LOVE LIES BLEEDING

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

As 21st-century noirs go, Love Lies Bleeding is pretty great—until it takes an inexplicably wild swing at the end. I would recommend this film, but I would have to warn you about that at the same time. I won’t spoil what happens, except to say it’s somewhat debatable whether what happens is something we are meant to believe is actually happening, or if it’s a character fantasy. I am not averse to wild swings as a concept, mind you; I just want them to be clear in their purpose or what they represent, which is really lacking here—in spite of several allusions to it earlier in the film, which only make at least that much sense in retrospect. Without the wild turn at the end, I might have felt confident that this could be one of the year’s best movies.

It could be argued that, so far at least, it still is. There’s a lot of far worse stuff out there, after all. It’s just that there’s a sequence of maybe five minutes in this movie that really straddles the line between subversive and bafflingly weird.

All that aside, Love Lies Bleeding is a dark, twisted, violent, lesbian romance thriller that is absolutely worth a look. It’s beautifully shot in New Mexico, starting with an opening shot that we only realize well into the story later was the camera lifting out of a ravine that plays into the plot. And it’s edited with a unique sort of precision, moving the plot forward without any excess bloat while keeping the pace at a steady clip. Best of all, it’s exceptionally well cast, with Kristen Stewart as gym manager Lou, who falls for mysterious body builder Jackie, played actual body builder Katy O'Brian, wandering in from out of town. They both get increasingly mixed up with Lou’s gun range owner and insect enthusiast dad Lou Sr (Ed Harris, with both his telltale bald head and a ring of hair that is nuts-long, and somehow it fits the character.)

We learn early on that Lou doesn’t speak to her father, and one of many refreshing elements of Love Lies Bleeding is that this estrangement has nothing to do with Lou’s sexuality—evidently he couldn’t give half a shit about that. I expected some kind of cathartic confrontation between Lou and her father by the end, but much of the story goes by without giving a sense of any catharsis coming with an earned payoff. This is where director and co-writer Rose Glass’s expert construction of the story comes in, because eventually we get just enough revealed about Lou’s dark history with her father, and we understand perfectly why she doesn’t speak to him.

In the meantime, both Lou and Jackie find themselves suffering the consequences of impulsive, violent mistakes. It should be noted that, in at least two scenes, something pretty gruesome occurs. In the first, we see the same shockingly horrid wound so many times, it begins to feel like Rose Glass is toying with us. She’s certainly having fun with this movie: the comic moments are few and far between, but when they do come, they are pretty hilarious.

And that’s the bottom line with Love Lies Bleeding: this is a postmodern take on film noir, with its own sensibility, in a world that is dark and dangerous and yet you love being witness to it. It takes a brief detour into “Wait, what?” territory that I could have lived without—but then immediately reeled me right back in with one final bit of humor, and then a bit of interpretive dance over the end credits. You kind of have to be there. Just because it isn’t perfect doesn’t mean you shouldn’t go there.

I don’t know if you’ll root for them exactly but you’ll still want to know where they’re going.

Overall: B+

THE KILLER

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

The Killer could also have been called The Assassin’s Odyssey. It’s presented in a series of “Chapters,” each in a different location where the title character (Michael Fassbender) makes a kill. Or, as in the case of the deliberately tedious opening sequence, attempts to make a kill. His botched hit makes for the entire premise of the film: he stupidly heads home, stupidly waits an extra night, discovers his girlfriend severely injured in Santo Domingo, and spends the rest of the film hunting down all of those responsible for harming her.

I’m hard pressed to find this plot to be exceptional or memorable, except that, ironically, it is exceptionally and memorably executed. In spite of it veering on being self-satisfied, the editing, and particularly the sound editing are consistently clever. This is a David Fincher film released as a Netflix movie on November 10, after a theatrical release limited enough that I was not able to see it theatrically—and I found myself, watching it at home, rather wishing I had seen it in a theater. The sound editing alone would have made it a much better, certainly more immersive experience.

It’s an objectively fun watch even at home, at least once it gets past that opening scene, hanging out with The Killer in an abandoned WeWork office, waiting out the right time to shoot a mark in a building across the street, and truly overwhelming us with voiceover narration. Voiceover is often pointless and lazy, but it proves to have a point here, coming from an unreliable narrator with a penchant for self-delusion. I was bracing myself for the voiceover to overwhelm the entire film, but mercifully, it’s used comparatively sparingly once that first shot is missed. It’s the inciting incident, and it comes roughly 15 minutes into the film.

The locations of each “Chapter” span the globe and virtually every corner of the States: Paris, Santo Domingo, New Orleans, Florida, New York, Chicago. Each has a vibe distinct from all the others. Only one—Florida—proves to feature a legitimate action sequence, with his mark getting the job on The Killer after he’s crept into his house in the middle of the night. And to be clear, the sequence is tense, and thrilling to watch, with excellent fight choreography.

