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

Advance: HIS THREE DAUGHTERS

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

Carrie Coon, Natasha Lyonne, and Elizabeth Olsen are all well established as singular performers, and all of their talents are very much on display in His Three Daughters, mostly a three-hander about estranged sisters reconvening to say goodbye to their father in hospice care. There’s something just slightly off about the presentation in this film, though, written and directed by Azazel Jacobs. There are so many extended monologues, where a character is ostensibly speaking to another person but after a while is functionally talking to themselves, it has the striking feeling of watching a filmed play. I found myself wondering if, indeed, this movie would actually play better as a stage production. It would be easy enough to produce, the entire story set in one New York City apartment.

Jacobs previously directed (but did not write) the 2021 film French Exit, which was absolutely not for everyone but which I was deeply delighted by. I still think it’s criminal that movie could never gain a genuine cult following the way oddball movies used to be able to. That film took a wild turn into the fantastical, whereas His Three Daughters is much more straightforward and sentimental. It’s immediately clear that this is a family drama, dealing with sibling rivalries and grief.

The sisters are Katie (Coon), Rachel (Lyonne), and Christina (Olsen). They were all raised by a father who remains unseen in a back bedroom until the very end of the film, but soon enough we learn that Rachel had a different mother who died when she was very young, and a different biological father but this one raised her as his own. The mother of the other two also died while they were young, a point of commonality that becomes a part of both their tensions and their connection. Rachel, a stoner who spends a lot of time in her bedroom tracking sports she has bets riding on, has kind of checked out while her two sisters have descended on the apartment—Katie from just another New York City borough, and Christina from thousands of miles away. Katie takes it upon herself to take control and is quick to judge, and Christina is sort of hippie-adjacent, spending the most time in the room with their dad, singing possibly Grateful Dead songs to him and doing yoga during her breaks.

These women have clearly distinct and well-drawn personalities, and it’s easy to believe them as sisters. Still, there’s a slight sort of detachment to the dialogue—and the rather striking number of extended monologues. The film opens with Carrie Coon delivering a monologue as Katie, nothing but a white wall of what we only later realize is this apartment as the background. It feels rather like a self-taped audition and doesn’t doe the film any favors in setting the tone. After several minutes, the camera cuts to Lyonne as Rachel, listening to her in resigned silence. Rachel is the quietest one for a while, but soon enough all three of them are talking plenty. His Three Sisters is mercifully short on histrionics, which makes the one genuine screaming match between the three of them all the more effective.

As the story unfolded, I felt more connected to all three of these women, the excess of monologues notwithstanding. In the end, this story of forging connection through shared grief left me genuinely moved. There is a turn at the end, when Vincent, their dad (Jay O. Sanders), suddenly comes out of his room and even gets his own monologue. For several minutes, this genuinely threw me for a loop. The monologue ends with a gentle reveal that made me feel a little better about it, even though the sudden shift of perspective to a character we didn’t even meet until this point is a bit jarring.

His Three Daughters is a Netflix movie that will get a brief release in select theaters on September 6, then will be available on the streamer September 20. These three actresses are always worth watching, and this film is thus as good a way to kill 101 minutes as any. I’m not sure there’s any real necessity for theatrical release with this one, though. This is exactly the kind of movie that’s perfect for watching at home, with some tissues handy.

Let’s work through their shit together.

Overall: B

TWISTERS

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

It was a somewhat surprising experience watching Twisters in the theater last night, a 6:15 p.m. showing with perhaps ten other people in the theater—from what I could tell, all of them young. And I did not survey them, but it seemed likely that many, if not all, of them had never seen the original 1996 film, Twister—which, I really have to say up top: was much better. After re-watching that film only a couple of weeks ago and being genuinely impressed by how well it stands up, particularly in terms of its special effects, I could not help but be just slightly disappointed by this new one. I found myself envying those kids: they were clearly having a great time, while I was over here, nitpicking.

And in so doing, I am going against what I have long stated I stood for: which was that films should be judged on their own merits. The problem is that, in creating a “legasequel” such as this, the filmmakers are openly inviting comparison. And when you do the comparison: Twisters falls short. Not by a wide margin, but it falls short nonetheless.

