MARIA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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-

THE PIANO LESSON

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

The Piano Lesson is the third August Wilson play to be adapted to film in the past eight years, the others being Fences (2016) and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (2020). As with the others, this one is both compelling and feels very much like a filmed stage play. If you didn’t already know it was such an adaptation, you might sit through its almost exclusive scenes of characters in rooms talking and think: Was this a play?

This is always what makes film adaptations of stage plays tricky. On the one hand, watching a story like this is certainly more effective when scene unfold live on stage. On the other hand, film certainly reaches far more audiences. How much more is perhaps the most pertinent question: film adaptations of plays don’t tend to be huge hits, although sometimes (as with Fences) they do go on to gain Academy Awards recognition.

The Piano Lesson is currently in limited release, showing here in the Seattle area only at the Landmark Crest Cinema, up in Shoreline. This is a Netflix production, and as is typical, they have released it in a small number of theaters for Oscar qualification; it will be streaming on Netflix November 22. I can tell you there’s no need to go out of your way to see it in a theater; there is much to admire about this film, but none of it made exceptional by the theatrical viewing experience rather than simply watching it at home.

Although the titular piano plays prominently in the plot, there is surprisingly little piano actually played in this movie. It’s much more about what the object itself represents, as a sort of family heirloom, with lore attached to it that dates back to slavery times: the ancestors of the present-day family whose story this is are carved into the piano’s wood. In the opening sequence, we see the piano being stolen, on Independence Day in 1911, from the former slave owners who have had the piano for decades. It’s the family etched into the piano who are stealing it, but the story being told focuses much more on the descendants of that family, 25 years later.

I will freely admit getting a bit of a kick out of any movie with an otherwise all-Black cast, where the very few White characters onscreen are either outright evil or merely forgettable and insignificant. Plenty of White dipshits will see this as “wokeness” gone too far. I see it as poetic justice. The fact that August Wilson’s dialogue is reliably poetic is icing on the cake.

The original play was produced in 1987. but there was a revival Broadway production in 2022 and 2023 starring Samuel L. Jackson, John David Washington, Ray Fisher and Michael Potts—all of whom reprise their roles here. Most of the story takes place in the house of Bernice (Danielle Deadwyler), her daughter Maretha (Skylar Aleece Smith), and her uncle, Doaker (Jackson), which is slowly revealed to be haunted by James Sutter (Jay Peterson), the patriarch of the aforementioned slave-owning family. Bernice gets paid a visit by her brother, Boy Willie (Washington), and his friend Lymon (Ray Fisher). A couple of other visitors wind up showing up: Wining Boy Charles (Michael Potts), Bernice’s other uncle and Doaker’s brother; and Avery (Corey Hawkins), an old family friend, now turned preacher, who has aims to marry a very resistant Bernice.

A huge amount of the dialogue consists of Bernice and her brother Boy Willie arguing over the piano. Boy Willie has come to Pittsburgh with a truck load of watermelons he intends to sell, and then buy land with funds combined with the sale of the piano. This is actually a rich and compelling argument to witness, because both characters have valid points of view on the matter. Boy Willie believes their forefathers would want the piano to be used to make their lives better and more secure, being worth enough to help make that happen. Bernice believes far too much love and sacrifice went into the carvings to cast it aside as a family heirloom. I think I’m with Bernice on this one, but it’s not difficult to understand Boy Willie’s opinion on the matter.

The Piano Lesson is directed by first-time feature film director Malcolm Washington—John David’s brother and also son of Denzel—and he holds his own fairly impressively, creating an adaptation about as successful as the other two from recent years. It’s the supernatural element where your mileage may vary: this one has a legit ghost, and a preacher who comes to throw holy water around and attempt to cast out the spirit. It’s like August Wilson suddenly gained a strain of The Exorcist—albeit one far more subtle than that comparison might suggest.

This also allows for a lot of myth and allegory, of course, particularly when it comes to generational trauma. For me, The Piano Lesson mostly works, and the challenge lay less with the content itself than with adaptation across mediums. Once you can cross that hurdle as a viewer, this is a film that succeeds just by sticking with you.

A lesson is conveyed by ancestors.

Overall: B+

A REAL PAIN

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

In A Real Pain, Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin play adult cousins who attend a guided holocaust tour of Poland, and the tour guide is a Brit who is the only person in the group not in any way Jewish. How often does it actually happen that way, I wonder? I could be wrong, but I would expect that more often than not these tour guides are Jewish or have some connection to Judaism, or at the very least to the country they have chosen to operate in. I’m sure there are exceptions to that, as in this story, in which it’s a fascinating narrative choice.