This is what I like most about The Killer: each change of scenery is given room to breathe, all the while with The Killer not so much getting character development, as gradually revealing his subtle ineptitude. This is a guy who exudes confidence, and then regularly makes preventable mistakes. Much as I lapped up the crackling energy of the Floridian house fight, my favorite of all the hits we follow The Killer on is the one in New York, where he catches up with the one woman on his list. Even when the movie is already quite good, Tilda Swinton manages to elevate anything she’s in. Her sequence is the one with real dialogue, a verbal sparring partner with Michael Fassbender who not only matches his talents but exceeds them.

It seems a lot more common for a film to run out of steam, its second half being the weaker half. The Killer achieves the inverse of this, in fact with each scene being better than the last. That opening scene left me skeptical, but by the time The Killer meets up with “The Lawyer” (Charles Parnell) and fatally ropes in his secretary (Kerry O’Malley), revealing to us some bullshit about empathy in his inner monologue, it becomes clear that The Killer is not your standard hitman movie.

I wasn’t quite as satisfied as I wanted to be by the end of this movie, essentially a series of creatively violent vignettes. So many of the preceding scenes so far exceeded my expectations, though, I’m willing to let it go. Everything builds effectively on what came before it, and the destination being a bit hollow means less when the journey is the point.

You want your sociopaths to be at least competent.

Overall: B+

THE PALE BLUE EYE

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

There are so many familiar faces in The Pale Blue Eye, it gets genuinely distracting. There are four Harry Potter series cast alumni, although to be fair Toby Jones was merely the voice of the house elf Dobby in those films; his actual face is familiar from countless other films. The same goes for Simon McBurney, to a lesser degree: he voiced Kreacher in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I. The genuinely jarring faces are two who were much larger characters in the Harry Potter universe but are much older and thinner now: Timothy Spall as Superintendent Thayer; and Harry Melling as Cadet Edgar Allen Poe—yes, the Edgar Allan Poe, played by the young man who once played the far heavier Dudley Dursley.

As it happens, Melling is inspired casting. This guy grew into a gaunt, almost crater-eyed young man, perfect for the aesthetic of a 19th-century poet with a taste for the truly morbid. He works well for ambiguity as well: Poe has a flair for the eccentric and dark, but it is well established early on that he is not the villain.

Who is the villain proves to be complex, arguably even convoluted, in The Pale Blue Eye, which is wrtier-director Scott Cooper’s version of a murder mystery. Cooper is the man who previously brought us such varied titles as Crazy Heart, Out of the Furnace, Black Mass and Hostiles, and this body of work evidently granted him a blank check from Netflix: this new film was granted limited release just prior to Christmas, and has otherwise been streaming exclusively on Netflix since January 6.

I rather wish I could have seen it in a theater. The Pale Blue Eye is the kind of movie that moves at a glacial pace but rewards patience, and strikes a compellingly melancholy tone that would far more successfully draw viewers entirely into its world from inside a cinema. As for whether it’s worth watching at home, at best that depends on your interest in the film’s genre, and particularly, its aesthetic.

To be honest, this movie isn’t quite dark enough. It establishes an eerie vibe, but never manages to be unsettling, or even particularly spooky. I dug it when Poe asked a woman out on a date to a cemetery, where she proceeds to have a seizure. More of this please! But really, even with its element of Satan worship—which itself is really quite sanitized—this film is really nothing more than a conventional murder mystery, grafted onto a 19th-century American setting.

That’s not to say I still didn’t find it worth watching, mind you. Christian Bale returns to work with Scott Cooper for the third time—that’s half of his feature films, to date—as the detective summoned to investigate grisly murders involving the removal of corpse’s hearts. He makes a rather unlikely but oddly workable pairing with Melling as Poe, as they team up to suss out clues together.

Charlotte Gainsbourg is underused in a supporting part as a passing love interest of Bale’s. Robert Duvall appears in two scenes as a crusty old academic. And Gillian Anderson is both virtually unrecognizable and iconic as Toby Jones’s tightly wound wife—the wife of the local doctor. The glacial pace picks up about halfway through the run time, which for me at least made it worth the wait. And then, about three quarters of the way through the story, there is a sequence climactic enough to feel like a solid ending to the film. Anyone not already familiar with the runtime would no doubt be surprised to find another half an hour left to go, in which we are treated to the final twist, turning everything we saw on its head.

It’s fun enough, I suppose. Not as thrilling in surprise as I might have liked. But, to its credit, The Pale Blue Eye offered a world I enjoyed inhabiting for a couple of hours.

We’re not on Privet Drive anymore: Christian Bale and Harry Melling have an unlikely meeting of the minds two hundred years in the past.

