GLADIATOR II

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

Protip: don’t rewatch the original film just days before seeing its “legacyquel” that’s being released decades later. I keep making this mistake. I watched Twister right before seeing Twisters; I watched Beetlejuice right before seeing Beetlejuice Beetlejuice; I watched Gladiator right before seeing Gladiator II. The only consistent purpose this seems to serve is how the new film definitively fails to live up to the first.

You see where I’m going with this. Even more than the other examples, Gladiator II follows all the same basic story beats as its far superior, Best Picture-winning predecessor from 2000. The comparisons to The Force Awakens and Top Gun Maverick are apt—and I’d throw in Alien: Romulus as well, given how its story directly mirrors the original Alien from 1979. These movies do what they do with varying success, although it should be noted that Gladiator II does it with the least success.

Does this mean I wasn’t entertained? Absolutely not. My answer to Russell Crowe’s Maximus from the original film, when he asks the immortal line “Are you not entertained!” is an emphatic, I am. Granted, in this film Paul Mescal’s Lucius asks a question with similar delivery from the middle of an arena when he asks, “Is this how Rome treats its heroes!” It doesn’t land with quite the same import but I guess you can’t have everything.

Gladiator II is, overall . . . fine. But this is its greatest weakness, because the original Gladiator was so much better than that. It had an iconic hero in Russell Crowe’s Maximus; it had an iconic villain in Joaquin Phoenix’s Commodus. It also had an undeniable movie star at its center, and the closest to that we get in Gladiator II is Denzel Washington—as the most notable scheming villain, among several. It should be noted that Washington is the best thing and most fun person to watch in this movie. Paul Mescal as Lucius the conquered and enslaved gladiator, and Pedro Pascal as the Roman General who is the target of Lucius’s vengeance, are both capable and talented actors but neither quite rise to what director Ridley Scott is clearly aiming to replicate with them. I hesitate to say it’s their fault, given that the script is one of the weakest elements of this film.

One might be tempted to celebrate the amount of queerness thrown into Gladiator II—until you realize it is exclusive to queer-coding villainous characters. Washington’s Macrinus, who is clawing his own way from a distant past in slavery with eyes on the throne, reveals himself to be bisexual, wears gold earrings, and always wears colorful, flowing robes. Joseph Quinn and Fred Hechinger play twin Emperors Geta and Caracalla, both of them presented as effete, one of them with a clingy male concubinus. And again, this young emperors are both villainous as well, but neither comes across so much as formidable as like a couple of fickle little dipshits.

These details are all unfortunate but relatively subtle; I was entertained enough not to be too bothered by it, at least until I had more time to reflect on it once the film ended. There’s a lot of gladiatorial combat, of course, and several large-scale battle sequences, and if there is any place where Ridley Scott shines, it is here. And if you can watch this without a vivid recollection of its better predecessor, the performances are compelling, especially among the three leads, as well as that of Connie Nielsen as Lucilla, one of three characters (and two actors) who return here from the first film.

The Colosseum gladiator scenes, however, must be called out in their ridiculousness. Ridley Scott used real tigers in one of the gladiator battle scenes in the 2000 film, and apparently felt it was important to “up the ante” this time—over and over again—but never with anything real. We get to see baboons, a rhinoceros, and even sharks, all of them transparent CGI. It’s difficult to care about the supposed danger characters face if they are effectively battling a cartoon. The sharks, for instance, dart around the water like they’re in a video game. The Colosseum apparently really did get filled with water to host mock naval battles as entertainment, but that’s the extent of the realism here. How the hell could the Romans ever have transport all these giant sharks to the Colosseum anyway, let alone captured them live in the open ocean?

Yeah, yeah: it’s just a movie, right? Suspension of disbelief still has its own boundaries, and those boundaries can be strained. Still, most of the time I watched Gladiator II, I adopted that very frame of mind: it’s just a movie, and in spite of all these details I can easily pick apart, I’m having a good time. I can’t say I was disappointed in it, mostly because I enjoy the actors, they play well off each other, and their performances do manage to elevate the lesser material, at least to a degree. The script lacks the tightness of the 2000 film, doubly unfortunate give the degree to which it simply attempts to replicate it—but, it was still compelling enough to follow. This is a 148-minute film and I never got bored. Will I ever go out of my way to watch it again, or recommend it to anyone else? Not likely.

Gladiator II was an adequate way to spend a Saturday afternoon. It wasn’t terrible, it wasn’t great. The key point here is that simply re-watching the original Gladiator was time much better spent.

Not a fully accurate representation of The Colosseum.