Eisenberg wrote and directed this film, his sophomore feature film effort on both counts. It’s easy to be skeptical of yet another young(ish) actor fancying himself a director, but it really should be noted how assured and accomplished A Real Pain is. It’s a film filled with scenes set up to go a predictable direction, but which consistently go a different way. There’s a scene in which Eisenberg’s David is ranting to the rest of the tour group over dinner about Culkin’s Benji while he’s gone to the bathroom. He goes on so long that I was sure Benji would be revealed to be standing behind him and overhearing all this. Instead Benji does something totally different, serves as an effective disctraction, but is wholly in character.

Eisenberg and Culkin are two very different people, and so are David and Benji. After a while, it becomes increasingly clear that this casting is inspired. These cousins were only born three weeks apart, so they grew up very close, and you really feel it in their characters. David consistently allows Benji to walk all over him, and it’s never clear whether this has always been their dynamic, or if it’s only happening now because of a recent, sad incident in Benji’s life. Either way, I found Benji often deeply annoying, and can’t imagine tolerating him the way David does. He even asks David to lend him his phone so he can play music in the shower, making the dubious claim that he can’t on his own phone. I’d tell him to use his own fucking phone.

The magic trick of A Real Pain is how much we empathize with both of these guys in spite of their character flaws. In typical Eisenberg style, David is neurotic and nervous and awkward, taking anti-anxiety pills. At least he’s not a pretentious prick, a type of character Eisenberg excels at playing. David feels wholly his own person, someone with deep affection for the people in his life, from his wife to his son to, vividly illustrated here, his cousin.

I do love a story about grown men with an enduring love for each other, that isn’t sexual. We do get more of them these days than we used to, but there can never be too many stories of platonic but deep bonds between straight guys. Audiences need that modeled for them, and this movie does it stupendously. Granted, David and Benji are cousins, so it’s about more than friendship, as they are family. But, they are also so wildly different from each other, they function as best friends who complement each other.

The tour group they are on is fairly small, The others in the group are an older married couple (Liza Sedovy and Daniel Oreskes); a Rwandan man who escaped the genocide and converted to Judaism (Kurt Egyiawan); and a recently divorced woman played by Dirty Dancing’s Jennifer Grey. I heard her interviewed on a podcast recently on which the hosts insisted she’s “a scene stealer” in this movie, and I don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. She’s fine, but the part could just as easily have been cast with any other competent actor.

Will Sharpe, though, conveys some surprising subtlety as James, the tour guide—particularly when Benji randomly breaks and criticizes James’s over-reliance on historic facts and statistics at the expense of experiencing the moment. James takes the criticism with a graceful willingness to learn, an unexpected thing to see.

This tour also goes to locations notable to the holocaust not often seen in film, in particular the unusually well preserved concentration camp Majdanek, in Lublin, Poland. David and Benji take this particular tour in part because this is the city where their grandmother was from, and they leave the tour a day early to visit the house where she grew up. There, they have an interaction with a neighbor that is characteristically awkward, but which these characters manage to turn into their own brand of sentimentality.

That is perhaps why A Real Pain really spoke to me. The characters in it struggle to make it work, but with persistence they make it work. The story is very well constructed, and I can only imagine this film succeeds in much the same way, with loving layers of polish over time.

A relationship that’s more functional than it seems.

Overall: A-

SMALL THINGS LIKE THESE

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

You could say Small Things Like These is a spiritual sequel to the 2013 film Philomena. Both films are a pointed examination of the barbaric practice of forcing young, unwed mothers to carry their babies to term in private before taking their children away from them. Small Things Like These ends with a note that this was done, at least in Ireland where the film is set, at recently as 1998. I nearly fell out of my chair, but cruelly puritanical treatment of woman should come as no surprise no matter the era.

I key difference, though, with Philomena is that it tells the story of one of these women. Small Things Like These makes a man the protagonist, something I went in wondering how they were going to pull it off. It turns out there is a very good reason for this, as Small Things Like These is very much about doing the right thing in the face of injustice, even if you’re not the one experiencing it.

Perhaps the most memorable line occurs in a conversation between Bill Furlong (Cillian Murphy, predictably excellent) and his wife, Eileen (Eileen Walsh). After a chance encounter with one of these teen moms at a local convent, who desperately pleads for him to take her away, Eileen tells him: “To get on in this life, there are some things you have to ignore.”

Director Tim Mielants, working with Enda Walsh and based on the 2021 novel by Claire Keegan, takes a lot of time to get to this point. We spent a lot of quiet moments with Bill, who runs a business delivering coal—including to the convent—and comes home every night to a large house of women: his wife, and three daughters. A great deal of time is spent on what it took me a short while to realize were flashbacks to his childhood. In the meantime, I kept wondering why I was being shown these scenes, and indeed even what story was being told.