Overall: B

THE BATMAN

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

The Batman is markedly different from the many other iterations of movies, and movie series, featuring DC Comics’ most iconic superhero character. It’s certainly the longest, at 175 minutes. Too long? Perhaps; a good half an hour could have been shaved off this film and it would not feel as though anything were missing. On the other hand, given the style, tone, and pacing of this film, that run time gives it room to breathe. Some might feel that it has lulls, but those people would not understand the modern noir vibe that director Matt Reeves (War for the Planet of the Apes) was going for.

One could also argue that Reeves, who also co-wrote the script with Peter Craig, throws in too many characters, with Paul Dano, Colin Farrell, and John Turturro all playing villains—two of them iconic ones from Batman lore: The Riddler and The Penguin. This is not to mention Jeffrey Wright as Lt. James Gordon; Andy Serkis as Alfred; Peter Sarsgaard as District Attorney Gil Colson; and notably Zoë Kravitz as Selina Kyle, the cat burglar who will later become (but is never once referred to here as) Catwoman.

As always, I must reiterate that a film should be judged on its own terms. That proves a unique challenge with The Batman, which qualifies as a third reboot of a Batman film franchise in the past 33 years, and the fourth series of films featuring the same Caped Crusader character within a single film universe, when counting Ben Afleck in the “DC Universe” films that largely flopped with both critics and audiences. In other words, The Batman has to do a huge amount of heavily lifting in order to justify its own existence. What reason is there for yet another Batman?

There isn’t one, truthfully, except to keep raking in box office dollars. Only time will tell whether The Batman proves itself on that front; when I was leaving the theater, other patrons were overheard complaining about how long it was. Some people are finding it a “bland” take on Batman, but I wholeheartedly disagree. I fear I may be in the minority here, but if they had to cram this many significant characters into the story, giving it a three-hour run time actually allows The Batman to do what I have long wished more comic book superhero movies would do: prioritize story over spectacle.

And that’s not to say there isn’t plenty of spectacle to be seen here, which is kind of the point: once we get to its several stunning action set pieces, it works as a payoff few other blockbuster movies in recent years have achieved. The Batman does not open with a blowout action extravaganza, but rather a dark and creepy scene in which we the first in a series of murders by the serial killer we learn soon enough is The Riddler (excellently portrayed by the criminally under-seen Paul Dano). When we’re not watching action scenes, The Batman is unusually quiet, its characters uniformly speaking in hushed tones barely above a whisper.

A lot of this film brought to mind the first of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy, the underrated Batman Begins (2005). Both films focus on Bruce Wayne’s early days as Batman, and both films feature several characters, some of them less well known, that would qualify as villains. The difference in The Batman is that the title character is still relatively new to Gotham City, yet already established as a known presence. And if I had any complaint about the Nolan films, it’s that he traded in the hyper stylized universe of the Tim Burton films (still the best ones) for a “gritty,” more realistic world much like our own—which doesn’t as effectively present a vigilante dressed as a bat and working with the local police as a plausible idea. It’s clearly a fantasy and should be contextualized in a world that is also fantasy.

Matt Reeves’s Gotham City isn’t anywhere near as stylized as Burton’s was, but it is much more so than Nolan’s was, a bit of a happy medium. Gotham City itself is largely made up in visual renderings, quite well done actually, but still grounded as a city that looks like a city in our world. It’s the film noir cinematography, lighting and coloring that gives The Batman its signature style, very distinct from the many films that came before it. Granted, there have been many Batman films and there have been countless examples of film noir, but Reeves blends them in a way that sets a new kind of mood. It’s a dark mood, with only occasional bits of humor, but it’s a mood that is very much my jam nonetheless. Combine that with an invigorating score by Michael Giacchino, and you’ve got a movie I will happily go see again, its length notwithstanding.

If I had any true complaint about The Batman, it would be that the sexual chemistry between Zoë Kravitz and Robert Pattinson is not well enough explored. In fact, although I must say I liked her better as Catwoman than I did Anne Hathaway in The Dark Knight Rises (2012), Kravitz’s Selina Kyle lacks a certain charisma; there is no bite to her. This is no fault of Kravitz’s, who does exceedingly well with the part she is given; the issue, really is how she is written—much more as a hero than as even a potential villain. And Catwoman works best as a character when she can’t seem to decide which she actually is.

The rest of the characters, however, are well written and very well cast, especially Robert Pattinson as The Batman himself, instantly becoming my second-favorite Batman ever (after the obvious, Michael Keaton). Pattinson is now the sixth actor to play Batman on film since 1989, and he succeeds better than most at the “Batman voice” used while in the bat suit. (Christian Bale, much as I liked him otherwise, really overdid it with his gruff delivery.) Pattinson’s delivery here works well because he speaks fairly low the same way all the characters do, and is hardly distinguishable from how he speaks as just Bruce Wayne.