Overall: B-

BEETLEJUICE BEETLEJUICE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overall: B-

BLINK TWICE

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

Blink Twice opens first with a trigger warning. This is the first of many things in this film to be ambivalent about. In this case, it sets a tricky sort of precedent. On the one hand, surely some people will appreciate it. On the other hand, I spent the first half of the movie wondering exactly how horrible the “mature themes and depictions of violence, including sexual violence” we were primed to expect would be, as depicted onscreen.

How bad is it, then? The good news is, we get only one, relatively brief scene, which is not excessively explicit or graphic. It is still, however, objectively horrible—it depicts a kind of dark, unconsentual debauchery that might have fit in, more explicitly depicted, in a movie like Caligula. It also marks a sharp tonal turn from the rest of the movie, which has a lightness and even winking vibe to it, until we discover the billionaire tech bros hosting this private island getaway are horrible monsters.

I can’t decide whether the movie would have worked better without the trigger warning. There’s something to be said for a true reveal of monsters who seemed at first to be charming. As it is, we are primed not to trust these billionaire White guys from the start. Not that we need a trigger warning for that to be the case, mind you. But the trigger warning was apparently not part of the original plan, and was reportedly added just before release, because the movie It Ends with Us received criticism for not having one. (The trailers for that movie were relatively subtle about it but still made it fairly clear that domestic violence would factor in the story.)

There are plenty of insensitive people who love to poke fun at the very notion of “trigger warnings.” There are still times when such things are very much appropriate. I just can’t decide how useful it could possibly have been in Blink Twice. But this is mostly because I can’t decide precisely what to make of the movie overall. It would seem director and co-writer Zoë Kravitz, in her directorial feature film debut, took a wild swing with this one—and did not quite hit. I have a lot of questions.

I would love to know more about Kravitz’s intentions with several of her artistic choices. Casting a Black woman, Naomi Ackie, as the main character, Frida, has to have been a deliberate choice. The rest of the cast of women includes several White women and a few other women of color; the men who have brought them to this island are all exclusively White, all but one of them middle-aged (some of you may be disheartened to learn that this definitively includes Channing Tatum). But it’s a curious choice for this film never to address race directly at all, and by default place White women, women of color, and Black women on an equal playing field. This gives Blink Twice a problem shared with the Hulu series The Handmaid’s Tale, in that it simply does not reflect reality.

And Kravitz, while not directly depicting reality—we all know this is a movie—is clearly trying to reference reality with this movie. It directly quotes the “believe women” adage, and at times seems to be trying to be a version of Glass Onion, contextualized in the “Me Too” movement. Compounding matters is the inclination of Blink Twice to be “fun” in a similar way, which trivializes sexual assault at the same time it purports to be taking it seriously. The result is something a lot less fun than the marketers of this movie would lead us to believe. We get some “scorned woman” revenge, and an inevitable turning of the tables, but it rings hollow, engaging in the very tropes Kravitz seems to think she is innovating.

Without getting too far into spoiler territory, I will say that key plot points involve memory manipulation, and the insistence of tech billionaire Slater King (Tatum) that “forgetting is a gift.” It would seem there is a splash of Bill Cosby going on here, and as the story goes on, our heroine figures out a way to conjure her repressed memories. There’s a turn at the end involving King’s own memory that seems almost clever in the moment, but I now cannot make it make sense.

A movie like this only truly works when it has clarity of purpose, and that is the fundamental thing missing from Blink Twice. I cannot trash it completely, because it has excellent performances across the board, which alone would indicate that Kravitz has some bona fide directing talent. She got consistent performances out of a stacked cast, which includes Christian Slater, Simon Rex, Haley Joel Osment, and even Geena Davis, who hasn’t had a high-profile film role in a good 25 years (she’s had several high-profile TV roles, to be fair). Casting Davis is both clearly deliberate and a bit on the nose, given her founding of the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, 20 years ago now. Blink Twice has parity in male and female characters, although not one of the male characters is a good guy—something I’m sure will incense some far-right dipshits. Normally I would be here for it, but it only works if the movie sticks the landing.

Instead, I left Blink Twice with more questions than answers, and not in any satisfyingly provocative way. I’m talking basic plot points. This is a rare movie that is often beautifully shot and has intricately layered performances, but a baffling script and inscrutable editing. The actors perform with the conviction of people who understand the director’s vision, which leaves me to wonder what crucial details may have just wound up on the cutting room floor. Or maybe they are all just patting themselves on the back for being a part of a film that has “Something To Say,” but without fully understanding what the hell it’s saying exactly.

He’s not the only thing here worthy of suspicion.

Overall: B-

TRAP

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

I’ll say this much about M. Night Shyamalan: his movies are no longer the utter disasters they once were.

They’re still hardly masterpieces. And his latest trend seems to be to take a premise that has great potential, and then squander it, in a disappointingly muted way. He can’t even fail dramatically. This was the case with last year’s Knock at the Cabin, and it’s the case with Trap, in theaters this weekend.