To the credit of this film—and its editor, Alain Dessauvage (who also edited the superb French film Close)—there comes a point at which the story being told finally starts to click into place, in a skillfully organic way. On dual tracks, we realize that Bill’s own mother was unwed, but granted kindness by a woman who offered her employment as a live-in maid and allowed Bill to live with them as well. She even keeps Bill with her when his young mother suddenly dies. And this is what grants Bill both a unique perspective and an unusual empathy for these girls underling forced labor at the convent’s laundry.

Emily Watson plays Sister Mary, the nun running this convent. Never before have I seen Watson play a character so effectively chilling, in just one sequence. Bill delivers his coal earlier than usual, and finds one of the teenage girls, Sarah (Zara Devlin), sleeping without a blanket, locked in the coal room in the dead of winter (Christmastime, to be precise—surely another pointed narrative choice). Sister Mary plays it off as foolish games of children, but it’s quickly apparent that this kids are being abused.

Before long, a couple of different people take Bill aside to warn him against “making yourself a nuisance.” One woman says, ominously, “Those nuns have their fingers in every pie.” Clearly news has traveled fast in the town that Bill has seen something at the convent that he shouldn’t.

I won’t give away the ending, except to say that in the final scene, I was dying to know how his wife an daughters will respond to the very consequential choice Bill has made. We never find this out, the credits rolling before the story can get there. This is an example of a film leaving key questions unanswered in a deliberate and profound way.

The idea of doing what’s right in the face of institutional injustice hangs over the entire, deceptively simple story of Small Things Like These—delivered with a finesse that Blitz reaches for, in a much louder and more chaotic way, but does not quite reach. This is a film constructed in such a way that a rewatch would likely give fresh illumination. I’m not especially eager to revisit it, given the somberness of the story. But even the first impression is one that’s going to stick with me for a while.

Big Issues Like This: standing up to self-righteous horrors is no small thing.

Overall: B+

BLITZ

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overall: B

EMLILA PÉREZ

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

There’s a lot going on in Emilia Pérez—some might argue too much. It’s a Mexican cartel movie; it’s a story about a trans woman’s self-actualization; it’s a musical. I kept wondering how this movie might most succinctly be encapsulated as a logline or an elevator pitch.

More than anything, the musical element is the easiest to be ambivalent about. I remain unsure as to what the point of it is. Never mind the somewhat dubious nature of Zoe Saldaña playing the protagonist when hers is not the trans character, within minutes we witness her as Mexico City defense attorney to crooks, Rita—who breaks into song while walking through the streets, providing some exposition in a fairly economical way. The crowded streets become part of an intricate ballet of modern dancers around her, with choreography that is undeniably impressive. Saldaña’s singing is competent, and this scene provides a preview to what’s to come: a film that is a musical in the most fundamental and traditional sense of the word, characters sometimes even singing lines that would make far more sense uttered straight.

Mind you, the presentation of musical numbers is the only conventional thing about Emilia Pérez. How many traditional musicals have you seen about drug cartels, or that revolve around the transition of a trans woman, let alone both? This movie has songs about gender-affirming surgery, and there really is a moment when a Chinese surgeon in Bangkok utters the line, “From penis to vagina?”—in song.

The quality of the songs, by French singer Camille (with a score composed by Clément Duco), is spotty. The singing of lines between Rita and an Israeli surgeon upon their first meeting makes little sense. But there are deeply touching musical moments too, such as the child of a post-transition parent singing about how she smells like the father he remembers.

That brings me to Karla Sofía Gascón, the 52-year-old trans actress who plays the title character and the Mexican cartel leader pre-transition. We see her first as “Manitas Del Monte,” and when we later see her as Emilia, it is a stunning revelation. Gascón’s performance as Manitas is astonishing in retrospect, an unusual sort of layered performance that skirts the boundaries of meta storytelling. She is also incredible as Emilia, filling the screen with her unforgettable presence. Gascón, as it happens, has 41 acting credits on IMDb, 37 of them from before her transition in 2018. If nothing else, we can rest assured that director Jacques Audiard cast a trans actress for this role.

Oh, did I mention that Emilia Pérez is actually a French film? As in: it’s a French production, filmed in a studio near Paris. No French is spoken, however, due to the setting being largely in Mexico City—recreated in studio. Presumably the same was done in other settings, from China to Switzerland to Israel to England. A surprising amount of the dialogue—and singing—is done in English, a logical choice given how common it is for people who don’t speak each other’s native languages to default to English in order to communicate.