I want to tell you that I found The Batman thrilling, but for the fact that so much of it is quite subdued in its tone and pacing. What I can say is this: it works. It works better than it even deserves to, perhaps. And it spends just the right amount of time slowly building toward its multiple genuine thrills, particularly a beautifully shot car chase with The Penguin (the impressive makeup for which renders Colin Farrell all but unrecognizable), and a climactic sequence in which a flooding Gotham is taken under siege. It took me a few minutes at the start to decide whether I was going to like The Batman, but then it settled into its noir tone, and I was into it. Then it moved toward its set pieces in an unusually organic way, and I found myself thinking, I love this movie. I can feel that way about it while acknowledging it’s not exactly a masterwork, nor is it even the best Batman movie ever made. But it’s a movie that delivers on its promise, and meets the moment.

Woman! Cat! Why can’t you be naughtier!

Overall: B+

KIMI

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

Here we are with Steven Soderbergh again, offering his fourth straight-to-streaming film in as many years. Okay, they weren’t quite all straight-to-streaming, although they’re certainly trending that way: The Laundromat was streaming less than a month after a brief theatrical release in late September 2019; Let Them All Talk was released straight to HBO Max in December 2020; No Sudden Move was released on HBO Max in July 2021; and now we’ve got Kimi, also on HBO Max as of yesterday (February 11). It would be tempting to say Soderbergh is trending this way due to the rippling effects of the pandemic on the film industry—except that the pandemic only accelerated industry changes that began well before it, and considering that 2019 streaming release, it would seem Soderbergh saw the writing on the wall well before any of us had any idea Covid was coming. One wonders whether he’ll make movies for theaters ever again. His next project is Magic Mike’s Last Dance, so, who knows?

Whatever the case, this guy sure as shit keeps busy. He clearly isn’t obsessed with making “great cinema,” either, opting instead for steady work making competent offerings on an annual basis. He just likes making movies.

And, to his credit, he’s capable of adapting. In the case of Kimi, he has finally made a movie that directly acknowledges the pandemic, with its central character, Angela (Zoë Kravitz), being an agoraphobic tech worker who works from home, having had made some progress but noting that the pandemic cause a relapse of sorts. She has an ongoing, very socially distanced relationship with a man in the building across the street (Byron Bowers)—having established a connection during lockdown—as well as a mysterious man on another floor we regularly see looking her way. His very existence in the movie means he will become a key figure in the plot eventually, and when that inevitably happens, it’s in an unexpected way.

A bit of fun for the locals where I live: Kimi is set in Seattle. Interiors mostly shot in Los Angeles, but there are plenty of exterior scenes—especially once Angela is given no choice but to leave her apartment. I got taken out of the story momentarily when Angela takes a light rail train from International District Station to an office building by the grain silos on the waterfront. Light rail doesn’t go there! Of course, no one outside of Seattle will know that or care. And it was still a minor thrill to see Sound Transit get such prominent, onscreen product placement.

Anyway, you might be wondering who the hell Kimi is. It’s more of a what, actually: it’s a virtual assistant, like Amazon’s Alexa or Microsoft’s Siri. Angela works the error logs of voice commands that didn’t work and resolves or corrects them, and then runs across one which sounds as though a murder may have been recorded. Angela looks into it, and peril ensues.

Clearly Kimi shares a lot of its DNA with Alfred Kitchcock’s Rear Window, but it’s just different enough for that not to be to its detriment. The virtual assistant element is a nice twist for the modern age, and Angela’s relapse into agoraphobia provides a logical context wherein the pandemic also exists. Kimi was filmed in the spring of 2021, just after the peak of vaccination drives, when we were headed into a brief period of relaxed mitigation measures. This allows the production to feature characters here and there with masks on, but most of the time people are going around maskless. There’s one scene in downtown Seattle that is unusually crowded, but whatever, it’s a movie. I enjoyed spying Seattle landmarks and locations in these scenes.

One of the bigger surprises is Derek DelGaudio, previously seen as the jaw dropping illusionist in last year’s Derek DelGaudio’s In & Of Itself (that one streaming on Hulu), as Kimi’s villain. He actually only gets a few scenes, and anyone carrying a threat or intent of violence would qualify as his henchman. DelGaudio plays Bradley Hasling, the creator of the Kimi virtual assistant. The well constructed script draws connections between all these characters that, while they are contrivances, are also the hallmarks of effective storytelling. Kimi starts off a bit slow, much of the story confined to Angela’s apartment. But, the world broadens a bit when her need to report what she heard on the recording forces her decision to leave home, and then for the last third or so of the film, things get much more exciting as the action and suspense ramps up.

There’s also a sprinkling of humorous moments here and there that are a nice touch. Kimi frankly feels a little like a movie made for streaming rathe than theatrical release, but it serves its purpose. It’s a mid-level Soderbergh offering, and at a cool 89 minutes in length, it makes for a perfectly good diversion at home over the weekend.

