it’s easy to take her for granted. Elliott Heffernan, as her son George, is quite the find—proof again that truly talented child actors are out there, waiting for discovery. Someone tell the casting agent for Goodrich. And then there’s Harris Dickinson, a young actor poised to embark on a great career with the excellent Beach Rats (2017) and who has since seen that promise fulfilled. He’s very good but kind of wasted in a relatively minor part in Blitz,

There are moments in Blitz where director Steve McQueen, who also wrote the script, gets a little too on the nose. In one overwrought scene, racial tensions simmer in one of the many London underground shelters of World War II. It might as well be the start of a bad joke: “An Arab, a Jew, and a Black guy walk into a shelter….” It’s a Black, Nigerian soldier who approaches to diffuse the tension, and then delivers one of the most pat speeches imaginable, about how sowing this kind of division is exactly what Hitler wants and they are stronger united. This is all true, of course, but the delivery is practically a megaphone of allegory for current American culture wars.

That soldier’s name is Ife, and he is but one of many stops on young George’s almost pointedly Dickensian journey through the wild dangers of London during the Blitz. Mileage varies widely among the different characters whose paths he crosses. In one instance, he is basically kidnapped by a group of truly dark opportunists, enlisting the 11-year-old boy’s help in squeezing into the tight spaces of bombed-out and collapsed buildings to loot valuables.

In one of the aforementioned great scenes, Blitz cuts to a crowded night club, filled with revelers having a great night out on the town, dancing to a large brass band. The camera moves through and around the crowd for so long, among nameless characters we are only now being introduced to, until air raid sirens are heard, and the camera backs up and above the crowd, suddenly hushed and looking up to the ceiling in silence. The horrific aftermath it cuts to next is made all the more effective by the time just spent with all these people.

Blitz feels a little like an attempt to emulate the 1998 Spielberg film Saving Private Ryan, following the journey of characters in search of someone while the utterly random horrors of war play out around them, and sometimes to them. McQueen’s approach is at a bit more of a remove from the characters, with much more focus on the journey itself. This might work more for some than others.

To be certain, I was riveted by Blitz from start to finish, largely because of the sense of danger and menace around every corner. In the opening scene, a man gets knocked out by an out of control fire hose, of all things. McQueen and his editor, Peter Sciberras (The Power of the Dog), make some odd choices of timing when it comes to shifting to flashbacks. Several times, the film cuts to clearly-CGI renderings of bombs descending from the sky, only to cut to a much more serene scene. I kept expecting to be startled by some explosion or another, only for it not to happen. There are startling moments of other kinds, such as when a tube station being used as a shelter suddenly floods with water. We know George will make it out, but that makes the scene no less harrowing.

Blitz only takes place over a couple of days, in 1940, when the British have no idea they have another half a decade of war ahead of them. Rita (Ronan) puts George on a train to evacuate him for his own safety, something he fails to understand: he wants to stay with his mother. The only reason he winds up traversing a London intermittently blasted by Nazi bombs is because he jumps off that train, and makes his way back. Along the way, some people help him, some people take advantage of him. In the aggregate, this is one lucky kid.

It should be noted, too, that he is multiracial. His father, originally from Grenada, gets in trouble with the law for blatantly racist reasons, and we only learn in passing later that the reason he isn’t around now is because he’s been deported—possibly another barely-veiled reference to scapegoated immigrants in present-day America (and Britain, for that matter; this is a British production, after all—as is Steve McQueen). George’s race, as well as Rita’s association with it, is a through line in the story, a point of view rarely depicted in the seemingly infinite number of films set during World War II,

We only ever see George’s father, Marcus (CJ Beckford), a couple of times, in flashback. It would have been useful to have gotten to know him better, but McQueen is much more interested in depictions of George barely missing death at every other turn. Much of this is very well rendered, if on a clearly limited budget. McQueen is making the best of what he has to work with. And he’s working with a stellar cast, who lift up a script that is adequate but falling just short of fully realized cohesion.

A mother and son lose and then find each other through mutually steely resolve in Blitz.

Overall: B

GOODRICH

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

Michael Keaton plays Andy Goodrich, a gallery owner who is both a good guy and a rich guy. Maybe this is nominative determinism.