And there’s a bit of a double-edged sword to this comparison. The 1996 Twister knows exactly what it is: a blockbuster disaster movie showcasing special effects (many of them shockingly practical) that does not pretend to be anything else. The premise being preposterous is incidental; the stock characters elevated by broadly charismatic performers. It had two teams of scientists chasing tornadoes in Oklahoma in pursuit of new data they can get from a new device they called “Dorothy,” which they hope will help extend advanced warning times by launching sensors up a tornado funnel from its base. One of the groups is the clearly villainouse one because their leader is ”in it for the money, not the science.”

The 1996 Twister was also a product of its time, its shamelessly knowing execution, of a dumb plot in the name of thrilling sequences, being something that would just never play the same way today. The unfortunate result is that the 2024 Twisters infuses an element of self-seriousness not present in the previous film, which really doesn’t work either. Which begs the question: Why make this movie at all? Box office would have to be the only answer. I’m sure the relative disinclination of young moviegoers to rewatch “old movies” (Twister came out 28 years ago) has not changed and never will.

So why not just make a new movie about tornado chasers? What purpose does it serve to ride the coattails of a movie from three decades back whose coattails petered out long ago? Especially when this movie’s connection to Twister is tenuous at best? I actually found this point lacking in clarity, the only “character” in this film that was actually seen in the first being “Dorothy” herself, the contraption that releases sensors . The young scientists in pursuit of grant money even make derisive references to how old she is. This is never stated explicitly, but Dorothy must have just been handed down by their scientific forebears and that’s it; there is no other narrative reference to the first film at all.

There is a meta connection, however, when James Paxton, the late Bill Paxton’s son, appears briefly as an aggressive customer trying to check into a hotel while he and his girlfriend willfully ignore a gigantic tornado approaching. There are also other subtle references, such as when the film’s primary protagonist, Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones), visiting to assist an old friend for a week to get new data, responds to someone saying “Welcome back!” with “I’m not back!”—the latter being an exact line Bill Paxton delivers in the first film. Also, this movie’s story beats are nearly identical: opening flashback of a traumatic event in the midst of a tornado; survivor later pursues an understanding of this enigmatic force of nature; two teams of people compete with each other to catch up to multiple tornadoes in a single day of several tornado outbreaks.

All of this is to say: the script here did very little for me, it’s such a rehash of the first film, which itself took no pains to be any work of staggering genius. This time around, director Lee Isaac Chung (pivoting rather hard after the quietly wonderful 2021 film Minari) and co-writers Mark L. Smith (The Revenant) and Joseph Kosinski (who directed Top Gun: Maverick) introduce a character named Tyler (Glen Powell, by far the most charismatic presence in this movie—the man is a star) who we are clearly meant to read as an analog to Carey Elwes’s pompous character from the first film. Kate’s old friend Javi (Anthony Ramos, whose ample talents are criminally wasted here) has been employed by a guy with real estate connections, and between Tyler and Javi, Twisters ultimately “flips the script” from the first film that is clearly meant as a “twist” from initial expectations. But, it never amounts to much.

So what does that leave? Tornadoes, of course! This would be the whole reason I’m not sorry I saw Twisters, because it still features countless tornado sequences that are genuinely thrilling, and what else is anybody going to this movie for? Plus, in spite of this movie’s characters on average not being half as compelling as those from the first film, even with the down-time, “character” scenes, the run time is a perfectly decent 122 minutes, keeping it from overstaying its welcome or feeling bloated.

Still, this does feel worth mentioning: the effects in the 1996 Twister hold up surprisingly well after 28 years. The effects in Twisters hold up about as well as you would expect: they aren’t bad but they don’t push anything forward; they aren’t any more impressive than they were in the first film, although there are several shots with more comprehensive composition. This movie isn’t going to continue impressing thirty years from now in the same way, though. Not that it appears to have any intention to; it only exists to entertain us all in the present moment, and on that point it succeeds.

And that brings us back to the cast, and specifically Glen Powell, without whom Twisters would not be nearly as good as the just-fine movie it is. Here he plays a storm chaser with a whole crew who post videos to a YouTube channel with a following of 1 million, who at first seems like an arrogant ass but of course (spoiler alert!) turns out to have a heart of gold. I would argue that, on a character level, Powell is the single person who makes Twisters worth seeing. He actually manages to elevate his contrived material with a performance that is as nuanced as it is undeniably charming. (Admittedly, some viewers don’t find his character so charming; this is not a universal response. But, the critical and box office success of his most recent four films in only the past two years speaks for itself.)