There’s an unusually strange tension with Trap, where it’s difficult to tell whether it’s deliberately not taking itself seriously. It has moments of levity that are funny because it feels unintentional, and yet everything about it feels like it’s also by design. One of the most frustrating things about Shyamalan is how clearly intentional he is in every aspect of his filmmaking. But if he’s so meticulous, how could he write such jarringly contrived, forcefully stupid dialogue?

I’m plenty ready to lock into a movie, even a contrived one, if it works on its own terms. But Trap takes a great premise and then totally abandons it in its third act. We spend the first two thirds of a movie following Cooper (Josh Hartnett) and his daughter Riley (Ariel Donaghue) as they attend an arena pop concert, and Cooper learns early on that the entire concert is a trap set for “The Butcher,” a serial killer who dismembers his victims. The twist, which comes early on and was already spoiled in all of the marketing materials, is that Cooper is, himself, “The Butcher.” The first two acts focus on his attempts to figure out how to evade the trap.

Of course, the idea that any law enforcement agency would set up an entire arena concert with a pop superstar performer as a trap for a serial killer is bonkers-preposterous. So is the “profiler” Dr. Josephine Grant (Hayley Mills—of The Parent Trap fame—get it??), an objectively old lady who is somehow the leader of this entire scheme. How often do you see a white haired lady step out of a car with the iconic FBI letters on the back of her jacket, and then wonder whether she should be using a walker?

In any event, there’s a lot going on in Trap that stretches the limits of suspension of disbelief. Still, I found myself very engaged and entertained by this movie, even as it takes sudden turns into the idiotic. When Cooper realizes the trap has been set for him, he manages to get past security doors, and eventually even backstage, with mind boggling ease. When Cooper meets merch salesman Jamie (Jonathan Langdon) and asks him why there are police all over the arena, Jamie’s dialogue is filled with so much overtly obvious exposition it’s literally laughable.

And yet. Still. Entertaining! There’s something to be said for the performances here—including Jamie, but especially Ariel Donaghue as the daughter who is fangirling out and yet perceptive enough to clock that her dad is acting weird. And 46-year-old Josh Hartnett, as the villainous protagonist, is exceptionally well cast as a guy who acts like a dorky dad on the one hand, and a total psychopath on the other. Alison Pill gets a chance to shine a bit in the final act as Cooper’s wife, Rachel, but by then Trap has lost its steam.

I do have some respect for Trap in that it is almost entirely built on tension, really no violence ever seen onscreen, only the threat of it. There are guns in this movie, and a some of them are fired, but very minimally and in ways you don’t expect. The story even loops in Lady Raven, the pop singer character played by M. Night’s daughter Saleka Shyamalan as a fairly significant supporting character (one of the weaker performances, unfortunately—on the more impressive side, Saluki wrote and performed all of the songs herself).

And here’s the thing. All the comically forced dialogue notwithstanding, and the wildly telegraphed intension behind the camera movements, I’d have enjoyed Trap a lot more if the entire film had that one setting, in the concert arena. When key characters started actually making their way outside, I was convinced something would hold them up and force them back inside, so that the climax of the film would still take place in the concert venue. This live concert is the thing that sets Trap apart from other movies like it, about a cat and mouse game between law enforcement and criminal. Why Shyamalan completely abandons it for the film’s third act is truly a mystery.

They just . . . wind up at a house. This is where the “climax” takes place. Granted, there’s also a pop superstar there, so that gives it some novelty. It’s still far less interesting than a serial killer scheming in the middle of tens of thousands of fans—even if we’re supposed to believe the FBI is questioning every single man there before they leave the venue, and yet Cooper somehow manages to evade the cops the arena is crawling with at every turn. Have I mentioned not a single thing in this movie is remotely believable?

I just wish Shyamalan knew that a movie doesn’t have to be believable to work, but being earnest about it undercuts its effectiveness. It can be difficult to tell whether he’s earnest or being dopey for fun. Either way, Trap is dumb as hell and still entertaining for roughly two thirds of its 105-minute runtime. At least its length is reasonable. And it’s long enough for the wind to go out of its sails after the characters leave the venue, and well before we have a chance to.

Oh I guess this movie doesn’t star Ashton Kutcher.

Overall: B-

DEADPOOL & WOLVERINE

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

I’m so sick of the fucking multiverse.

Deadpool & Wolverine takes a moment to acknowledge that it knows this about me—and, presumably, a whole lot of other viewers. The problem is not only that the moment comes far too late in the film, but after spending a majority of the film leaning on the Marvel “multiverse” as a critical element of its premise, its setting, and the driver of its incredibly convoluted and frankly stupid plot.