Check it out, Zoë Kravitz at a Seattle bus stop!

Overall: B

COPSHOP

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

I can’t help but wonder, is Copshop another movie that’s the product of the pandemic? The cast may not be especially small—there are 23 credited parts—but the setting is still characteristically limited: probably 80% or more of the movie takes place at a rural Nevada police station (hence the title). I would guess that at least a third of the movie features only the three leads: Val (Alexis Louder), the cop looking after two criminals in the jail downstairs: Teddy Murretto (Frank Grillo), the man on the run from Bob Viddick (Gerard Butler), the man hired to kill him. Several scenes feature just the three of them, bantering in the jail, Murretto and Viddick in separate cells.

The rest of the cast, ultimately, ultimately serves to up the body count, which is quite high in this film. There’s a lot of gun fights, and a lot of relatively multidimensional characters we’ve spent some time getting to know get dispatched unceremoniously. Given the action-crime genre, I have mixed feelings about this. Director Joe Carnahan is offering a quasi-stylized movie clearly meant to be more fun than gritty, in which case, why bum us out like that? On the other hand, it could be seen as a refreshing change of approach: these people may be characters, but their lives mean something. Something tells me, though, that Carnahan wasn’t thinking too much about that.

It’s not that big a deal, anyway; I found myself having a good time with this movie regardless. In fact, I never did watch a trailer to this movie before seeing it, and only went to see it based on relatively good reviews and a synopsis that made it sound more dramatic than action-packed. As a result, this movie was a pleasant surprise, and exceeded my expectations.

Granted, there is no question that Carnahan is emulating far better directors here, like Quentin Tarantino or Edgar Wright. Or even Shane Black, whose 2016 film The Nice Guys is vaguely similar in tone but lands its humor with far greater success.

In the moment, though, Copshop suffices, and I did enjoy the supporting turn by Toby Huss as Anthony, the unhinged rival assassin who shows up and ultimately wreaks all the havoc that makes this movie as entertaining as it is. As for Gerard Butler, this is the kind of low-rent crime thriller he’s basically typecast to be a part of these days, his very screen presence is generic, and the character of Viddick manages more than one implausible plot twist that made me wonder if he moonlights as an illusionist.

Butler aside, it’s the casting of Copshop that elevates the material at least a little bit, especially Alexis Louder as the unusual choice of a Black woman as the hero in a film of this type. There’s a lot of genuine gun loving in this movie, of course, but that just goes with the territory here. Part of the fun is the confined setting at the police station for the vast majority of the film, much of it with Val, Murretto and Viddick locked behind the bulletproof door to. the jail while Anthony, cracking weird jokes—and Copshop is best when it gets weird, which it honestly doesn’t do enough—as he tries to get in after them all.

Copshop could have benefitted from some polishing, but its minor messiness, even when it gets a little hackneyed at times, is part of its charm. I wouldn’t say anyone should rush out. to theaters to see it, but I still found it well worth my time.

Val is a gunslinging badass,

Overall: B

NO SUDDEN MOVE

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

What exactly defines a “noir,” anyway? I’ll freely admit I could be off base here, but when I think film noir I think 1940s, black and white, crime drama, maybe mystery. Lots of stark imagery, lots of shadows. I may have a narrow idea of what qualifies for the genre. I have long thought of Blade Runner as “future noir” because of its blend of crime drama and clear 1940s aesthetic influences, even though it was set decades into the future.

Hmm. “A genre of crime film or fiction characterized by cynicism, fatalism, and moral ambiguity.” Okay, fine. No Sudden Move definitely fits the bill.

Of course, so could countless other crime dramas, particularly ones—as this one does—that double as a period piece. What distinguishes No Sudden Move as a “noir film” as opposed to simply a crime drama that happens to be set in 1950s Detroit?

The literal French translation is black film. A curious point, given the story and setting here, Detroit at the height of its prominence in America, when it had 1.8 million people and was the fifth-largest city in the United States (behind, at the time, New York City, Chicago, Philadelphia and Los Angeles); the city ranks 14th today, having declined in population by nearly 64% over the past seventy years. Furthermore, several of the characters are Black, with Don Cheadle getting top billing. There’s something you don’t see in “classic noir,” but it certainly gives new meaning to the idea of film noir.

The rest of the principal cast is either Black or white, although one of them is Latino: Benicio del Toro, who gets second billing. He and Cheadle play Ronald and Curt, respectively, who are hired along with the young white guy Charlie (Kieran Culkin) to “babysit” a family at their house while the dad (David Harbour) is escorted to the office of his boss (Hugh Maguire) to steal an incriminating document about the automobile industry in his safe.