I was particularly struck by Selena Gomez as Jessi, a woman convinced she has been widowed when Emilia’s transition coincides with the faking of Manitas’s death. Gomez is reportedly dissatisfied with her performance of Spanish dialogue, as she is not fluent, but for those of us watching who are also not fluent, she was excellent. Furthermore, Gomez gives a consistently flat and muted delivery of her lines in the Hulu series Only Murders in the Building, and if that’s the extent of your familiarity with her as an actor you would never expect the kind of performance you see here. I might be tempted to say she has a shot at an Oscar nomination, if not for the fact that she is given far less juicy material than her costars.

How in the world does Rita fit into all of this, you might quite reasonably be asking? Rita herself asks this, when a pre-transition Emilia has her abducted and then offers millions for her assistance in finding a surgeon who can be discreet enough not to endanger her. Rita is merely a high-powered lawyer. In the end, you could say she was tapped for her powers of persuasion.

To the significant credit of Jacques Audiard and his co-writers Thomas Bidegain, Nicolas Livecchi and Léa Mysius, Emilia Pérez takes frequent unexpected turns, is utterly unpredictable, and is always absorbing. It’s also a tad chaotic, and there is a shocking moment at the end that I truly did not see coming and am still unsure how I feel about. This film is already being met with deeply mixed responses, some finding it an incredibly original work of art and some finding it outright offensive. I find myself falling in the middle, but leaning slightly toward impressed by how well its boldness somehow actually works. This is an international feature in every sense of the phrase, and its very existence is extraordinary.

The cis-het gaze: Zoe Sadaña offers some star power assistance.

Overall: B+

GOODRICH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overall: B

Tasveer Advance: KATLAA CURRY [FISH CURRY]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Overall: B

WE LIVE IN TIME

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

Make no mistake: We Live in Time is a tragic story and a bit of a tear jerker. I walked in pre-equipped with tissues and I suggest you do the same.

It is not a spoiler to say this is about a woman dying of cancer, as that’s the whole premise. Now, director John Crowley (Brooklyn) and writer Nick Payne (The Sense of an Ending) sprinkle in some classic rom-com elements, some of them a bit far fetched, from a meet-cute where Almut meets Tobias by running into him with her car, to the delivery of a baby in a gas station bathroom. I was easily able to lock into this stuff, largely because it illustrated the life worth living even in the face of it being cut short.

The biggest reason it’s easy to engage with We Live in Time, though, is the casting, which can make or break a movie. I might not have even had much interest in this movie, certainly not based on the premise alone, if not for the two leads: Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield. These two are well-established as stellar actors, and neither of them have ever had more palpable chemistry with their costars. Their story unfolds with a warm sweetness that is never saccharine, making you want to hang out with them, even when they face terrible and likely fatal news. Perhaps even especially when that happens. These two are precisely what makes this movie work.

Tobias gets a job with Weetabix, an odd bit of product placement, getting several mentions in the film. Far more notably, and ultimately very key to the story, Almut is a high-end chef with aspirations to participate in a European cooking competition. A lovely subplot involves Almut mentoring another chef, Jade, and their relationship develops both personally and professionally over the course of the story. Jade is played by nonbinary actor Lee Braithwaite, in their debut feature film role, more than holding their own alongside a powerhouse actor like Florence Pugh. I only wish the Tobias character could have gotten an equivalent subplot, although a few scenes with his father (Douglas Hodge) comes kind of close. There’s a sweet scene in which Tobias’s father helps him prepare for a date with Almut, giving him a haircut and even shaving the back of his neck.

Next to the phenomenal casting, though, a key part of what makes We Live in Time work is the editing—very relevant to the film’s title—by Justine Wright. This story is told as a nonlinear narrative, jumping back and forth in time in Almut’s and Tobias’s relationship. It regularly returns to key periods, though: when they first start dating; when they have a baby; and when Almut is given her ovarian cancer diagnosis. Over time, we are even provided more context around her cancer, the risk for which could have been significantly lessened but for her choice to keep the possibility of having a baby. And even with all the time jumps, we always know where we are, and it always feels like the story is unfolding just as it should.

In the cancer-diagnosis era scenes, their little girl, Ella, is played by a tiny actor named Grace Delaney. Even this proves to be excellent casting. Delaney isn’t given a lot of lines, but she is in a lot of scenes, and her presence always feels just as natural as anyone else’s. This is likely more a product of skilled direction and editing than anything else.

In the end, though, it’s Florence Pugh and Andrew Garfield who are everything to the success of We Live in Time. Their performances, and their chemistry, are the magic sauce that makes the movie deeply compelling from start to finish. Conceptually, it’s just a romantic drama with just as many joyful turns as sad ones, but on paper does not sound particularly exceptional. What is exceptional is its cast, who make this a movie well worth the time.

Don’t fret! A lot of the movie is way more fun than this looks.

Overall: B+