There is plenty of talent elsewhere in the cast, mind you; they just aren’t given enough to do. Besides Ramos in a fairly thankless role, Tyler’s crew also includes critical darling Sasha Lane (American Honey, How to Blow Up a Pipeline), whose career trajectory never quite went where it should have. Here the most interesting thing she’s given to do is remote pilot a drone for aerial shots of the tornadoes.

As always, though, here is the bottom line: is Twisters entertaining? Yes. Does it give you what you come to see? Absolutely yes. No one’s coming to these movies for dimensional character portraits, they’re coming for the thrills, of which Twisters has countless. I’m just nitpicking because it’s what I’m here to do. Granted, the 1996 Twisters has thrills that are just as good, with a better cast, and more successful wit in its dialogue. But even then it was only the thrills that mattered, and it’s really all that matters here. I didn’t quite get everything I wanted out of this movie but I certainly got what I came for.

The two leads in this picture are ready for their close-up.

Overall: B

MAXXXINE

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

There was a time when actresses famous or their roles in horror films were called “Scream Queens,” and that is indeed what the title character in MaXXXine aspires to be—even though no one ever uses the phrase in the film. As it happens, Mia Goth has carved out a similar niche for herself, although it exists a few steps to the side of “Scream Queen.” I’m not sure what similar title we could give her—Feature Eater? Picture Witcher? Wackadoodle Chicken Noodle? We can worship it.

One thing that’s for certain is that Mia Goth has a vibe. And it’s one of a woman barely feigning stability. Such is the case as Maxine Mix, a porn star attempting to break into Hollywood in 1985 with the backdrop of the Night Stalker serial killer. People close to Maxine keep dying, and it’s made clear early on that the homicide detectives investigating suspect someone besides the serial killer, just trying to make the murders look like the work of the Night Stalker.

This is all fertile ground for a fun homage to eighties slasher flicks, replete with a banger soundtrack of mid-eighties pop hits. (Frustratingly, movies like this never assemble the featured pop tracks into soundtrack albums anymore; search for the title on your music streamer of choice and all you’ll get is the motion picture score. Boring!) And, for a little while, MaXXXine really is fun, with a protagonist who is delightfully damaged and demented.

We’re made to expect that Maxine can handle herself even in the face of danger. In arguably the most memorable scene in the film, she turns the tables on a would-be attacker in a dark alley, forces him to strip naked at gunpoint, and forces him to suck on the barrel of the gun before she does something kind of hilariously grotesque to him. And there was something I really liked about this scene, the way it flips the script on so many of those old slasher movies with helpless women victims: here, it’s the man who is degraded onscreen, the woman with the agency. It has the exact same exploitative vibe, just with the gender roles reversed.

But, strangely, I’d have to say that’s where MaXXXine peaks, although there’s another pretty great scene involving a man trapped in a car getting compacted. MaXXXine has nearly all the elements you’re looking for in a movie of this sort—except that it presents itself as something with more depth than what it’s imitating, and in the end, it actually doesn’t.

As time goes on, and we get hints of Maxine’s secret past, our protagonist proves to be more helpless than you might expect—resourceful for sure, but she gets out of multiple scrapes only with the assistance of others, mostly men. And when her secret past is revealed and becomes an integral part of a climactic sequence around the Hollywood sign, it’s all fairly disappointing. I wanted more out of this movie, which starts out with an inventive spirit and then just gets lazy with it.

On the upside, MaXXXine still has a compellingly retro-moody tone, and more importantly, very good performances, particularly by Goth, and by Elizabeth Debicki as a ruthlessly ambitious film director. Several other actors are a bit wasted, though: Bobby Cannavale and Michelle Monaghan as the two relatively dull detectives; Kevin Bacon as a dirtbag private investigator; Giancarlo Esposito as a shady agent. I just wish the script were better. For all its retro neon-mood recreations, this film still feels very much a product of its time, when homage runs rampant without anything new to say.

I don’t know if she’ll blow you away but she might cock your gun.

Overall: B-