It’s always a convenient device, isn’t it? Well, less and less so as the years of is use drag on. I don’t think any Marvel movie has used “the multiverse” in a particularly clever or certainly original way, aside from the exceptional Spider-verse movies. Marvel runs out of ideas for specific characters, and then recycles them using the same characters in “alternate universes.”

With Deadpool & Wolverine, we get a “threequel” in the Deadpool franchise, and a resurrected Wolverine as a follow-up to the relatively uncompromised vision that was Logan (2017), one of the best superhero films of the 21st century. Not that that’s a particularly high bar. I wish I could say it’s a delight to see the return of Dafne Keen as Laura, except that she’s utterly wasted in this movie, given nothing of real consequence to do onscreen. The same can be said of the plethora of cameos by other actors who were once big stars in franchises of their own, now showing up to take part in CGI-laden battle sequences that barely have visual comprehensibility.

I can say this for Deadpool movies: at least they’re consistent. Every one of these movies is of B-minus quality, but I cannot deny they make me laugh. Deadpool & Wolverine has a lot of very funny gags, delivered by actors with very good comic timing. These are the things that elevate a movie that would otherwise just be garbage.

When the movie starts, before the opening credits, this film rather pointedy acknowledges how very dead Wolverine is. Well, that Wolverine, anyway. Almost immediately. director Shawn Levy, along with writers that include Rhett Reese, Paul Wernick and Ryan Reynolds himself, introduce the “Time Variance Authority” previously introduced by the Disney+/Marvel series Loki, which had a first season that was surprisingly fun and a second season that was relatively lame. One wonders how many viewers of this movie now have seen Loki and have the kind of working knowledge of the Marvel Cinematic Universe that has been expected of viewers for so long that a good majority of them are now utterly over it. In any event, you can pretty easily imagine how we get Wolverine back into a feature film as played by Hugh Jackman—for the ninth time. The man was 32 the first time he played this character. He’s 55 now, and among Deadpool’s endless meta gags in this movie, he quips that Jackman will be playing this character until he’s 90. It feels as though that may actually happen.

The thing is, I’m not nearly as sick of Wolverine as I am of the multiverse, because Jackman has an unstoppable onscreen charisma, and a genuine chemistry with Ryan Reynolds. And I won’t deny my delight in how much more Deadpool leans into a winking queerness with every film, this time constantly leering and lusting after how hot Wolverine (or, as the case may be, Hugh Jackman) is. Most of the time, Deadpool, in all its iterations, is dumb but fun.

Still, I wish they had come up with a better story idea. What we get here as a story arc is frankly lame, only partly saved by the rapid-fire comic delivery. As is often the case, though, Deadpool & Wolverine suffers from an uninspired villain, here played by Emma Corrin as a cross between Lex Luthor and Sinéad O’connor. Corrin was fantastic as Princess Diana in The Crown, so they’re clearly a gifted actor—yet another just wasted on this movie.

Ultimately, Deadpool & Wolverine boils down to a skilled delivery of an uninspired project packed with countless uninspired supporting characters. In the climactic sequence, it steals a conceit straight from Spider-Man Into the Spider-verse, then amplifies it, and “playfully” vulgarizes it. That is, of course, what the Deadpool movies have been doing all along: throwing out all the bloody violence and profanity it can just because it’s an R-rated superhero movie. This time around, characters say “fuck” so often it starts to sound forced, almost compulsive, as though being uttered for no other reason than to increase the count of its usage. There comes a point where that just gets boring.

I’ll never understand why studios think giving every single one of these identical story beats is a good idea. Foul language and giddy dismemberment does not alone make a movie stand apart; it has to have a uniquely compelling story, and on that front, this movie is utterly lacking. in the end devolving into the same climactic, mediocre special effects bullshit as countless others before it. If this movie has any saving grace, it’s the two leads. If you focus on their delivery and stay “in the moment” at all times without regard to wherever (or whenever) the hell the “sacred timeline” movie is going, you’ll have a relatively good time.

Just because he’s delighting fans by wearing a yellow suit doesn’t mean we haven’t seen this before.

Overall: B-

EVIL DOES NOT EXIST

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

Evil Does Not Exist is an odd title for any movie. The word “evil” alone is evocative of horror, but the rest of this particular title negates that. Or is that ironic, in which case one might still assume it’s horror? Evil may not exist, but nihilism does! One of the many things about this film that are lost on me is the fact that it’s actually a very simple and straightforward drama.

Emphasis on simple, as opposed to drama. To call this a feature-length exercise in deadpan delivery would be an understatement. The most “dramatic” sequence would be several minutes covering a community meeting for “feedback” by townspeople concerned about the impending construction of a “glamping” site in a rural area outside of Tokyo.