Some might debate both points. Andy is so distracted by his career that he’s the only person in his life who didn’t know his wife was addicted to pills. Keaton is a singular actor, though—a guy who can play dark and brooding as well as winning personality. As directed by Hallie Meyers-Shyer (Home Again), he is very much the latter. We can’t help but root for him. As for being rich, that’s relative. I suppose the character Andy Goodrich might think of himself as “middle class.” Not from where I sit, looking at that guy’s house.

Goodrich is a solid, standard family drama, with a premise that it uses to convince itself it’s “modern.” The title character is an older man—age never stated, but if we are to assume he’s the same age as Michael Keaton, then he’s 73. He has a grown daughter, Grace, played by Mile Kunis, and Grace’s age is stated: 36. With that math, Andy would have been 37 when she was born. He also has twin childen who are only 9 years old. Andy would have then been 64 when they were born. Kunis gets an amusing line about how being 27 years older than your siblings is “pretty much unheard of. Except maybe in L.A.” Of course, this movie is set in Los Angeles.

The film opens with Andy’s call from his wife, informing him in the middle of the night that she’s checked into rehab and she’s leaving him. She trusts he can take care of the twins. People in Andy’s life sure have a lot of faith in him for a guy who’s so clueless. Even his 9-year-old daughter comments on how many pills her mom was taking. The one exception is Grace, who resents watching her dad mature in parenting the twins in ways he never did when she was their age.

Grace is also pregnant, which is a great way for the script to provide opportunities for Andy to both step up and disappoint. Goodrich is overall kind of slight as a film, but I can’t deny that I locked into it. Keaton has a singularly weird charisma even as an old man, which he knows how to calibrate in ways few other people would. I got several good chuckles out of this movie, and and it made me cry in all the spots it was clearly designed to.

I hate to pick on children, but the twins didn’t work as well for me. I’ve been spoiled in recent years by countless movies featuring child actors who are incredibly well cast and perform with a convincingly naturalistic style. I used to think kids just naturally can’t act, and then I was proved wrong. Goodrich is like a throwback to a time when weirdly precocious kids were cast in movies. I’m not blaming the kids, really; they might very well grow into some useful talent. And they’re not terrible, they’re just a little off most of the time. This is more a reflection of the direction than anything, and perhaps Meyers-Shyer is just better at directing adults than kids.

And then there’s Michael Urie, a welcome sight in a part it’s easy to be ambivalent about. He plays Terry, the divorced gay parent of a classmate of Andy’s twins, and he and Andy bond over their separations and become friends. There’s a scene where things get, let’s say, awkward between Andy and Terry. It’s both really entertaining and incongruous in the overall plot, something that makes little sense in its inclusion. At least Urie gives Terry more dimension than the script does.

There’s a couple other big names in relatively small parts, notably Kevin Pollack as Andy’s business partner, and a criminally underused Andie MacDowell in just a couple of scenes as Andy’s ex-wife, Grace’s mother. We need more movies with both of these actors in parts with more substance. And that’s not to say Goodrich doesn’t have substance—it has a fair amount—but their parts don’t particularly.

It’s Keaton and Kunis who are the heart of Goodrich, and if anything makes the movie worth seeing, it’s them. Keaton is great most of the time, but for a couple of scenes that allow his delivery to sort of trail off oddly. Kunis is lovely all of the time. There’s an overall warmth to Goodrich that just about makes up for its unevenness.

A father-daughter dance that warms the heart. Most of the time.

Overall: B

Tasveer Advance: KATLAA CURRY [FISH CURRY]

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

Katlaa Curry is only the second film ever made in the Gujarati language to tell a queer story (the first was a 2013 film called Meghdhanushya — The Colour of Life), and it happened as a stroke of fate, a quasi-accident. There is a key scene in which two characters who are destined to fall in love have a conversation over a dead fish, caught in the Narmada River (India’s fifth-longest river, and the longest one that flows through the state of Gujarat), a fisherman teaching the other one, who is very squeamish, how to get used to handling fish. The squeamish character, originally written as a woman, is meant to stick their finger down the throat of the fish—which the original woman actor refused to do. The production’s solution was to make the story a gay love story—simply because the only actors willing to stick their fingers down a fish carcass’s throat were men.