It’s quite clear that a lot of actors have great respect or Steven Soderbergh as a director, and are either eager or happy to take part in often large ensemble casts for his projects, regardless of the medium. Lately Soderbergh is using HBO as the conduit for his output, most recently with Let Them All Talk, starring Meryl Streep, Candice Bergen and Diane Wiest as old friends on a cruise. That movie and this one could not be more different, except that they serve as the latest example of how prolific and eclectic Soderbergh is and has long been. Plus—and this is key—they are the kinds of movies that get little support for major studio releases in movie theaters anymore, and so they get released direct to streaming.

This is almost certainly less lucrative for Soderbergh, but all evidence points to his being more creatively fulfilled. And when it comes to No Sudden Move, a whole lot of name actors seem to agree, with the cast also including the likes of Brendan Frasher (almost unrecognizable), John Hamm, Ray Liotta, Matt Damon, and even Noah Jupe as David Harbour’s teenage son.

If I had any particular criticism of this film, it would be that, as is typical of films of this type, the women aren’t given enough to do. A fair number of women get speaking parts, and No Sudden Move at the very least passes the Bechdel Test, and a key twist near the end involves one of the women and is impossible to see coming—all of which I appreciate. None of this changes the fact that every woman onscreen, including even Amy Seimetz as David Harbour’s wife, are fundamentally secondary not just to the plot, but to all of the men involved in it. I want to see a crime noir that is “modernized” in a way that gives women equal footing in the way the plot unfolds, rather than them just being angry or resentful about their husbands’ behaviors and personal associations.

That said, we take what we can get, and among the men at least, this is a hearteningly diverse cast. And the script, by Ed Solomon (Men In Black), brings all these characters together in uniquely satisfying ways. That “babysitting” job of the aforementioned family goes sideways very early on, and every turn that follows is just unpredictable enough to be not overdone, and the story remains consistently compelling from there to the end. When it comes to crime dramas, No Sudden Moves holds up to the tenets of the genre.

These two experience a lot of close calls.

Overall: B+

ZOLA

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

Do yourself a favor, save yourself the time, trouble, and money and just click here to read the original Twitter thread on which this movie Zola is based. The original tweets, first posted in 2015, have since been deleted from Twitter, but we all know now we can rely on someone saving screenshots. Just be sure not to make the same mistake I did and click the “Next” button, which actually takes you to a different, unrelated post. Just scroll down and you’ll see every screenshot, all 148 tweets, which frankly make for a far better experience than watching the movie.

I mean, the movie is . . . fine, I guess. The first tweet is verbatim the first line in the movie: “Y’all wanna. hear a story about why me & this bitch here fell out???????? It’s kind of long but full of suspense.” The thing is, that is absolutely an accurate description of the twitter thread. The movie, on the other hand, is neither long (86 minutes) but still manages to drag, or even remotely suspenseful. On the contrary, it’s unlike possibly any other movie I have ever seen, in that it is packed . . . with filler.

Zola could have made a truly fantastic, thirty-minute episode of, say, an anthology TV series about people’s crazy stories. Maybe even with a focus on sex workers’ crazy stories. Every one of the jaw dropping twists and turns in the story, countless though they are, could have been tightened up into that time frame. Maybe director and co-writer Janicza Bravo thought that would be too overwhelming to viewers? Except the whole point of that story is how chaotic it is.

It’s true that sometimes I complain about too much happening in a movie, and how it never takes time to breathe. The difference is, for maybe three quarters of its run time Zola is nothing but the breathing. We get slow shots of Zola (Taylour Paige) and her new stripper friend Stefani (Riley Keough, playing the young woman who in real life was named Jessica) putting on makeup in the same mirror together, or a montage of these two with Jessica’s boyfriend Derrek (Nicholas Braun) and who will turn out to be Stefani’s pimp (Colman Domingo), on their 20-hour drive to what Zola has been told is a lucrative dancing gig. There’s a scene where colored lines suddenly appear over Zola’s forehead as it otherwise fades to black, as though she’s having an out of body experience. There’s also a scene in a gas station bathroom with a crane shot from directly above, showing Zola and Stefani peeing in neighboring toilet stalls, passing toilet paper to each other under the wall. When that particular scene, which was very short, ended, I thought to myself, Why the fuck did I need to see that? I thought at first that I should give the movie the benefit of the doubt, and maybe something in the plotting will reveal it to be more relevant than it appeared. Instead, I’m still wondering.

The pimp’s name in the movie is X, and for some reason he is portrayed in a far more villainous fashion than he ever was in Zola’s original Twitter thread—as in, repeatedly threatening to Zola directly, as she gets roped into tagging along on Stefanie’s nights of doing sex work. More than once you wonder if X is going to physically assault her; the man is very menacing, in a way he was never portrayed in the original Twitter thread. Ironically, the end of the Twitter thread reveals that man to have been a horrible man indeed, to extremes actually never made explicit in the film: kidnapping of underage girls and links to murder. This, after the tweets portray Zola as being a lot more complicit in the weekend shenanigans than she is as a character in the film.