This is the first time things get even remotely interesting in Evil Does Not Exist, and it felt like it was about 45 minutes in. Here’s something I have no idea about: was this just a reflection of Japanese cultural politeness, or was this scene muted by even Japanese standards? I would guess the latter, but it’s a wild, uneducated guess. All I know is that several townspeople bring up perfectly reasonable concerns, from potential pollution to their groundwater to the impact on their local economy, and the two hired hands there to listen largely deflect by saying things like “We’ll take your feedback under advisement.” The small crowd gets increasingly agitated, but I use the word “agitated” loosely: they each take a turn to deliver their concerns calmly, while everyone else in the room is dead silent. One young man in the front row finally says “What?” in response to being told not to get too emotional, and he ultimately stands up aggressively—only to have Takumi (Hitoshi Omika) force him back into his chair.

Takuma is the central character here, a guy referred to as “weird” even by others in this movie, a widowed, reclusive “odd job man” living in a cabin with his young daughter, Hana (Ryo Nishikawa). One of the odder aspects of this movie is how the two hired hands sent to the village by the company planning the “glamping site” refer to themselves as “talent agents” who work in “show business,” even though they’ve just been sent to convince this town that a glamping site in their midst is a good idea. Is this the Japanese equivalent of “paid crisis actors”?

Takahashi (Ryuji Kosaka) and Mayuzumi (Ayaka Shibutani) ulimately try courting Takuma to take the job of full-time caretaker, after being told that is something they will need in order to keep guests from the city in check, and it’s a bit of a fool’s errand. All of this runs parallel to Takuma’s live with Hana, where they walk through the forest and he teaches her the names of trees and how to identify them. The visitors keep hearing distant gunshots, told they are people hunting deer in the area. Eventually the point is made that deer are not dangerous to humans, unless they are been shot and are still alive and cornered. This becomes an apparently crucial plot point in the end, and I could not put together how it related to the story overall.

Evil Does Not Exist is getting extremely high praise by other critics, but I just could not connect with it. Its first half hour or so is particularly challenging, with truly glacial pacing—the opening shot alone is just a slow pan looking straight up at barren winter tree branches, for what seem like countless minutes. Then it cuts to Takuma outside his cabin, chopping wood, for another several minutes. Not a lot happens in most of the scenes in this movie, until the aforementioned community forum. Not much happens there either, but compared to the scenes that preceded it, it practically feels like an action movie.

And then, at the very end, things take a jarringly dark turn. Maybe there is something allegorical going on here, or something subtle regarding Japanese culture, that I just don’t have the wherewithal to grasp. Or maybe it’s something else entirely. All I know is that it took a herculean effort to get halfway toward connecting with this movie, which in the end I could only respect as something I assume exist on a level I can’t grasp.

Hey can we take turns, and you can watch me chop wood for five minutes?

Overall: B-

THE AMERICAN SOCIETY OF MAGICAL NEGROES

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

There were multiple ironies to my experience watching The American Society of Magical Negroes, starting with the fact that the theater I went to see it at started to show the wrong film at first. After deeply confusing those of us in the audience with this very film’s trailer playing amongst all the others before the feature started, they then played American Fiction—a vastly superior film in every way imaginable.

Eventually, once the correct film was playing, after some time I registered another irony. This is a film about Black people whose literally magical job is to ease the discomfort of White people. And this film is so blandly inoffensive, with a premise with great potential to be effectively biting, it plays as though the movie itself exists to ease the discomfort of White viewers.

On the one hand, The American Society of Magical Negroes just can’t win. It triggers the Fox News set by quite directly suggesting the most dangerous animal on the planet is “White people.” Then it rankles leftists by having its Black protagonist risk everything by falling in love with a White woman. (Sort of. We’ll get back to that.)

And here is where we get into the fundamental difference between The American Society of Magical Negroes and American Fiction. American Fiction didn’t give any of its White characters a pass. This movie, by contrast, wants us to think it’s highlighting the absurdity of the myth of the “Magical Negro,” and then gives its White characters a pass at every turn. There’s an impassioned speech near the end, delivered by Justice Smith as Aren, a new recruit for the Society of the film’s title, explaining to his coworker Jason (Drew Tarver) what it’s like for him to live in this country as a Black person. And—spoiler alert!—a minor light goes on in Jason’s head, showing a definitively contrived, if small, step toward White understanding. Except to present all this in the context of literal fantasy genre filmmaking rather undermines the message we’re meant to get from this movie.

This is a film of endlessly missed opportunities. It doesn’t even play with the concept of a “Magical Negro” as a historic stereotype specifically in literature, cinema, and television, where Black supporting characters reliably come to the aid of White main characters. Instead, while trying to convince us it’s using the concept subversively, it’s just continuing the tradition of its use. The only difference is that now, the protagonist of the film is the Black supporting character, and the White main characters are its target audience. The oddest thing about this movie is that it’s like a low-rent Harry Potter but with an undercooked premise and a lead actor who is actually more charismatic and talented than Daniel Radcliffe.