This was the second film I saw at this year’s Tasveer South Asian Film Festival, which was how I learned this behind-the-scenes story, as well as some other relevant details. The cast was made up of local theater actors. Director Prajapati Rohit shot the film in ten days. And there was no particular intention of pointed progressiveness when they first set out to make the film, but once the turn to a gay love story happened, the implications for how it might move the needle of local attitudes blossomed.

Side note: Gujarati is the sixth-most spoken native language in India, with over 55 million speakers. It is the official language of the state of Gujarat, spoken natively by 86% of the population there. Prajapati Rohit pointedly leans into this, with opening titles written in both English and the Gujarati script. There is no Hindi to be found anywhere in this film, which is Gujarati first and Indian second.

Katlaa Curry moves at a measured pace, first introducing us to Raaymal (Priyaank Gangwani), a local fish merchant. This is also notable as most of the Gujarati population is vegetarian, but Raaymal takes his boat further up the Narmada River to fish, then brings what he caught into villages and towns to sell. This is how he meets Ratan (Ranganath Gopalrathnam), who has attempted suicide and gets caught in Raaymal’s fishing net. Raaymal revives him, and ultimately befriends him.

A lot of time is spent on Raaymal and Ratan just getting to know each other, and it takes a while for it to become clear why Ratan has attempted suicide—because his lack of interest in girls has left him hopeless. Meanwhile, Raaymal helps build a kind of beach shack home for Ratan to live in since he doesn’t feel he has any family to go back to. The element of queerness kind of seeps into the narrative slowly and organically, first with a confession by Ratan that Raaymal responds to with laughter and a “What does it matter?” attitude. This attitude, among the characters of this film, becomes a bit of a theme, both quiet and extraordinary in the barriers it breaks.

They settle into a routine, Raaymal visiting Ratan every day, and eating the fish curry Ratan has learned to make even though he doesn’t eat fish, and which Raaymal loves. It’s when Raaymal gets pressured into marrying a woman that things get complicated—for all three of them. Kumati, the wife, is played lovingly by Kinnary Panchal, and I was left with a lot of questions about this whole scenario. At last night’s screening, it was noted that 80% of gay men in India are married to women, and it’s very common for these women to know about it and completely accept it. What they care about, we are told, is that they have shelter and food.

It struck me that sexual desire and fulfillment for women was never part of this conversation—neither within the narrative of the film nor in outside conversations about it. And I was sitting there thinking: What about her? Of course and as always, there is a great deal of cultural context to consider here, not least of which is how devalued women are in South Asian cultures, especially if they are unmarried (to say the least of when they are widowed). And in the discussion at the screening last night, to be fair, there was a brief comment on how, if movies like this can move the needle on cultural attitudes, perhaps over time fewer women will have to settle for situations like this. Still, all the conversations about gay men (and specifically Raaymal) falling in love, and getting their physical needs met, have this glaring ignorance of any of the women involved getting their needs met. I’m a little hung up on the fact that housing and food are not the only basic necessities they should be granted. Are we supposed to assume Kumati is asexual? That she’s content never having children? It’s odd that we never see any of the characters here even mention children.

This is Raaymal’s and Ratan’s story, and it’s a warm and lovely one—if a little overdone with dreamy close-up shots of dead fish swarming with flies. But it also has a very slight unevenness to the story that fails to address the many implications raised. There’s a deeply memorable scene near the end between Raaymal and Kumati in which they come to an understanding that shocks and relieves Raaymal. And we are happy and relieved for him, as we should be. But I am left with a feeling of sorrow for Kumati, which Katlaa Curry clearly does not intend, as we are meant just to be grateful to her, as Raaymal is.

It was also striking to me how, reportedly, none of the cast of this film is queer-identified, even though Priyaank Gangwani and Ranganath Gopalrathnam have a palpable erotic energy between them and real chemistry with each other. Here is where we get into cultural differences again, because in Hollywood the conversation has moved into the space of giving queer actors the queer roles. In India, they are still in the space of queer people being grateful for “representation” granted by straight actors. And what more could they ask for? The Indian film industry, Bollywood or otherwise, is not exactly swarming with queer actors who are out of the closet. These things can only happen one step at a time, and Katlaa Curry is but one of those vital steps.