To be fair, the film begins with title cards that say “most of this is true,” basically acknowledging the artistic license it takes, and the vast majority of the major beats of the story are indeed lifted directed from the original account. (I immediately went to find that Twitter thread when I got home, just so I could find out.) There are some fascinating directions the film goes when it comes to racial dynamics, as Zola is a Black woman and Stefani is a white woman who oozes Black cultural appropriation, particularly with her “black accent.”

It can’t be denied that there is plenty to unpack with this film, ripe for discussion. It’s just poorly edited. Honestly, they could have taken a whole lot more artistic license and just added more stuff to make the film compelling on a consistent basis from beginning to end, maybe then simply saying “loosely based on a true story.” What we got instead, it’s like they were too concerned with being as close to the real story as possible, except that those 148 tweets cover an entire weekend, and if you’re going to adapt a written account of something into a feature film, you really need the full text to be more than just roughly 4500 words (that amounts to, say, nine pages).

I am intrigued by both of these main characters, both as they existed in real life and as they exist fictionalized on film. The women who portray them are more than competent (although to be honest, Nicholas Braun as possibly mentally ill boyfriend Derrek gives arguably the best performance), and make me want to know more about them and their bananas situation. Even as Zola goes back and forth in her resentment versus support of Stefani: at one point she retakes her photos for her, and reposts ads so she makes $500 per client instead of $100. None of these characters are perfect or simple or incapable of being their own brand of a mess, although I suppose I do think it’s cool that real-life Zola was so involved in making the film she got Executive Producer credit. I just think she would have been better served in a different medium.

The story is incredible, the movie isn’t.

Overall: C+

GEORGETOWN

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

Too many actors dream of being directors. And too many of the best actors have their sights on “ascending” to the level of director, maybe because they want to be their own boss? There are plenty of cases where this works out, but arguably more often it doesn’t. Case in point: Christoph Waltz, in his feature film directorial debut with Georgetown, in which he also stars. Sure, more experience at it could make him better, but if this movie is any indication, he is better left as an actor in the hands of other directors. It’s earned him two Oscar wins, after all—albeit for his only two nominations, under the guidance of the same director, Quentin Tarantino.

Waltz is no Tarantino, and I daresay he never will be. Georgetown is a wildly different, yet far more understated and therefore less memorable, story about a D.C. con man attempting to make a name for himself among the political establishment with the help of his far older widowed socialite wife (Vanessa Redgrave) and her contacts. She’s found dead in their home one night, and of course the young husband is the prime suspect.

It should be noted that the film begins with this: This story does not, in any way, claim to be the truth. Nonetheless, it is inspired by actual events. The “actual events” are detailed in a 2012 New York Times Magazine article, “The Worst Marriage in Georgetown,” by Franklin Foer. Curiously, cited in the opening credits as the source material—although the script was adapted by David Auburn, who wrote the 2019 version of Charlie’s Angels as well as The Lake House (2006). After seeing Georgetown the film, my guess is that you’ll be far more likely to be wowed by the 2012 article. Just go read that.

Not that Georgetown is bad, on any level really. It’s just mediocre, on pretty much every level. The story, as written, is . . . fine. The performances are . . . fine. The treatment of the death at the heart of the story as a mystery is somewhat odd, given both the fact that we know from history and how increasingly obvious it is even in the film. And the film makes odd choices that make it almost pointedly less interesting than the real story, such as the fact that young Albrecht Muth was all of 18 years old when he first attempted to ask out Viola Drath in 1982, when she was still forty years married and 62 years old. That’s a 44-year age difference.

In Georgetown, these characters are respectively named Ulrich Mott and Elsa Breht, and when we first meet Mott, he’s an intern—just as Muth had been—but already in his fifties. Granted, by the time Elsa is found dead she is identified as being 91 years old, and Ulrich is still clearly in his fifties. No one ever states explicitly what their age difference is in the film, but it’s still clearly somewhere close to at least 35 years. Waltz just makes an effort to avoid depicting Mott any time in his youth, perhaps so he wouldn’t have to attempt playing that much younger than his own real age, or hire another actor.

Still: it’s less interesting. Georgetown also creates a young daughter for Elsa, who is suspicious of Ulrich from the start: “He looks like he could be my brother!” she says. The daughter is played by Annette Bening, an actress of ample talents who is entirely wasted in this part, and not just because she’s put in terrible wigs in the flashback scenes.