Because this is the one major strength of The American Society of Magical Negroes: the winning cast. Justice Smith embodies his character wonderfully, playing both awkward and increasingly confident with equal skill. David Alan Grier exudes warmth as Aren’s mentor, and Michaela Watkins is a welcome presence, if relatively inconsequential, as his boss. An-Li Bogan has great chemistry with Smith as the love interest for whom Aren ultimately risks everything. The story here rather lacks focus and suffers from uneven tonality, but the cast alone makes up for a lot, and together make this movie watchable, if ultimately forgettable.

A particularly curious element of this film is the multiracial ethnicities of both its protagonist and his love interest. Aren even mentions at one point that his mother was White, yet never offers any clarity on what must be unique to that experience, distinct from either being White or having two Black parents. Lizzie is briefly referred to as “ethnic” but never clarified beyond that—evidently we are to understand that, as a matter of fact, she is not a White woman. At least not fully: she’s Asian and White. But, given that Jason makes a comment about not realizing she’s “ethnic,” it would seem she’s “White enough.”

It may be that I’m splitting hairs here, and overdoing the parsing of ethnic heritage in characters—except that this movie is quite literally asking for it. It seems to give White women a pass in particular, in the end offering Lizzie a last-minute “twist” that underlines the role of women in society as “supportive wives and girlfriends.” This is incongruously problematic on its own, as it creates a a false equivalency between the otherwise very real struggles of women, including White women—something that has its place in film for sure, just not this one and not in this way—and Black people experiencing racism.

The American Society of Magical Negroes has some genuine charms (including Nicole Byer as the Society’s president), but it ultimately fails at what it aims to be, and struggles to clarify its point of view. Everything it aspires to, American Fiction achieves with ingenious finesse. I recommend you just watch that movie instead.

We’re meant to learn how White people are more dangerous than sharks, except this movie has no bite.

Overall: B-

ANSELM

Directing: C+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: C+
Music: B

It’s not often that the experience of a film so closely resembles getting a dose of chloroform. I suppose that’s hyperbole, but I was certainly sedated. I truly could not keep myself awake during Anselm.

Art is subjective, right? I hesitate to say this makes Anselm a bad movie. And there were moments, when I managed to stay awake, that I was genuinely astonished and amazed. Anselm Kiefer, a German painter and sculptor who is now 79 years old, is seen in this film working on many of his countless works of art—this guy is incredibly prolific. And makes tactile, three-dimensional pieces on canvases so huge, often twice his height and double again the width, that countless of his pieces are seen, both stored and in progress, in a gigantic warehouse. He gets around the space riding on a bicycle.

In one sequence, Kiefer is seen melting metals down into liquids, then pouring it from a bucket—using a pulley system operated from a safe distance—directly onto a canvas lying flat on the floor. It’s genuinely fascinating, and makes you yearn to find the finished piece, wherever it is now, and touch it. In fact, Kiefer evidently has so many pieces in a quasi-abstract style that is very much my jam, I would be first in line to an exhibit were I to find out there was one near me. Seeing the art in person, I am sure, would be very stimulating indeed, on both visual and tactile levels.

Which is all to say, I don’t think my response to the film Ansel has anything to do with Ansel Kiefer at all. Rather, it has to do with the film’s director Wim Wenders, who once made a name for himself with eighties films like Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire. And, to be fair, the critical consensus with Anselm is very high praise indeed—and I don’t begrudge anyone responding to this film in such a way. Still, I have to speak my truth, and my truth is that this movie literally sedated me.

It’s not like I was operating on lack of sleep or anything. I was perfectly alert before going into the theater, and woke right up when the movie ended (when I was also relieved it was over). There’s something about the smooth, gliding movements of the camera as it passes through Kiefer’s works of art, alternating between a soothing, quiet score, and much longer shots of total silence. It’s the visual equivalent of being rocked to sleep.

The theater where I saw this movie, at 7:30 on a Friday night, was surprisingly full, and I found myself looking around to see if I could get any sense of how the rest of the audience was reacting to it. I couldn’t tell if anyone else was nodding off, but it did strike me that I could not hear anyone eating popcorn. It did feel like, in one way or another, the rest of the audience was also being put under some kind of spell.

It should be noted, also, that Anselm is being presented in 3D. I feel compelled to mention the 2012 documentary Pina, featuring dance tributes to German choreographer Pina Bausch. That film was also presented in 3D, the first documentary feature I had ever seen in that format, and I was truly blown away by it, completely held in its thrall. I actually came to Anselm with Pina very much in mind, thinking: if a documentary must be presented in 3D, an examination of art is the way to do it. How much closer can you get to feeling like you’re in the same room with it, without actually being there?