A love that dares speak its name, at just the right time.

Overall: B

PIECE BY PIECE

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

Pharrell Williams really wants you to know how pleased with himself he is that he wants the documentary about him and his music career to be a LEGO movie. Lego Pharrell comments on it multiple times, on camera.

It’s cute. And undeniably entertaining. It’s also a transparent tactic, a way for Williams to put up a wall between him and his viewers, so we never really get to know him. Piece by Piece is little more than a broad overview of his three-decade career in hip hop and pop, touching on all of the key beats, tracks and singles Williams worked on or released. Quite the parade of superstars he’s worked with appears onscreen as LEGO talking heads (Snoop Dogg, Justin Timberlake, Gwen Stefani, Busta Rhymes, Timbaland, Jay-Z, and countless more, including Chad Hugo, Williams’s other half in The Neptunes), none of them given enough screen time to offer anything in the way of real insight.

I went to this movie already knowing to expect this. But director and co-writer Morgan Neville really won me over in the first half of the 93-minute runtime, employing clever visual flourishes that can only be possible by animating the stories being told. Some great visual gags get sprinkled into the narrative, some of them LEGO-specific: a young Pharrell watching Star Trek attempts the Vulcan salute, only to discover it’s not possible with his cylindrical LEGO hands. Plenty of other whimsical delights pass across the screen, particularly when talking heads throw out a hypothetical aside, such as E.T. freaking everyone out at the mall.

So, for a good while, I was thinking Piece by Piece was actually much more fun than I had been led to believe. The LEGO animation is very colorful and imaginative, making this a singular moviegoing experience, even among documentaries that play with form and genre.

But later, things get genuinely weird, and not necessarily in a good way. Making a big deal out of the fact that Williams’s wife, Helen Lasichanh, is giving her first-ever on-camera interview doesn’t quite mean as much when we only ever see her as a Lego Lady. And when the content turns serious, it’s easy to become ambiguous about the use of LEGO to tell this story. There’s a moment when Pharrell breaks down crying, in gratitude for all the friends and family that stood by him over the years. A LEGO version of Morgan Neville—who gets a surprising lot of screen time—offers him a box of tissue. Seeing this scene play out among LEGO pieces is fundamentally ridiculous and undermines the impact.

And I haven’t even mentioned the LEGO representations of moments of historic import, including the Martin Luther King rally on the National Mall, and even the protests in Ferguson, Missouri. I saw these scenes flash onscreen and thought: okay, this is bonkers. Outside of these visual references, the vast majority of Piece by Piece renders its subjects with the same childlike joy that we’ve seen in nearly all the characters in previous LEGO movies. Their vocal delivery, as sitting interview subjects, indicates their expressions are much more neutral most of the time, and yet their LEGO selves typically speak with some manner of smiles on their faces.

After a while, this stuff creates a unique sort of cognitive dissonance, even more pronounced by the use of this gimmick to create some distance between Pharrell Williams and those who are interested in him. Certainly nothing in Piece by Piece reveals what makes him tick, or even gives much of a sense of who he truly is as a person. The whole exercise feels like an attempt at having his cake and eating it too: he let someone make a movie about him, but he didn’t have to reveal anything genuine about himself. I’d have settled for some insight into how becoming one of the first superstar producers ever to exist really affected him on a deep level, but, no such luck.

In the end, we’ll just have to let Pharrell Williams’s work speak for itself, which it does plenty well with or without Piece by Piece. As I write this, I am listening to the soundtrack, packed with all the biggest hits he produced along with five new tracks, and that is a spectacular experience, highly recommend. This is a man with jaw dropping talent, in a movie animated by people with incredible talent, and the two just don’t much inform each other. At least we get clever gags like “PG Spray” used in the room where Snoop Dogg is interviewed, keeping things family-friendly in a story about a guy your young children don’t likely know or care about.