I wonder how many of these actors already knew each other on some level? Maybe they found the premise compelling and wanted to help out a fellow actor who is trying on a director’s hat. The spirit of giving is nice and all that, but when it comes to women actors past a certain age, both Vanessa Redgrave and Annette Bening are given thankless roles here. The entire film revolves around what a deluded conman Ulrich Mott is, and somehow even Christoph Waltz can’t make him that interesting. And this is a guy who duped countless high-ranking officials and politicians. There’s an irony on being a successful conman, when it takes that much skill and work to get there: why not just apply that same work ethic to legitimate paths to success? At leas then you won’t wind up disgraced. But, I suppose the mindset of a conman just doesn’t work that way.

Unfortunately, I’m not sure all the work that clearly went into Georgetown particularly paid off. This movie was filed as far back as late 2017, and wasn’t even scheduled for release until 2020. We all know what happened then. And after a brief Italian theatrical run in June 2020, it was punted to VOD release just this month, in 2021, three and a half years after production wrapped. That alone is somewhat telling. The movie is better than that might suggest, actually, but it’s also nowhere near its potential. I liked it okay, but I spent seven bucks to watch this on Prime Video and I don’t think you should.

A marriage of suspicion is no enough to make this movie all that memorable.

Overall: B-

I CARE A LOT

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

Let’s start with the things I love about I Care a Lot, now streaming on Netflix, as there’s a few. I love that three of the four principal characters are women, including the protagonist. I love that said women are just as shady as characters as any of the “Russian mob” men they get mixed up with: we need more nuanced woman villains! I love that Diane Wiest is cast in a key part, as we don’t get to see her enough.

On the other hand, we still don’t get to see Diane Wiest enough, even in this movie, and I don’t love that. She features more prominently in the first half than in the second, and I spent too much time hoping her character would be the one to get the last laugh in the end, only to be disappointed. Jennifer Peterson is a fascinating character, and I wish writer-director J Blakeson had given her more agency. She’s really the only character in this movie who deserves to take charge of her own fate, and she winds up being the only one denied it.

I’ll still credit Blakeson for how much agency he gives Marla Grayson (Rosamund Pike, effectively playing her as an unsettlingly amoral person), regardless of how villainous she is. This is a woman running a practice that is legal but, to put it euphemistically, “morally dubious” as they mark elderly people to be deemed unable to care for themselves. Marla gets courts to grand her guardianship over these senior citizens, places them into assisted living facilities, and sells off all their assets.

I’ll even credit Blakeson for casting Peter Dinklage as Roman Lunyov, her most direct nemesis and Jennifer Peterson’s mob boss son. Nothing in the script indicates that Roman is a little person, and nothing in the dialogue is changed to make a single reference to his size. He just exists as another person here, albeit a clearly evil, criminal one who wields a lot of power. In someone else’s hands, they might make his lifelong resentment of being marginalized a part of his psychological portrait—it certainly was in Game of Thrones—but here, it’s completely incidental, and only Dinklage’s performance has any relevance to his presence in the cast. (And he’s very good.)

On the other hand, I have somewhat more mixed feelings about the choice to make Marla, and her partner/lover/accomplice (Eiza González), lesbians. Sure, this detail is also incidental and does not hinge on the plot in any way. Still, the slight sting of history remains, where far too many films have made their most horrible characters gay.

All that said, for much of I Care a Lot, we are treated to a riveting game of cat and mouse between Roman and Marla, who surprises him by being every bit his match. This is a surprise to him because he is part of a very powerful mob family, and makes the mistake of underestimating Marla as a small-time crook. Marla is an incredibly dynamic, intelligent woman who refuses to be intimidated by the men who assume they can easly shut her down. This makes her an unusually compelling character, even as an awful person herself, especially as Rosamund Pike plays her.

And, no disrespect to Peter Dinklage—who is reliably great—I just wish that cat-and-mouse game had rather been between Marla and Diane Wiest’s Jennifer. This is one of the problems with I Care a Lot, as even though it gives women (good or bad) far more credit than most movies do, at the same time it gives the elderly no credit or agency whatsoever. In this universe, every old person is helpless and vulnerable, a potential victim for prey. Even when Jennifer begins to realize, and deviously delight in the fact that Marla has gotten in over her head by involving her son, that remains the context: she is dependent on her son. I want to see the movie where Jennifer is the clever one.

I suppose you could argue it’s just too easy not to be happy with these things, especially when it’s a movie that has so much going for it—and, I Care a Lot has a lot. It does make several narrative leaps of faith over probability, but I won’t spend much time nitpicking over that; what crime thriller doesn’t? I can say this much for the film: it delivers on the promise of the genre, being plenty suspenseful, and sprinkled with dark humor, throughout. I used to gauge whether I’d recommend a movie based on whether I thought it was worth going to the theater to see. Would this one have been? It would have for me; I’m just not sure it would be for others. Lucky for you, you can already fire it right up from your couch. From there, it’s plenty worth your time.

Strong, nuanced women, all of them awful . . . it’s great!

Overall: B