The stark difference really comes down to tone. Pina was a film of action, a kind of documented series of interpretive dances. Anselm, by contrast, is a visual catalog of stationery objects. I don’t dislike museums, but they do have a tendency to tire me out surprisingly quickly; I get fatigued, as though all that art has tested the limits of my brain function. This was essentially my response to Anselm, just much more severe. I hadn’t been this powerless to sleep since I was anesthetized for a colonoscopy.

My best theory is that it simply had to do with the environmental context: a movie that lulled me to sleep, the 3D format giving it a heightened realism, in a very dark movie theater. I suspect this film, ironically, might be more effective seen in 2D at home. If nothing else, it introduced me to an artist I had never heard of, whose art itself I actually love.

I didn’t actually want to take a nap, I swear!

Overall, what I actually saw: B-

LISA FRANKENSTEIN

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

The funniest thing about Lisa Frankenstein is its release date, nestled up against Valentine’s Day as though it’s a sweet romance. This is a romance between an eighties teen and a reanimated corpse.

It is amusing that Diablo Cody, who wrote the script, has a mind as bent as one that thinks up the absurdist, gross-out gags that are sprinkled throughout this film. Cody lives to defy stereotypes. Lisa Frankenstein was also directed by Zelda Williams, daughter of Robin Williams, setting the story the year she was born (1989). If this and her previous film, Kappa Kappa Die (2020) are any indication, she has a real taste for old-school camp. (There are even cop characters named Officer John, and Officer Waters.)

But, nailing the tone in a film like this is the real tricky part, and Williams doesn’t quite make it. We get introduced to our young heroine, Lisa (a lovely Kathryn Newton), her blithely affectionate stepsister Taffy (a bubbly Liza Soberano), her indifferent dad (Joe Chrest) and her weirdly cruel stepmother (Carla Gugino, chewing the contrived scenery), and establish ourselves in their slighty off-kilter world for just a bit too long before we ever even meet “The Creature.”

“The Creature” is played by Riverdale’s Cole Sprouse, who apparently took months of mime lessons for months to prepare for this role, in which he has (mostly) no lines. He does a fine job for what it is, but I’m not sure he couldn’t have done just as good a job without so much effort. He’s playing a man dead for at least a century or two, and Lisa Frankenstein does very little to explain his reanimation—Lisa is just a high school kid with a crush on the bust of his tombstone, who wishes to “be with him,” and then a sudden burst of lightning results in him showing up at her house.

This is a deliberate lack of depth, of course; it’s very much the point. Lisa Frankenstein is a cross between Heathers, Beetlejuice, and Mommy Dearest, but minus the depth, the cleverness, or the biting satire. Lisa Frankenstein has some cleverness, to be fair, and it’s all in service of camp, to varying degrees of success. I enjoyed it most when its humor is darkest, as with a great gag involving what amounts to a penis transplant.

There weren’t a lot of people in the theater when I went to see this, maybe twenty people—and yet, in spite of how critical I am of it, oddly, in the smattering of moments I found genuinely funny, I was the only person there laughing. That was an odd experience.

There is a very specific sensibility Zelda Williams is going for here, and mileage will definitely vary depending on what you’re looking for. I suppose it could be said that Lisa Frankenstein delivers on its promise; I just wanted a better promise. Its sort of “camp lite” aesthetic gets tired pretty quickly, and that happens before The Creature even shows up. There’s a physical journey he goes on, getting less and less gross as Lisa, an established seamstress of skill, systematically sews him up. Conversely, Lisa starts off withdrawn and then becomes sexily confident over time, but also oddly selfish, using The Creature for assistance with another boy who is her crush at school. I guess we’re supposed to feel bad for The Creature, except of course, he’s a reanimated corpse. I don’t know about you, but I’ll never have any interest in fucking an undead guy, I don’t care how cute he is.

In the end, Lisa Frankenstein has its fun, if tonally inconsistent, moments. The casting is very much in its favor, and I particularly look forward to seeing Kathryn Newton—who was also fantastic in Freaky (2021)—in other things. They make the most of the slightly undercooked ingredients they have to work with.

I guess it’s not terrible, as meet-cute body horror goes.

Overall: B-

WONKA

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

An argument has been made that, well, Wonka is for kids, and kids deserve movies too, right? Well, here’ s my counter-argument: the likelihood that kids will indeed enjoy Wonka notwithstanding, there are still kids’ movies out there that are actually good. This is not one of them.