Clap along if you feel like LEGO’s what you want to do,

Overall: B

SATURDAY NIGHT

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

The best thing about the new film Saturday Night—and there are many good things about it—is the casting. Everything revolves around Lorne Michaels as portrayed by Gabriel LaBelle, who is fine. It’s the ensemble abuzz all around him that truly impresses. Ella Hunt is so convincing as Gilda Radner, it’s easy to wish the movie were just about her, and we only get a few brief scenes with her. Cory Michael Smith expertly channels the swagger of Chevy Chase’s early years, a lot of the antagonistic dialogue directed toward him taking on a peculiarly meta tone given how little-liked Chase is in the industry today. And the choice of Matthew Rhys as George Carlin, the first-ever host of Saturday Night Live, seems counterintuitive at first, and yet Rhys knocks it out of the park. I’m sure plenty of viewers won’t even realize it’s him until they see the end credits.

I’m barely scratching the surface here. Dylan O'Brien stands out as Dan Aykroyd, particularly in a scene in which Aykroid is uncomfortable being asked to wear short-short jean cutoffs for a sketch (something that is reportedly an artistic license invention for the film—his being uncomfortable, not the sketch itself, which actually aired later in the season). Nicholas Braun (Succession’s “Cousin Greg”) manages to disappear in two roles, of both Andy Kaufman and Jim Henson. Jon Batiste appears as Billy Preston, an amusing bit of casting in that Batiste is the band leader for The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, which currently runs on CBS as the same time as NBC’s The Tonight Show—the very show CBS threatens to run a rerun of instead of airing Saturday Night in this film.

That threat is another film invention, incidentally. This one bring me to one of my few complaints about Saturday Night. Artistic license is to be expected, as is compositing multiple stories from a longer period of time into a story depicting just one evening. And with no knowledge of what’s real or what’s invented, Saturday Night works quite well; it’s certainly a fun time at the movies. That said, creating tension where none is particularly needed seems odd: why tell Lorne Michaels about CBS in the film that “They want you to fail,” if that was never actually the case? Director and co-writer Jason Reitman could have held the tension for the entire film just fine with the case and crew simply trying to get their shit together by the time they went on the air at 11:30. There is no need to create a villain (Willem DaFoe’s great performance as CBS’s threatening proxy notwithstanding), a trap that far too many films fall into when they would work just fine without one.

Saturday Night unfolds largely in real time, taking roughly an hour and 45 minutes to depict the ninety minutes leading directly up to the first-ever episode of Saturday Night Live (then called NBC’s Saturday Night) going to air. This compressed narrative is what gives it very Sorkin-esque pacing and dialogue. There’s a lot going on, as the camera moves throughout the building but mostly in the halls and backstage behind the studio, passing by one famous personality after another. Most of the time it follows Lorne Michaels around, seemingly in a daze, more often than not evidently unable to give concise direction to the myriad questions aimed at him. I did find myself wondering if Michaels really felt that out of it on the first night of the show.

I saw this movie with two people with a far more directly historical connection to Saturday Night Live than I possibly could have: they were in high school or in college when the first season aired; I was a year from being born. I felt a distinct difference in how the movie hits, depending on the generation of the viewer. There may be another distinct, if perhaps less pronounced, difference with people who had their own connection to a later cast of SNL—it is oft repeated that your favorite SNL cast tends to be whichever one it had when you were a teenager. I always liked SNL fine, but even when I was a teenager it was never that important to me. As such, I had a good time watching Saturday Night, especially during all the chaotic backstage antics (and it’s true that when the chaos stops, how compelling the film is shifts as well), but I would hesitate to call this movie something special. I would probably find a published oral history far more interesting.

As Saturday Night is happening, though, it’s undeniably entertaining. The script, while not its strongest element, has several zingers that got good laughs out of me. And if anything makes this film worth seeing, again: it’s the stacked cast, whose performances as generally less like gimmicky impersonations than they are effectively capturing the essence of the characters they are playing. I don’t expect to remember this film long after its time has come and gone, but it’s still as good a way to spend a Saturday Night as any.

Recreating history: the cast of Saturday Night.

Overall: B

BETWEEN THE TEMPLES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overall: B