Mind you, it’s not terrible either. But that’s just the thing: there is a Roald Dahl legacy to live up to here, as well as a Gene Wilder legacy, and Wonka falls short on both counts. This movie doesn’t even live up to the 2005 Tim Burton film Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which I still insist was wonderful, I don’t care how many haters there are out there. Of course, that’s not to say any of these films have held up to the truly classic, enduring 1971 film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory—which, astonishingly, was rated G—but, on the flip side, kids today are neither likely to know anything about that film, nor have much interest in watching it if they do. It would be the equivalent of me having any interest in a film released in 1934 when I was ten years old.

The bummer of it right now is, if you want to take your kids to the movies, Wonka is nearly the only option. The only others in multiplexes right now are the animated films Migration and Wish, which are both getting worse responses than Wonka. Wonka, at the very least, is sprinkled with several genuinely charming moments, of the sort that are a signature of director Paul King. (King directed both of the Paddington films, and both of them are far superior to this.) If you’re one of the adults taking kids to this film, well, you’re kind of shit out of luck.

And, to be fair, it’s not just that it doesn’t live up to Roald Dah’s cinematic legacy. From the opening scenes, in which Timothée Chalamet dances with a bunch of people holding “Wonka” umbrellas behind him, the choreography middling and the lyrics unmemorable, I thought: Oh. This isn’t going to be great. The sequence ends with Wonka getting charged a fee for daydreaming, a brief gag that works better than any of the extended theatrics that came before it.

My biggest issue with Wonka is the visual effects. This movie was made on a budget of $125 million, and I just have to wonder: where the hell was the money spent? Just on the talent? Chalamet’s $9 million paycheck is objectively ridiclous, and yet even that is but a fraction of that budget. Once again, the shockingly good Godzilla Minus One comes to mind—that film was made for $15 million, and it looks far better than this.

Wonka is appropriately color saturated for a film that is clearly presented as a musical fantasia. And yet, a huge amount of it is rendered in subpar CGI, giving it a far more artificial look than films about the same character released 52 and 18 years ago. I was especially mystified by the one Oompa Loompa, whose movements are noticeably jerky-jerky. How can a film this expensive to make look so bad? To give credit where credit is due, Hugh Grant imbues the Oompa Loompa with more personality than any single other character in the film, which almost makes up for the bad visual effects. Almost. (Side note: it’s also in this film’s favor that the Oompa Loompa is given full autonomy, and never becomes the stand-in for slave labor that the Oompa Loompas were in either of the previous films.)

To be fair, Timothée Chalamet, an objectively great actor, does his best with what he has to work with. As do a bevy of other big names who make up the supporting cast: Olivia Colman as Mrs. Scrubitt, the innkeeper who tricks Wonka into indentured servitude; Keegan-Michael Key as the Chief of Police, so easily bribed by Wonka’s rival chocolatiers with chocolate that he gains a ton of weight over the course of the film (and I find the idea that this is “fat shaming” to be debatable at best); Rowan Atkinson as Father Julius, also easily bribed with chocolate; Jim Carter as Abacus Crunch, one of the other indentured servants slaving away in the inn basement; even Sally Hawkins, the mom in the Paddington movies and here playing Wonka’s mother in a few flashback sequences. In none of these cases does the actor get as much to chew on as they deserve, in spite of Olivia Colman’s extensive screen time as one of many villains, but the one who most directly steals Wonka’s luck away from him.

Fundamentally, Paul King seems to have missed the point entirely, of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which is about a possibly-corrupt, borderline sociopathic chocolatier weeding out the one good little kid in a group of spoiled brats. The only way Wonka’s return to that character’s story, particularly as a prequel, would make sense would be for Willy to learn the same kind of lesson himself as a youngster. Instead, Wonka is presented as pure hearted, and constantly taken advantage of by the adults around him who are the spoiled brats.

There is only one genuine kid in this movie, Calah Lane, who plays Noodle, also toiling away indefinitely in the inn basement. Lane is quite lovely, actually, one of the best things about Wonka, with onscreen charisma that helps keeps the proceedings watchable. But Noodle and Willy are both similarly pure of heart, dealing with heightened, standard kids-movie villains. Willy Wonka is supposed to be backed with subtext, and Wonka, generally pleasant as it is to watch, is all text.

All of that brings us back to this: kids will have a great time. The group of kids in the row of seats behind me, who did not shut the fuck up the entire film, certainly did. Surely they neither know nor care anything about Gene Wilder’s or even Johnny Depp’s iterations of Willy Wonka. For them, there is only Timothée Chalamet. But here’s the key difference: none of those kids are going to grow up regarding this as an unfortgettable classic from their childhoods. It’s just another passable outing at the movies, and in the context of its cinematic legacy, that’s a real shame.

Hugh Grant’s ample charms can’t elevate a middling achievement.

Overall: B-